Sabbat Crusade

by Dan Abnett

  ‘Nothing that either party did not deserve!’ Ajji snapped, walking up to stand by Tey and stare up at the King. ‘A pack of machine-ignorant waterbags and a pile of righteously-scrapped heretech. Not an iota of the Omnissiah’s grace in any of it. Leave them to it, let them chew each other to crude rubbish and let the whole mess be an object lesson. Just as the war was, I’ll point out to you. This planet was lost to the Light until we chose to take a hand.’

  One splay-fingered augmetic hand made a gesture at the word ‘Light’, a stylised cog/sun that was the mark of one of the galactic north-east’s thousands of transmechanic sub-cults. Tey copied the gesture and let his data-streams spirit the image away to index it against his archives of Segmentum Pacificus technotheology. His subprocesses cross-referred it into his internal dossier on Ajji; less than a second later the corona of annotations she wore in his vision danced and shifted, and he felt his knowledge and insights about her reshuffle themselves in his mind. It felt like suddenly remembering something he had learned long ago, except that he knew this knowledge was fresh.

  He paused to relish the sensation – delight in new knowledge linking with old was one of the cornerstone shamanic ecstasies of his own order – and when he felt the sensation subside he realised Ajji was staring at him. She had extruded an ochre eyelight on the end of a slender silver tendril and was scanning him up and down with it.

  ‘Do you find fault or satisfaction with your assignment to watch over the graveyard, transmechanic?’

  Ajji’s reply was another terse, canted interrogative, until she remembered her manners and vocalised instead.

  ‘May I know the utility of communicating this to you, magos?’

  ‘Speculative utility,’ Tey answered after a moment. ‘My optimal mode of engagement with a mission is broad fact-gathering around all tangents, vectors and horizontal and vertical shades.’

  He paused to reconsider his phrasing, although Ajji had said nothing. He was aware that his words would make little sense to anyone without access to the dizzying multi-dimensional ideograms that his data-flows formed and re-formed in his brain. He tried again.

  ‘My mission history furnishes repeated and convincing proof that broad-scaled data gathering considerably increases operational effectiveness. Effective insight and action can often be derived late in a mission from patterns that were not apparent at the time of acquisition.’

  ‘You don’t know why you’re asking.’

  ‘But it may well be useful that I do, in ways that will not make themselves apparent to me until far later. Any given data point may seem meaningless when I acquire it, but only because the information which will give it meaning by association is still unknown to me. Trying to impose a priori criteria for what is meaningful and useful harms this process and reduces the effectiveness of my work. I speak from experience.’

  ‘You don’t know why you’re asking, you’re just asking on general principles and you have faith that my answer will be useful some day, somewhere.’

  ‘Faith, curiosity, analysis. Three of the signal virtues of our priesthood, were I immodest enough to point the fact out.’

  They were silent for a little time. The wind was up, and gust-blown grit kept up a desolate little tune upon the curved Coffin-Worm hulls sprawled on either side of the pathway behind them. Ajji retracted her eyelight and they both stared up at the Inheritor King’s prow-spire and the distant ceiling of the Headstone overarching it.

  ‘My methods don’t meet with your approval, then?’ Tey asked at length.

  ‘What methods?’ Ajji retorted. Her noetic band squealed with a dozen simultaneous pingback codes, a mannerism with the same meaning as throwing one’s arms up in frustration. ‘I barely understand your methods. You haven’t briefed us, haven’t explained anything to us. A despatch came ahead of you that we were to render any and all assistance to the magos travelling aboard the Ramosh Incalculate while it made ready to do its own work, but all you seem to want from us is answers to inexplicable questions. What are your methods? What is your thesis? What are you even doing here, Magos Tey? Why is the Headstone just hanging over the graveyard instead of picking up the Inheritor King and carrying it away like it was supposed to?

  ‘I sit and study the manifold, I watch the skitarii hunt these heretical bastards who continue to manage to get in here I still don’t know how, I sit and watch our attempts to continue the work of the graveyard gradually sliding into disorder, and I hate disorder, magos, it offends me personally and philosophically. And in the middle of it all, here you are, wandering about at random, gadding off to talk to those incompetent fools out in the work camp, and asking me if I like it here.’

  She stopped, and composed herself. Some of the fire of her words had leaked into her body language and noosphere: the big, rangy form had hunched slightly and her hand had slipped into a fist, while the noetic link back to her servitor was thrumming with heightened-alert messages.

  ‘I think I have given you my answer,’ she vocalised. She sounded a little surprised at herself.

  ‘I think you have. Thank you, transmechanic. For what it is worth, I regret the… aggravation my work is causing you. It brings me no pleasure. But my own mission parameters are ironclad, and my methods, I assure you, do work. Tolerating my activities must, for now, be considered part of the general disorder of running a facility such as this in a time of war.’

  He couldn’t resist that last little dig – Ashek was not a war zone, scuffles with partisans notwithstanding. And although Tey regretted it later, that was the note he left her on that afternoon, walking away towards the Inheritor King’s enormous barbed prow and leaving her standing, silent and resentful, in the blowing dust.

  XVIII

  Tey was almost physically under the thing’s armoured skirts before he realised he wasn’t sure if there was a way into it. The other three Hammerstone Kings had all been prepared for the delicate attentions of Daprokk’s cutter crews, who had explored them at length and mapped the access points throughout their undercarriages, built access scaffolds up to their lower hatches and ramps. But the other three Kings were the ones that had seen battles and been stormed by force, and the cutting crews had been the most careful with them, treating them with the respectful wariness due a powerful, bestial enemy whose life might not have entirely deserted it. The Inheritor King had barely been made mobile. It was a truck, Tey told himself, a grandiose one, but no more than that. An over-engineered cargo-eight.

  That thought amused him, and he looked about him. No, there were far more than eight track arrays around him. A twelve? More than that, even. Tey suppressed the surveyor routine that would have automatically fed him the number and blueprints and strolled down the length of the Inheritor King’s undercarriage, looking up at the hull and around at the titanic treads, absently counting them up.

  It wasn’t like being in a temple, Tey decided. The space beneath the Inheritor King was an oppressive place, the track assemblies thick and deep on each side of him, blocking out most of what light there was. Unlike the soaring vaulted roof of the Ramosh Incalculate over the graveyard outside, in here (and Tey did find himself thinking of it as in here) the hull was close overhead, a shadowed mass bearing down low enough that it felt as if all the life and air were being crushed out. It was like the spaces traditionally dug beneath the temples, Tey decided. He was in a catacomb.

  Mind wandering, Barrel shuffling through the dust behind him, Tey walked the length of the Inheritor King. He turned sideways and slipped down the aisle beneath the twinned treads, the links so massive that when Tey reached he could only barely hook his fingers over their lower edges and the upper run of the treads was lost in the darkness overhead. He stood beneath the ramming spike and stared up at the mountings for the giant power field generators that had still been half-built in the Heritor’s forges when the battlefront had collapsed around them. Those fields would have armoured the King’s p
row against attack, and fed a disruptive pulse down the length of the ram to scramble void shields and split fortress walls. This was more like a cathedral space, the sides of the prow rising up around him, sloping inward to where they met in the superstructure overhead. The prow had been built so that swarms of infantry or whole tank formations could advance under its protection: once the King had driven through a fortified line or into a battle formation, the prow would raise and the Archenemy’s soldiers would pour into the breach.

  As Tey meandered this way and that beneath the Inheritor King’s underbelly, he had first let his mind drift into its usual frayed cloud of semi-random associations. He had allowed it to run unmolested for a time, and he was aware that his hindbrain was finding this soup of data – the exploration of the King, the Ashek war dossiers, his conversations with the other magi, the disturbing chattercode the night of the raid – to be rich indeed. The layer of augmetic processors wrapped around the inside of his skull was working at such pace that Tey’s sensors had noticed an actual temperature change, something he had not experienced in decades of duty and dozens of missions. The noetic bridge between those processors and Barrel’s data-churn, with its unimaginable density of information, was a bright blaze of transmission in Tey’s readouts.

  He cast a light eye over the swarms of data-particles now, watching patterns form between his conscious thoughts, his memories, and the files he had absorbed straight from his inloads. There was a strange doubling feeling as he watched himself watch his own mind at work.

  He tossed a carefully-sorted stream of referents into the storm, as though he were standing on a bridge tossing dye down into the swirling waters below to see their currents more clearly. The great eddies of information began to boil more angrily as his processors rethought every data-particle’s relationship to every other one in light of these new directions. Tey started to notice backwaters into which low-correlation data was drifting, sudden tidal surges as a point of relevance was discovered and great volumes of knowledge rushed into new positions, upwellings and vortices as insight led to insight and fed back into the constant motion. His mission directives were like deep, implacable currents running beneath it all; his intellect, the Machine-God’s benediction given manifest form, was the sun warming the sea.

  And there was the sealed data-rune from the archmagos, the secret run of Tey’s thoughts that he had locked away from even his own brain, and this was the moon, high and distant but its pull shaping every tide and flow.

  Three of the vortices had stabilised, dancing around one another like whirlpools, like tornadoes, as their central concepts acquired enough referential weight to accrete information around themselves. Tey threw an associative mapping layer over the entire pattern and then drew it into his alpha-mind. For a moment it was as though he was remembering something he had once known perfectly; a moment later he could not remember what it was like to not know these things.

  The Ordinatus. That was the first of the referents that had gathered a data-swarm about itself. Tey had known that the war engines of the Centurio Ordinatus would loom large in his deliberations – even the most casual first assessment of his mission briefing had brought them to mind. But still, his thoughts darkened and he murmured a soothing canted blessing in a base-eight code he had learned on Mars to regain his calm.

  His mental records of the Centurio began to orbit the hotter, messier mass of data his deep mind had synthesised from the war records of the Imperial Guard and the Titan Legions, sometimes chasing behind it or swinging around it and sometimes seeming to drag the denser, more cohesive data-mass along behind it in turn. Tey’s mood failed to lighten. He drew a line of thought down the outer layers of each data-mass, prompting them to put out tendrils and threads towards one another, their facing surfaces rippling and mirroring each other. Data scattered back and forth between them in particles and waves which slowed each time they felt Tey’s main attention on them, and unfurled menus and maps of themselves, summaries of what they contained, lists of current and previous associations.

  Heritor Asphodel has built his own Ordinatus. That phrase ran through thread after thread of data connections. Each time it presented itself to Tey’s vision it was strung with Munitorum and Mechanicus icons. It was the Munitorum who had made the claim, no less offensive for being carefully veiled between the lines of their communiqués. It was the Mechanicus analysts who had come to their high priests to pass the foul accusation on.

  The structure of Tey’s newest data-reverie shook as if a wind had passed through it. He had surprised himself by allowing a sudden burst of anger to interrupt the calm analysis of the reverie. He exerted his will over his passions and carried on.

  The two data-masses were joined by a whole cat’s cradle of connections now, with major associations zipping back and forth between them like transit cars on inter-hive cableways. Tey focused his attention on the centre of that connecting web. The sight of it bore down on his heart.

  Data-sigils hung through the connection web like gems strung through a spire dam’s netted veil, or like stages in one of the beautifully illuminated diagrams of evolutionary spread that Tey had seen on tapestries in the Biologis Shrine on Khulan. Each sigil was that of an Ordinatus engine, the strangest and most terrible faces of the Machine Cult’s war-making. And from each great Ordinatus, strands of concordance ran to the blood-dark icons that signified the Hammerstone Kings.

  In an almost-forgotten high corner of Tey’s mind, the thought-process locked inside Archmagos Gurzell’s thought-seal fizzed and burned, prickling at Tey’s brain, wanting to be released. He ignored it and brushed his mind over the threads of his analytical web, letting data soak into his foremind each time his attention brushed one of the connecting threads.

  A thread connected the Treading King to the noble blue-and-gold insignia of the Ordinatus Rakenheim. Tey’s feather-light mental touch shook loose facts, histories, images that settled on his foremind like petals dislodged from a blossoming tree. Tey saw picts of the engine as it climbed up from the machine-pits beneath Rakenheim’s capital hive, up the collar of cliffs and into the usurpers’ siege lines. He soaked up its blueprints, understood in microseconds the principles of its architecture. Saw how the design of its arching back and armoured shoulders were so uncannily like the form of the Treading King.

  He skipped across to a thread which strung through three Ordinatus data-tiles as it spiralled down towards the signifier for the Poison King. The gangling sprawl of the Ordinatus Karros; the sleek, flared outline of the Ordinatus Stygia; the rearing scorpion-tail of the Ordinatus Malamuria. Each flared in his vision and then shrank back to a wireframe, as though the attention he had paid was enough to incinerate it to its bones. But left glinting in the centre of each was what mattered: the beautifully complex and compact reactor systems, marvels of improvisation, purifying and burning fissile ores in processes that called on the deepest and most taxing mysteries of the Magi Physik.

  It had been four millennia since the Ordinatus Karros had hunted orkish invaders through the asteroid belts around its forge world. Two and a half since the Ordinatus Stygia had stalked across the ocean beds, in the blackness and silence and mind-numbing pressure and cold, slipping under the apostate Hedoniarch’s warfleets. And only eight hundred years, perhaps a handful more now, since the Ordinatus Malamuria had raised its tail and carried its monstrous gravitic projector to war over the splintergrass steppes.

  Such different machines, divided by so much space and time and war. But the ideas at the core of them, the concepts behind those reactor furnaces each carried in its heart…

  This was something Tey normally found beautiful, the union of such far-flung places around the objective and undeniable beauty of a principle of engineering or a work of forging. But not like this. Not when the final variation on that beautiful work was the blasphemous machine-pit deep in the guts of the Poison King, where the heavy elements from the hotstone flats had been
purified and ignited in the reactors or turned into lethally radioactive payloads for Asphodel’s guns.

  Tey had felt this sensation before. The creeping, clinical revulsion of having to watch something he held precious and sacred being covered in the excrement of the Archenemy. It was like having to wash and groom the corpse of a murdered loved one for burial.

  But he did not turn away. He had function, he had duty. He moved his mind on.

  The close-combat limbs on the Treading and Poison Kings used quantum-fluid bearings that recalled sacred archeprints from three forge worlds in the Segmentum Solar.

  The accelerator rail that ran up the Blighting King’s spine, launching aircraft into the sky and lobbing the Heritor’s malevolent little Blight-Ball mobile strike-points into the enemy. To a first scan, even a careful one, it appeared to be its own thing, but when Tey turned the schematics and auspex-log compilations over in his mind the parallels sprang clear. The thing was far weaker, a barely-there shadow of the great gravimetric accelerators that the Mechanicus built for the Imperium’s space fleets, but the design elements were hauntingly similar.

  And the Inheritor King. The skeletal structure of its long, segmented body, the architecture of its drive distributors, even the fat, triangular armoured housings of its tread arrays, all recalled the form of the Ordinatus Mars. And oh, that hurt, the mirroring between this twisted Heritor’s most fell creation and the oldest, greatest war-shrine of the Centurio Ordinatus, the one that bore the name of the Machine-Cult’s home world.

  Except…

  Tey knew he was holding on to the hope that he was wrong. That none of this meant anything. He could feel that possibility vanishing from his thought processes like water running through his fingers, every new insight and observation rendering the hope weaker.