Carcharadons: Void Exile, page 10
Voldire attempted to address the faculty, but was sick instead. As he wiped soupy effluvium from his lips, Vost scurried forward and genuflected before the festering ark.
‘Praise the Infernal Architect for your return, my great and forever-tenured datagnost,’ he intoned from the rusting arches of his vox-grille. ‘Everything is beginning to stir. My own students are currently offering fivefold praises throughout the workshop and foundry levels. Surely, the time is nearly upon us!’
Voldire saw that his fellow academic was correct. The misshapen sacs and birthing cysts that bloated the flesh deck all around his ark were writhing, talons and fanged maws pressing against the taut membranes. The vessel’s heartbeat was strong, vital. He was not the only one rising from his slumber.
‘It does me good to see so much of the faculty assembled,’ he declared, his voice hoarse. ‘The portents are fine indeed, but are they supported by evidence? By verifiable, empirical data?’
‘We believe so, my datagnost,’ Milner Krost said. Every word he spoke was backwards, a curious blessing indeed, but the transcription device he had invented, and which had been stitched into his vocal cords, reversed his speech, rendering it more understandable.
‘The spirits of the sensorium have addressed us loudly and clearly,’ he said. ‘The world of the unenlightened lies before us. The Mother-of-Them-All has led us straight and true, just as the Infernal Architect intended! Tuptuo war eht si ereh.’
The final sentence was garbled as Krost’s vocal regulator glitched, but its meaning was clear enough as one of his students scampered forward and held up a bone-edged data-slate in trembling hands, eyes averted from Voldire’s towering, fivefold-blessed form.
He took the slate and grunted, momentarily brushing aside one of the imps hacking at a swelling neck growth as he applied his focus to the information delivered to him.
It was accurate, as per Krost’s statement. The Mother-of-Them-All had almost reached her long-awaited destination.
‘It is time to awaken our kin,’ Voldire stated, feeling a surge of anticipation. ‘At long last, we shall bring the light of true science to our old home.’
CHAPTER IX
There was a figure standing in the middle of the astropathic chamber.
Binharic Attendant Master Twei-Seventeen experienced the nearest thing to fear his machine-stunted emotions had known in a very long time. He checked his twin optic units for any signs of malfunction, but both were operating flawlessly. The sight they were sending to Twei’s circuit-inlaid brain was not some program phantom or false simulation.
There was a giant in the choristorium, in the centre of one of the most heavily guarded places on Diamantus. Shadows coiled and writhed about him, and the light of the lumens dimmed. The very air itself seemed murky, unclear. Twei recoiled, his mental implants struggling to compute the correct response.
‘Do not be afraid,’ the giant said, in High Gothic. ‘No harm will come to you or your charges. I will need them for only a moment.’
The figure was carrying a staff, and he raised it and spoke words that were not High Gothic, nor Low, nor Lingua Technis. Words that Twei’s encoding refused to permit him to understand.
The astropaths that were Twei’s charges began to writhe in the embryo fluids filling their transmission coffins. There were half a dozen hardwired into the psi-reactive metals of the choristorium’s floor, forming Diamantus’ astropathic choir, its only means of swift interstellar communication. As binharic attendant master, Twei-Seventeen was responsible for handling the choir, capturing the raw vision-messages they received, and sanctifying and authorising those that needed to be sent. The arcane workings of the machinery that aided his duties were known only to him and a few others on Diamantus.
The séance boards that formed part of his control lectern started to light up. The vitae signs of the choir spiked. Energy fizzed through the transmission coffins, the pallid, wasted things within thrashing in the throes of a warp fever dream.
The shadowed giant was sending a message.
That should not have been possible. The proper litanies had not been spoken, the techno-invocations had not been made. Twei had blessed and authorised no message, and yet one was being sent.
The bell above his station tolled, confirming the transmission.
‘Stop,’ he finally cried out, accidentally speaking in binharic before reverting to the same tongue the giant had used. But the figure was already disappearing, dematerialising before Twei’s very optics, pulled apart by the same shadows that had silently birthed him.
The lumens regained their potency, and the astropaths ceased their frantic disturbance, vitae signs becoming steady and regular once more.
Finally, belatedly, Twei-Seventeen triggered the alarm impulse.
As skitarii rushed in, their consciousnesses attempting to interface with his own so he could identify the threat to them, he hurried over to the enoptromantic mirror that hung above the transmission node, offering both prayers for forgiveness and requests for aid and clarity as he fitted his hands into the circuit gauntlets. They danced across the scrying boards, the ancient mechanisms concealed behind the clouded mirror starting to tick.
He looked into the murky surface, at his own unclear reflection, his bionic eyes seeing the data he had called up slowly swimming to the surface, like an old pict that took time to resolve itself on imprint paper.
He had demanded to know the contents of the message the giant phantom had sent, but it was scrambled, even the emotional stamp of it too foreign to Twei for him to be able to understand. The destination was translatable though. He scurried to another station and called up star charts and the triangulator, his actuators twitching with unsanctified, nervous impulses.
He sought to trace where the message had gone, the buzzing demands of the skitarii for clarification growing more strident as he ignored them. He had expected to find the recipient on some distant world, some great and terrible fortress, or perhaps even within the illogical warp horrors of the Great Rift or the Maelstrom or the Eye.
But the message had gone to none of those places. He repeated his requests, retraced its passage through the empyrean two, three times, until he had to accept, via logical deduction, that his own machines were not lying to him.
The message had gone out to nowhere. To deep space. Into oblivion, the blackness, the void where nothing could, or should, live.
Binharic Attendant Master Twei-Seventeen could not begin to compute who, or what, had received it.
Khauri shuddered in his armour; without its support, and the staff in his grip, he might have collapsed.
He was back in the space he had claimed in Megafactorum Primus, a spoil caretaker’s office. He had convinced the overseer who usually occupied the lean-to adjacent to the slag heap to vacate it for the next few days. The man had fled without protest.
The door was barred, the window shutters closed, and markings had been chalked out over the bare floor. Small candles, placed at each point of the pentagram he had inscribed at the room’s centre, guttered as Khauri fought to recover.
The effort of unmaking the wards guarding the astropathic spire and forcing its choir to transmit his message had almost broken him. He had experienced the panic of a swimmer realising they had struck out too far from shore. But he had turned back, just in time. He looked at the shadows crowding in on him, glaring at them, hating them. Hating the power they gave him – the power that still, after almost a century, made the old scars on his back ache.
He whispered the evocations necessary to banish the darkness, until only one piece of it remained, deeper than all the rest. He looked into the heart of it, took a breath, and spoke again, in the foul language it understood most clearly.
‘Not today.’
The shadow receded, until there was only a hint of darkness beyond the candle glow, nothing more.
He had done what needed to be done. Perhaps it was too late, but he had been instructed to hold out for as long as possible, until there was no other hope.
His skull ached, always a sure sign of approaching disaster. He only hoped he hadn’t waited too long before sending the call out into the deeps.
Battle-Gnostic Volv had been ordered to provide an update, and was bound by his programming to comply.
He drove data demands into the mind-cores of the servitors and the lesser adepts tending to the macrocannon platform’s augur stations, making them flinch.
The command apex’s control chamber was in darkness, apart from the aching glow of the oculus stands and viewscreens and the flickering light of the votive candles dripping their wax onto the tops of the targeting cogitators. Volv shifted in his interface cradle, grinding the nubs of his teeth together in frustration as he waited.
Delays disrupted the divine rhythms of the harmonious binary. His station, ODP/01, was the largest of Diamantus’ orbital defence platforms, and he would not be the last to report back to the Fabricator General.
He reviewed the previous set of scans in an effort to ease his mind while he waited for the latest one to finish, magnified pict captures and data screeds flashing up on the inlaid glassplex of his cradle. They showed the approaching danger, the abomination drawing with slow inevitability towards Diamantus.
Other Imperial assets had apparently given it a name, as befitted their superstitious ways – Grim Destiny – but to the Adeptus Mechanicus it was identified simply as threat marker 0.00.1.0. And a threat it undoubtedly was. Volv felt revulsion run through his circuitry as he reviewed it.
The idea that it was a space-going ship at all was difficult for his mind engrams to quantify. It was the size of one of Diamantus’ small moons, and indeed part of it appeared to be composed of some sort of stellar body, likely an asteroid. Into that frigid rock had been jammed all manner of smaller vessels. The sensorium scans that had already been run on the huge anomaly had detected a range of ship classes, ranging from Civil Fleet merchantmen, including Universe-class mass conveyors and Carrack haulers, to war frigates and cruisers of the Imperial Navy. Some specific vessels had even been identified via visible keel tags or structural returns, all of them lost from Imperial records aeons ago. They had returned now, crammed and meshed together as though by the hand of some idiotic, capricious child. Volv deleted the comparison from his mind, deciding that metaphors were beneath him, but there was certainly no denying that the detritus of the galaxy had come together and created a monstrosity.
The primary thrust of the Fabricator General’s update demands involved a report on how long it would be before threat marker 0.00.1.0 approached the maximum range of the weapons batteries bristling from the defence platforms ranged above Diamantus. The information reached Volv in fragments and fractions via the info-packets collated from the augur stations. He refined it, sifted it for clarity of meaning, paring it down to the essentials, so that those he was about to transmit it to did not have to. Tardiness was a grievous sin, but a confused or poorly composed report was even more unthinkable.
His gaunt, circuit-inlaid fingers danced over his interface cradle’s runeboards, composing the final section and attaching the raw data as evidence addenda to the primary message.
>Threat marker 0.00.1.0 will cross maximum range threshold in one hour, six minutes and three seconds, Terran standard, as of transmission<
He affixed his digi-seal, turned a series of crypt keys and intoned a verse of the Seventeenth Omnissiac Canticle, then bade the Master of Transference strike with his hammer against the node of communication.
With a clang and a screed of Lingua Technis praise, the message launched, carried through the ether via the noosphere, down to the pickup arrays bristling atop the Pinnacle of Mount Antikythera.
Volv settled back into the nest of wires plugging him directly into the defence platform’s command apex, permitting himself a moment’s relief from the imperatives programmed into his consciousness. Then he snapped at his underlings, lashing out with demands of his own. It would take precious time for the macrocannon battery to be primed and sanctified for its opening salvo. The neighbouring platforms likewise had yet to prepare their weaponry and acquire sanctioned target locks. It was time to remind both the platform’s crew and his fellow battle-gnostics that Diamantus was at war.
Grim Destiny or threat marker 0.00.1.0 – it did not matter what it was called. What mattered was that, in just over one hour, the blessed weaponry that the Omnissiah had placed at Volv’s disposal would break it to pieces.
Sharr hauled on a gigantic valve wheel, teeth gritted.
Ordinarily it would have taken a crew of menials to work the great ring, and that was before centuries of disuse had caused it to stick fast. Sharr’s great musculature tensed up, servos grinding as they added to his vast strength. After over thirty seconds applying the sort of force that would have been capable of briefly lifting the rear of a Chimera armoured personnel carrier, the wheel groaned and gave way, beginning to turn.
‘That did it,’ Blood Eye’s voice ticked in his ear. ‘All the power coils are now active and feeding into the engine core. I can feel the machine spirit awakening.’
Sharr stepped back down from the platform that gave access to one of the engine’s upper interface plates, rejoining his brethren around the main power coils leading through from the generator chamber. A deep growl, like the waking exhalation of some huge beast, had started to rise up from the main block, vibrating through the enginarium.
Combined with the power flowing through the thick coil bundles, it seemed as though Blood Eye’s labours had borne fruit. Using only the wrench that formed the hilt of his knife and the brute strength of the other Primaris, the exiled Techmarine had been able to bring the Sire of Belaphrone’s foremost engine back to some semblance of working order.
What remained to be seen was whether or not they could now coax enough power from it for their purposes. The plan – inloaded anonymously from the Nomad Predation Fleet as it swam through the depths – was to reactivate the engine of one of the ships jutting at an angle from the upper rear of the hulk, and in doing so nudge the listing trajectory of the greater whole off course. At the very least, it would buy time for Diamantus. At best, it might remove the threat entirely, causing the conglomeration of stellar debris to drift out-system, casting it back into the Outer Dark.
The plan had been formulated before full knowledge of what lay on board the hulk was known, but that was not Sharr’s concern. The Void Exiles had their instructions. Completing them was all that mattered.
‘I will continue nursing the engine,’ Blood Eye said, heaving down on a number of levers in the block’s flank. The growling increased.
‘We are running out of time,’ Talon noted. There was less than a day left on the chrono countdown. After it reached zero, there would be no hope of averting the hulk’s course before it was too late.
‘The awakening cannot be rushed,’ Blood Eye said. ‘But the Sire of Belaphrone’s spirit is not yet gone, not yet subsumed or corrupted. I believe it will aid us. It hungers for vengeance, and we shall take it together.’
CHAPTER X
The Council of the Awakening was convened without further delay.
The faculty descended into the Pit, that space below Voldire’s ark that formed part of the Mother-of-Them-All’s core.
It was a fivefold-blessed place, in no small part because it represented the scientific liberation that Voldire had dedicated his life and career to. Sections of it appeared to have once been an exploratory ark of the Cult Mechanicus. Now its former command cradle formed Voldire’s ark, and the great ring of cogitators beneath it comprised the Pit.
Its centre, sunken between the ancient machinery, was a gaping flesh-maw ringed with jagged teeth of bone and plasteel. It was the greatest of the Mother-of-Them-All’s many mouths, and with it the necessary praise would be given.
Voldire had taken his place at his lectern seat above the alpha cogitator, the metal groaning under his bulk. All of the mighty, rune-carved machines were slumbering, but the datagnost had no doubt that, when called upon, they would awaken to full functionality. The blind and scientifically illiterate superstitions of the Mechanicus would have struggled to activate such hardware, but Voldire had learned the true way to interface, and had made improvements on the original devices.
‘Praise the Great Innovator,’ he burbled, voice crackling over the bridge’s flesh-webbed vox-speakers. ‘Praise the Infernal Architect, who builds for our futures!’
A squall of worship and black binharic canting suffused the air. The council was in session, and the ritual began.
Prisoners were herded, screaming, between the cogitators and towards the maw. They were not willing sacrifices; they had not been shown the Primordial Truth yet. That saddened Voldire, for he wished to enlighten all, from the lowliest menial to the fool who styled himself the Fabricator General of Mars. But sacrifices had to be made. That was one of the constants of existence – the real constants, not the false shams of physics, of chemistry or biology, those mere veneers. Sacrifice led to knowledge, which led to power, which led to the strength to liberate and enlighten. Those were the immutable building blocks around which both existence and un-existence were constructed. Machine and flesh, flesh and machine, no longer at war but united, fused, impossible to differentiate, pure in their shared purpose.
All this Voldire had learned, and more, from the divine being that had saved him.
Many of the datagnost’s memories were treacherous and confused, for time was another of those malleable matters that had lost a great deal of meaning. Still, he remembered the day of his revelation with absolute clarity. It had come after his disgrace, after the petty-minded fools that ruled Diamantus had banished him, because they feared or could not understand his genius. As a young tech-priest, newly raised up from the post of adept, he had sought to improve the functionality of the Pinnacle’s computational systems by modifying one of the standardised airflow units used in the data-stacks, ensuring that the cogitators would be cooled more efficiently.
