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Dominion Genesis – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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One

I am not wholly human.

If I were, I would be equipped to express the emotion – cruel, logic-corrupting emotion – that pours from what is left of my amygdalae as my ship bursts from the empyrean’s grasp, and I behold the apocalypse that bears down upon my home.

Tears might spring from lacrimal glands, but they, along with the rest of my organic eyes, were excised on the thirty-eighth anniversary of my induction into the Most Holy Cult Mechanicus.

Anguished cries might erupt from my lips, had my skull not been artfully reshaped in steel and bronze. My lips are immobile, subtly sculpted to permit the function of the vox-grille that has replaced my teeth.

I could tear my hair, or rend my clothes. But my scalp bears a dense weave of monofilament mechadendrites that permit coupling with my ship, and my robe is marked with the griffon-and-cog of my home world. Even in the depths of despair, I will not damage my connection to the Peregrinus, nor besmirch the icon of my forge and home.

I am not denied an outlet for my anguish solely by the incompatibility of my physical form. My rank requires that I prevent any trace of the torment that dominates my thoughts from spilling into the communion, the noospheric connection I share with my crew. I am Talin Sherax, ductrix and explorator superior of the Peregrinus. It falls to me to set an example for my adjutants, my acolytes and thralls.

There have been few times over the course of my long life when I have wished to be free of the gifts of the Omnissiah, unburdened by the demands of rank, that I might indulge the remnants of my humanity and give voice to the heartbreak that grips my animus.

But seeing a tide of xenos horrors approaching my home world, I dearly wish for it now.

Two

<The home world!>

<Omnissiah be with us in the hour of our need.>

<Attempting spatial reckoning – Error – Error – Aggregated hostile entities defy spatial reckoning!>

<Cease.>

I allow the more expressive members of my command crew two point six seconds of impeded efficiency before my order cuts across the communion. In testament to their adherence to doctrine, the blurts of panicked binharic vanish instantly. The noosphere is still polluted by snippets of unfiltered emotion-signifiers, wafting around their bearers like noxious emissions, but I can forgive these lapses. They are witnessing a crisis without equal in the annals of their home.

<All stations, report readiness condition.>

The command is redundant. My cranial dendrites permit an interface with the Peregrinus’ machine spirit comparable to that of a Collegia Titanica princeps; I know my ship as I know my physical form. But the order gives my subordinates an action upon which to focus their attentions. The communion calms as each officer and adept attends to their function and that of their thralls, diverting their awareness from the atrocity unfolding across the planet of their birth.

There is no such respite for me. There cannot be. I am forced to stare, through every one of my ship’s many eyes, at the apocalypse that bears down upon the fourth planet of the Gryphonne System.

Tyranid bio-ships, living organisms adapted to endure the rigours of the void, crowd the orbital space around the rust-red world. Millions of creatures, billions of tons of claws and tentacles and malignant, alien flesh, form a vast fist poised to crash down into the planet’s gravity well, drawn like locusts to the mass of humanity that labours across the world’s surface.

The same panicked awe that grips my crew churns within me. The scale of the hive fleet defies attempts at computation. Thermal scans show only a great smear of colour thousands of miles across, close-packed bodies bleeding heat into the void. Optical imaging displays a concentration of creatures so dense they occlude the light of the stars that lie beyond them. The light of a galaxy ravaged by ceaseless war, and now blighted by a tireless, hungering leviathan.

<Friend/foe interrogative received from the forge-cradle, ductrix,> Kalida Isocrates, the Peregrinus’ magistrix of transmission, sends from her casket. The silver-chased shell that holds Isocrates’ mortal form is suspended twenty yards above the epicentre of the deck, a host of input-output cables connecting her to the ship’s vox-arrays. The magistrix is one of several members of my command cadre who are semi-permanently installed within their posts, sacrificing independence of motion for a deeper connection with the machine and their role aboard the ship.

<Response authorised.> I cling to the lifeline of protocol, an anchor against the twin buffets of calamitous data and unfamiliar emotions. <Has the Kurzgesagt completed translation?>

<Nothing yet, explorator superior.> Krishnan-Psi, my magister of augury, is at their station beside the primary sensoria displays, coiled spine moving sinuously as they pore over data-feeds.

I open my awareness to the host of signifier codes that present themselves for the Peregrinus’ attention. Hundreds of vessels, each emblazoned with the ident-flag of their home, crowd Gryphonne IV’s orbit. The sight and sensation of so many ships brings a small measure of calm to my animus. I draw strength from the gathered might of my people.

The forge world is prepared for the storm that falls upon it.

The precursor signs of tyranid invasion had been identified months before this day – primarily geological instability caused by the xenos’ strange form of interstellar travel, which drew upon the gravity of the Gryphonne star itself to pull them towards their goal. More subtle, but no less disruptive, were the waves of sabotage, assassination, and ambush that erupted within every forge-city and population centre. Reports reached the Peregrinus telling of genomic perversion among the serf class and running battles with xenos-worshipping sects that had burst from their slums. The forge world was gripped by war before the first bio-ship caught sight of the Gryphonne star.

These signs were heeded. The strength of Gryphonne IV’s arms is famed across the length and breadth of humanity’s realm, and the dominars of the forge-synod have not been idle in preparing its defences. The call went out to the forge world’s allies and vassals, to its tributary worlds and its far-flung fleets. It is that call that has brought the Peregrinus back, racing through the immaterium’s tides so its crew can stand with their home in its hour of need.

The vagaries of the empyrean have caused the Peregrinus to be the first vessel of our flotilla to force apart reality’s membrane and translate back to the true void. It was a harsh and difficult passage, most acutely for Zubin Kian, the ship’s Navigator. For the past seventy-one hours, the abhuman has filled the vox-link connecting his armoured chamber with the command deck with low moans and whispered prayers, begging humanity’s God-Emperor for respite from his task.

His has been a battle I comprehend, but do not truly understand. Over the previous two and a half centuries, the archives of the Adeptus Mechanicus have become replete with studies documenting the stages of tyranid predation, recorded by doomed magi who learnt even as the worlds around them were devoured. All analyses report a disruptive influence in the warp, whose effect on individuals with a connection to the empyrean is debilitating, to say the least. Reports that I have inloaded speak of astropaths breaking their skulls against bulkheads in order to silence the sibilant chittering that fills their minds, and blinded Navigators who drive their ships onto the warp’s treacherous tides.

That Kian’s outbursts have been restricted to impassioned pleas to the Omnissiah is a testament to his resilience, not his weakness.

The shudder of the Peregrinus’ void engines lighting travels through its superstructure, demanding my attention. My vessel has just completed translation from the empyrean, and while the disconcerting spectacle of the xenos host drags at my focus, duty requires more of me than a self-indulgent fear response.

I expurgate my active cognition of unrequired inputs, and plunge my mind into the ship’s data stream. The Peregrinus responds immediately, its machine spirit and my animus conjoining in holy synthesis.

Immediately, my psyche is struck by a gale of unfamiliar sensations. I momentarily struggle against the current, overwhelmed by all that the Peregrinus perceives from second to second. My cardiovascular pump lurches towards hypertension, matching the racing tempo of the ship’s reactor-heart.

It takes me a moment to grasp the problem. My vessel is afraid.

The fears of its crew – and its ductrix – are bleeding into the Peregrinus’ soul, conveyed by every panicked runeboard strike, unguarded vox-burst, and elevated heart rate. Every fearful action is absorbed and aggregated by the millions of sensory inputs around and within my ship, infecting its animus with thoughts of ruin and loss.

I was appointed to the command of the explorator ship Peregrinus twenty-seven Martian years ago. Though a brief period in the lifespan of a void-going vessel, in that time I have learnt much about my ship’s nature, and my own.

The human cerebrum’s instinctual response to overstimulation is to withdraw, to curl back on itself in self-preservation. I master that impulse, routing my cognition through formidable logic-baffles of my own design that conquer my cerebellum’s fearful reaction. Instead, I diffuse my essence through the tempest of sensation and information, the storm of data rendered as clusters of binharic and other, more esoteric code. I make myself a filter, rather than a dam. With deft commands I compartmentalise the Peregrinus’ sensory feeds, isolating those that are impeding efficiency, diverting the ship’s mighty cognition towards familiar actions and processes. I skim the data stream, drawing out what insights I require, shaping the ship’s demands and urges to my design.

Such an approach is not without risk – more belligerent machine spirits require domination, rather than partnership. But my trust in my vessel is absolute.

Krishnan-Psi’s sending rises from the rushing river of data. <Ductrix, empyric emanations detected.>

I shift my focus to the readings of the primary auspex array in time to watch, through the comforting abstraction of hexamantic code, a tear begin to form in the skin of reality.

The remaining ships of the explorator flotilla break free of the immaterium’s grip minutes after the Peregrinus, having retained remarkable cohesion in spite of the shadow in the warp. I speak a brief catechism of thanks as each vessel emerges. Cloying streamers of ectoplasmic residue cling to their hulls, as though the empyrean itself is attempting to claw them back into its embrace. Such sentience is an impossibility, but I nevertheless feel a shiver of relief through the organic portions of my brain as the wounds from which my companion vessels burst clench shut.

Protocol requires immediate vox-contact between each vessel of the flotilla following a warp translation, but as the seconds stretch on, nothing is forthcoming. No doubt the same spasm of shock that impeded our functions is hindering theirs.

Finally, I feel an incoming vox-link, interpreted as a prickling against my cochlear augmetic.

<All vessels, report your condition.> The brief code-string betrays nothing of the sender’s emotional condition, the order relayed in perfect, unclouded binharic. If Satavic Yuel, lord explorator and praefector of Explorator Fleet Rhi-Alpha-2, is affected by the vision of doom before him, he does not show it.

<Nominal, lord,> I return immediately, bypassing Kalida Isocrates and taking direct control of the Peregrinus’ vox-array in my haste.

<Steady yourself, Talin. Trust in the Omnissiah.>

I pulse a clipped acknowledgement. Yuel’s use of my familiar identifier is revealing; he is disturbed after all.

<Recall the challenges our world has overcome,> Yuel continues, now on an open frequency to every ductor and ductrix under his command. <The trials it has endured. This will be the latest chapter in our proud history.> The vox-link closes abruptly.

Yuel is right.

Yielding to an impulse that arises not from the authority precepts I inloaded upon my ascension to command of the Peregrinus, but from somewhere far more human, I open the ship-wide communications net.

‘Servants of the Omnissiah, heed me.’

My words rasp from the vox-grille mouths of gargoyles and grotesques, hum from noospheric interlinks, and wink into being across jade-green consoles. They are transliterated into binharic, lingua technis, skit-code, and the dozen other dialects used by the tech-priests, skitarii, and serfs aboard the Peregrinus. They will be recorded, naturally, by all who hear them, either in the grey matter of their memories or else the more robust implanted data cores of those honoured to possess them.

‘Xenos fall upon our home. The forge-cradle of us all. It is possible, in this moment, that you experience doubt, even dread. Be on guard, for these concerns are unfounded. A corruption of your duty and purpose.

‘Gryphonne IV must not fall. Our foundries have burned for ten thousand years and more. We are the redoubt, the bastion of the Deus Mechanicus. While we endure, the Omnissiah endures. Our quest for knowledge, for the purity of comprehension, goes on.

‘Gryphonne IV cannot fall. Our walls have stood against every threat to arise since the dark ages of myth and legend. The god-machines of the Legio Gryphonicus walk, against whom no foe can stand. The maniples of our skitarii are without peer, resolute and unyielding. The war-algorithms of Arch-Dominus Zane and the forge-synod are infallible, promising annihilation with the surety of mathematic precision.

‘Gryphonne IV will not fall. The xenos will break against our birth-world, and afflict humanity’s galaxy no more. We, the honoured defenders of the Most Holy Cult Mechanicus, will ensure their destruction.

‘Praise to the Omnissiah. May He honour and guide our labours.’

I close the vox-net with a crisp crackle of static.

My words are met with silence, as is appropriate. Not for the Mechanicus the gross and raucous cheers of Imperial soldiery, nor the solemn oaths of moment of the Astartes. Expressions of emotion are symptoms of organic frailty, reminders of the distance each acolyte of the Cult Mechanicus stands from the purity of the Machine God. They are to be comprehended, even tolerated when necessary, but resisted at all times.

I remain as I was when my vessel first crashed from the immaterium’s embrace, rigid in my command throne, augmetic eyes locked on the forward viewportal.

<Prime weapons arrays. Begin sequential testing of void shield emitters. Bring secondary and tertiary generatoria online.>

I release my orders into the communion with my bridge officers, speaking as much with the ship itself as with its crew. Both respond immediately, the Peregrinus’ eager machine spirit reacting to the streams of subsidiary commands from my officers and to its ductrix’s bellicose humour.

<Void engines to maximum output. Take us home.>

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2024.
This eBook edition published in 2024 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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Cover illustration by Jodie Muir.

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