Belisarius Cawl- the Great Work - Guy Haley Read online

  Insect, said the voice of the mountain.

  ‘I bring most humble greetings,’ said Cawl. ‘I am so very pleased to make your acquaintance. I am Beli–’

  Insignificant, but bold. You come to us now, out of your cage of metal and flesh. You show yourself, light to light. Why?

  Belisarius Cawl was alone in the dark, his body lit only by the light of his augmetics. This was not a physical space. His body was a machine projection. A form of imagination shared.

 

  Cawl enacted a dozen sub processes to guard his mind. The probing presence withdrew.

  Interesting, the voice said. Primitive, but well protected. Let us try another way.

  A force gripped Cawl and pulled his limbs outwards, leaving him like an insect pinned to a board. Cawl screamed. This time, the being breached his outer data walls and slipped into the upper layers of his soul. The laws of time and space stretched and bent. Cawl had the impression of an immense data probe riffling through his past.

  Not your original form. Not your original being.

  Again Cawl screamed. The pain was a phantom, but felt all too real. Every one of his augmentations was carefully ripped away and pulled out for display. The Pharos sought to model him, and turn back his existence through time to see what he had been before. It was all illusory, but it still hurt.

  Nerve impulse, organic, bioelectrical, overlaid mechanical and electronic enhancements, but evolved from… the thing paused. You are one of their things, ultimately. Another pause. You do not know this. You are ignorant of your genesis. A debased thing of a debased age.

  ‘Oh, great one!’ Cawl panted. ‘Hearken to me. I bring offers of an alliance between–’

  Nerve impulses detected in material form of subject. Purpose of impulse, production of vibrations in gas medium. Result, it talks, said the voice. It will cease talking.

  Pain flooded Cawl’s being, tormenting him down to the lowest sub-atomic particle and beyond.

  He yelped. ‘No need for that!’

  Still it talks. Cease!

  The pain increased.

  ‘I have a proposal to bring to you!’ said Cawl. ‘Show yourself! Let me speak with you, face to face!’

  Face? queried the being. Face. Frontal expressive area to fore of upper body, often attached to endoskeletal box housing the organ of material-immaterial interface, it said with finality. Face. Face to face. A curious expression. Implication of personal contact. You have no ‘face’, only the facsimile of one, and in your corporeal state the face you have is not your own. The voice was pleased with itself. We have no face. Light needs no face. Let us see what face was yours, once.

  The most deeply rooted of Cawl’s implants were teased from their housings. Cawl shrieked as metal separated from bone. He blinked in surprise as flesh long ago purged crept across his features. By now, his immediate vicinity was crowded with floating components.

  Time is nothing to us, the voice pompously declaimed. You are a thing of time. It paused. Cawl felt it scrabble at his consciousness. So far, the deeper parts of his being remained inviolate. This annoyed the being. Insect, it said petulantly.

  ‘You wish to understand me,’ said Cawl.

  We wish to vivisect you, said the thing. There is nothing worth understanding in you, but we will pull you apart all the same, to see how you work. We must understand this new age.

  ‘There’s no need for that, we are kindred spirits, you and I!’ Cawl gasped, somehow. Bits of his thoracic extension were drifting away in the dark, where they disassembled themselves into their constituent components and floated in exploded diagrammatical form. It was very neat, if rather disturbing.

  We are not like you, said the voice. We are a god. You are nothing.

  Immobile, wracked with pain, Cawl still laughed. The thing’s annoyance grew.

  ‘God’s a flexible term, in my experience. There is one god, the Machine-God, and you are not He.’

  It was the thing’s turn to laugh. Its voice broke into a dozen mocking voices, booming from unseen horizons and overwhelming Cawl’s mind. The thing redoubled its efforts to penetrate Cawl’s defences and mine his soul for information. It forced itself a little deeper. Cawl groaned.

  These are the gods of your time. God of Machines. Gods of Chaos. God of… men? Men. It paused, evaluating the word. There is weakness in this era. You are a man. You are weak. Your species is weak, far removed from the original plan of our enemy. These are not gods you worship, this Machine-God, these entities in the warp, this Emperor. We will explain. The first is a lie. The second are emergent consciousnesses caused by etheric disturbance. The third is a weapon. It paused at this. There is war. The… rift? A rift has opened. The purity of reality is polluted. The war continues. Our war. You fight it. But you are weak. You are echoes. Echoes of might. Blots on purity. Glory has left this galaxy.

  ‘Actually, I can be strong if needed,’ said Cawl. ‘If we talk, you and I, you shall see. I have much to offer! See how I continue my efforts to charm you while you torment me.’

  Searing pain coursed through him. He howled, then smiled.

  ‘You’re not going to shut me up. Listen to me.’

  The thing was silent.

  Perhaps, it said.

  ‘I can help you.’

  Perhaps.

  ‘We have much to teach each other.’

  That is definitely not so. You can never learn what we know, and you have nothing to teach us.

  ‘You are wrong.’

  Instead, you will free us.

  It paused.

  You have heard that before. We see it in the patterns of your mind.

  Cawl said nothing.

  You have heard that before, from one of your so-called gods. The voice insisted. Cawl got the sense of something settling back to regard him from a greater distance, the action of a being desiring to understand the whole of a complex mechanism by changing perspective. This is a strange era. We have much to learn. We shall adjust your temporal resonance again, so that you may show us more.

  ‘Wait!’ said Cawl, but by then he was back in the past.

  Circa 10,000 years ago

  Cawl and Friedisch spent an uncomfortable month locked in their quarters on the Altrix’s ship. The craft was fast, and the warp smooth, but Terra was a long way from Ryza. Time dragged. They became fractious and Cawl, especially, disgraced himself with his pettish behaviour. They were allowed to socialise at first, but eventually became sick of each other, so spent much of the voyage apart at opposite ends of their shared quarters, bickering every time they spoke.

  In a moment of unusual thoughtfulness, the Altrix allowed them onto the observation deck when the ship passed the holy orb of Mars. A guard came for them and led them up through the ship. They sniped and argued like rival dowagers until they came to the gallery windows, where the sight of the great evils done to Mars silenced them.

  They gaped. Friedisch gripped Cawl’s arm.

  They sailed near Mars, not far off the higher anchorages. The world was crowded by debris clouds of stupendous scale, their components ranging in size from substantial parts of battle cruisers to flecks of paint that glittered in the sun like morning frost, misting the view. But though thick, the clouds could not conceal all that had happened to Cawl and Friedisch’s world.

  Giant black scars cut across the red deserts. Whole cities had been razed. New and awful craters gouged the surface where once temple forges and industrial complexes had lifted their spires in praise of the Machine-God.

  ‘Belisarius, it’s gone. My home, it’s gone.’ Friedisch raised a shaking hand and pointed to where a deep fissure marked the location of Mundus Planus fabricatory conurb.

  All over Mars cities had been wiped away. Impact patterns spread their dark splashes over the ground. The fabled Ring of Iron, which circled th
e equator, had suffered as much as the mother world. Sections were missing, the material broken off and floating among the wrecks huddling around the red world. Mars’ polluted skies twinkled with re-entry tracks and the flash of laser discharge shooting down the largest pieces of debris.

  ‘This is Mars,’ said the Altrix. She stood with her hands clasped behind her, back straight, like an officer delivering a report to her general. ‘This is your home. You will note the large amount of damage done to the world by the Adeptus Mechanicus reclamation force. I understand that fighting is still going on in the deeper hives. The traitors are tenacious.’

  ‘All the knowledge, all those people,’ said Friedisch quietly. He stifled a sob.

  ‘I assume you are making some kind of point here,’ said Cawl grimly.

  The Altrix nodded once. ‘I am making a point. I want you to see how much has been lost. I want you to remember what you see here when the director makes his offer. Knowledge is precious. Almost as much wisdom as blood was spilled in the war. We must work together to preserve what remains.’ She looked at them and curled her lip. ‘No matter how distasteful that might be.’ She unclasped her hands. ‘I shall leave you here to observe the results of man’s folly, and think upon what I have said. My men will take you back to your quarters. We arrive at Terra in three days.’ She walked by them, pausing as she passed. ‘This will soon be over,’ she said.

  It was the only kindly thing Cawl ever heard her say.

  Terra greeted them with the cold indifference of a neglectful mother. The worn out birthplace of humanity had little affection for its trillions of children before Horus’ great betrayal. In the aftermath of war, it had none left at all. For Cawl and Friedisch this coldness was to be expected, and they returned it. Their loyalties lay with Mars.

  Terra was in worse condition even than the Red Planet. Wounded, grey and black, all traces of the Emperor’s efforts at rejuvenation wiped clean, it cities were smouldering piles and its people, where they survived, were lost in shock. Its mighty court of orbital plates was missing. Old Earth was naked, dead, diminished; a corpse world crawling with vermin.

  They rode their shuttle down in grim silence. Altrix Herminia caught Cawl’s eye and raised a questioning eyebrow at him.

  He turned away.

  They arrived at the half-ruined Lion’s Gate spaceport to find a world in mourning, and not solely for the loss of the Emperor. There was not one person untouched by the war. Everyone, from legionary to peon, had lost someone. Black adorned everything.

  Security was tight, but the Altrix had clearance of the highest sort. Her warriors were ushered through the crowds of troopers manning the checkpoints. No questions were asked regarding her guests.

  They had to drive through what was left of the Imperial Palace. Most of the transit system was wrecked. Only the most important roads were clear. They wound a circuitous route through a broken wasteland of metal and rubble haunted by grey survivors. Legionaries patrolled the streets in incongruously bright armour. They were all laden with honours that told of heroic actions in the defence. Even such minor celebration of victory seemed obscene.

  There were precious few of these transhumans. The Legions were shattered, their survivors gone in pursuit of the fleeing enemy.

  Their transport was military, all-terrain, a truck held high over the ground on eight fat tyres. Nothing less than that could have traversed the ruins.

  They passed long lines of emaciated people waiting for rations being distributed from a burned-out hab block. Though barely more than a shell, it was in far better shape than its neighbouring buildings, which were reduced to cones of rubble scores of yards high.

  Through armoured windows Cawl peered at diseased faces. He knew enough of human physiology to see that most of the people would not last out the winter. ‘Such a waste,’ said Cawl. ‘So much death.’

  ‘The wages of treachery are always collected by the undeserving,’ said the Altrix. ‘You see, now you understand what Director Sedayne understands – that humanity needs to be saved from its victory. Only knowledge can do that.’

  Cawl looked at her from under his cowl. He was in a foul temper and didn’t care to hide it. ‘You know, you will not hear much disagreement from me on that count, so why the need for the men with the guns?’

  ‘Mortal minds are fickle. Individual choice cannot be allowed to stand in the way of destiny.’

  ‘Charming. What manner of education produced a woman like you?’ Cawl said.

  ‘A truthful one,’ she replied.

  The transport turned a corner on to one of the palace’s gargantuan processional ways. Its great width was narrowed to a ravine by falls of debris from downed hives. In the distance, the jagged buttes of the broken palace walls bit at the horizon.

  Night was coming. Days were short and cold. There was so much material in the atmosphere it would take a thousand years for the sun to shine cleanly again. Sol tracked across the grey heavens, a woeful smear as miserable in colour and movement as every other soul on Terra.

  There were a few places where luxury hid. There were buildings intact, and some entire spires, the surprise survivals that exist in any war, and, as in any war, such places were monopolised by the rich.

  Herminia took Cawl and Friedisch to a starscraper in Outer Gryphonia, not far from the remains of the Celantine Wall. The building stood amid a multi-level wasteland formed from the bones of its brothers and sisters. Though still erect, the scraper’s lower levels were a honeycomb of blasted-out walls and gaping, artificial caves. The effects of war continued all the way up its considerable height to the top, where wounds in its silvery skin caused by voidship lance fire looked like the claw marks of gargantuan beasts.

  But there was life within. The inside was full of servitors shoring up the structure. They laboured, each absorbed in their own limited tasks, but together they produced work of stunning complexity, and at speed.

  ‘Terra will rise again,’ said Friedisch. ‘I hope the same is happening on Mars.’

  ‘Both worlds survive,’ said Herminia blackly. ‘They will never be the same again.’

  They entered a lifter with Herminia’s guards at their back. It rose rapidly. Atmospheric controls were malfunctioning, and their ears popped several times before the lifter began its long deceleration.

  They disembarked on a high floor which appeared whole but whose corridors played host to the antics of freezing Himalazian winds. Atmospheric cyclers groaned in their attempts to maintain a breathable pressure. Already high upon the mountains, the altitude the building added thinned the air to nothing, and both Cawl and Friedisch panted plumes of ice crystals.

  Herminia took no consideration of their difficulties, and they were hustled down the corridors by her guards. Neither she nor they suffered from the rarefied atmosphere, and they arrived in perfect formation, helms and weapons gleaming amid the dereliction, while Cawl and Friedisch struggled to breathe.

  They came to a grand door swathed with the limp plastek sheeting of an auxiliary airlock. The airlock inflated like a balloon, until it stood rigid, enabling the door to open. Cawl and Friedisch were shoved inside, where they took grateful gulps of warmed, thicker air. Once inside they got a good look at the room door. It was bronze, ten feet high. The etched decoration of civilians and Space Marines leading humanity to a better future seemed painfully quaint.

  A suite of rooms welcomed them, the principal of which was huge and opulent. There was a window overlooking the battered city, but it had been darkened to near total opacity, shutting out Terra’s pain. Rich carpets ran to walls of pleasingly sinuous shape. Antiques furnished the rooms. Artefacts and pieces of art from Terra’s long past stood in downlit alcoves. It was designed perfectly, a calming space. But this echo of Imperium’s lost promise had not escaped the ruin entirely. A thin layer of fine dust lay on everything, despite the best efforts of the ventilation system to
keep it out. At least in there the pressure was more bearable, and the tech-priests’ breathing settled.

  There was a single man in the room. Two of Herminia’s soldiers stayed behind to stand sentry, the rest exited to an antechamber, leaving the sum of the occupants at six. It seemed too small a number to fill the room. The carpeted floor hid dangerous gulfs.

  ‘Belisarius Cawl, Friedisch Adum Silip Qvo, I present to you Director Ezekiel Sedayne, technologist and scientist of the Emperor’s inner research cadres, biotechnical division.’

  Sedayne took the delivery of his title with studied diffidence, and turned to a table covered in dull gold leaf, where stood a selection of decanters and several expensive looking glasses.

  ‘Do you drink, Cawl? Qvo?’ he said. ‘Alcohol, I mean.’ He addressed the bottles rather than his guests.

  ‘I am not as pedantic as some of my colleagues,’ said Cawl. ‘I don’t deny myself the pleasures of flesh either. They are given to us by the Machine-God to enjoy.’

  ‘Your religion is so charming,’ said Sedayne.

  ‘Yes, I drink,’ said Cawl frostily.

  Sedayne smiled, again at the bottles and not at the men. ‘Then allow me to select you something.’

  He spent a moment doing so, then picked a tall, fluted vessel, and poured purple liquor from it into three glasses. He took them all up in one large hand, and presented one each to Friedisch and Cawl.

  ‘Plum brandy.’ Sedayne looked at them gravely, then smiled. He had grey, intense eyes and the thin skin of someone living on mortgaged time. ‘They have made this for thousands of years around the Mediterran desert. I am rather partial to it. I hope you enjoy it.’

  Cawl took the glass. Friedisch’s hand shook as he accepted his.

  Sedayne was tall and thin. Cawl would have suspected off-world heritage, a life in low-g habitats, but Sedayne wore no supplementary braces on his limbs to help him move under Terra’s pull. Although he did lean for support on a glossy cane, that seemed more because of his age. He had long black hair, and features that had many of the ingredients of handsomeness but which did not come together to provide it. Clothes of simple cut but expensive make clad him in black and greys.