by Dan Abnett
A twist of the faucet on one of the fountains produced nothing but a dry rasp.
Approaching the annex, the whitewashed tunnel walls were overpainted with dark red stripes, and there were numerous caution signs and warnings that demanded correct papers and identities on pain of death.
Still, the whole place was bare and empty, and thick with dust and litter.
At the end of the red-striped access tunnel, the vast adamantite blast-gates to the annex stood open. There was an eerie silence.
The annex was a colossal tower of hewn rock dressed in red steel, filling a side chimney of the crater that housed Cinchare's minehead. A sealed
glass dome covered the paved yard between the blast-gates and the annex, and the building itself rose up beyond the glass to the top of the crater rim. High above, I could see the blue rock and the starlit void beyond. Meteors streaked overhead
The doorway of the annex was a giant portal taller than three men, framed by thick dork columns of black lucullite. Above it leered the graven image of the Machine God, its eyes clearly carved in such a way that they would flare ominously with gas bum-offs piped up from the mines. They were cold and dead now.
And the burnished metal doors of the portal were open.
I stepped inside. Fine sand covered the floor of the grand prothyron. Dust motes glittered in the bars of light spearing into the high hallway through deadlights up near the ribbed roof. Both walls were entirely panelled with banks of codifiers and matriculators, all dormant and powered down. Crescents of dust bearded every single switch and dial.
I knew at once this was a bad sign. The tech-priests treasured machines more than anything else. If they had evacuated as Kaleil described, there was no way they would have left such a wealth of technology here… especially as each unit was clearly designed to slot out of its alcove in the black marble walls.
The chamber beyond the prothyron was a veritable chapel, a cathedral dedicated to the God-Machine, the uber-Titan, the master of Mars. The floor was creamy travertine slabs, so tightly laid not even a sheet of paper could be slipped between the stones. The chapel itself was triapsidal with walls of smooth, cold lucullite and a roof thirty metres above my head. There was yet more precious technology arranged in six concentric circles of intricate brass workstations around a central plinth. All of it was dead and unpowered.
I crossed the chamber towards the plinth, painfully aware of how loud my footsteps rang back from the emptiness. Chilly starlight shone down through an opaion in the centre of the roof, directly above the massive grandiorite plinth. The huge, severed head of an ancient Warlord Titan hung above the plinth where the starlight shafted down. I realised that nothing supported the head – no cables, no platform, no scaffolding. It simply hung in the air.
As I got close to the plinth, gazing up at the Titan's face, my hair pricked. Static, or something like it, bristled the atmosphere. Some invisible, harnessed force – perhaps gravity or magnetics, certainly something beyond my understanding – was at play here, suspending the multiple tonnes of the machine-skull. It was a silent marvel, characteristic of the tech-priesthood. Even with the power shut down, their miracles endured.
On one workstation console – a brass frame full of intermeshed iron cogs, silvered wires and glass valves – I saw a length of canvas-sleeved neural hose, one end plugged into the display, the other frayed and severed. That was more than just a case of someone leaving in a hurry.
Over the years, my dealings with the Adeptus Mechanicus had been few. They were a law unto themselves, like the Astartes, and only a fool would meddle with their power. Bure – Magos Geard Bure – had been my closest contact with them. Without the Priesthood of Mars, the technologies of the Imperium would wither and perish, and without their ceaseless endeavours, no new wonders would ever be added to mankind's might.
Yet here I stood, unmolested and uninvited, in the middle of one of their inner sanctums.
My vox-link pipped. A voice, Medea's, badly distorted by gravity flux, said Aegis wishes Thorn. By halflife d-'
It cut off.
Thorn attends Aegis/ I said. Nothing.
Thorn attends Aegis, the whisperless void/
Still nothing. What little 1 had caught of Medea's brief message troubled me – 'halflife' was a Glossia code word that could be used in phrases to disclose an important discovery or indicate a grave predicament. But what troubled me far more was the fact she had cut off. My reply, if she had heard it, indicated her transmission had been incomplete or garbled.
I waited a full minute, then another.
Without warning, my vox pipped quickly three times. Medea had test-keyed her transmitter in a non-vocal code form that indicated she couldn't talk and that I should stand by.
I brushed the min skin of dust off one dead workdesk and gazed at the worn, rune-marked keyboard and the small display screens of thick, convex glass, wondering what secrets I could possibly unlock from it.
Little, I decided. Aemos, who frankly knew more than it was healthy to know, might have a chance. He had worked closely with Bure years before, and I fancied he had more experience of the mysterious tech-priests and their ways than he cared to admit.
My motion-tracker suddenly clicked around, and I tensed, pulling my stub-nose laspistol. The tracker's display on my mask's right lens indicated a movement or contact seventeen paces to my left, but even as I turned, it flashed up more. Multiple contacts, all around, coming so fast that they overlapped and utterly confused the tracker for a moment. The lens display showed a default '00:00:00' for a second as it struggled to compute the vectors, and then it scrolled a tight column of coordinates in front of my eye.
But by then, I knew what it had sensed.
The sanctum was coming to life.
In swift succession, each workstation chattered into action, cogs whirring, valves glowing, screens lighting, pistons hissing. Pneumatic gas-pumps exhaled and communique flasks began to pop and whizz through the network of elegant glass-and-brass message tubes that ran between the consoles and up the walls. Several desks projected small hologram images above their hololith hubs: three dimensional strata maps, spectroscopy graphs, sonar readings and oscillating wave-forms. Powerful underlights
ignited on the plinth-top beneath the floating head of the Titan and threw its features into malevolent relief.
I sank down behind one of the stations, which vibrated and chattered against my back. The sudden, inexplicable life was daunting and alarming. Somewhere close by, one particular machine was rattling and repeating like an old machine gun on full auto.
As suddenly as it had started, the life died away. Stations fell silent and their lights went out. The throb of power leaked away into the darkness. The Titan's underlights dimmed and died. One by one, the holograms extinguished and the desks fell dormant. The chirring of cogs and servos and the throb of valves ebbed into stillness.
The last sound to go was that autogun racket. It continued for a good few seconds after everything else had stopped, then it too ceased abruptly.
The chapel was then as dark and quiet as it had been when I first entered.
I got to my feet. There had been no power in this place, no feeding source. What had started and woken the machines? It had to have been some signal from outside.
Using commonsense and guesswork, I went around the circle of stations nearest to me, hunting for the one that had chattered like a stubber. The most likely candidate was a bulky desk that seemed to have external and general gain vox functions. But its keys were dead to my touch.
On a whim, I got down on my knees and peered behind the desk. There were fixings where a basket hopper should have been sitting to catch the print-outs. The hopper was missing. The sheaf of print-out had fallen down into the dust under the desk.
I scooped the sheaf out. It was about nine metres long, punch-cut by the printer's jaws into shorter sections. Clearly this desk had been disgorging print-outs for some time without anyone around to collect them. The
sections at the bottom of the spool were beginning to yellow.
I looked them over, but they meant nothing. Tabulated columns of machine code in close, regular bands. Carefully, I laid them out on the travertine floor and rolled them tightly into a thick scroll.
I was nearly finished when my vox pipped.
'Aegis wishes thorn. By halflight disabused, in Administr-atum by heart. Scales fall from eyes. Multifarious, the grasp of changelings. Pattern thimble advised/
'Pattern thimble acknowledged. Thorn arising by heart/
Medea's words had told me all I needed to know. They had found something in the Administratum, and they needed me back swiftly. There was danger from Chaos all around. I should trust no one.
I bolstered my laspistol and tucked the print-out scroll into my waistband.
As I ran out of the annex and down the red-striped tunnel, I tugged my combat shotgun out over my shoulder and racked the slide.
EIGHTEEN
Pattern thimble.
Going rockside.
Geard Bure's translithopede.
Glossia's not so hard to understand. It uses subliminal symbols and 'head words'. Don't look for a mystery in it, it isn't there. That's why it works so well as a private code. There is no encryption – at least no mathematical encryption – to be calculated and broken. It is idiomatic and visceral. It is verbal impressionism. It uses the uncalculable, unregulated mechanisms of poetry and intimacy to perform its functions. There have been times in the last – well, the increasing years of my career, let's say – there have been times when an ally or retainer of mine has sent me a Glossia message using terms and words that have never been used before. And still, I have understood them.
It's a knack. It's knowing how to use, and improvise, a shared cant. There are basic rules of construction and metaphor, of course, but Glossia's strength lies in its nebulous vagueness. Its idioms. Its resonance. It is akin to the gut-slang of the Ermenoes, who have replaced language with subtleties of skin-colour.
Pattern thimble, for example.
'Pattern' indicates a course of action or behaviour. 'Thimble' is a qualifier, disclosing the manner or mode of said action. A thimble is a small tin cap that you might use to protect your finger from the short, sharp stabs of a needle during darning. It wouldn't fend off, say, an atomic strike or a horde of genestealers. But, in the idiom of Glossia, it would seal you against sudden, spearing, close attacks. It is also quiet and unremarkable.
And so, quietly, unremarkably, I slipped down the tunnel ways of Cin-chare Minehead towards the officium of the Administratum. I was stealthy and secretive, and my motion tracker and shotgun were my thimble.
Pattern thimble. Gideon Ravenor had coined that particular phrase, adding it to the vocabulary of my Glossia.
I thought of Ravenor, alone in his plastic-sheeted cot on Thracian. My anger, dimmed these last few months, welled.
My motion tracker warned me into cover at a junction of transit tunnels about half a kilometre from the plaza. Hidden behind a stack of empty promethium drams, I watched as two electric buggies buzzed past, heading towards the concourse area. Bandelbi was driving the lead one. There were two miners with him, and three more in the buggy behind. They all looked grimy and slovenly.
There were more buggies in the plaza, parked out in front of the security office. I saw a couple of labourer-types lounging in the building doorway, smoking lho-sticks.
I slipped into the miner's welfare through the back. Medea and Aemos were waiting for me in the shabby rec-room billet.
Well?'
We nosed around the Administratum/ said Aemos. 'It wasn't even locked.'
Then the place started to crawl with Kaleil's people and we skedaddled/ said Medea. Both of them looked tense and pensive.
They see you?'
She shook her head. 'But there is a damn sight more than twenty of them. I counted thirty, thirty-five at least/
What did you find?'
'Recent archives are non-existent, or they've been erased/ said Aemos. 'Nothing for the last two and a half months, not even a caretaking log, the sort of thing you'd expect Kaleil to have been obliged to keep/
'He could be recording it at the security office/
'If he was following official protocol, it would have been automatically copied to the central archives. You know how anal the Administratum is about keeping full records/
What else?'
Well, it was a cursory examination – we didn't have much time. But Kaleil told us Imperial Allied pulled out nine months ago and Ortog Promethium followed them two months later. According to the archive, both corporations were active, working and fully crewed as recently as three months ago. There's no record of any "Grav" cases, nor any filed reports or memos about the possibility of such a problem/
Kaleil was lying?'
'In all respects/
So where is everyone?'
Aemos shrugged.
'Do we leave now?' Medea asked.
'I'm determined to find Bure,' I replied, 'and there's something afoot here that really ought to-'
'Gregor/ Aemos murmured. 'I hate to be the one to point this out, but this isn't your concern. Although I know full well you are as loyal to the Golden Throne now as you ever were, in most respects that matter, you're no longer an inquisitor. Your authority is no longer recognised by the Imperium. You're a rogue… a rogue with more than enough problems of your own to sort out without involving yourself in this.'
I think he expected me to be angry. I wasn't.
'You're right… but I can't just stop being a servant of the Emperor, not just like that, no matter what the rest of mankind believes me to be. If I can do any good here, I will. I don't care about recognition, or official sanction.'
'I told you he'd say that/ Medea sneered at Aemos.
Yes, you did. She did/ he said, looking back at me.
'Sorry to be so predictable/
'Moral constancy is nothing to apologise for/ said Aemos.
I took the scroll of paper I'd recovered from the annex and showed it to my old savant.
"What do you make of this?' I told them what had happened in the sanctum of the Machine-God.
He studied the curling sheaf for a few minutes, checking back and forth.
There are elements of this machine code that I can't make out. Adeptus encryption. But… well, look at the text breaks. These are the filed records of regular transmissions from outside the minehead. Every… six hours, to the second/
And the sanctum's dormant systems would wake up the moment an external transmission came in?'
'In order to record it, yes. How long were the machines in life?'
I shook my head. Two, maybe two and half minutes/
Two minutes forty-eight seconds?' he asked.
'Could be/
He ran his finger along a line of header text above the last code-burst. 'That's exactly how long the latest transmission lasted/
'So someone's out there? Outside the minehead on Cinchare somewhere, sending regular transmissions back to the Adeptus annex?'
'Not just someone… it's Bure. This is the Adeptus code-form for his name/ Aemos leafed back through the sheets and studied the yellowest and oldest. 'He's been broadcasting for… eleven weeks/
'What is he saying?'
'I've no idea. The main text is too deeply codified. Mechanilingua-A or С or possibly some modern revision of one of the hexadecimal servito-ware scripts. Possibly Impulse Analog version nine. I can't-'
You can't read it. That's enough for me/
'All right. But I know where he is/
I paused. You do?'
Aemos smiled and adjusted his heavy augmetic eyewear. 'Well, no. I don't actually know where he is. But I can find him/
'How?'
He pointed to a vertical strip of coloured bars that ran down the side of each transmission burst. 'Each broadcast is routinely accompanied by a spectrographic report on the location of the transmitter. These colours are a conde
nsed expression of the type, mix and density of the rock surrounding him. It's like a fingerprint. If I had a good quality strata map of Cinchare, and a geologicae auspex, I could track him down/
I smiled. 'I knew there was a reason I kept you around/
'So we're going after him?' asked Medea.
Yes, we are. We'll need transport. A prospecting pod, maybe. Can you handle one of those?'
'Piece of cake. Where do we get one?'
'Imperial Allied has an excursion terminal full of them/ Aemos said. 'I saw a schematic guide of the minehead screwed to a wall/ I had seen just the same sort of thing, but I didn't recall a detail like that. It reminded me of the extraordinary photo-memory Aemos possessed.
What about the chart and auspex you said you'll need?' Medea asked.
'Any prospector machine will have an on-board mineralogicae or geologicae scanner/ said Aemos. 'That will suffice. A comprehensive chart, though, that'll be less of a certainty. We'd better make sure we have one before we set off/
He sat down on his cot and began to adjust the settings of his wrist-mounted data-slate.
What are you doing?' I asked, sitting down next to him.
'Downloading a chart from the security office's cogitorum/
'Can you do that?' Medea asked.
'It's simple enough. Despite the gravities, my slate's vox-link has enough range to communicate with the office's codifier. I can make a text-bridge and ask it to send its chart files/
Yeah, yeah, but can you do that without knowing the system's user-code?' Medea asked.
'No/ said Aemos. 'But fortunately, I do know it/
'How come?'
'It was on a note taped to the edge of the central control desk. Didn't you see it?'
Both Medea and I shook our heads and smiled. Just sitting there with Kaleil, talking and sipping fifth-rate amasec, Aemos had soaked up and memorised every detail of the place.
One question/ Medea said. We don't know what's going on here, but s probably a safe bet your friend is no friend of Kaleil and his pals. If we can find him using this, why haven't they?'Щ
'I doubt even an experienced miner could make much sense of this spectroscopy expression. It's an Adeptus code/ Aemos said, proudly.
