The World Engine

by Ben Counter

  ‘They’re heading for the Sol system,’ said Faraji. ‘To Mars, my lord. To Terra.’

  Orbital Supply Station Madrigal 12

  High Polar Orbit, Safehold

  Varv System

  Encryption Code Hemlock

  Inquisitorial Eyes Only. Ref. Lord Inquisitor Quilven Rhaye

  Scrivened: Medicae Obscurum Kalliam Helvetar

  Addendum Tertiam

  This functionary has suffered from nightmares.

  This is not unusual as she has experienced them from childhood. However, the nightmares suffered in association with autoseance contacts are of sufficiently atypical nature, and correspond closely enough with memory-fragments experienced during contact with the subject, that this functionary has chosen to record them here. They were experienced over a period of forty-eight hours, during the required period of psychological decompression between contact attempts.

  This addendum has been void-safed along with the annotated transcripts of the autoseance contacts, given the potential of their contents. It had not escaped the notice of this functionary that these nocturnal hallucinations constitute justification for presentation to the Inquisitorial authorities as per the standing orders given to the Varv Deliverance Fleet by Lord Inquisitor Rhaye. His functionary shall duly present herself upon completion of the autoseance procedures.

  The most lucid of the nocturnal visions are as follows:

  I am hanging in the void. I am aware that I am of great size and that time is sped up to the point where my fellow planets spin rapidly as they swing in great circles around my star. My star is a fountain of yellow warmth in the infinite cold. One brother is rust-red and barren. Another is a noxious mass of poisonous cloud. Fecundity erupts across me. Life spreads and changes form. It scatters from me like seed pods picked up by an unfelt wind. Corruption follows it, and I become polluted and decayed, tendrils of darkness worming through me. Finally another world enters orbit, bright silver and shining with power. The corruption throughout me causes me immense pain. I beg the newcomer to end it. Happily, blissfully, a pulse of crimson energy pierces me right through and the silver planet fulfils my wish…

  I kneel before my gods. Some heretics claim they are merely parasitic aliens who seek to drain us of our vitality and leave us withered and dead. But the heretics will be left behind and forgotten. The star-gods move among us in bodies we built for them. The face of one falls upon me. I am bathed in its expression of beneficence and love. I am incapable of doubt. Our enemies will fall before the star-gods. We will be granted eternal rule over the galaxy. My god is three times the height of any of us, his body made of liquid gold. His hand reaches out and touches me. I am filled with light and love. Then I am gone from my body, and where there was warmth I am steeped in nothing but the void…

  I am locked in a tomb. I have been here for millions of years. I have lived and remember every second. Time has become a torture device. Every moment is suffering. I have gone through rage, contemplation, and insanity, and come through each no more able to shrug off the awful inevitability of time. And yet I hear a stranger’s voice. It promises me I can be free. It promises me death. Both are the same to me. All I have to do is reach out to him and he will carry me from my sepulchre. But he is far away and from my prison my voice can barely be heard. I cry as loudly as I can, and I feel the stranger’s eyes upon me…

  The ship’s alarms are blaring. I am surprised they still function. Outside the planet is shaking as if trying to throw off its outer layer and birth whatever lies at its core. For all I know it is doing exactly that. I can also hear, far closer, the rising roar of the plasma vessels. Those that remained intact have now been breached and soon a critical tide of plasma will roar through the decks. I am ready for their nuclear fire. My only concern is that my head survives. My head, and enough of the rest to be identified. I pray the shielding will hold enough for that. It is the last prayer I will speak. I make it an earnest one, to the Emperor and His primarchs. If it is answered, I cannot tell, for the roar is growing louder by the second…

  Upon awakening from each such episode, this functionary conducted mind-scourging rituals with meditation and prayer to remove the traces of moral threat that may have been created. Though this left her in a suboptimal mental state, nevertheless the slow but continuing putrefaction of the subject corpse required immediate continuation of the autoseance process.

  Higher doses of mental and somatic stabilisers were administered, and a medicae servitor tasked with monitoring life signs for the side effects likely to ensue. With these precautions undertaken, primary contact with the subject was again achieved.

  NINE

  Chaplain Masayak

  As the new body of the would-be Overlord of Borsis took its first steps, the great arena shuddered as it must have done millions of years ago. Then, the necrontyr had gathered to watch the vast blood spectacles held to honour their new star-gods. Alien beasts and slave-gladiators had fought for the entertainment of the crowd. Now the place was a crater of cold steel, watched over by the vast energy generator towers of the district. Lightning crackled between the pylons whose spires reached the clouds streaking the sky. Flocks of flying scarabs wheeled overhead, feeding off the electricity arcing between the towers. And from beneath the arena floor emerged Turakhin.

  Chaplain Masayak watched the ground heaving up as Turakhin dug his way out of the hidden vault. The arena floor was covered with iron filings as another might be with sand. The Astral Knights assembled here gave Turakhin a wide berth – none of them trusted the necron, even if they had an enemy in common. For that, Masayak silently praised them.

  Turakhin’s new body was a war machine of immense size. It had eight articulated legs, each segment a slab of polished and inscribed steel, supporting a body similar in shape to an enormous version of Borsis’s ever-present scarabs. It was somewhat larger than a battle tank of the Imperial Guard. Atop this hull was a humanoid torso, again enormous, resembling that of an oversized necron warrior-construct. The head was a mass of targeting lenses arranged around a multi-barrelled gauss weapon. One arm was a huge claw, with massive shovel-like blades to tear down obstacles and barricades. The other was another gauss weapon, this time with a single massive barrel and glowing power coils attached by cabling to the cylindrical generator units mounted on the hull.

  ‘A body fit for the overlord,’ blared Turakhin’s voice from the war machine’s vox-casters. ‘A body fit to tear the usurper apart. Do what you will, my friends, destroy whatever Nephrekh dogs stand in your way, but grant to me the honour of destroying Heqiroth!’

  ‘Leave the parcelling out of honours for when our mission is done,’ said Masayak. ‘We fight as one, overlord.’

  ‘For now,’ said Turakhin. ‘I grow impatient. We march!’

  Chapter Master Amhrad had ordered Masayak and the Seventh Company under Captain Ifriqi to join up with Captain Khabyar’s Ninth. The arena had been chosen as their muster point as it was close to the suspected new location of Heqiroth’s court, and because it housed one of the vaults Turakhin had used to keep his new bodies. The force represented a sizeable chunk of the Astral Knights strength on Borsis, almost two hundred Space Marines, along with the human slave guides. And, of course, Turakhin.

  Masayak turned to the two company captains who had joined him in the gallery. This was perhaps where past Overlords of Borsis had watched the spectacles in the arena. Now it served as the strikeforce command post.

  ‘Which one of us will kill it?’ asked Captain Ifriqi.

  ‘Always too fast to pull the trigger,’ said Captain Khabyar. ‘Turakhin will be dealt with in time. Let it be useful first.’

  ‘So speaks a Devastator captain,’ retorted Ifriqi. ‘You should have destroyed Turakhin the moment it showed itself. We do not need it.’

  ‘We will take every advantage we can,’ said Masayak. ‘And when the enemy of our enemy proves itself a new enemy, we wi
ll destroy it. Thus spoke the primarch, thus reads the Codex Astartes. If there are no further dissentions, I agree with Turakhin on this point. We leave now.’

  The two captains ordered their sergeants to gather at the arena exits for the short march to the target zone. On the arena floor the Astral Knights were suddenly in motion, hurrying past Turakhin to take up the marching order.

  ‘We run our battles close on this world,’ said Captain Ifriqi. ‘And every objective seems the last. How many chances will we have on Borsis after this one?’

  ‘We will not need another,’ said Masayak. ‘Have faith, and your brothers will take it from you. To your duties, captain.’

  The first responsibility of a Chaplain was to rise above the truth.

  That was the lesson taught to aspirants to the Chapter Reclusiam. Recruits who had earned the status of a full battle-brother and who possessed the necessary combination of willpower and obedience were apprenticed to the Reclusiam to learn the ways of the Chaplains. They would become the spiritual leaders to the Chapter, advisors to the Chapter Master and figures of wrathful inspiration on the battlefield. It was a burden very few could be expected to shoulder. Masayak was one who could.

  The truth was that the Astral Knights were losing on Borsis. Every objective required more fury and luck to achieve, and each one promised greater disaster if it was not. Zahiros’s failure to kill Heqiroth had sparked an endgame on Borsis with Heqiroth constantly moving to fox the Astral Knights’ attempts to pin him down and assassinate him, while the necrons relied on the attrition that was inevitable when they had millions of warrior-constructs to spend in whittling away the hundreds of Astral Knights. Every strategic assessment would determine the Astral Knights could not win on Borsis. They could not even retreat – destruction was the only possible result.

  But a Space Marine had to rise above such a truth, and he did it by following the Chaplains. When defeat was certain and duty was impossible, a Chaplain spoke of an inevitable victory and duty fulfilled. A Space Marine had the strength of mind to believe him.

  And the Chaplain? He had the strength of mind to believe himself.

  Masayak refused to believe the truth that was placed before him. The truth was a petty thing. His truth, that the Astral Knights could be inspired to defeat Heqiroth and destroy Borsis, was the only truth conducive to the Astral Knights fighting at their full capacity.

  And sometimes, on rare occasions written of in the Chapter histories, that truth became a reality. The Chaplains led their battle-brothers to impossible victories, because they did not accept the concept of any victory being impossible.

  The beginning of that impossible victory would lie within the dark labyrinth of the generatorium district. Here enormous turbine houses and towering pylons cast a wreath of incessant lightning across the sky. Vast amounts of power were dredged up from somewhere deep below the surface of Borsis and routed across the surface of the whole planet. The resulting structures formed vast canals and blocky peaks with no roadways, and so travelling across them was a slow and precipitous affair that taxed even the Space Marines.

  After three hours a splinter of the strikeforce had reached its objective, one of the pylons. The pylon was a hollow spire that thrummed with power. Lightning cascaded down its sides as it bled off excess energy from the generators below.

  ‘Souls and bodies be warded, brethren,’ voxed Masayak to Squad Gehesson. ‘The enemy must not have leave to gather himself and strike back. All must be fury.’

  Sergeant Gehesson led a Devastator squad, loaded down with heavy weapons. They were not ideally armed for a close-quarters assault, though that was exactly what they were likely to face. The responsibility to lead them in the charge would therefore fall on Masayak himself, who fought with crozius and bolt pistol.

  ‘Make ready to breach,’ voxed Gehesson, struggling to be heard over the crash of the lightning. ‘Stay tight and do not stop. Move in the Chaplain’s wake.’

  One battle-brother clamped a demolition charge to the tower’s double doors.

  ‘Twenty seconds,’ voxed the brother as the rest of the squad took cover.

  Hajar, this Astral Knight was named. Resolute and aggressive, with more than a touch of pride. An Astral Knight through and through. Those were the kind of men Gehesson cultivated in his squad, straightforward and arrogant as the sergeant himself.

  The charge blew and the doors were ripped inwards, thrown off their mountings in a mass of blackened steel. Masayak vaulted out of cover and ran into the tower. The power field around the crozius in his hand crackled on and the flickering bluish light caught the shapes of the warrior-constructs waiting on the lower floor.

  The necrons were anticipating exactly this kind of attack. It did not matter. Masayak’s truth was that the necrons were hopelessly unprepared and caught by surprise, and he fought accordingly.

  Masayak dived into the necrons and brought his crozius down on the head of the nearest. Before it had the chance to bring its gauss blaster to bear the mace-like crozius crushed through its skull and upper chest. The power field burst it open and shards of it flew across the chamber.

  ‘Thus are the wages of the xenos!’ bellowed Masayak over the vox. ‘Thus does the Emperor’s justice fall!’

  The squad crashed in behind Masayak. Bolter fire streaked past him. Sergeant Gehesson wrestled a necron to the floor and rammed his chainblade up into its abdomen and out through the back of its shoulder. Sparks sprayed from the ruptured construct’s body. Brother Ghular wielded his heavy bolter like a massive club and knocked another warrior-construct clean through an interior wall, revealing the pulsing power coils running up the core of the tower.

  Masayak forged upwards. A spiral staircase ran around the tower’s core. Each segment revealed was crammed with xenos machinery, glowing coils and silver orbs which spat arcs of electricity between them. Niches in the walls held spare construct components – steel skulls lined up like a hunter’s trophies, rows of hanging arms, segments of spine and ribcage, replacements for parts lost in the dangerous work around the generatorium district.

  Masayak rounded a corner to come face to face with a work-construct, its lower limbs heavily reinforced, additional hydraulics powering arms which ended in shovel-like claws. Masayak beheaded it with a sweep of his crozius before it could react, and put three bolt pistol shots through the warrior behind it.

  More warriors were streaming down from the upper floors. In this situation a regular human soldier would halt and take cover, and try to winnow away the attackers with attrition. But Masayak did not have the numbers for that, and time was too great a pressure. He dived into the charging necrons, ignoring the gauss blasts that stripped furrows from his power armour, and struck all about him with his crozius as the lightning of its power field crashed around him.

  Squad Gehesson struggled to keep up. They might want to halt, but Masayak could not let them. He would drag them with him to victory. Only Brother Ghular kept pace, as the bulk that made him capable of wielding his heavy bolter so easily also made him a human battering ram. He didn’t draw his combat blade or fire a single shot, instead crushing and stamping the warrior-constructs in front of him and leaving his battle-brothers behind him to finish off the fallen.

  Near the pinnacle of the tower, where the walls gave way to skeletal ribs letting the ozone-heavy wind whip through, Masayak faced a necron of fine and ornate worksmanship. It was a worker-construct, but one whose additional components were suited for combat too. It wore the hieroglyphs and lacquered armour plating that Masayak by now recognised as the marks of the necron nobility.

  ‘Tell your kind,’ said Masayak, ‘that as you fall, so shall they all follow.’

  ‘And as you fall,’ replied the invader in a metallic rumble, ‘you will be cast down among the vermin. All of you. Vermin.’

  The noble fought with a circular saw attached to one arm, and the blade screamed a
s it sliced through the air towards Masayak. Masayak ducked under it and shattered the construct’s elbow joint with his crozius. The saw fell to the floor and spun out of control, chewing through one of the ribs making up the walls. The pinnacle of steel fell into the tower between Masayak and his enemy, and the two had to disengage before they were crushed to the floor.

  ‘You invade our space,’ said Masayak. ‘And you destroy our worlds. You are the vermin, the locusts who consume. We are the cure.’

  ‘We ruled this galaxy before you existed,’ came the reply. The noble lifted a replacement arm from a rack of tools on the wall – this one was a cutter or welder fuelled by a large cylindrical fuel tank, and a blue-white flame leapt from its nozzle. ‘We will rule it again. And when we do, it will not remember you.’

  The cutter ripped through the fallen steel beam and the two halves fell away. Masayak lunged, parrying the thrust of the cutter and knocking the noble’s arm away. Masayak leapt in to follow up, driving a knee into the noble’s midriff. Decorated armour clattered onto the floor. Cables hung loose from the necron’s chest where the plating buckled and fell away.

  Masayak grabbed the noble’s other arm and wrenched it around. He felt the joint pop out of place and spun the necron away from him. He rammed the crozius into the necron’s spine, this time letting the full force of the power field sunder the metal. The necron fell against Masayak with its full weight as its legs were suddenly useless. Masayak hauled the necron off its feet and held it over his head.

  He walked to the edge of the floor. Below him the generatorium district stretched out, lit by the broken strobes of lightning between the towers. The noble struggled, but the damage done to its control systems was too severe.

  ‘I am mankind,’ said Masayak, ‘and I am extinction.’

  Masayak hurled the noble over the edge. He watched it fall, clattering off the middle levels of the tower. It hit the ground and the fuel tank of its cutter must have been ruptured, for a blossom of crimson fire burst at the base of the tower.