by Ben Counter
The journey had been arduous. Tharkk had called for more regular rest breaks to keep his tech-guard from collapsing from exhaustion and Tech-priest Thalassa had to be carried across the rougher ground. Something in Interrogator Hawkespur's metabolism had reacted badly to the pollutants, and tumours were breaking out in her throat and lungs so her breathing got more and more laboured and she had to stop to cough up lungfuls of foam. The Grey Knights were competent at battlefield first aid and Saphentis could have been an able surgeon, but Hawkespur was beyond help. Without a fully-functional medical suite, she would die within a week. Hawekspur herself hadn't commented on this at all - she was the finest naval stock, brilliant and brave enough to serve as interrogator to an inquisitor of the Ordo Malleus, and she didn't let anything as trivial as her own death get in the way of her duty.
'We should nearly be there.' said Hawkespur at the end of the third day. They were walking on the floor of a chasm between two multi-storey factory complexes, rearing up like tarnished steel skeletons. 'We should rest. The fortress will probably be guarded and we don't want the tech-guard going in exhausted.'
'You're not doing so well yourself.' said Alaric. Though the hood of Hawkespur's voidsuit was up he could see her reddened eyes through the visor.
'I could do with a rest, too.' she said grudgingly.
'You're no good to us dead, interrogator. I heard you were the best shot on Hydraphur.'
'Just a third-round winner, justicar.'
'Good enough.' Alaric looked around their immediate surroundings - the lower floors of the closer factory complex looked deserted and they would cover them from observers overhead. It was a good place to hole up before making the final slog down the datacore valley that led to the fortress. 'My Marines just need an hour of half-sleep. We'll take the watch, tell Tharkk to have his tech-guard rest. Thalassa, too.'
Hawkespur looked around. 'Where is Thalassa?'
Alaric followed her gaze. He could see the Marines of his squad, spread out through the formation with Lykkos taking up the rear. Tharkk and his remaining tech-guard were in the middle with Archmagos Saphentis. But not Thalassa.
The chasm floor was littered with debris and trash. There was plenty of room for Thalassa to be hidden if she had fallen. 'Damnation.' said Justicar. 'We need her.' He switched to the vox. 'Grey Knights, I need a visual on Tech-Priest Thalassa.'
The acknowledgement runes flickered back negative. 'I helped her over the broken ground two kilometres back.' replied Brother Cardios. 'I haven't seen her since.'
'Captain Tharkk!' called Alaric.
The tech-guard officer jogged up to Alaric. 'Justicar?'
'Was Thalassa with you?'
'No, justicar. No orders were given to assist her.'
'We can't spend time looking for her.' said Hawkespur.
'I know.' said Alaric. 'Tharkk, get your men into the cover of the factory. Hawkespur, go with them. Get some rest. Grey Knights, search by sections, half a kilometre range, then pull back and take the watch. I'll stay here.' He turned to where Archmagos Saphentis was sitting unruffled on a fallen slab of rusting machinery. 'Archmagos, you were responsible for Thalassa.'
'She was subordinate to me. I was not required to watch her. There was a difference.'
'Was? You sound like she's already dead.'
'And you believe she isn't?'
Alaric turned away from the archmagos and stomped into the shadow of the factory complex. Saphentis was probably right, that was the worst of it. Since the moment they had crash-landed he had known Chaeroneia would have ways of killing them without them even knowing, But they couldn't afford to lose Thalassa - Saphentis could perform some of the same functions but he wasn't a data-specialist like her.
Saphentis had been responsible for Thalassa and that was what worried Alaric the most. Thalassa had been horrified at Chaeroneia, as any right-thinking human would be, but Saphentis had not shown such revulsion. He seemed to be impressed by the way the planet had reinvented the Mechanicus creed. If Thalassa had suspected Saphentis wasn't on the planet for the benefit of the Imperium, but to fulfil some other agenda, would Saphentis have had any compunction about killing her? Probably not. The higher the rank, the less human the tech-priest and Saphentis was both high-ranking and soulless.
Alaric watched Saphentis idly pick up a chunk of rusted wreckage and incinerate it in a crucible formed from the palm of one bionic hand, watching the smouldering nugget giving way to a wisp of black smoke. The strikeforce now needed Saphentis more than ever, so Alaric couldn't just storm in accusing Saphentis of being a murderer and a traitor -Saphentis would just flee into the black heart of the city and the Grey Knights probably wouldn't be able to find him. Alaric wasn't even sure if he could take Saphentis in straight combat if it came to that, since Saphentis's combat augmentations were formidable and Alaric didn't know the full extent of what he could do.
And Saphentis knew it all, too. He knew full well Alaric couldn't do without him. If Alaric's worst suspicions were correct then Saphentis was just using the Grey Knights and tech-guard as a bodyguard while he searched for some tainted prize on Chaeroneia, and the wrench of it was that Alaric couldn't do anything but go along with Saphentis and hope he had the wits to know when Saphentis was about to betray them. This was what Alaric hated more than anything else - the politicking, the petty betrayals that seemed to seethe through everything the Inquisition ever did. There was a time when he had thought organisations like the Mechanicus and the Inquisition stood together in the service of the Emperor, but every day that went by seemed to show him some new way for humanity to fight itself instead of focusing on the Enemy.
At least the Grey Knights themselves stood apart. They were one, devoted, pure of purpose. That was the quality that would see them through this, traitors in their midst be damned.
'Haulvarn here.' came a vox from the squad. 'Nothing here. I'll bring the squad in on a final sweep.'
'Understood. I'll take first watch, make sure each of you gets some half-sleep. We're now a body short and the next stage will be harder.'
In Chaeroneia's gritty twilight, Alaric watched the bulky armoured silhouettes of his Marines as they moved back along the chasm floor. The Grey Knights were some of the best warriors and yet they were at the mercy of this planet, isolated, ignorant and alone. It gave Alaric a glimmer of solace that they had been in just the same position fighting Ghargatuloth and yet they had never once taken a backward step in doing their duty. Even if Chaeroneia killed them, it would have to work hard before they fell.
But the end was surely coming, even if the Grey Knights could hold it off a little while. Thalassa was dead, there was little doubt. She had fallen down one of the many sheer drops or been carried off by some swift predator. And if it was the Enemy's greatest weapon to sow confusion and violence in the Emperor's own ranks, then the Enemy was succeeding.
IMMERSED IN THE quicksilver slime of the datapool, the creature that had once been Archmagos Veneratus Scraecos felt again the pathetic weakness of his remaining fleshy parts. It was cold and painful in there, the liquid metal crushing against him, the weaving filaments cutting into the patches of skin that remained between his augmentations and attachments. Scraecos had long, long ago left behind useless human fears like claustrophobia or the terror of drowning, so the datapool held no dread for him. But it was still shocking to be shown how far he had to go before he was completely at one with the Machine-God.
It was only the deeper, more human part of him that felt shock, of course. That part was gradually being buried by the rest of Scraecos - the haughty, pure logic that knew the Omnissiah's plan made no allowances for concerns like fear or suffering.
The mechadendrites extending from Scraecos's face reached out into the medium of the datapool, gathering bunches of the floating filaments. Dataprobes extended from the heads of the mechadendrites and the information contained in the pool flowed into him. Scraecos saw the structure of Manufactorium Noctis bloomi
ng in the logic architecture of his mind, spires and foundations riddled with chambers and tunnels, webs of walkways stretching between the towers. Warm, enormous biomechanoids clinging to the underside of the city, flooding the city with their bioelectric energy and the products harvested from their bodies. He saw the works where menials were bred and birthed and where they were brought back again into the city to form the raw materials for more biomechanical architecture.
Part of Scraecos glowed in admiration at what they had wrought over the last millennium. But that, of course, was only a tiny and insignificant emotion in the sea of logic. The rest of Scraecos simply absorbed it, discarded what he did not need to know and zoomed in on the rest.
The hunter-programs despatched by Scraecos had been exacting. They had demanded even more of the surplus menial stock than normal. Now there would be thousands more biological assets herded into the hunters' hidden places and given over to the hunters' strange ways. Self-aware data constructs, the hunters were relentless and voracious, surpassing even the immediate needs of logic in their pursuit of prey. But they had, of course, a weakness - though Chaeroneia was riddled with data media like the glassy black crystalline medium or the liquid metal of the datapool, there were still plenty of areas in Chaeroneia that were far away from any containment medium. That meant the hunter-programs could not go everywhere, only the places where a medium existed to hold them.
Scraecos illuminated Chaeroneia's data media in his mind. Whole towers of crystal glowed strongly, including the old menial reclamation spire the intruders had left only a short time before. Dataslates held by tech-priests overseeing work in the towers also glowed, tiny specks of moving light. A hunter-program could travel in such a medium if it had to. Many tech-priests themselves were lit up, as large data storage organs were a common augmentation among the overseers of Manufactorium Noctis.
On the horizon, between the city and the command spire complex, was a massive shining area where there were plenty of spaces for hunter-programs to hide. But that was an area the tech-priests of Chaeroneia wanted to keep the intruders away from. So that was no good.
Scraecos concentrated on the places in the city where the programs could hunt. Then he synchronized all the data feeds from tech-priests, sensorium-equipped servitors and all the semi-natural biomechanical creatures in Manufactorium Noctis. A single stream of perception coursed through the datapool, wrapping thousands of filaments into a long pulsing rope, writhing like a serpent.
Scraecos wrapped his mechadendrites around the filament rope as if they were the tentacles of a deep-sea predator, worming dataprobes into its length. The perception burst into him and he had to open up all his capacity to accept it, the datafeeds of millions of perceiving creatures and machines in one tangled burst.
Few tech-priests on Chaeroneia could have done it. Fewer still had the respect of the hunter-programs. That was why the tech-priests, Scraecos among them, had chosen him.
Because something somewhere, knew where the intruders were.
Millions of images of Chaeroneia flickered through Scraecos's mind. He overclocked his augmented brain until they slowed down enough for him to sort them properly. Hordes of menials slaving over massive steaming engine-blocks. Sacred symbols projected onto the clouds, the endless holy litany of the Machine-God's revelations. Tech-priests gibbering the praises of the Omnissiah from spire-top temples, their machine-code prayers exalting the Great Comprehender who had given the priests of Chaeroneia His revelation through the avatar that had appeared to them long ago.
All magnificent, but not what Scraecos was looking for.
Scraecos concentrated on the wastelands between the spires, where intruders might think they could hide from the city's infinite eyes. Ruined and abandoned places, deep and forgotten. Layers of discarded history, wreckage and decay, swallowed up by the corrosion so daemonised by the literature of the old, ignorant Adeptus Mechanicus. But the God of Machines was also the God of Rust - Scraecos knew that now, and so did Chaeroneia and so these places were as a sacred to the Omnissiah as the most carefully anointed temple. Scraecos searched the alleyways and undercity sumps, the rotting graveyards of titanic biomechanical creatures and the windblown eyries of the flying animals that scoured the spire tops for prey.
There. One of them had seen something. Armoured humans in an unfamiliar gunmetal-grey, the unknown livery of the Space Marines who had infiltrated Manufactorium Noctis. The viewpoint was high and distant but there was no mistaking them. They were moving, spread out in formation, with unarmoured humans and what looked like a priest of the old Mechanicus in the centre.
Good. They were still moving like soldiers, still thinking their military minds could outwit the grand intelligence of Chaeroneia's priestly caste. Scraecos cross-referenced their location and direction.
It was clear where they were headed. And on Scraecos's mental map it was a place almost blinding with the level of data media it contained, a place where the hunters could grow strong and brutal, move like lightning and bear down on anything that would sate their hunger. And they would find prey now, that was for sure.
Somewhere deep, deep down beneath the desolate layers of his personality, Scraecos smiled. The rest of him, the logical majority, simply bade the hunter-programs to depart their logic-cages in the command spire's own data network and go hunting in Manufactorium Noctis.
Chapter Ten
'The daemon can exist in an infinity of forms, but all are identical in one respect. Every daemon is a lie given flesh, for only a creature made of deceit can take form in the truth of the universe.'
- Lord Inquisitor Coteaz,
At the Conclave of Deliae
'THIS IS IT.' said Alaric as they reached the head of the valley.
'I don't like this.' said Haulvarn, who was taking point with Alaric. 'Anyone up there could cover us all the way in.'
He was right. The valley was a sheer-sided slash in the architecture of the city, dozens of storeys deep and walled with sheer black crystal like the substance in the crystal spire. Slabs of fallen crystal, like giant shards of obsidian, littered the valley floor. And if there was anything up on the crystal clifftops, they would have their pick of targets as the Grey Knights and tech-guard made their way towards the powerful, cylindrical shape of the data-fortress itself at the far end of the valley.
эThen we'll have to be quick.' said Alaric. 'Lykkos, keep watching the clifftops, you're the only one with the range. Everyone else, stay close and keep moving. They'll see us coming.'
A thin, sharp wind whisded down the valley, cold and hard like the smooth glassy sides. The trash underfoot, Alaric realised with a jolt, was composed of ancient servitor parts - rusting craniums, metallic armatures, strands of tarnished steel that once wound round human limbs. Alaric had no doubt that the human parts of the servitors, probably harvested from the less-able menials, had in turn been removed and used to create the biomechanical monstrosities that powered much of the city. The mechanical remains, the servos and the exoskeletons, had ended up here. The Imperium as a whole did not place great value on an individual human life, but at least humans were ultimately sacred to the Emperor and their deaths, no matter how numerous, were all unavoidable sacrifices. On Chaeroneia, human lives were no more than fuel.
'I am picking up contradictory readings.' said Saphentis, who was looking at the auspex mounted on one of his arms. 'There are unusual energy sources nearby.'
Alaric felt something prickling against his psychic core, the shield of faith that kept his mind safe from the predations of the Enemy. The feeling grew as the force moved down the valley. Something probing his defences, homing in on the beacon of his mind and scraping psychic nails against its surface.
The hexagrammic and pentagrammic wards woven into the ceramite of his armour were heating up. He heard something whispering, a low hissing sound that seemed to form his name, over and over again, just below the range of his hearing.
'Anyone else hear that?' he asked.
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'Hear what?' said Hawkespur.
Something moved inside the black crystal of the cliff face, like a creature swimming under black ice. That was all the warning Alaric had.
His wards flared white-hot and he was thrown from his feet as something massive and yet somehow incorporeal ripped past him, hurling him against the opposite face. Crystal shattered and bit into the skin of Alaric's body, scraping deep gouges in his armour. He hit the ground hard, willing himself to keep a grip on his halberd. The screaming sound was so loud it was like a wall of white noise, shrieking right through him, filling his mind.
Gunfire stuttered. Bright crimson las-blasts streaked in every direction.
An ice-cold spectral hand reached out of the crystal Alaric had just slammed into, snaking around his throat and lifting him up. It was not physical, not flesh and blood or even metal. Alaric saw a glimpse of a face that was not a face beneath the crystal, formed of a jumble of geometric shapes that coalesced into snarling fangs and burning purple slashes for eyes.
'Domine, salve nos!' hissed Alaric and the psychic wall around his soul flared outwards, burning the creature's talons with the fire of his faith. The monster screamed and reeled back into the wall, dropping Alaric.
'Tharkk! Get your men in close! Grey Knights, surround them!'
Half-real creatures were leaping across the valley, streaking from one crystal wall to the other. One tech-guard was lifted off his feet as he went and the creature began to devour him. The tech-guard's emotional repression wasn't enough to cut out the pain as he was twisted around in the air, the maddening haze of shapes that made up the creature's body whirling about him. Piece by piece he was sliced apart, geometric scraps of skin flayed off, and neat cores of bone bored out of him. The process took a handful of seconds before the creature reached the opposite wall but time seemed to slow down, as if Chaeroneia wanted the man to suffer as much as possible before it was done with him.
