Toxic-data. Data-death. Overload.
Let Hesst be alive.
He was plugged in. He would have taken the brunt of the shock–
Don’t think about it. Just get upstairs.
She trips over the sprawled body of a high-grade servitor. A hand steadies her arm.
‘Do not fall, magos,’ a meatvoice requests.
Tawren looks up into the menacing face of Arook Serotid, the master of the tower’s skitarii brigades. Arook is a creature modified for war, not data. His ornate armour is part ceremonial, part ritual, a deliberately baroque throwback to the eras of threat-pattern and fear-posture.
‘Indeed, I will not,’ she agrees. He helps her up the stairs, moving blind and mindless servitors out of her way. He is a metre taller than her. His eyes are hololithic crimson slits in his copper visor. She notices that one of them is flickering.
‘We took a hit,’ he says.
‘A major datashock,’ she says. ‘Hypertraumatic inload syndrome.’
‘Worse than that,’ he replies. ‘Explosions in orbit. We’ve lost ships, orbitals.’
‘An attack?’
‘I fear so.’
They’re both using fleshvoice mode. She’s painfully aware of it. It’s so slow, so painstaking. No canting, no data-blurts. No simultaneous and instant transmissions of ideas and data. She doesn’t believe she’s ever spoken to Arook in fleshvoice before, and he’s clearly not used to talking at all.
But the mannered effort is necessary. They were both insulated from the datashock. They must stay insulated.
‘I need to reach the server,’ she explains.
He nods. That one red eye is still blinking. A malfunction? Arook has taken some damage. Like all skitarii, he would have been linked to the noosphere, so the datashock would have hit him like everyone else. However, the skitarii also have their own dedicated emergency manifold, a crisis back-up. Arook has been hurt by the inload shock, but he’s switched to the reinforced, military code system of his brigade.
He leads the way up.
‘You are undamaged, magos?’ he asks over his shoulder.
‘What?’
‘Are you hurt, magos?’
‘No. The data shock missed me. I was unplugged.’
‘That was fortunate for you,’ Arook says.
‘It was. There was a scrapcode problem. Server Hesst switched from discretionary to deal with it.’
Arook glances at her. His visor looks like a raptor’s beak. His shoulders and upper body are huge, like a bull simian. He understands. It is simple protocol. When dealing with a significant scrapcode problem, a server will have his second-in-command unplug so that there is no danger of the second-in-command being compromised by the scrapcode. It is an operational safety measure.
It has saved Tawren from far more than just a scrapcode infection.
‘Might the scrapcode be an issue?’ Arook asks.
Tawren has already thought of that. A serious noospheric failure brought on by a critical code corruption… that might have caused orbital collisions or accidents. It might have even caused the grid to misfire, or a ship to discharge weapons in error.
They reach the command deck. There’s a pall of smoke in the air. Technicians are struggling to free injured moderati from broken amniotic pods. Servitors hang limply from their plug sheafs. The screens are fizzling with blizzard noise.
Hesst is crumpled on the platform.
‘Out of my way!’ Tawren cries, shoving through the hesitant servitors and sensori clustered around him.
There’s a pool of dark fluid beside his head. She can smell the toxic hormones and excess chemicals that have seared through his bloodstream and ruptured his vessels.
‘We must disconnect him,’ she says.
Arook nods.
A technograde servitor blurts something.
‘In voice, damn you!’ Tawren snaps. ‘The noosphere’s gone.’
‘Disengaging the server could result in extreme cerebral trauma,’ the technograde clacks. ‘We need a cybersurgical team to properly detach him from the MIU.’
‘He’s dying,’ says Arook, looking down at the server. Arook has seen death many times, so he knows what he is looking at.
‘He is severely injured,’ the technograde clicks. ‘Expert disengagement may save him, but–’
‘We understand,’ says Tawren. She looks at Arook.
‘We need the specialists,’ she says. ‘If there’s any chance of saving him, we have to take it.’
‘Of course.’
She kneels beside Hesst, getting blood on her robes.
‘I’m here, server,’ she says, leaning in. ‘I’m here. It’s Meer Tawren. You must hold on. I’m ready to relieve you, but we need a surgical crew. Just hold on.’
Hesst stirs, a flicker of life.
He murmurs something.
‘Just hold on. I’m here,’ she says.
‘Unplug me,’ Hesst gurgles, flecking his chin with blood.
‘We need a surgical crew first, server. There has been a major incident.’
‘Never mind me. The grid is off. It’s off, Tawren. Unplug me and take over. You have to see if you can get it restarted.’
‘Wait,’ she soothes. ‘The surgeons are coming. Wait.’
‘Now!’
‘You’ll die, server.’
His eyelids flutter.
‘I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. I don’t matter. The orbital bioengines have gone, Meer.’
Her eyes go wide. She glances at Arook.
‘They’ve gone,’ Hesst repeats, his voice a sigh. ‘You have to plug in, Meer. You have to take my place, plug in, and see what can be salvaged. See what control can be re-established.’
‘Server–’
‘You have to reconstruct the noosphere. Without the grid, Calth is defenceless.’
Tawren looks at the heavy cable-trunking of Hesst’s permanent MIU link, coiled on the floor under him like a dead constrictor snake. She can’t detach that without killing him, surely? Especially not with him in such a fragile state–
One of the sensori cries out.
They look up.
Debris is falling from the clouds from the orbital explosions. The first scraps of metal are raining down across the river valley, trailing fire like meteorites. She sees them strike the river in columns of steam, or scratch across the rooftops of Kalkas Fortalice. Some heavier chunks strike like rockets, exploding buildings. Something smacks against the command deck’s windows, crazing the armourglas.
The hail of debris is just the beginning. Larger objects are falling. Parts of ships. Parts of orbitals. Parts of docking yards.
Tawren sees it before the sensori do. The grand cruiser Antrodamicus, twelve kilometres from bow to stern, falling backwards into the atmosphere from its ruptured drydock in a cloud of micro-debris, falling slowly and majestically, like a mountainside collapsing.
Falling, stern first, towards them and Kalkas Fortalice.
‘I don’t care what there isn’t, show me what there is!’ Marius Gage roars.
Zedoff, master of the Macragge’s Honour, starts to argue again.
‘Show him,’ a voice booms.
Guilliman is on the bridge.
‘Better still, show me,’ he growls.
‘Assessments! Everything you’ve got!’ Zedoff yells at his crew.
Impact was less than two minutes ago. The flagship’s screens are blind. There’s no data, no noospheric link, no contact with the grid. What comms traffic exists is a stew of screaming voices.
‘We’re blind,’ the Master of the First Chapter tells his primarch.
‘Some impact in orbit?’ Guilliman says. He casts a look at Magos Pelot, who is seizing on the deck. Most of the other Mechanicum personnel are faring no better.
Crewmen start handing the primarch data-slates. He scans fragments of the record. Gage knows that Guilliman is putting them together in his mind. A line of data from here, the last snatch recorded from there, a pict, the most recent auspex scan…