Baron Roland marched from the darkened interior of the first translifter’s hold. The platform shook with the booming footfalls of the ten-metre giant. Malcolm marched at his side, and Roderick and Anthonis took longer steps to take position on either flank.
A host of mechanised giants marched onto the platform, the sunlight gleaming from the jade and topaz plates of their vast battle armour. Vasey and Garratt came next, together with the younger Knights they had trained.
The consorts of the Knights came next, each of the Cadmus women in their brightest finery and most prized jewellery. The consorts of House Cadmus never bore arms, but without their strength, the Knights could not function. They too bore items of value: folded flags, honour trophies and rolls of honour their husbands had won.
Cassia’s nose was in a book as usual, Aikaterina had her newborn son held tight to her breast, while Aeliana played a Raisan war song on a steel-framed viola that was amplified through Roderick’s hunting horn.
A phalanx of Assembler Thexton’s Sacristans flowed onto the platform after them, red-robed and proudly bearing icons of the Cult Mechanicus. Heavy gonfalons of Cadmus unfurled from long banner poles carried by bulk servitors. Cordelia didn’t miss the irritation in Arch Magos Kyrano’s body language at the sight of the Imperial aquila where once the Cog of the Mechanicus had sat.
The Knights marched across the platform in perfect lockstep, and Cordelia saw her suspicion that the sallow-skinned man was a Knight confirmed in his obvious appreciation of their power.
Cordelia smiled as she saw the momentary alarm in the faces of the gathered officials as it looked as though the striding Knights were going to roll right over them.
At the last possible moment, the Knights slammed to a halt.
Roland’s Knight took a step forward as the Knights behind him held their reaper blades high in salute. Hunting horns skirled, repeating the triple blast that sounded the charge.
The horns fell silent.
‘Gentlemen,’ said Cordelia, in flawless High Gothic, ‘House Cadmus brings its swords to defend Vondrak.’
When a Knight wears his armour, he is at one with the world and a brother to all warriors. He judges no man except by his deeds and fights with honour as his watchword. Out of his armour, every consort will agree that their husbands are easily irritated and foul-tempered.
So being stuck in the heart of a forge-temple with a host of the Martian priesthood that once considered themselves our masters is wearing at every Knight’s reserve of patience like a sculptor’s rasp.
The insect-buzz drone of binary from drifting servo-skulls and the acrid smoke from the censers the silent priests bear only serves to heighten the tension. Anthonis swats at a skull that drifts too close. It darts out of reach with blurt of hurt binaric ire.
Arch Magos Kyrano looks up at me. ‘Confirmation: you have reviewed the tactical inloads pertaining to this mission?’
The steel half-mask of his face is underlit by the glow from the hololithic table around which we are gathered. The impression is undeniably sinister. I wonder if he realises how he appears to ordinary men, or if he even cares. The Mechanicus are a breed apart, distant from the concerns of a flesh they no longer remember.
I move around the rotating holographic orb representing the contested battlefronts spread across the surface of Vondrak. The image is too zoomed out to be of any use, so I push the tech-priest manning the controls out of my way.
‘What are you doing, Baron Roland?’ says Kyrano. ‘You are not Cult Mechanicus certified.’
‘True, but I’m not an idiot and I’ve sat around enough of these damn things to know how they work. Yes, we have read the inloads, but when a man is asking me to risk the lives of my Knights, I need him to say it to my face.’
I lean forward and manipulate the various levers, dials and resistance meters of the table, ignoring the burble of outraged binary that fills the chamber from the observing tech-priests.
The image on the hololith descends through various strategic layers until finally the image of a semi-ruined city swims into focus.
‘Tell me about Vikara,’ I say.
Kyrano sweeps his hands through the spectral city and haptic implants cause a host of information tags to appear throughout the rotating image.
‘Vikara fell to the xenos three months ago and is now largely in ruins,’ says Kyrano. ‘The minoris omniphagea swarms have yet to turn its way, and the bulk of its infrastructure is still intact.’
The gently rippling image of what was once an Imperial city confirms this, but the biological encroachments of xeno-organisms are all too obvious. Noxious stranglevines split plascrete columns and slabs, spore chimneys rip through the bedrock to spew corrosive clouds into the air and acid blooms stain every wall.
Within a month at best, Vikara will cease to exist.
‘It is a distribution hub,’ continues Kyrano. ‘A transit station for munitions and war-materiel bound for neighbouring sector war efforts directed against Hive Fleet Leviathan.’
‘Was,’ puts in Malcolm. ‘It was a distribution hub.’
‘Vikara may yet be reclaimed.’
Malcolm shakes his head. ‘Not a chance. It’s an organic hellhole now. The only way you’ll get it back is if you travel arse about face through the warp and reach here a year ago.’
I hide a smile as Kyrano struggles to maintain equilibrium. It is a curious thing that the emotion tech-priests find hardest to cast off is anger. Perhaps they are more human than we give them credit for.
‘The nature of Vikara’s purpose has only superficial bearing on the proposed mission,’ I say. ‘Where is the forge-temple?’
Kyrano forces his gaze from an unrepentant Malcolm and sweeps his hands through the city, bringing up a golden cog icon over a building that, miraculously, appears to be free of any obvious biomorphic infestation.
‘Your objective lies here in the eastern district. A forge-temple of minor importance in all respects but one. Sealed in the temple’s data vaults are the last remaining memory engrams of one of the Binary Apostles.’
Reverent cant gusts from the tech-priests. More than one makes the symbol of the Cog Mechanicus across his chest. Kyrano waits, as though expecting a similar response from us.
When none comes, he says, ‘Informational: the Binary Apostles were the original techno-savants who departed Old Earth for the Red Planet, the founders of the Mechanicus. Mythical figures, no one truly knows who they were or how they achieved their miracles. Some say they dreamed them as they slept in the caves beneath Olympus Mons, others that they were drawn to a great chasm by–’
‘We don’t give a ship rat’s fart who they were,’ snaps Malcolm, always the most bluntly forthright of my Knights. It is not his place to speak like this, but Malcolm has always strained the limits of rank. Now more than ever.
I let it go, because he will say what I should not.
‘Do you think we don’t see what this is?’ says Malcolm, jabbing an accusing finger at Kyrano.
‘It is exactly what it appears to be, Sir Malcolm – a rescue mission.’
‘It’s a bloody suicide mission,’ barks Malcolm. ‘For some dusty piece of scrap metal! And the temple’s probably a digestion pool by now. It’s madness, Roland, pure bloody madness. The Mechanicus would rather see Cadmus destroyed than forsake the Cog.’
Roderick nods in agreement, while Anthonis and William pointedly study the scrolling mission parameters on the hololith. Garratt and Vasey are keen to ride, but they are young and have yet to face the tyranid swarms.
If they had, I doubt they would be so eager.
‘It will be highly dangerous,’ agrees Kyrano. ‘But I can say with a high degree of certainty that the temple remains intact.’
‘How?’ I ask.
‘Because nothing, human or xenos, has gone in or out of the temple since the city fel
l.’
‘It’s shielded?’
‘Yes, by a form of energy barrier we have never seen before. This particular Apostle’s area of specialisation was said to be in shield technologies – early voids, the ion technology of your Knights, Geller fields, refractors, brane displacers and the like. It has long been rumoured that his or her spirit still resides in the temple’s Manifold as a data ghost. It is my belief that some immutable nature of the Apostle’s essence is keeping the temple safe.’
‘The Apostle is still alive?’ I ask, understanding something of how such a thing might be possible.
‘I believe so, though not as you or I might understand it. Nothing so coherent as to be considered conscious, perhaps, but a binaric meme endlessly circling within a Manifold engine that came from Mars itself. Too precious to be allowed to fade, too degraded to be anything other than insane.’
‘And this is what you want us to risk our lives to save?’
‘Yes.’
I rise from the control panel and straighten my uniform jacket as I return to my Knights. ‘So, just to be clear, you want us to ride to Vikara, a city already fallen to the swarms. Then you want us to find a forge-temple haunted by the ghost of an insane Apostle. Assuming we can get in, you want us to somehow return the temple’s Manifold engine to Vondrak Prime? Is that a fair assessment?’
Kyrano nods, either not hearing my caustic tone or choosing to ignore it.
‘Knights offer the most statistically significant odds of success from all the forces at my disposal.’
I hold a hand up before Malcolm snaps at that choice bait.
‘We are not at your disposal, arch magos,’ I say, tapping a finger against Kyrano’s chest. ‘I did not bring Cadmus to Vondrak to yoke ourselves to the whims of the Martian priesthood once again.’
Kyrano meets my gaze, ocular implants to human eyes.
‘Then why did you come?’ he asks. ‘The war-summons was not specific to Cadmus, and Hawkshroud had already broadcast their intent to fight.’
‘Hawkshroud?’ scoffs Malcolm. ‘Those ragamuffins? They’d come running if you told them you were fighting sleep.’
‘Hawkshroud are an honourable house, Malcolm,’ I say. ‘Their esteem and willingness to fight are laudable.’
Malcolm purses his lips and nods, aware he has crossed a line. In the presence of the Mechanicus, the Knight houses must present a united front.
I return my attention to Kyrano.
‘We came to show that even though we no longer bear the Cog, we still hold the Mechanicus in high esteem. We are all servants of the Emperor, are we not?’
A beat, then, ‘Of course, Baron Roland. Then you will ride?’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘House Cadmus will ride.’
Weaknesses
The chamber at the heart of the forge-temple was little more than a cell, but its occupant had voluntarily sealed himself away from the world. Its walls were smooth cream and fashioned from a polymer compound impermeable to vox-theft. Its walls boasted no inload or exload ports nor a single connection to the temple’s Manifold or noosphere.
Just as the early pictographers required light-tight chambers to do their work, so too did dataproctors require data-tight chambers.
This one was less secure than Nemonix would have preferred, but Vondrak was hardly a high-functioning forge world, and he had taken the liberty of scrambling nearby systems to provide a data-fog within which he could operate invisibly.
He sat cross-legged on the floor, flicking through the personnel files of House Cadmus. Image after image of Knights scrolled past, together with every aspect of their lives. Some was banal and easily accessible – service records, deployments, family histories, all easily available to someone who knew how to look – but other elements – behavioural profiles, biological samples, gene-markers – were elements few of the Knights would be aware even existed, let alone were being perused by an outsider.
‘Do you really think you’re going to find something in there?’ said a voice that was eerily familiar and yet almost unrecognisable.
‘I do,’ he replied. ‘Cadmus are no different to anyone else. The weakness is in the people.’
‘A typically Martian viewpoint,’ said the voice.
‘You’re thinking the same thing,’ replied Nemonix, as a shimmering hologram robed as a mid-ranking adept of Mars came into view. Nemonix glanced up at the hologram, which was being projected from thousands of micro-transmitters woven into the fabric of his own robes.
‘Well, of course, I am,’ said the adept. ‘I’m you. How could I think anything else?’
‘You’re not me,’ Nemonix reminded the hologram. ‘You’re a simulation of a me that no longer exists.’
The holographic Nemonix waved away the distinction. ‘Just because you’ve systematically stripped yourself of everything that made you me and turned you into you, doesn’t mean I can’t have thoughts of my own.’
Nemonix laughed. ‘Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? You are nothing more than a copy of what I used to be, and a poor one at that.’
‘Yet you keep me around,’ said the hologram. ‘Why is that?’
‘Because it gratifies me every day to see how far I have come since I made the engram transfer,’ said Nemonix.
‘That’s not it,’ said the hologram.
Nemonix turned back to the isolated data-slate with a sigh.
‘You are engineered with a self-sustaining form of anterograde amnesia, and every time I switch you on we have this same discussion,’ he said. ‘We bicker, you claim some deep insight as to why I created you and keep you around. I ignore you and we concentrate on the task at hand. So, can we take it as read that this latest discussion ended the same way and move on?’
The hologram folded its arms, and Nemonix sighed.
‘Here,’ he said, holding out the data-slate.
‘You could just upgrade my cognitive architecture to encompass noospheric functionality,’ said the hologram. ‘It would save you having to hold things out for me to read.’
‘Not a chance,’ said Nemonix. ‘You’re kept isolated for a reason. I can’t be leaving data trails behind me, and you’d leave one even a greenskin could follow.’
The hologram shrugged – as it always did – and perused the slate. Nemonix cycled through each of the Knights of Cadmus, letting the earlier incarnation of himself digest each one.
The last Knight to be displayed was Anthonis of Cadmus.
‘This one has potential,’ said Nemonix. ‘Destroying the foot of a Warlord Titan before it could crush a Cadian colonel. I think he could be our way in.’
The hologram shook his head. ‘No, this one’s too clinical, too cold. There isn’t enough humanity in him to exploit.’
‘Someone who takes on a Warlord in Knight armour has to have a planetary-sized ego,’ said Nemonix.
‘It wasn’t ego that drove him into that fight, it was necessity. Anthonis knew that without Colonel Pask the fight was lost. To him, there simply wasn’t any other choice.’
‘Then what about Roland? Usually the alpha has the biggest ego to exploit.’
‘No, if it’s Roland that brings down Cadmus, the whole house goes with him, and from what I read here, the Mechanicus want these Knights back in the fold.’
‘Then what would you suggest?’
‘I’d suggest we don’t go looking for strength to turn, but weakness to exploit,’ said the hologram. ‘Components within a machine that don’t function are replaced, but human beings are much more sentimental. They’ll put up with a broken cog in the machine, not realising that one little cog is what will bring them down.’
‘So who is the broken cog in House Cadmus?’
‘Flick back six pages.’
Nemonix did so and nodded.
‘Yes, this one,’ said the hologram, and Nemonix
remembered that hunger, the thrill of the hunt that had largely been cut away with every augmentation that protected him from leaving any trace of his passing.
This was why he kept his old self around: to feel the things he could no longer experience and leech from it vicariously.
‘For the past ten years, he’s been chasing Roland’s coattails in the Cull,’ continued the hologram. ‘He’s hungry to lead, but Roland won’t let go of the reins. This one’s ripe to pluck. Give him what he wants and he’ll paint the Cog back onto every Knight’s armour himself.’
Nemonix studied Sir Malcolm’s behavioural profile and nodded in agreement. ‘How will we get to him?’
‘Through the weakness of every man of flesh and blood,’ said the hologram with a smile. ‘His woman.’
Nemonix scrolled down.
‘Her name is Cassia,’ he said.
On the eve of bloodshed, Cadmus feasted.
No matter the world, no matter the supply situation, the Knights and their consorts gathered at the hearth to revel in one another’s company with as much food and drink as could be sourced.
An old tradition, going back to before the fall of the High Lord, and which Cordelia had revived upon the ascension of Roland to command of House Cadmus.
In Golem Keep, those feasts took place in Swinford Hall, the monolithic wing of the mountain fortress raised by Roland’s distant ancestors. The feast chamber itself was a fantastical rotunda of slender steel, monolithic sculptures and stained glass that jutted from the plateau over the endless forests. No seats were permitted in the Hall, so no man or woman could garner favour by their proximity to the master of the house. The quarters Lord Ohden’s steward had assigned Cadmus were adequate, decided Cordelia, but they weren’t Swinford Hall. The warriors drank a local fermented concoction and talked too loudly as servitors seconded from the Sacristan camp by the city walls brought platter after platter of roasted meats and steaming root crops. Every Knight except Anthonis, who ate sparingly and only ever drank water, would ride out tomorrow with a sour belly and a hangover, but even that was traditional.