Dorn’s jaw tightened. ‘Listen to yourself, Diocletian. Hear the words you are speaking and the course you advocate.’
Necessity overcomes morality, Kaeria’s hands signed in the air before her breastplate. Never without regret. Never without shame. Yet even immoral victory must outweigh moral defeat. The victor will have a chance to atone if conscience demands. The vanquished lose any such opportunity.
‘You quote my own brother at me?’ Dorn narrowed his gaze. ‘Roboute is not here, Oblivion Knight. Would that he were. In his absence, I am Lord Commander of the Imperium.’
Diocletian resisted a flare of temper at the performance unfolding before his eyes. ‘This is base hypocrisy, Lord Dorn. How often have your Imperial Fists prided themselves on enduring conflicts that proved to be flesh-grinding stalemates to other forces? Now you object to the execution of… chaff… to keep the Emperor’s greatest secret. How is this even worth discussing?’
Dorn’s armoured gauntlet crashed onto the central table, causing the hololithic image of the Sol System to jump and flicker. ‘We are speaking of more than my own sons. Their lives are coin I may spend as I see fit, but you have been underground for five long, long years, and the Ten Thousand isn’t the only force to have bled itself dry. This isn’t the Great Crusade, Custodian. You cannot annihilate loyal souls on a whim. The meaning of “necessity” has changed now that we draw near to the final days of this war, Diocletian.’
The words echoed in the air between the gathered hierarchs, as solemn as any confession of guilt.
We will not argue this matter, Kaeria signed, though even she seemed hesitant now.
‘We will gather the army required,’ said Diocletian. ‘With the Sigillite’s aid, if he sees fit to grant it. And I will bring your reservations to the Emperor when circumstance allows.’
‘That is all I ask,’ Dorn acquiesced with grim consent.
Trimejia closed her left hand, summoning the servo-skulls to drift together and dock with the ports on her hunched spine. Malcador made no reply at all. Diocletian wondered how much of this the Sigillite had already known.
‘If that is all,’ said Malcador, ‘I believe we are finished here.’
Trimejia vocalised a spurt of irritated code.
‘Is that an objection, archpriestess?’
The docked servo-skulls thrummed, a chorus of skinless faces desperate to speak. ‘Mars,’ the three probes voiced at once. ‘The Mechanicum beseeches the Omnissiah for permission to retake Sacred Mars.’
Dorn stiffened. ‘Not here,’ he said, curt and clear. ‘Not now.’
‘The Fabricator General is aware of your refusal, Praetorian. He bade me take my request directly to those waging war at the Omnissiah’s side.’
She leaned closer to Kaeria and Diocletian, spindly and inhuman, so frail for one who commanded such authority. ‘Mars must be retaken.’
Malcador’s staff thudded upon the floor. ‘Mars will be reconquered when we have the resources to do so.’
Diocletian and Kaeria remained silent throughout the exchange. They shared a glance, hardly blind to the tension. Malcador’s gesture was a plain request for them to leave.
‘This meeting is concluded,’ said the Regent of Terra. ‘You have our gratitude, Sister, Custodian.’
Before any of the hierarchs could argue otherwise, Diocletian and Kaeria strode from the room. There was a great deal yet to do before they could return to the Dungeon.
Four
Anomalies / Bodies in the mist / End of Empires
Alpha-Rho-25 didn’t consider himself burdened by any particular degree of sentiment. Even so, there was a pang of loss as he came across the dead servitors. Whoever had constructed them had done so over many weeks, with painstaking care and expertise, to serve in the Omnissiah’s name. And now they were reduced to… this.
Such a waste.
As one of the Mechanicum Protectors assigned to the Unifiers, his role was simple. He was to stalk through the webway, overseeing the Mechanicum’s restoration work and shoring up their defences in the outward tunnels – that region known by the vanguard as Magnus’ Folly. It fell to him and those like him to defend the outskirts of the Impossible City and guard the Unifiers working in the tunnels leading deeper into the web. Now it fell to him to watch over the retreat.
A decision that had been too long in coming, by the Protector’s analytic perceptions. Casualties had risen starkly in recent months. Too few defenders stretched too thin through far too many tunnels. Falling back to the defensible bastion offered by the Impossible City was the logical course of action.
Alpha-Rho-25 had taken part in one thousand, six hundred and eighty-three individual skirmishes since being brought into the Imperial Dungeon five years before. His recordings of individual foes destroyed were accessible to the archpriests who coded his orders, but he didn’t like to review them himself or tally the totals. That kind of behaviour seemed close to self-satisfaction – what a full-blood human might call smugness – and therein lay danger. To be satisfied with oneself was to consider oneself perfect, to abandon all hope of refinement and improvement. A tragic delusion indeed. Perfection did not exist outside the Omnissiah Himself.
No, one must always evolve. To consider the stasis of satisfaction was nothing more than a vaguely amusing heresy.
Nor did Alpha-Rho-25 find himself burdened with the weight of superstition. These creatures he had fought now for five years were hardly ‘daemons’ in the terms referred to in human mythology. They were entities of incorporeal origin, breaching the barrier between the unmapped tides of the aether and the material universe. Aliens, then. A xenos breed from the warp. It was quantifiably true.
If pressed to be truthful on the matter, he found the relentlessly warlike entities no more or less disgusting and unnatural than the perfidious eldar, in whose ruins the Imperial Vanguard had made their fortress. All alien breeds suffered from the unholy imperfections of their forms. That was the beginning and end of the matter.
Still…
Still.
These ‘daemons’ were violent beyond any other species Alpha-Rho-25 had encountered. And they took a great deal of effort to extinguish. The fact they bled was no guarantee they would die. Many of them refused to even bleed at all. That was quite galling.
He hunted alone in the dayless and nightless flow of time that shrouded the Impossible City. His hunting grounds on this operation were far from the Godspire, a full forty kilometres away, where the eldar ruins grew ever more decayed. Contact had been lost with the boundary servitors guarding one of the many thousands of capillary tunnels leading deeper into the webway, which was by no means unusual.
However, questions remained. These boundary servitors had been guarding a far-flung passageway with significant defence batteries and gun emplacements. It shouldn’t have fallen at all, let alone so swiftly and with so little warning. Subsequent contact had been lost with the reinforcement servitors, their handler and then again with the three squads of Thallax war machines sent forwards from the tunnel’s second barricade to ascertain the gravity of the situation. All of this was less than typical.
And so, while the rest of the Imperial vanguard withdrew and abandoned the outward tunnels, Alpha-Rho-25 went hunting back through them.
He loped onwards, lens-eye scanning, panning. The sloping walls of this tunnel were glossy white, something that seemed a cousin to clean marble and polished enamel, yet was entirely unrelated to either.
Like walking through the marrow of something’s bones, thought the Protector, finding the notion disturbingly organic. Who had they been, those that ruled here before the interloping eldar colonists had even dreamed of setting down foundations? Had the original creators of this realm used the bodies of their immense, fallen god-foes as material for its construction? Nothing would surprise Alpha-Rho-25 about those long-dead entities’ intentions or methods. He had seen too much in the last five years to cling to surety about anything here.