Throneworld

by Guy Haley

  Koorland gave Kubik a look the Fabricator General found unreadable. He queried the diagnostiad via mind shunt.

  spoke the diagnostiad into Kubik’s mind. It addressed him with a single voice.

  ‘Let us not point the finger, Chapter Master,’ said Kubik. ‘This war has taken us all by surprise. You have a good chance of success. In aiding you I will not be casting my military away needlessly, so you I shall aid. That was your intention in contacting me, yes? To ask for my help, and not cast aspersion and accusation?’

  Koorland nodded curtly. ‘Yes, my lord. That was my intention.’

  ‘Good. Five regiments of skitarii will accompany you, and attendant support. I will pledge also seven cohorts of the Legio Cybernetica. The Basilikon Astra will transport them, and provide heavy supportive fire. Alone, or in support of the Merchant Fleets, our warships would have stood little chance. With your battlefleet, they can operate within acceptable parameters of survival.’

  ‘I desire to speak with Phaeton Laurentis and Eldon Urquidex,’ said Koorland. ‘They are known to me, and I would confer with them.’

  ‘Urquidex, Laurentis? I am not familiar with them. One moment please.’ Kubik made a show of calling up their information. ‘Ah yes, minor biologians. Unfortunately, both magi are occupied with other duties.’

  ‘Another time, perhaps,’ said Koorland. ‘You have our thanks, Fabricator General. While the Imperium stands together, it shall not fall.’

  ‘Mars will not allow that to happen. We are united, as always.’

  whispered the diagnostiad.

  ‘When will your forces be ready?’ asked Koorland.

  ‘Chapter Master, I called the Taghmata of Mars weeks ago in anticipation of reinforcement. Our military is already prepared to sail as soon as I give the word. You insult me and the oaths of fealty and alliance Mars holds in sacred compact with Holy Terra. We have stood ready to sail to Terra’s aid since the very first. We could not act alone, nor would we support the fool’s crusade called by Juskina Tull.’ Kubik stood from his throne, mechadendrites and other, subtler supplementary limbs waving in displeasure.

  ‘You have my apologies, Fabricator General,’ said Koorland. ‘No implication was meant. Your aid is generous, and will save the lives of many of the sons of Dorn.’

  ‘Transmit me your marshalling coordinates. I will despatch the Taghmata, and place the Prime under your direct command. I have only one request.’

  ‘That is, my lord?’

  ‘Any and all materiel and technology taken in the battle must be collected by my subjects, and delivered here to Mars.’

  ‘For what purpose?’ asked Koorland.

  ‘Its study is vital to the defeat of the orks.’

  ‘I will agree to this, in exchange for all information pertaining to the ork threat you have already gathered.’

  ‘We have provided what we know to the Senatorum,’ said Kubik smoothly.

  ‘There are explorator fleets all over the Imperium,’ said Koorland. ‘Many of your forge worlds have been attacked. I have seen some of the intelligence you have gathered. It seems a little… thin.’

  ‘It is all we have,’ said Kubik. ‘Delivery of materiel will speed our analysis. We shall share what we learn when we have learnt it.’

  Koorland stared a long moment at the Fabricator General. ‘Very well, but we shall oversee the transfer.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Kubik.

  ‘We will speak again soon, on the day of our victory.’

  Koorland’s image vanished as Kubik cut the link. The whispering of the diagnostiad members rose and fell like the rush of wind in the leaves of a forest. Kubik took to his throne again, and commanded it to descend. Gracefully it sank away, bringing Kubik to rest upon the only flat surface in the sphere, and the only part free of the cavities of the diagnostiad’s cells – a platform a hundred metres across, a raised road of Martian bronze leading across it to a huge pair of doors, guarded by a phalanx of stooped cyber-constructs. Kubik glided out of his throne. The doors opened before him. Outside stood the primary members of the Synod of Mars, waiting on his orders. Bowing profusely, they took his commands.

  Eldon Urquidex was marched alongside Magos Laurentis up the Channel of Motivational Energies as Performed by the Flesh, a broad processional way laid out in mimicry of the internal workings of a cogitator’s logic boards. They were deep within the forge temple of Olympus Mons. Passages left at irregular intervals, each one guarded by bio-constructs and barred by heavy grilles known as the Gates of Logic.

  The Channel was the largest road in a three-dimensional labyrinth, and the main route taken by supplicants to the Synod of Mars. The edifice had been constructed aeons ago during Old Night by a Fabricator General of questionable sanity, the legacy of costly experiments to mimic the ineffable deductive powers of pure energy through the medium of humanity. Techna-liturgia moving around the circuit were supposed to operate in a manner similar to the sub-atomic particles of the holy Motive Force. It had not of course worked, but where it had failed as a computational device, it succeeded as art, and remained a sacred place.

  The Channel bored through the mountain in a las-straight line to the audience chamber of the Fabricator General, and Urquidex was worried.

  Urquidex’s mechanical face was misleading. Behind the steel and the telescopic eye stalks lurked a very human brain. Not so long ago, Urquidex would have welcomed an appointment with Kubik as an opportunity to secure advancement with the Synod. Manipulation, flattery, spurious logic – these tools were Urquidex’s to deploy as easily as the fine manipulators on his additional limbs. That was before he became a traitor. Fear chilled the fluids in the tubes of his augmetics. Urquidex had worked himself to the centre of Kubik’s plans, and had come to disagree with them entirely. With news of the Last Wall’s arrival at Sol, and their dash for Terra, Kubik’s intelligence core and native brain alike would be slaved entirely to political scheming. It would take the slightest misstep to expose Urquidex. What small patches of skin remained to him were slick with the unpleasant excretions of anxiety.

  The heavy tread of Kubik’s cybernetic guardians rang ominously on the metal plates of the Channel. Everything Urquidex saw, his nerves imbued with a sinister aspect. Servo-skulls and vat-constructs darting through the air became spies following his every movement. The chants of magi and electro-priests droning from the factory-chapels and techno-basilicae carried counter-melodies of accusation. The hisses and whines of holy manufacturing processes barely concealed their contempt for him. Laurentis, his emotions so heavily circumscribed by the surgery necessary to save his life after Ardamantua, lurched along placidly on his tripedal motive assembly, the thoughts whirring through his rebuilt brain secret from all.

  Urquidex was no Ultima Mechanista, wishing away his humanity; for him and the members of his sub-cult, balance was to be sought between mechanical and organic. For was not the flesh nothing but the wet machinery of the Omnissiah? Finding such a balance was a cause of much worry to Urquidex. He thought back to Ardamantua, torn between the cold logic of the Subservius’ mission and the horror he had experienced at the annihilation of the Imperial Fists. Ruminating on that weakness, he envied Laurentis his new-found detachment.

  Too soon they came to Kubik’s audience chamber. The doors were a pair of cogs set in series, one bearing a skull, the other a mechanical face: the machina opus split into two wholes. The cyber-constructs stopped and slammed their power glaives into the metal floor.

  With mouthless voices they announced the magi’s arrival. ‘Magi Biologis Eldon Urquidex and Phaeton Laurentis request audience with his high l
ogician the Fabricator General of Mars.’

  Urquidex found that rich. There had been no request, they had been summoned. He would rather be anywhere than in Kubik’s presence today. Did Kubik know? Had that giant intellect uncovered his involvement with the agents of the Officio Assassinorum?

  The doors rolled apart in opposite directions. Urquidex and Laurentis were ushered in. The audience chamber was designed to intimidate. On his best days, Urquidex found the vast space, crisscrossed with giant, crackling power conduits and humming with data-streams emanating from the diagnostiad, to be unnerving, and today was not one of his best days. Urquidex steadied himself and put his emotional feeds on temporary hold, redirecting his thought processes through the far steadier mechanisms of his intelligence core.

  ‘O mighty and most wise Fabricator General Kubik! Prime of primes, artisan without compare,’ said Urquidex, spreading his multiple limbs and executing a complex obeisance. ‘I am your humble servant. State your bidding, and I shall comply to the letter, without the error of signal loss or personal interpretation.’

  Laurentis said nothing, but executed an awkward three-legged curtsey, his single organic eye blinking incongruously in the centre of his facial mechanisms.

  Kubik sat in a high-backed, ovoid chair that floated a metre above the ground on a snapping grav-field. The dusty smell of high-energy discharge washed out from it as he floated forward to stop not far from the two biologians, the repulsor unit of the chair buffeting at their robes.

  ‘Magos Biologis Eldon Urquidex, Magos Biologis Phaeton Laurentis.’

  ‘Prime of primes, alpha of alphas,’ said Urquidex.

  Laurentis said nothing.

  ‘Tell me,’ said Kubik. ‘What do you know of Second Captain Koorland of the Imperial Fists, lately returned to this system?’

  Urquidex’s mechanical body parts sagged with relief. ‘Whatever you wish to know, Lord of Mars.’

  Kubik’s chair turned, its energy field spitting, and he performed a slow circuit around the magi.

  ‘Laurentis first, you spent much time with him on Ardamantua.’

  ‘He was kind,’ said Laurentis, his vocal modulator thoughtful. ‘Honourable.’ Laurentis paused. ‘Fabricator General, it is often wise in such circumstances as these, where mismatch exists between the relative hierarchical status of two participants in an exchange, to provide an opinion not nece­ssarily held by the responder. To give informative discourse couched in the subjective language that tallies with the result the interlocutor wishes to hear. I calculate you wish to hear the bad, but I cannot voice it. He saved my life.’

  ‘Speak the truth. Flattery compromises logic,’ said Kubik.

  ‘I will say nothing against him,’ said Laurentis. ‘He is, in common parlance, a hero. After my transformation, he threatened Magos Urquidex with violence should additional damaging circumstance befall me.’

  ‘And why is this remarkable?’ asked Kubik. ‘The primary purpose of the Adeptus Astartes is to safeguard and promote the persistence of the human race. They are made to be that way, as predictable as the energy output of a lasgun.’

  ‘It is possible he was following his indoctrinative programming,’ conceded Laurentis. ‘But I believe he genuinely wished to help me personally.’

  ‘Intriguing. An altruist. An uncertain modifier to my calculations.’

  ‘There is more. He was also… sad,’ said Laurentis, as if struggling to recall what the word meant.

  ‘And you, Urquidex? State your initial observations and hypothetical deductions.’

  ‘He was most persuasive,’ said Urquidex unctuously. ‘Unafraid to offer violence to further his aims.’ Urquidex remembered being slammed into a wall. Most unpleasant. ‘I found him driven. He will not be easily controlled.’

  Kubik’s subsidiary vocalisers made a dry clacking laugh. His primary voice remained thoughtful and cold. ‘Do not second-guess my intentions, Urquidex.’

  ‘I only think on the progress of the Grand Experiment, and how the arrival of the Last Wall will affect that progress,’ said Urquidex.

  ‘You and I are not dissimilar,’ said Kubik. ‘We are both biologians, even if our specialisations differ. Our creed is a self-evident truth – to abandon humanity entirely is a self-defeating exercise. Logic is a tool best utilised by a thinking, feeling organism, not an end unto itself. The end is knowledge, not logic as some of our brethren believe. Logic gives us a framework to understanding, but it does not provide insight. Without insight I could never have become Fabricator General nor could I survive the political processes of the Senatorum Imperialis. Logic is not the only mode of thought necessary to true communion with the Omnissiah. The flesh is weak, but the machine on its own is weak also.

  ‘Let the cults of expunging strip away their humanity and decry us as modus unbecoming. We must never forget the even split upon the Omnissiah’s own sigil, skull and cybernetic. A sentiment the magi of the Ordo Biologis can only agree with, is that not so, Laurentis? Before your unfortunate wounding, you had few augmentations.’

  ‘A choice I made to remain better attuned to subtleties of biology, Fabricator General,’ said Laurentis. ‘I have lost so much to the orks. I see more clearly now, but what was taken from me was not given willingly. I cannot imagine giving up so much of gross human feeling as a conscious act. What little emotion remains is coloured throughout with regret.’

  ‘Your skills as a dialogian remain. Do you still possess the necessary knowledge and mental subroutines to act as an effective translator?’

  ‘I remain first and foremost of the xenology sub-order,’ said Laurentis. ‘Linguistic expression is a part of my ability, not the whole.’

  ‘Nevertheless, it is your linguistic ability I enquire after,’ said Kubik. Upbraiding so heavily cybernised an adept as Laurentis for pedantry was pointless.

  ‘My linguistic skills are two-point-three-four per cent more efficient than they were,’ said Laurentis. ‘What I have lost in instinctive appreciation for the modes of speech, I have gained in rapid pattern recognition.’

  Kubik swept around the magi again. ‘Then you are to report after this meeting to Artisan Trajectorae Augus Van Auken at Pavonis Mons. There is a new project of grave importance being undertaken, vital to the war effort and to the success of the Grand Experiment. The full suite of your abilities are necessary. I have been forced by this Koorland into committing a portion of the armies of Mars to the attack on the ork moon. No matter. It shall afford us the opportunity to acquire new materials for study, and a great number of experimental subjects for Van Auken’s undertaking.’

  Urquidex’s logic streams shivered with misgiving at this revelation of a new experiment. His implants seized upon the statement and trapped it in data crystals embedded in his thorax for later parsing. His initial hypothesis suggested something bad.

  ‘Perhaps my abilities might also be useful, my lord?’ said Urquidex. ‘I too have experience with Veridi giganticus.’

  ‘You are to remain upon the Grand Experiment. Your investigations into the effects of the ork teleportation technology upon biomatter are invaluable.’

  ‘Yes, my lord,’ said Urquidex.

  ‘We must be careful,’ said the Fabricator General. ‘The feuding of factions within the High Lords leaves us with no choice but to consider the ultimate divorce of our interests. There are those that suspect and work against us. Guard yourselves against them.’

  A poor-quality hololith engaged, projecting a bubble of light that resolved itself into a live pict feed. In a grainy aerial view dogged by frequent cutouts and signal dispersion a woman was making her way across red sands, a breathing mask supplementing the thin Martian air.

  ‘This individual is not as she appears,’ said Kubik. ‘The diagnostic covens came across erroneous data-transfer protocols. Her code signum proved to be falsified.’

  ‘Who is she?’ asked Urquid
ex.

  ‘She is an operative of the Officio Assassinorum. I have been watching her for some time. Vangorich’s killers are elusive, but not invisible. We observe her from a high altitude aether-drone, and she knows nothing of it.’

  The woman made her way across a landscape cluttered with ancient fragments of broken machinery. The view swung around. The hive factories of Tharsis piled themselves up behind her.

  ‘Sicarian assassin clade 950-Alpha-Xi, execute target,’ commanded Kubik.

  The woman stopped, alert to peril not yet visible to the magi watching the pict feed. She cast away her red robe, revealing a close-fitting combat suit and a pair of bulky ­pistols strapped one to each thigh. She drew them both, aimed them in opposite directions, and opened fire. The action proceeded without sound. She ran, arms outstretched and rock steady, guns blazing. Her head flicked back and forth, identifying new targets, her guns ready to follow. Urquidex was certain every shot was a kill.

  ‘Assassins are skilled, but she is one, and we are many,’ said Kubik.

  An assassination clade of Sicarian ruststalkers skittered into the pict field, over twenty of them, converging on the Assassin from all sides, their long legs nimbly picking their way over the rough ground. Always seemingly on the verge of toppling over, their darting movements instead propelled them towards their target with staccato purpose, blade limbs held out to impale and slice. The Assassin upped her fire rate. Sicarians dropped, their breached pressurised armour shooting out streams of gas, spindly augmetic limbs folding in on themselves. They came closer and closer, unconcerned with their own deaths, determined only on hers. The Assassin halted, still firing, but she was surrounded and could not escape.

  The Sicarians pounced on her. With a flurry of cybernetic limbs, it was done. The Assassin lay dead on the ground.

  The pict view abruptly veered as the aether-drone sped away on some new task. The sky filled the image, before fizzling out.