‘The Headstone! They are directing a plan against it? Against Magos Tey?’
‘Against the dignitary you are bringing to examine the graveyard, sir, and this is bigger than we thought they were capable of and they’re in the Kings now and we don’t know what they’re going to do in there.’ Daprokk’s hands and the dendrite arching over his head were all making small, involuntary movements. The darker-robed adept at the top of the stairs stood unmoving. It – he? – had been joined by another figure, stocky and thick-legged with a strange metal hump standing up behind its head. Neither of them spoke a word. ‘Can you guarantee that the Headstone is out of range of any weapon they might bring back online? Can you guarantee that this transmission is so harmless that we can just let them make it? We don’t have the power or the skill to do this from the carrier, but you have these gantry antennae and a transmechanic.’ Sarell took a deep breath and made a deeper bow. ‘Enginseer, please. Will you consider what I have told you?’
The violet lights under the cowl seemed to stare at her for an age.
The end didn’t come quite as Kovind Shek expected.
He had been alone by the time he reached the Treading King. The bulk of his men had spent themselves in staggered ambushes to slow down their pursuers, and the rest had holed up in a row of wrecked Blight-Balls and begun a ferocious firefight with a platoon of Mechanicus guards coming from the Graveyard Shrine to try and intercept them. Under cover of their last two hand-bombs, Kovind had swung up through the scaffolding around the King’s rear legs, slipped in through a plasma breach and begun working his way up through the compartment levels by touch and memory.
The Treading King had been stormed, not abandoned or killed with firepower, and every hatch had been blasted open. There was no way for him to secure the route behind him and so, after he’d ridden out the heady rush of seeing the three colours of the transmission loop, Kovind had made ready to double back and fight. He had only allowed himself a short glance out of the command window at the night’s final prize, and had fought back the urge to weep a little: Asphodel’s greatest creation, the mighty Inheritor King, its magnificent train of spires and steeples surrounded by such junk and pawed over by cog-lickers and eagle-lickers and...
But he had remembered his dignity. He was a man of rank, one of the few with a bloodline that had allowed him to take part of his world’s name as a badge. He could not have asked for a death more fitting to that rank, not if he really stopped to think about what he was doing. He reloaded his autopistol and felt the weight of the hand-bombs in his satchel.
The chatter sped up again, acquired a squeal and then a bass note. Kovind had coded some of it himself, had Psinter refine and recompile it, had drawn on mysteries he had had etched directly into deep memory and could barely recall consciously. Now in the brains of the Kings it was feeding into a matrix that Asphodel himself had laid down. What concepts, what layers of logic and unlogic, might that mind have wielded? Kovind glanced back at the transmission deck. The three colours were still there, the three Kings’ brains all parallel-processing the code as it grew. The telltales on the power-block he had connected to the codecasters were still green, It could run for an hour yet. Could he hold off any Imperial invaders that long? He could try.
And then the subtle song of the chatter matrix was defaced. An ugly hoot of interference blared out of the codecaster lectern, scraping through Kovind’s transmission. He stood there for a moment, pistol dangling in his hand, mouth open, as the lights on the great key flickered, darkened for a moment and came up again, struggling to find their old rhythm. Now in among the chatter was a reedy discord, weaving around a crackling syncopation that Kovind knew had no place in his code. They were being jammed.
In a bound he was back at the console, but what could he do? How could they have prepared for a countersignal? Could they? Kovind growled aloud and looped a fist around to strike himself in the mouth. Focus. Act your rank. Self-recrimination was for lessers.
What could they do? Recoding on the fly was out of the question. Modify the frequency? How could he get a signal to Psinter or Jopell, if they were even still alive? Override the code for a moment? Try to work an instruction into it? Kovind was unaware that he was making panicked little moans under his breath as he scanned the console, looking for the right controls.
This ended with glorious battle in the halls of the Treading King. This ended with his little work entering the greater work and the Hammerstone Kings walking again. It didn’t end like this, not with the squalid little redcloaks and their filthy–
The hellgun shot cratered the top of Kovind Shek’s spine and the back of his head, and the explosive vaporisation snapped him forward at the waist. His face bounced off the controls and his corpse slid slowly down the lectern. By the time it had sunk onto its knees the Guard were in the command bridge and a boot kicked Kovind’s body aside. A moment later the chatter squealed to a stop as Haffith tore the great key out of the codecaster and broke it in half under his heel.
‘Has Transmechanic Ajji managed to confirm what the signal was?’
‘No, magos,’ Daprokk answered. The breeze plucked at his red cowl. The two of them were standing beneath the Machina Opus atop the shrine ziggurat, using vocal conversation that the wind would render hard for vox-thieves to overhear. ‘We... selected a course of action that incidentally matched that which the other Adeptus had... happened to...’
‘You took their advice, enginseer. No need to pretend you didn’t. I was watching you, remember? I’m not holding it against you.’ Daprokk’s hands twitched for a moment.
‘Without knowing what the signal was,’ his interlocutor went on, ‘we’ve no way of knowing whether we managed to defeat its purpose or not. Speaking as part of a priesthood that takes gaps in knowledge as an affront, still this is a particular concern.’
‘The Sister seemed to believe that it was an attack that was to use the three most functional Hammerstone Kings as weapons against the Ramosh Incalculate,’ Daprokk ventured. ‘An attack on you, even, sir. The initial purpose of the delegation was to meet you, but at the time they set off they apparently believed you were still on board the Headstone.’
‘Even they’re using that nickname now, then?’ Daprokk didn’t know how to answer that. ‘No matter. I don’t believe this is any reason to alter my plans, Enginseer Daprokk. Except in one respect. I think it is time to speed them up. When the transmechanic has completed her current analytical cycle ask her to create an encrypted tightlink to Shipmaster Tobin, please.’
Daprokk made the sign of the cog, canted a formal, if slightly rushed, salutation, and hurried to the lifthead, noetic speech already radiating out from his personal links and feeding into the shrine’s manifold. The other magos, in his dusty robe that was almost as much russet as red, watched him go. The successful jamming of the transmission had not eased his mind any.
He walked around the sculpture, adjusting his vision for the floodlights, and stared up at the King the insurgents hadn’t managed to breach. The Inheritor King’s colossal raked prow and spire-bridge loomed over the shrine in the dark.
‘Not the reception I’d wanted,’ murmured Magos-Parralact Galhoulin Tey. ‘I wonder what will happen next?’
Deep night in the graveyard. Blackness and silence in the bridge of the Inheritor King. The breeze-blown dust against the windows could not be heard in here, and the combat shutters were drawn, sealing the little wedge-shaped chamber off from the gentle Asheki moonlight. The great throne where Asphodel had sat, the coding pit where he had crafted his chattercodes, the pulpits from which his lieutenants had commanded this King and passed his orders out to his armies, all now empty and lost in the dark.