Myriad - Rob Sanders Read online

  Their gathered intelligence told the Omnissian Faithful that Gordicor was answerable only to Aulus Scaramanca and the Fabricator General himself – the magos had secured successes of his own, as testified by loyal constructs recruited from the ashes of such outposts and bases. Lately, Gordicor’s troops had appeared with greater regularity in the southern hemisphere and the polar regions, suggesting to the leadership of the Omnissian Faithful that he was now closing in on their position.

  As the rebels moved through the wreckage of the fields, they took cover once again at the sound of gunfire. The grav-craft was strafing the ground with the atomising stream of an under-turret mounted eradication beamer. As Lennox got closer, she could hear the distinctive sound of rad-cleansers and see the flash of beam impacts past the shattered remains of a toppled solar collector. There she spotted the huddled shapes of three constructs, hiding from the fighting beyond.

  ‘Find a position,’ Lennox told Omnek-70. The skitarii silently obeyed, slipping off with his arquebus to find a place from which to offer covering fire. As always, the Ranger had orders not only to kill Dark Mechanicum constructs but also to put a transuranic round through any members of the Omnissian Faithful if a situation become unworkable and capture seemed likely. The resistance the rebels offered on Mars – symbolically and actually – was bigger than any one construct, even Lennox herself. The princeps had told Omnek-70 that she would much rather suffer his marksmanship than be taken alive into the bosom of corruption.

  ‘What by Holy Mars is going on?’ the princeps hissed as she came up behind 44-Torq and Scallion-Six-One. They were a couple of scavengers with a talent for spotting untainted weaponry and equipment. They had also brought back to Invalis their fair share of recruits and salvaged constructs. They had the sallow skin of forge-worlders, and their overalls were filthy. Their belts were nests of tools for recovering salvage and they carried cargo nets on their backs full of reclaimed parts, equipment and supplies. 44-Torq looked around, startled to find two shapes behind him, but looked down at the sand in relief as he recognised Lennox and the hulking enginseer.

  ‘Are we glad to see you,’ Scallion-Six-One said.

  Lennox ignored him. ‘Who’s he?’ she asked, pointing her caliver at the ragged figure crouched next to him. Dressed in the remains of a ribbed suit and wearing a gas-masked hood, the gaunt figure had numerals printed across his forehead.

  ‘Lenk Four-of-Twelve,’ said the stranger, offering his hand. Beyond the burns on his suit, he looked fine to Lennox. Certainly not tainted.

  ‘He’s been with us for a few days,’ Scallion-Six-One said. ‘Indentured forge labourer. We found him while searching through Dynax Maximal. Says he was over at Icaria.’

  Lennox had been sent over to the rebel forces holed up in the Icaria-Selenium Basin. All she had found was ash and charred bodies.

  ‘We’re bringing him in,’ Scallion-Six-One said confidently. ‘Well, we were.’

  ‘They almost had us.’ 44-Torq nodded over at the gunfire. ‘Thallaxii – the Ordo Reductor. They came out of nowhere.’

  Lennox lowered her head as a heavy weapons cyborg unleashed a photon thruster cannon at the grav-craft from the ground. A repulsor engine on the craft exploded, causing it to bank and crash spectacularly into the sands.

  ‘Who are they fighting?’

  ‘This, you will not believe,’ 44-Torq told her. ‘They’re killing each other.’

  Lennox was incredulous. ‘Infighting in Kelbor-Hal’s ranks?’

  It seemed strange to the princeps. The corruption suffered by such constructs had been absolute in her experience. They were slaves to darkness.

  ‘We were trying to secure a find,’ Scallion-Six-One told her. ‘A real prize. A Kastelan-class battle automata. Pretty beaten up, but in one piece and without a hint of corruption.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Gordicor’s shock troops swooped in on a pass,’ 44-Torq said. ‘We ran for our lives and hid, obviously. Except, when the cyborgs deployed, they didn’t seem interested in sweeping the area for us at all. It seems like they were looking for the unit, too.’

  ‘The Kastelan?’ Lennox said.

  ‘They took our find,’ Scallion-Six-One said with obvious regret.

  44-Torq shrugged. ‘We hid here for a while and, before we know it, they’re firing on one another...’ As his word trailed off, the sound of gunfire faded, and the scavenger fell silent.

  The battle was apparently over.

  Lennox heard the trudge of footsteps up behind. It was Omnek-70.

  ‘They’re all dead,’ he told the princeps with confidence. ‘Come and see.’

  He led the way through the wreckage of the shattered solar collectors. 44-Torq and Scallion-Six-One scrambled over to their find, where Enginseer Zarco joined them. While Lenk 4-of-12 and Lennox walked slowly through the carnage, Omnek-70 moved from body to heavily armoured body, checking that the Thallaxii were truly dead. Such cyborg warriors were known for their resilience.

  The Kastelan lay immobile in the red dust. It looked wholly unremarkable, and Lennox paid it no further mind.

  ‘Report,’ she said after Omnek-70 had returned from the crash site.

  ‘Confirmed. All dead. For attacking their own allies, they were thorough.’

  ‘That doesn’t make any sense,’ Lennox muttered.

  ‘That’s not all,’ Omnek-70 said. ‘These aren’t the only bodies. Look here and here. Skitarii forge-guard out of Vertex Australis.’

  ‘They’re a long way from their forge,’ the princeps said.

  ‘While some of the skitarii have been blasted apart,’ the Ranger said, ‘some of the kill shots are galvanic.’

  ‘You’re saying some of them turned on their own, like the Thallaxii.’

  ‘Not just that,’ Omnek-70 informed her. ‘This body exhibits the kind of corruption associated with scrapcode infection, as does this... but this one does not. Nor this one. If we had come across this skitarii or that cyborg before they were destroyed, we would probably have tried to recruit them.’

  ‘Fascinating,’ Lennox said in a tone that suggested anything but. ‘Perhaps Gordicor is becoming more subtle in his methods. Enginseer, what do we have on the Kastelan?’

  ‘These markings,’ Zarco told her. ‘First Maniple, Daedarii Reserve Cohort. The barrel on the shoulder-mounted bolt cannon has burned out and the maxims on its arms are empty. Shielding and automotives are down – probably a drained reactor. Wait…’

  ‘What?’ Lennox demanded. She and Lenk 4-of-12 were already giving the thing a wide berth. When the enginseer suddenly got up and backed away, the princeps tensed.

  ‘Is it polluted?’

  Zarco didn’t answer at first. He stared down at the hulking robot before moving back in to check its cranial housing.

  ‘I’m not detecting any evidence of corruption,’ the enginseer told her. With the plating and visor optics removed, he peered inside the workings of the battle-automata’s head. ‘But I’m also not finding any evidence of a bio-plastic cerebra, or doctrina wafers.’

  ‘No wetware?’ Lennox asked.

  ‘Or operational hardware.’

  ‘But looking at the evidence,’ Omnek-70 said, ‘this unit was responsible for the deaths of at least some of the forge-guard – the Thallaxii also.’

  ‘It might have something to do with this,’ Zarco said, pointing at an object at the centre of the Kastelan’s chest with his axe, seeming not to want to get too close. It was an intricate orb of polyhedral cogs and interlocking gears. The Byzantine arrangement became smaller and more complex the deeper they stared into its disturbing depths.

  Lenk 4-of-12 came up behind Lennox, transfixed by the thing. As he peered around her shoulder, the princeps shrugged the menial off with annoyance.

  ‘What is it?’ Lennox asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Zar
co told her honestly.

  ‘Enough,’ the princeps said. ‘I don’t want to be out here when the next cohort of Dark Mechanicum troops arrive looking for their fallen comrades. We’re leaving.’

  ‘What about the Kastelan?’ 44-Torq asked. Despite the alien thing embedded in the centre of the battle-automata’s chest, the scavenger was eager to bring back his find.

  ‘I leave that assessment to the enginseer,’ Lennox said.

  Zarco considered. ‘It is a rare and valuable find,’ he decided. ‘Whether we refit the unit or use it for parts, the reclamation is worth the risk.’

  ‘Fine,’ Lennox said. ‘Then when we get back to Invalis, it can go into quarantine with this miserable specimen.’

  As the princeps pushed past Lenk 4-of-12 and marched back towards the Archimedex, the forge labourer looked back and forth between Lennox and the battle-automata.

  ‘What does she mean, “quarantine”?’

  The Mole pushed through the hole in the cave wall and settled on the cradle of its tracked carrier. Exiting the gyroscopic troop section, Lennox marched down a set of stairs slid out by a pair of hunchbacked servitors. The cave was crowded with other tunnelling machines that were the workhorses of the Omnissian Faithful’s holy work: Hellbores, Termites and smaller breaching drills.

  ‘Process the retrievals,’ the princeps ordered as she departed the Archimedex, leaving Zarco and Omnek-70 in charge. ‘I’m going to see the lexorcist.’

  Lennox made her way through Invalis Base. Situated as they were, deep beneath the highlands, the Omnissian Faithful had so far managed to avoid the attention of the Dark Mechanicum. Orbital surveillance stations and Marauder Vigilants criss-crossed the hemisphere with their augurs and pict-feeds. Ordo Reductor extermination squads searched for rebel elements forge by forge. Daemon engines stalked the dunes of Mars, following the sweet scent of un-warped flesh.

  None had found Invalis Base. Using burrowing transports like the Archimedex, the rebels of the Omnissian Faithful broke surface leagues away, ensuring that no track, no footprints or heat signatures left a trail back home.

  The region had always been a deadzone, avoided by the Mechanicum and Knightly orders alike. Crystal deposits in the mountains gave off a strange radiation that resisted augur scans, turned data-streams to static and drained cells of power. The highlands were scattered with the rusted wrecks of constructs, vehicles and aircraft that had accidentally wandered in, while the canyons swarmed with feral servitors whose populations in such an area had gone unchecked. With the base situated in a small network of caves far below the mountains, the Omnissian Faithful managed to operate beyond the debilitating technological phenomenon, while at the same time benefiting from its natural protection.

  Lennox moved through numerous gauntlets and checkpoints, manned by heavily armed gun-servitors and monstrously bastardised servo-automata. The base itself was a ramshackle place of draping power cables, scavenged equipment and facilities creatively crafted from scrap. Genetors worked on vat-bred reinforcements in their improvised labs. Lennox passed liberated tech-thralls who stood at their posts in the rags of their old uniforms. Cybernetically adapted labourers and menials moved crates of ammunition, blessed unguent and supplies to the lower caves. Scavengers delivered weapons and recovered parts to the artisans in the workshops. Repulsor drones drifted about their duties, while enginseers made constant repairs and rough refurbishments to the base. Code scrubbers monitored the local lines, codestreams and noospherics for any hint of corruption. Consoles and runebanks, meanwhile, were manned by exhausted adepts and half-mangled servitors.

  As Lennox marched down the grille walkways, she acknowledged the leaders of other rebel groups heading on missions to the surface – former skitarii sub-alphas, secutor priests and Adsecularis thrallmasters, all leading squads of mismatched troops and constructs.

  The command centre was a crowded nexus of battered runebanks, cabling and interfaced servitors. The crackle of hololithic displays lit up the gloom, while the air was thick with noospheric chatter and scrubbed vox-streams. Entering the command centre, Lennox found Arquid Cornelicus – the magos catharc in charge of base security. The priest moved between a nexus of runescreens, with nest of datalines and cables reaching down from the ceiling and plugged into the many ports and interfaces that covered his body. Watching over his work was the hag logista, Algerna Zephyreon – a tall but crooked construct in ragged red robes. The depths of the ancient’s hood were lit by optics of ever-changing colour and sequence, while her emaciated form clicked continually with calculus engines like a fine clockwork instrument.

  She waited upon the third construct observing the runescreens in the command centre. Trundling forth on a tracked throne was Raman Synk, lexorcist ward engine and leader of the Omnissian Faithful.

  Synk had been a covenant agent of the Mechanicum, responsible for the prosecution of techno-heresy for the Prefecture Magisterium, the Malagra and the Lexorcist General of Mars. He had been better prepared than most when the infectious corruption of the scrapcode swept across the Red Planet and the maddened Fabricator General had declared war on all true subjects of the Omnissiah.

  But Synk had paid a terrible price in those early days of war and betrayal. Now he was but a broken construct.

  He had found purpose, however, in the doom of Mars. In the dark days since, he had established the Omnissian Faithful and launched a campaign of sabotage and destruction upon the Dark Mechanicum, from deep beneath Invalis.

  Although he was little more than a red-robed cadaver restricted to a throne, the metal digits of Synk’s skeletal hands were at constant work upon the runekeys of a claiverboard built into his chest. A floating servo-skull called Confabulari 66 with an undercarriage of tools, interface lines and clawed appendages fussed about him, attending to the lexorcist’s needs. Synk’s voice even proceeded from loudhailers mounted on the servo-skull.

  ‘My lord,’ Lennox said, stepping through the cables of the command centre and kneeling briefly. Confabulari 66 circled the princeps slowly.

  ‘Princeps,’ the lexorcist said through the servo-skull’s loudhailers. ‘Your mission to Temple-Tarantyne was a success. A mighty God-Machine denied to Kelbor-Hal and his accursed Warmaster.’

  ‘Yes, lexorcist.’

  ‘Yet the same scavengers reported that some hours later,’ Raman Synk said, ‘the Belladon Ventorum, the engine that hunted you at Tarantyne, left the assembly yards in company with two other Warlord Titans. They marched across the Argye Planitia, the Autonox solar collector fields and on into the Invalis region. A corrupted siege company of Krios battle tanks and a section of Thallaxii joined them at Malea Corda.’

  ‘Gordicor?’

  ‘Undoubtedly,’ the lexorcist agreed.

  ‘Then we need to mobilise,’ Lennox said. ‘Why haven’t you sounded the general alarm?’

  ‘Because they stopped at Phasmi Fossae.’

  ‘Outside the deadzone?’

  ‘I don’t think the magos reductor can know of our location,’ Raman Synk told her. ‘If he knew where we are, he wouldn’t have sent Titans and siege equipment. He expects to find a rebel fort or camp. His God-Machines won’t help him here – and not in the Invalis deadzone either.’ A rasping chuckle emanated from the loudhailers.

  ‘But how could the Ordo Reductor even know we are in the area?’ Lennox said.

  ‘Timings and trajectories don’t lie,’ Logista Zephyreon said. ‘The Titans followed you from Temple-Tarantyne, to Autonox, to here.’

  ‘That’s impossible,’ Lennox told the hag defiantly. ‘We were well below augur-range. We surfaced only once, to pick up scavengers and salvage.’

  ‘The magos catharc has a theory,’ Synk said.

  ‘A theory I am putting to the test,’ Arquid Cornelicus said, moving between runescreens, trailing cerebral cabling. As the main screen sizzled into focus, Lennox saw that it was show
ing visual-feed captures from the base’s quarantine facility – a large reinforced cell that was used by the magos catharc and his code scrubbers to inspect constructs and materiel for evidence of corruption. In the reinforced quarantine chamber, the princeps could see the towering Kastelan-pattern robot standing upright but lifeless. Dwarfed by the battle-automaton and hugging the rocky wall was Lenk 4-of-12, diagnostic cabling swinging from his ports and up into he ceiling hub. Cornelicus activated the vox receivers.

  ‘Get me out of here!’ Lenk 4-of-12 howled. ‘Don’t leave me in here with this thing!’

  The forge labourer seemed genuinely uncomfortable in the robot’s solemn presence.

  ‘You think the battle-automaton is corrupted?’ Lennox asked. ‘That it somehow transmitted a trace of our position?’

  ‘We’ll soon know,’ Arquid Cornelicus said. The princeps looked down at the floor and then at the lexorcist. The magos catharc spoke into his vox-bead. ‘Release the probes.’

  Lennox watched the runescreen as mech-spiders dropped down from the quarantine chamber ceiling on thin cables. They crawled about the armoured shell of the battle-automata, fawning over it with their augur-probosces. Several flattened themselves and, trailing their lines, scrabbled between the armoured plates of the robot to inspect its inner workings.

  ‘Both the scavengers who found it and my enginseer examined the unit, but could find no evidence of pollution.’

  ‘Yes,’ Logista Zephyreon said, her voice a harsh reproach. ‘A find altogether too good to be true...’

  ‘The good princeps is not to be blamed for this,’ Raman Synk said, silencing the hag. ‘Diemon Gordicor becomes more desperate and devious by the day. He’s a warped construct answering to equally warped masters. He’s ready to try anything. He knows that rebel groups need a constant supply of weapons and equipment. He simply needs to scatter such tracked items about and wait for our scavengers to bring them back to base. Inevitable really.’