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Adeptus Mechanicus – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Skitarius

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SELECTED: DENTRICA I OF III
ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED
UPLOADING… +THE HIERARCHY OF COGS+

The snow and ice were red. Not with blood, though the constant exchange of noospheric chatter between Haldron-44 Stroika’s receivers and the explorator arkcruiser Maestrale told him that there was a 94.767 per cent chance that they eventually would be. Now, they were red with algae. The deep freeze of Perborea allowed little light down to the surface, but what gloom made it through the maelstrom fuelled the blooms that streaked the ice world’s face.

Stroika was skitarii – from the hydraulics of his legs and the revolving joints of his arm-appendages to the acknowledged frailty of his flesh. He was as the Machine God continued to make him. Forge-raised on Satzica Secundus, Stroika had followed the patient path of protocol and worked his way up through the hierarchy of cogs.

<Secondary target identified,> Stroika reported.

Stroika’s cranial engineering sizzled with the static of an uplinked intrusion. Sound that bypassed the ears. Visions that were experienced by the mind and not the eye. Binaric cant, novabyte and noospheric blurts overlaid one upon the other, neuro-synced straight into the brain. Orbital magna-picts, sensory feeds and holo-diagrammaticals dropped from the explorator arkcruiser above, like a thunderbolt, straight into the skitarius’s mind.

The streamed doctrina imperatives all carried the authorisations of Magos Omnid Torquora, but Stroika experienced the intrusion as the pure will of the Machine God. All forge-worlders, from the Fabricator General to the lowliest servitor, made up the Corpus Mechanicus – glorifying the Machine God Incarnate with their artifice, both in their workings and their base organics. The Omnissiah found expression in and acted through them all. This was the Motive Force; the holy transference of data and instruction down through the stratified ranks of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

Stroika – like all the skitarii of his legion – was possessed of a fraction of the Machine God. He was one of a billion, billion parts working in magnificent union and harmony. It was through the priesthood and techno-magi of the Cult Mechanicus that the Omnissiah made His needs and wishes known. As hosts of the Machine God’s unquestioned divinity, the magi spoke the word of the god, in His many favoured cants and streams. Stroika felt his doctrinal wetware respond.

<This mission has been blessed, Stroika-unit,> Magos Torquora told the skitarii officer. <By the cog that turns. By the oil that eases. By the spark that leaps. We do the Great Maker’s work here. This most holy of missions does not allow for complications. You understand me, Stroika-unit? Identify the secondary target. To break with me and the mission is to break with Him. Receive of His blessing and remember all that you have achieved in His name. Know that you will achieve so much more.>

In the great gears of the Mechanicus machine – the machine that made war in the name of indomitable progress and majesty reclaimed – the fighting constructs of the Omnissiah became greater than their parts. Haldron-44 Stroika had striven to become greater still.

Stroika remembered. He reviewed a lifetime in service to the Machine God. How he had been a star-gazing menial, whose weak flesh was a blueprint of tattoos depicting the holy bionics and augmentations he had dreamed of one day possessing. He remembered a miserable eternity as a citizen-factotum and his subcutaneous electronic bar codes that burned with accumulated tallies and commendations. As an auxilia forge-sentinel, blessed with his first augmetics, he had been given the honour of guarding isotope scrap depot 3-64-63.

His record of off-world service in the numberless ranks of the Legiones Skitarii would have been a credit to any cybernetic soldier of the Cult Mechanicus. As sub-alpha, princeps and alpha he had led clade units of his own. He had earned the Crux Mechanicus and had risen through the ranks. Now, with a small legion his to command, he was Alpha Primus Haldron-44 Stroika of the Deuteron-IV Praetori, seconded to the infamous explorator Omnid Torquora.

Stroika’s attachment of Sicarian infiltrators, selected from his expeditionary legion for the mission, were spindly silhouettes in the snowstorm. The integrated senses of his helm immersed Stroika in a blizzard of data. Omnispectral lenses and bleak optics filtered the red static of the storm. His acquisition reticules fixed on the outline of each of the skitarii soldier-operatives in turn, cycling through radiant energy wavelengths. Stroika’s cogitae cores decrypted and processed the different datastreams fed back to him through the arkcruiser’s phylactix.

The Primus experienced the ice world as no one man of mere flesh and blood could. He saw his column of infiltrators from orbit. Through the arkcruiser’s arrays he acquired the meagre heat of the skitarii organics and the power signatures of their bionics on the razored apex of the icy ridge. High-gain antennae from a swarm of disposable probes returned to him the data-betrayal of the killclade’s own voxmissions and uplink designations. He felt the air-to-ground surveyor pulses of the Mechanicus Sky Talon holding position kilometres above them. He became one with the auspectral returns of the Onager Dunecrawlers that had transported them across the desolate ice plains. The simultaneous datastreams met in Stroika and gave the skitarii commander a holo-dimensional fix on their position. All this, Stroika processed through the busy warmth of his cranial cortex.

The Sicarians of the Infiltroriad-Spuria~660 fired the climbing spikes of their cloven metal feet, making progress up the frost-shattered ridge. They were led by the detachment’s commander, Princeps Talus-Spuria I/X, who – like his infiltrators – advanced with his right-hand weapons-cradle collapsed and locked to his back.

The soldiers moved with a hydraulic choreography, bionics trudging in unison and their mantid gait in sympathy with the leading princeps. To Stroika, Talus-Spuria I/X and his nine other infiltrators appeared like long-legged insects, from their gangling advance to the dome of their helmets and bulbous optics.

<Princeps, all stop,> Stroika streamed.

His order received an immediate response. The infiltrators became still, like figures frozen in a pict. Standing like statues on the ridge, dusted with red snow, the skitarii and their princeps awaited further orders.

Bringing the metal digits of a bionic gauntlet to the side of his helm, Haldron-44 Stroika made a series of delicate adjustments to otherwise chunky instrumentation. A crest-holder ran transversally across the top of the helmet: the demicog of a Primus. The vanes and crenellations of the plume crackled with the flow of transmitted data. The silky foil of his officer’s greatcloak, the rust-red of Mars, flapped behind him in the storm, acting as a receptor-threaded receiver.

Haldron-44 Stroika felt the presence of the Omnissiah echo through him. Through his neurocircuitry. Through the synaptic flash of sparks between his brain cells. Through his very soul.

The mind of the Primus flashed with orbital auspectra, static-grained captures and holodiagrammatic representations. Binary streamed through his thoughts, while data-layered codemissions and the cacophonous cant of lingua-technis laced through him. Stroika became momentarily one with the downlink and saw the energy signatures of his targets moving across the blood-streaked ice of the valley. Several kilometres ahead of them, the data-visitation revealed a large life form. No doubt something the targets were stalking whilst Stroika and his infiltrators in turn hunted them.

Silhouettes of codified fauna native to Perborea flashed up beside the energy signature. Another gift from Magos Torquora and the Maestrale. None seemed to match the form, however. This didn’t surprise Stroika, as Perborea Prime, being a backwater ball of ice in a hazardous system, was not a well-documented world.

<Secondary target unknown,> Stroika streamed back to the arkcruiser, his thoughts piggy-backing the phylactic shunt between the skitarii, the Onager Dunecrawler, the Sky Talon and the Maestrale. <Collating…>

Crunching up through the ice, weaving through the column of skitarii, Haldron-44 Stroika assumed position on the razored ridge. Looking down through the bloody, howling maelstrom into the valley below, the Primus could barely make out their targets. Magnocular lenses on his helm whirred to focus and filters cycled but the targets were still just a signatured blur through the blizzard.

Stroika lifted his left arm. It was an augmented appendage terminating in the bionics of an armoured gauntlet, and he held it up like a feudal world lord flying a bird of prey. Instead of a raptor, however, the skitarii officer carried an infoslave servo-skull which bore the designation Phrenos~361. The construct was fashioned after the Cog Mechanicus, being half bone and half cogitator. A cog turned about the skull like the rings of a gas giant, spinning in place on a magnetic field. The barrel of an arc blaster protruded from the servo-skull’s under-jaw, ready to drop and lock in firing position. A bundle of prehensile interface cables drooped down from the stub of Phrenos~361’s spine, anchoring it to Stroika’s arm.

<Get me a visual,> Stroika ordered, launching Phrenos~361 into the crystal-cold air. The servo-skull retracted its serpentine cables, its rotating cog speeding to a magnetically accelerated blur. Angling the blade-cog about it, Phrenos~361 was able to fly down the side of the ridge. Stroika watched the drone surge away. Cycling through the optical arrays of its augmented eye-sockets, Phrenos~361 transmitted a pict feed of its progress across the algae-streaked ice. The servo-skull’s data was uploaded to a visualisation processor in Stroika’s mind.

Buffeted by the streaming blizzard of red, Phrenos~361 cut through the freezing maelstrom, closing on the targets. Shapes smudged into the storm became silhouettes. Phrenos~361 counted twenty-three in total, the outline of each figure searing to brightness before fading away as the servo-skull catalogued them. In the main the column was made up of lumbering brutes, buried in ragged skins and furs. They pushed their exhausted carcasses on, leading with the jutting underbite of their tusk-crowded jaws.

Smaller, sinewy creatures struggled through the red drift about them, large noses protruding from hoods and the shredded cast-offs of their brute compatriots. Phrenos~361 flashed through the outlines of individual limbs and a stream of data analysing bodily proportion and ratio. The dimensions of the figures confirmed what Stroika already knew. Their targets were xenos. They were greenskins.

<Proceed,> the Primus ordered, prompting the servo-skull to move on.

Haldron-44 Stroika had extensive experience of orks. His service record indicated 2,372 confirmed greenskin kills across a range of warzones, but he had never encountered xenos such as these before. The creatures he had expertly despatched on Antioq, Ptolomae Phall and Phaeta Secunda were monsters in love with their godless machines and the devastating capabilities of their primitive xenos technologies.

The column of fur-shaggy aliens Phrenos~361 hovered above sported no such developments. The greenskins were barbarians in the truest sense of the word. They dripped with simple jewellery: bones, teeth and scavenged shiny objects, threaded through their ears, lips and green flesh. The only protection they boasted was the resilience of their monstrous frames and the furs that hunched their backs, trailing red through the snow. Their only weapons seemed to be simple stabbers and choppers, crafted from crude pieces of recovered scrap – dagger shards, spear-sharpened struts and axes fashioned from twisted metal.

The greenskin savages didn’t seem to notice Phrenos~361, who surged ahead of the loping column through the streaming snow. The pict feed relayed back to Stroika showed little more than the red static of the valley floor. Finally, the servo-skull closed in on a larger creature. The blur of the alien monstrosity seared into focus as Phrenos~361 advanced as close as it dared.

The creature’s outline flashed up against a cycling catalogue of potential matches but in the end the Mechanicus survey files failed to identify the beast. Bigger than a Dunecrawler or tracked conveyer, the beast slid through the snow and ice like a slug, warming the freeze beneath it to create a slippery trail that carried its bulk. Its blubbery body was covered with a carpet of shaggy hair while its head was decorated with a quartet of antlers. A thin membrane extended between the network of prongs, filtering the howling gales of their red bounty. Trapped algae funnelled down through the hollow antlers and feeding tubes into the alien herbivore.

<Data collated. Threat assessed,> Stroika told Magos Torquora. <Conclusion: non-threatening. Mission proceeding.>

<Diagnostiquorum consulted,> Torquora told him. <Assessment confirmed… wait… parsing…>

<Magos?>

Stroika’s mind became a kaleidoscope of alerts and warnings. Data-feeds and hologrammaticals told him that an inbound meteorite was due to impact in the vicinity. Perborea was a crowded system, awash with debris and the planetary wreckage of ongoing calamities. Several such impacts had struck the mountains and the Maestrale had suffered collision damage from a number of close encounters.

<Incoming,> Stroika transmitted to his infiltrator clade. The gangly skitarii went down on one knee in unquestioning choreography. The Primus joined them as a meteorite – bright and white – blazed through the sky overhead. It narrowly missed the ridge upon which they were positioned. Following the path of the meteorite, Stroika’s cogitators and targeters flashed estimated trajectories through his mind. He watched it strike the valley floor. A red cloud rocketed angrily for the sky, with a blast wave radiating out from the crater.

<Brace for impact,> the skitarii officer ordered. His modulations were calm but insistent. As the blizzard died about them and the wall of snow and fury roared up the valley side, the Sicarian infiltrators shot anchors and cables into ice at their feet. <Three… Two… One… Impact.>

Haldron-44 Stroika felt the blast wave hit him. The elemental force almost took him from his feet – as it would have done for the rest of his skitarii, but for the anchors that kept the spindly soldiers from flailing away. With his greatcloak whipping about him, Stroika reviewed his sizzling feeds. The greenskins had marched on with indifference through the screeching turmoil of ice and snow. Several of their diminutive attendants had been blown some distance away, their rags catching the force of the blast like kites. The Primus watched Phrenos~361’s pict feed pitch wildly as the servo-skull fought to ride out the storm.

As the howling impact hissed to a stop, Stroika and the Infiltroriad-Spuria~660 found themselves submerged in a thick, bloody haze of ice and algae. The meteorite crash had kicked up colossal amounts of snow into the atmosphere. Stroika knew that if he didn’t act swiftly, his greenskin targets would become lost to him. He was not the only one to come to such a conclusion, although it was difficult – and pointless – attempting to separate thoughts of his own from those visited upon him by his tech-priest master up in orbit. In the end, they were all gifts of the Machine God, regardless of the mind from which they originated.

<Reacquire targets,> Omnid Torquora ordered. <Priority one.>

Stroika acknowledged the order with the noospheric blurt of a salute.

<You heard the magos,> Stroika told Talus-Spuria I/X and his infiltrators, <and through him the Great Maker. Reacquire the targets. Triple-time it.>

With the clunk of climbing anchors released from the ice and whipping back on their cables, the princeps and the Infiltroriad-Spuria~660 launched themselves over the frost-shattered ridge. Reaching out with the fingers of a gauntlet to steady himself, Haldron-44 Stroika followed, skidding down the valley side after them with his greatcloak flapping. The blood-red snow of the slope streamed about the skitarii officer and in his descending wake.

SELECTED: DENTRICA II OF III
ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED
UPLOADING… +BASE FLESH+

Stroika could hear the wails of the beast. As his skitarii had zeroed in on their targets, cloaked by the red mist of the meteorite impact, the greenskins had closed on their own.

Holding some distance away through the bloody haze, Stroika and the infiltrators were rejoined by the servo-skull Phrenos~361. The drone whirred to a stop, landing on the Primus’s gauntlet and securing itself with the prehensile grip of its snaking cables. The skitarii officer’s clicking optics revolved slowly to focus, overlaying filter upon filter. In false-colour horror, Stroika was presented with a vision of slaughter. The greenskin savages were hacking apart the alien herbivore, burying huge, cleaver-like blades in the beast, shearing through fur, blubber and bone. The creature’s blood turned the snow to dark slush about it. It shook its antlers and emitted a mournful roar of defiance as it attempted to slide its way out of the frenetic butchery.

Stroika’s auditory equalisers rang with the valley-bounced echoes of the beast’s suffering. Infrared filters froze the warmth of blood-splatter patterns as they sprayed through the red miasma. The guttural grunts and bellows of the greenskins were cross-referenced for linguistic origin.

Talus-Spuria I/X and his skitarii held position on the ice of the valley, their spindly forms masked by the haze of snow that still hung in the aftermath of the meteorite strike. With their augurs and optics, Stroika and the skitarii could see the xenos, but the savage greenskins could not see them. The Machine God abhorred waste, however, and Talus-Spuria I/X had his soldier-operatives run firing protocols, preparatory targeting solutions and xenos data-files, ensuring that when the time did come to engage the enemy, they were as ready as they could be. Kill-shots had already been calculated. Trajectories had been calibrated. Probabilities had been processed. These, augmented by the flexibility, invention and natural instincts of their base flesh, made the Omnissiah’s servants deadly opponents in waiting.

Haldron-44 Stroika watched. Recorded. Monitored. The greenskins finished the miserable alien herbivore before hacking the beast to pieces. They took huge slabs of skinned meat and shaggy fur over their shoulders while their servant creatures dragged antler, bone and the harvested delicacy of internal organs. Little was wasted and by the time the feral hunting party was done, all that remained was a mound of steaming entrails.

<Proceed?> Talus-Spuria I/X transmitted.

<As you were, princeps,> the Primus sent back.

The infiltrators tracked their quarry along the valley and up through a labyrinth of steep-sided ice ravines. The greenskins’ progress was slow but indomitable, while the miasma of blizzard-quelling meteorite impacts helped to mask the presence of the Infiltroriad-Spuria~660. Like skeletal spirits, rimed in red and ice, the skitarii haunted the xenos, matching them step for step, calibrating their own advance to maintain a consistent distance between them and their targets.

Breaking out across a new ice field, Stroika and his skitarii trailed the greenskins to a crooked mountain that reared in isolation from the frozen plain. The outline of the mountain flashed in the optic overlays of Haldron-44 Stroika’s helmet. Angles extended beyond the structure and data streamed down beside the imposing form of the red peak.

<Are you receiving this, magos?> Stroika said.

<Processing,> Omnid Torquora transmitted back from the Maestrale. <The diagnostiquorum concur. It looks favourable, Stroika-unit.>

<Sir,> Talus-Spuria I/X said.

<We have lost the xenos?>

<Yes, Primus,> Talus-Spuria I/X returned. <Solonoid-Spuria IV/X confirms that the xenos have entered a tunnel in the mountainside.>

<Magos,> Stroika said, <I am requesting authorisation to proceed.>

<Granted,> Omnid Torquora told him. <Clarification required. The Omnissiah demands it.>

<Secure the tunnel, princeps,> Stroika ordered.

The infiltrators observed their instructions with simultaneous urgency. The light hydraulics of their cloven legs helped them to bound through the red snow at speed. Stroika’s own appendages brought him up behind their fanning number. His cloak streamed behind him.

<Weapons online,> Talus-Spuria I/X blurted in chuntering code. The glow of the infiltrators’ optic-arrays clunked to a brighter shade. The skitarii of the Infiltroriad-Spuria~660 extended their left arms, each holding a flechette blaster. The pistols sizzled to life. The weapons-cradles that replaced their right arms unfolded, extending from where they had been collapsed and locked behind their shoulder joints. Each formed the hydraulic arm and pivot-cradle of a close combat weapon. The infiltrators were armed with taser goads that crackled with voltaic lethality.

As the skitarii infiltrators split into two fast-advancing columns, Haldron-44 Stroika launched Phrenos~361 once more into the air. The servo-skull’s cog-blade whirred silently to a blur, carrying the drone forward to scout the tunnel. With his cloak rippling behind him, Stroika thrust the hydraulics of his bionic arms out, forcing two arc pistols to slide down their length on rails. As the chunky pistols clunked into palm locks, the skitarii commander settled his thumbs back around their grip-interfacia and brought the weapons to crackling life.

<Skitarii,> Stroika transmitted to the infiltrators. <Honour the machine. Be as its parts, working in harmony, in blessed unison, as one.>

The Infiltroriad-Spuria~660 filed into the ragged entrance cut into the ice wall. The algae-threaded freeze gave way to darkness. This mattered little to Stroika and the skitarii. Their augurs and optics fizzled as their visual filters allowed them to probe the depths of the tunnel. Stroika’s feeds recorded the drop in temperature and the changing gradient. They were descending.

The Primus trudged down the centre of the passage, his heavier hydraulics chewing up the ice floor. Infiltrators padded along the walls of the tunnel in two columns, leading the way with the silencers of their pistols. While their combat chassis design offered their base organics ample protection, it was still a lighter designation, suiting their allotted role.

Phrenos~361 had drifted far ahead of the unit, almost catching up to the meat-lugging greenskins. Relaying pict feeds back to its master, each presenting some enhancement or capture of note, the servo-skull showed the xenos disappearing into a ragged metal opening at the end of the tunnel. The rust and twisted serrations made the opening appear like a mouth swallowing the greenskin monsters.

The Mechanicus tech-priests and soldiers formed a shunting chain of hallowed transmissions. Stroika and the infiltrators experienced the mission through the servo-skull’s optics, as Magos Torquora and his diagnostiquorum experienced it through them. The Omnissiah monitored the glorious progress of His servants through every feed, stream and imperative passing between them.

<Vessel located, magos,> Haldron-44 Stroika said. <Praise the Omnissiah.> The skitarii officer regretted the invocation immediately. His rising heart rate and the flush of hormones recorded in his bloodstream smacked of pride and self-congratulatory relief.

<You will be informed when the mission is completed, Stroika-unit,> Omnid Torquora sent back. <When it has met its designated goals to the satisfaction of your priestly betters and to the greater glory of the Machine God.>

<Understood, magos,> the Primus transmitted. He felt his mind flood with the phylactic intrusion of the priesthood. Like a scope brought to focus or an instrument recalibrated, Stroika felt the trivialities of wayward impulse fade. He felt the procession of sentiments warm from the heart run cold. His mind seared to precision and necessity. The cloud of thoughts and feelings afflicting brain and flesh dissipated, sizzling to the demand of his cerebral systems: targeting data, ballistics and acquisition reticules.

He was no longer Stroika, forge-worlder, proud servant of the Mechanicus and commander with care for both his skitarii and his techno-magi overlords. He was Stroika the living weapon. A cold equation, an eventuality to be delivered, an instrument of divine artifice and design. He was sync-slaved – synapse and engram – to a higher purpose. An instrument of the holy Motive Force.

<Probability that the vessel is the Stella-Xenithica, 17.877 per cent,> Torquora informed him.

Geometrics and augur scans of the isolated mountain flashed through Stroika’s neural engrams and processors. Now the Infiltroriad-Spuria~660 had tracked the xenos back to their ice caves, the Maestrale had been able to narrow its search for a vessel long crashed on Perborea and buried in ice. Only the colossal craft’s mighty prow now protruded above the frozen plateau, in the shape of the crooked mountain. The arkcruiser’s ice-penetrating augurs had given Omnid Torquora and the diagnostiquorum the vessel’s estimated shape and dimensions.

<Probability that the vessel is the Stella-Xenithica, 42.112 per cent,> Torquora said.

The Sicarian infiltrators waited either side of the opening, where the warped metal met the ice. As Phrenos~361 glided through the crumpled superstructure of the ancient vessel, the servo-skull projected a broad shaft of hologrammatic light that felt its way through the ruin. Walls were rust-mulched fragility clinging to the skeletal structure of the vessel’s girders and decking, giving the inside the appearance of a dripping cave or the burnt-out interior of a leviathan’s ribcage. Phrenos~361 moved quietly through the freeze, optics whirring, scan-shaft buzzing. New instruments emerged from its cranium. In the distance, echoing through the tortured architecture of the craft’s vast interior, the drone’s vox-corder isolated the sounds of the greenskins. The monsters were dragging their prize back to the feral tribe that had made the wreckage their home.

Phrenos~361 stopped to repeat a scan, augmenting with filtered optics and captures. The servo-skull had been scanning for positive idents, fixtures and serial numbers. Anything that might help the Mechanicus confirm the vessel as the fabled Stella-Xenithica. A series of digits flashed through Stroika’s mind. It was a serial mark on a trunk distribution pipe, something that had largely escaped the ravages of time and temperature. Something recently uncovered by the soggy collapse of a rust-eaten wall. Stroika’s stubby vanes relayed the find to the Maestrale. Even as he did, he could tell from the archaic numeration that the serial number was old and it was Martian.

<…Positive identification confirmed,> Omnid Torquora told Stroika. The explorator’s voice was cool and steely, betraying nothing of the excitement Stroika knew the magos must be feeling. <Our search is over. The serial confirms the vessel’s origin. The Martian shipyards. The holy Ring of Iron. Cross-referencing the manifests, I am ready to declare this wondrous find as the Stella-Xenithica, Terran colony ship, bound for the Autrega System, lost in the void. Probability 99.678 per cent. Blessed be the number. We give thanks for our certainty. Stroika-unit – secure this hallowed artefact and its secrets.>

<Phrenos~361,> Stroika transmitted, prompting the servo-skull to glide around. <Survey the vessel and report findings.>

The drone turned and, with its revolving cog-blade accelerating about it, drifted off down the passage, scanning and pict-cataloguing the find.

<Skitarii,> the Primus addressed the infiltrators. <We stand before the artifice of our Martian magi and forefathers. Its sacred design, the wonder of its workings and the consecration of ancient iron is ours to claim in the name of the Omnissiah, for it is He who guided Magos Torquora to this place of rediscovery. It is in His name that we shall purge the corruption of the xenos infestation and restore the secrets of this find to the servants of Mars.>

SELECTED: DENTRICA III OF III
ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED
UPLOADING… +HARD DATA+

Stroika heard little of the battle. His mind was drifting on the serenity of screed and data-hymnals that proceeded from the skitarii infiltrators as they fought their way through the green alien plague. With filters and scrubbers engaged, Stroika heard the canticles of the Omnissiah.

The greenskin monstrosities and their runts, however, gripped their skulls with foetid claws and bled from their eyes and ears. Without filters, the aliens were treated to the white noise of crippling neurostatic that proceeded from the Sicarian infiltrators. Despite the veritable assault on the senses that being in the neurostatic aura entailed, the greenskins fought like mindless barbarians. Roaring through their pain and confusion, their brute faces trickle-streaked with blood, the xenos savages fought on – swinging, stabbing and bludgeoning with their primitive weapons.

Stroika leaned out of the path of a monstrous weapon. His mind burned with projections, warnings and hologrammatical trajectories. These, combined with augmented reflexes to act on such information, gave the servants of the Adeptus Mechanicus the edge they required to survive the dangers of a hostile galaxy.

While not genetically engineered for transhuman supremacy like the Adeptus Astartes, the skitarii’s blessed bionic enhancements allowed them to punch above their weight when faced with warp-spawned corruption or the savagery of the alien. For the Cult Mechanicus, there was a tool for every job and a job for every tool. The advanced weaponry, cybernetic resilience and sensory superiority of the skitarii meant that they were invariably that tool. Whether it was the garrisoning of forge worlds and fabricator moons, the merciless punishment of techno-heresy or crusading for that most precious of commodities – data – the Legiones Skitarii were both the tool and the weapon of choice.

Beneath the armour plating, the battleware and bionics, however, there were men. Men who had been butchered in the Machine God’s name, serving the Great Maker through their flesh, blood and augmentation. Cogitae and bioplastic wetware could do little to match the economy of base organics. For a priesthood who needed warriors who could think for themselves while unquestioningly serving the needs of the Mechanicus, however, the creativity of the human brain and fortitude of the human heart were necessary evils. For where the logic of the machine was absent, mistakes were ultimately made.

The weapon was as savage and uncouth as the orks could have made it: the thick length of a bone, inset with a cleaving blade fashioned of sharpened girder-shard. The barbarian greenskin that wielded it was not about to be lectured on the finer points of design, however. The rude blade whooshed in front of Stroika’s throat before smashing straight through Gaskii-Spuria IX/X. The Sicarian infiltrator was swept aside in a cacophonous blur of plating, hydraulics and blood. Stroika watched Gaskii-Spuria IX/X’s biometric feeds die on his optic overlays, along with the infiltrator as the green beast cleaved what was left of him down through the rusted decking.

Stroika brought up his arc pistols. Blasting streams of electricity from the weapons, the skitarius forced the brute into a retreat. The creature’s hulking frame was punched back by each arcstream burst, its green flesh smouldering to blackness.

As it lifted its monstrous pike above its head, Stroika shot the weapon from palsied green claws that smoked and crackled with the surging energies blasted through them. Stomping forward on his thick-set hydraulics, Stroika fired upon the alien again and again. Two chest-searing streams stopped the beast’s gargantuan heart, a third scorched into its forehead and broiled its brain. The xenos barbarian reeled back like some felled giant, smashing partly through the corroded decking.

From the layout, the cavernous chamber that the greenskins had chosen as their communal hovel had been some kind of flight deck. Mouldering mounds of scrap that had been long-forgotten designs of atmospheric lander littered the space, while a cargo recess in the floor served as a raging fire-pit upon which blubber-fat was burned and meat roasted. Fungal blooms grew out of the scrap and debris, thriving in the dank interior of the ice-entombed derelict.

Runts had been left in charge of preparing the feast. With their unintelligible shrieks of disorientation and alarm bouncing about the dripping darkness, barbaric green beasts and feral hunters were flooding the chamber from adjoining grottos and partially collapsed passageways. One static-enraged beast shouldered a path of destruction straight through a corroded wall.

The infiltrators met the furious rush of green muscle with suppression fire from their blasters. Flechettes thudded across the open space, shredding furs and mauling alien flesh. As the metal darts sank into the tough hide of the feral creatures, electrical signatures drew more of the darts down on the targets, savaging the orks. The greenskin monsters pushed on furiously through the white noise and flechette storm as further blasts ripped through them. Several crashed to the deck in neurostatic incapacitation. As they fell, the infiltrators finished the beasts with the stabbing blaze of their taser goads.

The flight deck flashed with roasting streams of electrical energy. As the cells of Stroika’s arc pistols drained away, he ejected the battery magazines and slammed the grips of the pistols into the thigh-loaders of his titanium legs. There spare mag-cells waited, pneumatically punched into the handgrips of the pistols upon impact.

Bringing up the pistols, Stroika blast-hammered screeching runts back into the great fire and through the weakened deck plates, down into the darkness below. Several ran for their miserable lives, forcing Stroika to shoot them in the back. He turned one into a convulsing nest of spidery arcs that smouldered on the deck, while the force of another arcstream caused an alien wretch to explode in a fountain of crackling gore.

The Sicarian infiltrators soon became stretched. Like Stroika they moved with the unflinching speed and fluidity of the machine. Acquisition reticules and calibrators danced across the darkness, zeroing in not only on enemies but on pre-calculated vulnerabilities. Information streamed. Links and feeds chuntered with the unspoken exchange of combat data. Hard-linked weaponry answered the call of targeter and xenocidal impulse.

Compatible fusions of combat hormones and serenitives were released slowly into their bloodstream, enabling the skitarii to maintain a state of battle-furious calm. Enemies were despatched with a ruthless, religious fervour. This found expression in the cold, almost automatic efficiency of their slick aim and death-dealing lack of sentiment. To an enemy the cybernetic soldiers might appear as machine-spirit guided robots, but the skitarii were more than just hydraulics, gears and processors. They hated with the hearts of men and dreamt the glories of the Omnissiah ascendant, a day when all true constructs of flesh and iron might be connected as one. A time when the Machine God might extend His data-ravenous reach and that of His empire throughout the whole galaxy.

The greenskins came at them, the bloody beads of their eyes searing with neurostatic rage and territoriality. The ancient crash site of the Stella-Xenithica was their tribal home, possibly since their original planetary infection. They were not going to give it up or be driven out onto the merciless, algae-streaked plateaus of the ice world. The feral beasts charged, their fur-wrapped feet thundering across the quivering deck, their eyes bleeding and their jaws opened wide in fang-furious display. The beasts were gigantic and wielded bludgeoning blades fashioned from twisted struts and torn decking – huge, rude and serrated.

<Pattern Involutia,> the Primus ordered.

With stabbing, hydraulic steps, the skitarii infiltrators formed a circle, their backs to one another and the roaring fire. Their blasters punched through the darkness beyond, ripping through hearts and throats. The resilience of the alien beasts, however, was something to behold. Stroika’s cogitator grew warm inside his skull, processing the data of death and destruction that was all around him. As feral greenskins crashed into the deck, the brutes behind them stamped through their carcasses in rage-filled desperation.

The skitarii officer saw the wall of jagged weaponry and green muscle close about them like a trap. It was a spiked and shrinking enclosure of alien rage that would skewer and then pulverise the Infiltroriad-Spuria~660.

Haldron-44 Stroika felt the presence of the Machine God burning through his neurocircuitry and the brain in which it was embedded. Magos Torquora was transmitting the gifts of the Omnissiah from the phylactic diagnostiquorum aboard the Maestrale. Alien dissections. Files of xenos research and experiments that bordered on the heretekal in their detail. Structural schematics of early Terran colony ships from the infotombs of Mars. Through Stroika, the Omnissiah made His merciless need known to the soldiers of His machine empire.

<Be the sacred oil that soothes the impairment of age,> Haldron-44 Stroika transmitted to the skitarii squad, <and the prayer that reclaims spirits thought lost. Cleanse the holy form of His design of pollution – of alien life that is death to the machine and an affront to the purity of the Omnissiah’s purpose. Fourth denticle, concentrate fire.>

The Sicarian infiltrators turned in unison. Three greenskin monsters were tearing their way up through the rusted mesh of a bay floor-cover nearby. Like the digits of an ancient timepiece, Stroika’s warning relayed to the cybernetic soldiers the position of the emerging aliens – four teeth or denticles around the Cog Mechanicus. The space became a storm of shredded darkness.

Stroika aimed his arc pistols at the chamber ceiling. His targeters and uplinked overlays attempted to find a structural weak spot in the blackened girder supports running the corroded length of the hangar. As he fired, the infiltrators zeroed in on the target and added their own blasts to the strategic fire. The chamber grew to brightness before Stroika’s crackling streams faded. The mauled, white-hot section gave. The weight of the girder tore its opposite end from the mouldering supports. Stroika watched as the girder fell, followed by a cascade of detritus from the floor above, burying the three greenskins hauling themselves out of the decking.

<Tenth denticle, concentrate fire,> Stroika transmitted to his skitarii. The schematic Magos Torquora had sent him revealed the weakness of a plasma-welded join in the decking nearby. The joint marked where cargo bays had given way to the flight deck proper. Blasting a pair of arcstreams along the length of the rust-weakened seam, Stroika’s fire encouraged the Infiltroriad-Spuria~660 to follow suit with their rust-shredding blasters.

With the added weight of charging greenskins slamming down on the floor section, the join sheared away with a rippling fountain of rust. Within moments the decking beyond the seam was gone and a number of the stomping greenskins with it. Stroika watched the feral savages fall down through the wreckage, into the blackness beneath.

<Now show the Omnissiah your reverence and bend a knee,> Stroika commanded. As the circle of infiltrators knelt in unison, Stroika turned. With his bionics firmly anchored to the ruined deck, his torso began to revolve. Turning within the abdominal gimbal-mounting of his hydraulic legs, Stroika brought up his arc pistols. Holding the weapons out to either side of him, he let loose streams of electrical energy that twirled about him and over the helmets of the kneeling skitarii. The arcstreams crackled and spat through the darkness, lashing greenskins back with their fury. Green flesh smouldered in the wake of the revolving beams, while bolts of residual electricity rippled about the hulking frames of the oncoming monsters.

Several of the scrawnier, snaggle-toothed specimens went down and struggled to get up under the repeated attentions of the arcstreams. The larger brutes – feral orks jangling with rings and primitive glyph-carved tokens – seemed able to shrug off both the scorching beams and the muscle-spasming effects of the current. With several greenskins dead or dying on the flight deck but many more still raging for the skitarii, Haldron-44 Stroika’s arc pistols stuttered and fizzled dry.

The effect was instantaneous. The xenos brutes came back at the circle of cybernetic soldiers like a green tidal wave. The infiltrators’ white noise seemed to infuriate the beasts as much as disorientate them. The huge monsters heaved their primitive axes down. The skitarii used their optic-arrays, logistic overlays and pneumatically fired reflexes to avoid the worst of the greenskins’ fury. Spindly infiltrators leaned back, stepped sideways and turned aside bludgeoning weapons that demolished the flooring and smash-scattered wreckage. Despite the heart-stopping fury of the attacks, the skitarii’s movements were fluid and assured.

As the alien beasts roared at them, the infiltrators had only a dull awareness of their human fears, their minds sizzling with the rush of data being processed and shared. Their magi overlords had calibrated their experience of the world to suit the needs of the mission. Fear was but an inconvenience. Feelings, emotions, relationships, these all had their allotted place and purpose in Mechanicus society. In battle however, such frailties of the flesh were phylactically dimmed and eclipsed by their function as living weapons of the Omnissiah.

Their brains might have been allowed the creativity and invention to make them a flexible force – capable of evolving strategy, zeal and improvisation. Their hearts, however, were a void. Instead of sentiment and inclination, the skitarii felt targeting data, battle-protocol, imperatives and the processed thought-streams of their officers and lord magi. They felt the presence of the Omnissiah in order and instruction. They felt Him act through their very bodies, their bionics and organics. For the soldiers of the Legiones Skitarii, it was all they needed to know.

The rabid violence of the chamber was intoxicating. With fury and frustration, the greenskins came at the skitarii with growing speed, savagery and force. The Sicarians of the Infiltroriad-Spuria~660 calibrated their movements and predictions to remain a millisecond or two ahead of their monstrous foes, looking for an opening. The greenskin savages were not without a mad unpredictability, however, and for Quasiq-Spuria II/X and Valek-Spuria V/X the opening never presented itself.

Stroika felt the biometrics of both infiltrators spike and fade as the orks they were combating unleashed their feral wrath. One green monster slammed a strut-spear straight through the chest housing of Valek-Spuria V/X, skewering the skitarius. The ork heaved the cybernetic soldier up with ease, allowing him to screech horribly down the length of the serrated shaft.

The greenskin savage shook the thick spear from side to side. Valek-Spuria V/X’s spindly appendages flailed about, before his ruined torso and gimbal waist-socket parted. Stamping down on his helm with a fur-wrapped foot, the greenskin put the infiltrator out of his misery. Quasiq-Spuria II/X was felled by another alien beast, the force with which the creature chopped down with its hacker enough to smash the skitarius into bloody scrap.

<Maintain formation,> Stroika heard Talus-Spuria I/X order. The princeps moved in to plug the gap where his pair of infiltrators had died.

As the feral greenskins intensified their territorial assault, the princeps and his infiltrators deployed their close combat weapons. Flechette blasters still shredded orks to distraction, between the brutal sweeps and stabs of primitive weaponry. Adding to their ragged thud, taser goads sparked off crude blades and sent bolts of bone-shattering energy through green flesh from their hyperdynamo capacitors.

Several greenskins backed away like chastised animals, snorting, working their mangle-fanged jaws and shaking the shock from their weapons. A number of beasts dropped their hackers and choppers, glaring at the Sicarian infiltrators with suspicion and rage before drawing their skinning shards from fur belts.

The most hulking and monstrous of the savages – a thing that wore the skull of an even larger chieftain as a tribal helm – lumbered forth. It wielded a spiked metal totem pole as a weapon, which it used to spark-smash the taser goad of Schrada-Spuria VII/X aside. Grabbing the infiltrator’s slender metal arm in one great claw, the greenskin chieftain seemed unfazed by the thudding of crackling flechettes into his barrel chest. The chieftain used the bionic appendage to wield the Sicarian infiltrator as a weapon. Smashing aside Solonoid-Spuria IV/X and Cynkade-Spuria X/X with their comrade’s armoured body, the towering savage beat Schrada-Spuria VII/X from side to side into the demolished decking.

<God of man and machine,> Haldron-44 Stroika thoughtstreamed to himself, <guide me, Your instrument, in destroying this pollution of Your great works.>

Stroika’s revolving shoulders cycled clockwise, sending his appendage-arms down and around. As they did, his wrist joints turned, presenting his arc pistols to the rear. Two auxiliary appendages cycled and unfolded over the tops of his whirring shoulders, from where they had been carriage-locked to the back of his combat chassis and hidden beneath his officer’s cloak. Each weapons-cradle held a crackling arc maul. The weapons sizzled with electrical energies. With his quad weapons appendages charged and presented, Stroika prepared himself to face the monstrous chieftain.

From the arkcruiser, the Machine God answered his call. The Primus’s cogitator coils and combat overlays were flushed with additional data downlinked from Magos Torquora and the explorator diagnostiquorum. Species-specific vulnerabilities. Logistae projections. Battle-addenda, compensating for the creature’s larger size and resilience.

‘Meet my Maker…’ Stroika voxed at the oncoming ork, his static-laced voice a metallic boom in the cavernous chamber.

The noise just seemed to provoke the hulking thing. The greenskin chieftain swung its totem like a great, spiked metal club. Stroika’s movements were assured and hydraulically slick, his helm and crest-holder ducking down beneath the furious passage of the uncouth weapon.

He side-stepped, allowing the beast to cave the decking in beside him, the totem tearing mangled mesh and cargo pit covers up from the floor. Flinging the scrap aside, the greenskin chieftain came at Stroika again. The red beads of its bleeding eyes burned with territorial hatred, while the beast’s scar-cratered face contorted with its desire to see Stroika and his skitarii join the mouldering wreckage of the chamber.

Augurs and phylactic intrusions crowded Stroika’s optics with trajectories, highlighting and streaming notation. The skitarii commander turned up the length of the deck-buried totem. Stroika’s torso spun in its interface socket, his outstretched arms coming around like a wheeling star. One arc maul, followed by the other, smashed through the globed muscle of one green arm, knocking the chieftain back with the intense electrical shock that the arc mauls delivered. With energy snapping in a spidery web about the wound, Stroika brought around his pistols, streaming fire from one and then another into the beast’s barrel chest.

The greenskin roared its pain and shock. Even the beast, dull as its nervous system was, could feel the intense flow of electricity through its bones. In its retreating frustration, the hulking creature lashed its totem column back, taking the head of Vega-Spuria III/X from his armoured shoulders with a sickening clunk.

Lifting its weapon, the chieftain stomped across the ruined deck at Stroika. Burying the spiked totem in the busy, encrusted architecture of the hangar roof, the green abomination hauled on the superstructure. Stroika’s neurocircuitry sparked with warnings and contingencies. With a groan, the corroded metal gave. Using the totem as a grapnel, the alien pulled part of the chamber roof down on Stroika, forcing the skitarii officer to take several powered steps and dive out from under the descending wreckage.

Bringing his arc mauls up, Stroika created an improvised roll cage from the curvature of his appendage-arms and the length of the weapons. Tumbling back to his metal feet in one fluid movement, the Primus whipped his foil cloak about his cybernetic frame and positioned himself on the greenskin’s flank.

Blasting the monster in the neck and side of the head with twin streams from his pistols, Stroika monitored the beast’s predicted reaction. Bringing its claw to its seared face, the stun-shock of electricity coursing through its thick skull, the monster stumbled to one side. Still carrying the momentum of the roll, Stroika stomped behind the beast. He smashed at the monstrosity through its furs, prompting an agonising roar from the greenskin.

It brought its girder totem around savagely, but Stroika stopped, anchoring his metal feet to the deck and locking his hydraulic frame. Holding the arc mauls out to deflect the weapon, the skitarius felt his absorbers, pistons and fibre-bundles soak up the impact. The anchors on the soles of his feet tore up the rusted deck and he was pushed backwards by the monstrous force of the swing.

With alarms and integrity warnings flashing through the darkness of his helm, Stroika intensified the blaze of electricity between the metal totem and the crackling mauls. Heaving back with his hydraulic might, Stroika shocked the weapon from the spasming claws of the feral chieftain.

Pressing his advantage, the Primus rotated his shoulder demi-joints. Bringing his pistols back overhead and his arc mauls behind, he blasted continuous arcstreams at the beast, forcing it into a retreat. Holding out its massive claws before the onslaught and howling its alien agony, the monster stumbled back through the engagements of several of its tribe. Its kin were faring just as badly against the Sicarian infiltrators.

Falling back over a rust-shattered pipe, the greenskin monster went down. Still it retreated, half crawling and half convulsing back beneath the intense energies that razed its flesh and wracked its body. The creature looked up at the Omnissiah’s cybernetic servant, its blood-bead eyes glassy with alien hatred.

As Stroika brought his crackling arc mauls over and down once more, he beat the alien creature down into the deck. The skitarius turned with the force of a fired piston. The arc mauls came around, trailing a static-bright glare. They struck the hulking greenskin in the side of the head. The first stove in the skull it was wearing as a tribal helm and then the beast’s own. The second took the ugly head from its globed shoulders and sent it bouncing off through the darkness.

‘For the sanctity of the Machine,’ Stroika voxed down at the fountaining carcass of the green monster, ‘and He who works through the miracle of its operation. You are an aberration and not part of the Omnissiah’s grand design. Therefore, you must be destroyed.’

Keying back into his feeds and the web of data streaming from the engagement, the Primus found the chamber to be strewn with alien bodies. Among the rank corpses of the feral monsters was Cadmiad-Spuria VI/X, who had died a few footsteps away. Princeps Talus-Spuria I/X moved about the chamber with his surviving infiltrators, pointing their pistols down at dying greenskins and blasting a point-blank and functional death into the skulls of the beasts. It was not execution. It was eradication.

Stroika felt the return of his humanity – the shred his duties allowed him. He was no longer the living weapon that circumstance demanded. Emotions flooded back. Filtered though they were through his psychosurgical suppressions, they still presented as an intoxicating rush. He felt the conflicted warmth of concern, of relief, of satisfaction. As he cast his busy optics across the bodies of his dead skitarii, he noticed the distant pang of loss and responsibility in deaths that had previously been reported and catalogued.

Riding on the magnetic hush of its revolving cog, Phrenos~361 drifted forth out of the darkness, augurs, scopes and pict lenses retreating into cavities in the servo-skull’s cranium. Revolving his shoulder joints, Stroika cradle-locked his maul-appendages to his back. Ejecting his spent power cells and extending the hydraulics of his arms he sent his arc pistols back along their rails to where they sat in cavity holsters inset within his chest plating. The Primus brought up his arm and allowed Phrenos~361 to land, anchoring itself with prehensile cables and micro-mechadendrites. The drone uploaded the hard data of its survey findings.

<Magos,> Haldron-44 Stroika transmitted back to the explorator arkcruiser. <The Stella-Xenithica has been purified of the alien infestation. No further xenos targets detected.>

The report was a formality but one Stroika took legitimate pride in delivering. Through phylactic communion, Magos Torquora and the diagnostiquorum saw what the skitarii saw and experienced the mission vicariously from the Maestrale. Through the umbilical streams of invisible data-tethers, they were one with the Omnissiah.

<Status report,> Torquora streamed back.

<Princeps Talus-Spuria I/X reports the loss of seven Sicarians. I am recommending the princeps, Solonoid-Spuria IV/X and Cynkade-Spuria X/X for the Exonumia-Maxital in recognition of their part in this historic undertaking. With your permission I would like their designations recorded in the mission log.>

<Granted, Stroika-unit,> Torquora transmitted back.

<The vessel-artefact is secure, magos, and awaits your inspection,> Stroika told him. <A survey reveals an estimated two-thirds of the colony vessel intact. I would, however, recommend that purge teams accompany your survey catalogistae and the magi archeotechnis down to the crash site. The vessel may still be infested with alien growths and spores.>

<They have already been despatched, Stroika-unit,> Magos Torquora told him, visiting upon the skitarius an orbital pict of a great explorator drop-ship, sat on the ice beside the buried wreck of the Stella-Xenithica.

<I don’t understand, magos.>

<They were despatched the moment you confirmed the identification of the vessel,> Magos Torquora told the skitarius. <The Omnissiah allows not for doubt in these matters of high significance and I allowed none for your failure. You have and will always have my complete confidence, Primus.>

<The honour is all yours, magos explorator,> Stroika sent back. <By the Machine God’s good grace, your researches led His servants to this great find. Who knows what secrets will be unearthed from a relic-vessel of such age?>

<I am coming down to the surface,> Omnid Torquora told him. Stroika could detect, even in the ancient magos’s steely transmissions, the hint of excitement. <Let us find out.>

0010

SELECTED: DENTRICA I OF II
ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED
UPLOADING… +THE CORPUS MECHANICUS+

The arkcruiser Maestrale made its descent. Below the explorator vessel the forge world of Satzica Secundus turned. Bathed in the heat and red light of its local star, the planet’s thick, black cloud cover was tinged with an infernal hue. The arkcruiser’s approach meant dropping down through the planet’s swarm of tiny fabricator moons. Upon doing so it drifted downwards through the orbital plates, defence platforms and shipyards that circled the forge world. The ponderous progress of their mesmerising paths was a thing of intersecting beauty. These obstacles the Maestrale negotiated with clockwork precision. There would be many scopes, optics and eyes trained on the vessel and Magos Torquora would not risk the disaster of a collision.

The low gravitational conditions on Satzica Secundus meant that the factoria, smoke stacks and strato-forges reached high up into the sky. They pierced the planet’s oppressive cloud cover, the result of thousands of years of relentless industry. The chemical brume of heavy metal vapours was a pincushion through which the tallest soot-stained towers, forge temples and ventscrapers rose.

Haldron-44 Stroika stood on the edge of the flight deck, looking down upon his forge world home as it rose up to meet him. The servo-skull Phrenos~361 hovered idly nearby, waiting to be of some service to its master. About them the superstructure of the bay creaked as the arkcruiser once more knew the gravitational pull of low anchorage. Stroika’s optics glazed with idle trajectories and data unsought. As it was, the Maestrale was keeping rotational pace with a colossal structure below – a mighty forge whose temple towers rose so high out of the black cloud that they almost appeared to reach out for the arkcruiser.

Stroika didn’t need datastreams to tell him that he looked upon the forge temple principal, the seat of the Fabricator General and High Gnostarch of Satzica Secundus. It was known across the forge world as the Thunderfane, for taking the cacophony of its sacred industry highest into the heavens.

As Stroika watched, he saw a baroque craft of ornate design ascend from the Thunderfane’s apex platforms, a vessel all brass, gold and Martian red. Extending the telescoptics of his helm, the Primus scanned the vessel for identification. To his surprise, the Fabricator General’s own orbital barge was approaching the Maestrale, flanked by a pair of ornamental landers.

<Sir.>

The stream carried the signifiers of 10-Victro Tiberiax, Stroika’s legionary second among the Deuteron-IV Praetori. While alphas, commanders and princeps like Talus-Spuria I/X led individual units, Stroika and Tiberiax held responsibility for every skitarii soldier on board the Maestrale, and both the martial and cult traditions that governed their number.

<Report.>

<The magos, sir.>

The landing bay was suddenly awash with activity. A gaggle of tech-priests arrived on the deck, the skirts of their rust-red robes trailing after them. Some were spindly magi sporting scaffolds of slender clawed appendages, while others were nests of snaking mechadendrites. Several of the diagnostiquorum were broad, barrel-chested constructs whose augmentations had added a baroque bulk to otherwise feeble frames.

The tech-priests were shadowed by Mechanicus protectors, personal bodyguards of frightful augmentation. The magi and their personal ward engines in turn were flanked by 10-Victro Tiberiax and soldiers of the Lex-70 Ranger-Expatriarii. All knew their place in the stratified ranks of the Mechanicus. The heavy hydraulics of the skitarii’s legs beat a rhythm on the deck that could be heard and felt.

Stroika had assigned the rangers as a planetary escort, ensuring that the visored helm and plate of each soldier gleamed. Their robust hydraulics had been soaked in baptismal oils and received special attention for the slightest lag or fault. With ceremonial battle cloaks and polished galvanic rifles, Stroika was certain that the Lex-70 Ranger-Expatriarii would do both himself and his magos proud.

At the heart of the delegation was Magos Omnid Torquora. The explorator had spent an extended lifetime in the field. He had favoured the perils and rewards of exploration and reconquest over a forge world existence, with its feudal politics and currying favour at the Thunderfane.

His choices had cost him, however, especially during his early survey missions as a young explorator in the Dragortha Deeps. His body was now but a flesh-plugged husk. The depths of his red hood hid the ghoulish features of a cadaverous face and the darkness within it framed the blue burn of optics that seared with priestly obsession.

Torquora’s torso was spoiling flesh shot through with cables, while the ragged stumps of his limbs had been surgically interfaced with a hulking suit of crafted armour. The clinker-plate frame lent the ancient tech-priest the bulk of a battle-automaton, the magna-pneumatics of each shoulder supporting stowed heavy weaponry. The chunky hydraulics of armoured legs carried the weight of the explorator’s augmentations, clunking with each heavy step.

A slender pair of auxiliary appendages reached out through the tech-priest’s chassis-concealing robes. Their multi-digits were feverishly at work across the runebanks of cogitators and logic engines housed within the armoured pulpit that formed the suit’s projecting chest.

Omnid Torquora led his diagnostiquorum of tech-priests, logistae and artisan advisors. The disciples of the Machine God. Behind them an itinerant ark trundled on thick tracks. The prize within was hidden behind adamantium plate, a kaleidoscopic bubble of overlapping protective shielding, stasis fields and a chrono-containment lock. A technological treasure the explorator had recovered from the Stella-Xenithica and was now to ceremonially present to his Fabricator General.

<Escort and delegation ready, sir,> Tiberiax communicated.

10-Victro Tiberiax marched ahead of his skitarii and the diagnostiquorum’s protector ward engines. Like his rangers and Stroika, Tiberiax gleamed for the occasion. The silver of his plate and the rich red of his battle cloak honoured the event. The only individual who seemed to have gone to no extra preparation was Torquora himself, whose brazen bionics went unpolished and whose robes were dark with the stain of maintenance and grease. Even the explorator’s spoiling stench had gone unmasked. Stroika’s processors told him that there was a 16.349 per cent chance that the magos had simply been too busy with his preparations. Based on how the officer knew Torquora felt about forge world politics, the skitarius estimated a 43.998 per cent likelihood that it was intended as some kind of slight or insult.

<Very good,> Stroika sent back to Tiberiax. <You are right on time.>

Tiberiax sent the noospheric blurt of a salute to his commander, which Stroika returned as he joined the party. Cranial locks turned on the side of Stroika’s cog-plumed helmet, allowing the Primus to disengage it from his cranial interfacing. His shaven head was covered in haptic sockets, flesh plugs and a web of embedded cabling. He held the helmet out and allowed the servo-skull Phrenos~361 to carry it in its trailing mechadendrites.

Stroika’s skin was swarthy like that of his Satzican brothers. His eyes were his own, but ringed with screw-interfacia optics that gave him the appearance of wearing lensless goggles. His mouth was relaxed and his face at the kind of peace and obedience of mind that surgeo-suppression procedures ensured.

Stroika looked to Magos Torquora and opted for the modulated informality of speech.

‘The Fabricator General sends his personal barge for you, my lord.’

‘For me?’ the explorator said, his own modulations shot through with truculence and sickly static. ‘For you? No, Stroika-unit. For the treasure we bring him. He honours the Machine God’s wonder with his barge, not our own.’

‘Are we not all the Machine God’s wonders, magos?’ Stroika ventured.

‘Yes, but we are not all equal in His eyes,’ Torquora replied, the party of tech-priests and its ceremonial escort making its way across the deck. The Fabricator General’s barge rose to meet them, the ornate transport settling in a flight bay. The hydraulics of its landing claws hissed and the craft was briefly lost in a cloud of steam. ‘One cog may turn another through a set of gears and yet by the nature of the mechanism the two cogs never meet. We are those cogs, dutifully turning, lending power to the betters turning above us.’

‘But we are about to meet the Fabricator General…’ Stroika said.

‘By the grace of your function, you have been allowed your curiosity,’ Torquora warned the Primus. ‘Do not use such a hallowed gift for insolent suggestion.’

‘My lord, I…’

<I know what you are thinking before you do, Stroika-unit,> the magos explorator told him, his voice echoing through the skitarius’s thoughts. <Do not forget that. If your questions proceed from a spiritual impulse–>

‘They do, magos,’ Stroika assured him.

<Spoken like a cult soldier,> Torquora streamed. The Primus did not know whether this was a compliment or not. Once again, Stroika heard the magos’s voice proceed from his jaundiced lips.

‘These events are unusual in their historical significance. Protocol is being subverted. You are to me as I am to the Fabricator General. As billions are to him. He is nothing, however, to the Great Maker – who is the glory of the Machine absolute, the Corpus Mechanicus. The Omnissiah can make us and He can break us. In this instance, something wonderful has happened. A gift long lost has been given back to our empire. This audience with the Fabricator General is not an honour – it is a formality. I tell you this: the Omnissiah has bestowed this gift on us all. I shall be flesh-damned before I let it end up in the depths of some vault or as part of a political pay-off. It shall function as it was intended and through that function honour us all. I would not meet with this nest of silicon vipers, were they not to be the key to such a realisation.’

‘Then you hold no regard for the Fabricator General and the priesthood of Satzica Secundus?’ Stroika asked.

‘I hold them in every regard,’ Omnid Torquora told him. ‘I simply wish to be that cog far removed. I do not desire to be coated in the grease of their oily dealings, their affairs of heart and greed. Why do you think I sought the path of the explorator? It was the ships of such undertakings and the tech-priests that commanded them that could take me farthest from this place. We must, however, pay the price of our successes.’

As the delegation of tech-priests, protectors and skitarii rangers approached the orbital barge, its ramp descended. Lowering with it was Master-Manciple Proxis, the Fabricator General’s personal emissary. Proxis kept the claw-toolage of his appendages buried in his accommodating sleeves. The master-manciple’s ribbed gown and hood concealed the wonder of his workings, but his face was plain to see. Within the glass bowl of his head sloshed an excited mixture of liquid metal that masked his features. The metal had the ability to replicate the faces of those whom he addressed. Combined with a dialogus-matrix, this made Proxis an excellent emissary for his master, since it was difficult to feel hostility towards one’s own face.

Proxis issued forth a stream of code, reverential blurts and binaric cant. He followed this introduction with one issued from his vox-hailers.

‘Magos Torquora,’ Proxis said, his features assuming the semblance of the explorator’s rancid own, ‘his excellency Voricar Trega, Fabricator General and High Gnostarch of Satzica Secundus, bids you a welcome return.’

‘I am honoured,’ said Omnid Torquora, turning his hood slightly to reinforce to Stroika that he was anything but. Within moments the master-manciple’s face had changed again. It assumed the form of his Fabricator General – the flattery of a younger incarnation, of course – before returning to a silvery representation of Torquora’s own.

‘It has been too long, magos,’ Proxis said.

‘And yet not long enough…’ Torquora returned, allowing a ripple of doubt to pass through the liquid metal in the bowl, ‘…to fully complete my mission. I had to leave a macroclade of skitarii to secure the remaining secrets of the site. I fear that we leave further secrets undiscovered, to be pillaged by the enemies of Mars.’

‘The Fabricator General regrets that,’ Proxis told him, ‘but wishes me to assure you that reinforcements are en route to the Perborea system to further secure the Stella-Xenithica site.’

Torquora turned to allow Haldron-44 Stroika to see the displeasure on his ruined face, the light from the deck lumens invading the depths of the tech-priest’s hood. Stroika had left a skitarii garrison under the command of Talus-Spuria I/X, who had received a well-earned promotion for his part in securing the colony ship.

His orders had been to provide security for the wreck and the small army of catalogistae and magi archeotechnis Omnid Torquora had left on the miserable ice world to continue the Omnissiah’s good work. Stroika had thought it unlikely that the secrets of the colony ship would be discovered by others, based upon the length of time that had passed between previous visitations. The Primus could not believe that the Stella-Xenithica or even the greenskin savages had purposely visited the ice ball of a planet, which held little strategic or resource value. What Stroika hadn’t factored into his assessment was the danger posed by other magi and explorators, eager to get to Perborea and steal the vessel’s valuable secrets and treasures for themselves.

‘Is that–’ Proxis began, craning the bowl of his head around to see the itinerant ark behind.

‘Yes,’ Torquora cut him off. ‘It is.’

‘When the Fabricator General learned of your find, from the encrypted astrotelepathic field reports, he insisted upon seeing such a treasure for himself. He was eager that it benefit immediately from the sanctity and full security of the forge world. That is not a problem, is it, magos?’

‘No problem,’ the explorator said, through gritted adamantalloy teeth.

‘You understand, of course, magos…’

‘Oh yes,’ Torquora told him. ‘I understand completely.’

‘Shall we, then?’ Proxis said. ‘The entire forge world awaits you and your treasure.’

‘Let’s.’

SELECTED: DENTRICA II OF II
ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED
UPLOADING… +THE QUEST FOR KNOWLEDGE+

The orbital barge roared across the surface of the clouds, churning up a billowing chromatic haze from the toxic darkness below. As Haldron-44 Stroika stood in the baroque luxury of the bay-vestibule, he watched his home world blur by. The barge passed between zeppelins tethered to processing towers and down through the torrents of high-altitude traffic: haulage brigs, bulk transports and freighters.

Cherubim and silver-skinned servitors moved about the barge passengers, all decked out in the feudal livery of the Thunderfane, offering consecrated oils, power and amasec for those tech-priests who were partial.

A pair of ancient security-automata flanked the closed bay ramp, their still and imposing forms like statues. Master-Manciple Proxis was exchanging words of congratulation with the tech-priests of Torquora’s diagnostiquorum, as his role dictated. Several electro-priests came forth chanting cult litanies and giving thanks, the flesh of their faces a network of sub-dermal circuitry. Making the sign of the Holy Cog and slashing the crackling bolts of blessing across chests with the termini of their fingertips, the tech-priests moved on to more formal rituals about the shape of the tracked ark.

Like the magos explorator, the skitarii rangers and protector bodyguards wanted little to do with the ceremony and fuss unfolding in the vestibule-bay. With the servo-skull Phrenos~361 still holding his helmet beside him, Haldron-44 Stroika returned his gaze to the broad viewport on the barge’s elevated belvedere.

The barge was surging across the thick ocean of black cloud, taking a tour of the region’s grandest and most significant strato-forges. Upon their clean domes, pyramids and temple tops that reached clear of the smog, thousands of tech-priests, magi and forge world significants gathered to watch the passage of the barge from balconies and platforms. They were there to honour the return of the Maestrale and its precious cargo, but despite gathering for the purpose of celebration, there were no shouts of jubilation or waving from the crowd. They simply stared blankly at the passing of the barge and the treasure it contained. They made the sign of the Holy Cog and streamed their coded praise.

Stroika knew that it would be the same in the darkness below the cloud cover. In earlier service to the Omnissiah, he had toiled in the groundmills and scraper-factoria. He had done so as both a fresh-fleshed menial and a citizen construct, proudly putting the first of many augmentations to work in the name of the Machine God Incarnate.

Code-streaming vox-hailers would have announced through the smog the arrival of the explorator arkcruiser and the unseen overhead passage of the barge. Forge-worlders in rubber and trunk-trailing gas masks would have stopped to observe the occasion on the freightways and up through the workshop-platforms. They would have done so in similar silence, no doubt enjoying a moment’s respite from their back-breaking duties.

Completing their brief tour, the flanking ornamental landers peeled away as the barge set its course for the Thunderfane. The vessel coursed between columns of flame that reached up from the stackscrapers of satellite strato-forges as the temple furnaces vented in its honour. The forge temple principal towered magnificently against the Satzican sunset, its colossal crown of node towers arcing with power. Coming in through the electrical storm, the ceremonial barge deposited its passengers on a lofty temple platform.

With Phrenos~361 hovering beside him with his helmet, Stroika led the way between the still forms of the security-automata. 10-Victro Tiberiax fell in line and the two skitarii officers stepped off the platform with their cloaks flowing behind them. Omnid Torquora followed with platform-shaking steps, trailing his diagnostiquorum and the itinerant ark, which itself was flanked by ranger sentinels and protector bodyguards.

The delegation from the Maestrale found it slow going through the outer halls of the strato-forge temple. As the capital forge on the planet, its halls were grand and swarming with a sea of tech-adepts: forge masters, arch-magi, tech-priests, magnates, logistae and cult retainers. Temple thralls stood guard in cages mounted on stilt-platforms, dotted throughout the chamber’s length. The smell of ceremonial ozone burned on the air.

Stroika and Tiberiax parted the crowds, but with so many wishing to congratulate the magos explorator and catch a glimpse of the trundling ark, negotiating the hall took time. Finding another hall and another, each boasting its own sub-strata of forge world society and significance, Stroika knew that Omnid Torquora would be detesting every wasted moment. They had both spent so much time away from their home, exploring and on legionary deployment, that they were not ready for the overwhelming welcome.

<Stroika-unit,> Torquora streamed, <get us out of here. That would be an order.>

Stroika and Tiberiax exchanged a wry glance and a nod, the two skitarii officers surging on through the crowds. Through the great arch beyond, lined with choral servitors vox-blurting code-canticles of the Cult Mechanicus, Stroika found a ceremonial doorway guarded by another pair of relic security-automata.

Master-Manciple Proxis and Torquora’s delegation were admitted by armed temple thralls. The inner temple beyond was sparse in comparison to the entrance halls, with a few dozen forge masters, logistae and magi in attendance about the enthroned figure of the Fabricator General.

‘Magos Explorator Omnid Torquora,’ Master-Manciple Proxis announced. The call was echoed by vox-hailing servitors ornamentally embedded in the chamber pillars.

The huddle of tech-priests parted as Torquora stomped his augmented way across the chamber and up to the throne, flanked by Stroika and Tiberiax. The skitarii officers went down on one knee, as did the explorator in his hulking suit. He rose again, towering over the attendant magi and advisors. A swarm of winged cherubim scattered from where they had been perched around the throne and the scaffold about it. Machinelings scuttled away. The suddenness of the movement turned hoods and drew the sear of optics. The glowers – both organic and artificial – were palpable. While he was not the only imposing construct among them, Torquora’s size and offline weaponry were designed to intimidate.

Such displays did not stop a robed member of the Fabricator General’s retinue from venturing forth. The construct wore the black robes of a temple codescrubber, a magos catharc charged with the Fabricator General’s spiritual security.

A mekspider rappelled from the chamber ceiling on a tiny winch-wire, landing on Stroika’s shoulder. Extending a probe-interface, the mekspider momentarily explored a local flesh-plug in the skitarii officer’s ear before dropping onto the floor and crawling up a member of the diagnostiquorum. Mekspider drones of different sizes and designs skittered about the explorator delegation, criss-crossing the open space with their wire feeds. They were all conduit-connected to the magos catharc, who was checking Torquora and his attendants for any sign of technological deviance or xenological corruption. The magos catharc took readings from Omnid Torquora personally.

The black cloak and hood of the Fabricator General’s codescrubber housed a rippling body made up almost exclusively of writhing, tentacular mechadendrites. The helmet-mask of its face and whirring telescoptics did little to offset the horrible suggestion of a body buried in a nest of strangling serpents. As it moved through the crowd, the tech-priests and forge masters instinctively withdrew. Some of them had clearly received the chief codescrubber’s invasive attentions. Haldron-44 Stroika shuddered to cogitate the lengths to which the magos catharc would go to purify a machine of code-corruptions or xenos infection.

‘Omnid, Omnid, Omnid…’

The metallic voice was everywhere. Like a whetstone along a blade – chill and grating.

‘My Fabricator General,’ Torquora said.

‘Approach, my friend,’ the metallic boom announced. ‘It is good to see you.’

At the Fabricator General’s suggestion, the magos catharc slithered aside and the mekspiders crawling about Torquora’s delegation rose towards the ceiling on their fibre-cables. Stroika watched his magos stomp up towards the throne, allowing the skitarii officer a better view. The throne was set upon a dais of colossal cogs. About it was a scaffold from which draped a semi-transparent foil. The material was shot through with engrammatic patterns and circuitry, forming the sigil of the Thunderfane forge temple and its planetary overlord. Through the foil Stroika could make out the enthroned figure of Voricar Trega, High Gnostarch of the Thunderfane and Fabricator General of Satzica Secundus.

The steel hiss of the Fabricator General’s voice proceeded from huge vox-hailers set in the throne. The throne itself was not only the figurative seat of power in the forge temple principal and the Mechanicus world beyond; it was an actual seat of power. The throne was made up of a quad of fusion towers from which electricity snapped and arced. The Fabricator General sat within – an almost permanent fixture. Little of the man that had been Voricar Trega remained, the ancient magos now being little more than a robed automaton, sitting in a nest of interfaced power cables and haptic feeds. It was said the very power produced by the forge world itself passed through the Fabricator General’s crackling form.

Omnid Torquora knelt once more and took up the foil with one of his auxiliary appendages. Drawing it to his hood, he kissed the Fabricator General’s sizzling sigil. Standing, the magos explorator drew back.

‘What has it been, Omnid?’ Trega said, his voice echoing through the floor and chamber. ‘A century?’

‘Two, my lord,’ Torquora told his master.

‘You have been busy, magos.’

‘The Great Maker wishes it so,’ Torquora said. ‘I see His blessing continues to burn bright in both Satzica Secundus and your resplendent self. This is your third incarnation?’

‘The Omnissiah favours me with His grand design,’ the Fabricator General affirmed. ‘Enough about me. This day looks to your accomplishments. So, the Stella-Xenithica…’

‘The Perborea system, my lord,’ Omnid Torquora said. ‘Out on the Nooneus Drift. Planetoid seven of sixteen.’

‘A Terran colony ship, out there?’ Trega boomed. ‘How did you come to find the vessel-artefact?’

‘Many years of research, data-salvage and dead ends, Fabricator General,’ the magos explorator told him.

‘But the defining piece of evidence,’ Voricar Trega said. ‘Come now, Omnid. Don’t be modest. Share your successes and receive, through us, the Machine God’s thanks. The relevance is pressing.’

Stroika felt his magos hesitate. The skitarii officer’s equalisers recorded faint stress patterns in Torquora’s returns and a vague sense of threat in the Fabricator General’s own. The gathered retinue of forge masters, magi and logistae seemed to close in on Torquora and his revelations. The small horde of sycophants and predatory advisors was mostly made up of scrawny, cybernetic fusions – hooded tech-adepts draped in robes and spidery servo-appendages. Punctuating their number, however, were true oddities, ancients and sectarians like Torquora and Trega, who had fully embraced their machine form.

‘Merchant Charter records, my lord,’ the magos explorator told him. ‘Guild losses are reported by law to the Chartist Captains but can be acquired by interested parties for a price. I detected a pattern of disappearances in the vicinity of the Nooneus Drift. My Navigator and magi aethyricus isolated a tempestuous region of the warp nearby on a backwater trade route. It was my theory that the anomalous conditions pushed traversing vessels off course.’

‘That was your theory,’ Voricar Trega said, the node columns of his throne crackling with expectation. ‘But the Omnissiah demands of us data, does He not, Omnid? Hard data.’

‘Yes, my lord,’ Torquora said. ‘I took the arkcruiser Maestrale along the same route.’

‘A risk?’

‘Aye, but a necessary one,’ the magos explorator said. ‘For the Great Maker did not engineer us merely to exist but to push the boundaries of that existence. To become more – and that cannot be achieved without risk.’

‘Good, Omnid. Good…’

‘The tumultuous immeteorology of the route forced us to drop out of the warp on the edge of the Perborea System. Sixteen unremarkable planets orbiting an unremarkable star. The system was, however, crowded with debris, making exploration hazardous.’

‘But that did not stop you.’

‘No, my lord,’ Torquora said. ‘We made a systematic survey of the worlds, cataloguing many new species of xenos fauna and flora. We discovered several wrecks. Merchant vessels listed as losses in the Chartist records.’

‘And the Stella-Xenithica?’

‘Yes, my master,’ Torquora confirmed. ‘En route from Terra to Autrega, the colony ship had suffered the same fate – only thousands of years earlier. The crew perished in the extreme conditions and the artefact-vessel had suffered both the crash and the effects of time and environment. My skitarii forces purged the derelict of xenos infestation and secured the site for archeotechnological investigation. Cataloguing continues, but one of our first finds was of such magnitude that protocol dictated you should be informed, my master.’

‘Show us,’ the Fabricator General commanded with a gesture, his metallic digits slow and heavy with expectation.

Haldron-44 Stroika and 10-Victro Tiberiax advanced with the tracked ark, flanking the machine. A number of the magos explorator’s diagnostiquorum came forth to collapse the shielding, stasis fields and chrono-containment security systems of the armoured chest. Removing the heavy lid, several magi went to delicate work connecting cables and mumbling spirit-appeasing litanies of candescence over the technological wonder inside.

‘A Mark IV Martian hololithic projector,’ Omnid Torquora announced as his tech-priests made the sign of the Holy Cog and retreated before the Fabricator General. ‘A relic in its own right.’

Torquora nodded and one of his magi archeotechnis hauled down on a switch handle set within the itinerant ark’s side. The hoods and faces of the gathered tech-priests were illuminated by the hololithic static that fizzled in the space above the baroque projector. With a clunk, the projector cycled through a series of three-dimensional images. The air shimmered with intricate charts, blueprints and construction details. These were accompanied by columns of test data, material designations and litanies; a hololithic template containing all the sacred knowledge required to build the wonder of a technological artefact.

‘By the Motive Force…’ one of Trega’s forge masters uttered.

From the ripple of prayers and makings of the Holy Cog, Stroika assumed that many of the tech-priests had not believed the magos explorator’s reports. The Fabricator General knew Torquora of old, however, and had had no such lack of faith.

‘Praise the Omnissiah,’ Voricar Trega thundered, ‘for here before us are His missives, brought forth from the doom of our past and the darkness of ignorance.’

The forge masters and tech-priests watched as the blueprints of an ancient weapon flashed before them.

‘I present to you,’ Omnid Torquora announced, ‘the Standard Template Construct schematic for what these hololithic captures term a “Geller Device” or “Empyreal Bomb”.’

Stroika watched as optics intensified and a ripple of Omnissiah-honouring prayers passed through the gathering. There were no gasps or exclamations – only the drone of engaged cogitators and logic engines.

‘This is indeed a wonder,’ Voricar Trega said, ‘as you promised, Omnid. You have done well and honoured both your forge world and the Great Maker, whose ancient works grace our presence. What say you, my councillors?’

The gathered magi and forge masters turned in on themselves, gabbling code and cant as they unleashed their enthusiasm on each other. Stroika watched them in silence, the air alive with wireless feeds and identifications transmitted as badges of authority.

‘Phlegra Octaveen,’ the Fabricator General urged. ‘What say you?’

A tall, armaplas tank crawled forward on a quad of legs. The tank was filled with a murky liquid and a respirator rose and fell on its brass top. Lamps flickered on within, illuminating Phlegra Octaveen III, arch-calculus and cipher engine. There was little left of the old hag. Her threadbare cranium and toothless maw were strapped into an oxygen mask, while a wrinkled, saggy torso floated in the tank’s murky solution, supporting a single, skeletal arm. Pipes and nutri-lines ran up through the solution and into the logista’s diaphragm and the ragged stump of her other shoulder. The inside of the tank was covered in smears and numerals: the notations, mathematical enumeration and supra-calculi of the cipher engine.

‘Lord Fabricator,’ Octaveen said, bubbles rising from her mask as she spoke through a pair of vox-hailers. ‘Even the briefest of computations show the impact such a device might have on the galaxy. The Imperium and the Martian Empire are beset by warp storms in the void and immaterial storms within the aethyr itself that frustrate communication and physical expansion. This device would revolutionise warfare and travel. We could be looking at another golden age for both empires.’

‘A-a-and why would we want that?’ Eudoxus Zultra vox-stuttered, the gangling forge master looking around for agreement from the hooded tech-priests about him. ‘T-t-t-t-he Machine God has seen fit to bestow this wonder on Satzica Secundus and its priesthood. W-w-w-w-why share such a gift with those of base flesh? T-t-t-t-he worlds of men would appropriate it as their own – as they do all the Omnissiah’s wonders.’

‘They honour not the Machine God…’

‘Terra must be notified. Our accords have lasted thousands of years…’

‘The device belongs with Mars…’

‘Argentae,’ the Fabricator General said, the metallic hush of his voice descending upon the argument like a foil blanket on the flames of a fire, extinguishing it instantly. ‘Argentae Nuvias, my old friend. Your thoughts, magos aethyricus?’

Haldron-44 Stroika saw that the tech-priest could not attend personally and instead joined the retinue as a ghostly hololithic presence that bled from the gloom of the chamber. Nuvias’s hood and robes crackled, providing little evidence that anything existed within them.

‘As a weapon,’ the magos aethyricus said, ‘it would deny the pollutive entities of the warp purchase on the dimensional reality of worlds sacred to the Omnissiah. A powerful tool in our never-ending fight against the incorporeal threats that lay claim to our very plane of existence – the plane where flesh and iron exist in harmony.’

‘Could it even be constructed?’ Engra Myrmidex said, drifting forward through the crowd. The Fabricator Locum was second in authority only to Voricar Trega himself, and had long upgraded beyond the restraints of humanoid form. His shell-hull was comprised of clinker brass plates, arched into a foetal curve. The head of the ancient was a nest of optical arrays, pictcorders and auspectra, and below these hung a delicate array of fine brass instruments and mechadendrites. His tail dribbled a length of interface cables and holding his frame in place were a pair of coaxial propellers – ducted fans that helped him to hover above the ground. Most grotesque of all was the techno-magos’s tri-sentience: three surgically intermeshed brains, carried beneath the shell like a bulbous, pulsing, precious cargo. Three minds that spoke as one. ‘Reproduced? Mass produced?’

‘Well, Argentae? Phlegra?’ the Fabricator General demanded. ‘Speak, as you would before the Great Maker himself.’

‘The template seems intact, my Lord Fabricator,’ the logista bubbled.

‘The Machine God will provide the rest,’ Argentae Nuvias said with shimmering confidence. The tech-priest and tech-priestess had little intention of disappointing their machine master.

‘Then, my Fabricator General,’ Engra Myrmidex said, drifting his fans and form around to face the enthroned Trega, ‘I would consider it an honour only your greatness could bestow, to oversee the construction of this Geller device, this empyreal bomb, and test it.’

‘You will do no such thing,’ Omnid Torquora announced.

Stroika looked about the chamber. Silence had once more descended. The necks of magi and forge masters clicked around as they moved their hoods between the magos explorator, the Fabricator Locum and their Fabricator General. The skitarii officer detected the heat signatures of weapons held by temple thralls as they came online. He felt his aegis protocols stir and his own weapons engage. A stream of noospheric chatter passed silently between the Primus and 10-Victro Tiberiax.

‘Kn-kn-kn-know you not your place, magos?’ the forge master Eudoxus Zultra said, craning his lank frame over Omnid Torquora and jabbing the spindly toolage of a finger at him.

‘You address your betters here,’ the magos catharc hissed from the octopoid slithering of its hooded robes. ‘This is not the void or some backwater rock where you might feel the freedom of your lofty station. Take care, magos. You stand among giants here at the Thunderfane. Magi ordained by the Great Maker and charged with His authority decide what will and will not be done. All else goes against the Omnissiah’s grand design and is deemed heretekal.’

‘Your name and designations will forever be recorded in the discovery of this wondrous find, Omnid,’ the Fabricator General soothed. ‘You wish to be involved further in its development?’

‘I do, my Lord Fabricator,’ the magos explorator said.

‘Your encoded messages betrayed some reticence about being recalled to Satzica Secundus, Magos Torquora,’ the Fabricator Locum said. ‘It was expected that you would return to your work on Perborea and unearth further wonders for your forge world and Fabricator General.’

‘Would you not rather return, Omnid?’ Voricar Trega asked. ‘Construction. Deployment. These were never your calling, old friend. And this technological wonder must be tested. Data, my friend. The ongoing Quest for Knowledge supersedes petty notions of ownership. We must know the device’s capabilities. The discovery was yours but the find brings glory to all. Besides, the Omnissiah fashioned you for service amongst the stars.’

‘Where I would serve him, Lord Fabricator,’ Torquora insisted. ‘Testing the Geller Device.’

‘Absolutely out of the question,’ Engra Myrmidex said.

‘It sounds to me, Fabricator,’ Torquora seethed through the metallic hiss of each carefully chosen word, ‘that you speak not for your master but in his stead. You are not Fabricator General yet, Lord Myrmidex. As others gathered here have been swift to remind me, remember protocol. Remember your place in the mighty machine of our forge world collective.’

Stroika’s equalisers could detect the strain in the modulated voice of the magos. He knew his master did indeed wish to leave the forge world and return to his duties. He would not, however, give up the prize of an STC template so easily to the scheming magi of the forge world priesthood. Even Haldron-44 Stroika, with his limited appreciation for temple politics, could see that the Fabricator Locum was attempting to claim the all but limitless power of the Geller Device for himself.

The chamber was silent. Myrmidex did not want to repeat his mistake, nor Omnid Torquora overreach himself in the opinion of his Fabricator General. Voricar Trega seemed equally impressed and disappointed in them both.

‘The Fabricator Locum,’ the Fabricator General said finally, ‘his attendant magi and the forge masters under his purview will undertake the holy construction of this Geller Device for the testing of it on the nearest immaterial anomaly to Satzica Secundus – the Great Gyre, the warp storm that claimed our sister forge world Velchanos Magna, so long ago.’

‘Very wise,’ Argentae Nuvias said, the hololithic representation of the magos aethyricus crackling and warping.

‘V-v-v-v-velchanos Magna, yes, yes,’ Eudoxus Zultra agreed. Other forge masters and magi gave their modulated approval.

‘However,’ the Fabricator General said, hushing the gathering once more, ‘I do not wish my old friend Omnid Torquora to be separated from this undertaking. The Omnissiah chose him as I do now, to see this holy experiment through and usher in this new golden age of which we speak. He will attend on the Fabricator Locum as his executive second and aid him in securing the data required to deem this undertaking a success. This is part of the Great Maker’s design, and as such cannot be contravened or perverted. For as my magos catharc was right to indicate – that is a heretekal path. Lord Myrmidex?

‘Spoken like the Omnissiah himself, Fabricator General,’ Engra Myrmidex said stiffly.

‘Archmagos Torquora?’ Voricar Trega asked, elevating the explorator with a single word. Monitoring his master, Haldron-44 Stroika detected an almost imperceptible hesitation before Omnid Torquora spoke. When he did, his words cut with steely acceptance.

‘All praise the Omnissiah…’

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(2) the purchaser of an e-book product from Black Library website (“You/you/Your/your”)

(jointly, “the parties”)

These are the terms and conditions that apply when you purchase an e-book (“e-book”) from Black Library. The parties agree that in consideration of the fee paid by you, Black Library grants you a license to use the e-book on the following terms:

* 1. Black Library grants to you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free license to use the e-book in the following ways:

o 1.1 to store the e-book on any number of electronic devices and/or storage media (including, by way of example only, personal computers, e-book readers, mobile phones, portable hard drives, USB flash drives, CDs or DVDs) which are personally owned by you;

o 1.2 to access the e-book using an appropriate electronic device and/or through any appropriate storage media; and

* 2. For the avoidance of doubt, you are ONLY licensed to use the e-book as described in paragraph 1 above. You may NOT use or store the e-book in any other way. If you do, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license.

* 3. Further to the general restriction at paragraph 2, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license in the event that you use or store the e-book (or any part of it) in any way not expressly licensed. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the following circumstances:

o 3.1 you provide the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.4 you attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.

* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.