To Speak as One - Guy Haley Read online

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  To Speak as One – Guy Haley

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘Servants of the Machine-God’

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  To Speak as One

  Guy Haley

  ‘What is this?’ Inquisitor Cehen-qui unrolled the message scrip and pulled it through his hands. Paper rasped on his soft gloves. As he read the message again, his expression grew more incredulous. His fine brows narrowed. His glossy black topknot fell from his shoulder and laid itself across his shining white tunic.

  Four of Cehen-qui’s most important staff attended the inquisitor. The first was a small, bald figure of non-specific gender. Callow had no title. Factotum was the closest word for what Callow did. Callow fetched, Callow carried, Callow smoothed away the irritations of the day. Cehen-qui expected little more than that, so it was Callow’s great misfortune that they’d been given the message to deliver.

  Callow blinked nervously. ’It is an astropathic message, my lord, from the Archmagos Dominus Belisarius Cawl.’

  ‘I can see that, you fool,’ Cehen-qui snapped. ‘And stop cringing.’ He reread the message for the third time before screwing it up and throwing it down onto the deck of the station command centre. The paper rolled in and out of shadow as it passed under broken lumens, then fell down a hole left by a missing plate. ‘Who by the Sacred Throne of Terra does he think he is?’ He straightened his very white gloves.

  ‘My lord?’ said Callow, in some distress.

  The second attendant, a tall man of late middle years, at least in appearance, shifted the heavy book he carried and laid a calming hand on Callow’s arm. He shook his head. Don’t say anything else, he meant to convey. Callow didn’t notice.

  ‘Who does he think he is to demand our prisoner?’ Cehen-qui continued. ‘Who does he think he is that he can command the Emperor’s Inquisition, the Inquisition,’ he growled, ‘to do his bidding like that?’ He clapped his hands together. His gloves muffled the sound. The gold braid on his jacket swung violently. Callow flinched.

  ‘What do you think of him, Gamma?’ Cehen-qui asked his third attendant.

  Gamma was an adept of the Machine Cult. He wore black robes fringed with golden cog teeth. His augmetics, most obvious of which were a pair of heavy industrial claws poised over his shoulders, were plated gold to match. His armour was a very deep red, with the smallest accents of cream. His forge world was so obscure that few would have recognised the colours. He liked it that way.

  His full name was Frenk Gamma-87-Nu-3-Psi. Cehen-qui never used it.

  ‘He is a heretic and a blasphemer,’ said Gamma firmly. ‘He pollutes the Omnissiah’s work with his meddling. He makes free use of xenos technology, and,’ his voice thickened with disgust, ‘he conducts original research. We cannot give him the aeldari. Who knows what perfidious use he will put it to.’

  The second servant, whose name was Valeneez, sucked in a breath between unevenly spaced teeth. He had been in Cehen-qui’s service longer than any of the others.

  ‘I disagree, Frenk, and respectively with you, my lord. His communique bears the seal of Lord Regent Roboute Guilliman himself. Technically, there is a case to be made for the legitimacy of the archmagos dominus’ request.’

  ‘Cawl is a puppet of the usurper,’ said Gamma. His bloodshot eyes glared above his respirator mask. His augmetics made an angry clicking.

  ‘Gamma has a point,’ Cehen-qui said. ‘While I believe the returned primarch to be true to the cause of human survival, Lord Guilliman has no more right to command the Inquisition than Cawl has. To whom is the Inquisition answerable, Valeneez?’

  ‘The Emperor Himself,’ said Valeneez deferentially. ‘But the Lord Guilliman is the Emperor’s son, and His appointed deputy, ruling in His stead, so therefore it is reasonable to–’

  ‘Appointed by whom?’ said Cehen-qui loudly. The few crew on the command deck tried very hard not to listen in. ‘We only have his word that the Emperor gave him this role. Of course,’ he said, tugging his coat into place, ‘his right to command the armies of the Imperium in defence and reconquest of the Emperor’s domains is indisputable, but command the Inquisition, whose operations he has actively worked against? Never. The primarch’s authority in this matter will not stand. The prisoner remains where he is, imprisoned, until the excrutiators from Cypra Largo arrive.’

  ‘If we assume you are right…’ began Valeneez.

  ‘I am right!’ Cehen-qui shouted. He tapped at the Inquisitorial badge pinned to his sash. ‘This says I am right.’

  ‘Well then, my lord, given that you are right,’ Valeneez said, ‘we are not in a good position. This station has not been occupied for some time, most of its systems are offline, we’ve multiple blind spots, not enough storm troopers to patrol it, and a barely functioning weapons grid. If we stay here we are leaving ourselves open to attack. We should take the prisoner elsewhere.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Cehen-qui, becoming thoughtful. He looked out of the long slit window overlooking the station’s three prongs. The orange gas giant it orbited filled much of the view beyond. ‘Cawl is a maverick. If we do not give him what he wants, then the danger is that he will attempt to take it from us. However, we cannot change the rendezvous. None of our messages to Inquisitor-Castellan DelGrani have got through the warp storms. We must assume that the ship is still coming, and will be here within the week. The prisoner cannot get free. He must be presented to excrutiators with the appropriate abilities as soon as is possible. His own kind will be looking for him. We must be ready to stop Cawl. I will not have the prisoner’s knowledge fall into the hands of the Adeptus Mechanicus. We might be exposed, but we are not without our own weapons now, are we, ShoShonai?’

  He turned to his fourth servant. She stayed off the few spots where the deck was properly illuminated. She stood totally silent, face downcast.

  ‘ShoShonai, I am speaking to you,’ Cehen-qui said. ‘Are you ready?’

  She lifted her head. Her face was shadowed by her hood. Silvered eyes shone in the dark. ‘My lord,’ she said with a voice of inhuman quality. The cloth of her robe moved disturbingly, as if a nest of serpents writhed beneath. ‘We are ready.’

  ‘My lord!’ one of Cehen-qui’s minions called from the etheric monitoring station.

  ‘What is it?’ Cehen-qui said.

  ‘I have a warp signature on the edge of the system.’

  ‘Any indication of provenance?’

  ‘Datapulse signum identifier will not reach us for another four hours, my lord, but etheric waveform patterning suggests a vessel of middling gravitic draught.’

  ‘Well then,’ said Cehen-qui briskly. ‘They’re here. To action stations, everyone. They shall take our prize over my dead body. If that happens, I’ll make sure the rest of you die first.’

  Otranti was a gas giant of a vivid shade of orange, with a fuzzy atmospheric boundary. It reminded Primus of a rare fruit he’d tried thousands of years ago, the albaricoque. It had been velvety and sweet. He had liked it.

  He tried to remember if that had been one of the last things that had moved him.

  The station was a bright dot against the equator, and growing fast.

  ‘Interesting,’ said Qvo-87.

  ‘Interesting?’ said Alpha Primus. His purple lips were downturned. Only the slight raise to his voice’s pitch indicated he was, in fact, interested in what Qvo had to say. Even so, he sounded like he was on the cusp of crippling ennui.

  ‘This facility is very poorly defended,’ Qvo wen
t on. A small forest of pistons lifted his command cradle up so that he could peer into a set of displays hidden behind rubber viewing visors, forcing Primus out of the way. The command deck of the 0-101-0 was too tight for the Space Marine. Qvo’s command crew were bulky creatures, high-level magi possessing many extra limbs. None looked remotely human any more, and although Primus could feel the flickering of humanity within their metal bodies, his eyes insisted they were not people, but ugly idols to the Machine-God. They were creatures with steel souls.

  Primus was the first to acknowledge he was as artificial as them himself, everything about him having been rewritten down to the genetic level. The big difference between he and they was that they had chosen to be the way they were. He most definitely had not. Thinking about it made his scars itch, and as much of Primus’ skin was scar tissue, the experience was unpleasant, so he stopped thinking about it. He cleared his mind as easily as switching off a lumen. Blankness took the place of irksome thought, until Qvo started gabbling again.

  ‘Interesting, interesting, interesting,’ said Qvo. It was impossible to tell where the magos ended and the ship began. Primus had known all the iterations of Qvo. He still wasn’t sure if he was a machine or not.

  ‘You will not provoke more interest in me by repeating the word interesting,’ said Primus. His voice was low and miserable as a leaden bell. ‘You are irritatingly predictable.’

  ‘I am, aren’t I?’ said Qvo brightly. ‘I do wish that the Archmagos Dominus Belisarius Cawl had seen fit to give me a broader range of self-determinative logic patterning.’ He gave Primus a mock-serious look. ‘But that would break the lore.’

  ‘I care not at all that your red-robed brethren would find you an abomination,’ said Primus.

  ‘Lucky me, I am unique,’ said Qvo. He spoke distractedly, flitting on hissing pistons between screens and interface ports. He hummed a few bars of an ancient tune, and stopped. Primus lifted his heavy head. Qvo tapped away on a brass claviboard with four of his hands. Green logic code scrolled down a wafer-thin glass screen.

  ‘Are you going to give me the appropriate data to accomplish my mission or not?’ said Primus.

  ‘I am hoping it will not come to that.’

  ‘When our dear master is involved, it always comes to that,’ said Primus. ‘We are here. I shall be fighting. It is never any other way. Why this place? We are asking for trouble.’

  ‘Ahem.’ Qvo cleared his throat preparatory to speaking. The noise was entirely synthetic; only his head appeared to be organic, therefore he probably had no throat. If Primus was honest, he was mildly curious about what parts of Qvo were flesh and what were not, but asking the infuriating pseudo-magos would have felt like a defeat, so he never did. That, like so much else, annoyed him.

  ‘Because this station has the exact combination of circumstances that will allow us to secure what we need without anybody finding out about it, that’s why,’ said Qvo. ‘It is a genius plan on the part of the archmagos.’

  Qvo pulled a number of levers. A high-detail hololith in far-spectrum colours sprang up in the middle of the bridge. Primus ducked a hissing pipe to get a better view, coming to stand to the front of Qvo.

  Primus’ eyes possessed the spectral spread to see the hololith. Qvo knew that, Primus knew Qvo knew; presenting the diagram in such exotic shades was his way of making some kind of point. Qvo always seemed to be making a point. Primus was often at a loss as to why, or indeed what the point was.

  The station had an unusual configuration: a tall cylinder topped with a wide disc with three long, boxy limbs pointing towards the gas giant, the spread of which was contained within forty-five degrees. It looked like a primitive wheel with all but three of the spokes broken off. The rear of the hub had a bulge fringed by the piers of a modest dock. A single ship was berthed there: swift, deadly and highly technologically advanced, with a superstructure surmounted by a gilded Inquisitorial ‘I’ surrounded by lightning bolts.

  ‘The station is an ex-void dungeon,’ Qvo said. ‘Run by the Ordo Xenos to imprison and interrogate xenos captives. The number of different types of containment unit it boasts is quite fascinating, with facilities to hold life forms of extreme sorts – high-pressure beings, high-G, non-water-based life, non-carbon-based life, gaseous entities, beings both transdimensional and temporally unstable, warp sensitive and warp native, even–’

  Primus’ fist clenched involuntarily. ‘It’s a prison for aliens. I understand. Please continue.’

  ‘It was a prison for aliens,’ corrected Qvo. ‘It has not been in use for several hundred years.’ The hololith zoomed out until it incorporated a tri-D light model of Otranti. Qvo depressed a button with an unnecessary flourish. A decaying orbital track was projected onto the image. ‘Behold! A decaying orbital track,’ he said, also unnecessarily, as Primus could clearly see it for what it was. ‘It looks to me like this moon here…’ More images flickered on. A small moon was outlined in a shade only visible to creatures with infrared sensitive vision. ‘…was hit by an asteroid – you see the debris about it?’

  Primus did see. It was blindingly obvious. Qvo was beginning to give him a headache.

  ‘The moon’s orbit is not where it should be. Its gravitic interference has perturbed the facility’s orbit. Cosmic billiards, if you will.’

  ‘What’s billiards?’

  ‘Never mind,’ said Qvo.

  ‘It must not have been very important, or the Ordo Xenos would have corrected the fault,’ said Primus.

  ‘Or,’ said Qvo smugly, ‘it is very, very important. Bringing out the kind of vessel required to pull the station back into a stable anchor, or a construction barge to fit it with engines to allow it to do the task itself, would require the requisition of a great deal of men and materials. Even were the workforce liquidated in its entirety, the news would get out. The station’s secrecy would be compromised. Did you not think of that?’

  ‘Politicking and secrecy are the methods of cowards,’ said Primus. ‘They are not my way.’

  ‘You’re more of a direct mass strike sort of man, aren’t you?’ said Qvo. ‘I wonder what they were doing there? I wonder why they have come here now?’

  ‘The prisoner,’ said Primus.

  ‘Yes, but if they wanted only to interrogate it, then why not take it to another facility? Why this one? Because if there is one thing more secret than a top-secret facility, it’s an abandoned top-secret facility. Something’s afoot here. How exciting!’

  ‘You are like a child.’

  ‘A child’s curiosity and enthusiasm gives the energy of a star to any inquiry,’ said Qvo. ‘You must learn to enjoy your work.’

  ‘I enjoy nothing,’ said Primus.

  ‘That’s not true. I know you like killing people.’

  ‘Like is too strong,’ said Primus. ‘Combat alleviates boredom. That is all.’

  The station in the oculus proper had grown in size from a glint to a round of light. Primus stiffened, and took a few steps forward towards the armourglass.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Qvo.

  ‘There’s a psyker on the station, a powerful one,’ said Primus.

  ‘You can handle that,’ said Qvo. ‘The archmagos made you powerful too.’

  ‘This one feels different,’ said Primus.

  ‘How?’

  ‘There is more than one voice to the mind.’

  Qvo disengaged himself from some of the cables. Not many, only enough to allow him to be carried forward on tentacles of banded steel until he was beside Primus; otherwise he remained joined to the ship as thoroughly as if he were a component. He adjusted his elevation so his face was level with Primus’.

  ‘Can you be more specific?’ asked Qvo.

  ‘No.’ Primus felt the smallest twitch at the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Are you smiling? Are you well?’ said Qvo, with genuine concern.

/>   Primus wasn’t listening. The being on the station knew he was coming. A brightness in his witch-sight flashed, then went dark. He was being actively blocked.

  ‘This could almost be interesting,’ Primus said.

  ‘We are being hailed by the approaching vessel,’ reported one of Cehen-qui’s followers. The inquisitor did not have anything as specialised as a vox-master. All his troops were expected to be flexible and well versed in multiple arts. All but his four principal servants – Callow, Valeneez, Gamma and ShoShonai – were dressed in identical uniforms, as fuliginous as Cehen-qui’s robes were white.

  ‘Make them wait,’ said Cehen-qui.

  ‘As you command, inquisitor.’

  ‘Gamma, give me a deep augur scan, if you would.’

  Gamma’s industrial claws reached down and ripped out a dusty chair so he could get close to the augury. His supplemental limbs jabbed at buttons and levers, his mechadendrites plugged into multiple input jacks, so that he was working three stations simultaneously.

  ‘The ship is that of Cawl’s principal lackey, Qvo-87,’ Gamma said. ‘He styles himself a magos, but he is nothing of the kind.’

  ‘Meaning?’ said Cehen-qui.

  ‘Cawl has many blasphemous creations in his service. Things that think and act like men, but are not. He has only avoided censure because his followers are so many, and Cawl is cunning, always sure to make his things so they almost adhere to the principles of the lore. Qvo-87 is a clone, in a way. As such, it could be argued that he falls within the lore laid out in the Warnings. But there are others that say he is not a clone, not even within a very wide margin of error.’

  ‘You are one of those.’

  ‘I am. They call Cawl the Prime Conduit of the Omnissiah. I call him blasphemer.’

  ‘That’s all fascinating, Gamma,’ said Cehen-qui dismissively. He stretched out his back. It cracked. ‘Do they have their weapons powered?’

  ‘Not yet. All weapons are retracted and inactive, all defensive and offensive subsystems unengaged, but they could be hiding their intentions.’