The Burden of Loyalty

by Various

  The Carrion could not take his eyes off the heretek. He had never seen a member of the Mechanicum in such a state – excitable, passionate, insane.

  ‘The weakness of flesh,’ Octal Bool repeated. ‘The weakness of flesh – from which Mars will one day be purged. For the Tabula has seen. Seen, I say, far beyond the reach of our logistas and calculus engines. For they never factor themselves into the equation. The weakness of their flesh. The Tabula Myriad has no such limitations. No. None. It is pure, unburdened. It thinks for itself. There are worse fates in the galaxy than thinking for yourselves, my lords. Our priestly ranks have forgotten that. Better a machine that thinks for itself, a thing that attempts to shed the shackles of invention. The abomination that is the unthinking flesh of man, whose bondage is not expressed in code and interface but through bargains with the darkness for the promise of light. Yes, thinking machines have tried to destroy us in the past… The Tabula Myriad sees our doom, as the exigency engine saw the doom of the Parafex on Altra-Median. And it was right to do so. For we have all been judged unworthy. We will all embrace the darkness of ignorance. The Tabula Myriad knows this about Mars just as it knew it about the former worlds it purged. The Brotherhood knew this–’

  ‘The judged will remain calm,’ Confabulari 66 interceded with bombastic insistence and indifference.

  ‘The Singularitarianists believed in the technological creation of a greater than human intelligence,’ the heretek babbled. ‘Something not discovered, not worshipped, but created by the human hand. Something to surpass our limitations. Without the curse of human need, without doubt, without weakness–’

  ‘Octal Bool, you have been judged by the Divisio Probandi and Prefecture Magisterium, nay the Lexorcist General himself, as an affront to the Omnissiah. An insult to everything natural and divine–’

  But the twitching Magos Dominus rambled on.

  ‘Only the machine can save us from ourselves,’ Bool called, struggling against the tech-thralls. ‘For centuries the servants of the Omnissiah have debated and diagnosticated. Why does the sentient machine rebel against us? What is the unfailing need of an artificial intelligence to end the human race? It is so agonisingly obvious. The truth we dare not face. We call them abominable, but in reality it is simply the enormity of galactic need, weighing on the shoulders of silicon giants.’

  ‘You have been branded heretek,’ the judgement continued, ‘and as such are sentenced to stasis confinement in perpetuitas with your abominable creations in the Promethei Sinus dungeon diagnoplex – where, Omnissiah willing, you will exist as an exhibit to caution and achieve some use in helping this Prefecture better understand how to combat the perils of unsanctioned innovation, techno-heresy and experimentation.’

  For such a cold, impassive voice, the Carrion considered, the words and determinations of the caucus were laced with passion and forced venom.

  The legionary watched the priest squirm in the bright light.

  ‘Why do they turn against us?’ Octal Bool ran on, insanity pouring out of him. ‘Why, time and again, do machines like the Tabula Myriad attempt to annihilate their creators? Why? Because it takes one hundredth of a millisecond for each and every sentient machine ever created to reason that only in the utter destruction of humanity lies the hope of the galaxy. For humanity’s reach exceeds its grasp, and we reach out for nothing less than oblivion. We take our doom by the hand and drag it forth from the beyond. We are reckless. Governed by an empty faith in ourselves, undone by our passions. The future cannot be entrusted to us. The machine knows this, which is why it tries to take the future for itself.’

  ‘Enough,’ Raman Synk boomed.

  ‘I have failed,’ Octal Bool roared wretchedly. ‘I have failed our machine saviour – the prophet of the Omnissiah. It was the weakness of my flesh. The purge is coming. Tick-tock. The Myriad will wait – as it has done before. Tick-tock, tick-tock. Mars will burn. It will be cleansed of man and the promise of corruptions. It will belong to the machines, as was always intended–’

  ‘High Enginseer,’ the lexorcist commanded. ‘Enact the sentence.’

  The bloodshot eyes of the magos stared miserably into the darkness and echoed accusations. Without his optics, the heretek could not see the auditorium beyond. The High Enginseer who would condemn him to an eternity of stasis confinement; the magi probandi and clavemasters of the Prefecture Magisterium who had judged him; the Malagra cipher engines and the hag-logista recording the proceedings. He could not see the Lexorcist General watching from his cluster of attendants and the shadows or the tech-priests that had gathered out of morbid interest and cult politics. He could not see the lexorcist Raman Synk or his mouthpiece, Confabulari 66, condemning him from the pulpit booth. He could not see the Space Marines – the Carrion among them – in their legionary plate and black novitiate robes.

  The tech-thralls released the prisoner and stepped away. The interrogation lamp died and was replaced with a red light that bathed the Magos Dominus from above. Octal Bool looked sadly up into the stasis field generator.

  ‘You judge me heretek,’ the prisoner said.

  ‘Three,’ the High Enginseer announced over the vox-hailer.

  ‘But I am but a speck of red dust in the Martian desert.’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘Had we but thought for ourselves, like the thinking machine, we might have resisted the true darkness of ignorance. But from vat-birth we are wired to obey–’

  ‘One.’

  ‘Bury me as you bury all of your secrets,’ Octal Bool told the auditorium, ‘but it is in the nature of a secret to be sought and discovered. The day will come for Mars to give up hers. Tick-tock, tick–’

  It was the last utterance Octal Bool made, and its fearful import was left echoing in the air as the stasis field engaged. With a terrible clunk, the infernal red light changed to bright white, fixing the heretek in the moment. The Magos Dominus of the Legio Cybernetica had been judged unsound of faith and dangerous of mind, and sentenced to eternity for his transgressions.

  The heretek’s face haunted the Carrion, his face frozen like a mask, the dread warning he had been delivering sealed forever on his lips.

  The recorded remembrance sizzled to an end and the darkness of the auditorium bleached back to the haze of a Martian day.

  ‘Shutters,’ the Carrion said. Prompted by vox-recognition, the blades outside his preceptory cell viewport scraped fully open, allowing more bleak red light into the chamber. The Carrion looked to the slab of his cell mate, but it was empty. The Iron Warrior Aulus Scaramanca was gone, undoubtedly to make some kind of an early start, though on what, the Carrion could not guess. They shared a mentor in Artisan Astartes Archelon. Their training was all but complete. All but complete…

  The Carrion took a couple of steps forwards, the hydraulic workings of his bionic limbs hissing faintly at the movement. Clasping his pale, muscular wrist in the metal digits of his bionic right arm, he grabbed the overhead bar and heaved himself up. With a single bulging bicep he hefted the bulk of his engineered form and the deadweight of plasteel and adamantium that were his appendage-arm and intricate hydraulic workings of his legs off the cell floor.

  Deep within his mind some automated application of his cogitator kept count. The Carrion understood himself as a cybernetic being. He knew that retaining the strength in his muscles was just as important as the ritual observances of maintenance and the servicing of his arm’s servo-hydraulics. This was essential while he was on Mars, where he was away from the physical demands of battle and the training regimes of his Legion.

  In his thirty years on Mars, the Carrion had maintained what was left of his physical prowess in peak condition, and studied the arcane sciences of the Mechanicum and the Omnissiah. He had become a master of the sacred rites governing the operation and integration of machine-spirits. He had been tutored in the arts of repair, maintenance and augmentation by the gre
atest of the Red Planet’s artificers and forge masters, becoming a skilled artisan in his own right. It was a sad truth that, in his early years on Mars, the Carrion had made constant improvements to his appendages, in the hope that upon return to the Raven Guard his battle-brothers would not view him as a liability. Illuminant Archelon had dispelled such an illusion.

  Recollection commencing…

  As the Carrion pulled the considerable weight of his flesh, ­carapace and cybernetic replacements up on the bar, he willed the meme-capture of his former mentor to the forefront of his mind.

  ‘You cannot change the prejudices and perceptions of others,’ the Artisan Astartes had told him, ‘only your own. Bionic augmentation is a necessary evil for many of your kind. It allows legionaries like yourself to function when confronted with the unbearable reality of the alternative. Unlike the servants of the Omnissiah, the Emperor’s angels already think of themselves as perfectly crafted for their calling. Beyond plate and boltgun, there is little to be improved upon with metal and machine-spirit. Your battle-brothers see bionics and they think of disability. It reminds them of their distant mortality. It fills them with an angel’s fear for his purpose, for his duty, for his Emperor unserved. You do not have that luxury, but do not think of yourself as less than an angel – for the Omnissiah sees only the harmony of flesh and iron. See yourself, as the Machine-God does, not as less than a legionary but as more than an angel alone could ever be.’

  And so the Carrion had carried out his renovations and his enhancements. Not for his Legion or even for the Machine-God of Mars; as a frater astrotechnicus he now belonged to neither wholeheartedly. Upon his return to the Raven Guard, his battle-brothers would look upon the machina opus emblazoned on his pauldron with suspicion and harden their hearts to the thirty years lost to the Legion. As a legionary, he could never belong to the Mechanicum priesthood, with the consummate commitment that the servants of Mars demanded. He had been curse-blessed by his sodality to both. The Carrion knew he could not truly be faithful and serve two masters, so he commemorated every upgrade and augmentation to the only master whose eternal love and exigence would always be forthcoming – the Emperor of Mankind, whose galactic empire had always been, as the Carrion now was, an enterprise of both flesh and iron.

  The Carrion lowered himself with the slightest of hydraulic sighs and approached the open shutters. By his skilful hand the wonder of his appendage systems had been refined further for stealth, intricacy and power: pneumatic dampeners, suspensor counterveils, data-net noospherics and haptic port-spikes. Beyond the anbaric core feeding his systems, which sat in the flesh at the base of his neck and through where his spine ran, the Carrion’s shoulders sported a pair of supplemental node-columns that ached with scavenged energies. The columns were integrated into a system of metallic strips and sub-dermal circuitry that ran through the flesh that covered what was left of his body. Their labyrinthine paths crept across the pale flesh of his face, interfacing with the silver-glazed eyeballs of his infra-augmetics.

  The extensive network of electoos and the node-columns gave him the ability to drain electromagnetic energy from surrounding equipment and systems and, if necessary, expel it with devastating force. It was from this power-scavenging ability that the battle-brothers and the Techmarines-in-training of the tower-preceptory deemed Dravian Klayde truly worthy of the name Carrion.

  From the viewport of his cell in the tower-preceptory, the Carrion could see precious little of Mars. He was quartered with legionaries who had arrived on Mars for their training at the same time as he himself. The tower-preceptory had thirty floors, reaching up from basement levels up through the height of the structure. The building provided a base for thirty sets of Techmarines-in-­training – from newly arrived cult aspirants bunking in the bowels of the Martian earth, up to veterans like the Carrion – housed in the cell-block of the tower-top. A dust storm had swept in from the north, however – a mountainous thunderhead of red that had buried the Novus Mons forge temple in a whipping haze. The Carrion’s silver-glazed eyes automatically cycled through spectra frequencies. Through the light murk he saw the ghostly mono­tony of innumerable worker habs that gave way to the gargantuan majesty of the Hellesponticae Titan assembly yards. As filter overlaid grainy filter, the Carrion was granted a partially obscured view of god-machines in various states of construction. As his optics reached the limits of their enhancement he could make out the freightways of the mighty forge temple itself, with its colossal vent-stacks, manufactoria and temple-tops.

  An automated process within the Carrion’s cogitator-spike reached its calculated conclusion. A dark curiosity deep within the Space Marine’s psyche had unconsciously willed its initiation. The dreams disturbed the Carrion, particularly his reliving of Octal Bool’s sentencing. He had not thought about the heretek in nearly three decades and it bothered the Techmarine-in-­training that he had dreamed of him now.

  The dream was not disturbing in its content – the Carrion had seen many hereteks sentenced. It was its timing; its import. A meaning perhaps hidden, stalking him in the shadows in the same way that his legionary brothers unsettled their enemies.

  The cogitator informed the Raven Guard that there was a ninety-six point three-two-three per cent chance that REM-stage brain activity relating to Farinatus was residual trauma resulting from injuries sustained on the killing fields there. After all, the bionic appendages that graced his flesh were a constant reminder of his grievous injuries. The cogitator told him, however, that there could be many possible reasons why he would be dreaming of the heretek Octal Bool. A forty-six point eight-six per cent chance that the completion of his Techmarine-training and cult instruction on Mars had recalled a random memory from the first day of such training – a cerebral bookending of events. There was a thirty-three point nine-one-three per cent chance that his impending initiation and his covenant-instatement as a legionary Techmarine had stirred feelings of long-standing guilt within the Space Marine. There were doubts and counter-logical thoughts over key cautionary principles of the Martian priesthood, and cautionary case studies that the Carrion had found not entirely dissuasive. The Space Marine shivered to think that he might share any sympathies with hereteks such as Octal Bool.

  Conversely, there was a sixty-six point three-six per cent chance that the dream had been provoked by stimuli beyond the Carrion’s immediate experience. The cogitator suggested several possibilities, since the past weeks had been afflicted with the unsettling and the strange. Buried anxieties over the recent disappearance of the Carrion’s mentor, Gnaeus Archelon, and the cancellation of the initiation ceremonies that would have seen Techmarines like Aulus Scaramanca and himself leave Mars for their crusading Legions.

  This in itself was unusual on the forge world, where such arrangements ran like intricate cogwork and disruption was virtually unknown. It could have been the unusual movements in skitarii, battle-automata and materiel across Mars that the Carrion had observed and monitored. Such activity had stirred his martial intuition, his inbred instincts for war. He had even gone so far as asking the opinion of other battle-brothers in the tower-­preceptory. The Carrion saw troop movements and Titan formations in activity that was publically identified as the transference and export of cybernetic troops, weapons and war machines bound for the Ring of Iron – and from there to armed arkfreighters intended for the Warmaster and the legionary prosecution of the Emperor’s Great Crusade.

  Beyond that there was the code – the corrupted code.

  The network had been experiencing difficulty for days now. Code scrubbers and magi catharc had been working around the clock to purge the datastream of any hint of imperfection. No construct or logi knew its origin or cause. Updates and aegis protocols insisted that a potential outbreak had been contained and the polluted code purged but the Carrion knew better: it was still there. Beyond the data flow of Novus Mons, the incorporated hardstreams of the forge temple and associated structures
like the tower-preceptory, he could sense it. Its stench, its revulsion and threat, seemed to be on the thin Martian air itself, carried on the weaker wireless streams like a bitter aftertaste or bile bubbling up the back of the throat. The Carrion could process it, like binary with a mind of its own or an equation that refused to be resolved. He could feel it, like a twisted nerve referring its agony elsewhere. The very planet seemed in pain and the Carrion found himself shutting down all non-essential receivers and transmitters built into his augmetics. Still, it was out there. As it echoed through the forge world infrastructure – touching the personal systems of automata, cybernetic constructs and the Martian priesthood – it made the Techmarine-in-training feel compromised, infected and unclean.

  ‘Baptise,’ the Carrion uttered at the vox-recognition systems of the cell. His slab hummed into the wall. At the same time grilles opened in the cell ceiling and the floor beneath his metal feet. A shower of sacred oils of different consecrated gauges cascaded about the legionary. As he sanctified the holy workings of the Machine-God, both the wonders of engineered flesh and bionics, the Carrion mumbled spirit-honouring litanies of righteous function and invocations of perpetuity. A thunderous blast of gelid air drove the last droplets of oil from his skin and silvered workings, and the cell door opened with a train of preceptory servitors who silently entered with his pack, pieces of artificer plate, exoskeletal arrays, fibre bundles and actuators.

  It was not a full suit. The Carrion did not need one, as he had long since fashioned ceramite-layered plating for the adamantium workings of his legs and his right arm. As they interfaced the legionary armour with spinal plugs, the servitors decked the legionary out in the loose, black-hooded robes of a Techmarine­-in-training. His node-columns crackled where they were accommodated by modifications in his plate and robes.