Planetkill, page 13
And the Omnissiah was praised with unceasing industry. Tox-flues and convection stacks ran through the towering facility like veins, steering noxious waste into the rotten atmosphere and the curdled sea. In secure laboratoria, some even surrounded by void shields, wizened genetors created what natural biological processes could never devise. Their chemical creations were processed and refined in vacuum-sealed cauldrons, stretching across vast vat-galleries, which looked out over dead oceans. In filtration and infusion chambers, servitors were hard-wired into endless banks of support and monitoring machinery. Their organics were all but eroded by the corrosive toxins and, despite the durability of steel and plasticide tissue, many disintegrated within days of exposure.
Rottle’s cortical splicing had not only robbed him of knowing why he left Mars, but why he was part of this magnificent process. He calculated that his service in Martian genetoria had qualified him or perhaps won him preferment. Upon arrival, he was responsible for overseeing the purity-choirs that kept the Life-Eater’s toxins dormant during refinement, for calibrating gene-vats, and igniting the lumosphoids to ensure uncorrupted organics – all in the blessed name of the Omnissiah. He could no longer remember the risks involved. Glory unto the Omnissiah was all.
Adept Biologis Hieronym Rottle was one day promoted to Magos Biologis. It was his status when he interfaced with the core data-net. He did not remember when this happened.
He did remember that Archmagos Biologis Vaeyvor said that comprehension of risk was directly proportional to apprehension of self – and members of the Mechanicus were but the tiniest teeth in the smallest cogs of the Machine God’s infinite artifice. So it was during a moment of weakness when Rottle recalled his self that his story began. It was a moment of humanity, of which Rottle had little left, that burned the remainder away.
He had long ceased to calculate the passage of time in Standard Imperial increments – years, days, hours, and so on – because time had long ago become a measurement of only viral gestation, germination, and genetic refinement. But Hieronym Rottle did remember that planet-fall was a long, long time ago when he finally left his humanity behind.
The vat-gallery stretched across the entire spire’s width, capped at either end by great bulbous windows of strengthened plexi-glass. Despite the roaring thermals outside, the wind’s scream barely filtered into the gallery. At one end, Rottle inspected a gene-vat, checking ignition nodes and the gene-spool assembly. Sickly light yellowed the very air. Further down the gallery, darkness engulfed the endless rows of vats and cauldrons. Here, shadows fell away sharply before the shimmering plexi-glass.
The light suddenly changed. Darkness fell across Rottle’s back, swooping across the floor before him. He turned, servos whining with the discomfort of unfamiliar speed. He was reminded of Vaeyvor’s admonitions: the Machine God’s cogs need only turn the holy P’i-solute, they need not be quick. Rottle was unaccustomed to speed.
Beyond the plexi-glass, drifting towards the facility on boiling thermals, was a leviathan. The leviathans were native to the planet. They were enormous creatures, the size of a cargo lander, with great gas-filled sacs that gave them enough buoyancy to graze the upper atmosphere above the planet’s pollution. Vaeyvor said they were harmless, like the extinct whales of Terra. In the high thermals, they grazed upon krillions, microscopic bacteria that synthesized less poisonous pollutants and toxins. This allowed them to survive the vast extinctions that mankind’s presence had heralded on the planet, and instead they thrived. No other life existed, yet Rottle would occasionally consider the resilience of such weakling flesh with something akin to surprise – or at least what his remaining emotive centres recognized as the residual synaptic shudder of astonishment.
Yet this leviathan was dying. It had sunk into the bilious toxins of the ocean’s convection currents. Its skin was flaking and cracking as it slewed towards the facility. Its gas sacs were swollen and distended, livid and ugly. As Rottle watched, it wheeled round, flexing and gleaming in the sun’s pale light. One sac burst. A gout of watery gore fell away, then another, and another. The leviathan lunged at the facility, crashing like an orbital blimp.
There was very little humanity left in Magos Biologis Rottle, but there was enough to feel fear. His mandible-tines fluttered and his plasticide jowls quivered. One augmetic eye opened to unnatural size, telescoping polished lenses towards the oncoming leviathan. He calculated mass, acceleration, torque and trajectory. His throat had long ceased to conduct air through his mouth and his olfactory and nasal filters whined awkwardly. Rottle had lost the ability to scream long ago.
His augmented legs juddered as he determined the optimum direction for flight and the most hopeful place of safety. Strengthened plexi-glass might withstand bolter fire, but not a crashing leviathan. The entire spire could collapse. The servitor overhead continued to murmur its binary catechism, unaware of the imminent impact. Rottle leapt towards the overhang of the nearest gene-vat.
But that tiny part of humanity in Rottle was enough – just enough to cloud the cold certainty of calculation, to blur his tightly angled path of flight. Rottle struck the gene-vat head-on. Though only the size of a modest man, he weighed far more. Durasteel fittings and plasticide and rubbrete tissue all weighed much more than human organics. Rottle’s humanity was but a humble fraction of his mass. His momentum was immense.
The gene-vat shook, swayed, and settled – its legs buckled and the suspensor field growled and fizzed. Rottle staggered, almost losing sentient operable function – consciousness – and his auditory sensors shrilled with the impact.
In that moment, he never saw the long-dormant spire defences growl into action as gyros swivelled onto the incoming target. Several racks of Hurricane bolters – three linked boltguns – opened up and a furious torrent of hot metal strafed the leviathan. The Hurricanes blew great chunks of rancid meat from the creature, disintegrating it in a blizzard of shells. To the targeting scanners, the target simply evaporated. When Rottle looked, staggering and reeling, he saw nothing. Neither did he see three drops of dormant Life-Eater drop to the floor from the vat’s sizzling lip. Outside of the vat’s stasis field, the Life-Eater awoke.
‘A miracle,’ Rottle hissed weakly, marvelling at the leviathan’s disappearance. Then he collapsed, which was when the miracle really began.
Canyons sat between the cog’s teeth. They stretched into the distance to join the cog’s body, a great plateau made of iron. Across this burnished vastness, great engines and machines reared up against the horizon. The sky was pink, stained and slashed by swathes of coppered cloud. Rottle noticed the towering majesty of Olympus Mons, larger than he would ever have believed and, above it, in a strange orbit – that hardly calculated correctly – was Terra itself, all gleaming steel and chrome. Everything turned slowly, inevitably, reclaiming perfection from a forgotten past. From the greatest pounding of the giant cogs’ teeth to the sympathetic vibration of the tiniest gear, a binary hymn thundered into eternity.
It filled Rottle with life – even as what remained of his mortal body disintegrated in the vapours of the Life-Eater.
The great cog boomed its impossible rotation, its teeth grinding like glacial ice across the world before him. Arcane machines rumbled and screeched their praise to the Omnissiah. Bulbous pistons and grand, gargoyled chimney stacks belched forth great clouds of incense. Endless lines of venting spines spat out superheated air that roared into the thin atmosphere. It all echoed against the iron buttresses that towered above him like cliffs and the vast data-stacks that scratched the blooded sky like obsidian claws.
Above it all, the teeth of every cog and gear clicked and hammered their praise to the Omnissiah; endless arrangements of teeth, some sharp, some blunt, some jagged tessellations of impossibly complex angles, all sang their praise – like mouths of the Machine-God made manifest, like the Omnissiah speaking the binary truth of knowledge itself.
Rottle began to listen for meaning.
The binary thunder skipped a beat and lowered its tone. It gained awkward pitch and asymmetric rhythm.
It was then that the Omnissiah spoke to Hieronym Rottle.
‘My servant,’ the voice emanated. ‘You have come to me.’
Rottle’s mandible-tines fluttered. His vox failed him.
More words flowed from the endless majesty of Mars’s machinery fields. ‘I have watched you. I have come to make your destiny. I have come to teach you the weakness of flesh.’
Rottle’s vox-piece couldn’t compete with the sheer scale of sound that the Omnissiah vocalized. All he managed was a prolonged and pathetic Yes.
‘I have come to show you the destiny of all flesh, Hieronym Rottle. I have come to turn your Life-Eater into the death of fleshed and living form. I have come to show you knowledge.’ There was a strange ecstasy in the Omnissiah’s words. Rottle recognized it: the adoration of uncorrupted information, perfect data, purest knowing. ‘That is, Hieronym Rottle, if you will listen.’
Rottle’s neck sheath flexed as he nodded. His beard of trim mechadendrites lapsed into flaccid obeisance as he listened. While his mortal remains liquefied in the vapours of the Life-Eater, the Omnissiah showed Rottle everything.
‘A miracle,’ said a hushed voice.
‘Indeed,’ conceded another, his speech falling away into a grating fizzle. ‘But permissible?’ The intonation turned into an electronic whine like a vox-caster switching channels.
‘2.05%, Archmagos Biologis Vaeyvor. His remains constitute the Lex Organicum, He is still human. The chassis cybernetics and servitor systems have not compromised his humanity.’
‘Extraordinary, adept. The probability of his survival was less than a deciota underpowered to the fifth quarter. A mathematical miracle – something I believed that the Omnissiah spurned.’
‘My lord?’ Wonder and disbelief mingled in the adept’s voice. There was too much humanity there for Vaeyvor’s liking.
‘The Omnissiah works by knowledge alone,’ the archmagos replied severely. ‘This is an unprecedented incident, but a numerically permissible one.’ It was only unprecedented in so far as the Holy Ordos remained ignorant of Rottle’s accident and recovery. Other permissible incidents had occurred in the past – such as the flensing of Reppertrix Straynge on Crux II or the ascension of Enginseer Heliope – but the Ordos would descend upon the Mechanicus and eradicate all records and recollections. Vaeyvor rarely regretted such culling, but it was such a waste of tech-priests and magi. Only Vaeyvor knew of these incidents by the gaps in his labyrinthine memory, the names without things that were like negative impressions of an ancient pict-stealer. What he knew was that the Holy Ordos had worked against the glories of the Omnissiah, and that Umbracogg was now one of the few places in the galaxy that such a miracle might take place undiscovered because it simply didn’t exist in the wider records of the Adeptus Terra. Perhaps that was the miracle: it was secret, permissible.
‘Should we proceed?’
‘Yes. Activate his higher functions,’ grated Vaeyvor.
‘Thy will be done, in the name of the Omnissiah.’
An electrostatic charge filled the air and power routers thrummed. With Rottle now largely a being of ceramite and steel, his power core required a great jolt of energy. His remaining flesh was kept preserved within external flexi-glass suspension wafers that insulated it from the power core’s energy field.
The facility’s chirurgeons had remarked upon the strange quality of Rottle’s remaining flesh. Contaminated by the Life-Eater, it should have broken down into the chemical sludge that was capable of devouring more resilient proteins, such as keratin and chitin, as well as bone. But Rottle’s remaining soft tissue was oddly resilient, if rotten and suppurating, and the chirurgeons only dismissed the puzzle because they assumed Rottle to be dead. That any flesh had remained was perhaps the greatest miracle of all.
The flexi-glass wafers shuddered as the charge continued to build. A great, low frequency groan broke across the vaulted apothecarion. For Rottle, it was the noise of consciousness. He returned to the materium shaking with the trauma of his own rebirth.
The light was harsh. He felt lumen-filtrators slide over his ocular lenses as they focused. His lenses were more mobile than before, as if mounted on tenticular armatures or mechadendrites. His companions fell into focus. There was an adept, very much bound by flesh, whose only modifications were neural braces and socketing arrangements that poked sorely through the flesh of his jawline. His eyes, both organic, peered back at Rottle nervously. He was young; there was too much humanity in his pale face.
The other figure was Archmagos Biologis Vaeyvor, hooded in his familiar cowl. As he spoke, vox-tendrils swung into sight below his hood. They curled and flowed with something akin to curiosity, or uncertainty.
‘Magos Biologis,’ Vaeyvor said, rasping as softly as his vox-tendrils allowed. ‘Welcome.’ He looked at the adept and nodded. The adept punched a button. Rottle noticed a cantilevered arm swing into his peripheral vision before it plunged into his chest. He expected pain, but felt only the smooth impalement of a broad-breadth data spike. He didn’t know that he had a data-port there, but before he could feel the shock of intrusion, before his ocular lenses could flare in surprise, he was engulfed by the sheer pleasure of a data-stream download far faster than he had ever experienced before.
Everything became clear.
There was less humanity in Magos Biologis Hieronym Rottle than most servitors, but he was still a man. His sentience had been preserved and his humanity remained in the flexi-glass wafers that dotted his ceramite chassis. To isolate his humanity like this was… liberating. He fluttered his mandible-tines with satisfaction.
Then it happened. The memory of Olympus Mons, Terra’s strange orbit above the machine-fields, of Mars’s piston-and-cog hymn to the Omnissiah, and of the Omnissiah Himself – it all flooded back into Rottle’s consciousness with a data-torrent that blew back across the data-spike and destroyed most of the power routers.
The gloom of Archmagos Biologis Vaeyvor’s deep hood flashed with a constellation of lumen-alarms, optic-bulbs, and visual sensors. He peered forward, looking intently at the prostrate form of Rottle’s body-chassis.
‘Magos Biologis,’ Vaeyvor hissed. ‘What is this?’ He gestured at the smoking power routers and the data-spike sizzling in Rottle’s new data-port.
With the memory of his vision returned to him, along with his consciousness, Rottle felt something akin to delight – and it was with elation that he realised his memories had reached out through the data-spike into the local system network. They now existed independently of his own mind, merging with the apothecarion’s machine-spirit. Vaeyvor now shared in their glory and knew the answer before Rottle even spoke.
‘My miracle, archmagos,’ Rottle said weakly. ‘The Omnissiah spoke to me.’
‘I…’ Vaeyvor paused, his vox-piece grinding into a deep growl of scepticism. ‘I see.’
‘I have been told a great secret, an idea, beat out by the holy machinery of Mars. The Omnissiah conveyed knowledge to me from the forgotten past.
‘I can improve the Life-Eater, my lord. I can perfect it. I have been blessed by a revelation of pure knowledge that only the Omnissiah could bestow. I can create the instant destruction of our enemies by robbing the living of life itself, by taking from existence the weakness of being!’
‘We do not have the technology to replicate vortex weaponry, magos,’ responded Vaeyvor. ‘Using such a weapon against a planet would create dangers beyond our understanding. The Life-Eater need only sterilize, not obliterate. We seek only to take life, not matter.’
‘My point exactly, archmagos. The new Life-Eater will take only life, not matter, nor any creation of the materium. It will attack the very spark of life and destroy only those beings whose being marks them as living.’
The archmagos paused, gears grinding quietly until a hiss indicated the release of internal coolants. Vaeyvor was calculating probabilities, possibilities, solutions and scenarios. ‘The very spark of life?’
‘Yes, my lord.’
‘From the god-like Astartes to the lowest of the underhive?’
Rottle nodded his prehensile optical sensors. The sensation was strange.
More coolants hissed from inside Vaeyvor’s voluminous cloak. ‘From the highest aquila of the Terran sky to the deepest ocean scumling?’
Rottle nodded again, aware that Vaeyvor was intoning the Catechism of Cleansing. He knew what came next.
‘From purest sentience to bestial instinct – the eradication of living existence?’
‘Oh yes, my lord,’ responded Rottle with certainty. ‘I can promise the very eradication of life. The Life-Eater has never been so hungry as I shall make it.’
More coolant hissed from under Vaeyvor’s cloak as he continued to process the situation. As archmagos, his own operational systems were soft-wired into those of the facility. He had seen Rottle’s vision himself, shown to him by the apothecarion’s own machine-spirit.
He nodded, small puffs of decompressed gas escaping from the lip of his hood as he did so. ‘It seems that the miracle of your survival, magos, is but part of a greater whole, something far more miraculous indeed.’ Vaeyvor’s vox was hushed, reverential, little more than a mechanical croak. His vox-tendrils soothed the shape of each word. ‘It is our purpose to pursue knowledge, to reclaim ancient learning, to forge the perfection of the blessed Machine, to fashion the Omnissiah’s very divinity for Himself. Is it not?’
‘It is, my lord,’ responded Rottle. The adept remained silent.
Vaeyvor continued to assess the situation. Many of the chirurgeons and tech-medicae had been unaware of Rottle’s identity. They assumed he would become little more than a mechanical corpse in the service of the Machine God. To let Rottle live now would risk unwelcome attention; to let him die might betray the Omnissiah Himself. But he could be buried in shielded laboratoria for years, hidden in the facility’s poisonous depths, where few dared tread, or trod without dying. The secrets of the Machine-God could be made manifest secretly, and one day unleashed in the glorious name of the Emperor. No one knew of Rottle’s recovery. Except the adept.
