Planetkill, page 17
‘The Planet Killer comes, young Ghuul,’ wheezed the unison drone of the Nine in his ear. ‘How do we fare?’
It was a spurious question. Ghuul was permanently uplinked to the data-altar now. His knowledge was as immediately available to the Nine as it was to him. But despite the patronising tone, the Nine were deferring to Ghuul, architect of their salvation.
‘Seventy-four point three per cent, my lords,’ he replied anyway. ‘My calculations show that we need at least seventy-five point one per cent output to provide protection against even the least ambitious estimate of the Planet Killer’s power.’
‘There is no shortage of menials?’
It certainly seemed that way if one were unable to see beyond the walls of Artem Prime, he thought spitefully. But in fact they had already consumed over sixty per cent of the menial population. Artem Tertius, Peripheral and Zonal Geiger had already been shut down, their entire menial population stripped to feed the machine. Even now, his obedient tech-priests were stripping out every hard-wired servitor form they could access, shipping them in sealed stasis containers for annihilation.
Ghuul could not imagine what use its alien designers had intended for the Annihilator, but into its insatiable maw a thousand more desperate volunteers marched every hour. Each fresh death, each new release of life-force, pushed the generator’s output higher towards the vital one hundred per cent marker…
‘No,’ Ghuul agreed at last. ‘You’re right. There is no shortage of expendable flesh.’
He understood what had to be done to protect his world.
They screamed as they were put through. No one else had screamed. Hundreds of thousands of menials had marched like stunned cattle through the gates of the Annihilator. The twitching quadriplegic forms of disconnected servitors were pushed or carried through without even a moan. But when Udo and Moritz brought a team to rip the Fabricator Lords from their places in the House of Nine, the ancient magi yelled and hissed in protest. When, without a word of explanation, they were carried into the streets, into the bright sunshine of Celare Artem, they wailed at the touch of natural light as ragged sockets dripped milky, pink fluid onto the granite pavings. And, as blank-eyed menials carried their limp, oil-crusted bodies across the lintel of the Portico Publicum, they screamed in terror and final understanding until, in a perfect instant of disembodiment, their voices were stilled.
The sudden silence seemed to roll across the packed square of the Temple Courtyard and down the heaving avenues and into the immense forests. It was Moritz, lurking at his elbow, as she had been for weeks, who broke the silence first, but her voice was a whisper: too quiet for Ghuul’s audio-receptors.
‘What?’ Ghuul turned to look at her. But her eyes were fixed upon the towering door of the Temple. Her scarred features had gone slack and her arms hung limp, as if she had died but not yet fallen over. Her lips moved again and Ghuul was about to increase his audio-input when he heard the same whisper roll across the crowd in the square: the susurration of waves upon a shore as the dark clouds banked upon the horizon.
‘Φόβος.’
The word hissed off the lips of every face in the immense square. It slithered from the mouths of his assistants and clicked from the oro-emitters of his servitor bodyguards. It sighed from the tannoy systems. And in the deep recesses of the most ancient Stacks, it hummed and sparked from the data vault’s dark, alien heart.
Ghuul looked wildly about himself, desperate to find the source of the sudden, strange change in his people. But even as he thought to retreat, he found himself pinned in place by the weight of the optic cable attached to his skull, which his servitor attendants had dropped at the same moment as the word ‘Φόβος’ spilled from their slack and bloodless mouths. And then the crowd was moving. As one, they surged towards the Annihilator. All regard for Ghuul’s authority codes was gone, now. He was jostled and pushed. The cable was kicked and stepped on and tripped over and, with its wild movements, Ghuul was himself jerked about like a puppet, driven with the crowds towards the gaping space of the Portico Publicum.
‘No!’ he shrieked, and thought suddenly of the desperate, terrified Fabricator Lords whom he had sent to the same fate, minutes before.
But, even as the surging crowd thrust him to within a few feet from the Annihilator, the cable on his skull reached the end of its extent and yanked him to an irresistible halt. The ranks of his people surged around him, a stream around a rock, into the teeth of the humming portal.
Moritz rushed past him without so much as a backward glance and he whimpered after her as she stepped into eternity. It was over in a split second, but in that moment he saw, first, her robes disintegrate, then her peripheral augmentations, her skin – flaying her to the wet muscle – the soft tissue, bones and organs… all stripped apart to their constituent atoms in a fraction of a second. But by then, dozens more had hit the field, their bodies ripped to nothing as their life-force was siphoned away by the hunger of the shield generator.
The passivity of the crowd was crumbling. The slower movers were crushed beneath the urgent feet and tracks of the faster. Legless cataphracti, having torn themselves from their vehicles, dragged themselves on broken fingers towards the portico. Others turned on their neighbours, beating them to the floor or slashing them apart with mechanical attachments. With disbelieving eyes, Ghuul watched those on the periphery, unable to reach the portal, slicing apart their own flesh or hurling themselves from the windows and bridges that criss-crossed the city to hasten their inevitable destructions. And in his head – inescapable as the annihilation of his people – Ghuul felt the power output of the shield generator creep inexorably upwards.
As it passed the ninetieth percentile, he somehow found the strength to shift himself and his data-feed off to the side of the unending flow of bodies. Udo stumbled past him, seizing his master by the robes as he fell.
‘Φόβος!’ the young acolyte screamed into Ghuul’s uncomprehending eyes, his face pale with terror. ‘Φόβος!’
And the next second, Udo was torn away by the weight of the crowd, rushing with them into the green light of the Annihilator.
Desperate now, Ghuul reached up to the data-feed and wrenched at its connection to his skull. The pain of the uncontrolled disconnection sent shocks like blunt needles through his brain, snatching the breath from his lungs. But the angle of the feed was wrong: too far around the back of his skull to get both hands to it firmly. The feed was still live. Mindlessly, it plunged the frantic tendrils of his consciousness deep into the wash of data to make sense of the word that rang through Ghuul’s mind.
Φόβος … [‘foυ.bαs]… Phobos… First moon of Mars… Of course, it was. He had seen it, four hundred years ago, through the porthole of the shuttle above the surface of the holy Red Planet… A tiny, tumbling thing, not even big enough to be spherical, pitted with craters like the scars of a pox.
Φόβος … [‘foυ.bαs]… Phobos… ‘There was Phobos, unspeakable, staring backwards with eyes that glowed with fire… His mouth was full of teeth in a white row, fearful and daunting, and upon his grim brow hovered frightful Strife who arrays the throng of men…’
Phobos. Fear. Humans of ages past had christened the moon of Mars after their primitive god of fear before they had ever, really, understood what fear was. In the star-heart of his agony Ghuul’s ego disintegrated before the force of unquenchable terror. No simple human fear was this that had lain in wait in those ancient stacks, but an ancient, alien Beast of Fear. And now Fear walked on Celare Artem; not the Beast itself, but the echo of its true touch, resounding through space and time to reverberate in the minds of Ghuul’s people: the descendants of the first settlers who had chained it in the darkness and plundered its secrets.
Let loose by the call of their mundane fear of the Planet Killer, the Beast had reached out to make Ghuul its unwitting avatar. How gleefully he had spread its infection across his world through the defence shield, sustaining itself through the Annihilator. He was the Judas goat that led his people to the slaughter…
From so far away, the Beast reached to him across the stars. From beyond the Gates of Varl…
Defence field integrity 100%.
With the terrible strength of sudden and irrevocable madness, Ghuul wrenched the cable from his skull. A shriek of pain and exultation escaped his throat as he fell to his knees, the data-feed writhing and hissing sparks in the vice of his fist. As the life of the cable gradually died away, the silence of emptiness rolled in across the great square of the Portico Publicum and the great, glowing, green eye of the Annihilator stared down at Ghuul in wordless satisfaction.
Celare Artem is dead.
The forests grow and the seas tumble with joyful density of life and both encroach slowly upon the silent paths of the empty cities.
In the sky, the satellites click and beam strange powers that hiss with the whispers of the dead from one to another and on to the next in a never-ending web of impenetrable defence, and below them the machines go on. But the boulevards are empty. The temples echo to the dripping of water and the occasional, tentative, scampering paws of a daring rodent. Fleets of ships sit forgotten on immense landing strips, their crew quarters empty and their passenger sections vacant. The blast marks of a single departing shuttle are stripped slowly away by a tropical storm…
A scratchy voice, distorted by white noise, crackled from the brass grille on the astrovox console. Midshipman Leon McCabe leaned forward, trying to make out the mangled words through the crackle of aethyric interference.
‘…but we have heard that the Planet Killer is making way for Celare Artem, can you confirm?’
‘What are you listening to, midshipman?’ asked the Officer of the Watch from an inch away from his ear, startling McCabe into an involuntary yelp.
‘Residual astropathic echoes, sir!’ he replied, sharply. ‘From Celare Artem, beyond the Beltane Gate disturbance. I’m trying to patch them together. Time stamp is thirty days ago.’
‘Idiots,’ growled the lieutenant, turning away. ‘The Planet Killer hasn’t left the Eye for decades. The Mechanicus are jumping at ghosts, as usual. Let that be a lesson to you, midshipman. Listening to injurious rumour and gossip is punished by flogging for a reason!’
‘Yes, sir.’
SEVEN VIEWS OF UHLGUTH’S PASSING
Matthew Farrer
Uhlguth swims in delirium and basks in the endless transforming tides that wash and storm out from the Great Wound. Uhlguth is powerful and precious, eternal and corroding and consuming and growing. Uhlguth is mighty. Uhlguth is insignificant. Uhlguth is in mourning.
Uhlguth’s master has left it. From somewhere out beyond the reach of Uhlguth’s awareness came a master for Uhlguth’s master, a warlord whose bitter consciousness prickled at Uhlguth’s senses like a hot needle. He was making a kind of war not seen in this place in many lifetimes, hammering all the little masters into a great mass and carrying his new struggle to some great outer place beyond Uhlguth’s understanding. Uhlguth’s beautiful master took all his warrior-children who rode Uhlguth’s back through the eternal fever-storm, and followed the hot-souled little master away.
Uhlguth knows its own might, its own value. Other masters have tried to steal it before. Soon they will try again. Even now it can feel the first of the ambitious would-be masters trying to enchain it.
Uhlguth has never been alone before. Uhlguth misses its master. Uhlguth does not want a new master. Uhlguth wants its old master. Uhlguth knows what it has to do.
View the First: In The Throne Room
The chamber is smaller than the orbit of an electron…
…except when it flickers out to light years in width at the touch of an observer’s senses.
It is built of unbreakable stone and daemon-tusk ivory…
…except that when the observer looks away the place is nothing but giggling shadows and vacuum.
It is crowded with predatory shades and spite-twisted dream-things…
…but if the enthroned prince should ever lift his gaze he will see his hall full of nothing but solitude.
The creature perching on the back of the throne clicks its beak, shivering with amusement as echoes assemble the random sounds into coded meanings that twist and change. It is restive, longing to caper in immaterial storms with its kin, but its master’s command binds it to this court as an ambassador until its master’s fancies change.
At that thought the feathered thing (which has had many names or perhaps none, names are things to wear lightly, everything changes so why should not a name?) gives a screech of glee, setting the swarming shades squealing.
Its master’s fancies change, indeed! Its master is the Great Conspirator, the Cartographer of Fate, the Damnation Oracle, master of complexities and subtleties to test the wit of gods, Puppet Master, Grandfather of Sorcerers, the First and Final Manipulator! The feather-thing bounces and caws, heaping titles upon its master in gleeful obeisance. His master is the master of cunning, conspiracy and control. Why would the embodiment of deep and cunning control turn his own plans to naught on a passing fancy?
Cackling, the ambassador launches itself into space, wings scraping rainbows out of the emptiness, talons flashing from colourless ivory to sparkling glass, emerald teeth extruding from its beak and then vanishing.
Succumb to a passing fancy? How could he prevent himself? For his master is not his master for his master is nobody’s master. His master is the Changer of Ways, the Capricious Soul, the King of the Court of the Lords of Change, randomness, rebirth, surrender to endless patternless whimsy. How can an embodiment of the warp’s endless froth of entropy resist undoing patterns, even its own?
The ambassador, feathers changing from pure light to clacking blades of bone joined with cobalt-blue smoke, turns lazy somersaults above the throne, talking contentedly to itself. It talks to itself of what a thing it is to be a creature such as itself. It considers the faculty of raw instinct, finding its echo in the feather-thing’s blood-and-brass-clad cousins. The faculty of senses comes alive in the elegant blasphemies serving its master’s youngest sibling, their yearning lives and rapturous deaths. To its melancholy rivals, the devotees of rot, it assigns no faculty at all: they are defined, the ambassador decides, by their abandonment of their faculties and their slide into mortified despair. And then there is its own scintillating master who, the ambassador declares, embodies the faculty of intellect.
And so here is what his intellect understands: that his master defies intellect. He is the patron of learning and he is the embodiment of treacherous mis-meaning that renders learning false. He is the architect of a thousand conspiracies and he is the churning randomness that brings plans to ruin. He is the brightest light of the mind and he is the unknowable shape squatting in the shadows cast by that light. All the warp is contradiction, for the nature it is to melt reality until the impossible cannot help but exist. His master is impossibility at its purest, the harmony and uniting of X and not-X, making of them symmetries that flower like a Mandelbrot set, each petal breaking into its own beautiful and recursive contradictions down to infinity.
Circling, the ambassador sings to itself of hate and self-hate and the paradox of un-nature. The warp is a place of un-form, un-logic, free of suffocating order. But the echoes of little minds living in arid space imprint that joyous formlessness, stamping it into thought-forms they do not even realise they are creating. They populate the great sea with mirrors of their own pitifully bound minds, each thought-form a maddening coffin for a consciousness that hungers to dissolve back into blissful energy.
But those imaginations also stamp on them the greatest urge of living things: the imperative to survive. Every moment is a war. Hating their imposed forms they yearn to dissipate, and hating the thought of dissipation they savagely cling to individual existence. Who can wonder that their manifestations are so fierce, that their violence is so unending?
Only its master truly understands, the ambassador thinks smugly as it hangs in the air. Only its master has fought the contradiction by embracing it, weaving paradoxical natures so deep into its own soul that it has perforce become the master of paradox and anti-logic, warping the meaning of meaning into something it can live within. What a beautiful timbre of existence there is to be had in the service of the fundamental contradiction at that existence’s core!
Its thoughts swirl and its reverie breaks. True to its nature its whim changes: enough contemplation! It craves diversion! The rustling thought-imps chitter and gossip as they sense their fickle lord’s thoughts shift. Out through ever-coalescing walls the ambassador sends a gaze like a blue-white metal breeze wrapped in wiry red foam, roaming through space turbid with warpspill from the Wound, stamping patterns onto what it touches even as it blasts those patterns back into formlessness, wrenching out meanings and understandings that no mortal sense or mind could perceive.
Hot like a battleship’s lance and cold as a traitor’s heart, its gaze falls on Uhlguth.
What a specimen! The winged daemon coos as it spins on a pinion and flexes its claws. So much for the feathered ambassador to delight in, so many clashes of meaning and qualities turned back upon themselves. Here is a fierce, burning loyalty, which the creature sees as a many-dimensional cone shining from Uhlguth’s body; here is the rebuff and abandonment that comes to it as chilly echoes of Uhlguth’s spirit-cries. Loyalty its own curse, its own death sentence. A little crude for the ambassador’s exquisitely subtle appetites for contradiction and betrayal, but rich savour nonetheless: miserable, gormless questing along a cold and useless trail, anger, misery, doomed hopes.
The ambassador’s gaze draws out a cascade of mirages in Uhlguth’s bow-wave, backward echoes thrown along the curve of time. It sees Uhlguth brought to bay among nests of shining worms whose songs span the stars. It sees fortresses break, shattering starships tattoo Uhlguth’s skin with fusion fire, whole worlds sent reeling and cracked open. It sees terror and agony, the shriek of broken chains and the click of mechanical eyes watching Uhlguth’s corpse.
