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The Inheritor King – Extract

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The Inheritor King

Matthew Farrer

I

Are you looking forward to seeing the graveyard?’ the scrapwit Runer had asked, and it had taken Mhorock Tobin an effort to keep the string of expletives off his lips. He had simply sat and stared at the brightly-coloured threads of readout, unable to decide if the question even deserved to be dignified with an acknowledgement, and after a few moments the man had wandered off out of the bridge without further word. His ugly little porter hadn’t been in attendance. Maybe that was what had made him say even stupider things than usual.

This was where he had come to. This was his life now. These were the sorts of people he had to travel with. This was the sort of insult that littered his days.

‘Master of the Ramosh Incalculate,’ he had used to murmur to himself over loopback audio, back when things had just started to go wrong. He had been trying to remind himself that he was still a man of substance and rank, the anointed master of a great Adeptus Mechanicus craft. There wasn’t much consolation in that any more.

He knew what everyone called his ship now. He had banned the nickname on board but he was sure even his own crew had adopted it. It was why the question had been such a foul insult, a spit in his face. Deliberate humiliation or unbelievably crass stupidity? Tobin couldn’t work out which was the least offensive explanation.

The Headstone. That was what they called his ship. Headstone. An inert thing, a crude thing, whose only function was to show the ending-place of something that had once been alive.

The worst part about the nickname was that, even to Shipmaster Mhorock Tobin, it made perfect sense.

Battered, gutted and old, the Ramosh Incalculate was no longer a proud ship of war, carrying Titan Legions to the field in their giant armament silos. It had been deconsecrated by a coven of Legion magi, removed from the rolls of main-line fighting craft, refitted with an arkosect bay to collect and break down the remains of salvaged engines of war. Tobin had tried to console himself with that. It was no trivial office, caring for the Machine-God’s fallen idols in the last of their existence, but it only diluted the bitterness, it did not dispel it.

He had been so proud to command the Ramosh Incalculate to war. And now he sat at the bridge of a giant, mobile corpse marker.

He looked down through his scopes, filled his vision with the feed from the lower optics to see the view beneath him on the surface of Ashek II.

His orders had been to park his Headstone over a graveyard.

Tobin supposed that someone, somewhere, thought that was funny.

II

The Headstone was hanging over her, and it was getting on her nerves. The thing was too high up to be visible from the ground, to the naked eye or to Ajji’s not terribly specialised optics, but it was oppressively obvious to her finer, higher senses.

Ajji, tech-priest and transmechanic and up to now one of the two most senior Mechanicus personnel at the Chillbreak Delta graveyard, sat motionless in the dark. She was cradled in support webbing, tucked into an anchor-shrine so tiny that her broad shoulders almost touched its walls. Her organic eye was closed, her two mechanical eyes shuttered, her arms – slender, slightly atrophied organic arms fitted with engraved titanium augmetic sleeves – half-extended and her hands linked in one of the intricate devotional forms of her cult.

There was silence around her in her physical cocoon, but that was the least important of the environments she was watching. Around her in her machine-senses the graveyard’s manifold was as full of quiet, rustling activity as a forest glade. The great transception antenna atop the shrine ziggurat rumbled like a bonfire and shone like a lighthouse; against it the repeater nodes arranged through the graveyard glowed like lanterns and the alarm stations around the perimeter were hot little candles.

She watched the hubs of movement around the guard stations and the overseer huts as the shifts changed, and the processions out through the workers’ gates as the cutting crews shuffled out of the graveyard and back towards the Missionaria Galaxia prisoner compound over the ridgeline. One by one the confirmations came in: the right numbers of prisoners had been counted out, all casualties of the day’s accidents accounted for. The handful of skitarii roaming the alleys between the piles of war-scrap signalled their shift to shoot-
on-sight order paradigms, and the sentries at the main gate signalled an escalated alert level at the approach of the ground crawlers that were bringing in the Adeptus delegation.

That set Ajji’s teeth on edge all over again. Finicky, prying little walking interferences, all of them, the Missionaria meddlers, the Sisterhood, the scrapwitted Administratum assessors. She had heard that they had been besieging the alpha-shrine that the Mechanicus had begun to build in the ruins of High Hive with petitions and requests and demands, as though they had some right to a say in the business, as though the reclamation of Ashek II were being done for them. She had felt wryly sorry for her peers up north having to deal with it all, but her amusement had evaporated as she had watched the Adeptus compound grow up around the internment camp where the graveyard’s labour-force of Asheki conscripts went to sleep. That rubbish wasn’t supposed to have spread down here.

And here they came through the gates, a formal reception, spirits of Mars preserve us, here to see the machine priest.

That was what the idiots called him, no matter how many times the Mechanicus had used his title of Magos Parallact in their communiqués. Somehow that Low Gothic title had got stuck in their heads and couldn’t be winkled out.

Let them have each other, Ajji thought sourly. Maybe they’ll keep each other busy and out of the way of those of us with actual jobs to do. Months more work, maybe years, just to strip down those battle-line machines, before we start in on the Hammerstone Kings. Let them jabber away about whatever they want to talk about, them and that walking mass of fancy airs who rode in on that flying headstone.

To her own irritation, she spared a moment’s distracted attention to look up through the auspexes at the Headstone, the giant block of machinery hanging in its own distant haze of data manifold high in the sky. And then looked inward to yet another transmechanical link, one so tightly encrypted and smoothly engineered she could not have cracked it open to listen even if she had wanted to risk doing so. It was the link that bound their guest, Tey, the Magos Parallact, to the plodding little servitor that followed him nearly everywhere, a tiny two-station manifold that reflected every engagement by her own systems back on themselves.

The magos was sitting in the tiny seclusion-cell they had arranged for him, just below the ziggurat’s peak. The miniature manifold he shared with his retainer creature was still and quiet, uncommunicative as he’d been ever since he had shuttled down from the Headstone. God of Mars alone knew what he was doing. Ajji hoped he was preparing himself for the audience with the Adeptus delegation when they arrived. The last thing she and Enginseer Daprokk needed was for this outsider to embarrass them and make their work harder than it was.

She caught her line of thought and tried to steer it a little. She did not like to think of herself as so vulnerable to irritation, so disrespectful of what was, after all, a higher office than her own. She just wanted the work to go on, she told herself. Orderly and controlled. Was that too much to ask?

With one more virtual glance at the little manifold loop in the magos’s cell, she sighed and went on with her duties.

III

By day, the burning had been ugly, but by night it was exquisite, horrifying art. The clusters of sky-skewering metal spires, wrapped in a fuzz of black against the white sky, became towers of soft, sombre red light when the sunlight went away, waxing and waning as the winds of the burning thickened or thinned the smoke clouds. The fat domes packed around the spire bases, wearing their own coronets of towers, sweated smoke from their crumpled sides until nightfall, and then lit the cracked tundra with orange-white fire for kilometres around.

Every dome and bulge of the hive city burned its own way. Some, whose outer skins had been breached and split by the bombardments, showed veins of throbbing light winding across the black, cracks in their shells with the furnace still blasting inside. Some places bore great incandescent wounds: glowing volcano-mouths in the tops of the domes where the lances of the orbiting warships had gouged through the hive’s void shields; breaches in the sides, glaring like open kiln doors, where the Legios had closed in to demolish a hardpoint, or to tear open an entry for the waves of Guard.

The size of it. The breath-stealing size of it. The mind-blanking, thought-emptying size of it. The fires made ripples and shivers across the shells of the hive, made shimmying flame spouts climbing upwards, made avalanches of red-hot metal where the furnace finally broke the structure’s cohesion and sent pieces of it sliding and crashing down in more shouts and billows of flame. And the fire spouts were monstrous, broader than a Titan’s shoulders, and the avalanches were like wrath beyond any mortal wrath, each one tearing away layers of metal that had held thousands of human lives up here in the sky and scattering them down, down into the red-orange-white roil where every shift and swirl of fire was broad enough to sweep a city into nothing.

Sands of Mars, who could shape words when confronted with this? Was there anywhere in this galaxy a disciple of the Machine who’d attained clear enough thought to remain unmoved by this? Humans were not made to behold this. This was what the war had done. It had taken these cities of billions and turned them into hell.

Burning ladders to hell.

Tey had seen that phrase flagged as a context referent when he was first mind-mapping the Ashek II inload and had made peripheral note of it, routing it off to a third-order data-harmonic routine that Barrel had been looking after for him. It had come back to him after they’d broken warp at the system’s edge. Once back in real space he had resumed his habit of inloading lower-order information and letting it sit in his system while his organics ran several hours of REM sleep. He had awoken early, while his machine cortex was still engaged on the personal-maintenance cycle. He had popped into perfectly clear consciousness, into the clicks and whirrs of his hands stripping and checking his leg augmetics, and surprised himself by saying the words aloud.

Burning ladders to hell. He’d come across the term several times as he had made his way into the Sabbat Worlds, in the more poetic of the despatches and propaganda pieces that had come back from the front, but he hadn’t realised it had been coined here. A Guard officer, apparently, watching the pyre that had been Ashek II’s High Hive.

A hive tower shuddered and slumped, and part of its buttress collar cracked away and came down through the roasting air like a fat, slow comet. Where it impacted the tapering dome beside it, it released a fresh, roaring combustion that flowered up, up, fading down into dirty red as the superheated winds ripped it apart. That fire-flower would have been tall and broad enough to swallow twice over the hab-spike Tey had lived in on Pirye. Insanity.

But hypnotic insanity. The air-crew that had flown around the pyre to capture these images had all been volunteers, combat-seasoned, not native to Ashek. But Tey had internalised the crew records with the rest of the data and knew the effect it had had on them. They had come back mute, slow in their movements, too full of the experience and with no way to release it. The commander had been flogged for insolence when he had been called in for a report and had stood in front of his superiors, unable to speak. One pilot had drunk himself to death, and one of the pict-operators had tried to. And one of the navigators, barely speaking above a whisper, had asked for a relief posting to the Grinds, slipped away from camp on her third night there, and walked away across the hotstone flats in nothing but her camp fatigues, to let the radiation finish her. That wasn’t a death that Galhoulin Tey would have wished on anyone, for all that she had apparently wished it on herself.

A blip in the recording: the colour in the pict flow blanched a little, and the edges of the flames became grainy for a moment. That gave Tey the little push he needed to break the reverie. ‘The wheel, turning, carries,’ he murmured, to try and bring himself some composure, and withdrew. The fire of High Hive acquired a black border, became a miniature of itself, and took its place in the great mosaic unfurled across Tey’s inner vision. Data-tiles hung in their thousands, arrayed in multiple dimensions through the purple-black of Tey’s personal memory cathedral, awaiting his command.

The tile showing the burning hive found its proper place in the array, put out silver-white spines and silently connected itself to its neighbours. The first things it touched were the orbital scans of the hive ruins as they were now, a blackened scrawl in three dimensions, an ashy whisper of what had been. Behind and above on a leftward oblique, it connected to combat vid from the final assault after the order to burn the hives. Tey had watched that too, twice. The blazing false day of the lance strikes, the wave of static as the High Hive void shields blew out. The curt streaks of light from the Titans’ missile sheaths, so quick, so anticlimactic as they punctured the hive at precise points. And the terrible light starting to build up inside, as the hyperincendiary warheads detonated and the burning began.

Activated by his scrutiny, the cluster of tiles started to rotate and rearrange itself, extruding more information. One offered up the text of the communiqués to the Legio Tempesta from Marshal Blackwood, conveying Warmaster Slaydo’s assent to the immolation that had returned Ashek II to the Imperium at such diabolical cost. Another provided a window into the datastack with the initial calculations of that cost, Administratum figures measuring the damage to the system’s tithing status and the logistical might the Imperium would have to expend to rebuild from the rubble. Another anchored a chronological thread of despatches, tactical breakdowns and schema-flows showing the path the Heritor had taken to escape Ashek II and flee the system.

Tey let his attention rest on that name for a moment. Responding, the tiles and threads rearranged themselves again.

Asphodel. The name sat at the centre of a whirl of links, data-lodes and referential concordances. Stacked yellow runes led to the Heritor’s Munitorum dossier, or at least as much of it as they had made available to the order of the Machine. The Guard command had been more generous with its data than was customary, and Tey had supplemented what had been officially provided through some private techniques of his own. He supposed there was more the Munitorum hadn’t revealed about the man, though. There usually was.

That musing triggered more responses from his deeper mind, and a softly glowing pink tag took position in his upper peripheral vision. Branching away behind it were data-paths he might care to pursue from his current train of thought: the current diplomatic agreements on information sharing between the Munitorum and the Mechanicus, background inloads on the memoranda of understanding that laid those agreements out, biographical details on the representatives of both sides who’d signed those memoranda, a sub-seam that promised details of other formal understandings reached between the two organisations, histories of clashes, of words or arms or both, where those understandings had broken down, comparative diplomatic histories with other arms of the Adeptus Terra in turn, theoretical treatises on the legal underpinnings of the Mechanicus’s membership of the Adeptus, any and all of these branching out and branching out again in turn in whichever direction he cared to turn his attention.

He focused back on the Heritor’s escape, and the pink tag faded down to grey and retreated from him. Now in front of him was a pict of the Crow-Hand, the monstrous spread-eagled creation the Heritor had ridden in from system to system. This was the triumphal image the battlefleet had selected as the header to its own Ashek dossier, Asphodel’s flagship reeling and listing under Imperial barrage, one of the last great victories in the reconquest. Its wounds bled plasma from its reactors, frozen air from its compartments, trails of debris from its disintegrating hull.

Ghosted in over the image was a tag leading to a spinning magenta rune denoting a classified data element. The intelligence had been firming by the week, and Tey thought it would not be long before it was verified. Asphodel had not gone down with his fortress. He hadn’t been aboard the Crow-Hand when it had finally shuddered apart under atmospheric entry and turned into hot metal meteor-rain over Ashek II’s south pole. He had slipped away from them somehow, left his grotesque orbital fortress and his great graveyard of woe machines behind.

(‘Are you looking forward to seeing the graveyard?’ Tey had asked Shipmaster Tobin, and the man’s reaction had been so strange that Tey had filed it away and kept it to analyse later, to see if he had made some sort of misstep. It would be inconvenient if discussion of the graveyard were a matter of some sort of sensitivity. After all, the graveyard was the reason they were here.)

His data began moving again, a cluster of amber tags swimming up to prominence, orbited by sparkling priority runes and Mechanicus classification seals. The core inloads for his mission here, the associative threads pre-formed, tightly braided into one another. It was meant to push his deliberations in certain directions, keep his thoughts pruned to what Archmagos Gurzell thought were the most productive tracks. Tey hated that, although after so many assignments the sentiment had abraded away to a tired, gnawing irritation. He’d worked with worse.

(‘Are you looking forward to seeing the graveyard?’ he had asked. The little scrap of recording from his own internal logs flitted through the flow and weave of information like the lone orphan at a dance, like a silkfly skittering from blossom to blossom looking for just the right bloom to attach to. Its passage left connection tags gleaming like silver dust on the other files it brushed against: Shipmaster Tobin’s personal dossiers, sealed and warded data-vaults on the woe machines, and other, more esoteric cross-references that chanced to mention graveyards or record strange conversational tics, directed by matching and testing algorithms operating so deep in Tey’s mind that he was not conscious of them running at all.)

The leading tiles whirled and settled into an undulating ridge like a sine-wave series, arranging themselves into a history of the Ashek engine war and then mobbing about as cross-references and tangents laced files together and then released them again. Now the burning of the High Hive anchored one end of the wave, the post-reclamation records making a gauzy flicker beyond it. The latter curve of the wave was made of a string of bronze and ruby icons showing the arrival of the Legio Tempesta and their engagements with Asphodel’s forces. Back along the crest was the string of Imperial defeats as the Asheki fifth columnists had declared open war, burned the southern hives and come north over the hotstone plains. Those markers glowed bilious green for Imperial defeat, but in the middle of them hung a bright white rune so hung about with cross-referent paths that it seemed to explode when Tey turned his attention to it. It was the marker for the Battle of Chillbreak Delta, where the Heritor’s machines had made their first serious breach in the Imperial fortification line, and where the Legio counter-attack a year later had finally turned the Archenemy’s retreat into rout.

Chillbreak Delta. The graveyard of the Hammerstone Kings.

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First published in Sabbat Crusade in Great Britain in 2014.
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