by Dan Abnett
‘A group of seniors from the Mechanicum, your esteemed colleagues, Pelot, dined with me on Macragge just a month ago. They were extolling the virtues of the newest generation cogitators that had been installed to run the Calth yards and grid. They were immensely proud of their machines.’
‘So they should be, lord.’
‘They spoke about them as if they were… as if they had personalities, as individuals. I took that as an indication of their near-perfection in the development of the machine-spirit.’
‘Indeed, my lord.’
‘We can build a world of greater perfection and higher performance than the human form, magos. We can exceed the natural limits of humanity.’
‘Sir.’
‘I’m saying, perhaps we should trust your wonderful machines to do the job for a time while the server removes the problem.’
Pelot nods.
‘That is our feeling, lord.’
‘Good. I will make our visitors aware that there is a scrapcode issue, and gently investigate if it’s something they have brought with them by mistake. They have been on the fringes of late. And your server will need their cooperation in his investigation.’
‘Very good, lord.’
‘Pelot?’
‘My lord?’
‘With regard to the natural limits of humanity, it’s worth noting that during our dinner, your colleagues did not really ingest any actual food.’
‘Yes, my lord. In fairness, I doubt you needed to either.’
Guilliman smiles.
‘Very good, magos.’
He turns to his deck officers.
‘Arrange and establish a live link, please. As quickly as possible,’ he instructs. ‘I want to talk to my brother.’
[mark: -9.32.40]
Telemechrus wakes, but it is not time for war.
He has been taught things, and one of them is to control his anger until it is needed. It is not needed now, so he controls it.
He analyses. He scans. He determines.
His determination is this: he is in his casket, and his casket is being moved for transit. Something, perhaps some clumsy or inexpert handling of his casket, has woken him.
It is not time for war. This disappoints him.
He controls his disappointment, just as he has been taught. He controls his anger. He realises he needs, additionally, to control his anxiety. Anxiety is akin to fear, and fear is an abomination previously unknown to him, and he has resolved absolutely not to let it in. Thus, his anxiety increases.
Telemechrus lived his life as a legionary of the XIII. Ten years’ service, from his genetic construction to his death in combat, and all that time he knew no fear. None whatsoever. Despite everything he faced, even death when it finally came, he was never afraid.
During the first conversation he had with them, after his death, the techpriests told him that things would be different from now on. His mortal remains, the remains of Brother Gabril Telemach, 92nd Company Ultra-marines, were no longer viable. Too much of his organics had been vaporised for there to be any continuation of life as he could understand it. But he was, in respect of his courage and service, and because of his compatibility, going to be honoured. His mortal remains were going to form the organic core of a cyberorganic being.
He was to be made a Dreadnought.
As a man, as flesh and blood, Gabril had thought of the Dreadnoughts as ancient things. They were veterans, brothers taken at the brink of death and installed inside indomitable war machines. They were old. Some were a century old. Some had been alive in those machine-boxes for a hundred years!
Gabril Telemach was not old. Just a decade of service.
Now he was trapped in a box forever.
There were adjustments to be made, the techpriests said. Mental adjustments. He accepted, first of all, that every Dreadnought, even the most venerable, had to be new at some point. Dreadnoughts were a vital part of the Legion’s fighting power, and they were lost from time to time. So new ones needed to be constructed at intervals, when the combat chassis were available, and when war-loss produced suitable and compatible organic donors.
The techpriests told him that he would lack many things his flesh body had taken for granted. Sleep, to begin with. He would only sleep when they placed him into stasis hibernation. He would experience – or rather not experience – long periods of this, because they would ensure he slept most of the time. They would wake him if it was time for war and his participation was required.
The techpriests said that this was because of the pain. There would be pain, and it would be constant. His pitiful mortal residue was sheathed in a cyberorganic web, laced into electro-fibre systems, and shut in an armoured sarcophagus. There would be no opportunity to manage pain the way he had done as a man, no mechanism for pain control.
For the same reason, he would find himself prone to emotional variations he had not known as a man. He would probably be prone to rage, to anger. Despite the devastating power bequeathed to him as a Dreadnought, he would miss his mortal state. He would resent his death, regret the circumstances of it, fixate upon it, come to hate the cold-shell life he had been given in exchange.
To spare him this bitterness, and the pain, and the anger, he would be encouraged to sleep for great periods of time.
He would also, they told him, probably be prone to bouts of fear, especially early on. This was, they explained, because of his profound change of state. His consciousness had been shorn away from a linear, mortal scale, from any timeframe he could recognise or understand, from time itself, in fact, because of the prolonged hibernations. Fear, anathema to the Space Marine, was merely part of the mind’s adjustment to this extreme fate. It was natural. He would learn to control it, and to use it, just like his anger. Eventually, fear would evaporate, and be no more. He would be as fearless as he had been as a legionary.
It would take time. There would be gradual and careful adjustments of his hormones and biochemical mix. He would receive hypnotherapies and acclimation pattering. He would be mentored by others of his kind, the venerables, who had grown used to their strange fates.
He had said to the techpriests, ‘I was fearless as a battle-brother, even though I might fall. Now you have rendered me invincible, you say I am prey to fear? Why then call me a Dreadnought? I was a dread nought before. I dreaded nothing as a man!’
‘This is the anger we spoke of,’ they had replied. ‘You will adjust. Sleep will help. Begin hibernation protocols.’
‘Wait!’ he had called out. ‘Wait!’
Justarius is his mentor. Justarius is venerable. Justarius is also sullen and, despite his greater lifespan as a Dreadnought, seems not to have shed the bitterness or the anger. Justarius prefers to sleep. He is curmudgeonly when woken. He seems, at best, ambivalent to Telemechrus’s concerns.
‘It’s Telemach,’ says Telemechrus.
‘My name was Justinus Phaedro,’ grumbles Justarius in reply. ‘They rename us like machines. Or they forget. I forget which.’
Telemechrus is the newest Dreadnought in the ranks of the XIII. He is Contemptor-pattern. He has yet to see combat.
They wake him once, during routine resuscitation in the vaults at Macragge. His implant clock tells him that he has been dormant for two years. The techpriests inform him that an operation has been announced. He will be installed in his chassis and shipped to Calth for deployment, and then woken when it is time for war. The war will be with orks. Telemechrus has questions, but they return him to his hypnotherapeutic dreams.
‘Wait!’ he says.
Telemechrus wakes, but it is not time for war.
He has been taught things, and one is to control his anger until it is needed. It is not needed now, so he controls it.
He analyses. He scans. He determines.
His determination is this: he is in his casket, and his casket is being moved for transit. Something, perhaps some clumsy or inexpert handling of his casket, has woken him.
His implant cl
ock tells him it is eighteen weeks since that routine wake-up on Macragge. Locator systems, reading noospheric tags, tell him that his casket is under transfer in the orbital yards at Calth. The staging post. The place of conjunction. He has roused too early. They’re not at the war front yet.
He wonders why he has woken. Was it clumsy handling? A loader jarring his casket? Justarius and Kloton and Photornis are nearby, in their own caskets, and they are still in hiber-stasis.
Was he physically disturbed? Or was it some scrapcode abnormality causing his cogitation systems to fibrillate?
Telemechrus doesn’t know. He is new to this. There are no techpriests nearby. He wants Justarius to wake so he can ask him.
Is this normal? What do these traces of scrapcode mean? He feels trapped. He feels anxiety. Fear will follow.
He is aware of the hibersystems trying to pull him back into unconsciousness where he belongs. They are trying to spare him the pain and the anger. There is no need to wake. You woke too early. You don’t need to be awake.
The techpriests are wrong.
It’s not the pain a Dreadnought is afraid of.
It’s the silence. It’s the oblivion. It’s the sleep.
It’s the inability to escape from yourself.
[mark: -8.11.47]
Guilliman looks at Gage and nods.
Gage speaks to the lithocast operators and they activate the system.
Guilliman steps onto the hololithic plate as it starts to come to life. The tiered stations of the flagship’s bridge rise up around the vast plate like the stalls of an amphitheatre.
Light blooms around him.
Figures resolve, there but not there at all. Light has been captured, folded and twisted to give the illusion of reality. Guilliman knows that, somewhere, millions of kilometres away, other deck systems are fabricating images of him out of light. He is appearing as a hololithic presence on the lithocast decks of other stages, for the benefit of the august commanders whose ghosts are manifesting to him here.
One in particular.
‘My worthy brother!’ Lorgar exclaims. He steps forward to greet Guilliman.
The simulation is remarkable. Though luminous, there is true density and solidity to his flesh and his armour. There is no lag to his audio, no desynchronisation between mouth and voice. Remarkable.
‘I did not expect to meet you like this,’ Lorgar says. His grey eyes are bright. ‘In person, so I could embrace you. This seems premature. I was informed of your request. I have had no time to dress in ceremonial attire–’
‘Brother,’ says Guilliman. ‘You see that I greet you in regular battle plate too. There will be time for personal greeting and full dress ceremony when you arrive. You are just a few hours out now?’
‘Decelerating fast,’ Lorgar replies. He looks at someone not caught inside the hololithic field of his bridge. ‘The shipmaster says five hours.’
‘We will meet together then, you and your commanders. Me and mine.’ Guilliman looks at the warlords whose images have appeared around Lorgar’s. They all appear to be connecting from different ships. He’d forgotten the imposing bulk of Argel Tal. The lipless sneer of Foedral Fell. The predatory curiosity of Hol Beloth. The hunched gloom of Kor Phaeron. The lightless smile of Erebus.
‘Some of you are already here,’ Guilliman notes.
‘I am, sir,’ says Erebus.
‘We will meet shortly, then,’ says Guilliman.
Erebus inclines his head, more an accepting bow of the head than a nod.
‘My vessel is entering orbit,’ says Kor Phaeron.
‘Welcome to Calth,’ says Guilliman.
The light phantoms salute him.
‘I’ve asked for this brief communication,’ Guilliman says, ‘to discuss a small technical matter. I do not wish it to mar our formal conjunction, nor do I wish it to create problems for your fleet during approach and dispersal.’
‘A problem?’ asks Kor Phaeron.
There’s a stiffness to them suddenly. Guilliman feels it, even though they are only present as handfuls of light. When they first appeared, he realises, they seemed like a pack of dogs, padding into the firelight, teeth bared in smiles that were also snarls, gleefully inquisitive. Now they seem like wild animals that he should never have brought so close to the hearth.
The Word Bearers have been fighting brutal, heathen wars of compliance in the ragged skirts of the Imperium. They’ve been fighting them dutifully and ferociously for decades, since that fateful day on Monarchia that changed the relationship between XIII and XVII forever. There is something coarsely barbaric about them. They have none of the praetorian nobility of Guilliman’s men. They don’t even evince the passionate devotion of their misguided days. They look sullen, world-weary, as though they have seen everything it is possible to see and are tired of it. They look hardened. They look as though all compassion and compunction have been drained out of them. They look like they would kill without provocation.
‘A problem, lord?’ Argel Tal repeats.
‘A machine code problem,’ Guilliman replies. ‘The Mechanicum has advised me. There is a malicious scrapcode problem in the Calth datasphere. We’re working to eradicate it. I wanted you to be aware of it, and to take steps accordingly.’
‘That could have been summarised in a databurst, sir,’ remarks Foedral Fell.
‘A connected matter,’ Guilliman says carefully, ‘is that the source of the scrapcode remains unidentified. There is a strong possibility that it is a data artefact that has been inadvertently brought in from outside the Calth system.’
‘From outside?’ asks Lorgar.
‘From elsewhere,’ Guilliman states.
There’s a look in Lorgar’s eyes that Guilliman hopes never to see again. It’s hurt and it’s anger, but it’s also injured pride.
Lorgar raises his hand and draws it across his neck in a cut-throat gesture. It takes Guilliman a moment to realise that it’s not a provocation, a curt insult.
The hololithic images of his officers and commanders freeze. Only Lorgar’s remains live. He takes a step towards Guilliman.
‘I have suspended their transmissions so we may speak plainly,’ he says. ‘Plainly and clearly. After all that has passed between us and our Legions, after all that has been toxic these last years, after all the effort to engineer this campaign as a reconciliation… Your first act is to accuse us of tainting you with scrapcode? Of… what? Of being so careless in our data hygiene we have infected your precious datasystem with some outworld codepox?’
‘Brother–’ Guilliman begins.
Lorgar gestures to the frozen light ghosts around them.
‘How much humiliation do you intend to heap upon these men? They want only to please you. To earn the respect of the great Roboute Guilliman, a respect they have been lacking these last decades. It matters what you think of them.’
‘Lorgar–’
‘They’ve come to prove themselves! To show they are worthy to fight alongside the majestic Ultramarines! The warrior-kings of Ultramar! This conjunction, this campaign, it’s a point of the highest honour! It matters to them. It matters very much! They have waited years for this honour to be restored!’
‘I meant no insult.’
‘Really not?’ Lorgar laughs.
‘None at all. Brother Lorgar Aurelian, why else would I have communicated informally? If I’d saved this matter to sully our ceremonial greeting, then you might have considered it an insult. A private word, between trusted commanders. That’s all this is. You know scrapcode can develop anywhere, and adhere to the most carefully maintained systems. This could be us, this could be you, it could be an error from our datastacks, it could be some xenos code that‘s been stuck to your systems like a barnacle since you left the outworlds. There’s no blame. We just need to acknowledge the problem and work together to cleanse it.’
Lorgar stares at him. Guilliman notes just how thoroughly his brother’s flesh is covered with inked words.
�
�This was not meant to spoil our long-overdue reunion,’ Guilliman says. ‘This was my attempt to stop the reunion being spoiled.’
Lorgar nods. He purses his lips and nods. Then he flashes a smile.
‘I see.’
He nods again, the smile flickering in and out. He raises a palm to his mouth, then laughs.
‘I see. Then very well. I should not have spoken that way.’
‘I should have been more circumspect,’ replies Guilliman. ‘I can see how it might have seemed.’
‘We’ll check our systems,’ says Lorgar. His smile is back. He nods again, as if convincing himself.
‘I should have been more circumspect,’ Guilliman insists.
‘No, you’re right. There is clearly a tension here that needs to be overcome. An expectation.’
Lorgar looks at him.
‘I’ll get to it. We’ll see if we can trace the code. And then we will meet, brother. In just a few hours now, we will meet, and everything will be put right.’
‘I look forward to it,’ says Guilliman. ‘We will stand side-by-side, we will take down this ork threat that our brother Warmaster has identified, and then history will be rewritten between us.’
‘I hope so.’
‘It will be so, brother. If I had not believed that the unfortunate rift between our Legions could not be healed by good society and the companionship of shared martial effort, I would not have agreed to this. We will be the best of allies, Lorgar. You and I, our mighty Legions. Horus will be pleased and the Emperor our father will smile, and old slights will be forgotten.’
Lorgar smiles.
‘They will be forgotten completely. They will be put to rest,’ he says.
‘Without delay,’ says Guilliman.
[mark: -7.55.09]
Criol Fowst sacrifices his last oblator. In the landing camps of the XVII and its army auxiliaries, landing camps that are spread across the surface of Calth, hundreds of majir just like Fowst are concluding similar sacrificial rituals.
The Brotherhood is chanting. So are the men and women of the Tzenvar Kaul, the Jeharwanate and the Kaul Mandori, the other three principal cult echelons.
