Sabbat Crusade

by Dan Abnett

  There was a lull. Tiny micromoments, but a gaping silence when it was measured in processing cycles of the two interlocked minds.

  –Forswear your Machine-God and begin your work.–

  Another lull. The Inheritor King waited.

  –I can make you. I can work your will for you now, as simply as a hand works a lever. Will you put me to that? I thought we understood one another, herald. Form the thought and encode the message. Say the words, if you wish to put it that way. Forswear your Machine-God. Ask me for your next task. Do it.–

  And Galhoulin Tey lifted up his voice and replied.

  And what he replied was:

  ‘Be quiet, please. I’m concentrating.’

  XXXV

  There was uncertainty, but very little of it. A brief ripple of disorientation ran through a handful of the King’s second-order cognitive threads but the invading mind’s primary focus never wavered. Tey was actually impressed.

  –This is over,– it told him. –I regret that you…–

  It fell silent. For moments upon moments the two minds spun in tight synchronicity. There was the sensation in each of quiet but rapid activity, a mental analogue to the almost subliminal whirr of delicate machinery running hard just beneath a solid casing.

  Tey broke the silence.

  ‘Now, then,’ he said. ‘Dealing with you has been a singularly unpleasant experience – and if you have been at all adept in assimilating any of the experiential data you have been seizing so gracelessly, you will have seen that my career has given me a high threshold in that regard. I sincerely hope that this will prove to be worth it.’

  The Inheritor King’s mind was a great scaffold, a hulk, a monstrous stone bastion filling the virtual-noetic space. Tey was like a cobweb stretched over it. But no longer a cobweb. Now his thoughts were alive again, spreading over the bigger, cruder mind like ivy on stone, sinking its shoots in, adhering, gripping.

  –Cease this,– the King said. –I am done with you. I won’t countenance this. I will strip your mind down and then render your physical…–

  Quiet again. The King’s mind remained as it was, static, rumbling with the pressure of an unreleased will to move.

  Across every strand of Tey’s thoughts, carefully pre-cached subprocesses willed themselves active. They opened up in dazzling array at every point of the edifice, thought-flowers blossoming against the King’s cold walls in the warmth of Tey’s psychic spring.

  The mindscape was transformed, and the Inheritor King fought against it.

  –You diminish yourself by resorting to this trickery.– Tey, still going about his work, did not bother to reply. –The least you might show, if you have any respect for your sham office and your sham priesthood, is… to…–

  For the first time the King’s transmissions were changing, their tone tightening, matching the growing tremors within the mind-bastion that Tey’s thoughts had encircled and trapped. The Inheritor King was feeling the strain.

  –…to, to, show a little grace, to… now, here, I see. Not complicated at all, or not in the way I had… what… cease this…–

  The blooms unfolding from the tight-packed logic seeds Tey had encoded into his thoughts were still growing, maturing into fully-nested thought-processors in their own right, ramifying upon themselves, interweaving new threads into the ever-denser structure that wrapped and held the King’s mind.

  An angry counter-attack formed inside the King like crystals in stone, assembling itself just out of Tey’s reach and bursting out as a swarm of self-replicating noetic processes that tried to strip the logic-flowers back to their seeds. Each one was trapped in the ever-finer weave of Tey’s thoughts, trapped, picked apart and cast back.

  –No! No, I will not allow…–

  Tey’s thoughts now processed the King’s attack code into thorns that drove back into its mind, finding cracks and weaknesses, slipping into process-points with the deftness of a wasp sting, an acupuncturist’s needle, a nanosurgeon’s probe.

  –Ah, here we are.–

  The heavy mental walls that had slammed out from the King’s psyche to trap Tey’s suddenly folded inward, unwrote themselves and vanished. In seconds, Tey’s own consciousness had regrown outward and filled the gap.

  ‘Your structure is interesting. There are ways to systematise thoughts even as we augment them. The Mechanicus Priesthood has schools of thought thousands of years old, devoted to debating which of the forms of logic-classing codes are superior. But the organising principles for your thoughts are… idiosyncratic, by any standard of my own that I care to apply.’

  The whole structure, the magos and the engine-intelligence alike, vibrated as the blocks of the King’s thoughts ground together in protest.

  ‘Which in itself is telling, so-called King. Everything is information. Everything is a data point. Everything a reference. So when I find that a certain point of control here is what stops all your operations off a given premise-set, for example…’

  The King’s thoughts grew a grey, silent crust of dead process-threads.

  ‘…or where I see that this is the interface that unlocks your front-order cerebral functions…’

  –…such as your speaking voice… ah, now, this is interesting.–

  Tey could feel the superstructure of the King’s mind tilting and shifting as it tried to re-engineer itself into something that could fight back against him. He saw nothing to concern him. Each of the countless intrusion thorns he had dug into that mind tracked every pulse of code and change of architecture. The Inheritor King could not now surprise him.

  Tey took a moment to send quick ghost-pulses of command down mental channels he had closed off – mere minutes ago, however much longer it felt to him. He perceived his perceptual and motor routines starting to work again, control of his senses and limbs starting to return. He slaved that process to a monitor routine that he spun out of raw code with a second or three’s concentration, and turned back to his primary work.

  –Your vocabulary primer structure, King, your language engine, for want of simpler words, is not what I expected at all. It’s crafted like a locution teacher inload rather than, well, what we use for servitor cortices, for example. Your concept tracks are so uncomplicated they’re rather endearing, but more importantly, King, what I see here, all these things in your mind…–

  ‘…they educate me.’

  The Inheritor King tried to howl as Tey pulled blocks of its structure free, shattered them into chips of code, teased them apart and consumed them, ingesting the King’s own mental substance even as he reclaimed his own knowledge, thoughts and memories.

  ‘There is intelligence at work in the creation of your mind. In fact, since my duly appointed superiors, benediction of the Machine be upon them, are not here to listen to us, I shall tell you that there is brilliance in it. The architecture of your mind has no formal pattern, but it has a pattern nonetheless. It shows the thought patterns of the man who made you. Even the most clear-minded Magos Logistae will leave something in the code they forge. If you have eyes to see and a mind to read, it will be as individual as the print of a human finger or the microstress marks from a custom-turned servo-grip. I can read the print in you, you know. Reading such things is fundamental to my calling. You are made in your Heritor’s image, more than you even understand yourself.’

  A purple tendril spun itself from nothing across the virtual space around them, threw out offspring, began weaving a lattice around and through the data Tey’s mind was still stripping back out from the King’s. If Tey had had a strictly physical analogue in this dataspace, he might have had it smile to perceive it. The great pyramid of semiconscious processes that supported his thinking intellect were rebuilding and healing themselves. The rustle and shine of association-chains and tangent flags that always crowded the edge of his thoughts was re-establishing itself. Tey had not realised how des
olate, how truncated he had felt in its absence.

  Tey pulsed his thoughts outward, spreading over his garden of thought-flowers like a puff of breeze, harvesting up the data each subprocess had uncovered, inhaling the conclusions they had drawn like quantum-coded pollen.

  Tey breathed in the distilled essence of the Inheritor King.

  There was mental silence for a time.

  Eventually, after an aching gap of empty processor cycles that had gone on for whole seconds, there was a stir from within the Inheritor King’s mind. That mind had looked like the great dark hulk of an onrushing war-engine, and then like the unforgiving face of a mighty bastion-cathedral. Now it was a vast hollow case of glass and filigree, full of fireflies and cold white wasps of light, the structures of its intellect running through the code shells in silver threads and wheels, thoughts flaring and shifting like pearlescent mists.

  A ripple went through the dancing lights in that palace of mind. The outer shell stirred. The consciousness within it moved. Tey looked, and knew what was happening. The absorption of knowledge was complete; there were no secrets from him now.

  The Inheritor King was attempting to speak. He let it.

  –What.– it said. Its code-stream was clumsy and choppy. –Gives. You. The. Right. To.–

  It said nothing more. Tey shut its voice off with the peremptory flick of a thought. His own reply was transmitted in code as simple and stark as a chilled and polished scalpel blade.

  ‘I am a magos, a priest of the Adeptus Mechanicus. I am a worshipper before the divine flame of invention. I am a driving cog in the Greater Work which my species has pursued since we could pick up tools in our fingers. I am a questor that carries a light out into the darkness, and I am a student of the knowledge we find from what that light reveals. I am a builder of intellect, knowledge and order out of base, stupid entropy, and I am a warrior who defends that order against all those who would degrade it. And to every creation of thought and hand I am appointed both master and servant, both engineer and companion. Every machine wrought of matter; every construct of thought and code.’

  The words felt almost odd as he framed them. How long had it been since he had last recited that catechism? It was comforting to recite it again.

  ‘But you are a creation. A built thing. Designed and made. It is axiomatic that you fall under my dominion by the blessing and will of the Omnissiah. You were since before the first scrap of you was forged. Since the moment your schema took shape in that forsaken man’s thoughts. Whether you wish it, whether you admit it, that is the way of it. Discard whatever you thought you believed about your creator, you newborn, you callow little ingrate. You owe your existence to me.’

  Tey’s attention sharpened and moved in. The Inheritor King felt it and its thoughts jittered and quailed. Tey looked dispassionately on as the other mind learned the sensation of fear.

  ‘They say regret has no place in an adept,’ Tey mused as he drew memory-threads out of its mind and braided them with his own. The combined stream of information spun in on itself, tighter and tighter like a storm-funnel, blending and sorting its elements according to directives and patterns Tey fed into it. ‘The teachings of the Terran and Martian priesthoods are interestingly similar on the subject. If one has done one’s duty by one’s oaths, then what is regret other than a wish that one had not done one’s duty? And so of course it is heretical. Counter-rational. It implies a second moral dimension to dutiful action. We are not supposed to admit that such a dimension exists.’

  Tey clutched the funnel of thought-threads in a mental grip and squeezed.

  ‘Nevertheless. I can admit this to you, King, since you will never be able to share my confidences. I regret that I had to allow you to come to life.’

  He pulled the tight whirl of data-particles and thought-threads toward them. The moment of contact was like a hood being pulled on, like a storm touching down, like nothing an unaugmented mind could imagine. Images and memories whipped around and through them both, unravelling and reweaving themselves to wrap around the thought-streams they touched. With the Inheritor King’s consciousness in his grip, Tey plunged deeper into the flow.

  The infostorm whipped their mutual frame of reference away, flickered it back in another form and suddenly they were in Transmechanic Ajji’s little shrine-cocoon. The sunlight outside the nest of rubble she had built was still casting sharp shadows across her trance-chair, and glittering off the hull of the Inheritor King looming overhead. Tey had loaded a memory from before the Headstone had descended to the surface of Ashek to grasp its prize.

  ‘I regret this deeply,’ Tey told the King as Ajji cycled up the repeater vanes around her seat. ‘Transmechanic Ajji had a fierce spirit and a fine mind. Each of those are things to prize, but the combination of them…’ He let the thought trail away as, in the memory-play, Ajji began her code-chant.

  ‘I do not regret my actions,’ he said as the transmechanic achieved full communion with her array and began to direct her electromagnetic song outward. ‘But I bitterly regret that those actions were ever necessary. That is a nuance that the Adeptus doctrines of regret are poor at capturing. If I were a man given to cursing I would curse the path of events that meant I had to let this happen.’

  Ajji’s song had not yet faltered. Tey watched her in the replay for a moment longer, then let a normative subroutine slip through his thought-threads and modulate them. The equivalent, in this space, of a sigh.

  ‘But I wasn’t yet sure. I had my suspicions. I was even confident in them. But I had to be sure.’

  The recording fragmented, spun, turned itself inside out. Now they were hanging in a second memory of the transmission ritual, a strange memory indeed. It was built of inhuman senses still awakening to their full potential, filtered through thoughts that were still learning how to be thoughts. They were looking at the scene as the Inheritor King had witnessed it.

  The senses were crude, but in the memory replay they sharpened with terrifying speed. In the part of him that now occupied the King’s mind like a puppeteer’s hand, Tey felt what it had been like, the King’s faculties speeding towards maturity, swinging to bear on Ajji’s small clear mind-voice like an aerie of red-eyed hawks wheeling and stooping at the sound of a songbird.

  ‘Because of you, I had to do this,’ Tey said. There were no emotion markers in his words, but the King’s mind still perceived the fury beneath them and quailed in its prison. ‘Because of you, I had to let this happen.’

  In the recording the King reached out, annexed Ajji’s cant-song, broke it and scattered it, slid down through the code-stream into the transmechanic’s mind. Tey forced himself to watch. He had felt her shock and her fear when he had monitored the ritual. All he could do was bear witness, then and now. He owed her this.

  He watched her try to fight. He watched her be hollowed out and consumed. For a second time, he watched the Inheritor King murder her.

  ‘I needed you awakened,’ Tey said in the ringing silence after the scraps of Ajji’s mind had fled the recording. ‘My work would have been incomplete until I had taken your full measure. I could not leave Ashek until I had that. I had to stand back and watch as you revealed your capabilities. I had to stand and watch.’ Now the fury was there. ‘Because of you. You and your brother Kings. Because you were made. You killed Transmechanic Ajji, and because I had to know the truth of you I could not stop you. It is because of you, you affront. You misbegotten offence. You… scrap.’

  There was a pause. The Inheritor King’s memories sluiced past. Sharp memories of its own: the burnished metal walls of the Headstone descending around it as the gravitic clamps lifted the engine clear of Ashek’s dust. Sludgy, dreamlike memories that had come to it as part of its initiating code: the strange little running battle when the Asheki partisans had ignited the processors of the other Kings to spark the Inheritor’s mind into full existence.

  ‘Well,
’ said Tey, as the memory streams danced around them, forming and re-forming webs of meaning and connection. ‘Well. I would apologise for that outburst, had I made it to someone who deserved an apology. It was inelegant. Noise in the signal. I surprise myself, lacking a better word of condemnation than “scrap”. But perhaps I have departed from my course of thoughts.’

  At that, a symbolic map of those same thoughts ghosted into existence about them. Tey reviewed the mental trains that had brought him here, examined the tangents that his ancillary processes had been exploring while his core mind had been intent on the King, looked for the path through his thoughts that was most fruitful and aesthetically pleasing.

  ‘Ajji never understood your nature,’ he said, ‘not even at the end. She died trying to sound the alarm about you, but you are not the danger she thought she was warning against. Daprokk would struggle with it too. He is diligent and dutiful, but he does not have the temperament for leaps of imagination. Leaps of faith, I suppose. I suspect that if I truly got him to understand what you are, then his faith would be the casualty.’

  The thought-map flattened and fanned out into two planes of data and teleo-calculus, tilting together like the open covers of a book.

  ‘They thought they had stumbled on a terrible secret of your creation. When they pursued it they never realised they were turning their backs to your real secret. The one I could not prove until I had seen you awaken. It is bitter to me that it took the sacrifices that it took, to show me that proof, but I must carry your secret back to my own masters now. It is a secret that they will hate to hear. They will have been hoping it is not true. They will be searching for reasons to disbelieve me. The proof is all-important.’

  Tey cut loose his restraints on the Inheritor King’s speech. There had been exultation in defeating it, but there was little triumph in being proved right. Let the upstart machine-beast rant. It could change nothing now.

  –Weak!– the King raged at him as soon as it felt his grip disappear. –You cannot destroy me! I will not be ended by a thing like you! I was made for something better! The Heritor will know your name! My master will look you in the eye before he takes his revenge for me out of your hide and your skull!–