by David Guymer
It was unusual for a machine-spirit, particularly one as jealous as Scholam NL-7, to reach out of its own volition, but he felt a tingle as it laced its system tethers with his and whispered its valediction. The pulsed binaric translated to a word.
Just one.
Chapter Eleven
‘She Who Thirsts and Ayoashar’Azyr are the masters of this dance, but it is the Laughing God who shapes their tune, for it is a fine tragedy indeed.’
– Fall
I
The alpha skitarius dragged Melitan along the walkway by the wrist. She kicked out with her feet, trying to find purchase on the runebanks as they slid by her, succeeding only in knocking over a few stools. The cyborgised veteran condensed more strength into his one arm than she could summon from her entire body.
And if she could get away from him – what then?
She felt herself succumbing to panic. Her heart was beating faster, thoughts spilling through her mind at a frenetic pace. She was numbly aware of herself pleading with the dumb Legio Cybernetica muscle-brute plodding on behind her, even as she wriggled like a maggot under a vivisector’s needle. With another pointless, piercing scream, she dug her heels into the grated flooring, yanked on her trapped hand and scrabbled along the floor for something to hold on to. Her fingers tore in her desperation, leaving bloody trails on the metal behind her. The blinking lens lights of the binary infocytes in the underslung data cradles blurred beneath her, stars in the heartbeat before warp translation. The lights were not especially bright, but they stung her eyes, setting off a pulsing migraine that made her gasp, killing her own efforts to escape as she slapped her palm to her forehead.
‘Why do you struggle?’ The alpha sounded genuinely perplexed. ‘We have been waiting decades for this moment. The chance to abase ourselves before the Sapphire King.’
Clutching her face in one hand, Melitan could only scream. It was an inhuman sound that came out of her, something ripped out of her, torn, mangled by a shrill binaric register that had the skitarii legionaries twitching in discomfort. Her eyes filled with racing numerals, as if her brain had triggered a purge and restart. Her mouth widened, but no sound emerged now but a strangled whine.
‘What is this?’
The alpha tightened his grip on her wrist and pushed the still-warm emitter of his plasma pistol to the roof of her head. The other skitarii backed off, warily, drawing weapons from sidearm holsters and covering their alpha.
Thrashing on the end of its chain, the robo-mastiff snarled and snapped at Melitan, salivary lubricant flying from its heavy jaws, its noospheric olfactors picking up the forced rewiring of Melitan’s higher processes and driving it wild.
Surrendering to the mastiff’s instincts, the keeper let some slack into the chain.
Pain erupted from somewhere deep in Melitan’s brain, repealing the mastiff’s paralysis codes and burning a command phrase into the ashes of her insular cortex.
‘Deimos!’
Motive Force abandoned the robo-mastiff even as it exploded forwards. It was as if the verbal override had doused its battery packs and severed every wire in its make-up, its sub-intelligence wiped clean before its dead body had crashed to the floor.
The keeper looked up from the junk metal shackled to her arms and at Melitan. It was difficult to express horror around so much suturing and functional addenda, but that was what she did.
‘What did you do?’ asked the alpha. Instead of shooting Melitan in the head, which is what she would have done in his place.
Omnissiah, when had she started to think like that – like an Iron Hand?
‘Androktasiai,’ she hissed. ‘One-one-zero-zero-zero-one-one. Execute.’
The primary data-tether, responsible for gating all inload/exload to the skitarius’ neural functions, went into sudden overload. Sparks sprayed from his temple, triggering a cascade eruption from the warriors of his cohort as the invasive kill algorithm jumped between their linked systems. They spasmed and jerked as their neural wetware melted into their grey matter, nonsense binaric screaming from their helmet grilles. The alpha clattered to the derrick and steamed. The rest of the cohort were not long behind. The acrid stink of melted plastek rose off their torched husks.
Only the Legio Cybernetica slave was still upright.
For all her obvious enhancement, her bionics were singularly, brutally functional. Her purpose did not require the same degree of interconnectedness as the legionaries. The muscle-brute tried to back away, but the spirit-flensed junk weight of the robo-mastiff was too great even for her. She went nowhere.
The unpackaging sub-personality in Melitan’s medulla nudged the somatic nerves in her face to produce a predatory smile.
She bent to scoop up the alpha’s plasma pistol. She had never held one before, and yet somehow she knew every aspect of its arcana. She aimed it at the keeper’s head, nudging the power slider towards minimum. So soon after Oelur’s execution, she didn’t want to risk overheating it.
She blinked uncertainly. Her vision doubled and wavered, and for a moment it had looked like someone else’s hand around the pistol. Or someone else’s eyes seeing it.
Could she do this? Could she end a life, just like that? Was she–?
She squeezed the trigger.
Warmth splattered her face, and she realised that the chamber was beginning to spin. She was prepared enough to throw out her arms before legs buckled from under her.
II
Melitan came to with a splitting headache. She had no idea how long she’d been out, but it couldn’t have been long because the infocytes were still beetling about nervously in their underfloor spaces rather than rolling her off the side of the gantry.
‘I must be getting used to passing out,’ she muttered to herself as she got hands under her to push herself into an upright sit.
The chamber turned around her as though she had become the centre of the galaxy, and she cradled her head in her hands with a groan. The distant rumour of screams and gunfire was barely audible through the reinforced walls of the observation level, but it felt as if it were going to sonicate her skull to powder. Nevertheless, the sound was oddly reassuring. Pleasing even.
The Dawnbreak Technology may have spread its corruption beyond the containment chamber, but the cellular operation of Zero Tier had contained it to a degree. Someone fought back.
She blinked until the gantry stopped spinning, and found herself looking down into the fractured optics of the alpha skitarius. She had done that.
‘Is that you in there, Palpus?’ she whispered to the pain in her head.
It was still there, but wasn’t getting any worse. She wished she could say whether that was good or bad.
‘What’s my favourite colour?’ she asked herself. ‘Red.’ She frowned. That probably didn’t prove anything amongst the Martian faithful. ‘What were my parent’s names?’ Her automatic use of the word ‘were’ gave her a moment’s pause, but she answered promptly. ‘Greta and Hayden Yolanis. We lived in the Laurentine Baronial Habs,’ she added, in case of doubt.
Satisfied that she was still her, she mustered the wherewithal to stand.
The power to the overhead lumens and the rune displays was down, but it was not, she belatedly noticed, entirely dark. A bitty grey sheen of low-grade illumination was coming off the cells that dangled over either side of the gantry. It was not an active light, but a luminescent strip of some kind, reminiscent of the radium tags she had used to paint on munitions canisters as a child-aspirant on Fabris Callivant.
She turned in the direction of the outer doors, far, far, out of sight at the far end of the gantry, and considered her situation.
As soon as the corrupted skitarii had the base secured, and perhaps not even as long as that, every last one of them would be looking to get into this chamber and past the containment doors behind her.
How long would it take a skitarii maniple to shift those two doors without main power? She dismissed the speculation. It was the wrong question. They had severed power to the base, so they presumably had the means of reviving it when it was in their interest to do so. Impressed by her own perspicacity, she turned her unexpected clarity of thought to what that meant for her. Should she stay, try to defend the Dawnbreak Technology for as long as it took for help to arrive, or use what little time she had to effect an escape? She shook her head. Again, the wrong question. This was Noctis Labyrinth Faculty Primus. No help was going to simply arrive. She was going to have to get out there and bring it back herself.
That was one problem solved, but it still left the biggest challenge in front of her.
How?
Almost before she had turned her full focus on that question, the solution came to her, the proprietary codes and facility schema she would need to enact it filing into her mind. She felt herself giggle. This was real knowledge, real power. It was what she had groped towards all her life and now it was hers.
She turned to look down the faintly luminous rail of cells.
She could do it. But she couldn’t do it alone.
III
The Harlequin’s eyes were larger than a human’s, deeper, in some spiritual, non-dimensional sense. The ghosting smile on her face hadn’t moved since Melitan had atomised the two infocytes who had tried to keep her from the cell.
‘What is your name?’
The authority behind her own voice surprised her. It seemed to catch the alien unawares too, for one achingly perfect eyebrow lifted.
Melitan nodded, satisfied. ‘Good. You hear me at least.’
‘I hear you, Magos Vale,’ the Harlequin answered, addressing Melitan by the name that Oelur had spoken in front of her. There was a peculiar cadence to her speech, as though her mind formulated it in verse rather than in prose. ‘I hear the laughter of Cegorach. The stage is diminished, the prizes cheaper, but still we perform his favourite dance.’
Melitan frowned, suspecting the eldar was mad. Whatever the oddities of the eldar psychology, she had been captive a long time. But again, some understanding that she was only dimly aware of possessing assured her that this was not so. This was simply the eldar’s peculiar manner of employing their spoken language – through cultural reference and idiopathic metaphor.
‘So what is your name?’
The alien laughed with mock gaiety. It was a performance, as the years of silence that preceded it had been a performance too. ‘Know me by the part I play. Call me Fall. And I shall name thee Pride.’
Melitan gritted her teeth. ‘Do you wish to be free or not?’
‘None of us are free. Only Pride would think so.’
‘Let’s try something less rhetorical. If I let you out of there, will you kill me or help me?’
The Harlequin simply smiled.
‘If you can give one straight answer, make it this one.’ Melitan held on to the safety rail and leaned over until her mechadendrite was almost touching the front glass of the cell. ‘Has the Dawnbreak device affected you?’
Fall’s laughter this time was unscripted, as though the question had been unexpected. ‘Of course,’ the eldar answered. Her sing-song voice took on a smoky quality as she mirrored Melitan’s posture and leaned forwards. ‘Is your imagination too infertile to understand what the eldar of the final Acts would turn their brilliance to?’ She laughed again. ‘But its effect on me is different. Your minds are different. Lesser. More subject to change. She Who Thirsts and Ayoashar’Azyr are the masters of this dance, but it is the Laughing God who shapes their tune, for it is a fine tragedy indeed.’
‘Wait,’ said Melitan, struggling to master her frustrations at the eldar’s riddling tongue. ‘What?’
Fall spread her hands dramatically. ‘Cegorach adores tragedy. It is the dance of Thiraea and Pyr. Desire steals the Wise from Reason, and brings only Death upon that which Desire pursues. I have danced that dance many times and played many of its parts. Always we hope otherwise, but always it ends the same way, and always do I dance it anew on different stages.’
Melitan was about to ask the eldar what she meant, but she knew. Deep down, she knew. This was why she – why Palpus – had wanted the technology contained, even as he had been forced to bow to Kristos’ order that it be preserved. It had been blighted by Chaos at birth. And now, because of Kristos and his ambitions, it had inveigled itself into the destiny of the Iron Hands. And of Melitan Yolanis.
‘I need to get out of here. I need to deliver word and bring help.’ Fiddling with the grip of her plasma pistol, Melitan agonised. Could she trust the eldar? Did she have even the remotest of chances of getting out of Zero Tier without her?
‘I’m going to release you,’ she said, reluctantly.
The Harlequin shrugged, as if Melitan’s decision had never been in doubt.
Turning from the cell, Melitan removed the smouldering form of the infocyte from the controlling runebank with a shove of her foot. There was no life to the unit, but to one with a full grasp of the Motive Force that was no bar. She understood as if it were obvious.
Like an Imperial Saint laying-on hands to a wounded soldier, she placed her palms to the console. She felt a tingle in her fingers as the subtle galvanism of skin on plastek breathed new life into the system. Mumbling and whirring the cogitator came online, reviving the infopane in turn with a sputter of greenish light. She held her breath, awed by the miracle she performed even as she performed it. One hand on the console to preserve the circuit, she manually keyed in the cryptex phrase. It was long and fiendishly complex. Exogenitor Oelur had envisaged no circumstance in which these cells were ever meant to be opened. But just because a possibility could not be envisaged did not mean that it did not exist, and the Voice of Mars had made certain to receive inload of the codes.
Comprehending the acceptable margins of ignorance was what separated the aspirant from the master.
The front wall of the eldar’s cell detached silently and dropped into the abyss. Melitan watched it fall, watched it disappear, and kept watching until she heard it shatter. She let out the wheeze she hadn’t realised she was still holding in, and looked up.
The eldar hadn’t moved at all.
Melitan pointed her pistol at her. ‘Get dressed. We’re leaving.’
Chapter Twelve
‘The worst kept secret on Medusa, since the uprising. The entire Iron Council knows there is something there.’
– Iron Father Verrox
I
‘I knew you would come crawling. Sooner or later.’
Iron Father Verrox stood framed by the access hatch of the rumbling Land Behemoth Ruination, lit from behind like an angel of annihilation despatched by the Emperor of Mankind. Although divinities and miracles were seldom proximate to the Clan Vurgaan Iron Father. Lydriik tramped up the ramp, head bowed, battered by the wind, his Rhino lost to the dust and howl of the ever-moving Behemoth.
Verrox glowered over the high rim of his gorget, a glint of tooth showing.
‘I thought it would be sooner.’
‘It is good to see you too,’ said Lydriik, dust screaming past his visor.
Verrox went proudly unhelmed. Long grey hair clad in iron ringlets whipped about him like the medusae of Grekan myth, banging on the hull plating and on the vast breadth of his Indomitus plate. The armour hung heavily on him, like a pelt, the rattling war-harness scored in old Juuket signifying the worlds he had laid to waste and the xeno races he had consigned to extinction. Totems and trophies of the same hung from battered lengths of chain. There were shell casings, traitor insignia, the mummified anatomies of alien monstrosities bested in single combat, all of them butting and twirling as the Tactical Dreadnought suit breathed. Lydriik’s armour had once been similarly adorned, before it and he had been ushered into Clan Borrgos.
&n
bsp; The Iron Father grinned, simian lips drawing over serried rows of chain-driven teeth. ‘The Vurgaan are the lions of Medusa. The Borrgos are jackals. I knew you would never be content on the Broken Hand.’
Lydriik nodded, without acknowledging the truth of what the Iron Father said. Verrox was terrifying, somehow embodying both the epitome and the antithesis of what it was to be an Iron Hand, but there was something intoxicating about him as well. Like hovering one’s finger over a mega-weapon’s trigger switch.
‘I have a favour to call in, old friend.’
‘Of course you do.’
With that, the Iron Father turned ponderously and strode inside.
The temperature soared by about fifty degrees as the wind fell away and the hatch was sealed. Lydriik removed his helmet, sweating in spite of his environment seals, and wiped sweat from his brow. The air aboard Ruination hovered around freezing, but everything was relative. It was a peculiarity of Iron Hands physiology that favoured the cold. Securing his helmet to the magnetic lock-strip that ran alongside his pistol holster, he followed after the Iron Father.
A hundred years he had been of the Vurgaan clan, in the wake of a battlefield initiation from Verrox himself on the feudal world of Battakkan. That century had been spent entirely on campaign, battling to remove the tau and their proxies from worlds across the Western Veil. This was his first time aboard the mobile monastery of his former clan.
Rusted weapons had been nailed to the bulkheads, so many they overlapped and made a wall of blades. The blood of those slain on them still tinted the blades. Red, black, green, pink. The air was coloured, like the cathedra of a Cardinal World, and it smelled of murder. Suits of armour stood sentinel over door hatches. Not Space Marine power armour for that was sacred, but trophies of a thousand campaigns. Ork mega armour. Eldar ghost armour. Understandably, given the clan’s recent campaigns, tau combat armour and battlesuits were particularly abundant. Everything rattled with the Behemoth’s unstoppable forward motion. The beat of blades on shields. The thud of boots on alien worlds. It was like walking through a mortuary ship, peering across the canyon of death, and seeing a gun line of the alien and the heretic.
