by Thorpe, Gav
For a being that prided herself on prognostications, of rendering the unknowable known, what he was about to do was utterly unprecedented.
Exasas-secondary:
Exasas-primary:
Exasas-tactical:
Exasas-secondary [emphasis]:
Exasas-tactical [affirmative]
Exasas-primary:
Exasas-secondary:
The digichip made an audible click as it slotted into the port.
It was not until now that Ghelsa realised how stress changed perception of time. It had not been that long ago that she had been standing in almost the exact same spot, looking at a squad of skitarii guarding the gates to the antae. It seemed like days had passed since then, so much had happened and so much had changed.
The skitarii were standing to either side of her, Kappa 1-Fade just within reach to the left. Others were close at hand, weapons ready, masked faces directed towards the entrance to the holy decks. Delta 6-Terror’s maniple, numbering four kastelans following their battle with the augmentatii, loomed above the other soldiers, now attended to by a loyal datasmith called forth by Exasas from duties elsewhere on the Imperator. The shadow of the magos’ battle-form swathed Ghelsa, once again tasked to her personal protection. A handful of battle-priests were still trying to gain access to the antae, their attempts lit by the flare of their bio-electricity.
It was a formidable force at Ghelsa’s back, and yet she felt no more certain of herself than when she had been standing on that same atrium floor with only Harkas beside her.
She had not understood the monumental task he had undertaken. His confidence had hidden the difficulties that had to be overcome, and Ghelsa’s only concern had been evading the hyperezia.
Thinking of them, she looked around the atrium, seeking the red-trimmed white cloaks of the downdecks enforcers. She saw none.
‘Kappa 1-Fade, do you know if any of the hyperezia have survived?’
‘I do not think there are any left alive,’ replied the alpha. ‘As a group they led the first insurrection against the augmentatii occupation of the labour decks and were slain.’
‘Huh.’ Ghelsa had always thought of them as sycophants and bullies – a necessary part of Titan-board discipline, but one fulfilled by the most unpleasant characters. Even so, having served the orders of the moderatus prime, they had still given their lives to protect the workers from whose ranks they had been raised.
Without warning, the alpha and closest skitarii snapped their weapons to firing positions, startling Ghelsa. A half-second later, the clank of unlocking levers preceded the main gates of the antae sliding open to reveal the sanctum of the tech-priests.
Incense billowed like living fog. With it came screaming tracer fire that slashed into the fulgurites and corpuscarii that had been trying to break the security protocols.
Panic hurled Ghelsa prone as the skitarii returned fire into the gloom, their augmented eyes seeing far better than hers. Her primal reaction saved her as a dull roar joined the crackle of arc rifles and the incense cloud split with a hail of bullets that cut Kappa 1-Fade in half and tore into the alpha’s squad.
In the smoke spilling from the antae, two giant shadows appeared.
In the milliseconds after interaction, Exasas located the antae codes and opened the main gates.
A data-packet was waiting for her, incongruous among the battle-scans and other digital detritus of war. Its source was Monderas.
Exasas hesitated, unsure whether the data-packet was a trap. Did he trust Monderas, or was this a last attempt to thwart infiltration of the Imperator’s core code?
The logistarius had not been an ally at times, but had attempted to warn of the problematic behaviour of the moderati. On balance, Exasas concluded that Monderas was likely not a conspirator, and accessed the datalog.
Its contents were brief, absorbed in no time at all, but their impact shuddered through Exasas for several seconds.
Monderas had felt the surge of an alien code being introduced through Moderatus Haili’s station. He had tried to stem its flow by throwing up his own battle-shield into the logistical systems.
It had worked for a second before a traumatising impact struck his spine. In-feeds from the czella security network showed Moderatus Gevren firing a laspistol, the blast pinpointing a very specific and lethal target.
The data-packet fractured, Monderas’ death recorded a dozen times over and more from a variety of inputs before he pitched forward. It was too late to be a useful warning, but Exasas realised it was not meant as such. It was a last testimony of innocence, a desperate plea to the Machine-God. If history was to record that the Casus Belli had fallen to the Eightwards Path, then Monderas had stated his opposition to it.
In the moments that followed, Exasas felt his persona splitting again and again, a thousand interpretations of his existence peeling apart from each other as consciousness flowed through the Imperator’s myriad systems.
He could understand why the humans would subject themselves to the experience. It was, even to his detached state, highly pleasurable to feel oneself multiplying like stars in the cosmos. There was a sensation of rapid ascent, as though he were transcending a mortal boundary.
And then he felt the mind of the god-machine.
In that moment Exasas also understood why the unaugmented human brain could only endure the mental spectacle for a few seconds. To witness the raw power of the Casus Belli – to share even a fraction of it – was to be born again with a fusion-powered heart, limitless power and immortality.
The lure was there even for his fragmenting presence. As adept as Exasas was at personality manipulation, to keep track of every spiralling, rising, flaring mote of existence within the Imperator’s labyrinthine systems threatened total persona dispersal.
He reigned in his perception, drawing back every splitting identity to a singular instance of herself.
Armed and armoured with this renewed self-awareness, he felt the tangible threads of the infectious codeware streaming along the digital arteries of the Casus Belli. They were everywhere, like fungal filaments given all the nourishment they desired, even spreading into the redundancy sub-sub-systems that underpinned the creation of the machine-spirit itself.
The source of the taint was also obvious. The darkness knotted together like a spider squatting in its web, spun about the princeps senioris’ position. From this crucible of corruption pulsed forth the energy that sustained the invasive presence.
Exasas found it surprisingly easy to negotiate the interweaving pathways, and ascended from the mid-decks towards the synaptic-like arrangement around the czella.
He felt resistance as he neared Iealona, who appeared within the core of the Casus Belli like a star caught in a black hole, her essence leaching into the blankness that was trying to consume the Titan.
The closer Exasas pushed, the greater the barrier to progress. He tried different approaches through other systems but each attempt slowed to a crawl before he could reach the central mass.
There had to be some way to cut through the opposing codeware, but Exasas had no experience of this kind of battle. He considered forming Exasas-tactical to examine the situation, drawing on the methodology of piercing a battle-shielded tech-priest, but decided against any persona duplication in case another identity chain reaction was initiated and could not be controlled.
He had been judiciously avoiding the taint-stream since entering, but there seemed no other way to reach the princeps senioris without passin
g into the vile codeware. Not knowing whether there would be a counter-attempt to invade his systems in the physical form still attached to the dataport, Exasas readied herself to stave off an attack from Iealona’s machine reflection.
In the first instance of contact, Exasas realised his total error. Like coldness that saps the heat from whatever it touches, the infiltrating energy was not originating from the princeps senioris at all.
It was feeding from her.
Ghelsa crawled away from the approaching giants, grimacing as the snarl of rotary cannons continued. The terrifying boom of phosphor blasters announced the intervention of the kastelans. She felt the heat washing down as the phosphor volleys slammed into the approaching enemy.
In the blossoms of pale fire she saw the pair of guardians, each as large as a wardroid, moulded from armour-plated flesh, their limbs ending with whirring bladed weapons and the rapid-firing guns that had mown down Kappa 1-Fade and his skitarii.
One of the kastelans thudded past, gleaming power fists raised. Their hard skin and armour aflame in patches, the herakli threw themselves into a counter-charge, their combat blades shrieking as they came up to full speed.
Gasping, Ghelsa got to her feet and threw herself out of their path, narrowly avoiding their trampling boots. She did not look back as she scrambled for safety, but she heard the screech of spinning chainteeth against kastelan battlehide and the explosive crack of power fists on modified flesh.
A new sound distorted her hearing – a bass thrum that shook the floor. The augmentatii dashed forward to meet the emerging threat, and Ghelsa looked over her shoulder just as a ball of plasma spat from the opening and seared into an advancing kastelan. Pushing herself even further away, she watched in growing desperation as several tech-priests stalked from the antae, their weapons spewing plasma, radium beams and scintillating rays.
They were met by a pinpoint barrage of fire from the battle-form, all of its weapons concentrated on the lead priest as it sped forward. A personal energy shield burned with ruby light as more and more detonations engulfed the tech-priest. Counterfire flaring from its chamfered plates, the warskin smashed into the traitor, pinning the tech-priest down with a clawed limb as it drove two gleaming blades repeatedly into the heretek’s chest.
Ghelsa finally remembered her arc rifle and opened fire, aiming at one of the tech-priests. The artificial lightning bolt slammed into the traitor’s leg, snaking up through the cybernetic alterations forged into the tech-priest’s body. Smoke issuing from breathing vents, the traitor toppled face first onto the floor.
One of the herakli had been felled by the kastelan, its head reduced to red mush by repeated power-fist blows. The other slammed its chainblade into the robot’s faceplate over and over, with each impact the powered teeth slashing deeper in a shower of sparks.
There was too much going on for Ghelsa to keep track of, her attention ripped from one horrific fight to another, from skitarii to tech-priest to kastelan.
The touch brought mutual awareness. The taint was not only an entity in itself – it possessed strong enough self-identity to react to Exasas’ invasive enquiry.
Spurs of dark data hooked into the magos’ consciousness spark, trying to drag apart his persona potential. He struggled, suddenly confronted by thousands of subtly different datastreams, each projecting a conflicting perception of what was occurring. A blizzard of interrogatory signals snarled through his sensory analogs.
Doubt. The corruption wielded confusion like a weapon, throwing a shadow over every datastream and datalog Exasas possessed. Faced with the overwhelming blot of incorrect information, he found it hard to pinpoint what was and was not truth. The entity devoured knowledge, turning it against Exasas as uncertainty, undermining even the most basic tenets of his understanding of the cosmos.
The magos felt detached from the cosmic engine, spinning away from the embrace of the Machine-God. Without that anchor, all that he was, all that he had been and would be, was rendered meaningless.
He responded not with equal force but with focus.
An incredibly complex equation formed in his thoughts.
Liberik’s Fourth Theorem.
Appended roughly a third along its length was an amendment, only three characters long. If proven true, it would be known as the Exasas Corollary. It had become the foundation of the entire identity-edifice known as Magos Dominus Militaris Xaiozanus Skitara Xilliarkis Exasas. Flesh and emotion had been stripped away to make room for the most complex formulae created by Metalican wisdom, yet all that remained was housed within three mathematical symbols.
The invasive entity felt almost petulant as it scrabbled and slashed and tore at the outer parts of Exasas’ personality. Inconsequential encounters and subroutined standard reports disappeared from his archives, but it did not matter. All the attack accomplished was reminding the magos that memory was peripheral – only the accomplishment of Higher Wisdoms was a measure of progress.
Heartened by the success of his resistance, Exasas purposefully thrust deeper towards the invader’s dark heart. He saw scraps of intangible formulae, impossible calculations derived from warp theory.
Daemoncode.
There had been scant proof that such a thing existed, though it had been posited ever since the first encounters with the immaterial denizens of warp space. A mathematical rendering of the lawless prism of the Empyrean.
It was impressive, constantly rewriting itself, but it was ultimately unstable.
Vulnerable.
The light of the princeps senioris grew bright, breaking out from the dark web that enclosed it. Like a shaft of sunlight piercing a gloomy vale, Iealona’s aura seared into Exasas, and with it came the power and wrath of the Casus Belli.
The daemoncode tried to flee as magos dominus and princeps senioris united. One protected the body of the Titan, the other the soul. Fuelled by the core of the Imperator, the released spirit of the Casus Belli howled through its systems, purging every fragment of the daemoncode.
As the contagion cleared, Exasas realised that another had been trapped in the etheric darkness – Moderatus Haili. Her companion, Rasdia, dwelt within a black-edged shield of self-corruption. The moderatus’ thoughts were almost blank, incinerated by the rage unleashed by the Casus Belli. On the command deck the body was functionally dead.
There was no sign of the main plotter, Moderatus Prime Gevren.
Iealona merged her thoughts with his, a perfect communion that surpassed even the connection of the noosphere. Through her the god-machine spoke, its immortal thoughts rendered into mortal comprehension.
It felt like the voice of the Omnissiah.
{I am weak from my efforts. Battle calls but I cannot answer. My guns have no voice.}
Iealona:
Exasas [inquiry]:
Iealona [cautionary]:
Exasas:
Iealona:
Exasas:
Iealona:
Exasas: erstand.>
He considered the paradox. He had given up flesh for the service of the Machine-God, and now he had to relinquish the mechanical avatar that had replaced it. What was it that he was attached to? Neurons had been replaced with silicate substrates, cells with bonded molecular links.
Exasas [inquiry]:
Iealona:
The last heretek defending the antae died amid a fountain of sparks from its personal defence screen as the magos’ battle-form ground the tech-priest’s head into the floor and severed the traitor’s limbs with simultaneous sweeps of its paired combat blades.
Ghelsa hadn’t moved or fired another shot for the last minute, but she pushed herself to her feet as the echo of gunfire faded into the upper atrium. Two kastelans had survived, standing among the half-human wreckage of skitarii, augmentatii and battle-priests. More of the magos’ warriors closed in, their alphas guiding them to positions overlooking the antae and supporting the robot maniple.
She realised that nobody was entering the holy decks and looked around, seeking a tech-priest. There were none – the electro-priests had died in the first salvos from the hereteks and the cybernetika datasmith had been cut down by flurries of fire aimed at the kastelans.
She and the other alphas were all that remained, and the squad leaders were looking at her…
‘I can’t be in command!’ she said. ‘You need to get orders from the dominus.’
‘Contact with the dominus has ceased,’ one of the alphas replied. ‘You are tributai-alpha, joint command as per the dominus’ last instruction.’
Ghelsa puffed out her cheeks as she considered what to do. The fighting had dissipated most of the incense from the antae, and the mirror-polished interior she had seen earlier was visible. Nothing moved within, but the haze obscured the far end of the sanctum.
