Sabbat Crusade

by Dan Abnett

  ‘The magos is–’

  ‘He must have known we’d find out sooner or later. He’s not here to oversee the breakup of the Hammerstone Kings. He’s not here to restore order in the graveyard or get those prisoners working again like they should.’

  ‘The alpha-forge said–’

  ‘The alpha-forge,’ Ajji replied heavily, ‘said we had a magos coming with orders regarding the Hammerstone Kings. That message was genuine. I know what I’m talking about. They couldn’t know this impostor would get here first. Somewhere there’s a real magos who was sent here. Might still be on his way, might have been misled off-course. This Tey can be very convincing. Might be dead. That’s my guess. Tey murdered the real magos, the one who would have come here in proper devotion and got to work. The ship’s crew might be dupes, or they might be in on it themselves. Why was the Ramosh Incalculate deconsecrated and taken away from the Titan Legios? We don’t know. Don’t deny that that’s suspicious.’

  The only response Daprokk could think of was to stare at her and wait for her to continue.

  ‘And now this. I tried to send a transmission to the alpha-forge. They need to know what this so-called magos is doing. My array is being jammed and suppressed. Can’t send through the surface relays, can’t send through the satellite shell.’

  ‘Perhaps if the machine-spirits of your transceiver network are troubled, it is a sign that–’

  ‘The disposition of my machine-spirits has been executed perfectly, Daprokk,’ Ajji snapped. ‘Their anima is in balance and their temperament is in accord with mine. Stop changing the subject.’

  ‘Ajji–’

  ‘They won’t get away with this. What sort of magos would do such a thing? One with a bad secret to keep. But listen: they’re using simple brute force and coverage to suppress us. They have more raw power than we do, but, Omnissiah laudatum, I’m a better transmechanic than they think I am. I have a way to get the warning out. But I need your help.’

  Daprokk ran through the memory-logs of his dealings with Magos Tey. He came to a decision.

  ‘Tell me.’

  XXVI

  For the second time, Tey was pulled from reverie by the alien buzz of the Heritor’s legacy code. The first time it had drawn him back out of himself in time to see the end of the partisans’ mad little raid. Now, it showed him the death of Transmechanic Ajji.

  After the jolt of code that had come leaking into his senses Tey surfaced into the shrine’s manifold, running flush-and-clear routines on his sensory and comms caches like someone trying to shake off the ringing in their ears after a great and turbulent noise.

  There was a change in the feel of the ambient data-field around him. It was hotter, more powerfully transmitted, the fine layers stripped out of it. There was an urgency, a change in the tenor of it. If Tey had left a manifold ordered like the calm, methodical activity of a manufactorum floor, then he had returned to something more like a skitarii battle-manifold, enemy sighted, waiting for the order to attack.

  A great shout of Mechanicus code from somewhere close by actually fuzzed Tey’s finer senses for a moment, and he turned his internal auspex about him. The incoming power loads were far greater than they should have been – someone had created a quick, improvised hub to funnel power from all across the graveyard’s grid into the transceiver array. How had Daprokk given his assent to that?

  Then, in counterpoint to what he had just perceived, Tey heard the chatter again, and it scattered every other thought from his mind.

  XXVII

  Successive revelations slammed home into his forebrain with analogue feedback almost like an electrical shock. If Tey had still had organic lungs inside his narrow steel-alloy ribcage he would have gasped. But every level of his mind had tested them, and his subprocessors fed an awareness of every attempt they had made to falsify this new knowledge and an awareness of how true it was.

  From the upmind streams that had been running on his conscious thoughts and investigations, the knowledge that the Inheritor King is not what we thought.

  From the process that had been running inside the sealed, crimson directive-rune from Archmagos Gurzell, the realisation that the Inheritor King is just what we feared.

  And the flash of insight as every thought-strand debouched into his consciousness and the combined data lit up like sheet lightning: the Inheritor King is not dead.

  And an instant later, the manifold was incandescent with screams.

  XXVIII

  Ajji screamed as it hit her. She had woven her own mind deep into the controls of the transmission array, deeper than she had merged herself with any machine she had ever had stewardship of. She was gambling everything on forcing a transmission for aid past the electromagnetic shadow of the Headstone, as oppressive to her data-senses as its physical self was to her sight.

  Ajji died without ever fully understanding how her gamble had failed. When she had thrown open her transceiver to send her distress call she had known that the matching transmitters in the Treading King, the Blighting King and the Poison King had been ritually destroyed after the raid. She had pronounced the rites over their slagged remains herself.

  But the virtual presence that sluiced down her open link, commandeered her mind, seized and snuffed and extinguished her, had come from the hulk of the Inheritor King.

  In the moment before a power-surge through Ajji’s augmetics blew her delicately-tuned nervous system to wreckage, the Inheritor King turned the graveyard’s manifold into a white miasma with a hellish coded howl of its own.

  XXIX

  Jers Adalbrect had no senses that could directly hear the King’s voice, but he heard it nevertheless. For a heartbeat, the vox-horns on their masts around the sand-choked remains of his old marshalling square yammered and chattered with some strange signal that he had never heard before: nothing that could come from a human throat, too broken and strange to be proper machine-cant but too weirdly quasi-organic to be simple static. He sat upright in his seat, eyes closed, listening to see if he could hear it again.

  No more noise from the horns. But that tiny bark of code was being answered. From the rows of worker tents and penitent cells around him he could hear the clamour rising. There were shouts, crashes. Screams were starting. Pain-screams, dying screams. The Asheki had recognised something in that code-bark even if Adalbrect could not.

  He walked to the door of his little cabin and looked out. Dust was welling up into the air between the tent rows as brawls broke out. One set of tents collapsed and Adalbrect watched an Administratum overseer struggle free of the fallen fabric only to be knocked to the ground and lost beneath a scrum of bodies, clubs and crude knives rising and falling. He smelled smoke. Somewhere someone had managed to start one of the buildings burning.

  He felt no fear, and no despair. He felt an empty calmness. The exhaustion of his nerves did not bother him now. His head was clear as he walked back into his little cloister. He didn’t know or care where that strange signal had come from. Time for all this to end. Past time.

  Adalbrect hefted his staff and sang a psalm to himself as he waited for the Asheki to come in and find him.

  XXX

  What a hellhole, Shipmaster Mhorock Tobin thought as he looked down through six dozen mechanical eyes at the graveyard. He allowed himself no distracting thoughts beyond that. He was concentrating on obeying the order he had been given.

  But below him, the hellhole raged on. The labourers from the work camps brawled with graveyard armsmen and a handful of skitarii in the choked little pathways winding among the cairns of scrap. There were sparks of weapon fire, and larger sparks as bigger blazes lit off in fuel dumps or from flammable debris. Many skitarii had had their systems overwhelmed by the manifold scream and were stumbling listlessly along, incapable of resistance, or had gone into undirected frenzies, lashing wildly about them with blade and shot whether there were enemies within rea
ch or no.

  In the centre of it all, a different sort of sign in his sensors, dim but as deeply and powerfully ominous as the first rumble of an earthquake: the sudden cycling-up of the Inheritor King’s engines, the flow of power to its tracks.

  GET IT AWAY. NOW.

  Tey’s message came in on an override channel Tobin hadn’t realised the magos even knew about, lancing through the ship’s systems and into his own personal noetics hard enough to cause him actual pain. Tey hadn’t told Tobin who was driving the thing, and he didn’t care. He had had to hold off his mission while Tey had fooled about in the graveyard, but now he was finally cleared to do what the Ramosh Incalculate had been sent here to do.

  ‘What are you doing down there, machine?’ he asked aloud, as the eyes inside the arkosect bay saw it fill with the great, grand, grotesque shape of the King. The ridge of spires down its spine rose up toward the bay’s ceiling as the Headstone engulfed its newest cargo.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Tobin answered himself. His ship, its Cyclopean mass guided down with millimetre precision, was in position. Tobin looked at his measurements, looked at them again.

  He engaged the gravitic clamps.

  ‘Got you!’

  XXXI

  The chatter was all around him now. The whole of the Inheritor King’s giant hull had come to life to conduct it. Tey spun on the spot, robe flaring around him, servo-skulls pinwheeling above him.

  Alerts and battle-cant prickled at the edge of his senses. All-out battle had broken out in the graveyard. The partisans must have been preparing for this. They had no intention of sitting back and letting their King be taken.

  Their intentions were not relevant any more. Tey was taking the matter out of their hands.

  As if on cue, he felt the King shift slightly as the Headstone seized it, shift again as its tracks left the earth. He could feel a tiny vibration through the decking of the bridge: they had lifted the monster up a fraction of a second before it would have moved its tracks and started to roll.

  Another squall of chattercode against his senses jolted Tey into action. He was not in the belly of the beast, but he was locked inside its dead skull, and he needed to be outside it. He began to mentally plot his way back to the breached hatch he had entered by, when he registered that the control boards were flickering and the blast shutters were trembling in their mountings at the bases of the windows. He glanced over at the great curved shape of the command throne that Asphodel had never had the chance to sit in. A man who created a thing like this to ride in and a thing like that to sit in would not be content to slog up to his bridge from a distant side hatch.

  Tey walked up into the shadows behind the throne, and the high doors opened for him.

  XXXII

  Ten minutes later he was looking down at the King through the thick diamond-glass wall of the Ramosh Incalculate’s viewing gallery. Standing on the King’s back waiting for the crane-arm to extend out and collect them had been harrowing: high-velocity winds were churning around the arkosect bay, scouring it with dust kicked up by the chaos in the graveyard and the lifter’s ascent. It had been an effort to keep his feet and not go tumbling down the side of the King, out and into the ever-lengthening free fall back to Chillbreak. The studied quiet of the ship’s halls seemed almost surreal by contrast.

  Tey brought his arms together, laced his hands inside the overlapping sleeves of his robes, felt his fingers start to writhe and work against each other as he stared down at the engine.

  Not dead, he thought, but not alive enough to fight back any more, at least not in time. I think I know what you are now. It is bitter to me that it took such extremity to confirm it, but now, at the end of it all, at least you are in my power.

  And as if on cue, that last thought was suddenly, horribly reversed on him.

  Tey didn’t feel it coming. He could have expected something, some harbinger. A twinge in his remote senses. An oncoming rumble of code across the noetic band. A warning shock as the attack hit and took the measure of his personal defences. But nothing, no warning. The voice was simply there, in his head, speaking to him.

  –We are under way, then. So good to have the journey finally begun.–

  Tey had heard engines give voice to shattering daemon-roars and the shouts of gods, or choruses of code that buzzed in the bones like surgeons’ drills. But the King’s voice was pleasant, conversational, human-sounding, softly modulated as if for a library or temple, and all the more frightening for it.

  And then there was this: Tey could not move.

  –We’ll be together for some time, you and I,– the King went on, –and you’ll need to learn respect. You are not to look at me the way you have been doing. I am not one of your little workshop toys, and I am not a salvage trophy. I am another thing entirely. You will need to understand this.–

  Tey tried to move a hand, couldn’t. Tried to turn his head. To shrug his shoulders. All denied him. He tried to vocalise, and his vox-grille stayed silent. He tried a radio-band binaric cant, then a string of noetic speech across increasingly subtler waves. Nothing. His mind whirled inside his inert statue of a body.

  –Don’t think that I consider you worthless,– came the voice again. –Why should I lie about it? You are valuable. I shall even call you extraordinary. I discussed you with the other Kings, and I don’t believe any of us encountered anything like you in the war.–

  Tey tried flickering the direct-beam infrared transmitters at the corners of his eyes, but those systems were numb. The tiny X-ray lasers in the tips of his little fingers could have sent a pulse-code of warning – Tey was not aware of a receptor in line to receive their beams but at least the signature would show up on the bridge. But although he conceptualised the message and the command to power them up, they stayed as inert as every other part of him. Somewhere in the back of his mind he could feel the persistent brush of his connection to Barrel, but he forced his thoughts away again. He would not do anything that might draw the King’s attention to that connection, not until he absolutely had to.

  Fear smouldered around the bottom of his mind but he caught it, teased it out, threaded the fear-thoughts through damping filters and cleared his head. He still had that much control, at least.

  There came a tiny shift in his equilibrium, as though the floor had tilted under him, and his gown and cloak flapped about him in a breeze that was suddenly everywhere for a moment before it died down.

  –I sensed that. Explain it. You may answer.– And Tey suddenly had a voice again.

  ‘We’ve lifted high enough that planetary gravity has thinned out,’ he said, as calmly as he could. ‘The ship’s gravity has re-engaged. The process is rarely completely seamless. The momentary fluctuation in air pressure is the most common visible indic–’ His voice vanished before he could complete the thought.

  –See?– said the Inheritor King. –You’re showing your value. I have pride, as is only right, but I’m not blind. I understand there are things I must know that I don’t yet know, and things I must do that I’ll need you to do. This is not unfitting. Every king needs a herald, does he not?–

  Tey’s body turned, carried him around so he was no longer looking into the bay. His feet moved to match, and he took a step down the viewing gallery to the high-crowned doors. His body walked, and his mind was carried along inside.

  Tey was unprepared for such a terrible alienation from himself, to be so unhinged from the body that had been his to command for decades upon decades. Each footstep was a jolt, each shift in balance as he strode forward seemed drunken and clumsy, certain to tip him over at any moment. He wanted to damp out his optics and perform calming exercises in a moment of darkness but even that was beyond him. A helpless passenger, he watched his metal hand extend his Martian signet and the blast-shutters rumble aside to let him through. His body began to walk again. Smoother, more fluid. He was already being manipulated m
ore skilfully. Barrel padded along behind him.

  –There will need to be changes,– the King said conversationally into his ears as he turned the corner towards the carrier shafts. Two of the ship’s crew came hurrying, shuffled against the wall and stared, but the King did not seem to be interested in them and kept Tey’s eyes straight ahead. –You will need to be reshaped before you are fully useful to me. Body and mind.–

  Tey watched himself step aboard a carrier-car, and watched Barrel shuffle in past him a moment before the car started to move.

  –And my maker may wish more changes in you when we reunite with him, of course, and I shall defer to his will as he is the Heritor and Magister and above Kingship himself.–

  Tey’s hand extended the signet again. There was a brief fuzz of code between it and the car’s reader and then a chime of acknowledgement. They were on their way to the Ramosh Incalculate’s bridge, the King chatting inside Tey’s head all the way.

  –You will not like the changes.– Tey thought he almost heard regret in its voice. –Or at least the ‘you’ to whom I am speaking now will not. The ‘you’ that you will be once my changes are finished will relish them.– The internal lights flashed red: they were entering the bridge. –But I won’t insult you by not expecting resistance. And here we are.–

  XXXIII

  Mhorock Tobin could feel hot fatigue running from his legs up his back and shoulders, as though he’d run up a hundred stairs with a weighted yoke on his neck. That he was used to: it was the Ramosh Incalculate feeding him sense-analogue reports of the orbital ascent. But coming on top of it was the damage from the demented brawl that had broken out through the graveyard as they lifted off. From one side came a series of pain-spots, radiating into him from the air next to his right calf as though he had an extra layer of skin out there, and that skin had just had a string of blisters pulled open. Missile-pocks from a salvo from somewhere in the hulk of the Treading King. His left foot kept wriggling against the sensation that there was a lit lho-stick ember inside his boot. A sustained heavy las-shot score that felt like it had cut through the shielding and broken a coolant reservoir somewhere just inside the hull. A groaning sensation around the side of his left hip preyed on his mind the most. That hinted at some sort of structural weakness, a freak shot hitting some of the mainstay supports inside the Titan bay. That giant cavity in the Ramosh’s belly felt alien enough to him already, the unfamiliar gape of internal walls removed and the twitch-tickle of feedback from the new gantries and macroservos, but since the last part of the ascent there had been a whole new layer of strange data, independent of the rest of his feeds, as though the damnable engine they had grabbed up from Ashek II had come alive and started wriggling.