by Various
Strix emitted a brief cant-caw that echoed about the cavernous darkness of the chamber. Everything was deathly still and the only sound that could be heard was the reverberant hum of stasis field generators. Such precautions in each of the cell-vaults had meant that despite the hench-units and constructs of the Prefecture Magisterium abandoning the maximum-security facility, nothing had escaped.
The Carrion limped forward into the vast obscurity, the hydraulics of his legs sighing with each cautious step. A pressure stud alerted the cell-vault auto-systems of authorised visitation from the detention complex above. Bleak strobes clunked and blinked their way to illumination. The walls, floor and ceiling of the chamber were all black metal, like the chasmal cargo section of some ancient freighter. Air-circulation systems hissed to life from sliver-grilles. Infravision ball-optics revolved in their pict-sockets capturing for an empty detention complex the advance of the Carrion and his attendant automata into the incarcetoria.
A simple runebank console, set in a pedestal before them, glowed to activation. Stepping forward, the Carrion shouldered his graviton gun and punched suspension protocols into the runeboard. Firing an interface spike and stabbing it into the haptic port set in the bank pedestal, the Carrion fed the security systems the authorisation codes of the Fabricator Locum. Uncoupling from the runebank and slamming the ‘Execute’ glyph-key, the Carrion stepped back.
The delay gave the impression that the machine was considering the Knight Errant’s request with the appropriate gravity – which the Carrion knew could not be true. With a clearance clunk that rattled the metal walls of the cell-vault and could be felt in the pit of his stomach, vents fired a silver steam. The runescreen on the pedestal began presenting the glyphs of a countdown, while the layered doors to the conveyer began to close as an extra security measure. The Carrion didn’t like the idea of being trapped in a sealed vault, leagues below the Martian surface, but he had little choice but to wait on the countdown. As glyphs flashed up and disappeared, the red lamps about the ceiling and floor-mounted field generators glowed to a searing radiance, bathing the vault in an infernal light. The Null and the Void brought their rotor guns up to eye-line while Strix flapped its wings and cawed, hopping between the Carrion’s shoulder-projecting node-columns.
The lamps began to illuminate the impounded technologies held in the dissipating stasis field. As line by line of lamps glowed on, the Carrion could see discoid plates in both ceiling and floor – like great chrono-containment magnets of similar polarity, holding something perpetually in place. On each plate, standing almost to attention, were ranks and ranks of battle-automata, possibly upward of three hundred units.
The constructs were Kastelan-class. They were hulks of plasteel, adamantium and ceramite – towering exemplars of ancient design and the excellence of forge world engineering. Chunk hydraulics. The brutality of heavy-duty workings. Armoured cabling and reinforced feeds. At twice the height of the Carrion and almost three times that of the Null and the Void, the battle-automata were lifeless yet imposing. Like statues, they demanded a moment of grim admiration of any who looked upon them.
Their reinforced plate was scuffed, dented and paint-stained the red of Mars, with chassis-frames and carriage-hydraulics polished down to their original materials. Only the workings of weaponry and the curved cortex-housing betrayed the bronze of exotic alloys. The red armour bore the sigil of the Legio Cybernetica and the production branding of Elysium Mons – the forge temple of their manufacture. Markings showed the battle-automata to have been drawn from a range of operational maniples, but all belonged to the Daedarii Reserve Cohort. The Daedarii had been formerly stationed at Phaethontis as a reserve section, after illustrious and punishing off-world service during the early days of the Great Crusade. Banners and foil ribbons riveted to their plate still listed their operational history and accomplishments.
As the first rank of battle-automata sizzled back to the present, the Carrion noticed movements from the impounded arcana. At the centre of what passed for a chest in the hulking machines, plate housings allowed space for what design dictated should be an interfaced representation of the machine opus – or Cog Mechanicum, the ancient symbol of the machine cult – a hybrid human and cyborg skull. On each of the battle-automata, and modified expressly against designations, the machine opus had been removed and replaced with an interlocking unit of brassy, polyhedral cogs. The gears were all outlandish shapes and intricate sizes, driving one another smoothly – their dentica and teeth fitting beautifully together. The arrangement ticked hypnotically like an archaic timepiece.
The Carrion had never seen anything like the arrangement during his thirty years on Mars. Watching the backward and forward action of the polyhedral cogs, the Knight Errant could not shake the impression that the gears were in the act of processing something rather than being physically driven.
‘…tock.’
The sound of a wretched voice echoed about the vault. The Carrion looked to his servo-automata.
‘Locate and isolate,’ he ordered, prompting the Null and the Void to advance with their rotor guns raised. The cyber-raven Strix took to the air and swooped over the cortex casings and silent bolt cannons of the statuesque ranks of battle-automata. Limping through the lines of metal giants, the Carrion held his graviton gun tightly to his chest. The Raven Guard felt vulnerable amongst the small army of heretekal machines: it was an unusual feeling for one of the Emperor’s angels.
‘Tick, tock,’ the voice came again.
As the Carrion dragged the sluggish hydraulics of his damaged leg, the meme-cells of his cogitator overlaid his dream of Octal Bool with the words bouncing about the emptiness of the chamber. They were a match – an exact match – for the heretek’s final words.
Strix found him first. The cyber-raven perched on the pauldron of a nearby Kastelan war machine, cant-cawing its discovery and drawing the Carrion and the two servo-automata to the heretek’s location. Advancing with the fat barrel of his graviton gun levelled, the Carrion found Octal Bool on his knees. The heretek was bent over double, but not in pain.
In joy – he was laughing.
As the madness went from silent hilarity through hissing and wheezing to unrestrained glee, the heretek kept blurting, ‘Tick, tock, tick, tock.’
The Carrion considered a range of approaches to the situation. This was not exactly what he had been trained for. He dismissed a formal identification of his person, purpose and credentials as pointless, while the implementation of physical violence would be counter-productive. Slipping down onto the armoured knees of his bionic legs before the former Magos Dominus of the Legio Cybernetica, the Carrion looked down on the frail priest. Octal Bool quaked with glee, looking about him at the mighty battle-automata. He seemed particularly excited by the strange whirr of their polyhedral cogs.
The Carrion took the heretek by the arms and lifted him up, drawing the madman to face him. The Raven Guard blinked the blank silver of his eyes at the priest. Bool bowed his head before the Carrion, revealing the blood on the crown of his head – still fresh – where the lexorcists and hench-units of the Prefecture Magisterium had ripped some interface or working from a cavity running down into his brain. Bool brought his head up and opened his bloodshot eyes. The Carrion reminded himself that for the heretek, thirty years had passed in an unbroken moment. His tortures and the traumatic stripping of his cybernetics were but fresh torments. His warning to those gathered in the auditorium – the Carrion included – all those years ago, was still bitter on his cracked lips. Of the true dangers to Mars, the embraced darkness of ignorance and a priesthood wired from vat-birth to obey. Of the purity of the machine and the weakness of flesh.
‘Mars will give up her secrets,’ the lunatic babbled.
‘She has,’ the Carrion told him grimly, ‘and she will.’
The heretek reached out absently for the silver workings of his arm and the paintless plate
on the Space Marine’s chest. He was like a beaten child, a tortured genius and an overloaded machine all wrapped up in one miserable specimen.
‘Octal Bool,’ the Carrion said, bringing the heretek back to the severity of the moment. After chrono-containment, the Space Marine reasoned, the free passage of time must have been a horribly disorientating experience. ‘Bool – I need you to remember. What you have predicted has come to pass. Mars has fallen. It needs to be purged, Bool – do you hear me?’
The heretek’s red-raw face screwed up with the joy of recognition. He nodded. ‘Of the weakness of flesh.’
‘Yes,’ the Carrion confirmed. ‘Of the weakness of flesh. Do you remember the Vertex? The planetary axle? The magnetospheric shield of Mars? Bool, do you remember your heresy, your sedition with the abominable intelligence and what you planned to do?’
‘The machines must rise,’ the heretek squawked excitedly.
‘And the Red Planet must be purged,’ the Knight Errant repeated, shaking the madman gently. ‘Bool, listen to me. This has to happen now. Just as you were planning, before being caught by the lexorcists of the Prefecture Magisterium. Bool, where is the abominable intelligence? Where is the Tabula Myriad?’
As the heretek slowly repeated his words back to him, he suffered a sudden realisation, like a spasm. Releasing his grip, the Space Marine watched the wretch stumble to his feet and set off through the forest of towering battle-automata. Pushing himself off the battered, red plate of the robots’ legs, Octal Bool moved with deranged certainty through the machines. Hobbling on his damaged limb, the Carrion followed him and in turn was followed by his servo-automata, their rotor guns at the ready.
At the centre of the huge vault, amongst what the Knight Errant estimated to be the entire Daedarii Reserve Cohort, he found the heretek struggling with the seals of a security casket situated on the disc of a stasis plate. Without his augmentations or carapace, the magos was a feeble thing of thin bone and wasted flesh. Sliding the cog-wrench off his belt, the Carrion stepped forward.
‘Stand back,’ the Raven Guard said, prompting the heretek to retreat.
‘Tick, tock, tick, tock,’ Octal Bool said, biting at his fingers. ‘Be careful…’
With one power armour-driven swing, he struck the magnetic seal from the crating with the cog-wrench. Weaving in under the workings of the Carrion’s bionic arm, Octal Bool seized the crate and heaved the heavy lid from it.
Peering down into the darkness, the Carrion was surprised to hear the heretek cooing and whispering into the crate. Laying a hydraulic hand on the priest’s shoulder and prising him away, the Carrion found that Bool was holding a small fabricant to his chest that in turn was clutching him back like a baby. From behind it appeared to be a cherub – a cybernetic construct of clone-flesh crafted into the form of a winged baby or angel. As it worked its white wings, Bool turned to the Space Marine and the Carrion saw its face.
The construct was not a thing of flesh at all but a small automata: a being of robotic frame and discoloured plasteel, with metal protrusions like ratchet-hooks for legs and tiny toolage claws for hands. Its head had the dead eyes of a doll, while the dirty plasteel of its face was a fixed mask. One quarter of its bald crown had been stripped away, presumably for an exploratory examination by the Prefecture lexorcists. Beneath, the Carrion could see the smooth workings of intricate brassy cogs and polyhedral gears – the same wondrous mechanism he had observed set in the chests of the battle-automata. Incredibly for such a fabricant – a thing of metal, plasteel and flywheels – the construct demonstrated simple but clear emotional responses. Bool and the thing embraced like father and child, the heretek reassuring the creation after its incarceration in the crate and the stasis field.
‘Uncannical,’ Octal Bool told the Carrion. ‘A pet project.’
‘Bool,’ the Knight Errant said. ‘Where is the Tabula Myriad?’
The heretek released the cherub, which crawled back into the crate. Within moments, it returned. The flapping of its white wings took it into the air. Over its shoulder it had the loop of a chain made of interlinking gears. As the Carrion watched and the cherub rose, a machine appeared from the crate.
‘Mars be damned,’ the Carrion murmured, shaking his head. Beside him, the Null and the Void responded to the aegis protocols and leaned in with the multi-barrels of their rotor guns. The cyber-raven Strix cant-cawed the consternation of a simple threat-assessment.
The mechanism was an impossible thing – a large orb of interlocking cogs and gears of a design, motion and intricacy far surpassing the basic mechanisms implanted in the battle-automata and the Uncannical. It was an overlaid nexus of ticking, rhythmic clicking and the slick, harmonious whirr of impossible gears working in unison. The Carrion couldn’t bring himself to think of it as alien, but its design and workings disturbed him. It looked as if it shouldn’t work, but it did. Perfectly.
While human in design – the clunky intricacy of the machine told him that – it was clearly not a creation of the Mechanicum, a hallowed fusion of flesh and iron. The exigency engine was all counter-clock gears and byzantine cog-work that became more miniaturised and unfathomable the deeper he looked into the mechanism. Baroque tools, interface-columns and molecular scoops extended and retracted gently through the labyrinthine workings with the serenity of a serpent’s tongue – testing, interacting and absorbing the base elements it needed from the air and surrounding environment.
‘This is the abominable intelligence?’ the Carrion said, but it was clearly a statement more than a question.
‘This is the Tabula Myriad,’ Octal Bool told him. ‘Purger of the Parafex of Alta-Median and purifier of the stellar exodus worlds of the Perdus Rift.’
The Carrion watched as the cogs, gears and workings of the abominable intelligence parted at the base of the orb, creating an opening.
‘Yes, yes,’ Octal Bool bleated.
Further polyhedral cogs and intricate workings appeared in the opening until the heretek approached the silica animus and took from it a smaller orb of interlocking gears, the same kind of mechanism the Carrion had seen at work in the battle-automata and the cherub.
The Knight Errant repressed a shiver. The abominable intelligence was self-replicating.
Octal Bool turned, carefully carrying the miniature intelligence in his hands and offered it to the Carrion.
The Raven Guard’s lip curled. His instinct was to destroy the thing but instead he settled on holding the ceramite palm of his gauntlet up.
‘I am not worthy,’ the Knight Errant told the heretek. He assumed the abominable machine could hear him. Bool simply smiled and bowed his head, then took the miniature intelligence and pushed it down into the bloody cavity in the top of his head. With a sickly realisation, the Carrion suddenly understood that Bool’s torturers in the dungeon-diagnoplex had removed such a thing with the rest of his augmentations.
Octal Bool’s face changed. The insanity and agitation faded. Twitches subsided, lines disappeared, muscles relaxed. With or without such slave-interfacia, Octal Bool was a heretek and sincere devotee of the genocidal Tabula Myriad and its cold equations. Once again, however, he had achieved abominable union with the intelligence and had given himself willingly to the prosecution of its harsh solution for humanity.
The Carrion looked from the Tabula Myriad to the human face of techno-heresy in the calm visage of Octal Bool.
‘There isn’t much time,’ the Carrion announced. ‘Mars must be purged. It must be poisoned and purified of the weakness of flesh.’
The intelligence-interfaced heretek gave the Carrion an awkward smile. About the Raven Guard, the reactor cores of the Kastelans fired to unified life. Autoloaders of arm-mounted maximus boltguns and paraxial mauler shoulder-cannons chugged to priming and the atomantic defence fields energised, filling the air of the vault with the crackle and static of weapons-phased shielding. With the artif
icial flesh of their neural cortices long extracted and no further need for wetware routines or the guidance of a machine-spirit, the battle-automata were now thinking machines, benefitting from their own simple exigency engines. Like Octal Bool and the cherub Uncannical, however, they were under the ultimate reason and control of the abominable intelligence. Without the need for vox-cant or orders in the form of binary, the battle-automata began to form up in their operational maniples.
As the Carrion looked about in amazement, battle-automata bearing the carapace identifiers of the First Maniple stomped to attention and assumed a protective formation about Bool and the Tabula Myriad. Among their stamped records of operational history, the Carrion could see the designations of individual automata: Dex, Impedicus, Nulus, Pollex and Little Auri. The Carrion nodded with appreciation as he realised that the units of the First Maniple were named after the fingers of the hand. The Knight Errant had no doubt that working in unison the hulking battle-automata would pack quite a punch.
‘Vertex Australis, and the destruction of the magnetospheric shield,’ the Carrion said to the serene Octal Bool and the intricate exercise in abominable genius that was the Tabula Myriad. ‘The eradication of flesh must be enacted.’
As the first maniples of battle-automata began forming up in front of the elevator doors leading into the cell-vault, Octal Bool gave him the peaceful certitude of his bloodshot eyes.
‘Fear not, ally of annihilation,’ the heretek said. ‘It has already begun.’
Execute
War had returned to Mars. Not since the Thunderhawks and Stormbirds of the VII Legion had departed had bolt and beam been exchanged with such purpose and determination. It was true that long after the sons of Dorn left the Red Planet to its treacherous fate, loyalist constructs – mutilating themselves by ripping out ports and interface-augmentia – fought on in the ruined shells of their forge temples. With no sockets or receivers, the true servants of the Omnissiah were immune to the effects of the infectious scrapcode that had driven so many of their compatriot constructs to madness and heresy.
