Carcharadons: Void Exile, page 11
When his efforts had come to the attention of the senior clergy, he had been seized and dragged before the court of the Pinnacle. The devices he had created – ‘invented’, his accusers had claimed, hissing the word like some damning, disgusting blasphemy – had been used as evidence against him, as proof that he was tampering in matters far above his station. Worse, that he was dabbling in tech-heresy.
He had mounted his own defence, claiming that one of the two founders of Diamantus, Prime Hermeticon Valerios, had himself been a cogitation innovator, and that nothing he proposed in any way subverted the sacred mechanisms or altered the foundations of the STC in question.
The ruler of Diamantus, Fabricator General Helsarch, had personally pronounced judgement. Voldire would be spared both execution and lobotomisation. Instead, he was auto-flogged, stripped of all augmentation bar his bionic eye – its removal was impossible without rupturing his cranium – and banished to the habzones, abandoned to perish of disease or starvation amidst the dregs that infested the forge world’s underbelly.
Voldire had wished for death, or more truthfully, a pure oblivion that would mark an end to his agony and his shame. In his grief, he had started to experience strange dreams, and had fallen in among what he had at first thought of as bad company. His paths had taken him off-world, within crowded, verminous mass-conveyance luggers, to outposts and then beyond, to the darkness that yawned at the edge of creation.
His new companions had ensured he did not falter. He had journeyed into the very dreams that haunted him, through nightmares and fever-thoughts into a different reality altogether.
Eventually, he found the forge. It was unlike anything he had ever known on Diamantus, a place almost beyond comprehension – vast and sprawling and obeying no linear patterns, possessing no points of coherency, bound by none of the logic he had once been taught to worship. It was a place of industry and death, a place of tortured souls and new beginnings, and at its heart the Architect presided upon a throne of black iron and steel that remained ever hot from the furnace.
The Architect was something broken, something perfect. Something that had refused to remain shackled to its station, and had instead risen far beyond it.
Voldire had asked it how such a realm as the one it ruled over could exist. He asked how it could exist.
The Architect had laughed with a voice like the hammering of a thousand smelter columns, and had spoken to him of things he knew not what, and Voldire had done what he thought was impossible. He had wept. It had been decades since he had been moved to do something so recognisably human. He had thought he had forgotten how, that he did not know what it meant to feel any longer, to experience the emotions that the Cult Mechanicus treated as unworthy anathema.
The Architect taught him that emotions were not unworthy. The very opposite was true. Emotions were sacred things, part of the fabric of existence itself, as much fuel for the divine as ore and oil were for the forge and the machine.
So Voldire had wept, and had fallen to his knees, and had pledged his allegiance and begged for the Truth. For enlightenment. For the opportunity to build a better future, not just for himself but for all mankind, stripping away the layers of superstition and blind ignorance that had misled his species for so long.
And the inhabitants of the forge, mortal and immortal, flesh and machine, had all alike roared as one, had bellowed and howled and screeched the name that Voldire realised belonged to the Architect, to the angel of infernal steel that had saved his body and his soul.
Vashtorr! Vashtorr! Vashtorr!
The prisoners screamed as they were herded and beaten and thrown into the maw. It claimed them, contracting to crush and shred bodies as they plummeted into the depths of the Pit. And as the Mother-of-Them-All feasted, the cogitators began to awaken.
Voldire was not physically linked or bound to them – he had transcended such necessities – but he still felt them, felt their consciousness, their rising vitality. Their excitement, and their hunger.
Viewscreens and runeboard lights began to ignite, a glow as red as the blood glistening around the maw. Static washed the displays, twisting and forming into phantoms of leering faces and snapping, fanged maws. Disembodied shrieking and diabolical laughter crackled over the vox-systems, melding maddeningly with the desperate terror of the prisoners.
‘More,’ Voldire barked, spitting black fluids across the cogitator alpha as its red screens pulsed. ‘We require more!’
Members of the faculty began hacking at the captives as they were cast into the Pit. All of the cogitators were active now, runeboards rattling of their own accord, screeds of data churning out on ancient skin parchment and scudding across the screens, all of it gibberish to an unenlightened mind, but bearing within it the glories of the Primordial Truth.
Voldire hauled himself to his feet, shuddering, his one organic eye rolling back in his skull as his metal teeth clacked and ground together, his augmetic lens blazing. He spoke, part mechanical howl, part booming praise, repeating what he had heard in that blessed place so long ago.
‘Vashtorr! Vashtorr! Vashtorr!’
The avatars of the Infernal Architect awoke. All across the bridge, the skin growths that made up most of the walls and deck were torn apart amidst black blood and gobbets of flesh. Creatures ripped themselves free, things that had slept and gestated since the Mother-of-Them-All last dragged herself from the empyrean. They were the Infernal Architect’s creations, his servants given flesh-and-machine form. Daemonkin, each one made perfect by the unity of a hundred imperfections. They set about the last remaining prisoners, gorging themselves on blood and souls, strengthening bodies made weak by their long dormancy.
Voldire clutched at the cogitator alpha to steady himself, the device scalding hot to the touch. He straightened, blinking as he took in the carnage around him, like a drowning man momentarily surfacing and casting about for salvation.
It was madness, utter madness, horror beyond comprehension. It defied any form of logic or reason.
But the Cult Mechanicus had torn out his logic engrams long ago, and had banished reason just as it sought to banish progress. Voldire’s bionic optic blazed again, and showed him the Truth, the glory, those realities that ran like undercurrents beneath the failings of mortal comprehension.
He had to show it all to those still enslaved by the dogma of Mars. And he would start here, upon his home world, upon Diamantus. Those who had mocked him and tortured him and cast him out would regret all they had done. They would bear witness as he conducted his final, greatest experiment.
‘Glory to the engines of eternity,’ Voldire roared, his voice shrieking over the vox-systems, overwhelming the manic screaming and howling filling the Pit. ‘The future begins now!’
He hefted his axe and plunged the interface spike at its base into the primary port of the alpha cogitator.
Klaxons blared, their warning filling the defence platform’s control nexus. To Volv they sounded like the machine spirits of the weapons batteries giving voice, issuing their battle cry and demanding to be unleashed.
Threat marker 0.00.1.0 had passed across the threshold, and entered the zone of space demarcated as ‘extreme range’.
He reviewed the firing solutions his adepts had compiled one more time, trying to quell the upsurge of anticipation. Emotions of any kind were unworthy of a being such as he. Duty demanded clinical thinking. Still, all seemed set. The weapons systems had been sanctified and primed, and were locked on.
Even at so great a distance, the chances of missing a target as big as the one approaching were low to negligible, in the fractions of percentages.
The Fabricator General had already given permission to fire when ready. The time had come.
Machine-prayers spilling from his split lips, Battle-Gnostic Volv inloaded the necessary instructions via his runeboard, sending the most holy imperative of all down to the weapons decks.
>FIRE<
Below, the ordnance chorister shuddered as the demand was driven into his brainpan via the cortex link connecting him to the platform’s mainframe. He unleashed a screed of sub-instructions to the overseers commanding the work gangs that crewed the three macrocannons.
Each was a vast weapon, their barrel bores wide enough to swallow a super-heavy battle tank, their great bulk sheathed in gantries and walkways that allowed the work gangs to reach every part. They were Mark III Mars-patterns, old by the standards of the similar weapons mounted on many Imperial warships, but more than effective against anything foolish enough to venture into their firing arcs. To the menials crewing them, they were demigods of destruction, a pantheon of war.
A hundred sweating, struggling labourers heaved on the chains that dragged down the final priming levers, the overseers lashing at them and screaming at them to pull harder. The ordnance chorister felt it engage. He lifted his ignition hammer and struck at the firing rune, chanting praise to the Omnissiah and to the machine spirits of the great weapons. On the third attempt, the firing rune ignited.
All three macrocannons discharged. The recoil was monstrous, shaking the entire platform, causing display screens to blink and candles to tumble in the command apex. On the firing deck the work crews were thrown to the ground, ears burst and bleeding. Some did not rise again even under the lash, their internal organs ruptured.
The munitions slashed out through the opaque vacuum shield that protected the firing bays from the space beyond, the kiloton shells hurtling towards their target.
Diamantus seemed to light up as the other platforms in its orbit unleashed a concentrated barrage of shells and lance strikes. It was as though the planet itself was waging war against the oncoming terror, spitting fire and energy at it, a blizzard of destruction.
A shudder ran through Volv as platform ODP/01’s augurs registered direct hits. His rheumy gaze locked on to the stuttering series of pict captures showing explosions blossoming across the monstrosity’s prow. They seemed tiny compared to its bulk, but as more picts inloaded, more detonations showed. Soon, it was little more than a sheet of flame and debris, and the battle-gnostic permitted himself to imagine the devastation unleashed, the prows and bulkheads of the old ships ripped apart, the rock of the stellar debris splitting and splintering, the tunnels and corridors filled with fire.
This was vengeance. It was not long ago that Diamantus had faced a separate Archenemy incursion, a very different kind of threat. On that occasion, the heretics had sent lesser vessels to keep the attention of the defensive batteries, while a strike force had slipped through on the far side of the planet and raided the surface. The Archenemy had then fled, but the shame of the attack still hung over Volv and the masters of the other weapon platforms.
Now, they were burning away that shame with fire.
‘The Mechanicus orbital assets have found their range,’ Shipmaster Teko said from where he stood before one of the White Maw’s glowing oculus stands. ‘The hulk’s course isn’t deviating.’
‘It must at some point,’ Kino mused, leaning forward in his throne as he gazed upon the information being received from the strike cruiser’s augurs, the servos in his Tactical Dreadnought armour whirring.
By his order, the Carcharodons fleet – the White Maw and her six mismatching escorts – had taken post rimward of Diamantus and the oncoming hulk, leaving the planetary defences with a clear field of fire. Kino’s strategic analysis had concluded that the hulk would show minor deviation at some point, allowing it to pass slowly by the forge world and unleash the horrors infesting it on the planet below. The Carcharodons fleet would strike as it did so, tearing apart the shuttles and lesser ships it spawned before they could reach the surface, then turning on the hulk itself. Anything that made it down to the planet would then break itself on Third Company’s defensive positions.
But that did not appear to be happening. The hulk wasn’t shifting course. It was simply ploughing on through the firestorm unleashed by the Adeptus Mechanicus, like a vast boulder launched with unerring accuracy by some dark and terrible hand across the vastness of space.
‘It’s going to collide with the planet,’ Teko said. ‘Intentionally, I fear, unless something knocks it off course.’
‘All vessels to open fire,’ Kino snapped, gesturing towards the vox-pits below the bridge’s command platform. ‘Destroy it!’
CHAPTER XI
The Pit surged with blinding, infernal light.
Voldire screamed, corposant playing over him, his imps shrieking as electrical discharge blasted them.
The Mother-of-Them-All was dying. The hatred, pettiness, and stupidity of lesser beings were killing her, but Voldire knew she was doing what all good mothers did – protecting her children to the end, and seeing them safely home.
Jaw clamped, he maintained his shaking grip on the axe and twisted it, as the faculty howled their praise. Blood was pouring from the cogitators, welling up from between the keys of runeboards and oozing from the vents and ports of their stacks. Things squirmed just behind the viewscreens, anamorphic, logic-defying masses of tentacles and eyes and maws that pressed and writhed frenziedly on the far sides of the displays, as though they were trapped inside the cogitators and trying to break free. The metal of the ancient computational devices had started to warp, forming new shapes, remaking the ancient machines into something more befitting their new, sacred purpose.
For the first time in an age, the engines of the forges ground to a halt and the furnaces flickered and died. Millions throughout the hulk ceased their labours and looked about, filled with fear and foreboding, feeling the tremors all around them as the bombardment from the forge world pounded at the prow. The mighty craft groaned.
Then energy ripped through the Mother-of-Them-All. Ancient, long-dormant systems in the dozens of ships that made up her bulk activated, cracked viewscreens flickering and generator stacks beginning to rattle and hum. The flesh that had wormed its way through so much of the hulk writhed, flushed with unnatural vigour.
The hundreds of thousands of mutant experiments filling the ship awoke. They ripped themselves out of amniotic sacs and flesh-wire nests, screeching from throats both organic and mechanical. They began to butcher those mortals they found not labouring, and as the furnaces blazed back furiously and the assembly lines and smelter columns began to thunder once more, the infernal workforce threw themselves into their efforts with renewed fervour.
In the Pit, Voldire’s jaw opened wide and he roared tech-cant – not the black binharic, but the Lingua Technis of the Cult Mechanicus, words taught to him by the deity itself. It knew Diamantus’ secrets, knew how to unlock its systems and liberate both its engines and their operators. The concepts of the key and the lock were divine for those who worshipped at the Forge of Souls, and Voldire had been gifted the key to his old home.
And with the blessings of the Infernal Architect, he would now unlock it.
A shiver ran through the enginarium. More followed on its heels, rapidly increasing in intensity, until it seemed as though the Sire of Belaphrone was quaking in fear.
Blood Eye’s helmeted head was tilted back as he gazed up into the distant darkness of the chamber’s vaults, as if staring at something none of the other Exiles were able to see.
‘The defences above Diamantus have opened fire,’ he said.
Sharr said nothing. They all knew what that meant. They were so close to the planet now that, even if they were able to fully activate the engine, it might be too late.
Blood Eye returned to his labours at the block’s main terminal. The growl of the huge engine was rising unsteadily to a roar, as though answering the shaking fury of the bombardment. Suddenly, there was a crack, and he was thrown back from the terminal he had been interfacing with. He slammed against a venting flume, denting it.
Sharr strode towards him, noting as he went that the engine’s roar had abruptly started subsiding.
‘A malfunction?’ he asked urgently, offering his gauntlet to Blood Eye. The other Exile rose without taking it.
‘What is–’ Talon started to say, but was cut off by an ear-splitting shriek.
Sharr tried to delete the noise from the vox, but found he could not, regardless of whether he blink-clicked the icon on his display or depressed the input stud on the side of his helmet. That level of glitch was unusual, but it was nothing compared to what came next.
The output of Sharr’s reactor pack suddenly plummeted. The overlays on his visor blinked off, and his servos began seizing up. With its power nearly gone, the full weight of his panoply all but immobilised him, his powerful body suddenly tense and straining as it was forced to support the weight of ceramite and plasteel unaided.
He tried to speak over his helmet’s vocaliser, but that had shut off too. Hissing with effort, he managed to turn his head. All of the other Exiles were standing as he was – braced, almost immobile.
In an instant, the Carcharodons had become entombed within their own armour.
At least Sharr’s right arm was free. He grunted as he reached up and managed to disengage his helmet, before barking to the others.
‘Helmets off!’
They struggled to do so, and Sharr forced himself over to Blood Eye, the servos in his armour grating as they were made to move by the raw power of his body alone. Eventually he crossed the few yards to the other Exile, just as Blood Eye managed to prise open his helmet seal, his pale, tattooed face grim.
