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Dream of the Locust – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Dream of the Locust

Tom R Pike

‘Beware the locust, for he dreams only of endings.’

– Masali proverb, first attested in the 38th millennium

Technoarchaeologist Kem Okhotnik’s cogitative instincts ruled out the possibility of good news before Shulgi even spoke.

<Still no response to query,> said Shulgi in a short binharic bark. The receiver dish affixed to the skitarius alpha’s head irised closed and retracted into the place her right ear had once been. She returned her omnispex to the clasp on her left thigh.

‘Her voice is silent,’ agreed Okhotnik. It was an affirmation of existing data.

The Dream of the Locust was making no broadcasts. Okhotnik’s hails in both binharic and Gothic had gone unanswered. Yet her communications arrays appeared to be in full working order. One could only conclude that the crew who had once been the Dream’s custodians were now dead.

When the Dream of the Locust emerged intact from the warp after a decade lost within, the wisdom of the forges had been divided on whether anyone aboard would be alive. But Okhotnik himself had assumed the crew to be dead from the first data Ryza had acquired regarding the Dream’s trajectory. Ryzan long-distance sensors had caught the ship emerging from the warp, and then watched her drift sidelong. Okhotnik’s mission was not rescue, but salvage.

The technoarchaeologist’s Shark assault boat was stocked with ten skitarii rangers and a datasmith. Near the rear of the compartment, two Kastelan robots idled: Awning-19V and Fulminant Niner. Each robot in the maniple was twice as tall as Okhotnik and older than the Imperium of Man. Yet they looked new. Their surfaces had recently been polished to a shine by servitors unworthy of accompanying them. They were magnificent machines, controlled by doctrina wafers that Datasmith Mosse would have to insert manually into a cavity behind their chestplates any time their instructions had to be changed. She was an expert at doing so under fire.

To an unaccustomed eye, the skitarii would have looked grotesque. Markos XVI’s head was floating in a jar of oil bolted to the front of his chest. Rhy Holmqvist had a third arm sprouting from his neck, just below the jaw. Okhotnik himself had a third upper appendage, his servo-arc claw emerging instead from his back. To Okhotnik’s eyes, the skitarii looked efficient. They were honoured to have been selected as tools worthy of the whetstone.

Technoarchaeologist Kem Okhotnik, Disassembler of Ways, was known on Ryza as obsessive in his attention to detail. Long ago, he had once spent an entire decade retrieving and cataloguing cyber-organic tongues, even turning down an upgrade because his work wasn’t yet finished. After he finally accepted his upgrade, he had led many forays that recovered archeotech. This expedition was just the latest.

The assault boat was ancient, held together by prayer as much as by rivets. To Okhotnik’s right, a microfracture leak in an old pipe slowly vented oil into the cabin, therein mingling with the scent of incense. The Dream of the Locust, on the other hand, was pristine. The old Mechanicus frigate, still a third of a solar hour away, showed no signs of hull damage. Remarkable.

Ensure the cargo is retrieved. That was the dictum with which Okhotnik had been tasked. He had reprogrammed the cogitator that interfaced with his organic brain to prompt him at regular intervals, playing back the mission briefing in his mind. He wanted to be centred, to be focused. And he wanted his team to be as well.

<Pilot,> said Okhotnik, <carry my voice to our escorts.> He switched his cyber-organic eyes off visual light, showing him instead wireframes. He glanced to the left and right simultaneously, pivoting his eyes in opposite directions, peering through the walls of the Shark and into the void beyond. Out past the armoured hull of their assault boat, flanking it on both sides, flew two Fury interceptors.

The Shark’s pilot extended his finger towards the console. A cap unscrewed itself, and a tendril snaked out of the finger, worming its way into a receptacle on the console. Another tendril extended from the back of the pilot’s head, reaching for Okhotnik. It unfolded like a steel flower, steam hissing from its joints, forming a dictaphone. A sigil on the board lit up with the crimson red of Mars. Okhotnik’s voice was live over the voxes of the three ships in his explorator squadron.

‘What is our task, tools of the Machine God?’ he asked his team. Ten skitarii, a datasmith, and the three ships’ pilots answered him in unison:

‘Ensure the cargo is retrieved. Secure it and return it to Ryza. All tools expendable in service of this goal. Do not damage the cargo. Do not open it. Do not investigate what is within, nor allow others to do so.’

The optimal solution was one where Okhotnik triumphantly flew the Dream back under its own power. But even the Dream was expendable, just like Okhotnik.

Okhotnik had been given just a little more information than his team. He knew how to identify the cargo by the container it was in. He knew it needed a power supply. That was all.

Not for the first time, curiosity stirred within him, only to be tamped down by his higher-level subroutines. Do not investigate what is within. He was a tool of the Machine God, a long, grasping, articulated arm, thrust out into the darkness, built to seize. An arm required only the neurons necessary to operate its fist.

An arm would be deconstructed for useful parts if it no longer served the function it was designed for.

Okhotnik’s right eye saw the interruption before the console lit up with green warning sigils.

<Technoarchaeologist, an object is emerging from the warp,> said the Shark’s pilot.

Okhotnik brought both his eyes to bear on it. A twisted mass of metal was coming out of a spiral funnel from the immaterium.

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