by Various
Egal’s breakthrough proved to be a labyrinth. The corridor split and then split again and again to become many. The different ways sloped sharply up and down, some narrowing to slits too small for even a servomat to enter. Within three turns Lakius felt thoroughly disorientated. The marching hieroglyphs on the walls seemed to hint at other corridors lying just out of sight, showing outlines of other labyrinths, turnings, dead ends which were just out of phase with themselves. In the Mechanicus doctrine the faeran portal alone would have been the subject of months of careful study before further advance was made. The twistings of this alien maze would constitute a lifetime’s work with studies of geometry and numerology.
Magos Egal was in no mood to linger, though, and he set Noam and Borr to calculating a path through. Adept Noam’s vast analytic power was directed entirely onto building an accurate map of the interweaving passages they moved through using direct observation, phasic scanning, micropressure evaluation and tactile interrogation. Adept Borr used his carefully learned arts conjecture and intuition to understand the underlying structure of the maze, and to determine what kind of xenomorphic logic would guide them through it.
Lakius was reduced to doing the work of a servitor, spooling out power thread and invoking marker-points at each junction so that Noam could tick them off on his mental plan.
The spool’s metriculator showed less than a thousand metres left of its five kilometre length when they found another portal, though the term seemed inappropriate for the gargantuan metal slabs confronting them.
The gleaming, baroquely etched metal stretched up into the darkness further than their hand lights could reach. The corridor angled away in either direction, following some inner wall but leaving a sizeable vestibule that the four explorators now occupied. They were dwarfed by the new barrier, rendered so insignificant that the opening of those titanic gates could only foretell their doom at the hand of something ancient and monstrous. Adept Noam did not even flinch as he stepped forward to begin deciphering the locking-glyphs.
Lakius’s mouth was dry with fear as the adept began tracing the first glyph. He looked back along the corridor, sure he had heard some scuttling noise. The twinkling silver traceries hurt his eyes, mechanical and organic. It took him a moment to realise that shapes were moving across them. Silvery, glittering shapes.
‘Watch the rear!’ Lakius shouted and hefted his personal weapon, an ancient and beautifully crafted laser made by Ortisian of Arkeness, whose spirit he had long tended to. Its angry red lash was sharp and true: it caught a shape, which blew apart in a blinding flash that spoke of minor atomics. The others crouched on their spindly legs and then leapt forward, buzzing down the corridor like a swarm of metallic insects.
Each was the size of a man’s torso, flattened at the edges like scarabs and fringed with vicious looking hooks and claws. They were fast but so aggressive that they impeded each other’s progress as they rattled and bounced over one another. Borr’s bolt launcher joined its roaring song to the hiss of Lakius’s laser. Their combined fire clawed down three more of the steely scarabs. Nonetheless, Lakius and Borr had to back towards the doors to keep their distance as more swarmed forward.
‘Keep them back!’ shouted Egal. ‘Noam almost has it!’
Their backs were almost against the doors already. Lakius focused all his attention on tracking and eliminating the machine-scarabs, his laser flickering from one to another in a deadly dance of destruction. But they were still getting closer. One scarab ducked between two of its fellows at the point of their destruction, and surged forward while the tech-priests were half-blinded by the explosions. The machine’s scrabbling claws ripped Borr’s bolter from his hands before its momentum carried it over Lakius’s head. It bounced off a wall and arrowed down amongst the priests. Lakius flinched away and saw it clamp on to Adept Noam’s back even as he completed the last sigil. Surgical-sharp hooks ripped into the lexmechanic as the twin portals began to slowly separate.
‘Could someone remove this?’ Noam asked calmly, like a man being troubled by a wasp on a summer’s day. ‘I–’
The scarab exploded like a miniature nova and Adept Noam was gone, consumed in an actinic fireball which knocked Lakius flat. He rolled desperately, purple after-images flashing in his vision, ears filled with the roar of detonation. He expected to feel the dread weight of one of the machines landing on him at any second.
Osil lay gripped to an operating table by steel bands, the arms of an auto chirurgeon delicately sliced at his skin, pulling forth steel splinters and suturing his torn flesh together. Pain blockers numbed his body but his mind was racing. Father Lakius had told him to prepare their sacred cargo for release. Such a dangerous undertaking was normally only made in response to a signal from the Adeptus Terra on distant Earth.
To begin the investiture of the living weapon the ship carried in cryo-stasis without the initiation code was tantamount to suicide. If the assassin’s crypt was opened without receiving the preparatory mnemonics and engrams specifying its target it would kill everything it found until it was destroyed.
Father Lakius, he concluded, must privately believe things had gone very, very wrong indeed.
Lakius flinched as something gripped his shoulder and started dragging him backwards. He realised someone was trying to pull him to safety and kicked his legs to scramble across the floor.
Moments later, Lakius’s vision cleared enough to see that he was beyond the doors and that they were closing. The dark slit of the corridor outside narrowed rapidly as they smoothly swept together. He pointed the laser still gripped in his shaking hand but no scarab-machines came through the gap before it sealed.
‘Splendid! They are without and we are within,’ Magos Egal’s voice said, close to Lakius’s ear.
He scrambled to his feet as quickly as he could, fearfully looking around. Egal stood nearby and beyond him the chamber they had entered could be seen in its full majesty. Huge, angular buttresses marched away down either wall, and the floor sloped gently downward. Frosty pillars of greenish light shone down from an unseen roof to reveal row upon row of tall blocks covered in angular alien script. The air held a chill and the silence of the labyrinth outside had given way to a gentle susurration like waves against a distant shore.
‘Where’s Adept Borr?’ Lakius demanded. Egal turned away from his accusing gaze, looking off down the cyclopean chamber.
‘I’m sorry, I had to shut the portal or the scarabs would have killed all of us,’ Egal seemed genuinely repentant. He could not even meet Lakius’s gaze.
‘You just left him outside!’ Lakius’s angry words rang hollow even to him. The young rune priest was dead and recriminations would not bring him back. They were trapped at the centre of the monolith now, the heart of the ancient structure. The Mechanicus-trained academic in him was already studying the chamber, too awed by the storehouse of alien archaeotech to give thought to the cost already incurred. The rows of man-high blocks seemed familiar, something about them… understanding blossomed with a now-familiar tang of fear.
‘These are cryo-stasis machines,’ he whispered. Metriculation memo-chips in his optic viewer calmly extrapolated that the chamber held over a million of them.
‘It’s what I brought you to see. They resemble the cryo-crypt of the Assassinorum vessel you arrived in, do they not? The best is at the centre, these are just… servants. Come and we may look upon a sight no living thing has seen in six hundred million years.’
Egal moved off down the slope and Lakius numbly followed. They passed block after block, each glittering with a rime of ancient frost. The floor got steeper until they had to crawl on hands and knees, gripping the blocks to lower themselves down to a flat circular section dominated by an immense stasis crypt. It was a sarcophagus in form, its top moulded into a representation of what lay within. Lakius expected to see a mask of death like the machine warriors, but instead found vivid life rende
red in polished metal, beautiful but inhuman and cruel. Rows of sigils around the lid shone with an inner light, and it felt warm to the touch.
‘Its already been opened,’ said Lakius. ‘Help me move the lid. I need to see inside.’
Between them they managed to turn the huge, heavy lid, swivelling it to reveal the interior. The sarcophagus was empty.
Egal seemed unsurprised; in fact, he was delighted. ‘Splendid! Just as I had hoped.’ He reached a gangling arm into the sarcophagus and brought out a silvery, metallic staff.
‘Lakonius described an artefact like this in the Apocrypha of Skarros. He spoke of a symbol of mastery born by the lords of the necrontyr, called the “staff of light”.’ He hefted the ornate device in both hands. As he did so, an intense blue-white light flared in the symbol at the top of the staff. ‘With this, we need fear no denizen of this edifice; with time they can even be tamed and made to serve.’
‘But what of the occupant of the crypt?’ Lakius asked, nervously noting the maniacal gleam in Egal’s eye. ‘The lord and master of this place that we’re plundering from? I fear in our current circumstances we could scarcely fend off any kind of attack and that artefact is more likely to draw one to us. We should go while we still can.’
‘Very well, but the staff of light could be our salvation. It would be madness to leave it behind.’
Osil limped towards the landing field where their ship lay. He had agonised greatly about whether to accede to his mentor’s request. By Imperial and Mechanicus law, the activation of one of the lethal members of the Officio Assassinorum without proper authorisation was treason of the highest order. Death of the flesh would be a secondary consideration beside the terrible punishments that would entail.
But Osil had spent almost twenty Terran years in the company of Lakius Danzager, studying the tasks he would one day continue when the father was gathered to the Librarium Omnissiah. He had imagined he would spend the rest of his life aboard the ageing cutter, maintaining its systems and preparing its cargo of Imperial vengeance when it was required. That was not going to be the case now. Osil had learned enough of Lakius’s clarity to understand that the explorator’s expedition was woefully inadequate in the face of the alien terrors of Naogeddon. Father Lakius feared the worst, that they were about to unwittingly unleash something so terrible that he believed only an adept of the Eversor temple would have a chance of stopping it. And so the assassin must be prepared.
Magos Egal strode ahead confidently through the labyrinth, thrusting out the staff like a torch, its fierce light burning back the shadows and setting the hieroglyphs aflame with blue-white flashes. Lakius scuttled along behind him, jumping at each new scraping, slithering noise, jabbing his pistol towards each new vagrant glitter of steel as it flicked out of sight behind a corner. The denizens of the labyrinth were dogging their heels, giving back before the circle of light from the staff and closing in behind.
After what seemed like an eternity they reached the first portal where they had fallen foul of the faeran field. The melted wreckage of the Praetorians and Renaillard’s body were gone, the corridor clear except for the power threads trailing off into the darkness. Magos Egal wanted to stop and investigate but Lakius feared some assault would take place if they lingered, and urged him to press on. The soft scrapes and scratches of movement were behind them now, but following closely all the time. As they started to climb the steps Lakius looked back and caught sight of dozens of tiny lights floating in the gloom. They looked like blue fires, seemingly cold and distant, but drifting forward in pairs, the twin eye-lights of murder-machines on their trail.
The cool grey light of the outside seemed blinding after the blackness within. The edges of the phasic rift in the structure’s outer sheath were wavering alarmingly and they ran past the entombed Praetorian to stumble out onto the gritty dust of the surface. It took Lakius a moment to gain his breath and he looked up to see Egal making adjustments to the phase generator.
‘You’re shutting it down, I trust,’ said Lakius.
‘Quite the contrary; I’m stabilising it so we can use the same entryway to go back in.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ Lakius said, and fired his laser.
Osil’s knees almost failed him when he saw their ship. A living sheath of machines covered it, their silvery bodies shifting over one another as they sought a way inside. The ship carried a great many devices to prevent tampering, as Osil knew all too well. If the machines found a way in, or worse still tried to breach the hull, the results could be devastating. He turned and forced his torn legs to start back to the command sphere.
Egal darted away from Lakius’s laser with inhuman quickness. But Lakius had been aiming at the phase generator’s power couplings, and the hit was more spectacular than he had imagined. The key-machine detonated and then imploded, a halo of white-hot flame flashing outwards for a moment before it was dragged back. A ragged distortion-veil skated erratically over the machine, crushing it smaller and smaller as it tried to suck everything nearby into it. Egal had been blown clear, but was left wrestling to hold onto the alien staff of light as it was drawn inexorably towards the rift.
‘Help me, Lakius. I can’t hold it!’ Egal shouted over the piercing shriek of air being annihilated in the void. Lakius levelled his laser at the magos and shot him in the head without replying. Egal fell back clutching his face. The staff plunged into the rift and exploded with a crack like lightning. Ozone hung heavy in the air as Lakius backed away through the laser mesh spines towards the camp. He spared a glance for his treasured weapon’s indicator jewel, and saw it was dim. His last shot had been at full strength, enough to punch through plasteel. Magos Egal was still moving, standing up.
‘Have you any idea how hard it was to get this texture right?’ he demanded indignantly, indicating the side of his face that had been caressed by a steel-burning laser. Charred welts revealed glittering metal beneath, quicksilver curves that betrayed an inhuman, yet familiar, anatomy. Lakius kept moving back, the figure of the thing that had pretended to be Egal was getting reassuringly distant, dwarfed by the solid black base of the alien structure. A pair of Praetorians came rattling forward from amidst the stormbunkers, balefully scanning Lakius with their targeters.
‘One life form identified. Classified non-hostile,’ one concluded.
The magos-thing was at the laser mesh. It leapt suddenly, astoundingly covering the hundred metres to Lakius and the Praetorians in a single somersaulting bound.
‘One life form identified. Classified non-hostile,’ the other Praetorian stated.
‘Surely you didn’t believe these clattering toys would be able to identify me?’ the Egal-thing smiled. ‘I had thought you one of the more intelligent specimens.’
Lakius’s mouth was dry with fear, but he managed a curt nod of acceptance before crying out ‘Praetorians! Audio primus command! Overwatch!’ The Praetorians locked their weapons onto the alien with eye-blurring speed, their simple brains entirely devoted to obliterating the first rapid movement they sensed.
‘You forget that I spent time repairing servitors after the last battle. I took the liberty of updating their command protocols at the same time,’ Lakius said with more courage than he felt.
The thing smiled more broadly still, and slowly cocked its head to one side. The Praetorians’ weapons tracked the minute movement faithfully.
‘Good for you, Lakius Danzager. You really are a clever one. How did you know I wasn’t human?’
Lakius hesitated for a moment. The thing before him exuded an almost primal sense of power. It was at his mercy for the present, but his instincts told him it could pounce on him at any moment. The Mechanicus in him yearned to learn what he could about it while his humanity screamed out to destroy it. His curiosity overpowered his instincts for a moment.
‘I wasn’t sure, but either you were the thing from the crypt or an insane explorator
who was bent on unleashing something unspeakable upon the world. When I understood that, my choices became clear. How did you replace Egal? Did he wake you in there?’ Icy daggers caressed Lakius’s back as he talked to the thing. Its silver and flesh smile widened even further.
‘What makes you think I replaced him at all? I have travelled a great distance since my first waking, walked in many places that have changed so very much since I saw them last.’
‘What were you seeking?’ whispered Lakius.
The thing’s ferocious smile was spread almost ear to ear. ‘Knowledge, mostly. I wanted to know how the galaxy had fared; who was left after the plague. You can’t imagine my surprise on finding your kind and the krork scattered everywhere. I’ve seen you humans trying to forge an empire in the name of a corpse; I have seen your churches to the machine. Racially, your fear and superstition are most gratifying. You make excellent subjects.’
‘You are necrontyr, then. You went into stasis to escape a disease.’
‘No, your language is inefficient. The plague was not a disease and it couldn’t harm us, but…’ The necrontyr tilted its head back as if dreaming of long lost times. ‘It was killing everything else.’ It looked back at Lakius. ‘And no, I am not a necron. You mistake the slave for the master. You’ll understand better when I take you back inside.’
It leapt. The Praetorians blazed into it with lasers and plasma, their bolts lashing at the thin form. Lakius was momentarily blinded by the orgy of destruction, and he fled towards the command centre in the hope of finding reinforcements. He looked back to see a silvery figure ripping pieces out of one the Praetorians. The other battle-servitor was smouldering nearby. The figure waved a piece of carapace jauntily at Lakius.
‘Sorry, Lakius, I couldn’t resist it,’ the thing called. ‘My race raised what you call “melodrama” to a high art form before you were even evolved.’ It chuckled and returned to eviscerating the Praetorian.
Lakius was spinning the locks shut on the command centre hatch when he sensed a presence behind him. He turned, too terrified and weary to fight but wanting to see his nemesis. He almost died of relief when he saw it was Osil.
