Day Of Ascension, page 3
And he had taken samples from the three-armed assassin, cut from her tough flesh as she snarled and snapped at him. He had interrogated his scrapings with the wheezing deduction engines that subjected them to a questioning the Inquisition would approve of. Poisons, radiation, physical trauma – pushing their resilience past breaking point because the only way you could know how tough a thing was, was to break it.
And he found he knew the pattern. He’d observed it before, though not in such concentrations. Those times he’d been able to scrounge live subjects for testing, there had been strains of the Morod populace who had displayed resistances and immunities that had pricked his interest. And, like Burzulem, he’d thought mutation, but unlike his superior, Triskellian dared to consider how that mutation might be put to use.
By that time, obviously, he had run out of subjects. As noted, the only way you could know how tough a thing was, was to break it. He was left only with his records, great long scrolls of calculations through which a disquieting thread ran. There was something about certain Morod bloodlines that was… different. Different to the regular run of mankind, yet consistent within itself. A most durable and persistent ‘mutation’.
In certain texts, prescribed and fenced about with Inquisitorial seals, there were complex tests one could administer to the mutant and the deformed. There was a litany of signs and omens, responses to certain diagnostic compounds, a secret language written in the shape of the eye, the number of the teeth, the fine structure of the skin and joints. And these signs pointed not to mere human deviance but something darker. Yet the texts Triskellian had access to were maddeningly incomplete and Burzulem had no interest in expanding that section of the Palatium library. ‘Insalubrious,’ as he said dismissively. ‘If your hand offends you, Visceral, just cut it off and fix up a new one. Don’t dabble your other fingers in the pus of the wound.’
And of course that was a sore point, now. His new arm was slow in taking. Triskellian had enough self-knowledge to suspect his own attitude was interfering with his control of it. The mechanical limb was a heartbeat slow in its responses, the three-fingered hand fumbling, now feeble, now destructively strong. His mechanical eyes had been easier to come to terms with, but then he’d endured the surgery and the discomfort stoically, desperate to return to the lab.
And, even while he was trying to come to terms with the artificial limb, this nonsense: Ascension Day.
Being placed in charge of the Auctorites conscription pool was an honour on paper, a tedious chore in reality. It took Triskellian from his worship, that study of the sciences whereby a priest might come to truly know the will of the Omnissiah. To spend days grinding through the worst streets of the city with the cage-wagons, census in hand and beating at every door, left him feeling wasted. And, as he got further from the Palatium and into the poor districts, the census became worthless and it was a matter of just going street by street and rounding up every likely subject. Every half-hour the burning red pain in his mangled shoulder would rise up inside him, and he would have to adjust the flow of numbing compounds feeding into his abused flesh.
Ascension Day: the high point of the Morod calendar, if you were a compliant member of the priesthood. There were ships in orbit, ready to take the planet’s tithe of flesh and blood, kith and kin. The practice had become an excuse to celebrate under Burzulem. There would be fasting, the mortification of the flesh and the scouring of the machine. There would be a feast and the priesthood would offer up in flames those defective things it wished to purge from itself. Like people. The assassin’s execution would be only the centrepiece of a greater cleansing. Through such fires are we tempered, Burzulem would proclaim, as always. So our impurities are burned away.
Triskellian hated it. The only true worship was in knowledge, that was his creed. Casting these wretches into the fire was a waste of material that could go towards his own experiments into measuring the toughness of the flesh. Every moment he was out here on the streets was a moment of true reflection and worship denied him.
In his ear – another augmetic replacement – he heard the voices of his skitarii officers. They had run into resistance in the next clave. The locals had barricaded the streets, and now thronged eight storeys of windows and walls, shouting, waving banners, throwing stones and shooting simple guns. They were one of the mine-workers’ collectives, that had suffered recently from failed air-pumps and inadequate safety protocols. Now they were to lose the youngest and strongest of their offspring to the conscription, and the weakest to the offering, and they weren’t having it.
Triskellian sighed. The world seemed determined to complicate his life, when all he wanted to do was return to the laboratory. He ran through the passages of the prescribed canticle against civic disobedience, constructing an appropriate protocol to inload to the skitarii. The squad alphas replied one by one with the correct response. His words would reconfigure their very minds, making them fit for urban warfare. Making them not care that the people he was setting them on might have been their own families once. They would clear the street without mercy, set an example that would have the clave falling over itself to offer up its finest for the pool.
He had never considered himself a battlefield commander, but Burzulem would excoriate him over any waste and so he sent a couple of servo-skulls to hover over the fracas so that he could adjust the skitarii’s priorities. The locals had nothing going for them but construction tools and brute animal aggression, but the close confines meant they had been able to close with the skitarii, pitting themselves against the cybernetic strength of the Adeptus Mechanicus soldiers. The line of steel and red cloth held, gun butts bludgeoning away with a mechanical rhythm. One or two fell, though, and there were enough of the rioters that sheer mass was forcing the line back.
Triskellian hissed through his teeth at the indignity of it all and took quick stock of what resources were close by. At his signal, a pair of dragoons stalked in. He’d hoped their tall shapes would break the spirit of the crowd, but apparently things had advanced too far for that. It was time to exhaust some labour resources in order to teach a salutary lesson to the rest. He ordered the dragoons forward, watching their long legs carry them at a charge down the street, shoulder to shoulder, lances levelled. Behind them, a third tall shape moved into sight, one of the Ironstrider Ballistarii armed with a pair of autocannons.
Quite literally overkill. Briefly, he considered ordering the gun-platform to hold off, in case the Sydonians’ charge carried the day, but he was keenly aware of wasting time. There would always be more workers, but time was a resource both precious and irreplaceable. Fire, he signalled, and the operator loosed over the heads of the skitarii, a barrage of munitions thundering into the rear of the crowd, tearing apart their close-packed ranks. For a moment there was enough loose biology misting the air to send Burzulem into fits, and after that the spirit of the rioters was satisfactorily broken. As was the tenement building they had been pressed up against, in fact, the wall sloughing into the road and exposing a maze of little cells and rooms that had each been a family’s home. Plenty of the non-combatant denizens were under the rubble, but that still left plenty of them penned in by the skitarii, awaiting disposal.
He inloaded a replacement catechism for the lead alpha, allowing the cyborg to better assess each candidate. The infants and the strong for one wagon, the badly injured, sickly or maimed for another. Trimming away the scrap from the true, Burzulem would say. And those in-between would have the privilege of going back to their mines and manufactoria for the greater industry of the Adeptus Mechanicus.
The fighting at the far end of the street was almost done, now; just a few pockets of resistance as the workers were brutally disabused of their notions. Triskellian looked over the mass of penned humanity thoughtfully, then inloaded a slight variant to the regular catechism, waiting to see if the alpha would protest or return any errors. The officer went on sorting, though, now with a third category.
There were only a handful with the particular deviations he was interested in. If I cannot be in my laboratory, Triskellian decided, I will bring my research with me. He tested each cursorily, finding most to be no more than victims of bad air and toxic metals, twisted at birth or during the course of their rough lives. But there was one… He had devised his own diagnostic tool for work on the assassin. It reacted to the presence of certain curious properties, not usually found in human blood. It was an innovation, and he knew it was less than reliable, but where better to test it than in the field?
One particular subject: she had been badly injured by the collapse, but he could see she’d been strangely formed already. There was a cancerous-looking swelling about one armpit that might have been the stump of a vestigial limb. Her skull was long. She was clutching a string of beads in her hands, whimpering over a prayer: Emperor preserve me, Emperor catch me with your many hands. The rosary coiled through her fingers like a segmented worm.
‘Where is this woman from? Is she assigned for residency in this habclave?’ he demanded of the prisoners. He didn’t think so; he felt he was on the trail of a bloodline, not just random mutation. Where were all her relatives?
Someone came forwards, perhaps hoping to earn better treatment, or resenting the woman’s whining or the way she looked. Someone gave him a clave where they could be found.
There was a precisely worked-out itinerary for all the conscription pool squads, a series of exacting instructions on numbered lines like a program for the skitarii. He couldn’t just make on-the-fly decisions to divert the heart of his force for his own base curiosity.
Or, rather, the word was shouldn’t.
The biopsy material he had abstracted from the assassin had shown some very promising results when subjected to all manner of stressors. Suspiciously promising, he had to admit. Reacting to things that would kill a human almost as if the tissue welcomed the challenge. And he should – again should – recoil from differences that placed the results outside the safe corridor of human variance. Save that he saw a toolkit there, for strength and endurance. Such possibilities…
It is necessary that I investigate. I am only exercising the mind the Omnissiah blessed me with. And he was filing the changes, amending the program so that this squad slowed its advance, that squad deviated to cover the clave Triskellian had been about to advance into, while he…
He inloaded the data across the South Chasm districts, imagining the whole skitarii force faltering in lockstep as its priority list was rearranged. Obey me. And he was good at managing the troops, he knew. Burzulem and his favourites so seldom had to get their hands dirty with those sort of field logistics, and it wasn’t the first time they’d devolved menial duties onto ‘Visceral’ Triskellian. It meant that, come the crunch, he was better at coding instructions for the skitarii than they were.
‘Adept?’ The closest alpha was staring at him, or at least the cluster of lenses and hoses that was the man’s face had turned his way. Behind it, the surviving portions of his human mind would be wrestling with the new instructions, trying to fit them in with the existing plan. But it wasn’t for the skitarii to question their masters, and he just sent a reinforcement of his order that had the alpha scurrying to obey.
As simply as that, it was done. Triskellian would turn this circus into an opportunity for science. He had expanded the conscription pool protocols to create a third category of prisoner: research subjects.
And, if his conscience pricked him about going beyond the boundaries of his task, there was a decade of resentment built up in Gammat Triskellian to shout it down. Because he was at the very scalpel’s cutting edge of the Genetor order, tech-priests whose field of study was the human body and how it might be maintained, preserved and improved, and yet Burzulem and his clique cared nothing for it. Triskellian had presided over the autopsies of a score of skitarii who had collapsed when their living cores had been unable to sustain the pistoning fury of their prosthetics. He knew that the secret was not just to cut further. If the flesh could be strengthened, there would be no limit to the artificial extensions that might be made to the human body. But time and again he was denied.
‘The soft sciences,’ Burzulem would mouth. ‘Getting your hands dirty.’
And Alloysia would echo, ‘Unsanitary.’
If only it had not been him. Triskellian remembered, all those years ago, waiting to hear who would be appointed Fabricator General when the previous incumbent’s systems finally failed. There had been complex elections and negotiations, and the calculating engines had gorged on data from across the planet. He, Gammat Triskellian, had been a front runner. He had been poised to lead their world into a future of rediscovery and faith through experiment. Life had seemed so full of promise.
But Burzulem had beaten him to the post, preferred by their peers and favoured by the calculations of the engines. And in the many years since, Triskellian and his fellows had diminished, been overlooked, derided, consigned to the degrading and the menial. Wasted.
In that angry frame of mind, Triskellian and his troops marched into the clave that had supposedly produced the deviant. The full cage-wagons had been sent back to the Palatium and fresh empties had arrived. He was ready to reap whatever harvest this district would yield for him.
At first sight there was little difference here to the tenements he had already moved through, save that the walls were still intact and the streets were clear. Nobody had tried to throw up barricades or organise a futile resistance. The skitarii were already pounding on doors, and at first it seemed he had been lied to, that he had sinned by deviating from the prescribed plan, and gained himself nothing. The census was checked, line by line. A quota of children was offered up, meagre but within tolerance. There were precious few sick or feeble who could be taken as offerings. Suspiciously few, he might have said.
There were entries in the district records. These poor claves had suffered savagely in past generations. Earlier conscription pool visits had hollowed them out, and there had been mine accidents, a vitriol spill in the nearby factorum. There just weren’t many people here. Perhaps it was just an unlucky district, where superstitious workers always assumed the deformed or the destitute came from. Triskellian could feel his temper rising. I’m squandered on this dross.
Be calm. Go over the data. Because that was like counting over the beads of an abacus or calculating prime numbers. It was the baseline of mindful worship, centring his thinking into the channels and conduits that befitted a tech-priest. And so he ran through the most recent batch of metrics from these new conscripts, turning the figures over in his head.
And stopped.
So very healthy, every one of them. Strapping conscripts for the skitarii, or perhaps destined to be the pride of some Guard unit. Not a mutation amongst them.
Morod was not a healthy world. The baseline toxins in the air, food and water didn’t lead to robust people. Everyone outside the Palatium’s comforts was a little sick. Not this lot. As though they’d been specially selected for this very purpose. And Triskellian should have just counted himself blessed and moved on to the next district. Any other tech-priest would have.
‘Where’s the rest of them?’ he asked. A simple question nobody there had an answer to. And, when the skitarii and the locals alike stared at him dumbly, he said. ‘Move into the buildings. A room-by-room search.’ Because what he was seeing here was called, in the old texts, a skewed sample.
There was some protest when the skitarii kicked in the doors and shouldered their way into the tenements, but the locals’ gambit had given the impression of docile servility so well that they were in no position to resist now. That left Triskellian out on the street with his personal guard and the wagons, waiting to see what might be lurking under these newly overturned stones.
There was graffiti on the nearest buildings, he saw. Nothing strange there: it was just about the only means of personal expression the South Chasm denizens really had. And it was almost disappointingly orthodox, really. No pornography or obscenities or revolution. A badly proportioned picture of a smiling Emperor, raining little stars down on a host of little stick people who were standing with their twiggy arms upraised in jubilation. But the more he stared at it, the more disquieting he found it. What he’d thought was just a lack of artistic merit began to look more and more like a style he couldn’t quite appreciate. Surely that smile was too broad, almost ear to ear. And the Emperor was depicted with a fan of arms, so as to pour out all the more blessings on His subjects. And some of those stick figures, yes, they had more limbs than was strictly necessary…
‘Adept.’ A signal from the skitarii alpha. ‘Report – we have encountered inconsistencies with the clave-plan filed at the central archive.’
‘Elaborate?’ Triskellian pushed forwards, adjusting his receiver so that he could hear the words over the groan of tortured plascrete and dropping rubble. At his thought, a servitor skull floated in to see.
‘Unlicenced excavations beneath the tenement, adept. The whole area may be structurally unsound.’
For a moment he assumed it was some lost mineshaft, but the skitarii were clustered around a hatch set into the ground. Sent down, the servo-skull revealed a claustrophobic chamber with several low doorways leading to more, and then more. Rag-shrouded figures scurried away from the skull’s light, hiding their eyes. There were skitarii down there already, grabbing people and hauling them, pale and wormlike, up into the light and air. Others were still proceeding, down into chamber upon chamber, a host of scrambling, shambling denizens scurrying like rodents before them. The skull’s relaying eye caught sight of the marks of that peculiar run of mutations. The most deviant of them could have been cousins to the assassin, their skin shading to bruise colours, horny and cracked at the joints, their teeth pronounced and sharp, their eyes amber or red.
