Belisarius Cawl- the Great Work - Guy Haley Read online

  Thracian did not respond immediately.

  ‘No,’ he said finally.

  The tanks rounded the final corner on the road. Ahead, protected by an outlying bailey, were the great gates of the fortress-monastery. Though the outer walls and gate blocked some of the view, the main gates were one hundred and fifty feet high, and visible from the road. They tapered gracefully to a gothic arch, the surround carved in the likeness of spreading foliage. It seemed the gates had borne a relief of peasant work, men and women cutting back vegetation with scythes, but more than that was impossible to see. Though cast from high grade adamantium, the gates were smashed, one bent almost in two by an inconceivable blow, the other buckled. Still there were no corpses, no dead, only inorganic materials left behind.

  ‘Slow down,’ said Felix. The eeriness of the mountain put him on guard. ‘Approach at three quarters speed. Weapons ready.’

  The sun was heading off to the west, and falling behind the fortress-monastery’s lower reaches. The uppermost tower atop the mountain bathed in golden light as it had every evening since the time the Emperor had walked and breathed. The defences cast long, black shadows that crept out to meet the convoy. The outer gatehouse’s drum towers embraced them in cool dark. These lesser gates were twisted scraps, and the gateway had been blocked with barricades. It appeared they had been held for a while after the first breach. With no dead, judging the course of the battle was difficult. How very strange to see a battlefield like that, still appearing fresh, preserved by the vacuum, scattered with debris and shell casings, but devoid of combatants. It was a model landscape before the principal actors had been added.

  Cominus’ tank shunted aside the remnants of the barricades. These had been overrun and torn down at some point, and presented little obstacle to the hover tanks. What was left was pounded flat by their gravity fields as they floated through.

  ‘Halt!’ voxed Cominus.

  The tank’s square body blocked Felix’s view into the bailey. ‘There are no threat indicators.’

  ‘No enemy,’ said Cominus, sending a pict-feed of what lay ahead to Felix. ‘We are entering the presence of the honoured dead.’

  ‘You are right to call halt. Go forwards. Slowly, Daelus,’ ordered Felix.

  ‘I have a higher regard for technology than Thracian,’ Daelus said, for once without levity. ‘I will be careful.’

  Wargear was all that was left. Empty suits of power armour lay around the bailey, most concentrated before the main gate. The bodies inside had been taken by the Kraken, and though some suits had been disarticulated during consumption, others lay as they had fallen, empty gauntlets wrapped around gun grips and swords, their sagging bodygloves holding battleplate together in semblance of life.

  ‘Honour the battle gear of the dead,’ intoned Daelus. ‘Honour the memory of those left behind.’

  ‘Bring us to a halt, Daelus,’ said Felix. ‘Disturb nothing. We must allow Thracian to retrieve the gear of the fallen, if he so wishes.’

  Daelus manoeuvred the tank to a gentle stop, and though the pulsed waves of the grav generators rocked a few of the abandoned war suits, not one piece was damaged.

  ‘Column halt,’ Felix voxed the others. ‘Chapter Master, I offer my regret and respect.’ To his own men he said, ‘I am venturing outside. Ixen and Yansar, follow me.’

  ‘There are no detected threat, my lord,’ said Daelus.

  ‘You know what to do should any emerge,’ said Felix. ‘Rear ramp.’

  He stood as the ramp descended. Before he set out, Cominus voxed him.

  ‘Stay within. Earthquake. A big one.’

  The tank’s contra-gravity field cushioned it from the effects of the tremor, but outside the empty armour suits jiggled where they lay, and loose material fell from damaged buildings.

  ‘The mountain is unstable,’ said Daelus. ‘We should consider putting our aerial assets on alert for evacuation as soon as we have disabled the defence matrix.’

  Felix wasn’t listening. He couldn’t hear. By the time the tremor hit its peak, he was somewhere else entirely.

  Chapter Eight

  An irrefusable offer

  Circa 6,500 years ago

  Strange music played an intricate mathematical progression of mellow strings.

  Felix screamed as his body was cut open. There was little pain. Cawl was no sadist, but certain of the procedures demanded that his subjects remain conscious, and the smell of Felix’s own burning flesh as the las-scalpels sliced it terrified him. The lack of human company made it worse. He was on his own, surrounded by unfeeling machines that moved around him on their predetermined paths of torment, incapable of hearing his terror or of feeling mercy. Mechanical spider limbs bearing blades and laser cutters and little pots of quivering organic jellies blurred past. Today, they were cutting into his skull. His head was pinned into place and he could not move. He felt the rubber tips of ruthless fingers peel back his scalp, heard the whining screech of blade biting bone, felt the soft cup suck onto his cranium and remove the top of his skull as if it were the lid to a jar.

  Other machines put things in there. They poked his brain. Strange colours bled across his vision. Phantom smells teased him. He burst into song through his tears as the seat of his soul was prodded, tugged and tested. And it went on, and on and on. There were hundreds of other youths undergoing the same procedures. He could hear them outside his sealed, sterile tube. Hundreds of other boys who were not really boys any more, but hormone bulked warrior-things halfway to maturity. Many of them screamed and cried. Felix need not have been ashamed of his fear.

  ‘Integration of stage five at ninety-seven per cent. Primaris subject 10-079-983 operating within optimal parameters.’

  A cool counterseptic mist squirted over his exposed brain.

  ‘Please, please let me go,’ he pleaded.

  Bang.

  A soft bump as his skullcap kissed his lower cranium. The whining busyness of a bone welder moved around his head. Hot bone smell made him want to sneeze. The thought of that panicked him. He envisioned his brain shaken loose.

  ‘Please,’ he whimpered, as his shaved scalp was tucked back into place and another arm bearing spools of thread and a jabbing needle stitched it tight.

  A cold nozzle pressed into the crook of his clamped-down arm and hissed.

  ‘Please,’ he said. He was falling asleep.

  ‘Be brave, my little warriors,’ said the monster’s voice over the music. ‘I offer you something no other shall have. Power to serve humanity as no others have served. In service to mankind there is glory.’

  ‘But I don’t…’ Felix slurred. ‘But I don’t want power…’

  Bang!

  ‘And that is why you shall have it,’ said the monster, close by his ear.

  Blackness, then:

  ‘Where are we going?’ said a voice that was the monster’s, but not. ‘Can you not at least tell me that?’

  ‘No,’ said another voice, a woman. ‘Patience, please.’

  Bang!

  ‘But I don’t…’

  Circa 10,000 years ago

  ‘…see why you can’t explain just a little to us.’

  The woman came to a standstill so suddenly her boots squeaked on the black marble floor, bringing Cawl and Friedisch to an ungraceful halt. Her soldiers stopped flawlessly. ‘My information was correct. You are irritatingly garrulous.’

  They were far away from the miserable districts housing the refugees, high up in Ryza’s upper levels, where glorious ways clad in precious stone and chased with symbolic, golden circuitry lifted high ceilings on fine columns, and the priests of the Cult Mechanicus went about in dignified debate, guarded by cyborgs with burnished augmetics. Cawl took it all in his stride, behaving as if he belonged there. Friedisch cowered, so overawed by the high and mighty cult lords around him he shrank away when the
y so much as glanced at him.

  Cawl smiled ingratiatingly.

  ‘Speech is the first mode of informational exchange. My entire life, my entire culture is concerned with the acquisition of information. You must forgive me a few questions,’ said Cawl.

  The woman gave him a hard look. ‘The Cult Mechanicus,’ she shook her head. ‘The Emperor should never have thrown in His lot with your kind. You are anathema to the Imperial Truth. Gods. Worship of knowledge. Insanity.’

  She resumed walking.

  ‘Without our knowledge none of your warriors’ enhancements would be possible!’ said Cawl. He waved his hand at the woman’s guards. ‘Our veneration of the Machine-God’s truths has preserved His gifts.’

  She stopped again.

  ‘Science made my warriors,’ she said. ‘Not superstition. Not praying to a non-existent god. Not singing to anything. I am a scientist. You are a witch doctor.’

  She began walking again, faster this time, so that Cawl and Friedisch were forced into a trot to keep up with her.

  ‘Then we are of one mind, surely,’ said Cawl. ‘You and I are both questers for the truth.’

  ‘We are not,’ she said. ‘I pursue the truth. You follow a religion. There is no gulf wider than that between our opinions in all the universe.’

  ‘I think you are wrong,’ said Cawl, who was never one to let a good debate die. ‘Faith in rationalism is still faith.’

  ‘I think you’re a threat to the Imperium,’ she said. ‘There has never been and never will be a true religion, except that followed by the Great Enemy, and that is not only evil to the root, it is predicated on a billion lies.’ She didn’t address them, but shouted forwards, as if she couldn’t even bring herself to look at the tech-priests. ‘Yet we rationalists dwindle, while your kind prospers. The inclusion of the Adeptus Mechanicus on the Council of Terra is the death knell for reason. So you enjoy your moral superiority all you want in the coming years,’ she said. ‘I want you to remember my words, because my opinion will trouble you for all time.’

  She turned down a side corridor, smaller than the major way they had been following, and ablaze with the light of knowledge conveyed down optic datapipes embedded in the walls.

  ‘Why?’ said Cawl.

  ‘Because I believe you know that it is true.’

  They arrived at a golden door twice the height of a man, guarded by cyborg warriors almost as tall.

  ‘Why have you brought us here to the uppermost sky levels, if you hate us so much?’

  ‘I have been ordered to,’ she said. ‘I am doing my job.’

  She stood still while scans from the heavy combat servitors ran down her body from top to toe.

  ‘It’s not me that wants you,’ she said. ‘If it were my decision, we would never have come here. The Lord Geneticist, Director Ezekiel Sedayne, wishes to meet you.’

  Cawl was surprised. ‘I know that name!’ he said. ‘Ezekiel Sedayne. Is he here on Ryza?’

  ‘You may enter, Altrix Herminia,’ the servitors boomed in unison.

  ‘He is not,’ said the Altrix. The doors opened onto a hangar housing a small, sleek ground-to-orbit transfer shuttle. An atmospheric shield shone over the entrance. They were so high up in the Ryzan cityscape that the smoggy brown of the atmosphere turned to black at the top of the view, and the steel-skinned planet curved away below into petro­chemical obscurity. ‘He is on Terra, and he wishes to see you there.’

  ‘Terra?’ said Friedisch. ‘We’re going to Terra?’

  ‘Not you, just him,’ said the Altrix. ‘You’re staying here.’

  Something in the hangar made a hollow bang.

  ‘Hang on just one moment,’ said Cawl, holding up a finger. He gave the Altrix his most winning smile. ‘I’m not going anywhere without Friedisch. If this Director Sedayne wants to see me, Friedisch comes too.’

  Bang.

  ‘What is that noise?’ said Friedisch.

  Altrix Herminia sighed in annoyance. ‘Very well. But I warn you that you have very little room to bargain. Do not use up my good graces at once. When we arrive at Terra you may wish to save all the favours you can for your negotiations with Director Sedayne.’

  ‘Bargain?’ said Friedisch. ‘Negotiations? What is that banging?’ He peered round the door.

  Bang.

  ‘Do stop that, Friedisch,’ said Cawl. ‘All that simpering. What bargain?’

  ‘The Lord Sedayne has an offer for you.’ She smiled unpleasantly. ‘I sincerely advise you not to reject it.’

  Bang!

  ‘One of your servitors is malfunctioning,’ said Friedisch, pointing out a cyborg repeatedly walking into the wall. ‘I can fix it.’

  Bang! The metal body case thumped into the metal.

  ‘What if we elect to stay here?’ said Cawl, also ignoring Friedisch.

  ‘It’s a little too late for that.’ Her warriors spread out behind the priests, guns raised. ‘You’re coming with me, like it or not.’

  BANG!

  Circa 10,000 years ago

  The metal hammered the boulder twice in succession.

  Bang! Bang!

  The cliffs reached up for slate grey heavens. The world was of dust and sand. There were signs everywhere that it was not always so. Erosive water patterns carved the stone into smooth undulations, so very different to the shapes cut by wind. Organic traces clung on, though long dead, dried-out roots and preserved rhizomes excavated by the careful archaeology of the breeze.

  Bang. Bang. The wind was getting into its stride, lifting up the dust of a thousand dead civilisations, casting handfuls of grave gravel against stone, chipping it away grain by grain to the beat of the metallic drum, uncovering and recovering the mess of forty thousand years of human civilisation.

  ‘Did I disturb you?’ the man’s voice said.

  The natural reaction was to turn and look. Cawl began the process, but he could not turn. The act should have been simplicity itself. All he had to do was move; a cascade of synaptic impulses racing from the brain, decided subconsciously before conscious decision, the id tricking the ego, that deception that enables all humans to be without being, activating the limbs, setting the body in motion, all without choice but with the illusion of choice.

  Turn.

  Simple.

  But he did not turn.

  Bang.

  Bang. Bang.

  Cawl bowed his head and dropped to his knee, facing away from the man. He did not like to kneel, he never had, being so tall it made him look ridiculous, but the being demanded it. Not the man Himself. He disliked bowing and scraping, but the essence of Him, His soul, was so potent you could feel the heat of it on your skin. That screamed out for respect.

  He had no name, at least not one that He shared, but He called Himself the Emperor of Mankind. The gall to call oneself so seemed immense, until you met Him. Anyone who had ever met Him knew the title was no hollow conceit. It was not born of arrogance. It was simply apt.

  ‘You may rise,’ said the Emperor. ‘You have no need to kneel. Knowledge should not kneel to power.’ He smiled. His humour washed over Cawl in a warm, uplifting wave. ‘It should be the other way around. Alas it is not always so, but we should try our best to treat each other with respect and make it true.’

  ‘I could not have said it better myself,’ said Cawl. He got to his feet. Still he did not look, but kept his eyes downcast. He had a fleeting sight of a brown-skinned hand. He looked away from it.

  Bang. The metal cared nothing for the doings of men, no matter how mighty. It cared only for its feud with the rock. Bang!

  Circa 100 years ago

  Bang! Bang! Bang!

  ‘Fall back! The outer gate is taken! Fall back to the walls!’

  Thracian stood on the bastion walk abutting the main gatehouse, looking down into a courtyard where d
eath reigned unopposed. An Icarus quad cannon chattered violently off to his right in front of the outermost tower of the main gate. Walls behind him rose to the sky, walls that should have been strong enough to hold back any enemy.

  The men that built them had not accounted for the hive fleets.

  A carnifex reared up in fury and took its death wound from a lascannon fired at point-blank range. The beast flung its club fists wide, and it flopped down with a crack of chitin on rockcrete. But its work was done. The barricades across the gateway were smashed aside, leaving the bailey unprotected. Two more carnifexes lumbered through the gate over their fallen broodmate. Massive talons stabbed at men. One of the beasts carried a biocannon whose ammunition sacs pulsed with its eagerness to fire. Its embedded eye roved over the banquet of targets. The carnifex raised the weapon, the sacs constricted, and a rush of hyper-acidic bile engulfed two Space Marines. The agony they endured as it ate through their soft seals and into their bodies was enough to make the Emperor’s chosen scream.

  All along the bailey wall, Thracian’s warriors were embattled. Creatures bounded up the dead piled at the foot of the fortifications, using them as ramps to launch themselves at the defenders. They did not care for their own survival. Most were blown apart, but for every hundred that cast themselves to certain death, one got through, and the horde numbered in the millions.

  There were hundreds of thousands of winged tyranids, too many to count, so many they filled the sky with an endless blur of crimson and cream. They shrieked as they flew, as if they were in pain, a harsh chorus that blended into one unending wail so overpowering it seemed it would outlast the universe. A constant barrage from the fortress’ guns punched holes in the swarm, creating a rain of blood and flesh. The void shield flickered, pulsing sheets of purple light when bombardment cysts impacted it. Some thousands of the beasts were caught by displacement after-effects and ripped apart. Others flew so fast they tripped the shields themselves, but each hole torn into the living clouds closed instantly, swallowed as swiftly as stones in a lake.

  A gargoyle dived at Thracian, vomiting bioplasma from its mouth while the weapon thing bonded to its forelimbs squirmed and spasmed, ejaculating a stream of acidic slime and frenzied beetles. The insects splattered harmlessly off Thracian’s battleplate. The plasma nearly took off his head.