Day Of Ascension, page 12
She saw hooked talons shear through steel, distended jaws catch about the metal face of one soldier and tear it away, lenses and conduits and all, revealing beneath where all that augmentation had been set into weak, raw flesh. And then a gun butt struck her shoulder and she was knocked from Sakiri’s shadow, stumbling back over the scorched body of a Great-Aunt. A skitarius stood over her, mechanically levelling his weapon, and over his head spoke the great heavy guns of a Dunecrawler. Davien looked frantically left and right for help, but in that instant all she could see were the bodies of the fallen. Dead workers in bloodied overalls and torn protective gear, dead Aunts with their purplish carapaces cracked, their jaws agape. The tide of battle was eddying as the red-robed metal soldiers pushed back.
She knew fear, but then it was transformed within her to a blazing white rage, an emotion that came from elsewhere to fill her to the brim. The hilt of something was under her hand and she took it up, a curved knife inscribed with the Many-Handed Emperor’s own image. The carbine spat fire that seared her shoulder but she was in past its barrel even as the shot came, ramming that blade into every part of the soldier she could reach, and careless of what might come after.
She struck steel, and then flesh, feeling a mad strength guide her hand. And more than that, she felt all the others, her kin, her Congregation. As she struck, so they rallied, as though her hands were knitting them all back into a unified mass. As the soldier stumbled away from her, her people surged forwards on either side, hammering into the skitarii so that their lines bent and broke and those at the back began to flee.
Soon after, she watched as Uncle Eddarc himself scaled the smoke-belching Dunecrawler and tore off its top hatch, hauling out a pilot still connected to the machine by twisted umbilicals, and then tearing out the man’s remaining innards before the crowd. By then Formulatus Plaza belonged to the Congregation and the skitarii were in full flight.
‘And now we move on, you and I,’ Sakiri decided, one ridgy hand on Davien’s shoulder. ‘We have work to do.’
‘What work?’
‘I thought you wanted to save your brother,’ the woman said. ‘There is also the matter of the gates of the Palatium wall, which will stand even against mining lasers unless we can open them. And I was given a target, and that target remains aggravatingly alive. They will have the Palatium sealed tight, for the man is a coward. I will get us to the Palatium. You can get us within the walls. Hey, Fomoran!’
Her voice cut through the sudden roar of dirtcycle engines as the subject of her cry drove up. He was a lean, bald man, a sweat-drenched headband about his grimy forehead. He was of the Congregation, a generation older than Davien, one younger than Sakiri. Davien knew him, the foreman of a team of prospectors who ranged the rocky wilds searching for untapped veins to mine. Atalan Jackals, who lived most of their lives without tech-priest supervision and had always been covert heroes to her and Niem. Now he pulled up on his grumbling bike with a long rifle over his shoulder and a half-dozen riders at his back.
‘I’d heard you were dead,’ he told Sakiri, with the ease of long association.
‘You’ll live in my shadow a few days yet,’ she shot back. ‘Get us to the Palatium, her and me.’
‘There’s fighting enough here for all of us,’ Fomoran told her.
‘The Many-Handed Emperor wills it,’ Davien snapped.
For a moment both Sakiri and Fomoran stared at her, and she waited for them to slap her down, but then the man leant back in the saddle and barked a word to his fellows, who guided their bikes closer, nudging them through the crowd.
‘We ride!’ Fomoran told his followers. ‘Sakiri, get up behind me. She can go with Ammarco there.’
Davien got gingerly up behind the designated rider, trying to fit between the man and his panniers packed with mining charges, loose fuses tangled and hanging. One stray shot… But then Fomoran had yelled out another command and they were tearing off at a tangent to the insurgents’ main advance, weaving through the streets of Auctorites’ wealthy centre, the places that people from South Chasm were never supposed to see. When they passed by a bronze statue of some superannuated enginseer or other, Ammarco hacked its head off with his power axe. Davien let out a high yell of triumph. She could feel the man laughing through the grip she had about his waist.
They met one band of skitarii on the way, belatedly rushing to reinforce Formulatus Plaza. Fomoran took himself up an overpass, separating from his people, who just roared ahead.
One of the riders was struck down, a scatter of carbine shot punching him out of the saddle and sending his limp form sprawling in the dust. The rest were on the skitarii before they could get another round off, hacking and beating, shooting them at point-blank range with pistols and shotguns. The skitarii alpha had a power sword with an edge that spat and seethed with undirected energy, and he hacked through the haft of Ammarco’s axe, sending the head spinning away. The blade was drawn back for another blow, the alpha’s face unreadable behind the steel slit of his helm. Then there was a hole punched past the rim of that slit and the man was down. Fomoran was shooting from the overpass, calmly picking off each individual enemy as they tried to fall back to a new position.
Soon after that, they were within sight of the palace, the remaining bikes pulling up in the shadow of one of the administrative archives. Davien and Sakiri slipped from behind their respective riders and took stock. Down along the broad front of the building, she could see there were skitarii outside the main gate. Not so many, and for a moment she thought Fomoran might just charge them here and now, relying on shock and fury to overcome their numbers. She backed off from the bikes, braced for the sudden roar of their engines.
Instead, Fomoran said, ‘I have a fight to get back to.’
‘The Emperor smiles on you,’ Sakiri told him, a hand on his shoulder. ‘We’ll all be in His embrace soon, one way or another.’
‘I long for it,’ he said. ‘An end to work. An end to pain. A return to the arms of our blessed father. Isn’t that what we used to say when we were young?’ For a moment his lean, creased face was oddly vulnerable. ‘Is it now, Sakiri? Is it really the promised day?’
And Davien knew the answer was No, because all of this had been set off by some scheming tech-priest, and tomorrow would see them all at Triskellian’s mercy. And yet Sakiri just squeezed the man’s shoulder and said, ‘We must all have faith.’
Davien felt as though she were two people, the one whose very blood burned with an inarguable faith, the other with a mind sick with worry that she had betrayed everyone for a tech-priest’s game. She watched as the bikes roared into life and sped away.
11
‘Is your monster complete?’ Triskellian asked drily. Certainly the thing in the bell jar had grown to perhaps twice its original size, large enough now that he doubted it would fit through the cell’s neck in the unlikely event he should ever want to extract it. Or extract it whole, anyway. He would have plenty he could do with parts and pieces, in the fullness of time.
The lumpen thing stared angrily out at him, one slab-like hand resting on the transparent wall of its prison. It had several arms now. The processes Doctor Tesling had set in motion had triggered the same processes usually active in a growing foetus, so that the subject – Niem, Tesling called it – had undergone a riot of growth and duplication. Not just bone and muscle mass: there were little vestigial limbs, and one of its main arms had split into two at the elbow, fingers twitching and curling in concert. Its head had begun the same kind of division, he noted with distaste, but stopped part way. Three eyes stared out at him, one human and blue, the other two yellow and devoid of pupil. The procedure had prompted the thing’s metabolism to sprout plenty of features derived entirely from its alien heritage too. It had a long, segmented tail ending in a foot-long bone blade, and its hide was covered haphazardly with plates of dermal armour. There were jutting fingers of bone along its spine, and one of its additional arms sported three curved claws useless for any kind of civilised task.
Claven brought him the latest test results, set out in neat rows of script. Over his shoulder, Herma’s voice rang out, ‘Physical resilience of the subject has increased by fourteen per cent since previous sampling. It is exceeding expectations, Gammat.’
‘Quite.’ Triskellian surveyed the monstrosity, reflecting that not all the ways those expectations had been exceeded had been positive.
‘When we come to our next project, doctor,’ he decided, ‘you will have to exercise a little more discipline. We will keep the enhanced physique and durability, the elasticity of the flesh. But we can do without these flourishes.’
The thing within the jar snarled soundlessly and flung itself against the clear barrier between them. Triskellian didn’t give it the pleasure of seeing him flinch. Without the emergency codes even this thing couldn’t break the glass.
Doctor Tesling wrung his hands, lips moving in some heretical prayer. Triskellian would have to break him of that habit quickly enough. He had wondered if Tesling would ever get to the point where he could wear a red robe and be seen in public. He was human enough, after all. If he was bald, so were most of the tech-priests, background radiation being what it was. If he wore goggles to hide his discoloured eyes, well, that hardly distinguished him from the average enginseer or datasmith. No, the changes Triskellian needed to make were internal. The man wasn’t quite broken in. I will have Herma recite morally correcting scripture to him. She’s good at that.
‘Doctor, I’m going to drag you away from your patient now,’ he said, placing his metal hand on Tesling’s shoulder. The touch of the steel fingers always made the man shudder. Another habit I’ll need to break him of. Perhaps when he has a prosthetic of his own… ‘Claven, Herma, continue to monitor the subject in our absence.’
Triskellian had already chosen his vantage point from which to conduct today’s feats of generalship. Up on the levels above his laboratory there was an ancient viewing chamber, which had once been used to tutor new generations of tech-priests in the sacred and prescribed rituals of maintenance and repair. Typically, the chamber itself had then fallen into disuse and the classes had moved to other locales, but Triskellian had set a half-dozen of his juniors to restore some functionality and, by proper application of prayer and elbow grease, they had the main screen connected to some of the eyes looking out over the Dodecahedral Plaza before the Palatium wall. Many of those ancient eyes were entirely blind, but through the remaining few he commanded a good view of the approach.
Burzulem’s whimsy over the decades had stripped the palace of its original impregnability. The man was fond of windows and arches and architectural follies that elegantly demonstrated mathematical truths but were inadequate for the purpose of keeping undesirables out. However, he had not compromised the outer wall, which ran all the way around the perimeter, enclosing both the Palatium Lucidium and its immediate grounds. The wall was high and sheer, capped with electrified fists of spikes and studded with gun emplacements, some of which still functioned. It would suffice to hold the mob until Triskellian was ready for them. Let them spend their strength against its steel.
He took Tesling to the viewing chamber, the space solely his as his siblings cowered in their dormitories or prayed for deliverance from the terrible mob. And I shall deliver you, my fellows. Once this debacle has convinced everyone that Burzulem is not fit to hold office, I shall beat the rabble back to their hovels and save the day. Who will deny me pre-eminence then? The algorithms will have to choose a new leader, and who else could be selected, other than the man who quelled a rebellion? He was already composing the relevant communiques to Mars in his head.
The screen flickered dully to life once he had Tesling in front of it. The Congregation and their insurrection were within sight of the wall, an unruly tide of semi-humanity oozing along the approach to the great main gate. Like some dreadful colony organism, a slime-mould or spread of fungus, Triskellian fancied. They were so messy and undisciplined. Now they had won a few skirmishes there was almost an air of festival to the whole business. Some of them were chanting, some even dancing. He saw flags and banners, that dreadful mangled Emperor figure with its horrible smile and taloned hands overflowing with stars.
‘What even is that nonsense?’ he asked Tesling, feeling indulgent. Let the man run out the last of his heresy.
‘It is the Many-Handed One,’ Tesling’s thin voice whispered. ‘He will come for us with His thousand offspring. His hundred hands will clasp us to Him. He will take us with Him when He flies between the stars, and we will live forever.’ His voice trembled as he looked on the great mass of his kin, close to tears.
‘Will you indeed?’ And Triskellian sent the command that opened some other eyes close to the palace, so that part of the screen now showed a host of Ten-Tangram’s people, waiting in silent readiness for his orders. The contrast between their deadly quiet and the inappropriate cheer of the insurrectionists was marked.
‘Let me tell you, doctor, how it will be between us, going forwards,’ Triskellian explained pleasantly. ‘This business will soon be at an end. I will crush the life from your Congregation, erase the threat it poses to us. Once it has done its job. Once it has let my fellows see how weak the hand that guides it truly is. Once I have taken on that mantle, and earned the role of Fabricator General by whipping your curs back to their holes.’ He had his metal hand pincer the medicae’s chin and tilt Tesling’s head back, while his living one pushed the goggles up that creased forehead. Tesling’s watery, yellowing eyes stared helplessly up at him.
‘Do not despair,’ Triskellian told him. ‘You will have your immortality.’ He permitted himself a smile. He would not go the way of Burzulem, with self-gratifying jokes and giggling, but he felt he was owed a modest smile, after all his hard work. ‘When I have broken the back of your wretched cult, dug out all its abominations, scoured its nests and hatcheries, I will yet preserve it. Suitably domesticated and tamed, those parts of your genetic code that can be made subordinate to our human strength shall be put to work within our bodies, just as the people of Morod work within our factories. They shall make us stronger, doctor. They shall help us resist the poisons and the radiation and the infirmities attendant on our eternal work. They shall give a new vitality to the flesh, to better endure our sacred communion with the steel.’
He stared without mercy into Tesling’s twisted face, feeding on the outrage he saw there. ‘It is a fine irony, isn’t it? When your xenos progenitors came to this world, they sought to suborn and dominate the human within their victims. But now they have done that work – all unknowing, insensate animals as they were – I shall dominate the xenos within their descendants and make it a slave to the human. I shall conquer using their own tools, and your eternal life shall be within a renewed and improved Adeptus Mechanicus.’
And then a new voice, breaking in, said, ‘I thought it must be something hideously organic, Alloy, but I never quite dreamed the priorities of our friend Visceral would be so subject to mutation.’
Triskellian whirled. The viewing chamber door had slid open soundlessly. He’d had no warning of it at all. He saw Alloysia the datasmith connected to it by one of her cables, smiling at him politely. The vast bulk of her Kastelan robot loomed in the doorway. Ahead of it, flanked by six of his personal skitarii – the ones outside Triskellian’s command structures – was Burzulem.
The bell-like shape of the Fabricator General drifted forwards, many feet tapping at the chipped flags of the floor. In one of his hands, Triskellian could not help but notice, was the weight of a volkite blaster, more than enough to do irreparable damage to either flesh or prosthetics.
‘I am disappointed in you, Visceral,’ Burzulem said. He was trying for his usual flippancy, but there was a very real anger rising up from the little fleshy remnant within him that gave his words edge and snarl. ‘You obviously think I am some sort of blind idiot not to notice the treason that you’ve set yourself to. I am already taking steps to reintegrate the bulk of our skitarii into a unified command structure. Or Alloy is. She was always better at that sort of thing than me. Or you, for that matter. Do you really think our glorious order would have stood so long if any ambitious malcontent could just interfere with the hierarchy and get away with it?’ He leant in, body tilting to make up for a lack of waist. Now it was Triskellian being loomed over, and he didn’t like the reversed circumstances one bit.
‘And so I came here to remonstrate with you, Visceral,’ Burzulem drawled. ‘Put you in your place. A little talking to from your superior to bring you back into line. And what should I hear but the rankest and most abominable heresy. Dealing with xenos filth, with… whatever this wormlike character might be. Incorporating hideous material into our very bodies. You’re beyond recovery, Triskellian. I’m going to have to have you rendered down for parts. And, because I wouldn’t deny you the opportunity to meditate on your sins and seek the forgiveness of the Omnissiah, I rather think I’ll do it while you’re still alive. What’s that word you genetors like so much? Vivisection? A rather fitting end for a traitor of your particular bent. Apt, don’t you think, Alloy?’
‘Most appropriate, Fabricator General,’ replied his locum.
