by Ben Counter
Antigonus forced a knee up under it and rolled over on top of the servitor, scrambling to grab his gun again. The servitor bucked and threw Antigonus onto the ground, pain rushing up at him again as silvered augmetics crunched against the hard ground.
The servitor was quickest to its feet, spraying gore from the massive pulsing wound between its hollow eyes. A mechanical hand clamped around Antigonus's throat and slammed him against the valley side, the black glass of the datacore material splintering into razors that sheared through Antigonus's thick robes into the pallid skin of his back.
The servitor's mouth lolled open and the tiny mechanical arm shot out, stabbing the gold-nibbed quill through Antigonus's bionic eye.
A white star burst in front of Antigonus's vision. White, knife-like pain rifled through his head. His back, his neck, his eye, so much of him was shrieking in pain at once that he couldn't tell where he was, or what he was doing.
He only just remembered that he still had the gun. Roaring through the pain, he stabbed the gun into the servitor's gut and fired. He fired again and again, until its grip went limp. Antigonus slid to the floor and realised he must have blown the servitor's spine out, severing the connection between its upper and lower body. The servitor stumbled a few steps, its arms and head hanging limp, before the dead weight of its upper half dragged it down to the ground.
Everything was suddenly silent. The only movement was the oily smoke sputtering from the servitor's ruined body. Antigonus's vision, already muted, was now somehow skewed, as if shifted sideways. Antigonus only had one eye left - his normal, unaugmented one, which meant he was limited to the visible spectrum and couldn't zoom in any more. He had lost a mechadendrite and his ribs were broken. He was bleeding somewhere inside, but his internal alterations were probably robust enough to cope with that. Already his bionic heart was forcing his pulse down to calm him. He was hurt, though and it would only get worse without maintenance -and no way in the Emperor's great creation would he ever let anyone on this tainted world repair him. He had to get off-world.
Antigonus struggled to his feet and began to run, the shadows of the industrial complex rolling over him. As black iron and red-brown rust closed over him the heretic projections flickered off overhead and were replaced with work rotas for the menials.
They couldn't watch him from overhead now. But they had hijacked the projection units, seduced the highest ranks of the tech-priesthood and sabotaged his personal servitor which had been sent with him from Mars. They didn't need eyes in the sky to watch him. They would find a way.
Chapter Two
You may say, it is impossible for a man to become like the Machine. And I would reply, that only the smallest mind strives to comprehend its limits.'
Fabricator General Kane (attr.)
MAGOS ANTIGONUS WASN'T supposed to die like this. Light was scarce beneath the complex. A single charred bulb cast a dull brownish glow over the abandoned workshop he had found. Old workbenches covered in rusted equipment were piled up against one wall and the low ceiling was hung with corroded cabling. Antigonus sat against the other wall, rivulets of rust-red water running down his back from the sweating metal behind him, trying to fix the failed servo in his motor units. His legs were withered and weak and without the servo-powered braces that encased them he could barely walk. He wasn't designed to fight. He was there because he had a facility with information systems and he could access Chaeroneia's data networks with ease. His purpose on Chaeroneia had been to debunk the apparently spurious rumours about heretical practices among the planet's tech-priests, then take that news back to Mars to satisfy the tech-priests there that their forge world was free from the taint of blasphemy.
'Primary objective failed.' he thought.
Antigonus sat bolt-upright. The voice had come from everywhere at once. He was alone in the workshop and yet there was something else in there with him. He pulled out his autogun again but he knew instinctively that it wouldn't do any good.
'Heretics!' shouted Antigonus, struggling to his feet. 'You can hide from me but the Mechanicus will find you! More will follow me! More from Mars!'
The only answer was Antigonus's own voice, echoing back through the empty workshops.
Antigonus crept through the darkness, wishing his servos were quieter. There was no one else in the workshop, but they must be near. He knew he couldn't put up much of a fight any more, but he wasn't going to go down easily. They would have to work for their kill.
More will follow. More will die. This is the way of our Machine-God.
The voice was too close, little more than a whisper directly into Antigonus's ear. It had to be someone in the room. Either that or someone controlling a machine in the room, like a servitor or machine-spirit, something complex, something that could speak. But Antigonus had secured the area before he stopped to rest. There was nothing like that in here.
Nothing, that is, apart from his own augmentations.
Clever boy.
Antigonus dropped the gun and grabbed the screwdriver he had been using to repair himself. The heretics were doing to him what they had done to Epsilon three-twelve, hijacking his more complex systems and taking control. Either they were controlling one of his augmentations directly or they had infected him with a machine-curse, an insidious self-replicating set of commands that could cause a system to self-destruct.
Which system? Like many tech-priests above the most junior rank, Magos Antigonus had several sophisticated augmentations, including datalinks that would provide a perfect point of infection. At least they hadn't got his bionic heart, otherwise he would be lying dead right now. His bionic eye was destroyed but the control circuits were still there, spiralling around his optic nerve. His mechadendrites? They were plugged directly into his nervous system through an impulse link. His bionic arm? The intelligent filtration systems in his throat and lungs?
Closer, closer. But not close enough. Know you the way of the Omnissiah, fellow traveller. The avatar speaks with us even now and it speaks to us of your death.
Antigonus jabbed the screwdriver under the housing of his bionic eye and levered the unit out of its socket, forcing himself to ignore the unnaturally dull, cold pain that throbbed from the ruined bionic. With a gristly sound the eye came out, taking a chunk of artificial flesh with it and landing on the floor with a blood-wet plop. Antigonus gasped as the shocking cold of the air hit the raw nerves in the wreckage now filling his eye socket.
Closer.
Antigonus scrabbled on the floor, dizzy and sickened by the awful raw throb spreading across his face. His natural hand grabbed the autogun on the floor and he put the barrel against the side of his head.
Don't let them take you, he told himself. They'll make you one of their own.
Even if you are dead, fellow traveller.
'Get out!' yelled Antigonus crazily. 'Out! The Machine-God commands you! By the light of understanding and the rule of Mars I cast this unclean thing from this machine!'
An enginseer sent by the Adeptus Mechanicus to maintain the war machines of the Imperial Guard would know the tech-exorcism rites off by heart. But such things were not often needed on Mars, the heartland of the priesthood where Antigonus had learned his role in the Cult Mechanicus. Antigonus knew he couldn't banish the thing with words alone, but right now they were all he had.
If it had his bionic arm, it would be using it by now to force the gun away from his head. No, it was something inside him, something it couldn't use to kill him straight away.
'I cast you out!' Antigonus put the gun barrel against his left knee and fired.
A thunderbolt of pain, the worst Antigonus had ever suffered, ripped right through him and knocked him unconscious as his left leg was blown clean off at the knee. Paralysing pain reached down and dragged him back to his senses, gripping hard and not letting go. Antigonus screamed, but somewhere inside him he heard the tech-infection scream too, as part of it was ripped away and the rest fled in
to the mechanisms of his right leg.
It was in the servos that powered his leg bracings, infesting the systems that carried commands from his nerve-impulses to the motors. Maybe it had got in when he had scoured Chaeroneia's information nets for suspicious power spikes early in his investigation, or when he had been forced to have his nerve impulse units repaired a few days ago. Maybe it had been in him since he arrived, waiting to see how much he would uncover before striking.
Either way, now he could kill it.
His heart was working overtime, leaching so much power from the rest of his augmetics that his bionic arm fell limp. It filled him full of enough painkillers to all but kill him and he dragged himself away from the twitching mess of charred flesh and metal that had been his left leg.
Mmmaake you sufferrrr...
'Don't like that, do you?' spat Antigonus, blood running down his face where he had bitten a chunk out of his lip. 'Did you think they would send just anyone? Someone you could defeat with a machine-curse? They teach us well on Mars, heretic tech-pox.'
Nnnot machinnne-cuuuurse... much worssse... much, much worssse...
Ice-cold fingers of information scraped up Antigonus's spine. The tech-priest writhed on the floor, the edges of his vision turning white, a high scream filling his ears. He fought the chill seeping up through him, forcing its way through his augmetics into his flesh, the whispering voice quivering with anger. It wanted revenge. It was supposed to just control him, but now it wanted to kill him instead.
Antigonus choked back the horror that had infected him and forced it, nerve by nerve, back down into the smouldering servo units in his remaining leg. He tried to pull himself upright but only got into a lopsided crawl, dragging the tattered stump of his left leg behind him as he slithered out of the workshop. He had to get out of there - it was a dead end and he was trapped. Perhaps he could find a menial down here that could help him, or a better weapon. Anywhere was better than the workshop, because the infection, or whatever it was, must have been capable of transmitting his location to the heretics.
The resources required to acquire - or, Omnissiah forbid, even create - such a sophisticated machine-curse were massive. There were relatively few even on Mars who could have done it. Antigonus didn't even want to think about what the heretics must have had to do to get hold of it.
The voice was a low stutter now, hissing darkly from the depths of Antigonus's augmetics. Antigonus made his way painfully out into a long, low gallery, like a natural void formed between the strata of collapsed factory floors. The ceiling dripped rust-coloured water and pools of it gathered on the floor. From somewhere far below came the throb of an ancient, powerful machine, probably one of the geothermal heatsinks that provided so much of Chaeroneia's power. Antigonus dragged himself to where the ceiling had fallen in and a faint reddish light bled down from above.
No ussse, tech-priest... they willll find you, they always do... I am not the only one...
Antigonus ignored the voice and dragged himself up the incline of the fallen ceiling. The floor above was more intact, with knots of machinery and hissing steam pipes everywhere. Somewhere he heard men's voices shouting. As he moved the noises got louder - shouting, machinery, humming generators, the lifesigns of a forge world.
The painkillers dispensed by Antigonus's augmetic heart were killing most of the agony from his shattered leg, but they were flooding his body in such amounts that they made the world dull and distant. Every metre he moved drained him as if he had sprinted it and he kept trying to push himself forward with a left leg that wasn't there.
He was a mess. When they got him off this planet he would have to spend months being cleansed of the tech-curse and then getting all his wrecked augmetics replaced. He imagined the hospitals where servitors trundled the corridors keeping everything clean, the polished steel of the operating theatres and the spidery arms of the autosurgeon that flensed away weak flesh and grafted on strong metal. The bionics experts who would take him apart and put him back together again.
He shook the images out of his head. He was exhausted and starting to see things. If he lost his focus and started letting his mind wander the tech-infection would take a hold and rot him away from the inside.
He rounded a corner and saw he had come across a functioning factory floor - dilapidated and dangerous, but still working. Several massive stamping machines thudded on, forming metal components that were carted away by conveyor belts.
Antigonus tried to find a menial or a tech-priest who could help him. A bent-backed servitor stood hunched over a conveyor line leading from a broken stamping machine, its hands working away to perform some routine modification on parts that no longer moved past it. Antigonus ignored the servitor - even if it had been sophisticated enough to interrupt its programmed task and summon help, the machine-curse inside him could have leaped into the servitor and used it to cut Antigonus to ribbons.
Antigonus pulled himself up against the casing of the closest machine and used it to steady himself as he inched forward on his remaining leg. The machine-curse was hissing and spitting, whispering abuse at him. He had hurt it, but he also knew that such things were self-repairing and soon it would be strong enough to take him over again.
Antigonus rounded a corner and saw more servitors, but no menials. The menials were the lowest class on any forge world, men and women who were little more than living machines ordered and directed by the tech-priests. They were there simply because there were many tasks that servitors could not do, but their servitude was self-reinforcing because it was from the ranks of menials that many junior tech-priests were recruited. At the moment Antigonus could trust a menial rather more than he could a fellow tech-priest, which counted as a sort of heresy in itself.
The servitors ignored Antigonus as he forced himself to traverse the factory floor. A battered iron stairway led upwards - Antigonus didn't fancy his chances of getting up them in his current state but it was better than waiting in the deserted factory for the heretics to hunt him down.
Getting desperate? Now you realise. This whole planet is against you. It is only with the rats and dregs that you can hide. What life is that? Not life at all. So much of you wants to join usss, traveller. It is no great hardship for the rest to agree.
'Shut up.' spat Antigonus as he struggled up the spiral stairs. 'You know nothing. You do not even have the blessing of the Omnissiah, you should not even be.'
No Omnissiah dreamed me into being. No, not that god. Another one.
'There is no other.'
Really? What of your Corpse-Emperor?
'Two faces of the same being. The Omnissiah is to the machine as the Emperor is to His servants.'
What was Antigonus saying? Why was he debating with this thing?
So innocent to think such things. So easily led. My god is something else. My god is one of many, the many who serve the One, the End, the Future that is Chaos...
Out!' Antigonus was yelling now. 'Stop these lies, heretic thing!'
The traveller starts to understand. Not a machine-curse, not a tech-pox. Something older, something stronger.
Daemon...
There was movement up ahead, footsteps and voices through the grinding of the machines. They were too urgent to just be more menials going about their business. Antigonus spotted the beams of powerful torches cutting through the shadows.
Daemon. It was a lie, just another way of rattling him. Antigonus had to concentrate on getting away. He looked around and saw a cargo elevator, rusted and old. Faded lights winked on the control panel and perhaps the machine still worked. Antigonus got across the factory floor to the elevator, trusting the noise of the machines would cover the sounds of his movement.
He let his mechadendrites haul the rusted gate open, keeping hold of his gun with one hand and steadying himself with the other. The socket in his back where Episilon three-twelve had torn out the mechadendrite was just one of a thousand points of dull raw pain forcing thei
r way through the painkiller haze.
With an effort Antigonus shut the gate behind him and jabbed a mechadendrite at the control stud. The cargo elevator shuddered and moved grudgingly upwards. Antigonus heard someone shouting from below - they had guessed he might be escaping on the elevator but the factory complex down this far was a warren of dead ends and it was better to keep moving that to let them close him down.
He didn't even know what he was running from. Maybe they had hunter-servitors with scent-vanes that could track him through the filthiest corners of Chaeroneia's undercity, servo-skulls with auspex scanners that already had his lifesigns logged. But he had to hope. The grand machine of the universe moved according to the Omnissiah's will and he had to keep the faith that the machine would move to keep him safe.
Antigonus leaned against the back wall of the elevator. Crushed strata of factories and workshops marched past, reduced to claustrophobic voids in the mass of twisted metal. Gouts of steam burst from fractured pipes. Rivers of pollutants and fuel forced their way through fissures in the metal, feeding rainbow-slicked underground rivers. Thousands of years of industrial history were crusted on the surface of Chaeroneia - charred ruins, glimpses of faded finery, strange machines that perhaps represented some technology lost to the Mechanicus, hidden places where escaped menials or wild servitors had carved out a short existence, even abandoned chapels of the Cult Mechanicus long since replaced by magnificent cathedrals and temples far above.
And somewhere, something beneath the surface that had created a heresy worse than Antigonus had ever imagined.
The elevator juddered to a halt. The doors chattered open and freezing vapour rolled in. Antigonus crawled out warily, feeling the temperature dropping rapidly around him and letting his newly unaugmented vision adjust to the half-light. Antigonus saw that he was in a stratum that must have lain undisturbed for decades or even centuries. It was relatively clean and intact and lit by hundreds of tiny blue-white lights mounted on control panels and readouts. Data-engines, huge constructions of knotted cables and pipe work like slabs of compacted metal intestines, stood like monoliths in long rows. Heavy ribbed coolant pipes hung from the high ceiling and the deep chill in the air suggested that the coolant systems were still working. This was archaic technology, the kind that Antigonus had only seen on abandoned parts of Mars and which was obsolete on even the most traditionalist forge worlds. These engines had held information in crude digital forms, before the newer datacore technology was rediscovered and disseminated. Antigonus wasn't even sure how such things might work. There must have been thirty such engines, great rearing knots of obsolete technology, silent and untouched. The structure of this floor was intact and Antigonus couldn't even see the trails of vermin or stains of corrosion that touched everywhere else in Chaeroneia's undercity.
