Knights of the Imperium

by Graham McNeill

  I turn, my senses and awareness now fully integrated with the armour. No longer am I a mortal being of flesh and bone and blood. I am a towering immortal, a beast-slaying hero from the epic lays collected in the towering stacks of Aegidius’s dusty librarius at the heart of Golem Keep.

  My Knights follow as I march from the Vault Transcendent, towards the great archway engraved with the names of every warrior who has worn the green and gold down the endless millennia from antiquity to this day.

  The fall of Gryphonne IV to Leviathan’s unstoppable swarms has seen the names of seventy-six Knights of House Cadmus etched into the marble. Grievous losses, heartbreaking losses. The kind of losses that might end a lesser house.

  House Cadmus is not a lesser house.

  Mourning banners still hang in Golem Keep’s echoing halls, but sorrow’s fist is already unclenching. The last Cull was a cathartic release of grief in an ocean of savage blood.

  Many of the dead still ride with me, data ghosts haunting the circuits of my armour. Now more than ever, I feel the deep burden of responsibility at the sight of their names.

  My brother Knights will feel the same.

  The urge to bring honour to their legacy is hardwired into every fibre of our being. It has been thus ever since my Rite of Becoming.

  Though Cordelia and the others advise against treating with the Mechanicus so soon after our emancipation, I see opportunity where others see only risk. This is why I am the master of House Cadmus. And this latest call to arms will see the newly dead avenged.

  I march beneath the archway, out onto the elliptical platforms cantilevered from the sheer flanks of a mountainous plateau. A kilometre above me squats the sprawling, brooding immensity of Golem Keep. Its windowless towers and crumbling ebon palaces are grim silhouettes in the clouds, a crag of nightmares in the hearts of Raisa’s barbarous inhabitants.

  A white-gold sun hangs low on the horizon, bathing the endless forests in a vaporous haze. Beneath their evergreen canopy, a degenerate race of abhuman savages eke out a wretched life in the dark. We could wipe them out with ease, but it is more amusing to allow them the semblance of existence.

  Each year we slaughter thousands of them in a yearly Cull to decide who will lead House Cadmus. This year, and for the thirty-one preceding years, none have surpassed my kill-tally.

  My Knights form up around me, a shield wall and marching formation all in one. They flex fibre-bundle muscles and stretch aural sensors, restless and eager for the coming fight.

  Simmering in the evening heat of the setting sun, ten trans-orbital landers wait to carry us to the bulk cruisers idling in orbit. Much of our war-load is already aboard. All that remains are the Knights.

  Malcolm takes position at my side. He thought he had me beaten this year, but he will have to prise my cold, dead hands from the reins of command.

  I am Baron Roland, Commander of House Cadmus.

  And an old enemy awaits us on Vondrak.

  The Great Devourer.

  Not the beasts of Leviathan, that would be too much to hope for and the universe does not play out its revenge tragedies so swiftly. No, this is a swarm that has been given a name from an ancient Terran myth cycle, the name of a many-headed beast that could only be defeated by the mightiest of heroes.

  Its name is Hive Fleet Hydra.

  Nemonix

  A shaven-headed flesh-thrall of the dataproctor had named this shadowed vault in a minor forge-temple as the location for their meeting. Located in the outskirts of Vondrak Ultima’s radial manufactory districts, the temple was closer to the battlefront than Arch Magos Kyrano would have liked, but the message was unequivocal.

  No sooner had it been delivered than Kyrano registered the detonation of a synaptic fuse within the thrall’s brain, forever burning any memory of the message from its mind. The thrall was baseline human, with the waxy features of something grown in a vat. Scrubbed of all but the most basic DNA signatures and conception markers, it looked human, but possessed none of humanity’s vitalism. It offered no name, and a basic bio-scan revealed cognitive architecture engineered to develop a perpetual form of anterograde amnesia.

  Needless precautions, thought Kyrano, but entirely in keeping with the dark rumours concerning the dataproctor cults.

  The deserted forge-temple was well chosen. Every senior adept had long since fled to Vondrak Prime, leaving only an expendable skeleton staff to oversee the last data transfers from its vault.

  As soon as he had offered his petition, Kyrano would join his fellow adepts. And once this business with the Binary Apostle was concluded, he would take a fast ship to Tolkhan, where the forge-synod had re-established itself in the wake of Gryphonne IV’s destruction.

  The dusty archive towers to either side thrummed with the passage of information, the whirr of magnetic plates and binaric choral chants. Wall-mounted atomisers in the form of cog-toothed skulls kept the air pungent with cooling incense.

  The dataproctor’s message had warned him to come alone, but Kyrano was an arch magos of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and a priest of his standing was seldom alone.

  A low-ranked tech-priest named Uzuki was the temple’s sole remaining adept, and he had welcomed Kyrano to his humble shrine as though the Omnissiah himself had manifested before him. He’d followed Kyrano to the data vault like a faithful cyber-mastiff, assembling its six lexmechanics like some kind of honour guard.

  The lexmechanics Kyrano would mind-wipe, and Uzuki’s silence could be bought with an empty promise of advancement within the Cult Mechanicus.

  Assuming there was any need. The appointed time for the meeting had passed three minutes ago.

  Where is he? canted Kyrano, impatiently tapping his fingertips against the matt-black surface of an archive tower. Haptic implants brought up a sheaf of glowing entoptic status panels. Even a cursory glance told Kyrano there were still thousands of zettabytes left to transfer.

  ‘Adept Kyrano?’ said Uzuki with a flesh-voice that betrayed his fear and lowly status all in one.

  Yes, Uzuki, what is it? replied Kyrano.

  The tech-priest cocked his head to the side, and Kyrano’s shoulders slumped as he recalled that Uzuki’s aural inputs were not modified for ritual levels of lingua-technis encryption. He took a moment to realign his oesophageal implants. It had been thirteen years and seven months since he had conversed with another adept in flesh-voice.

  ‘You have a question?’ he said, his voice rendered unfamiliar by lack of use.

  ‘Ah, well, yes I do, arch magos,’ said Uzuki.

  ‘Then ask it,’ said Kyrano when Uzuki didn’t go on.

  ‘Why are we still here?’

  ‘You have pressing business elsewhere?’

  Uzuki gave him a look that said he clearly did have business elsewhere. His head bobbed up and down, fear making his flesh-voice quaver.

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Uzuki. ‘There’s the matter of a, um, that is, a… tyranid host en route. Shouldn’t we be beating a hasty retreat to Vondrak Prime?’

  ‘Not until the data transfer is complete,’ said Kyrano.

  ‘Of course, arch magos,’ said Uzuki. ‘The data transfer will take at least another ten hours to complete, but, well, you see… I, well, I took the initiative, so to speak, to reroute some automation protocols from the noosphere and splice them to the lexmechanics’ cortexes. There is no need for you or I to remain.’

  Despite himself, Kyrano was impressed, but the infuriating lack of precision in Uzuki’s language offended him to the extent that he briefly considered mind-wiping him along with the lexmechanics. Bad form to take such drastic action against a fellow adept of the Cult Mechanicus, but he felt sure no one who had ever met Uzuki would condemn him.

  ‘We evacuate when I decide we are done, Adept Uzuki,’ said Kyrano. ‘If this damned adept ever turns up.’

  ‘He’s already here,’
a voice said from the darkness. ‘And I told you to come alone.’

  Despite his extreme deviations from the baseline human template, Kyrano still jumped at the sudden, unexpected sound.

  ‘An arch magos does not easily travel alone,’ he said.

  ‘There’s truth in that,’ allowed the disembodied voice. ‘Very well. One mind, eight minds? It makes no difference.’

  A figure ghosted from between two of the archive towers, and Kyrano’s ocular implants whirred as they struggled to focus.

  ‘Adept Nemonix?’ said Kyrano.

  ‘You were expecting someone else?’

  ‘No, but I am linked to every system of this temple, and I registered no entry,’ said Kyrano. ‘In fact, your presence is not registering at all. On any level. Why is that?’

  The figure kept to the shadows, but Kyrano had the discomfiting feeling that even were he standing in the full glare of a sodium lamp, there would be just as little to see.

  ‘Being a ghost in the machine has its advantages,’ said the dataproctor, as though being invisible to the multifarious auspex built into every facet of a forge-temple’s structure was a minor thing. ‘Not least of which is the freedom to travel without footprints of any kind.’

  Kyrano ached to know more but restrained his natural instinct for questions. He let the subject drop for now. More important matters had brought him to this place.

  ‘I have need of your order’s services,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ said Nemonix.

  ‘What is it you think you know?’

  ‘More than you would like, arch magos,’ said Nemonix. ‘Enough to see your every achievement stripped from you by the forge-synod, I can assure you of that. But shall we forgo threats, reveals and counter-reveals, the preening and the outrage? The unveiling of dark secrets between brother cults of the Mechanicus benefits no one. Agreed?’

  Kyrano nodded.

  ‘Very good,’ continued the dataproctor, stepping into the light. ‘Then let’s crank to the hub of the cog.’

  Kyrano flinched as Nemonix flickered like a negative exposure on a pict-plate, a ghost image that faded a heartbeat later, as though he were an adept-shaped hole in the world.

  ‘How are you doing that?’ demanded Kyrano.

  ‘If I didn’t tell you on Graia or Triplex Phall, what makes you think I’ll tell you now?’

  Kyrano consulted his data-coils and shook his head.

  ‘You and I have never met, Adept Nemonix.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ said Nemonix, with a soft sound Kyrano interpreted as laughter. ‘Our paths have crossed six times previous to this, arch magos.’

  ‘You are mistaken.’

  ‘No, you’ve just forgotten, as you will again.’

  Now it was Kyrano’s turn to laugh.

  ‘Impossible. The Mechanicus never deletes anything.’

  ‘I do,’ said Nemonix, exhaling a whisper of binary cant, his words a threat and an explanation in one. ‘The tech-priest beside you, what is his name?’

  ‘He is…’

  Kyrano’s words trailed off as he realised he had no memory of the tech-priest’s identity. A noospheric aura surrounded the man, but contained only the dull machine spirits of his basic augmetics.

  No name or designation, no history and no remnants of the man he had once been. At a stroke, the entirety of the tech-priest’s life had been erased from every nook and cranny of the noosphere.

  As far as Mechanicus was concerned, he had ceased to exist.

  Kyrano forced down his anger, as he began to suspect he had many times before. For the first time in his life, Kyrano wished he had retained a measure of his biological identity.

  ‘Now, to business,’ said Nemonix, lacing his hands behind his back as though wiping all trace of a member of the Cult Mechanicus from existence was an everyday occurrence for him.

  Kyrano had a horrid suspicion it might well be.

  ‘Gryphonne Four’s loss has allowed House Cadmus to slip their leash,’ said Nemonix, careful to emphasise just where his superiors believed the blame for that disaster lay. ‘Baron Roland of Raisa has selfishly taken advantage of your weakened standing within the forge-synod to reject the beneficence of the Mechanicus in favour of Terra. Your position within the synod is already greatly weakened by the loss of so vital a forge world. To let a knightly house just slip away would likely see you removed from the synod, perhaps even stripped of your title and holdings.’

  ‘You know a great deal,’ said Kyrano, struggling to hide his surprise.

  Judging from the tone of Nemonix’s next words, he presumed he had failed utterly.

  ‘Don’t look so shocked, arch magos. To someone like me, your floodstream is as porous as a macrogrit sieve. You may as well have announced your intentions over an open vox-caster link.’

  The dataproctor waved an admonishing finger. ‘If I were you, I’d think twice about using unratified STC fragments for neural firewalls. And I’d especially advise against using proprietary interpolation codes to fill in the gaps.’

  Nemonix waved away Kyrano’s open-mouthed shock.

  ‘No matter, but to return to the matter at hand, in and of itself, House Cadmus severing its ties with Mars is irrelevant. It is irrelevant, but also inevitable that other houses will hear of it. And if House Cadmus is able to cast off the Mechanicus with impunity, others may follow their example. Then where will it end? This poor ravaged house could be the domino that tips other Knight houses allied to the Mechanicus into thinking they can survive without the patronage of Mars.’

  ‘Then you understand what I require of you?’ said Kyrano.

  ‘To show Baron Roland the error of his ways and bring House Cadmus back under Martian control.’

  ‘Just so,’ said Kyrano.

  ‘And if that should prove impossible? How far are you willing to take this?’

  Kyrano straightened and said, ‘If Roland will not submit to Mars, you are to ensure that House Cadmus serves as an example to the other Knight houses of how bloodily catastrophic taking a similar course of action would be.’

  The dataproctor nodded, and just for a second his hazed outline became clear as he exloaded a string of impossibly subtle cant. A wash of static cascaded through Kyrano’s ocular implants.

  He blinked it away and looked around the empty data vault.

  A tech-priest he didn’t know and six lexmechanics stood with him in the midst of banks of whirring archive towers. Glowing status screens crackled with ripples of distortion, telling Kyrano that every single archive was completely empty of data.

  ‘The data transfer is complete,’ Kyrano told the nameless tech-priest, wondering why he was using his flesh-voice instead of binaric cant.

  He looked around the deserted archive space one last time, but they were alone. No sign of a representative from the dataproctors. Kyrano shook his head, irritated at having been forced to waste his valuable time for nothing.

  Angry at such a gross breach of protocol, Arch Magos Kyrano turned on his heel and left the empty vault.

  Vondrak

  First to emerge from the Cadmus translifters was a tall, slender woman with strong features and auburn hair bound up in an elaborate headpiece of gold, silver and dripping mother-of-pearl. Clad in a long, green dress with a gold pelisse over one shoulder, Lady Cordelia of House Cadmus stepped onto the vapour-wreathed platform and marched towards the official-looking men assembled on an elevated reviewing stand.

  ‘They look surprised,’ she said into the sub-vocal vox-bead disguised as a ruby choker at her throat.

  ‘These are Vondrak Prime’s senior military commanders,’ answered Roland in her ear. ‘They were likely expecting a Knight.’

  ‘I hope I shan’t prove a disappointment,’ said Cordelia, marching towards the reviewing stand with a stride as sure as any colonel of the Guard
.

  ‘Never that,’ chuckled Roland. ‘Right, what do we have?’

  Cordelia’s right eye was a subtle ocular implant that relayed what she saw back to Roland’s Knight armour.

  ‘Our old friend, Arch Magos Kyrano,’ said Cordelia.

  ‘Makes sense. The petition requesting our assistance came from him,’ said Roland. ‘He’ll be anxious to remind us how much we need the help of Mars. Who else?’

  Cordelia inclined her head towards a beautifully handsome man with caramel-coloured skin and a mane of glossy dark hair bound in a long scalp-lock. Encased in silver lamellar plate and a long cloak of scarlet, his exposed shoulder bore two crossed duelling blades and his lapels a crown between two star-shaped roundels.

  ‘Harun Rukanah,’ said Cordelia. ‘Colonel of the Mubarizan Sipahi. Service record inloading now. Looks solid. More good decisions than bad. I think we can count on him.’

  A short, compact man with sallow skin and a shorn scalp stood awkwardly beside the Mubarizan colonel. He wore faded khakis with a split-winged insignia on the left breast, one wing white and one crimson. Beneath the khakis, Cordelia saw a well-worn bodyglove.

  ‘We don’t have a visual of him, but I’m betting that’s Aktis Bardolf of House Hawkshroud.’

  ‘Looks like a Knight pilot, right enough,’ said Roland. ‘And the Space Marine?’

  Cordelia regarded the towering warrior in matt-black plate with a pearl-white trim and ivory eagle across his vast plastron.

  ‘We don’t know him,’ she said, ‘but he’s from the Sable Swords Chapter. From the iconography and embellishments to his armour, I’d say a captain.’

  Lady Cordelia approached the reviewing stand and gave a short bow to the men assembled above her. She made no attempt to climb the steps at the stand and gave them just enough time to realise that they were to come to her.

  Followed by their escorting soldiers, they formed up in front of Cordelia like junior officers approaching a lord general. Before any of them could speak, Cordelia held up her right hand.