by David Guymer
The Voice of Mars’ abilities and resources never ceased to astound her.
Everywhere in the sensor-crowded chamber, adepts and menials were having their equipment and persons probed. The presence of Louard Oelur and, perhaps even more so, the keeper and her robo-mastiff, kept complaints to a minimum.
The second skitarius squeezed Melitan’s arms hard enough to draw a gasp, then sent her brusquely into the primary flow of bodies, ready to receive another.
There was no physical or procedural weakness here that she could see.
She doubted whether Palpus himself could smuggle a microbial spore this far in or out of Zero Tier. Perhaps a real adept would notice something lacking, but given the fact that hundreds of them had to file through this checkpoint daily it seemed unlikely.
What do you want from me? she thought to herself, and immediately cringed, realising that an answer was a possibility and that she would just as soon go without.
The implant containing the Palpus meme-proxy remained mercifully quiet.
‘Are you satisfied thus far?’ asked Exogenitor Oelur.
Melitan noticed that while the skitarii rangers and the keeper had all passed through the auspex tunnel, Oelur and his litter had been waved through the cordon with only the most incidental of sweeps.
‘You could say that,’ she replied as she hurried to rejoin her escort. She felt that an inspecting magos should be asking questions so she thought of one quickly. ‘How regularly must workers submit?’
‘Twice daily,’ said Oelur. ‘Once as they come on-shift and again as they come off. We will survey the dormitory blocks and habitation areas on our return from the laboria.’
Melitan and her procession joined the flow of bowed heads and trailing robes.
None of the tech-priests spoke, but surrounded by the rustling of their robes and the click of metallic parts on the floor, Melitan felt an itch run down her spine. A disturbingly organic phobia that they were indeed communicating, all of them, about her, on a level below her ability to detect. She turned to Oelur, his bifurcated expression presenting its usual split between morbid serenity and a formaldehyde-stricken grimace. Compared to the rest of their detail, who did not share a single expression between them, his two faces were practically loquacious.
The adepts began to peel off. In ones, twos, threes. Recessed doors hissed open, then hissed shut. Lights flickered on automatically, sensing their presence and their movement.
‘I thought there were no higher machine-spirits in operation here,’ she murmured.
‘No exload-capable spirits,’ Oelur corrected. ‘We must still function.’
The exogenitor permitted her to observe some of the tech-priests’ work.
To the uninitiated looking in, it was monotonous and inscrutable. Perhaps it was monotonous and inscrutable to the initiated too, but Melitan had only her own experience to inform her. Individual adepts, largely oblivious to the others they shared space with, shuffled plastekware between benches, operated machines, read off data-slates, occasionally appending the information with their own notations, then returned to moving plastekware about and worked the machines some more.
‘What are they doing?’ she asked.
Oelur snorted, and gave her a look of unblinking scrutiny. She wondered if she had betrayed an ignorance of some secret knowledge, a cipher known to all magos biologis of rank, but the exogenitor turned back to the toiling adepts.
‘NL-Primus does not exist. Zero Tier does not exist. Nicco Palpus could have fired the Dawnbreak Technology into a black hole, but instead he divided it into three and split it amongst those magi he trusted best to contain it. Iron Father Kristos would not allow it to be destroyed.’ His primary head frowned, but not at anything being conducted in the laboria just then. ‘The Iron Hands are useful soldiers, a fifth column to stand between the Legiones Skitarii and Auxillia Myrmidon in the Omnissiah’s hierarchy of war. That is why the position of the Voice of Mars exists. In my lifetime alone I have seen the so called Iron Creed quietly revised several times. But this Kristos is different. He thinks himself more, he thinks his Chapter better, and he would use the Dawnbreak Technology to realise his vision.’
‘How?’
A rattling heave of a shrug. ‘The technology is transformative. It is a relic of the eldar, constructed to inhuman needs at the pinnacle of their febrile imagination and powers, at the very precipice of their descent. Who can say how such alien minds would have meant to exploit it.’ He rapped on the armourglass between them and the laboria researchers with a heavy mechandendrite. ‘Palpus humours the Iron Father for now, carefully, for even Kristos will not endure forever. Such is the nature of warriors. Such is the gift of stability that the Synod bestows upon the Iron Hands through the Voice of Mars.’
Melitan peered through the protective glass at the tech-priests working inside. Hooded. Anonymous. Manipulating their meaningless instruments in their sterile laboria.
‘They study the effects of the Dawnbreak Technology on living flesh,’ said Oelur. ‘And on technology, both Martian and xenos. I believe that Fabricator-Locum Hyproxius Velt was engaged in similar investigations on Thennos. Exar Sevastian I do not know, but I doubt that his facilities on Fabris Callivant would be suited for anything beyond mere containment.’ He sniffed, musing. ‘He received the lesser cache of the three.’
‘And…’ Melitan hesitated, unsure if she wanted to ask the question, but knowing it had to be asked. ‘Where are the test subjects?’
VI
Glass-fronted cells hung over nothingness either side of a lengthy observation derrick. Scrutiny was meant to work in only one direction, Melitan knew, but the bullet-like focus of so many stimulus-starved eyes had a force that was physical. The hangar-like space was cathedral quiet, layered in dark. Multi-focus stab-lumens ran from a creaking gantry. A susurrant mutter rose from the binary infocytes embedded in the data analysis pits that hung under the loosely tiled floor. Numerous consoles put out a gritty pall of illumination, but it was barely enough to show up the masked adepts that worked at them, the slow ivory click of their runekeys a devotional sub-dialect of its very own.
The cells themselves were large, more spacious than Melitan’s single cell in the outer dormitory blocks. The better to study their behaviour.
The first contained a human male. He lounged soporifically in an unmade cot. He was naked, a consequence of choice rather than imposition for unworn clothes lay strewn about his cell. Melitan could see drained electoos and numerous low-grade bionics on his body. An adept of the Mechanicus. A volunteer, perhaps. The skin around the augment attachment sites bore evidence of self-harm, gouge marks from teeth and fingernails as if he had attempted to pry the devices from his flesh.
Some uncanny confluence to a thing she had seen in her dream the night before sent a shudder through her, and she allowed Oelur and his guards to lead her on.
The next cell contained an unpainted Sentinel walker, apparently fresh from the manufactory lines. Its weapons had not been fitted and its machine-spirit did not appear to have been drawn forth to awaken the shell. Melitan made the sign of the blessed cog at that act of mercy and moved on. The next harboured a bloody smear on the glass and a lump of something non-specific on the floor.
‘The greenskin races do not react well to the technology,’ said Oelur. ‘We continue to hold it under observation in order to study any post-mortem influences. There appear to be none thus far.’
The derrick seemed to continue forever. Lit cells lined the walkway like a hall of horrors. A terrible fascination drew Melitan’s gaze to each and every one.
‘Do you tire?’ asked the ranger alpha, helping her refind her feet with a
n uncommon kindness of touch.
‘No,’ she smiled back. ‘I’m fine.’
Other cells contained more men. More women. All in various states of spiritual degradation and material undress. Some stared into space and cut at themselves like the first, but others maniacally laughed, cried or raged at their confinement. Melitan started from the handrail as a woman hurled herself at the glass of her cage and babbled.
‘Should these cells not be soundproofed?’ she asked, her heart racing as she allowed the ranger alpha to lead her away.
‘If that is your recommendation then it can be arranged,’ Oelur sniffed. ‘But the purpose of this confinement is observation.’
Others were comatose, hooked up to wittering chirurgical machines via murky intravenous lines. Plastek tubing splayed from their bodies like a peeling chrysalis. Melitan could read some of the rune notations on the chemical tanks. Some were formulated to hold the body alive in spite of brain death, others were concocted to keep the brain alive while the body decayed.
She saw representatives of dozens of alien races. A borous threll. A demiurg. A gretchin – its cranial contents spoiled over the glass. A worker-form chrome. Others she had never encountered before or that she knew only through textual descriptions of rogue traders and magos explorators from centuries or millennia past.
There were scores of cells. Hundreds.
Thousands.
The derrick stretched off into darkness.
She paused to look at one. Oelur issued another sub-vocal command and her escort clanged to a halt. It held an eldar female. She stared back at Melitan with almond-shaped eyes that gave away nothing. She was beautiful, both from an objective and an ascetic standpoint. Her features were sharply symmetrical, her hair was the colour of ochre, her skin like cream. She was so very nearly human, and yet hauntingly abstracted from it. She sat cross-legged on her bed, hands on her knees as though meditating, just staring, utterly unconcerned by her nudity or her confinement.
‘Subject one-two-four-one,’ said Oelur. ‘Eldar are notoriously difficult to capture alive, but it was essential for us to employ at least one as a control subject.’ He extended a mechadendrite to prod the glass, making the cell sway on its wire. The eldar did not react. ‘Designation, Harlequin. Taken by skitarii forces during a raid on Phaeton.’ He withdrew the extensor. ‘A proportion of the individuals you see here have had no contact with the Dawnbreak Technology at all. They are present simply to negate the symptoms of confinement as a causal factor from any observed behaviour.’
‘She does not seem to be affected,’ Melitan said, unable to break the eldar’s gaze.
‘Not in any way that it allows you to see. But the eldar xenos are uncannily adept at segregating body from mind. This is why they are so resistant to physical interrogation. It is quite fascinating.’
‘Fascinating. Yes.’
She stared at the eldar. The alien’s lips parted, slowly, shaping words that she had no conception of. One corner curled into a grin.
‘Did you see that?’ Melitan turned to Oelur, but the exogenitor did not appear to have noticed. When she turned back the eldar had fallen mute and was still again.
If it had ever been otherwise.
‘These subjects will never leave their cells,’ said Oelur, his litter-bearers already turning away from the cell and bearing him on. ‘Containment of the technotheurgic corruption is assured. If a new test occurs requiring the participation of additional subjects then we simply install another cell.’
Melitan moved after him, peeling her eyes from the eldar’s face only when she was out of sight. ‘And… what is the nature of the corruption, exogenitor? How does it spread as it did across Thennos?’
‘That is the question, is it not?’
Oelur’s two heads turned until they were both facing ahead. Melitan saw that the track of illuminated containers came finally to a halt somewhere in the near distance. Perhaps another hundred or so cells down. In the dark beyond them stood a goliath set of structurally reinforced and noospherically barred containment doors.
Pain wormed through Melitan’s skull to reiterate its earlier message.
Oelur cracked a conspiratorial smile. ‘Would you like to see it?’
Chapter Nine
‘One of my ancestors described the tournament as the stimulant of the aristocracy and the opiate of the peasantry. It is time now for both.’
– Princeps Fabris
I
The Shield of the God-Emperor was less than two-thirds the tonnage of the Omnipotence, but that was not the impression that greeted Jalenghaal aboard the Hospitallers’ hallowed flagship.
She was the sword of angels, seven kilometres of white armour so brilliant it looked as though she were on fire. Numerous golden aquilae emblazoned her length, a trillion words of scriptural writ inscribed in intaglio, as if the entire Corpus Divinatus and its compendium codicils had been transposed word for word, scale to scale, onto ceramite. Her internal splendour was no less magnificent, a gothic fusion of cathedral and mausoleum symbolising both celebration and interment. As her hull plating carried the scripture so too did her bulkheads. Her columns and braces glittered with golden lettering, every thread of every screw wound with infinitesimal words of valediction, malice and prayer. Similar decorative motifs recurred. Crosses. Scythes. Winged angels. Doorways surmounted by cracked skulls irised open like portals to the underworld, leading onto corridors bedecked with ever graver and more morbid imagery. Every passage was a reliquary. Lit by candles, protected by force field and armourglass, the bones of heroes, drops of blood preserved on strips of parchment, and weapons with which qualitatively valorous deeds had been performed in the name of an abstract creed, all sat in quiescence.
The bridge itself was a centre of worship first and of command second, and made the preceding kilometres of ship seem secular by comparison.
A million candles burned in sconces, cradles and in the hands of serfs who served no other purpose than the bringing of light. Despite them, it was dark, and Jalenghaal wondered if that was a deliberate metaphor for the work the Hospitallers performed on behalf of the Master of Mankind. Choirs of gene-eunuchs a thousand strong delivered dirgeful hymns of deliverance through duty’s end, amplified by the vast dome into an oceanic elegy of lament. The frescoed rotunda was replete with skeletal grotesques, shedding their liquefied flesh and shielding their skull faces from the golden brilliance of the Corpse-Emperor enthroned at the oculus of the dome.
At the sound of his guest’s approach, Chapter Master Mirkal Alfaran turned.
He was armoured, but unhelmed. His face was powdered white, eyes ringed with kohl so that his bald head resembled a skull. His armour was a penitent’s white, gold inlay and parchment strips, enough for a dozen tomes of scripture, burning under the candlelight. Hand-crafted aquilae clattered on strings as he moved. An enormous, two-handed power sword with the Hospitallers Cross at the crosspiece was mag-locked across his back, swathed in an elaborate scabbard that resembled a pair of angel’s wings. A single gold ring strung with actual white feathers pierced his ear.
For all the Chapter Master’s eerie sovereignty, Jalenghaal’s interest lay with his seneschal.
Venerable Galvarro was a Dreadnought. He was reputed to have advised every master of the Hospitallers since their founding as a Chapter almost a thousand years prior, and his armour was a sarcophagus fit for the interment of a hero. The pearly white ceramite was covered in plates of ormolu bearing mezzotints of heroic scenes. Pius and the Emperor. The Emperor and Horus. Dorn bestride the walls of Terra. Unknown heroes engaged in unsung acts across the deep history of the Imperium. Gilded fretwork encircled his weapons and his feet, like the work of a spider that spun gold in place of silk. Atop its sarcophagus, framed within an ornate pair of angel’s wings and haloed by a death’s head, a carillon of golden bells sang dolorously with ever
y steady breath of the Dreadnought’s living power, a panegyric without end for the fallen warrior within.
That was simply the sound that celebrated his existence. When he walked to war in earnest, the bells would sound a very different note.
‘Iron Father Kristos,’ declared Alfaran, jarring Jalenghaal for a moment, a moribund sweep of one gilded arm encompassing his vessel. His voice was a whisper. As though the Emperor listened and he would rather He not hear. ‘We welcome the sons of our father’s brothers, and are humbled that you would join us for the return to Fabris Callivant. Your timing is propitious. We have much to prepare and very little time…’
>>> END OF SIMULUS.
Jalenghaal’s eye opened with a start.
Neural restraint plugs tugged at the back of his skull and the roof of his spine as he instinctively tried to struggle free. He could taste blood in his mouth. But with enervated swallow muscles and no proper mechanism of expectoration, the fluid trickled through the slits in his facial grille. A passing adept wiped it from his face for him. Coolant vented from the simulus alcove and turned to steam in the hotter air. Shrugging off the neural plugs and adaptor circuitry he clumped out of his alcove, scattering the machine adepts fussing over inload-exload hardpoints, and glared down the line of alcoves.
The Garrsak clan embraced simulus technology like no other. Or so Jalenghaal had believed before he had set foot aboard the Omnipotence.
Scores of alcoves, enough for half a clan company, lined a walkway several hundred metres long. The intervening space was taken by power generators and data converters, great baffled coils of primary and secondary surge protectors. Loops of wire scrambled up the walls like creeping vegetation, and criss-crossed the air like a net. The walkway itself was nothing of the kind. It was a dump for a mass of thick, brass-ribbed cables that connected individual alcoves to the meme-stacks. To stand within it was to be shrunk to a millimetre scale to stand within the circuitry of a doctrinal wafer. It was enough that the manual tasks of command entry and cable transfer had to be performed by an automated assemblage of hooks and claws operating from a network of overhead rails. Hymning processionals of tech-priests, led by flesh-spare mechardinals in flapping vestments and mitres ran along them in shuddering, open-topped cable cars. The meme-stacks themselves stretched high towards a distant ceiling, shrouded by hyper-coolant like clouds clinging to the walls of a cathedral spire.
