Sabbat Crusade

by Dan Abnett

  ‘I should look forward to that, in fact,’ Tey replied. The King’s voice, for all its desperate fire, was growing thin and reedy in his senses, as though a volume slider was being steadily adjusted down. ‘I find your maker a rather interesting case, although not for the reasons you think. Not for the reasons Ajji thought, either.’ Tey directed his attention in towards his thought-map, to the internal functions that had been cycling up and testing themselves while he had been speaking. The process brought the ghost of a sensation-analogue, a feeling as though he had leaned far forward to stare at his own feet and legs. His motilics and proprioceptors were fully restored. Tey tested them, and realised he could feel direct sensation from his physical body again. He was still standing on the juddering deck of the Ramosh Incalculate’s bridge.

  –A trophy!– the King screamed, drifting back towards the periphery of his senses. –Asphodel will crucify you on my prow!–

  Its voice grew shrill as Tey took hold of a clutch of its code-tendrils and yanked them loose from where they had been embedded. He sent query sequences of his own down the now-empty broadcast channels, felt them bite and dig in. The sensation was like dipping fingertips into cool, scented water. After what felt like a year cornered deep inside his own mind, Tey reached out and coupled himself into the Ramosh Incalculate’s noosphere.

  –He will string your limbs and your mask from a banner-pole atop my crest, a hundred metres high! You will ornament me as I descend on your forge worlds and crack open your hives, trample your temples!–

  ‘I have been threatened with worse,’ Tey said distractedly. ‘You lack imagination.’ There was a tingle, a sizzle at the limits of his reawakening senses. A buzz. A faint vibration. Tey waited.

  ‘…is purged, Master, the circuits are…’

  Ah. Good.

  ‘…secondary helm are returning, prioritising stability on thrust and…’

  ‘…higher functions gone. Do you hear me?’ That was Shipmaster Tobin’s voice, the messages doubling and tripling as the man sent out commands in verbalised words, cant-bursts and noetic impulses. ‘All servitor positions down to routing functions only, I don’t care how basic the order is, do not leave any servitor with any internally-initiated function while there’s a chance they’re compromised. Until we work out what the damned…’

  That, Tey could help with. The command functions at the peak of the ship’s noospheric hierarchy were not complex, and Tey was now connected to them using the same channels through which the Inheritor King had seized ruthless control of the vessel. Not so hard to achieve, since the King had used Tey’s own marvellously subtle systems to do it. He reached out again.

  ‘Sir! Shipmaster, the–’

  ‘I see it.’

  ‘But Shipmaster, I didn’t do anyth–’

  ‘I know. Shut up. I’m going to–’

  Tey ran a test through another of the functions the King had taken from him, found it working, and put it to use.

  ‘Please relax, shipmaster,’ he said. ‘I took the liberty of carrying out your command, since I had control points already in place to do so. Your bridge servitors are operating as you instructed.’

  There were three entire seconds of stunned silence from the Ramosh Incalculate’s bridge crew after Tey’s voice came over the general vox. It would have been highly inappropriate for a magos of his standing to stoop to anything as crass as showmanship, so Tey chose to believe that the little burst of glee he felt was simple pleasure at having command of his own body, movements, senses, once more.

  With a final sequence of mental movements, his sight returned to him. His body unfroze and he looked around the ship’s bridge.

  They were all staring at him. Tey supposed he couldn’t blame them.

  –Ruin!– shrieked the Inheritor King at the back of his mind. –You will know ruin! All you will know will be ruin!–

  ‘Excuse me for a few minutes, please,’ Tey said, and walked out through the bridge doors.

  XXXVI

  The Inheritor King was thrashing and writhing in the arkosect bay. Tey walked slowly down the viewing gallery, watching it.

  Asphodel’s design had filled the King’s body with moving parts. It had been built so that the links between the segments of its enormous body could flex themselves through tight turns. Its mountainous upper hull was joined by actuators to the chassis and drive train beneath, the whole creation reinforced with gravitic stabilisers so that the King’s entire, titanic body could lean to and fro to deny enemy artillery a stable target. The great tapered snout that jutted forward like a warship’s ram had been built to raise itself into the air, so that the formations of infantry or armour that had advanced behind it could pour through the fortifications that that ram had been designed to breach.

  There was no way that any of this could help it now. The King hung in the invisible grip of the Headstone’s gravity clamps. Twist and buck as it might, there was nothing against which it could physically push, nothing it could reach to ram against and break. This was nothing born of reason. The Inheritor King was convulsing in rage and terror.

  The sides of the gun-decks undulated as the King frantically tried to traverse non-existent weapon batteries. The lines of empty barbettes that crested its back clanked back and forth; on the handful of them that had been fitted with turrets the empty gun barrels waggled and flailed. Treads big enough to crush a battle-tank like a beetle beneath a boot churned in silence, trampling nothing but vacuum.

  Stablights and signal beacons flashed down the King’s crenellated length, white and purple and red. The effect, Tey thought, was pathetic, a prey animal desperately raising its hackles even as it was pinned in the predator’s claws.

  Tey knew this creature. By now, the data-coils within his own body and Barrel’s were saturated with more knowledge about the Inheritor King than it could have possessed itself. He knew the taste and weight of its metal bones and its stony, ceramite skin; he had listened to the crackling of its nerves and the beat of its plasma-fired pulse. He suspected, with a frank lack of modesty, that the Heritor himself probably barely outstripped him now in the knowing of this creation.

  And in knowing and understanding it, the work was done. But still…

  But still.

  Tey found himself in a strange humour, a serenity born of exhaustion. He was not of a mood to finish this, although there was no practical reason to draw it out further.

  He watched it a little while longer, the great war engine writhing beyond the tall windows. He found himself almost meditating on the sight.

  He was, he realised, waiting for a marker. Something that would act as the formal cap and closure of his little war against the King. Tey thought on this, weighed it up, checked the idea for soundness and rationality. It seemed to make sense. Ceremony was intrinsic to the Mechanicus. Some final ceremonial touch seemed fitting.

  ‘I wonder if you understand what I told you before,’ he said. ‘Do you know enough about us? About yourself?’ Out of curiosity he unmuffled the King’s voice but it was barely coherent now, rage and curses. It had not tried to bargain or beg. Tey supposed that showed courage. That, or its creator’s arrogance was built into its marrow.

  ‘Ajji thought you were corrupted. She knew enough about Asphodel to know about his warpcraft. She thought that he had used that craft to make you. Damned knowledge. The abominated, toxic reflection of the Machine-God’s purity of law. I understand why she did. Such things exist. Our traditions teach us of them, when our teachers can be sure we are strong enough in ourselves to face that knowledge. Machines are made that ignore the beauty of our structures of understanding and ground themselves in structureless madness instead. They are not as our machines are. They are not tangible forms built around the perfect ideals that exist in the Machine-God’s thoughts. They are form put to excrescences dragged up from a place that no human thought should dwell on. Ajji was intellige
nt, well-versed. Senior enough to understand.’ Tey stood with his head downcast. Had he lungs in his slender steel body he would have used them to sigh. ‘But her understanding was not complete.’

  Down below one of the Inheritor King’s treads had slowed from the frantic speed of the others and was juddering and grinding. The beast had not been prepared thoroughly or properly to run like this, and its still-incomplete body was giving out under the strain. Tey could see little flashes and sprays of particulates inside the track housing. Enemy though the King was, Tey still found it distasteful to see a mechanism treated so.

  He averted his attention from the sight, bringing the eddying overlays of his data-flows up to his foremind. Little consolation awaited him there. With a mournful lack of surprise Tey saw his thoughts laid bare: the primary signifiers at the nuclei of all his current thought-clusters were Ajji and Daprokk, Daprokk and Ajji. Daprokk’s face upturned at the ziggurat the night the insurgents had made their move. The two of them in communion over the Graveyard Shrine. Ajji deep in meditation in her transception cage. The tight swirls of data from their thoughts and private communication logs that neither of them had realised Tey had opened and copied. He knew he would be mourning them for a long time to come.

  Best to have this over with. He yanked his attention back to the King again.

  ‘That wasn’t the secret I was keeping from them. That wouldn’t have been something I kept from them at all. We know who we are fighting for these Sabbat Worlds. We know the nature of our Archenemy. We know that your own maker is a warpcrafter. A consorter. A theologian of blasphemies. How else could he have had the insights to create something like you?

  ‘We know our cosmos is touched by the supernatural. We teach that feats of intellect and design must inevitably touch that supernatural, and we name what they touch as our god. The god of the Machine. Or, they must touch our god’s enemy. Our species’ enemy. The enemy of all that is. I need go no further into it. You are far more intimately acquainted with that enemy than I.

  ‘Except that you are not.’

  From the sleeves of Tey’s robes came quiet snicks and clicks as his long-fingered metal hands laced and unlaced and fidgeted.

  ‘It is a hard thing to communicate. It is a hard thing to conceptualise, even for me, little King, and I tell you with no modesty that I was born and raised and remade with a mind meant to hold concepts that break the ordinary members of my priesthood. But there it is. Your terrible secret is not that you were made with warpcraft. Your secret is that you were made without it.’

  With a mental blink, Tey imposed a structure on the free-floating swarm of data-specks. Now the King was framed in his vision in a luminous purple triptych like the threefold icon arrays so popular in the Segmentum Pacificus temples. Ajji on his left, as he chose to remember her, Daprokk on the right.

  In the centre, the Inheritor King flared with its own data-corona. Tey’s jewelled concordance maps rematerialised over its outline, and pennants of annotations and cross-references unfurled from the peak of its prow, the stump of its sensor mast, the points of each of the sticklebacked segments of its carriage.

  Tey pondered it for a moment, then realigned a few key thoughts and sent a process-tendril across the connection into the data-keg molded into Barrel’s back. He perceived the acquisition routines reaching into his memory as slick sensation down the back of his mind; there was the briefest twitch as the secret code-packets that his superiors had buried deep in his mind broke from their hiding-places and adhered to the tendril. Then Tey drew them back up to the front of his consciousness and watched them unknot and illuminate themselves across the shape of the Inheritor King.

  A parade of ghost-images overlaid themselves on the King’s hull, sparking red at points of concordance and fading to dull blue-violet where the designs diverged. The actual, physical engine beneath the gallery windows was crowded with treads, wheels, prows, great armoured bastion-sides, turrets and steeples. Weapons and engines sprouted up, detached and began to orbit the main engine: vast sonic shockwave dishes, gantries crusted with missiles like enormous barbed towers of coral, and stranger things still.

  ‘The Ordinatus,’ said Tey. ‘I don’t know if your architect told you about them. Or, at least, left the knowledge of them in your mind-meshes for you to discover when you awoke. I am sure he knows of their existence. How much he knows… Well.’

  In response to his line of thought a fierce little point of light zigzagged through the clouds of information, striking sidelights off the Ordinatus schematics that were shuffling about the King and comparing themselves to it, leaving a roiling wake of rearranged data associations behind it. Tey let his attention rest on it for a moment, long enough for it to unravel into a series of dossier headers: it was the records of the dealings between the Machine Cult and the Imperial Guard in the months before the Mechanicus and its Titan Legions had come to Ashek II.

  ‘Warmaster Slaydo knows,’ Tey said. ‘Several of his communiqués mention them.’

  The data-point unravelled further, sprouting a little solar system of icons: Munitorum, Battlefleet Pacificus, regimental icons of the Royal Volpone 50th, Ketzok 21st, and the Third Vitrian Mobile. ‘He was openly speculating to his tank and fleet commanders that your maker was building a blasphemous retort to the Centurio Ordinatus and its holy works. Well, “openly”. He used channels he had arranged for my colleagues to know about, and used phrases he knew would trigger our attention in a code he knew we would break. We knew what he was up to. Planting the idea that your Heritor-father knew our lore. That he had been one of us, even. That he was turning our own secrets against us. That we were slow to join the war on Ashek because we were reluctant to move against one that we considered one of us.’

  Deep in the sleeves of his robe, Tey’s metal hands snicked and clicked against one another.

  ‘An unpleasant way to behave. But I understand why he did it. And it worked, of course. There is a vast graveyard of war machines underneath us to attest to it. Still, he put us in a bad position. I think he could simply have asked a little more politely. But such are the mysteries of Adeptus diplomacy, are they not?’

  By way of reply the Inheritor King overcharged its internal flexors and its whole body shook like a living limb straining against itself. The stress feedback from its internal systems flared across the back of Tey’s consciousness. He fancied he could almost hear the groan coming up from the hull. A conceit of the imagination, no more – the King hung in vacuum, in the intangible grip of the arkosect bay’s gravitic clamps. But a compelling one. Tey watched the machine judder and grind at the centre of the whirlpool of data that filled his vision side to side.

  There was no urge to gloat. He felt tired, little more.

  ‘To know of the Archenemy is not the threat the inquisitors say it is,’ he said. ‘To know that there is an annihilator-incarnate set against the Emperor’s eternal order or the Machine-God’s will to impose creation? This does not endanger the soul. It strengthens it. That is my true conviction, little King. It provides a force against which faith and will must push. It provides the other half of the symmetry.

  ‘Ajji knew about the so-called Dark Mechanicus. She knew about Chaotic engines built with tainted logic and machine-spirits filled with scrapcode and daemon voices. Of course she did. She knew that the Heritor is capable of building them. Of course she did. She thought you were one of them. Your problem is that you are not.

  ‘You are something that the greatest minds of the Adeptus Mechanicus only discuss in soft tones and sealed conclaves, using even among themselves the deepest of codes and the most circumspect of phrases. You are the thing that breaks the symmetry.

  ‘Heritor Asphodel built you by himself.’

  Tey finally noticed the movement in the glass in front of him as the hands of his faint reflection laced and wrung. He slipped them free of his russet-red sleeves and locked them still in front of his
chest, in a sign halfway between the aquila and the cog.

  ‘Such a mind!’ Tey said. ‘We see the like, all the time, not least in ourselves. A mind that can grasp the nature of the world around it, start to see the patterns, test them, draw knowledge and build on itself. Our labours, and our religion,’ (and here, in the flowing code of the Primary Cant that Tey was using, the words for ‘labour’ and ‘religion’ were one and the same) ‘are founded on minds like these. Untold generations of them broke the ground that the foundations of our Cult were laid upon, once we had the means to truly marshal intellect and understanding through the instructions of the Omnissiah.

  ‘But your King never had the teachings of the Machine, just as he never had the whisperings of the Antithesis. He came to those later, once he was powerful. And that power… he built it. Himself.’

  Wireframe signifiers dotted across Tey’s datascape, and the Ordinatus icons changed pattern to whirl around them like courtiers attending royalty at some great, stately cotillion. Each central signifier flared and unfolded itself as Tey’s attention glanced across it: a dossier on a single aspect of Heritor Asphodel’s engineering. His metallurgy, or his engine-tuning, or his ballistics, or his avionics. His machine-spirits, his fission reactors. The crafting he lavished upon his chattercode networks, and the crafting he lavished upon each tiny blade that lined the rims of his Flensing-Wheels.

  ‘The Heritor Asphodel does not trouble us because he was one of us. We have dealt with apostates before. Your maker’s crime is that he breaks that symmetry between ourselves and the Antithesis. He is a third vertex in a cosmos that our faith tells us is defined by a single axis. No divine inspiration, no reclamation of knowledge that the Omnissiah laid down in the great ages of reason from which we walked into the Old Night. A man. A single, unfathomably brilliant autodidact. Where in our calculus is there a place for such a one as this?’