‘This is not your designated place of service. Please submit immediate summary report as to your last movements. Today and yesterday will suffice.’
‘I regret I cannot, master,’ Haast said humbly, secreting the lascutter in her sleeve.
‘Hmmm, your binharic projector is still non-functional?’
‘Yes, my master.’
Chume glided down the aisle, his long, serpentine fingers entwining with one another and disengaging repetitively. ‘Really, it is two months! This is most irregular. I will look into it myself. Tell me then verbally why you are here.’
‘I am awaiting a delivery of replacement parts for the master’s somnarium, steward,’ she said.
‘You will not find them here! You are very far from the correct store.’
‘I am lost, master,’ she said, feigning embarassment.
Chume was not deceived. His green glass augmetic eyes whirred as they focused on her face.
‘You are lying!’ he said. ‘This is modus unbecoming. You shall be reported and dealt with. You are in a high security area. This is an offence punishable by mind wipe. I am summoning the palace guard.’
‘If you must.’
Chume let out a shrill squeal as Haast cast off her cloak, revealing a supple, synskin-clad body underneath. She activated the lascutter and slashed it across Chume’s throat. His squeal became a gurgle, and he fell down, spraying artificial blood and lubricant.
An alarm sounded some way off.
‘Throne,’ said Haast. She turned to the cylinder and set to work.
Tybalt the Abolitiate dwelt in darkness. He dreamed no dreams. For him, there were periods of death with peaceful nothing inbetween.
The time for peace was over.
He came awake, activated by the last of his shouted trigger words. Warm liquid flushed around him, carrying methalon suspension fluid from his casket out of drains at the bottom. His body temperature rose quickly. He flexed his hand. The neurogauntlet’s five claws ticked on glass. He reached for his thigh where his executioner pistol was holstered and drew it.
His casket was at an angle. Light from its regulating machinery bathed his skull-masked face, supplementing the weak lumen-glow admitted by a gash in a metal surface where a triangle of plasteel had been peeled back. His casket was in a cylinder. He heard shouting, smelled blood, sensed the deadly prickle of radium ammunition.
Under his death’s head rictus, Tybalt grinned.
Insanity was the logical end result of a life like Tybalt’s, frenetic violence followed by enforced suspension. A normal man would not have survived long, but Tybalt was far from normal. It was not that his brain had been altered, or his body packed with implanted technology; what suited him to his role was not what had been done to him, but what he was. When Tybalt was born the sense of empathy human felt for fellow human was missing. Tybalt cared only for the suffering of others, not their tears or their stories. No smile could move him, only terror.
Tybalt had been born to kill. It was a trait the Assassinorum was only too glad to exploit.
Roaring like an animal, he drew back his gauntlet and thrust it forwards. The distance his fist travelled was minimal; the glass shattered anyway, destroyed by a combination of enhanced strength and carefully inculcated skill. Ripping and rending, he sliced the frame of his casket away, leaving its machines to die smoking. Shearing through the metal of the empty methalon cylinder, Tybalt climbed howling into the fray.
His emergence brought a moment of silence. A clade of elite skitarii gathered at each end of an aisle lined by cylinders. Haast was crammed in between two of the storage units. Bodies of cybernetic warriors that had strayed too close lay broken on either approach.
The targeting unit on Tybalt’s backpack rose up, its glassy eye taking in a 270-degree view of his surroundings and swivelling about to complete the picture. A miniature cogitator in the backpack calculated all attack vectors, ranking the opposing Martians in order of threat. Targeting reticules danced all over the faceplate screen of his skull helm. Combat stimulants pumped into his system in massive quantities, elevating his metabolism and mind to superhuman heights. The battle took a microsecond to observe, evaluate and process.
‘Eversor!’ said one of the skitarii. Their rifles opened fire again. Tybalt ran. He was fast, the low gravity of Mars made him faster. An inhumanly high leap sent him crashing among the cyborgs.
With his neurogauntlet flashing, Tybalt set about his deadly work.
Alarms blared all over Kubik’s palace. The sounds of battle grew nearer. Heavily armoured myrmidons enclosed the Fabricator General in a phalanx of steel-caged flesh as they hurried him from his apartments to the main gate, but he was not safe.
Lesser priests came running behind, shouting out status reports with emotionless efficiency. There were a dozen Assassins, one said; there are only two, said another. More broadcast frequent updates to the situation on Terra: the other High Lords were dead, and now Vangorich was coming for him.
An explosion rumbled beneath their feet. In its wake, masonry clattered. Dust blew on a chemical wind.
Kubik screeched angry orders in swift binharic, sending his servants scurrying away. He had been assured the remaining Assassins would be caught. They were not, and now they were in his palace. Those responsible for this failure would be rendered down to components, if he survived.
‘Prime of primes, we have an armoured transport waiting at the main gate,’ said the myrmidon lord, Primus-Ultra Gangovich. They marched down the great staircase of the palace, the weapons mounts of the myrmidons swivelling as they tracked potential ambush sites. By the open gates, Mechanicus troops of all kinds looked out, weapons ready.
‘The Fabricator General comes!’ a seneschal shouted. ‘Hail the Omnissiah!’
More cybernetic Martians joined Kubik’s group, shielding their high priest with their own flesh and metal. They swept towards the door. On the plaza outside, a clade of Onager Dunecrawlers squatted around a legged, armoured transport, waiting to bear Kubik away.
‘Get the prime to the walker!’ ordered Gangovich. Heavily armed skitarii poured out of the palace. Kataphron battle servitors rolled into position around the plaza. The walker’s door dropped and Kubik was hustled towards it.
When he was ten metres from the door, the walker exploded. Shrapnel scythed out, felling the lead elements of Kubik’s bodyguard. Others crowded around him as a shot rang out, striking down a myrmidon who had placed herself in front of Kubik barely in time. Another shot cracked across the plaza, and another myrmidon died. Its head removed, its body mindlessly stamped away.
Kubik’s enhanced mind went into overdrive. The scene was a total loss. Skitarii primes shouted orders. Weapons of the most potent sort blazed in every direction, but the shots kept coming, each a kill. The shooter moved constantly. Every time their position was located, they had gone, and another shot sounded. Kubik’s bodyguard were being whittled away fast.
‘My lord, this way!’ someone said. Arms and mechanical appendages pulled at him, dragging him back into the palace. A shot hit an Onager with an audible plink. A moment later the construct exploded, slaughtering dozens of the Omnissiah’s faithful.
‘We will take you to Port Fabricata,’ said Gangovich. ‘We must get you out of the palace.’
‘No!’ Kubik managed. They were in the hall again, away from the doors. Outside, the shrieking discharge of high-energy weapons carried on unabated. Kubik extricated himself from the manipulators of his would-be saviours. ‘I will go to the chamber of the diagnostiad. I will be safe there. It is inviolable.’
‘As you wish, my lord,’ Gangovich said, and Kubik was again hustled away.
Kubik arrived in an antechamber to the diagnostiad by one-man bullet lift, whisked there through a depressurised transit tube. The palace was a long way away, and Kubik began to relax. Outside the diagnostiad, troops of all Mars’ many varieties mustered to protect the approach. Not only Kubik needed defence, but also the tech-priest choir who made up the core of the Martian world-mind.