He lets his go. He lets it replace the abomination fear.
He analyses. He scans. He determines.
His determination is this: he is still in his casket, and his hibersystems have shut down. No, they have been interrupted. By a comm signal. An encrypted vox signal.
He was woken by an encrypted vox transmission that triggered an auto-response in his casket support system.
His casket is damaged. Telemechrus does not believe he can get out of it. He calls out, but there are no venerables around to counsel or help him.
There is no one around.
He will know no fear. He will know no fear.
His implant clock tells him that he has been dormant for a little over eleven hours. External sensors are down. He can’t see. He can’t open the casket. There is no noosphere. There is no data inload.
There is only the vox signal that woke him. He clings to that. He tries to decrypt it.
His inertial locators tell him that he is stationary. They record, eleven hours earlier, an extreme displacement followed by a kinetic trauma spike that was too intense to fully measure. He does not remember that. Hiberstasis must have shut him down before it happened.
Motion sensors light.
There is something close by. Something approaching his casket.
Friend or foe? He has no data. No means of determination. He cannot target. The casket is trapping him. He cannot even discharge his weapons while he is locked in the box.
Friend or foe?
Something strikes the outer shell of his casket and slices through the clamps. Something pulls the hatch open.
‘Are you alive in there?’ a voice asks.
Telemechrus suddenly gets optic feed input. Light. He can feel air flow against his skin, even though he has no skin.
The voice comes from the figure silhouetted against the light.
‘Respond,’ the voice says. ‘Are you capable of activity, friend?’
Telemechrus tries to reply, but his voice does not work. There is a whirr. A whine. A dry gasp of sonics. He engages his cyberorganics, drives power to his articulated limbs, shakes off the tingling numbness of stasis, and levers himself forward.
Clumsy and inelegant, he clambers out of the casket. The figure moves back to let him out.
He steps out of the casket, crushing rock fragments and glass to powder beneath his feet. He feels sunlight on his face, though he has no face. He stretches out his ghost spine, stretches his remembered arms.
His weapon pods engage. Power couplings light up. Feeds flow live. He looks down at the figure who freed him.
‘Thank. You. Lord,’ he manages to say.
‘You know me?’ the warrior asks.
‘Yes. Tetrarch. I. Identified. Your voice. Pattern.’
Eikos Lamiad nods.
‘That’s good. My face is not as recognisable as it once was.’
Telemechrus adjusts his optic feed and zooms in on the great tetrarch. Lamiad’s visual profile does not match the one stored in Telemechrus’s autostack memory.
Lamiad’s glorious golden armour is dented and scorched. The famous porcelain half of his face is cracked and disfigured. The intricate mechanism of the left eye is ruined.
His left arm is missing from just above the elbow, leaving nothing but a buckled stump of armour, and a cluster of torn fibernetic cables, broken ceramite bone-form, and frayed artificial muscles. With his right hand, Lamiad leans on his broadsword as though it were a walking staff.
‘You. Are. Hurt. Lord Champion.’
‘Nothing that can’t be repaired,’ replies Lamiad. ‘Except, perhaps, my heart.’
‘You. have. Sustained. Cardiac damage? Which. Vessel?’
‘No, friend. I meant it metaphorically. Do you understand what’s happened today?’
‘No. Where. Am I?’
Lamiad turns and gestures. Telemechrus adjusts his optic scope and pans out, wide, tracking. A desert area. The sky is dark and mottled with heat-strong blotches. A heat-blotch in the near distance represents a building structure of significant size, which is on fire. More distant but perhaps larger heat-blotch/fires can be identified and plotted. The desert is littered with debris, much of it Legion materiel, much of it apparently destroyed by impact. Telemechrus tracks around. He scans his own casket, crumpled, half-buried in an impact crater. Smashed storage pods and equipment containers are scattered all around. There are two other caskets.
Telemechrus checks for a noospheric, but there is none. He cannot patch and configure a global position with any accuracy.
‘You fell from a low orbit facility,’ says Lamiad. ‘Two of your kind fell at the same time, but their caskets were already damaged and they did not survive.’
Telemechrus zooms in on the half-open caskets beside his own.
‘Oh,’ he says.
‘What is your name, friend?’ asks Lamiad.
‘Gabril. No. It is. Not. It is. Telemechrus. Lord.’
‘Telemechrus, we have been attacked in the most underhand and cowardly fashion. The XVII Legion has turned on us. They have slaughtered us, crippled the fleet and the orbital facilities, and laid waste to vast tracts of Calth. We are close to defeat. We are close to death.’
‘I have seen. Death, lord. We have both. Seen it. Come close to. Us and yet in neither. Case. Did it claim. Us.’
Lamiad listens. He nods slowly.
‘I had not considered it that way. You are new-forged, Telemechrus, but you already display the wisdom of a venerable. The techpriests selected you well for this honour.’
‘I was. Told. It was. Because I. Was compatible. Lord.’
‘I think that is so. And not just biologically. I was almost made like you, after Bathor. The Mechanicum of Konor blessed me with a more subtle rebuild. It is not, however, as robust.’
Lamiad glances down at his shattered arm-stub.
‘Today, your Dreadnought build has allowed you to endure better than me.’
‘Without you. Lord. I could not. Even. Have got. Out of. My. Box.’
Lamiad laughs.
‘Please. Inload me. With full. Tactical,’ says Telemechrus.’
‘I was over there,’ Lamiad says, pointing towards the burning buildings in the middle distance. ‘The Holophusikon. That was supposed to be a commemoration of our future, Telemechrus. The orbital strike rained debris across this entire area. Large pieces. They struck the whole zone like a meteor storm.’
‘I was. One. Of them.’
Lamiad nods.
‘A whole ship came down over there,’ he says. ‘And that way, a section of orbital platform that struck like a rogue atomic. The Holophusikon took direct hits. There was no protection. I was hurt. Most others present were killed by the collision trauma, the shock concussion, and the subsequent fire.’
‘That’s Numinus City,’ he says, pointing in another direction.
Telemechrus scans another vast heat-source. He compares the stored grid positions of the city and the Holophusikon, and calculates his position relative to them, to within two hundred metres.
‘There is. No. Data,’ says Telemechrus. ‘There is. No. Central. Command.’
‘There is not.’
‘Have you. Determined. A theoretical. Lord?’
‘I am trying to assemble whatever strengths I can salvage,’ says Lamiad. ‘Then I intend to take the war back against the traitors who did this.’
‘What is. The strength. of your. Force. So far. Lord?’
‘It’s you, and it’s me, Telemechrus.’
‘Why?’
‘Why what?’ asks Lamiad.
‘Why did. Our brothers. Turn. On. Us?’
‘I have no idea, friend. I am almost afraid to know the answer. In that explanation, I fear, our future will burn again. Brother against brother. Legion versus Legion. A civil war, Telemechrus. It is the one blight the Imperium never even considered.’