Belisarius Cawl- the Great Work - Guy Haley Read online

  ‘This is an abomination,’ growled Cominus.

  The living Scythes were lost in grief, their weapons lowering as they saw their brothers slaughtered.

  A Space Marine was hardier than a man, tougher than steel, immune to shock and doubt in all but the worst of circumstances, but if the mind of an Adeptus Astartes broke, it broke catastrophically. Such dishonour as presented to them now was enough to shatter any warrior’s sanity.

  ‘Alpha Primus, stand aside,’ Felix said.

  Primus looked down implacably.

  ‘Out of the way! Cawl, shut down the machine!’

  Cawl did not respond. He stood half hidden by the whirl of past combat, tyranid attack beasts leaping through him and stabbing down with bladed limbs to finish the last few Scythes of the Emperor, his hands moving in ecstatic gestures.

  The mountain shook in response to Cawl’s delving. A heavy pulsing emanated from deep beneath their feet, throbbing through the mountain with such force that Felix’s vision blurred with each pounding thump, but the tableau of destruction remained clear as the airless Sothan day.

  ‘Cawl! Shut it down!’

  ‘He cannot hear you, tetrarch,’ shouted Daelus. ‘He is lost to machine rapture. The xenos engine has him.’

  ‘Can you do anything?’

  Daelus shook his head. ‘There is nothing I can do, my lord. Do you not see, this is far beyond my abilities.’

  ‘Watch your tone, brother,’ Cominus voxed. His reprimand was shredded by violent, alien static.

  ‘Let me through,’ Felix said again. Bolt rifles pointed at Primus until he stood aside, allowing Felix to move towards the archmagos. He steeled himself to push his way through the phantoms fighting and dying in the light of that fateful day.

  The mountain shook around the embattled Scythes. Further portions of the room collapsed, revealing more of the active blackstone beneath. The hall was losing its form, becoming a rubble-filled cave of dark rock full of racing lights. Space Marines shouted out warnings as huge chunks fell from the ceiling. Their voices broke up completely and the vox filled with a roar.

  ‘Cawl!’

  In the middle of the past, Felix could not see the present, only another bulwark of the Imperium falling to alien hate. Men who had died in that room years before died again. Moving through the crowd of ghosts was physically taxing, and his armour protested. He leaned into invisible forces that tried with all the mountain’s might to push him back until finally, he was forced to stop. He was poised an arm’s length from Cawl, his face inches from a warrior bathed in battle sweat fighting for a few more seconds of life against a towering beast composed solely of chitinous plates, gristle and ravening hunger.

  The machine was howling. Weird screeches and hooting boomed from the depths of the fortress-monastery over their vox network.

  ‘Cawl! Shut it down! Shut it down!’

  His words were heard only by himself. The mountain shook.

  ‘Cawl!’ He pushed against the storm.

  A genestealer turned slit yellow eyes upon Felix, detached itself from the projection, and attacked.

  Circa 10,000 years ago

  Cawl was in some other place where a vast and poisonous mind regarded him. Yellow and black armour, red and cream chitin, the mad tumble of melee, all gone. Instead there was blackness of the most warm and intrusive sort. Someone, or something, was breathing down his neck. He was surprised to find himself sitting in a chair, a warm metal cylinder a foot long in his hands with a single green light burning steadily at the top. Besides the indicator lumen, it was featureless but for a micron-thin seam where the lid screwed into the vessel.

  He was holding it in hands that were still all flesh. He twitched in surprise. This was not his body as he remembered. It was small, and lacking facility.

  ‘Still human,’ he breathed.

  ‘What?’ The presence behind him was Friedisch. Of course it was. The sense of the other, greater being was quickly forgotten.

  Cawl blinked eyes that were also of flesh. Confusion faded.

  ‘Stop breathing on me, Friedisch, you are putting me off.’

  Friedisch moved away. Cawl became aware of the gentle hum of well-maintained systems, and reality slotted itself back together. They had escaped from Horus’ war fleet. They were in the warp. There were no xenos monsters. No Space Marines fighting. No burning ambition.

  ‘Silence on the Silencia.’

  Cawl looked up from the cylinder with a scowl. ‘Are you making a joke, Friedisch?’

  Friedisch gave a little grin. ‘I am!’

  Cawl turned back to his work with a shake of his head.

  Friedisch gripped his friend’s shoulder amicably. ‘You always have to be the best at everything, Belisarius. The most intelligent, the most gifted, the quickest witted.’

  ‘That is because I usually am.’

  ‘You are modest too,’ said Friedisch, who was in too good a mood to be infuriated by Cawl.

  ‘I am modest!’ Cawl wore a technologist’s loop. Focusing motors whirred as he turned the cylinder over carefully in his hands, reading the machine marks on the metal with a seer’s attention. Fragments of memories perturbed him yet. He saw a flash of a Space Marine in an unfamiliar armour type die to the claws of a xenos fiend.

  He put the cylinder down hard, certainly harder than he meant. It clanked on the bench.

  ‘Are you all right, Belisarius?’

  Friedisch sat down in a chair behind Cawl. Though the Silencia was a luxurious barque as befitted its previous owner’s status, Hester Aspertia Sigma-Sigma had been of the Mechanicum, and so it benefitted from a well-supplied workshop.

  ‘I honestly don’t know.’ He glanced upwards, perhaps expecting to see an answer in the turmoil of energies surrounding their ship. Instead he saw a ceiling crowded with hanging tools and dormant mechanisms. ‘Maybe it’s the warp.’

  ‘It’s funny, I was going to mention that. Have you noticed how smooth our transit is?’

  ‘I had not, actually.’ Cawl glanced at the cylinder again. Too preoccupied with the clone-jar. Or…

  Teeth and claws and dying men.

  ‘But it is,’ Cawl said, forcing the image away. ‘Very smooth.’

  ‘The last time I took a voyage through the immaterium, I thought I would die. Or worse,’ said Friedisch. ‘But this, well this…’ He frowned. ‘This is like it used to be. Before the war,’ he said quietly. ‘Why do you think that is?’

  ‘I’m sure we’ll find out when we emerge,’ he said. ‘There is no point speculating on the unknown without sufficient data to reach a conclusion. If we allow ourselves to be drawn into the conversation, we will waste valuable time on unprovable hypotheses. We will find out in due course.’

  ‘Never a wasted moment, eh, Belisarius?’ Friedisch picked up a magnetic wrench, peered at it, and put it down. He had never shared Cawl’s drive for work, but then, few did.

  ‘I know you don’t share my concern about wasting time, Friedisch, but you should. Of all things, time is the most precious. More precious than knowledge. Time is the only thing we cannot make more of. Time is the limitation on all other things. When a person is born, they are in servitude to time. We spend time stupidly, when we should hoard it like treasure. I do not like to waste time. There is never enough of it, and there are many thieves who covet it.’

  He picked up the cylinder again, appalled with himself at how carelessly he had dropped it.

  ‘We might die before we arrive,’ said Friedisch. ‘The warp is cruel.’

  ‘If we do, we are dead. If we are not, and I do nothing, spending the hours in speculation, leisure or fear, they are wasted. Death comes for us all. What we do while it approaches is the only freedom we have. And I have this to think on.’

  ‘Any progress?’

  ‘So now you engage?’

 
‘I am frightened, Belisarius,’ said Friedisch, ‘but I am also bored, and though you seem to forget it sometimes, I too am of the Cult.’

  ‘Well then,’ said Cawl. He tapped the cylinder. ‘Within this is a half-formed clone copy of Hester Aspertia Sigma-Sigma, late and treacherous magos domina of Trisolian.’

  ‘Indeed. A clever guarantee of immortality.’

  ‘Not so clever,’ said Cawl. ‘A little desperate, even. She will not be coming back, for we have her last remaining clone seed. If this were to fall into the hands of our peers, it would almost certainly be destroyed, but that would be a terrible shame. Sigma-Sigma encoded all her knowledge into her clones. It’s just waiting there to be picked up. Think, Friedisch. She was a shrewd tactician. We could become so ourselves.’

  ‘But why? I never had you for a soldier.’

  ‘I am not. But tactics and strategy are knowledge. All knowledge is valuable. All knowledge yearns to be known, and we as members of the Cult Mechanicus yearn to know it. Do you know that I was once a student of Diacomes of Gestus Decorum?’

  ‘I confess I have never heard of him, or of wherever Gestus Decorum is.’

  ‘You know I have served many masters.’

  ‘Yes, yes, as you are always telling me.’ Friedisch affected Cawl’s voice. ‘“Friedisch, while you were diligently working your way through the lower mysteries, I was travelling the galaxy! Buck up, my man! Learn! Learn! Learn all you can, from whom you can.” That’s about it, no?’ He toyed with another tool.

  Cawl scowled at Friedisch’s mockery, but continued just the same. ‘Diacomes was a magos-ascetic. A hermit. He was also an incredibly skilled biologian.’ He smiled. ‘I think the path biologicus is my favourite discipline.’

  ‘Organic life is the Machine-God’s greatest accomplishment within the scope of the Great Work, all praise He who is three-in-one,’ agreed Friedisch. ‘By giving us life within an organic shell he presents us with the means and opportunity to improve upon physicality, as is his divine plan. He grants us complex weakness so we might learn metallic strength, and ascend to his level of machinic perfection.’ He scratched absentmindedly at the raw skin around his augmetic.

  ‘Such is life’s great test,’ said Cawl. ‘Now, the linkage of minds has been possible since the Age of Technology,’ said Cawl. ‘But there are a number of risks. Full linkage between living minds leads inevitably to psychosis as the personalities make war on each other for dominance. Hence the need for the moderation of the manifold in our Titan Legio. As such technologies demonstrate, it is impossible to achieve full blended consciousness between two living minds. Of course, it is possible to boost one’s own brainpower by linkage to a cloned or repurposed brain, thoroughly wiped, but the key there is that the brain be unformed, and patterning must be undertaken by the user. If one wishes to gain the full extent of knowledge within a deceased or living brain, it is impossible, for knowledge is indivisible from experience, and personality is the accumulation of experience. Ergo, personality must survive.’

  ‘Therefore, absorbing a person’s full knowledge risks conflict between personalities, which leads to psychosis,’ said Friedisch.

  ‘Which leads to death, and the loss of knowledge,’ said Cawl. ‘It is not a risk, it is a certainty. Diacomes, however, was certain this could be overcome. There are many interpersonal cybernetic networks, temporary and permanent, that enhance the capabilities of all involved, but no way of absorbing human knowledge into an extant personality without damaging or destroying that personality.’

  ‘Did Diacomes do it?’

  ‘The Dark Age technologists did it. He was sure of that. There is a way to transcend human limitations. Knowledge may be passed on.’

  ‘But did Diacomes rediscover the technique?’ Friedisch pressed.

  Cawl placed the clone cylinder carefully back into its rest.

  ‘No,’ said Cawl. ‘But he came close.’

  Cawl’s hand strayed to his memcore. His fingers rubbed on warm metal.

  ‘And you think you can do it?’ Friedisch snorted. ‘Really, Belisarius.’

  ‘I–’

  Bang.

  ‘What was that?’ said Friedisch.

  Bang. The ship shuddered.

  ‘I think we’re coming out of the warp.’

  ‘With no warning?’ said Friedisch incredulously.

  ‘I don’t think Hester Aspertia’s Navigator likes us very much,’ said Cawl. ‘He’s a nasty little mutant.’

  A musical refrain began to play throughout the ship.

  ‘Oh, now he’s telling us!’ said Friedisch. ‘I’d dearly like to wring his scrawny neck.’

  ‘No you wouldn’t,’ said Cawl. He locked the cylinder into place, then after a moment’s thought, picked it up, opened his robes and inserted it into a compartment concealed in his stomach. ‘You’re not very warlike.’

  ‘When did you put that in?’ said Friedisch. ‘In your, in your gut!’

  ‘We’ve been on this ship for weeks, my friend. While you’ve been moping, I’ve been working.’

  Bang.

  The ship jumped hard.

  ‘Come on, we should get to the command deck, we’re about to arrive at Ryza.’

  ‘Lead on, Beli–’

  BANG!

  Circa 10,000 years ago

  Cawl frowned. He was on a ship, now he wasn’t. Something wasn’t right. He felt…

  Tall, he thought. I feel tall?

  Bang. Metal struck dully off rock. Bang.

  The ship was gone from his mind. He was as tall as he had always been. He was outside the laboratorium complex, on the bridge in the mountains where he liked to go to think, and there was someone else upon the bridge with him, but he could not look at him. How could he forget that?

  ‘I am sorry, I am disturbing you,’ said the man. ‘I will leave you to your meditations.’

  Bang.

  ‘Do not go,’ pleaded Cawl. ‘I want more than anything to speak to you.’

  Bang.

  ‘Then look upon me,’ said the man. ‘You have nothing to fear.’

  Cawl laughed apologetically.

  ‘I find I can’t, I am sorry.’

  Overhead a mangy bird circled, black and brown feathers stuck out at untidy angles. Terra once had an abundance of wildlife matched by few worlds. They were so precious, Terran analogues. Inevitably, mankind ruined them wherever they were found, as he had ruined his own home. On Terra a few pest species persisted, mutated more often than not. The planet was not unique in its impoverishment.

  ‘I know you could make me, but,’ he gabbled. ‘But I’d…’ Cawl swallowed. ‘I’d rather you didn’t. It behoves one to make these efforts oneself. Do you not think?’ His voice was strange, not his own, deeper, more arrogant.

  ‘I do not force men to do anything, Belisarius Cawl.’

  Why did the man call him that? Belisarius Cawl was not his name.

  The man chuckled softly at what Cawl thought. He could hear what he was thinking. He could hear what everyone was thinking. He came to stand by Cawl’s side. ‘I require a break from the work also. I will stand with you here a while, and we can enjoy the view together. I find it helps to imagine how it will look when it is restored, and life is returned in full measure to this world. Would you like me to describe how it should look? I remember. I could show you, if you would like.’

  Cawl still could not turn his head to look at the man, but he smiled, and let gratitude warm his foreign voice.

  ‘I would like that very much.’

  ‘Then you must look at me.’

  Hesitantly, Cawl looked up into the brown eyes of the man. He expected them to be brown, because they always were. Incredible eyes, steeped in compassion and power. Otherwise, He seemed so nondescript, with long brown hair and skin the colour of light recaff. At least He was today. The Emper
or’s face was unremarkable, and should have been easily recalled, but although Cawl had met Him many times, he could never remember exactly what He looked like between meetings, as if He were not a man, but a figure from a recurring dream only remembered during sleep, and forgotten with the first rays of daylight. It was rarely the same face twice.

  The Emperor of Mankind smiled. He had an easy smile. Reassuring. Warm. His smile was so full of positive things that the thought of His frown frightened Cawl. If it were as judgemental as the Emperor’s smile was uplifting, he had no wish ever to see it.

  ‘Please,’ the Emperor said, gesturing down at the riverbed. ‘I did not mean to interrupt your rest. It is good to stop and think, to prevent us rushing in haste into decisions we may later regret. Haste is man’s greatest enemy. Contemplation is a neglected art.’

  Bang went the metal.

  Cawl’s body prickled with electricity to be so close to Him. It was neither a pleasant nor a wholly unpleasant feeling.

  ‘I have something to ask you,’ said the Emperor. ‘A personal favour.’

  Cawl was taken aback. The mightiest man in existence wanted something from him. He gaped. The Emperor found this amusing. His smile quirked.

  Cawl recovered himself. ‘Anything, my lord. You have but to command it.’

  ‘Thank you.’ He paused. The Emperor was unsure of what to say. When He opened His mouth, from it came…

  Bang bang bang BANG!

  The sensation of the presence returned. Not Friedisch, not the Emperor, the other thing, the thing in the warm and intimate dark that was watching him. It seemed… bored.

  Now

  BANGBANGBANGBANGBANG.

  Felix let his boltstorm gauntlet fire on full automatic. The machine-spirit exulted in the freedom to do violence, chattering out a delight of staccato explosions. Fire burst all around as the bolts found their mark. Shrapnel cracked from his ceramite, and his helm chimed warnings at the proximity of the explosions. The genestealer was gutted, lifted up and away from him, its back blown out. Alien blood spattered over Felix’s faceplate, obscuring his view of the Hall of the Founder further.

  Among the echoes of the Scythes’ last stand, living genestealers lurked, and they were throwing themselves out of the Pharos’ remembrance and onto Felix’s men. Threat alarms chimed in his helmet. He held his fist out, shooting almost blind. His battleplate cogitator had as much trouble telling past from present as he did. Targeting reticules danced over xenos killing machines and fired, only to find them phantoms. He activated his sword’s power field and swung wildly. In passing through a creature that was not there, it cleaved into one that was, cutting through its exoskeletal ribs and exploding its organs with a flash of light.