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The Lost and the Damned (The Horus Heresy Siege of Terra Book 2)

Page 19

by Guy Haley


  He had his own clade of lesser servants. Some of the disciples of Sota-Nul, such as Ardim Protos, had no followers of their own, whereas the likes of Illivia Epta kept legions of them. For Pent, eight followers were sufficient. Not too many to control, enough to be useful, and with the additional bonus of flattering Nul through imitation. The eight of them served him as ship crew, engineers, advisers, agents and all other things.

  said Acolyte Penta-7, who hunched low over the auspex scopes cramming the forwards portion of the command dome.

  Pent blurted. He used direct voxwave communication, always. The body he wore had a mouth, but it was not his own. Pent’s preferred disciplines were those of biomancy and cybertheurgy. He kept a stable of bodies of his own design to wear. He’d chosen his current one for its combat efficacy. It was large, heavily muscled, being vat-grown from abhuman gene stock, and heavily modified with bionics. Not that he intended to do any fighting; he wore it for appearance’s sake.

  Outwardly, he showed no sign of fear. Within his suit of flesh, it was a different story. Pent was little more than a brain in a jar hidden in the armoured chest cavity of his host. He had no face of his own to display worry or similar emotions, while that of his temporary body was immobile. Pent found joy in manipulating biological matter, but he saw no need for the humanity in them; the biological was merely another form of machine. The face had been cured upon the skull and painted brightly so that it looked like a carnival figure, and in whose permanently open mouth Pent’s glowing sensor array hid. But a magos can betray himself in other ways than an unguarded scowl or frown, and Pent kept a tight rein on his external links in case an involuntarily expelled data packet revealed his dismay.

  The command, delivered as electric pulses, was transmitted instantaneously via augmitter wired into his host’s vestigial brainstem. The ship shook when the order was executed. Air is remarkably hard and hot when encountered from the void, and the shields treated it as they would any other threat, shunting it partially into the warp.

  The violence of the reaction was alarming. The ship dropped by sudden degrees as the voids annihilated huge pockets of atmosphere, and accelerated into the lacuna, then decelerated abruptly when air rushed back in.

  An outside observer would have seen Pent in his grotesque body and his eight servants, all augmented to more or less horrific degrees, working quietly but for a gentle bleeping passing between them. The peacefulness of the data exchange belied the ferocious argument it conveyed.

  spoke Acolyte Penta-1.

  rejoined Acolyte Penta-2.

  said Penta-5, who was female once, but had transformed herself into a waving shock of metal tentacles arranged around a metal box.

  The ship lurched to the side. External gravity was taking hold, throwing the grav-plating’s effects out of true. Miniature gravitic vortices tugged at the adepts’ black robes.

  commanded Clain Pent.

  Attacks from the ground were coming in hard. Machines sang their hosannas of alarm as the first of the void generators burnt out. Immediately, servitors detached themselves from deep-set alcoves and clomped off the bridge to enact repairs. Pent reviewed the damage in his internal data-feeds. They were wasting their time.

  buzzed Acolyte Penta-3.

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