The Burden of Loyalty

by Various

  A sound from the rear prompted the Carrion to spin around. The Null and the Void did likewise, moving forward with the multi-barrels of their rotor guns. The Carrion thought he heard something approximating a bark. The short blurt of bale code had come from a creature that now bounded up onto the slanting roof of a toppled container. It was an oil-slathering example of cyber-hybrid carnivora. A thick-set thing of exposed, vat-grown muscle – canine as far as the Carrion could tell – threaded through with cables, pneumatics and protective studding. Its eyes were fat telescopics, its legs flesh-fused into single, hydraulically augmented limbs, its snout a pneumatic trapjaw of idling chainsaw teeth. At another bark of echoing cant, the brute thing summoned a pack of similar monsters, which leapt and scrambled up through the rusted giga-containers. Suddenly they were everywhere, appearing from the gaps between crates and sometimes through the breached openings of the containers themselves.

  The Carrion moved the barrel of his graviton gun between the skinless cyber-beasts. The Null and the Void’s fingers pulled back on the triggers of their rotor guns, setting their multi-barrels to a whirring blur – each one waiting for a full yank on the trigger that would activate the ammunition autoloaders.

  The cyber-creatures were wary at first, and then at the codestreamed order of some nearby corrupt construct the carnivora simultaneously surged for the Knight Errant and his servo-­automata. Their bounding steps and the combination of mastiff muscle and hydraulics made for a fearful rush. The Carrion blasted the nearest of them, shattering bone, demolishing augmetics and pulping raw flesh. Furiously charging the weapon, the Carrion smashed creature after creature into broken carcasses and bloody smears on the rockcrete floor and against container walls. The rotor guns of the servo-automata suddenly roared to the chatter of fully automatic fire, the Null and the Void shredding bounding cyber-beasts with economical bursts of fire, each trigger pull revving the multi-barrels to another carcass-chewing crescendo.

  The hollow was a swarm of bounding bodies, cyber-hybrid carnivora coming at them from all directions at once. The Void was knocked clean off her feet by one bullish beast, the thing snapping at her boots before attempting to drag her back to the pack. It received a side-mulching stream of rotor fire from the Null for its trouble, almost cutting it in half. Another beast came at the Null from behind but the Carrion smashed its screeching maw of cycling chain-teeth aside with the stock of his graviton gun before pumping the weapon and blasting its head, shearing jaws and all, clean off its hybrid body.

  As the gravitic cell on the weapon clunked to empty, the Carrion felt the extra weight of a pair of cyber-creatures biting into his left arm and leg. As the jaws chugged and their chain-teeth shrieked to full cutting power, the Carrion’s plate registered a breach. The monster chewing on his leg had somehow managed to gun its jaws to some of the adjunct hydraulic workings. Dropping the graviton gun, the Carrion slipped his cog-wrench from where it was mag-locked to his belt. Snarling at the creature thrashing at his leg, he smashed the base of the tool’s heavy shaft down on its reinforced skull, before slipping it between the monster’s whirring jaws and prising it off.

  With a power-armoured turn, the Carrion dragged the second cyber-beast around, its jaws locked on the plate of his arm. As the creature that he had prised off his leg came for him again, the Carrion cannoned the body of one cyber-beast into the other, knocking them both away. He brought the serrated denticles of the cog-wrench up and brained the first monster. As the second surged for his face, the Space Marine got the shaft of the tool between the construct-creature’s thrashing jaws. The wrench handle juddered against the cycling teeth, but the Carrion forced it back, bracing the beast against the side of a container wall, forcing the shaft through the workings of the creature’s maw.

  Leaving the cog-wrench in the ruined workings of the cyber-beast’s jaw, the Carrion turned around to find the Null on the rockcrete floor being mauled by another beast. Meanwhile, the Void was blasting oncoming creatures into blurs of gore and workings. Those that escaped the rotor gun’s attentions and made it to the Space Marine had the fired interface spikes of the Carrion’s hydraulic fist to look forward to. Stabbing and punching the chain-jawed half-dogs aside as they leapt for his throat, the Knight Errant held the shrieking maw of the second-to-last beast away from his face by its brawny neck.

  With his hydraulic palm against the housing of its pneumatic jaw, the Carrion drained the beast of its electro-motive power, turning it into a flailing lump of raw flesh, dragged down by deadweight bionics and appendages. Hurling the creature at the final beast, the Carrion broke them both.

  Turning, he found another creature still dragging and mauling the Null across the rockcrete. Opening his palm at the last of the cyber-hybrid carnivora, he blasted the monster with the meagre power sapped from its compatriot construct. The half-dog immediately released the savaged servo-automata before slinking away. The brute thing reached the nearest giga-container but before making it inside, the cyber-beast’s flesh began to smoke and steam and it crashed to the floor and died with a shower of sparks erupting from its slowing chain-jaws.

  The Carrion immediately sensed that something was wrong. The Void hadn’t used her weapon on the beast that had been mauling her sister construct and so must have been pointing it somewhere else. As the Null got to her feet, a pair of ragged scars tore across her face where the cyber-beast had savaged her, and the Carrion turned.

  About the hollow, standing atop the jumbled containers, he saw a familiar figure. The rust-red robes. The cadaver’s face. The missing jaw. The skeletal fingers on the clavier board. The leering servo-skull that drifted almost temple to temple with its master. Standing above the Carrion in some kind of warped judgement, it was the lexorcist Raman Synk who had set his cyber-hounds on the Knight Errant.

  Synk and his servo-skull Confabulari 66 were heretek hunters no more. Ghoulish balelight proceeded from all four eye sockets of the corrupted construct; the hunter had become one of his hunted.

  ‘You will surrender,’ the lexorcist’s voice boomed from the servo-skull’s inbuilt vox-hailers, ‘and receive the judgement of Kelbor-­Hal, Master of the Mechanicum, Fabricator General of Mars.’

  The Carrion looked about. All around the hollow, bonded battle-­automata of the Legio Cybernetica were stalking up to the container edges. They were Vorax-class hunter-killer units, formerly found in the sinister service of the Malagra and the Prefecture Magisterium. Exterminators of rogue constructs and hereteks, the monstrous machines now found themselves slaved to traitor protocols. The hunter-killers zeroed in on the Carrion with the large sensor-optics of their mantid heads, like a pack of machine predators. Shrugging their arm-mounted rotor-cannons forward into their firing cradles and bringing their irradiation cleansers up over their heads from their backs like the tails of scorpions, the hunter-killers were prepared for the lexorcist’s next order, as issued on the cortex controller built into construct’s clavier board chest.

  Raman Synk had him. Perhaps the slave-systems of the arklighter had betrayed them in some way. Perhaps the Raven Guard had not been as careful in his clandestine movements as he had assumed. Perhaps the lexorcist’s cyber-beasts had simply picked up the scent of honest endeavour amongst the reek of ruination. Regardless, the lexorcist had tracked him down and had the Knight Errant in the gunsights of his machine-predators.

  ‘Stand down,’ the Carrion told the Null and the Void, and the multi-barrels of their rotor guns descended.

  ‘You will surrender,’ Synk told him again, the vox-modulated voice bouncing about the containers.

  ‘To whom would I do that?’ the Carrion called back, playing for time.

  ‘To Kelbor-Hal, Master of the Mechanicum and Fabricator General of Mars,’ the servo-skull blurted back.

  ‘Not the Lexorcist General?’ the Carrion questioned. ‘Not the Prefecture Magisterium or the Divisio Probandi?’

  Raman Synk said nothin
g for a moment, as though struggling with old memories that refused to stay buried, and the balelight of his eyes dimmed for a moment.

  The Carrion pressed on. ‘Do you remember, lexorcist? You used to serve at the pleasure of the Prefecture Magisterium, in the dungeon-diagnoplex right beneath our feet.’

  Raman Synk’s cadaver face twitched with remembrance. He could not resist the corruption flowing through his systems, the madness that clouded his mind or the spoiling of his dun flesh. He could not deny what he had become – a pawn of evil.

  ‘You will surrender,’ Confabulari 66 boomed, speaking for its master. ‘Or you will be destroyed.’

  Raman Synk’s spindly fingers went to work on the cortex controller built into his chest.

  ‘Lexorcist, wait!’ the Carrion called, but Raman Synk wasn’t going to.

  Suddenly the lexorcist was a robe-thrashing mess of clutching hands and urgency. Strix had been circling above, observing. Processing its simple aegis protocols. Under such circumstances, the cyber-raven was programmed to defend its master. Landing on the lexorcist’s threadbare head, the hydraulics of its claws scratching at his hood and mottled flesh, the fabricant-familiar flapped its black wings and pecked at the top of Raman Synk’s skull. The lexorcist didn’t have protocols of his own for such a situation and responded by moving his hands between the half-completed targeting algorithms of his cortex controller and snatching for the construct attacking his head.

  Finally, sinking its metal claws into the lexorcist’s scalp, the cyber-raven pecked the interface pin of its sharp beak straight through the aged bone of Synk’s skull. Turning the pin like a tool-driver, the bird burrowed down into the traitor’s head.

  Confabulari 66 blurted snatches of corrupted cant, interspaced with high-pitched shrieks. As Raman Synk crumpled to the floor, Strix took off from the dropping corpse-construct and landed on one of the lexorcist’s unmoving hunter-killers, its beak dripping with blood.

  The Carrion exhaled and gritted his teeth. He couldn’t have given the cyber-raven many more seconds to act on its aegis protocols. A distraction might have been enough. Instead, the Carrion found himself under the guns of silent hunter-killers, waiting for their final authorisation to open fire – an authorisation that would never come.

  ‘No sudden movements,’ the Carrion ordered. If the battle-automata thought they were being attacked, they might defend themselves as a reflex protocol. The Carrion recovered his cog-wrench and slowly retreated from the hollow, prompting the Null and the Void to do the same.

  Limping a safe distance away, the Carrion took the time to make some rudimentary repairs to the chewed hydraulics of his leg and stapled closed the gashes running across Di-Delta 451’s mangled face.

  ‘We’re close,’ he muttered, limping his way through the jumble of cargo containers, Strix swooping overhead. Accessing the meme-cells of his cogitator and overlaying memory with actuality, the Space Marine managed to pinpoint the location of the Promethei Sinus dungeon-diagnoplex. Ducking beneath a collapsed giga-container and reloading a graviton cell into his gun, the Knight Errant hobbled up to the partially demolished rockcrete bunker sitting unobtrusively in the middle of the colossal container yard. In the bunker sat an equally unobtrusive blast door of pure adamantium. ‘That’s it,’ he said, though he needn’t have bothered since the servo-automata attending on him were only interested in the significance of direct orders.

  Firing one of the interface spikes in his hydraulic fist, the Carrion ran buffers before inserting the pin into the haptic door socket. Turning the spike with a clunk, the Space Marine processed the high security access codes that Zagreus Kane had supplied him with. As Fabricator Locum of Mars, there were few places Kane’s old passcodes would fail to work. As the adamantium door rumbled aside, the Carrion was presented with a second security door and then the sizzling grid of an anbaric security mesh. Each needed different codes to unlock or disable them. Beyond, the large cage of a freight conveyer car for the transport of hereteks and impounded materiel was revealed. Stepping inside with Di-Delta 451 and Eta/Iota~13, as well as Strix perched on one node-­column, the Carrion activated the conveyer hatch and took the car down to the only place it led – sub-level processing.

  As the doors opened on the blood-red haze of emergency lighting, the Carrion realised that this was where he had first seen the heretek Octal Bool. Beyond the detention complex, the sub-level housed the court diagnostica, operational quarters for the ward engines and Magisterium constructs, prisoner processing, cataloguing, interrogation/disassembly and the visitor auditoria.

  The detention complex was a deserted mess, appearing to have been abandoned in a hurry. Runebanks had been left on, while weapons and power cells had been stripped from the armoury. It made sense to find even such a high security installation as the dungeon-diagnoplex unattended, the Carrion reasoned. In the face of datastreams and voxmissions confirming a global conflict and a schism erupting in the ranks of the Martian Mechanicum, many constructs would have abandoned their posts to respond to both loyalist and traitor recall and reassignment. For the priests and ward engines left behind there would have been little point attending a facility housing hereteks below ground when Mars was being seized by traitors on the surface. Constructs like Raman Synk might have remained, only to be infected with the corruption of the spreading scrapcode.

  The Carrion found sentinel posts and aegis-stations abandoned, and holomat automata hanging lifeless from the ceiling; it seemed that no one was even remotely monitoring the installation’s dangerous charges. At each empty station, the Knight Errant found that the wireless receptors and hardfeeds had been smashed, along with encryptia and vox-hailers. It hadn’t helped the constructs manning such stations. Without adequate data buffers, the infectious scrapcode had found a way in anyway.

  Porting into the detention complex runebanks, the Carrion found the local hardlines and streams to be unclean and afflicted by the code-­corruption. With his buffers protecting him from the screeching madness of binary, the Raven Guard ran a swift diagnostic, ascertaining that the integrity of stasis containment on the sub-levels was still intact, and that the heretek prisoner Octal Bool was incarcerated on Level 93, along with his experiments.

  Another security conveyer took them from the security complex down through cavernous sub-levels of stasis-containment cells. Each level housed a different heretek or example of deviant technology, frozen forever in time – for while the servants of the Cult Mechanicum might abhor the abominable and unsanctioned, they also abhorred waste. Low-grade metals were regularly recovered from the slag-strata of ancient Martian operations. Strips of red desert were turned over to energy farms and anbaric-­irrigators to absorb wireless power waste straight out of the Martian air. Vat-grown flesh was recycled for the cloning of further servant constructs. In turn, even the fruits of techno-heresy were securely preserved for posterity – stasis-contained or buried in vaults and labyrinths – so that the future priests of Mars might learn more of its deviancy, if only to condemn it further.

  As the conveyer dropped down through the levels of the incarcetoria, into the bowels of the Red Planet, the Carrion thought on the radicals, the forbidden knowledge and the dangerous artefacts stored in the vault-­repositories beyond. The runebanks in the detention complex had pict-listed details of the imprisoned and impounded, level by level.

  The dungeon-diagnoplex housed heretek priests, xenarites and faith-­traitors, as well as their assembled corrupt works. Examples of alien artefacts, anima silica and warp-fuelled technologies had been chrono-contained in the facility, as well as madmen and machines.

  And magi, emaciated and unfinished, brutally bereft of their augmentations, their transgressions unsanctioned experimentation or illegal research. Some had indulged the techno-translations of censored texts or had been outspoken in their rejection of the machine – and therefore the Machine God – in favour of the purely biological, with its gove
rning passions and distractions.

  In the installation-auditia the Carrion witnessed all manner of deviant constructs – mantis-like drones, murderous cogitants, monstrous unsanctioned battle-automata, diseased engines on sprocket wheel and tracks, humanoid killing machines wearing the remnants of organic camouflage. The machine-mad. The gremlid-infested. He saw mist-eyed explorators whose brain cavities had become home to alien parasites and electromagnetic beings – dark experiments gone awry – intent on crackling their way, in ignorance and infancy, across metal walls and through local wiring to freedom.

  The cell-vault above Octal Bool contained the polished skeleton of a long-dead priest, hanging like an ornament from a spidery nest of servo-limbs and mechadendrites. The sentient metal tentacles had won the battle for supremacy with its Mechanicum master and now wore his remains like a ghoulish garment. The impressive collection of hereteks and deviancy was a testament to the Lexorcist General’s fear of anomaly and the Prefecture Magisterium’s purity of purpose. Nothing should deviate from the cold logic of the Omnissiah’s intentions.

  The conveyer shuddered to a halt. Level 93. Hydraulics fired and door after security blast door rose, parted or rolled aside. An anbaric security mesh fizzled to nothing, allowing the Knight Errant entry to the huge cell-vault beyond. The Null and the Void followed, their rotor guns raised and their first belt-fed, large-calibre stub-rounds chambered. The Carrion pump-charged his graviton gun. Perhaps it was the various security measures, but the vault felt like a dangerous place.