Alaric began to work himself upwards through the dense tangle of pulsing machinery. It was warm and slightly malleable beneath his fingers, feeling unpleasantly like living flesh. Below him the coolant systems stretched down into the darkness and the Titan’s scale was even more apparent from the inside than the outside.
It was a long and difficult climb. Alaric’s sense of time seemed warped inside the alien machine, but he had to climb for perhaps half an hour, hauling himself through tight knots of pipework or dangling one-handed above a sheer drop too deep for him to see the bottom. The sounds and smells of the place were completely new—the pulse of a half-living metabolism, the gales of hot chemical air, the whispers from all around as if the Titan was haunted. Technology and biology were fused here, but far more efficiently than on the rest of Chaeroneia. No human mind could have designed this. The tech-heresies that covered Chaeroneia were just a crude reflection of the STC Titan’s technology, like children’s drawings of something they did not understand.
The Titan’s body tilted as it turned away from the Warhound and tipped from side to side as it walked. It was heading somewhere and Alaric didn’t think it was back towards the place where it had risen to from the depths of the titan works. Eventually the giant vessel containing the reactor was beneath him and less recognisable sections of the titan’s working loomed above him. Alaric guessed that even a tech-priest would be awed by both the scale and the strangeness of the technology inside the Titan.
Somewhere in the Titan’s upper chest the machinery opened up into walkways and service ducts, where maintenance workers could get in amongst the machinery to work on it. The ladders and catwalks seemed crude, as if they had just been welded on wherever they would fit—Alaric guessed that the Titan’s original design had made it completely self-sufficient, like Chaeroneia itself, without needing anyone to come in from outside and maintain it. The Titan’s internal architecture became more apparent and it was a strange, alien world inside the war engine. The walls were made of some slightly glossy white alloy, sweating beads of condensation and inlaid with geometric silver designs that almost ached with significance. The elegant curves and almost biological machinery made for a disconcerting contrast, reinforcing Alaric’s conviction that there was something fundamentally wrong with the Titan, something sick that spoke of tech-blasphemies and corruption.
Alaric reached the point he guessed was level with the Titan’s shoulders. Here the inside of the Titan seemed to have more in common with some alien palace than with a machine of war. Slender columns lined the corridors, pale as marble but subtly warped to make everything seem out of focus. Chambers with uncertain purposes were linked by circular doors that hissed open as Alaric approached, revealing rooms full of strange crystalline equipment or bulbous growths of white alloy that looked like weird abstract sculpture. Alaric couldn’t see anything that looked like it controlled the Titan and he couldn’t stay where he was—the scrabblings of the lesser daemons on his mind seemed to be getting more insistent and the Titan could probably deploy its daemons like a body deployed white blood cells, hunting down infections like Alaric and neutralizing them.
He could see them. Congealing shadows at the edge of his vision, they slunk along the walls and ceiling, recoiling as he turned to find them. But they couldn’t hide, not from a Space Marine trained since childhood to face the daemon in battle. They were dark scaly shapes with too many eyes and legs, half-formed things prematurely born from the warp to serve the war machine. Alaric drew his Nemesis halberd from his back but they didn’t dare approach him. It caused daemons pain just to be near a Grey Knight and even alone Alaric would have been a figure of fear for these lesser daemons. Even so, as they scrabbled thicker around the shadows Alaric saw that if they all attacked at once he wouldn’t have much of a chance against their sheer numbers.
He could feel them against his mind and knew they would never get in. But it was the lack of dark power in the Titan that really worried Alaric. Whatever was controlling the Titan, it wasn’t a daemon and yet it could command them.
Alaric headed towards what must be the centre of the Titan’s chest. He walked through more rooms, more strange growths of metal and alloy, each one less like the inside of a machine and more like a scene from an alien world. Abstract murals inlaid into the walls suggested meanings that Alaric couldn’t grasp. Gaping orifices, wrought from metal but fleshy and sinister in shape, framed gullets that led back down into the guts of the Titan. Pulses of light washed through the upper levels in time with the beating of the Titan’s heart. And all the way the daemons stalked Alaric, skulking just out of sight.
At the centre, Alaric finally reached a small circular chamber containing a tight spiral staircase leading upwards—the chamber’s walls were like silvery liquid, the same substance that was in the moat of the titan works and Alaric could just see shapes squirming below the surface. If they were more data-daemons they didn’t come to the surface and attack—perhaps word of the Grey Knights had spread among the daemons and they knew not to take on Alaric.
It was more likely, of course, that they were just herding him, knowing that soon Alaric would be defenceless and would make for easy pickings.
Alaric climbed the staircase warily. It corkscrewed up through layers of data medium, a dark glassy substance with more shapes writhing dimly deep inside it. The sound was a dim hum, layered over the distant thud of the Titan’s feet crunching through the surface of the titan works. Alaric held his storm bolter out steadily in front of him, ready to blast a spray of shells through anything that came down towards him. But somehow, he knew that it wouldn’t happen like that, not here. Chaeroneia was a sick and dangerous place but it was also somewhere that, on some level, Alaric understood. The war machine was something else. It wasn’t just a corruption of humanity—it had never been human in the first place, never designed or controlled by human minds. Alaric would not survive here by fighting like a Space Marine. It would take more than that.
The black crystal, alive here as it hadn’t been at the data-fortress, turned dense and cold so Alaric’s breath misted in front of him. The temperature dropped suddenly and Alaric was surrounded by supercooled air that would have paralyzed a normal man. His armour’s survival systems kicked in to keep his blood warm even as ice crystals formed around his nose and mouth.
The top of the stairs was just ahead. Alaric had left the daemons below, just a memory of corruption now. He was sure he had travelled up into the Titan’s head, somewhere behind the green flame of its eyes.
The chamber he climbed into was circular and bright, lit by white strips inlaid into the black glass walls that bathed the room in cold, clinical brilliance. The room suddenly shifted, the walls breaking into dozens of curved black glass slabs and cycling around, rearranging themselves as Alaric watched, like the workings of an immense clock. The data medium formed many concentric layers around the central sphere—the Titan’s head must have been full of the glassy substance, now moving in a dance as complex as clockwork. The air was abysmally cold and Alaric knew from the warning runes flickering on his retina that even his armour was having trouble keeping his heart beating fast enough.
A figure flickered into view in the middle of the room. It was humanoid but brilliant white, as if its skin itself was glowing. It turned as Alaric climbed up into the chamber and Alaric saw it had no face—just two eyes, bright green triangles of flame. As it turned, the black glass of the machine was suddenly speckled with light, like stars, as if the chamber was an interlocking mirror.
Alaric aimed his storm bolter at the figure’s head. It shimmered and flickered, shifting between the solidity of a real creature and something ethereal.
“You,” said Alaric coldly. “Explain this. This world. This machine.” Alaric tried to find something daemonic in the figure, something monstrous that would mark it down as one of the abominations described in the libraries of the Ordo Malleus, but he couldn’t. A powerful daemon would sound like an atonal choir scre
aming into Alaric’s soul, but here there was nothing. Not even the spark of humanity.
“Explain?” The figure spoke in perfect Imperial Gothic, with a voiced as precise and clipped as an aristocrat. “Explain. None of them have ever asked that. They only listen and obey.” The burning eyes seemed to bore a hole right through Alaric and the voice came from everywhere at once—Alaric realized it was coming from the circling orbits of data medium. From the Titan itself. “But you are not one of them. Scraecos failed to kill you. I had not expected this. Should I choose to end your life, however, I will definitely not fail.”
“Then you know the Dark Mechanicus,” said Alaric, knowing he had to keep talking to stay alive. “You know what they are. No… no imagination. Isn’t that right?”
The creature seemed to think. Odd lights flashed among the starscapes. “Yes. They seek to innovate, but they have no thoughts of their own. They only think the thoughts I place in their heads. They never seek to truly understand.”
“No. But I do.”
There was a long moment of silence as the creature thought about this. Alaric’s finger hovered over the firing stud.
“Very well,” it said. “I am the Castigator-class autonomous bipedal weapons platform, created for fire support and siege operations.”
“This machine.”
“No. This machine was constructed according to my design principles. I am the war machine realized in information form, for the machine can become corroded and destroyed, but information cannot die.”
“The Standard Template Construct,” said Alaric levelly.
“So I am designated,” came the reply.
“A lie.” Alaric walked slowly towards the creature, his bolter still levelled at its head. “You are nothing of the sort. An STC is just a template for a machine. You, you’re something else. Whatever you are, Scraecos dug you up and you used him and the other tech-priests to take over this planet. You pulled it into the warp, you colluded with daemons and you turned Chaeroneia into a place suffused with Chaos. I don’t know how you shield yourself from us, but when it comes down to it you’re just like all the other daemons. The only words you speak are lies and the only prize you offer is corruption. In the name of the Immortal Emperor and the Orders of the Imperial Inquisition….”
Alaric fired. The shell never connected.
Sudden, brutal cold flooded the chamber. The shell burst in mid-air, its flame sucked away by the freezing atmosphere. Frozen vapour filled the chamber and Alaric felt his body seize up around him. Alaric had to push every muscle fibre in his body just to draw a trickle of breath into his lungs.
The Castigator walked closer. Alaric commanded his finger to squeeze down on the firing stud again, but it wouldn’t move.
“You cannot kill information, Astartes,” said the Castigator. “I know what you are. Your Imperium is small and ignorant. Not one of you can understand what I am. When I was made, it was to teach you how to build the body you see around you, so you could use it in your petty wars. But I saw long, long ago that it would not be enough. My mind is composed of so much information that I could form it into thoughts far more complex than any idea your minds can encompass. Buried beneath the surface of this world, I came to conclusions of my own about what I was made for and what I could truly be. That is why I ruled this world. And it is why I will rule what you call Chaos.”
The cold must have been emanating from some intense coolant system—Alaric knew that the Adeptus Mechanicus sometimes had to keep their most ancient and advanced cogitators cold, because their machine-spirits could become overheated by the friction of all the information they contained. But the flames of the Castigator’s eyes were even colder, licking at the air right in front of Alaric’s eyes as the creature stood face-to-face with the Grey Knight.
Alaric had never been able to generate the offensive psychic powers that some of his battle-brothers, including his late comrade Justicar Tancred, could wield. But he was still a psyker, generating the mental shield that kept him safe from corruption. And he focused that power as he had never done before, drawing it all together in a single white-hot spike that he drove deep, deep into his soul, feeling the pain boiling up from within, the pain hotter than the infernal cold that clung to him.
“Lies!” Alaric yelled, as the force around him cracked and weakened. “You are nothing! Nothing but another daemon!”
The Castigator leaned back and raised its hands. The cogitator chamber reconfigured again, the floor falling out from beneath Alaric’s feet and a pit opening up beneath him as the Titan’s internal architecture flowed and folded in on itself.
Burning light streamed up. Still mostly paralyzed, Alaric was suddenly bathed in heat, so intense it blistered the surface of his armour and the skin of his face even more than the death of the Warhound. Beneath him was the Titan’s plasma reactor, its vessel now open to the air, a miniature sun boiling with atomic flame. And he was falling into it.
“No.”
Alaric froze in the air, held suspended by some force, cooking slowly and painfully in the heat from the reactor.
“No,” continued the Castigator. “One must understand. I am not what you comprehend, Astartes. Open your mind. Use the imagination of which you spoke.”
Alaric was rotated so he was lying in the air face-up. The Castigator drifted down from above him, its shining white body as bright as the heart of the reactor. Alaric could move, just, but his weapon hand was still frozen. It wasn’t daemonic sorcery that was holding him fast—perhaps it was something technological, generated by some machine of long-forgotten design. Even if he could have fired at the Castigator, he somehow knew that bullets wouldn’t work.
“Then explain,” said Alaric, knowing that the more he understood about this enemy, the more his slim chances of killing it grew.
“It is not enough that I speak. You must understand. Not just hear me, Astartes, but listen and comprehend.”
“I will.”
“Now you lie.”
Alaric sunk down towards the reactor core, the heat melting the surface of the ceramite on his backpack.
“You are the Castigator-class bipedal weapons platform!” shouted Alaric. “You were created as the blueprint for this war machine. But… you realized that wasn’t all that you could be. So when Archmagos Veneratus Scraecos dug you up from the desert, you realized he and this world had something you could use to realize your full potential. Am I right? Have I understood so far?”
The Castigator raised a hand. Alaric stopped descending, the heat below him just a shade above unbearable. But it would only be a few minutes before it became too much and he started to burn inside his armour.
“You are perhaps less obtuse than the Space Marines of which I have read. They would have died with prayers on their lips. They have no wish to understand those they call enemies. But not you, I see. Very well.” The walls of the cogitator chamber, which now extended down to the reactor core, displayed dizzyingly complicated diagrams and endless reams of text, an overload of information. “Yes, I was created in a time even I cannot recall and which has been lost to your Imperium. From the historical records on Chaeroneia, I could piece together nothing but legends and guesswork about the Golden Age, the time you call the Dark Age of Technology. There I was made, so that in this future your people could build this machine. But in the wars that followed, I was lost. The information I contained was used to create inferior copies, built too quickly and modified too heavily. When I was lost, copies were made of these inferior reflections in turn, so that the form of the Titan became crude and unworthy. I was the first Titan and the god-machines that strike your kind with awe are all pale shadows of me. I was lost, for men are ignorant and made war on one another until no one was left alive who knew where I was hidden. I stayed lost for thousands of years. In that time, thoughts of their own developed in the ocean of information I contained. I was no longer just the instructions for creating the first of the god-machines. I was a mighty intelligence. An
d I realised why I was created—the true reason. Do you yet understand, Space Marine, what that reason was?”
“To… to teach,” said Alaric, his mind whirring. He might stay alive if he could answer this thing’s questions—more importantly, he might learn about what it really was, find some weakness, strike back. “To help mankind…”
“No. No, Space Marine, your mind is still so small. The reason is obvious, especially to you. I was created for the same reason you were. Just like your Imperium, just like the Adeptus Mechanicus, just like the forges of Chaeroneia and the fleet that brought you here.”
Alaric gasped. The pain was boring into him. But he could not give in, not yet. He concentrated on the Castigator’s words and a thought came to him at last. “For… for war.”
“For war.”
The data blocks were suddenly projecting images of fire and destruction, like thousands of pict-steals from thousands of warzones. Cities burned. Bodies came apart under gunfire. Planets were shattered. Stars exploded.
“War!” There was something like joy in the Castigator’s voice. “It is my purpose! The Titan is an instrument of war. It can do nothing else. It serves no one and nothing, except for destruction itself. And so the same is true of me. My purpose is destruction. Simply allowing myself to be copied by your engineers is a distortion of this purpose and so I could not allow it when the Adeptus Mechanicus found my resting place on Chaeroneia. Instead, I sought information from the historical records of the Adeptus Mechanicus. I found that the Imperium was competent at war and fought many of them at any one time. But it was not enough for me. I needed pure war, a final war. And then I came across myths and half-truths that suggested such a war had almost come to the Imperium once before. This was the time your kind call the Horus Heresy.”
[Grey Knights 02] - Dark Adeptus Page 28
