He heard whipping disturbances in the air, quickly followed by screams of pain. Abrehem risked a backward glance and his heart lurched as he saw the eldar assassin and his squad of gunmen entering the chamber. They were firing with their strange weapons, but the billowing thermals were serving to spoil their aim and only a handful of their victims were falling.
Abrehem paused as he saw that most of those who’d been hit were still alive, lying with limbs severed cleanly or disc-shaped slits punched through their backs. They screamed for help, and the person Abrehem had once been wanted to go back.
But the man he was now knew better than to risk his neck for people that were as good as dead.
‘Come on, Abe!’ shouted Hawke. ‘We need you.’
Grasping hands pulled him away, and once again they fled down darkened passageways that twisted, rose and fell and plunged deeper and deeper into a labyrinth of tunnels that even the Mechanicus had probably forgotten about. Where junctions presented themselves, Abrehem took turns at random, hoping their pursuers would eventually give up and hunt some easier prey.
What was it the agri-workers in the outlying farm collectives said?
I don’t need to outrun the grox, I just need to outrun you.
He was utterly lost, but the frantic people around him followed him like he was some kind of divine saviour. They shouted his name and wailed to the Omnissiah, to Thor, to the Emperor and the myriad saints of the worlds they called home. Every now and then, Abrehem would see the flickering, blood-red burst of code in the walls, dogging their flight like some kind of gleeful binary observer that delighted in their fear. He had no idea what it might be, and had not the time or energy to waste in thinking of it.
The tunnels grew ever more cramped, and Abrehem heard fresh, cracking bursts of gunfire behind them, swiftly followed by more screams. He picked up the pace, though his ravaged body had little left to give to their escape. His heart thundered against his sunken chest and his limbs burned with acid buildup from the sudden burst of activity and adrenaline. Bodies pressed in tightly around him, their fear-sweat stink pungent and their desperation hanging upon him like a curse. They wept as they ran, pinning their hopes for life on Abrehem’s guidance. The tunnels twisted around on themselves, a knotted labyrinth that could not have been planned out by any sane shipwright.
Yet for all their unknown dimensions and orientation, Abrehem felt a disturbing familiarity to these passageways, a sense that the ship was somehow leading them somewhere, almost as if it was reconfiguring itself to bring them to a place of its choosing. That was surely ridiculous, but the notion persisted until his lurching steps brought him into the chamber that was part templum, part prison and part sepulchre.
Hawke’s alcohol distilling apparatus burbled and popped against the blocked-off wall with the faded stencilling, and the stink of chemical shine made Abrehem want to heave his guts out onto the hexagonal tiled floor.
He’d killed them all.
He’d led them to a dead end. Literally and figuratively.
‘Shitting hell, Abe,’ snapped Hawke, as he saw where they’d ended up. ‘There’s no way out.’
Abrehem heaved great gulps of air into his lungs, all the strength draining from him as he realised they were all dead. He lurched on wobbling legs to the far wall as he saw the ripple of malicious code squirm across its surface. Even as he watched, it bled into the centre of the wall, and his jaw fell open as he saw it approximated the shape of a human hand.
It flickered like a badly projected image, exactly where Ismael had rested his hand when they had first found him here. Men and women pressed themselves to the wall, clawing at it and banging their fists against the unyielding metal. Abrehem’s eyes moved from side to side, seeing a lambent light that seemed to flicker in the eye sockets of the cadaverous skulls worked into the walls.
He looked up to the frescoes of Imperial saints worked into the ceiling coffers, and saw that one stood proud of the others, a simple representation of a young man in the plain robes of the Schola Progenium. His head was haloed in light, and he reached out of the painting with an outstretched hand that offered peace and an end to iniquity.
Abrehem recognised the saint, and a calming sense of rightness flowed through him.
Though the screams of the people around him echoed from the walls, Abrehem’s thoughts were clear and calm as the ocean on a windless day. He pressed his back to the wall at the back of the chamber, feeling hands touching him as though he could somehow ward off the coming danger.
The aliens appeared at the entrance of the chamber and the fear he’d felt of the eldar blademaster evaporated as Hawke stepped forwards with his contraband pistol outstretched.
‘Eat hot plasma death, xenos freak!’ he yelled and mashed the firing stud.
Nothing happened.
Hawke pressed the stud again and again, but the weapon’s power had long since been depleted.
‘Bastard skitarii,’ swore Hawke, tossing the weapon and retreating to the stencilled wall as the eldar warrior flicked its blade through a series of complex manoeuvres. Abrehem saw the cool grace in its every movement, a rapturous suppleness and ease that only inhuman reflexes and anatomy could allow.
Without quite knowing what he was doing, Abrehem bent to retrieve Hawke’s discarded weapon, feeling the snug fit as his fingers closed around the textured grip. It was heavier than he’d imagined, compact and deadly looking, the induction coils ribbed tightly around its oblong barrel. The bladesman’s head turned to him, and Abrehem sensed his amusement at their pitiful defiance.
Abrehem squeezed the firing stud.
And a bolt of incandescent blue-white light stabbed from the conical barrel to skewer the eldar warrior through its chest. The plates of the alien’s armour vaporised in the sun-hot beam and the flesh beneath burst into flame as the plasma fire played over its body. The swordsman’s scream was short and its charred remains collapsed in a smoking pile of scorched armour and liquid flesh.
The weapon gave out a screaming note of warning, but before Abrehem could drop it, the barrel vented an uncontrolled stream of super-heated air and plasma leakage. Abrehem screamed as the flesh melted from his forearm, running like liquid rubber from a shopfront dummy in a fire. The weapon fused to the bones in his hand and devouring flames licked up the length of his arm, melting the heat-resistant fabric of his coveralls to his ruined limb in a searing flash of ignition.
The pain was incredible, a nova-bright agony that sucked the breath from his lungs and almost ruptured the chambers of his heart with its shocking intensity. Abrehem felt himself falling, but as he fell he pressed his remaining hand to the exact centre of the wall at the back of the chamber. Blood welled from the deep gash in his palm and ran down angular grooves cut into the metal.
The wall thundered into the ceiling, slamming up into its housing with a hiss of powerful hydraulics. Men and women fell backwards with the suddenness of the wall’s rise, and a pressurised rush of air vented from the space behind it, carrying with it the scent of ancient incense, powerful counterseptic and impossible age.
Abrehem remained on his knees, clutching his blackened claw of an arm to his chest. His pain-blurred sight could not fully penetrate the darkness of the revealed chamber, but he saw the dimly outlined shape of a golden throne, upon which sat the hunched outline of a powerful figure with faint light gleaming from where its hands ought to be.
Then several things appeared to happen at once.
Abrehem heard the whine of alien weapons preparing to fire.
The seated figure’s head snapped up, and a pair of amber-lit eyes opened, flickering as though the fires of some subterranean hell shone through them.
Then, without seeming to pass through any intermediary stages, the figure surged from its throne and Abrehem felt a buffeting passage of frozen air as it flew past him. He was spun around and even his superior eyes could only process a fraction of what happened next.
Flashes of crackling silver, whippin
g arcs of blood and screams. A muscular shape moving with unnatural, drug-fuelled speed. Weapons fire and panicked screaming that was quickly silenced. Heavy thuds of bodies sliced in two falling to the floor, the rasp of armour smashed open and the wet meat thuds of flensed bodies coming apart. Abrehem saw the eldar die in a fraction of a second, heard the spatter of their blood and the slap of their severed limbs and dismembered corpses as they slammed into the walls and ceiling.
Then it was over, the aliens hacked, sliced and chopped into a hundred pieces; unrecognisable as anything that had once lived and breathed. Abrehem saw plates of armour spinning, their edges sliced cleanly, helmets with the perfectly severed stumps of necks still within them. He saw a ruin of gore that looked like the eldar had been instantly and completely eviscerated and their innards used to paint the walls.
And in the centre of the butchery stood the blood-drenched figure of a naked man.
Yet he was like no man Abrehem had ever seen. Muscular to the point of ridiculousness, his entire body was ballooned with stimms, and metal gleamed through his flesh where strength boosters and chem-shunts jutted from his intravenous network. A spinal graft encircled his pulsing chest and heat bled from his skin where integral vents had been inserted just below his ribcage.
His forearms were sheathed in bronze, and instead of hands he possessed masses of dangling, twitching flail-like whips. They writhed like the tentacles of a squid, coated in blood that hissed and evaporated in the electrical heat.
The man’s head was encased in metal that was part helmet, part implanted skull plates. A circular Cog Mechanicus of blood-red iron was stamped into his forehead and the skin of his cheeks was tattooed with what looked like scripture. His teeth were bared in a rictus grin of slaughter, and he walked towards Abrehem with grim and purposeful steps. The electro-flails sparked and danced as they trailed on the metal deck.
Hands helped Abrehem upright, and though he had to bite his bottom lip to keep from screaming in agony, he was glad to see that one of those who helped him upright was Ismael. Hawke loitered behind his old overseer with a stupid grin plastered across his features.
The bloodstained slaughterman stopped in front of Abrehem and he felt the flicker of its fealty optic scanning his eyes. The iron-sheathed head leaned down towards him as though to sample his scent, and the thing’s lipless mouth parted. Corpse-breath sighed from between its polished steel fangs as it knelt before him with its head bowed.
‘Adeptus Mechanicus,’ rasped the warrior, the words dust-dry. ‘Locke, Abrehem. Pattern imprint accepted. Rasselas X-42 activation sequence completed. By your leave.’
Abrehem wanted to answer, but the pain from his ravaged arm was too great and he sagged into the arms of his followers as unconsciousness swallowed him.
Microcontent 21
Azuramagelli was doing his best to track the eldar warship, but Kotov knew that the auspex would have trouble locking on to such a vessel even in the calmest of spatial conditions. He reclined in the command throne, warming up the Speranza’s weapons systems and diverting power to the gunnery decks. Without shields, there was a concurrent increase in available resource to allocate to the guns, but without anything to plot firing solutions, they might as well shoot blindly into space and hope for the best.
‘Eldar ship is coming about, somewhere on our upper right quadrant,’ shouted Azuramagelli.
‘Guns unable to gain a positive fix,’ noted Blaylock.
‘Increasing engine output,’ said Saiixek. ‘We can’t fight this ship, not here.’
‘Change nothing,’ said Galatea, and Saiixek’s inloaded command was instantly canceled. ‘We navigate the Halo Scar as decreed or we do not survive.’
‘We will not survive if we allow the eldar free rein to blast us to pieces,’ stormed the engineering magos, venting an angry cloud of icy vapour.
Kotov ignored the bickering voices, knowing that Galatea was right. His mind was sinking deep into the rushing torrent of the ship’s machine-spirit, his grasp on his sense of self slipping with every passing moment.
‘Blaylock,’ he whispered, his binary fragmentary and fading. ‘Hold on to my biometrics.’
‘Archmagos?’ replied his Fabricatus Locum. ‘What do you intend?’
Kotov did not answer and released his hold on the shard of ego-consciousness that prevented the immense machine-spirit of the Speranza from dragging the last essence of his humanity down into its mechanical heart.
He plunged deep into the datasphere and was instantly engulfed by an ocean of light. The inner workings of the Speranza spiralled around Kotov in an impossibly complex lattice of fractal systems, heuristic algorithmatix and impossible weaves of information that defied any mortal understanding. Down in the ancient strata of the Speranza, Galatea’s touch was a dimly perceived irritant, a skimming connection that could be erased with the merest shrug.
Kotov’s fragile consciousness plunged deeper and deeper, the gossamer-thin lifeline held by Magos Blaylock a tremulous thread in a firestorm of golden light. He saw systems flicker past his floodstream that were as alien to him as anything the most secretive xenotech might dream of in his fevered nightmares, and technological echoes of machines that surely predated the Imperium itself.
Power generation that could harness the galactic background radiation to propel ships beyond lightspeed, weapon-tech that could crack open planets and event horizon machines that had the power to drag entire star systems into their light- and time-swallowing embrace.
All this and more dwelled here, ancient data, forgotten lore and locked vaults where the secrets of the ancients had been hidden. In this one, fleeting glance, Kotov realised he had been a fool to drag this proud starship into the howling emptiness of space in search of hidden secrets.
The Speranza was the greatest secret of all, and in its heart it held the truth of all things, the key to unlocking all that the Mechanicus had ever dreamed. Yet that knowledge was sealed behind impenetrable barriers, bound in the heart of the mighty vessel for good reason. The knowledge of the Men of Gold and their ancient ancestors was encoded in its very bones, enmeshed within every diamond helix of its structure.
Was that why its builders had abandoned its construction?
Did they fear what damage the generations to come might wreak with such knowledge?
They feared what I might become...
The words came fully formed in Kotov’s mind, wordless and without vocabulary, but a perfectly translated sentiment that existed only as pure data.
said Kotov.
That is but the most recent of my names. I have had many in my long life. Akasha, Kaban, Beirurium, Veda, Grammaticus, Yggdrasil, Providentia... a thousand times a thousand more in all the long aeons I have existed.
Kotov knew he was not hearing words or anything that could be equated to language, simply the spirit at the heart of the Speranza adapting its essence in ways he could understand. He didn’t even know if the thing with which he conversed could be thought of as an individual entity. Was it perhaps something infinitely older and unimaginably larger than he could possibly comprehend; a galactic-wide essence given voice?
Dimly he recognised that these were not his thoughts, but those of the datasphere around him.
I know this, but even if this iron shell is destroyed, I will endure.
said Kotov.
Your lives are meaningless to me. Why should I care, so long as I endure?
I represent nothing, I simply am.
Kotov knew he could not appeal to the vastness around him by any mortal means of measurement, nor could he hope to persuade it with threats, promises or material concerns. What did such pure machine intellect and perfect thought care for the live
s of mortals when it had existed since the first men had stumbled across the principles of the lever?
said Kotov.
He sensed the Machine-Spirit’s amusement at his desperation and silently willed it to rouse a portion of its incredible power.
Very well, I will help you.
The vast awareness at the heart of the Speranza rose up around him.
Kotov’s mote of consciousness was flung into the maelstrom of surging data and purpose, spun around and hurled into the cosmic vastness of the informational ocean, as insignificant and as meaningless as a speck of stellar dust against the impossible vastness of the universe.
Bielanna watched the light fade from the human’s eyes, her war-mask keeping her from feeling anything other than savage joy at his death. The bodies of the ship’s crew lay sprawled around her, broken and taken apart by the stalking wrath of the Scorpion Aspect Warriors. The flame-wreathed form of Kaela Mensha Khaine’s avatar turned and strode back through the webway portal that had brought them to the bridge of the human ship.
It understood there was no more death to be wrought here and with its departure, the brutal desire to kill and main diminished. She still felt the touch of the Bloody-Handed God, and would continue to feel it until she allowed her war-mask to recede into the locked cell of her psyche where she kept it chained until it was needed.
It was already slipping from her mind and she let it bleed away.
Bielanna blinked, as though truly seeing her surroundings now.
The bridge of the human ship was an ugly place, made uglier by the arcing loops of blood on its iron walls and carelessly spilled in sticky pools. She felt the cold, closed-off arrogance of the humans that had sailed this ship, the legacy of death it had brought to those who had defied its masters, and she was not sorry it was soon to be destroyed.
The ship was breaking apart, its rudderless course carrying it into the deathly orbit of the neutron star that had taken the first human vessel. Bielanna knew she should rise and follow the avatar back to the Starblade, but the skein was becoming clearer now that her war-mask was fading.