The Omnissiah's Chosen - Peter Fehervari Read online

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  It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

  Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.

  To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

  VANGUARD

  Peter Fehervari

  The pursuit of knowledge is absolution.

  The conceit of absolute knowledge is merely hubris.

  – Ordinance Mechanica Obscura #01010

  The sky bled streamers of poisonous light over the grey-green morass of life below. Like the tentacles of some ethereal leviathan, the radiance touched and tested everything, questing for a foothold upon reality. The jungle shivered beneath its glare and the random chitter of numberless insects became a profane harmony. Like called to like and the tainted planet stirred towards wakefulness in the unclean dawn.

  But Omnissiah willing, this world will sleep a while yet, Magos Caul reflected as he cancelled the blasphemous simulation conjured up by his cogitation engines. I still have time…

  His carmine robes hung in loose folds about his skeletal frame as he floated above the concentric, whirling wheels of his data throne. His quartet of multi-jointed legs was furled up in arachnid repose and his myriad lenses had faded to dull green stains in the darkness of his cowl, disengaged while he gazed inwards at the infinitely malleable regions of the datasphere. The cogitator banks embedded in the wheels of his throne chattered as they saturated his nexus chamber with information from thousands of sensors across the planet.

  Caul clicked in binaric cant, switching his visual input to a defence servitor welded to the dome of his bastion. The position was optimised for the elimination of aerial predators and megaspores, and offered an unparalleled view of the contaminated sky. Through the servitor’s eyes he saw the warp-spawned anomaly from his simulation as a numinous spiral behind the dirty clouds of Phaedra’s troposphere. As night fell it would deepen into a multi-hued aurora that was vile, though only a ghost of the horror he predicted.

  Ghostblight, whispered a voice. It came from the neural cage where the magos’s instincts were interred alongside the rest of his humanity, smothered but not quite dead. He dismissed it as he dismissed every shadow of his former existence. His induction into the divine logarithms of the Omnissiah had elevated him above such emotionally charged nonsense.

  Hypothesis: the anomaly encapsulates a binary reaction – a feedback loop of corruption, Caul speculated. It draws current from the planet’s taint and in turn galvanizes its host to greater virulence. Query: which is the host and which the parasite? Is this a symbiotic conjunction?

  The anomaly had first manifested in the sky twenty-seven days ago, invisible to the naked eye, but triggering dozens of Caul’s sensor stations. He had failed to determine its origin, but it was growing stronger with every passing hour and building towards a Category Gamma warp storm. Could his fortress withstand a deathworld infused by the immaterium?

  The magos redirected his focus to a servo-skull patrolling the perimeter of his base and trained its gaze upon the immense structure he had forged around his explorator ship nearly two centuries ago. The Iron Diadem was a tangle of manufactories and silos mounted upon a stalk of titanium pipes rising from a vast lake. Over the decades Phaedra had assailed the refinery with a tirade of spore tsunamis, silt quakes and hurricanes, yet its lamprey grip on the lakebed had never faltered.

  Unfortunately the imminent catastrophe was not one of Phaedra’s paroxysms.

  Phaedra. Even the name sounded subtly poisonous to Caul. He had remained here only to dissect and codify the planet – the enemy – until leaving had ceased to be an option. During his sojourn he had crossed lines that some would call heretical.

  But my purpose has always been pure, Caul reasoned. This world exemplifies the degeneracy of the flesh. Its jungles are an inconstant, decaying riot of rage entwined with lust. Know thy enemy and decode it well.

  Yet his crusade might soon become untenable, and if he were lost then research of incalculable value it would be lost with him. That was unacceptable.

  the magos intoned.

  A swarm of delicate mechafilaments uncoiled from his cowl, swaying as they trawled the data-charged air like the feeding tendrils of a cuttlefish – filtering, filing and cross-referencing readings from across his territory, devouring parameters of light refraction, particle density, atmospheric pressure, gravitic arrhythmia and scores of other variables to fuel the ferocious engine of his mind. Caul tore through it all in seconds, slicing and splicing facts into possibilities, rejecting or promoting those possibilities to probabilities, then cycling back to hone the most promising towards a single categorical certainty.

  It was a sublime effort, yet the answer eluded him like some slippery, chimerical prey.

 

  Caul withdrew his mechafilaments and intoned the seventh mantra of Algebraic Concord to dispel the spectre of frustration. Every time he tried to determine when the storm would break, his conclusion was different. Sometimes he settled on months, sometimes weeks, but just as often it was days or even decades. The degree of inconsistency invalidated every answer. Even for a magos the variables were too byzantine – too chaotic…

  I will not make the attempt again, Caul vowed, but it was an oath sworn only to himself,
not the Omnissiah, for he knew he would break it as he had done countless times before. It was the same obstinacy that had chained him to Phaedra – an almost pathological refusal to accept imperfection.

 

  My research will be preserved. This time the oath was for the Omnissiah because Caul intended to honour it.

  Submerging himself in the datasphere, the magos cast his consciousness further afield, leaping from one relay beacon to the next, riding the datastreams that shadowed Phaedra’s labyrinthine waterways, seeking the holy warriors he had entrusted with his fate.

  The convoy of skitarii war galleys sliced through the slime-encrusted rivers of the Coil in orderly procession, their massive steel watercogs labouring against the ooze while their chimneystacks wheezed black smoke. The five vessels were identical in size and unmistakable in intent, their blunt, cannon-crowned prows and crenellated gunwales giving them the appearance of floating fortresses. Each had set out from the Iron Diadem bearing a maniple of one hundred skitarii warriors and their sacred war machines, together with a support crew of enginseers, bonded ratings and deck servitors. Still the voyage had taken its toll on their numbers. Some had been snared by Phaedra’s lazy, lethal wiles – an incautious rating beheaded by overhanging razorvine; another snatched by a wyrmtree lurking on the riverbank, and an engine crew lost to an infestation of swarming skrabs. And more had fallen to the true enemy, whose stealthy hit-and-run attacks had grown more frequent as the convoy neared its destination. The losses were regrettable, but sure to happen. Most importantly, they had been planned for.

  Standing on the elevated observation deck of the leading vessel, Alpha Phaestus-IR01 swept the riverbank with his long-barrelled rifle. The wooden stock of the antique weapon was wedged into the crook of his right arm in the age-old posture of a marksman as he scanned the jungle. Night had fallen, but his ocular omnispex transformed the bioluminescent snarl of fungi and petrified coral into a high contrast abstraction – the white heat of scurrying animals and the passive grey of vegetation. It was all irrelevant noise to the veteran skitarius. He was searching for the shrewd motion of sentient life. Enemy life.

  His bonded war brethren were deployed around him at equal intervals, each covering a different watch vector. An ignorant observer might have mistaken the skitarii rangers of Squad Irridio for identical clones or stylised simulacra of men. All wore hooded crimson robes over interleaved segments of dark armour, hiding their features behind jutting rebreather masks and bulbous goggles that gave them a pitiless insect-like cast. They had apparently suffered the same catastrophic trauma to their lower limbs, for from the knees down every warrior’s legs had been replaced with sculpted titanium augmetics. Only initiates of the Cult Mechanicus would have recognised this stigmata as the Red Planet’s due, a hallowed rite of passage shared by all skitarii. They were holy warriors so it was only fitting that they strode the land with the purity of the Omnissiah to guide their path.

  Especially a land as corrupt as Phaedra.

  Ixtchul-IR04 reported from his position in the ship’s watchtower. To outsiders the ranger’s signal would have sounded like a random burst of static, but to his fellow cyborgs it was a data-rich message. Three acknowledgments pinged back instantly, then seconds later a fourth – Brok-IR05, always the slowest of the squad. Alpha Phaestus-IR01 felt no rancour, for this wasn’t a lapse on his subordinate’s part; Brok-IR05 was simply the least of them, which was why he was designated the squad’s ‘5’.

  Every cog has its consecrated place in the machine, he reflected.

  His vision flickered momentarily as he interfaced with the lookout’s optics, then the dark riverbank was replaced by an eagle-eye view of the river ahead. Through Ixtchul-IR04’s eyes he saw a thin figure waiting on a coral outcrop. It stood in a pool of light cast by a saucer-like construct hovering above its head like a diminutive spacecraft. A pulse of pious revulsion spiked the Alpha’s brain at the sight of the alien machine, for though it was barely four handbreadths in circumference and appeared to be unarmed the drone’s mere existence was an abomination.

  It is a mockery of the Omnissiah’s sacred engines…

  With an almost physical effort Phaestus-IR01 switched his attention from the machine to its master. The alien was motionless save for a slight billowing of its frayed, ankle-length robe. Its arms were crossed from shoulder to shoulder as if in repose, but its black eyes were open wide and seemingly staring right back at him, inscrutable and aloof. There was no mistaking its cobalt skin and the flat wedge of its cadaverous face: tau.

  The long war between the Imperium and the Tau Empire for Phaedra had bled out years ago, but the last of the aliens were still here, abandoned alongside their Imperial counterparts when the conflict drifted elsewhere. Bitter and desperate, neither side fought for anything beyond survival anymore. Only the holy warriors of the Iron Diadem still walked a true path.

  Objective Skysight… The cohort’s mission designation flashed across Phaestus-IR01’s awareness with the insistence of pain. He neither knew nor cared what Objective Skysight actually was. It was enough to know that his magos demanded it and the xenos obstructed it. The rest would become clear in time.

  Alpha Phaestus-IR01 transmitted to the bridge. Moments later the silent alarm was broadcast across the entire convoy, alerting sentries and rousing the dormant from their meditations. Engines fell silent and the war galleys drifted to a halt. The clatter of metal feet and the hum of activating weapons from the deck below told him that the skitarii vanguard had been summoned to their posts.

  As he climbed the steps to the lead vessel’s prow bulwark, Alpha Viharok-TH01 felt his mind recalibrating itself to battle mode. The abstract geometries spun by his meditation shift were fading beneath a flood of diagnostics from his squad and the strategic topography calculated by the cohort’s Alpha Primus. The neural cogitator fused to his brain stem collated the data, and he frowned as Squad Thorium’s tactical efficiency registered at 88.42 per cent. It was an acceptable performance, but acceptable was unacceptable to Viharok-TH01. The unit’s tactical algorithms would require refinement.

  My vanguard will demand perfection, he knew. It is our duty to the Machine-God.

  ‘The Omnissiah purges!’ Squad Thorium chorused as Viharok-TH01 joined them. Their bulky armour was painted black and striated with dirt and corrosion, their tabards stained with promethium and threaded with oxidised metal bolts and techno-fetishes. All wore sweeping sallet helms of dark iron inlaid with bronze and daubed with their squad rankings. Insects buzzed about them, drawn to the glow of their rad guns, only to pop or dissolve in the baleful energies that suffused the weapons.

  Our presence alone brings death to the unclean, the Alpha vanguard observed with pride. We wear the purifying fire of the Omnissiah like an invisible cloak.

  He frequently led his squad on absolution pilgrimages. They would march into the jungle chanting the Nine Canticles of Decontamination, leaving only stubborn death in their wake. The paths they walked became enduring scars across Phaedra’s skin, for even her most tenacious fungi withered in their footprints. The vanguard bore a sombre blessing, yet they welcomed it despite the ravages it had wreaked upon their own flesh, for under their proud helmets the men of Thorium were cadaverous grotesques devoid of hair or teeth.

  But they still had their strength. Nothing else mattered.

  Catching sight of the waiting tau, Viharok-TH01 unslung his radium carbine and thumbed the power stud, offering its spirit his fealty. Like many skitarii, he revered his weapon as his master, believing his hands were merely tools to aid its will. In his case there was some truth to it, for his rifle was a priceless relic whose spirit had been stirred to permanent wakefulness by the magos. Such ‘cognis’ weapons hungered to fulfil their purpose, actively compensating for small flaws in a wielder’s aim.
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  ‘By thy will I ignite thee and charge thee well,’ Viharok-TH01 chanted in jagged lingua technis, leading his squad in the Seventh Litany of Liquidation.

  they reciprocated in reverent feedback.

  ‘For thy spite I will slay or die for thee,’ Thorium’s Alpha concluded.

  Neither fear nor doubt were functioning variables in the skitarii psyche. Where a common man might feel anxiety, the skitarii experienced only anticipation.

  Phaestus-IR01’s vision glitched again as the cohort’s Alpha Primus joined the sensory chain to the watchtower. All Alphas could access their squad members’ optics at short range, but the Primus could interface with every warrior in the force, even across great distances. Phaestus-IR01 held his breath reverently as he felt her icy assessment of the xenos.

  the Primus relayed over the command band.

  ‘I bear no weapons,’ the alien called, as if in answer. Its voice projected confidence, but Phaestus-IR01 detected a tremor of tension. ‘My designation is Por’ui Ybolyan,’ the tau continued. ‘I am authorised to facilitate a conciliation with the respected warriors of the honoured Omnissiah.’

  Ptoltec-IR03 chittered from Phaestus-IR01’s left. The ancient cyborg’s contempt saturated his code with static.

  ‘The enemy is most dangerous when it is cornered,’ another ranger rasped through the rebreather pipe wedged in his throat. While skitarii rebreathers didn’t prohibit mundane speech they certainly inhibited it, making flesh-speak a labour that many shunned; Rho-IR02 clung to it with obscure stubbornness. It was rumoured that the former Guardsman hadn’t embraced the Omnissiah willingly, but his brothers knew that was irrelevant now, like every echo of their past lives.

  ‘The losses our respective forces have sustained in this conflict are without purpose,’ the tau envoy continued, extending open hands to the warships. ‘The Wintertide Cadre and the Iron Diadem are the last significant forces of order on this malignant world. For the Greater Good of both our factions I urge you to cease this aggression.’