by Ben Counter
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 screaming 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. And 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'
In spite of the raging heat, Alaric could feel ice in his veins. The Heresy, the Great Betrayal, where the forces of Chaos had played their hand and come so close to taking over the galaxy. It had been the human race's most desperate hour and the Emperor had sacrificed everything but His living spirit to keep it from succeeding.
The Castigator was continuing, as static-filled pict-grabs sputtered across the data-blocks, the surviving images from the Heresy ten thousand years before. 'Horus wanted that same war. A war that would burn everything and never end. He and I, we sought the same thing. But I read also that Horus died and his forces were scattered and it seemed that I had awoken nine thousand years too late. But I knew that perhaps such potential would come to the galaxy again. I could not risk any harm coming to Chaeroneia, so I hid it in the warp, using details of tech-heresies hidden in the most obscure archives of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Many tech-priests had studied the ways of the warp before the Mechanicus found them and stopped them and when I put together all their heresies I had more than enough knowledge to have Scraecos and his priests enact the ritual.'
The images surrounding the Castigator were now of the warp, its maddening swirls of light and darkness made of raw emotion. Even depicted flat and distorted, the sight made Alaric's eyes hurt to look at it. 'The planet was removed to the warp and there I bargained with the powers I found, offering them my wisdom and knowledge in return for a place of safety in the warp. I tamed some of the warp-predators and brought them to my world and had the tech-priests worship me and rebuild Chaeroneia according to the principles of the Dark Mechanicus I pried from the most ancient data fortresses. They were diligent, my priests. They did my every whim, killing one another for the honour of serving me. And then I heard news of what was happening in your galaxy. The opening of the Eye of Terror and the invasion of the Despoiler. In Abaddon, the warp powers said, Horus was born again. And I saw in him the potential for the war of annihilation that Horus so nearly waged.'
Alaric was surrounded by images of the Eye of Terror opening and the Chaos war fleets of the Thirteenth Black Crusade flooding out. He saw Cadia overrun and the destruction of St Josman's Hope. He saw a battlefleet burning in orbit over Agrippina, defence lasers lacing the night sky of Nemesis Tessera. Dead men walking on the surface of Subiaco Diablo, animated by dark magic. Endless thousands of Imperial Guard marching into the most intense and desperate warzone in the Imperium.
The Imperial Navy had bottled up much of the Black Crusade within the systems surrounding the Eye. But the balance was still precarious and it would only take a slim advantage for Abaddon to break through and strike for the heart of the Segmentum Solar.
An advantage like the Standard Template Construct for the Father of Titans.
'And now.' said the Castigator, 'you understand. I feel it in you, the light of comprehension. You understand why I had to bring Chaeroneia back out of the warp and send a signal offering myself as tribute to Abaddon. Only he and the forces of Chaos can realize my true purpose. From me shall be copied endless god-machines and this time they shall be perfect, made using the unfettered science I taught the tech-priests of Chaeroneia. In the service of Chaos I shall stride a thousand battlefields at once and become one with the destruction that is my purpose. The galaxy shall burn because of me and so I shall become complete.'
'Yes.' said Alaric. 'Yes, I understand.'
Alaric was brought upwards into the cogitator core that filled the Titan's head and a block of data-medium detached from the wall. Alaric was
lowered onto the block, where he was cut off from the nuclear heat from the reactor. The cold of the cogitator core flowed around him again, but not intensely enough to harm him. He could move, for what good it did him. The pain of his burns raged all over him but more to the point the Castigator had been correct. Alaric couldn't fight a creature of pure information. He had battled the data-daemons before, but they had been susceptible to his training as a daemon-hunter. There was just no way for Alaric to harm the Castigator.
And he really did understand.
'You don't really know what you are.' said Alaric, pulling himself to his feet. 'It took you thousands of years to evolve into what you are. There's nothing else like you in the galaxy. We both know what you want now, but only one of us understands what you actually are and it's not you.'
The Castigator drifted upwards to stand in front of Alaric. It seemed to be thinking deeply. 'Perhaps, it is true.' the Castigator replied. 'The historical records and theoretical research have not suggested one such as me and I no longer follow the purpose of the Standard Template Construct. You are correct. There is one tiling I do not understand. I do not know what I am. But you do?' The Castigator's tone was almost conversational, as if it were speaking now with an equal - a friend, even.
'Yes, I do. I know that you bargain with the powers of the warp and teach sorcery to your followers. You are worshipped as a god. You rule through deceit. You lust for death and destruction. And you have pledged yourself to the service of Chaos.'
'All this is true, Space Marine.'
'Well, where I come from, there's a word for something like that.'
'And it is?'
'Daemon.'
The Castigator was silent for a moment. 'Interesting,' it said. 'Yes. Yes, I see. I am defined by these things, by my purpose and actions. And they are those of a daemon. Perhaps your words were not lies.'
The Castigator's pure white skin was changing. Tendrils of greyish corruption were reaching across it, standing out like veins. Its green eyes became darker and greasy smoke like befouled incense coiled up from their flame.
