by Henry Zou
The fire-team fanned out, training their submachine weapons on him while auspexes scanned for trip-wires, trigger bombs and motion sensors. Golias didn’t seem to care much for them. He splashed the pond surface with his palm, watching the wrinkles in the surface ripple outwards.
Roth approached the collector, slowly.
‘Hiam Golias. This is Inquisitor Obodiah Roth. I have heard a lot about you. I thought you would have put up more of a fight, considering.’
The collector looked up lazily, pushing his silver mane upwards and away from his face. He shrugged, nonchalant. ‘And I thought you would all be dead by now. Sometimes plans don’t go our way.’
‘You’re a bastard, do you know that?’ Roth remarked.
‘I was just protecting my interests. No one told you to come looking for me,’ Golias shrugged.
‘And who told you that we would come looking for you, Golias? Who told you?’ asked Roth, standing over Golias.
Golias didn’t look at him.
‘Someone with my interests in mind. Someone who doesn’t like you, inquisitor.’
Roth decided to change tack. He brandished his plasma pistol, and drew it across Golias’s field of vision.
‘This is a Sunfury MKIII plasma pistol. Its fusion reactor core fires an ionised gas nova that will melt ten centimetres of plasteel. Do you have any idea what this will do to your face?’
Golias said nothing.
‘Let’s start with some questions,’ Roth said, evening his tone. ‘Who told you I would be coming for you?’
Finally Golias levelled with Roth’s gaze. ‘I don’t know. I was warned by a Cantican officer. He did not indulge me with who sourced to him. Don’t ask, don’t tell. It’s how we operate.’
Roth probed him with a gentle mind spike, intruding on the man and making him startle visibly. Roth was perhaps more forceful than he could have been. He simply rifled through his emotional receptors, roughly. Golias was telling the truth.
‘Next question. Where is this relic?’ Roth asked.
‘What will you pay me?’ Golias replied brazenly.
‘I have three choices for you, Golias. We can kill you now, if you’re stupid enough. Or you can work with us, and live. Third option, you play me the fool, and we air-evac you and drop you into Archenemy territory.’
‘You won’t kill me, you need me for the relic,’ Golias said confidently.
Roth slapped the haughty merchant on the back of the head. He dealt him a second humiliating slap. ‘Are you stupid, man? Auto-séance. Heard of that? I’d love nothing more than to put a round through your skull and drag your soul kicking and screaming from the abyss for answers.’
Golias was less confident now. There was a tremor in his lip, slight but noticeable.
‘Be a good man. Show us where it is,’ said Roth, crouching down next to Golias in an almost benign manner. ‘I don’t want to have to waste a shot on your stupid head.’
Chapter Twenty-One
‘I’ve never seen anything of such scale and preservation,’ Madeline said.
She had joined Roth’s fire-teams via escorted Vulture gunship. Her expert opinion had, in Roth’s words, been warranted out of utter necessity. The Task Group, steering Golias with the muzzles of T20 autoguns, were led down a mineshaft. That was what it appeared to be at first glance, once Golias had opened a vaulted blast door concealed behind an oil portrait of a Golias ancestor.
‘This place is a mine in every sense of the word,’ Madeline continued breathlessly.
The elevator trolley, a wire mesh cage of flaking red oxide, clattered as it lowered the team. Its keening metallic screech echoed down the abyssal depths, screaming back up at them from below. Down and down they went, for six thousand metres until they hit the bottom.
‘Holy Throne,’ Roth muttered, as the phos-lamps of the conveyance trolley illuminated the subterranean dark.
‘Yes, every bit as majestic as you expected,’ Golias said.
In truth the collector’s relic was not what Roth, or indeed what any of the Task Group, had expected.
At first it appeared to be a mining seam, at least eight thousand metres in length. Striations of ore and red ironstone ran the length of its sheer, scoured face. Anchor bolts buttressed the monstrously cavernous heights where rock had been sheared away in precisely cut horizontal and vertical sheers.
Yet as they approached, they could make out finer details. Crenulations and fleche spires melded from the rock-face like unfinished sculptures. In some parts, repeating pointed arches seemed to be carved into the geo-strata, long orderly rows that played the entire length of the mining cut.
‘This is Imperial Gothic architecture, Ecclesiarch design, perhaps?’ Madeline murmured.
‘No. Dictator-class design,’ Roth said.
‘Dictator? I’m not familiar with that era of architecture. Is it of Fringe cultural origin?’ Madeline asked.
‘What he means,’ Celeminé began, ‘is that this is a Dictator-class cruiser. Can you see the lance-decks there? The gargoyle steeples there?’
Golias’s relic was a fossilised Imperial cruiser. A patina of mineral growth sheathed its exposed parts, simple salts and silicate deposits glittering like a rime of gritty ice. Geo-forms clustered across the ship’s flank like a hide of barnacles. It was as if the cruiser itself had become a part of the planet’s mantle, a tectonic wedge of quartz, mica, calcium and ironstone sediment.
Golias guided them up a ramp that led into a blast-cut opening in the ship’s broadside. The wound in the ship resembled a mining tunnel. Support beams created a framework beneath the sagging rock where demolitions and mining drills had punctured its surface.
‘This is the Decisive, a Dictator-class cruiser of the Second Naval Expeditionary Fleet,’ Golias proclaimed proudly. ‘The ship itself was downed on Aridun at some point during the War of Reclamation in Medina. There was nothing in the ship’s data to reveal the cause of the ship’s demise but judging by this entry wound in the ship’s hull, it had not been primitive barbarians that the Imperium had been fighting.’
Roth paused at the threshold of the cruiser’s wound. The jagged cross-section of the ship revealed a hull that was almost five metres thick. Whatever had damaged the Decisive had been powerful indeed.
‘Golias, if you’ve got any more aces up your sleeve, forget it. I want nothing more than to finish you, so don’t give me a reason. Understand?’ Roth growled.
The collector nodded mutely as Roth vented his plasma pistol with a vaporous hiss. Celeminé lit the ignition on her hand flamer. Captain Pradal slid the bolt of his T20 to semi-automatic. Even Madeline cocked the hammer of a slim, revolving stub-pistol.
‘You first,’ said Roth, waving Golias into the shaft.
Slowly, the Overwatch Task Group entered the ossified cruiser.
The vast interior of the cruiser was barely recognisable.
Over the millennia, beards of stalactite drip from the upper gantry formed an undulating warpage of ground rock across the surface flooring of the vessel. Roth led the way, the beam of his stab-light probing over broken shapes of ship instruments and cavernous corridors.
House Golias had strung up dim, phosphorescent lamps to light the way. Under the pallid light, Roth could see that age had changed the ship in strange ways. The belly of the vessel was vast, painted in hues of rotting teal, brown and mostly black. Many interior walls had collapsed, or had melted seamlessly with stone. Veins of opal glimmered in fissures. Thermal springs had formed in some corridors, vomiting intermittent geysers of toxic gas. The air was bad, and the wet, humid fumes cultivated bacterial strains of fungus on the walls.
‘Don’t touch anything, some of the microbials here are quite infectious,’ Golias said as he expertly led them down a path he had obviously trodden many times. The ship had been the sole reason that the ancestral patriarchs of the Gol
ias house had levied their estates in its location. They knew its worth, and invested in it. An investment that spanned forty-five generations.
‘Slow down, Golias.’ Roth commanded. ‘Where are you leading us?’
‘To the ship’s bridge, where else? Unless cave exploration is what you were after,’ Golias said in an irritatingly off-hand manner.
‘Golias, I’m very close to headbutting your nose inwards,’ Roth said flatly.
They climbed rather than walked for some time until finally emerging in a communications hall. Thirty metres to their front, the blast doors to the bridge yawned open like the ruptured shell of a rotting crustacean.
‘There’s the bridge, undisturbed since the Reclamation Wars,’ Golias said, suddenly rushing forwards over a crest of calcite deposit that might have once been a broken support strut.
Roth tightened the grip on his pistol and signalled for several of their CantiCol escorts to stay guard outside the command bridge.
Unlike the rest of the cruiser, the reinforced vault of the cruiser’s bridge was remarkably well preserved. It was like a piece of history, crystallised in time. A tactical spreadsheet was still spread on the tact-altar, its small chess-like pieces still pinned in place. The ship’s command throne was untouched, its neural plugs placed in a neat row on the leather seat.
‘Servitors?’ asked Madeline, pointing to the trio of frail cogitate-logicians standing around the command throne. They were strange creatures, with despondent human faces and ornate box-shaped torsos. Keys and wires spilled from a hatchway in their abdomen.
Golias nodded. ‘We purchased them to maintain this vault. They can power up the ship’s main databanks.’
Roth waved his pistol at Golias. ‘Be a good man, and power up the databanks.’
Golias, for once, was obedient. The servitors began their work, their bald heads bobbing up and down in rhythmic unison as their fingers trotted across the ivory keystrokes. Some of the cogitator screens had been damaged during the initial crash-landing six thousand years ago. Many of them had also fallen into disrepair despite the efforts of the House Golias servitors.
‘Over the course of several thousands years the cogitators had lost physical memory,’ Golias explained. ‘Disintegrating logic-engines and withering circuitry have corrupted much key data, but what I have here is invaluable. You’ll be so pleased, inquisitor.’
With a mechanical groan, the cruiser’s data banks started. The monitors that still functioned flickered a lambent green as the servitors dredged up the ageing data.
It had been there the whole time.
When the hololithic map of the Medina Corridor was projected, the six-thousand-year-old image reviewed Medina as it was – a cluster of globes each marked with clearly visible orbit lines and equatorial ley-lines across the planet’s surface. As the three-dimensional map made its orrery revolution and the planets shifted, the puzzle, for Roth at least, fell into place.
It was a moment of fleeting clarity, the exact breath between accepting reality and the blindness of not knowing.
The Medina Corridor was, in the old proverbial, a treasure map. The equatorial ley-lines formed linear markings across the globes. They appeared as thin razor scratchings visible from orbit. The alignment of planets in the Medina Corridor formed a stellar map, and the equator lines formed patterns. Patterns that were complex and interlocking yet primitively minimalist in concept.
Roth was dumbfounded that they hadn’t seen this earlier. It had been so evident, literally before their eyes. The Medina Corridor formed a series of links with the axis of the equatorial planar lines all meeting at a central location.
The centre of the Old Kings.
‘The Archenemy isn’t digging blindly at all…’ Roth began.
‘No. It’s forming the old equator lines and schematics required to awaken the Old Kings,’ Madeline said.
‘Awaken?’ Pradal asked, taking off his cap and running a hand nervously through his hair. The young captain was obviously confused.
‘I’m not sure. But ley-lines have existed for as long as human civilisation. Geodesy was an old Terran discipline of studying a planet’s magnetic fields, polar motion, tides and so forth. Early man postulated that such lines were extraterrestrial in nature, along with a heavy dose of geomancy. What I am sure of is that these lines across the Medina Worlds are related to the Old Kings.’
As the map spun on its three-dimensional axis again, dense blocks of script scrolled up the length of the monitors, revealing the extent of Imperial war-making intelligence during the Reclamation campaigns. It seemed even during the Reclamation, the Imperial military machine had given some focus on the existence of these Old Kings and their potential for changing the course of the campaign.
According to the sources, the origins of the Old Kings began far back in the antiquity of pre-Imperial Medina. What the ship’s data described as ‘Early Sentients’ had come to Medina, bearing with them the influences of a highly advanced xenos culture as well as their worship of the stars and constellations. This Roth already knew from Gurion’s briefings, but there was much more lodged in these databanks.
When the Early Sentients finally left the Medina Worlds, they left for their subjects a parting gift. They bequeathed them an embryonic star. Through their worship of the stars, in effect, the Sentients had gifted Medina a god. It was the Old Kings, or the Star Ancient or the myriad other names that had passed through the generations. The star was held in a form of dormant stasis described as a Tomb Bell, to forever watch over the people of Medina. Or so the databanks would have Roth believe. There was so much detail, so much scripture. So much to take in.
The intelligence report continued, ‘During a great time of strife, at the precise alignment of the magnetic conduits of the ley-lines with the astronomical bodies, the star could be released from its stasis and unleashed. The star within the Tomb Bell can be thus removed from its resting place and unleashed where strife is greatest.’ The report became vague thereafter, postulating various theories as to the significance of the ley-lines and the destructive magnitude of an expanding star.
‘A star kept in stasis?’ asked Roth.
‘This worship of astronomical bodies has happened for all time since the history of man,’ Madeline said.
Roth understood. On Ancient Terra, he knew of lost tribes that had carved similar lines visible from orbit. These lines were the geological conduits of magnetic energy. Roth had read about these before, although the true meanings and practices soon became lost to ritual and symbolism. Man did not truly understand the teachings of the Early Sentients. But they trusted themselves to a blind following of the schematics ordained by the elder races. They carved great helio-lines, swathes of geometric markings across the surface of their planets. The data did not elaborate any more as to the nature of these xenos or their practices. Roth humbly conferred with Madeline for answers.
‘Early Sentients, madame?’
The professor shook her head as she read. ‘Probably a disambiguation of the term. It would not be the first time that an alien race has played its hand during the early formative years of human development.’
‘And these lines? These ley-lines, have you studied them at length?’
‘I’ve seen them before. The composition of globe lines was called “Pedj Shes” in the earliest languages. It literally means “stretching of the cord”. It’s a process of marking long linear geometry across the surface mantle of planets, so that during a specified point of the astronomical revolution, the equator lines would align and create shifts in magnetic polar energy.’
‘And the early Medinians understood all of this?’
‘Probably not. An isolated society’s first contact with others often results in attempts to emulate and mimic without reason or understanding. According to anthropologists, symbology and fetishisation became more important than knowledge.
Roth had known that primitive civilisations when contacted by the Imperium often resulted in such behaviour. Primitives had constructed canoes in the shape of Imperial ships. The Tukaro culture of the Mephius subsector even shaped spears in the crude outline of lasguns, and made their warriors brand themselves with a stylised aquila, in order to mimic the power of the Imperial Guard.
Indeed during the Tukaro Civil Wars, the Imperium had deployed onto the primitive planet with a great deal of unknown equipment. The vast amounts of war materiel that were airdropped onto these archipelagos during the subsector campaign necessarily meant drastic influences to the Tukaro people, who had never seen the Imperium before. Manufactured clothing, medicine, canned food, textiles, weapons and other cargo arrived in vast quantities to equip soldiers. Some of it was shared with the Tukaro indigenous. Following the resolution of civil strife, the Imperium abandoned the primitive planet. It had no strategic or resource value to the Imperium, and planetary governance was ceded to the Ecclesiarchy. The cargo lifters no longer visited.
In attempts to receive cargo, the indigenous Tukaro imitated the same practices they had seen the soldiers use. They carved headsets from wood and wore them while sitting in fabricated control stations. They waved dried-leaf landing paddles while standing on the runways. They lit signal fires and torches in the abandoned starports.
The difference here was that the Early Sentients ordained mankind to worship the stars. They promised that during the proper alignment, the Old Kings would wake from their dormant slumber and strike their enemies down with wrath should their civilisation ever be threatened.
Suddenly it all made sense to Roth. He did not require the rest of the databank history to connect the remaining pieces. The insurrectionists who had fought the Imperial Fleet during the Reclamation Wars had attempted to release their embryonic star. Of that there was no doubt.
The Medina Corridor’s unique stellar alignment, orrery orbit and axis angles, and most importantly the constant shifting of its axial cycles, meant that the helio-lines that had once marked the planets would shift into alignment. But they had failed. Evidently, the Imperium had reclaimed the Medina Worlds.
