by Dan Abnett
But then the crews would have reported the deaths that had given them their supply of sacrificial hands as accidents, or not reported them at all, and so how trustworthy could those records be? Tey dismissed that line of thought as unprofitable for now and walked forward into the vaulted shadows of the Inheritor King’s bridge.
XXII
He must have been expecting something, because after he had walked into the broad upper deck beneath the great slant of the forward windows, Tey realised he was waiting. For what, he had no idea. A flourish of trumpets? The cant and lights of a system start? An attack? He shrugged inwardly. Another magos might have fretted about that odd, unfocused expectation, and audited their thoughts to find where such an unproductively open-ended process bundle was running and why. Galhoulin Tey, who depended on the messiness of his thoughts to produce insights that pre-engineered logical forms could not, simply noted the sensation and moved on.
Through the bridge windows he could see constellations: not the star-spatter of Ashek’s night sky (and its overlay of twinkling debris from the war) but tidy, symmetrical lines and clusters: the running lights of the Ramosh Incalculate’s all-encompassing arkosect bay. The lifter had been constructed to ferry an entire formation of Titans down to a planetary surface: to carry away the Inheritor King, the walls between the Titan silos had been stripped out, turning the ship’s belly into a single enormous open-floored hangar. Tey, who had started to feel a little like an ant creeping through the carcass of some great predator, found the sight something of a relief. Here was a slightly more solid reminder that he was on an Imperial-held world. The war was over here. The graveyard of enemy machines was a tribute to that fact.
Tey laced his fingers together and stood in the centre of the bridge with his head bowed, his cowl falling forward and dropping a russet fringe around the edge of his vision. The ocular skulls circled him, painting the catwalks and the control banks around him with their eyelights, turning the darkened bridge into a surreal mosaic of glints and glimmers and textures. The great dark throne that would have been Asphodel’s high seat loomed in the bridge’s rear chamber. Tey turned his back on it.
What were you thinking, then? Tey thought half-aloud. You were a creature of mind, so-called Heritor. Still are, wherever you are now. What did that mind of yours draw on? What fuelled you? I want to see it. I am standing in what you intended to be your greatest creation, I am in amongst your thoughts and ambitions made manifest in glass and steel and adamantite. But it’s not enough. Your followers are poor scraps of what they were when they stood in the shade of your banner, Asphodel. Your woe machines are wreckage and your three fighting Hammerstone Kings are hulks. And your Inheritor King stands mute. I do not know what I need to. And I do not like not knowing what I need to. There will be a way to make your thoughts speak to me. I will know how your mind was when you were here, Asphodel. I am the servant of a greater god and a purer machine than you.
He walked forward, around the gracious swoop of the outermost control banks that curved beneath the bridge windows themselves. Most of the control configurations he recognised, some he had to wait a moment for his pattern routines to flicker through his memories and show him similar devices from Mechanicus machines. Some bays had nothing at all for a hand to operate, but were just mountings for interface cables tipped in brutal-looking cranial plugs for servitors. Or for human pilots so heavily remade as to make little difference.
His deep-memory systems had noticed the attention Tey was paying to his library of control layouts and the delays were getting shorter as his systems brought the technical archives closer to his foremind, like an iceberg being ponderously carried towards him on a new current. The dance of patterns and diagrams across his vision sped up and spread out. Tey watched comparative overlays of Leviathan control banks, the bridge pits of Imperial starships, Titan consoles. The flickering patterns gained urgency, reached deeper into his vast internal library. An overlay of the bridge of an Armageddon gigatanker tried to match itself to the scene in front of him, but could find no purchase and slid away. An overlay of the macrosystem control pulpits of Ectarion Hive on Braga Sanctis flickered for a moment as Tey’s data-matching algorithms thought they found points of similarity, then that evaporated too.
Tey paced up and down the control banks, hands folded into his sleeves, metal fingers snicking softly as they moved against each other. He could see a pattern emerging, but it was the pattern of no-pattern. The architecture of the Inheritor King’s bridge shied away from every STC and archeprint that Tey’s monumental memory banks could bring up. Every time he thought he was identifying a perfect alignment of form, the details of the match missed one another by the barest of margins. It was as if the whole machine-edifice had been built by someone carefully kicking over the traces of their inspiration in the divine lore of the Mechanicus.
He resisted the temptation to force-match, and sparked with impatience at his own impatience – had he still owned an organic face capable of movement, he would have been scowling. Force-matching was cheating. Tey knew there was a truth buried somewhere in this tangle of inert machinery, but it was a truth that had to unfurl itself for him. It had to emerge from the constellation of data and the parallax of his thoughts. It had been an axiom of Tey’s almost since his induction: you could no more tear a truth out of the universe than you could tear a spiderweb loose in your fist and expect it to come away undamaged.
He made himself stand still. He dimmed his optics (an observer would have seen his eyelights fade, until the space under the russet cowl was nothing but shadow), and pushed his thought-mosaics back from his primary processes for a moment. In their place he arrayed a code-cant psalm, an ancient Martian tech-song, soothing and uplifting. The aural component keened softly in his ears and the code component spread out to fill his personal noosphere, its symmetries beautiful, traditional and comforting.
Tey sang to himself for forty-three seconds precisely, then lowered his head for a moment and reignited his eyelights. He felt composed, back on balance again. It would come to him. He would watch and listen…
Listen.
He allowed himself a little inner smile.
The Inheritor King was the only one not to speak. He remembered that from the conversation with Adalbrect. Speaking. Voices. The night of the raid was the night the Kings would find their voices.
Such a silly mistake. Tey had been looking where he should have been listening.
Tey cycled up a new bank of senses to full sharpness, dimming down his sight, focusing his hearing. He listened in every audible spectrum: to the electromagnetic bands, to the thrum of the graveyard’s manifold, to the buzz and chirrup of ambient energy. He woke senses more exotic still and turned them all to look past and through the banked controllers in front of him, and down into the dizzying microwebs of circuitry the Heritor had laid out beneath them.
Silly mistake. So obvious. The screams of chattercode the other Inheritor Kings had been woken to utter had all been pointed here. This was where they had sent the voices they had found. And deep in the Inheritor King there was enough life in the circuits to keep those voices echoing. The blank brain of what would have been the King’s machine-spirit was cycling the ghosts of its siblings’ chatterscreams around and around in its systems, like a newborn murmuring in its sleep, shaping words it was too young to understand.
Tey listened to the chatter, threaded it out through his systems and tried to parse it for patterns, traces of familiar cyphers, even common elements to the lower forms of heretek scrapcodes, the ones he was able to carry in his mind with their malignance contained.
He listened to the chatter, even while his senses traced it as tiny energy pulses through the control webs, mapping the channels of the Inheritor King’s brain.
He listened to the chatter, while Barrel stood motionless behind him and his servo-skulls circled in their holding patterns above him and the silence thickened around t
hem like gathering dust.
Tey listened to the chatter.
XXIII
Transmechanic Ajji watched him pacing slowly in the bridge of the Inheritor King, Barrel motionless beside him, the skulls orbiting. She watched him with her thoughts darker than the perpetual twilight that his monstrous lifter-ship had cast over them all.
While Tey had been meandering outside the great beast she had observed him through the optical scintillae atop the slender surveillance masts spaced through the graveyard, and through the eyes of a handful of skitarii who had obeyed her orders to fall in and shadow the graveyard’s guest. She had made sure no skitarius followed the quarry for more than fifty metres or so, short enough encounters to make it look like chance. She was unsure if Tey held her in as much suspicion as she held him, but she wasn’t going to take risks.
Now she watched him directly through her higher senses, tracking him by identicast triangulation from the shrine’s transceiver vanes. Tey was not communicating with the manifold, although he had left a single, basic IFF indicator running in contact with it – had he severed himself from it entirely, Ajji would have been prepared to consider that a hostile act and launch the skitarii and tech-militia on him without further thought.
The only thing Tey seemed to be communicating with was the servitor, the perpetually stooped little creature that was always lugging that data-churn around at his heels. Ajji had not attempted to actually tap the communications between the two – partly because the transmissions themselves were a wonder of subtle signal-craft and deep encryption that she suspected even her own considerable capabilities might not be a match for, but mostly because, even with her respect for the Magos Parallact worn down to nothing, that was still a line she was not prepared to cross.
But even disregarding their content, the fact of the signals betrayed the magos. Ajji was good at what she did. She was skilled in her technics, well-versed in her mysteries, pious in her devotions. She tracked the faint gossamer of Tey’s connection to his ‘Barrel’, re-geared her primary senses into the passive auspex, watched him, and brooded.
Hours came and went, changes of shifts and watches. Magos Tey did not move from the King’s bridge. He did not break his silence to make even the most basic routine check-ins or observances to the shrine, or to corticoflect to its shrine icons.
It was full night again by the time Ajji decided that Tey was dormant, or meditating, or at any rate not about to leave the Inheritor King. Quick on the heels of that observation, before her nerve could fail her, Ajji sent a summons to Enginseer Daprokk, and began to make plans.
XXIV
In the higher reaches of Galhoulin Tey’s consciousness, realignments were under way. Instead of silos in three virtual dimensions, his analyses were now worked into great webbed globes of facts, speculative annotations and connections, like tight-woven balls of virtual string. Each of these hung in his mindspace in precise and meaningful relation to the others, the surface of each globe sparking and glittering where data concordances connected it to its fellows.
Stringing them together like a silk thread through a set of pearls was the stream of chattercode Tey had stolen from the Inheritor King’s unformed and restless brain. The chatter as it had slithered into his senses the night of the partisans’ suicide raid. The chatter as it had whispered to itself in the dark below Heritor Asphodel’s empty throne. Chatter as it…
The data-globes’ arrangement was altering with calm unstoppability, like a once-in-a-millennium concordance in a planetary system. Tey felt the balance of his thoughts tilted this way and that by the shift in their gravity. Strands of his mind raced through each individual array, chasing connections and patterns around and between them, flashing back and forth to each other, building up a picture to present to his primary consciousness. But his primary consciousness stood back from the process, watched himself thinking, drew new ideas and data into the swirl and watched how his own thoughts dealt with them.
If the analytical groups he had been watching were planets moving in bright and orderly orbits, then these new ideas were rogues, dark gravitic anomalies from deep in his mental Oort cloud, moving into the light, bending the courses of the system around themselves.
(And in his secret mind, that hot, red, fizzing itch.)
He settled his mental focus on the first of the dark thought-spheres, feeling the rest of his processes gather and align on it also. After a moment, under the mental pressure, it flared off a bright swarm of data-tags that coruscated outward and began to integrate themselves more aggressively into the rest of Tey’s matrix.
These thought-spheres were scrapcode, were heretek, were De Umbra Xana and more, and it had taken a conscious act of will and permission for Tey to detach them from the locked vaults of his own mind. He had brought them out into the run of his thoughts with sombre focus and care, wrapping them in holy cant-admonitions and abjurative calculi whose principles had been laid down in the days when Mars herself was still burning in the agony of the Heresy.
Initiates to the Mechanicus priesthood soon began to hear oblique hints about the warp-perverted mirroring of the Mechanicus’s own beautiful logic forms into something only a rotted mind could use. By the time they had advanced any way up the complex ziggurat of holy offices they would know of its existence as a fact. By the time they had entered the higher mysteries of their particular order they would know how the Archenemy had made use of it, what atrocities they had committed with it. The most puissant and trusted magi might even begin training should they ever encounter it, in order to resist it.
Tey had sometimes been called on to help provide that training. He had insight and experience that he knew, for a simple and immodest fact, that few of his peers could match.
None of it was helping here.
Tey watched the sealed thought-processes that had evaluated the chatter logs throw their conclusions out into his mindspace where they were snatched up by the realigned thought arrays and sent into a tight, crazed blizzard of referents and matches. But the whirl did not last. After what had been only seconds of deliberation (though to Tey’s foremind, diving from concrete reality into his own dream of thought, it seemed a matter of hours) the processes slowed and drifted apart, unable to find purchase. The match was poor, the parallels almost non-existent. What correspondences he had been able to find were barely even the result of convergent design – they were nearly all anomalies, statistical noise.
Tey’s lower thoughts tasted disappointment, and the feeling was quick to percolate up through his mind and sour the taste of his mood. With each foray out into the graveyard to survey the woe machines, and with every new datum about the Hammerstone Kings themselves, Tey had been getting less certain of the premises of his mission. Now his certainty was in tatters.
Heretek, the Munitorum communiqués had said. They had sounded so sure of themselves, telling each other that Asphodel was the spawn of some renegade warp-touched forge world, some secret set of defiled teachings hidden away from the eyes of Mars by generations of corrupted devotees.
Of course they had sounded sure of themselves, Tey thought, skidding around on a momentary tangent. Slaydo and Blackwood had known just what they were doing when they had dropped their oh-so-casual speculations into the communiqués they had allowed the Mechanicus to overhear. It had galled Gurzell and his peers to have to play at being taken in, but to allow the slightest shadow to be cast on their cult would have galled worse. And anyway, Tey would find it stimulatingly ironic if the Mechanicus itself ended up using the Dark Adeptus as a cover to drown the secret that…
…but the locked directive Gurzell had had him inload into the peak of his foremind nipped off that train of thought then, and jolted Tey back onto his original one.
There had to be a match. In his own brain and in the great mind-trove he carried with him on Barrel’s back, Tey carried the work of hundreds of generations of magi in cataloguing the machiner
y of the Archenemy. And outside was a wealth of wrecks, a grand library of the Heritor’s lore, as soon as Tey could unpick the language that it was written in. He was sure there would be a match. There must be a match. The alternatives? (And the red locking-rune at the apex of his consciousness pulsed and jittered as the centre of gravity of his thoughts veered close, so close to it.) Tey did not wish to dwell on the alternative.
Keep working, that was all there was to it. Keep searching. Keep sifting. Motionless in the dark cell, nothing visible in front of him but the tiniest of orange glows from Barrel’s eyelights, Tey dropped further and further into the rolling sea of his own thoughts, hunting for heretek, listening to the chatter.
His senses were pulled in tight around him. He didn’t hear the alert-cry, barely registered the urgent summons from the Ramosh Incalculate. Nothing properly broke through to Galhoulin Tey until the Inheritor King screamed.
XXV
‘See?’ said Ajji. She was canting, using the most curt and functional code protocols but with steel-sharp priority and alert markers – the effect was gruffness covering desperation. Enginseer Daprokk was stunned and intimidated in equal measure.
‘I do see.’ Daprokk lacked the specialist adaptations Ajji had that would build a complete sensory picture of the graveyard’s manifold and the transmissions that were lancing through it, but the cruder representational logs that she was showing him told the story perfectly well.
‘But why would the Ramosh Incalculate block you like this? You are not bonded to the ship. The chain of authority here goes from ourselves directly back to the alpha-forge at High Hive. It doesn’t–’
‘Yes,’ Ajji snapped back at him. ‘That’s the point. We don’t report to him.’ The code-signifier for Galhoulin Tey had none of the formal status headers that the magos’s station entitled him to, but it was wrapped in encryption and security designators echoing the ones the graveyard manifold used for hostiles. Ajji wasn’t even trying to hide it any more: she was openly referring to Tey as a threat and an enemy. ‘He’s having his ship keep us clamped down while he goes about his business. Right in front of us. As if we don’t matter.’
