En route he passed Mechanicum Unifier priests and their battle-servitor defenders in droves, returning to Calastar. The mist swirled with the passage of bulk conveyors and tracked lab-platforms, yet it never dissipated.
Even the vastest tunnels, their sides invisible to visual or echolocating perception, had a clinging oppressiveness that sat ill within the Protector’s mechanical guts. As honoured as he was to have been activated and deployed within the labyrinth of the Great Work, he would not miss the eerily human pressures it placed upon his thoughts. Discomforts he’d believed himself long past pulled at his perceptions every time he left the web’s Mechanicum-engineered sections.
Troubling reports crackled across the vox of warden servitors in other outward tunnels committing sacred prayers of violence and failing to destroy their target. Something – a single entity – was testing their defences, then drawing back each time. Tunnels that had long since been repaired and which had seen no battles in years were reporting the expenditure of horrendous amounts of ammunition. Many then ceased reporting at all. Other Protectors were being released to cover the webwide retreat, but Alpha-Rho-25 was the first, already close to his destination by the time the Godspire unleashed more of his kindred.
With his back-jointed legs propelling him into a ragged sprint capable of outrunning a Triaros conveyor, he reached the outward tunnel barricade swiftly after setting out from the Godspire. A series of Mechanicum-constructed barriers and gunnery platforms faced away into the tunnel’s mist, the empty cannons tracking on unoiled mechanics, panning left and right over a vista of eldar rubble. Perhaps it had once been a smaller outpost far from Calastar, in the age of eldar supremacy. There was no way of knowing. There would never be a way.
He found AL-141-0-CVI-55-(0023) first, which was fitting. She had been the lead servitor of the boundary team. Her torso lay across a low broken wall of eldar architecture – wraithbone, they called the material, with their species’ pathetic sense of melodrama – with her skull cracked open and leaking into the ground mist. The mist possessed some kind of preservative properties for the destruction had occurred hours ago, yet the cranial residue was still wet. Another reality deviation that wasn’t the Protector’s duty or place to analyse and codify.
Alpha-Rho-25 crouched by the remains, the claws in place of his feet finding easy purchase on the rubble and his piston-legs hissing as he lowered himself. His cloaked robe rippled briefly in a sourceless breeze. Another anomaly. He ignored it, drumming his taloned metal fingers on his sphere-jointed knees as he mused.
The nearby passageway leading deeper into the webway was ringed with what seemed to be eldar bone plating and their ridiculous gemstone circuitry. Alpha-Rho-25 had seen the Mechanicum’s analyses describing the extent of eldar colonisation within the web. The original creators of this realm had constructed the webway from psychically resistant materials that defied corporeal understanding, but evidence of eldar habitation and restructuring was evident throughout the web. The sprawling necropolis of Calastar was only one of its kind, albeit the largest yet found, and eldar ruins lay throughout many dozens of outward tunnels.
The bodies of the other battle-servitors were in similar states, as were the Thallaxi robots several dozen metres to the north. Intriguingly their lightning guns’ chainblade attachments, fallen from slack hands into the mist, still sniggered in idle activation.
The servitors were dismembered but undefiled by further punishment. The Thallaxi’s body-shells were broken, their cranial domes shattered, and the organic cognitive slurry within now ran out, congealing greasily in the golden fog.
The daemon sensed movement. Motion prickled at its perception, jabs knifing against the searing muck of its thoughts. It abandoned its idle prowl, turning away from its explorations through the outward tunnels, drawn back to the site of its first hunt in this cold realm. It had to feed. Already its flesh steamed with the slow smoke of threatened dissolution. Stalking the infinite tunnels was, thus far, achieving little. Boundary servitors were chemical-blooded and grey of soul – their deaths offered scarce sustenance, yet they flooded the tunnels in numbers beyond the creature’s crude reckoning.
The soul it sensed now was brighter than those it had devoured before. The light of this new spirit gleamed through air and stone alike, a beacon amidst oily black vision. The pain of starvation lent conviction to the creature’s movements. It moved faster and faster, wraithing through the tunnels, between the ruins that populated them.
With no one else nearby – no one capable of intelligent conversation, at least – Alpha-Rho-25 allowed his annoyance to show across his angular and not particularly attractive features. In public, he looked like a man always on the edge of scowling. In private, he crossed over that edge and consistently indulged.
Servo-skulls drifted around him, scanning, always scanning. Their anti-gravitic gliding dispersed some of the higher tendrils of mist in their wake. Alpha-Rho-25 paid scant heed to the drones’ empty readings scrolling in Martian hieroglyphs across his vambrace monitor. If the osseous probes found what had done this, well, then he’d pay attention.
Instinctively, the prehensile mechadendrite attached to his spine slipped free from the bottom of his robes. The tail-whip gleamed with an armoured dataspike at its tip, more than capable of punching through a daemon’s ectoplasmic corpus. Alpha-Rho-25 let the coccyx-bonded tail rise up, scorpion-like, over his left shoulder.
Five years, he thought, stalking away from the Thallaxi and back to the slain servitors. Five years since he strode across the red dunes of Sacred Mars. Five years since he filled his respiratory tract with the metal-tasting holiness of Martian air.
And soon the conflict would be over, one way or another. All the violence and loss of life and materiel to reach beyond the Mechanicum’s sections of the webway, at last establishing a fortress at Calastar – meaningless. Each crusade vanguard that pushed out from Calastar to fight through the outward tunnels – meaningless. Tribune Kadai Vilaccan had led the most recent foray, and all calculations had signified a crushing victory. Yet not every qualifying factor had been available to insert into those equations. How could they have known what was streaming towards them through the outward tunnels?
Triumph had been torn from their grasp by sheer weight of numbers.
Severe casualties had been expected given the nature of their foes in this fascinating realm, but Alpha-Rho-25 had high enough clearance to know the truth. Their losses were far beyond the point of sustainability. The last five years had practically bled the Mechanicum’s Unifiers and their defenders dry, while the Ten Thousand could – at best – call upon perhaps a thousand remaining warriors. The Silent Sisterhood kept their numbers a mystery to all outside their order, but it was irrelevant – they had always been the rarest of breeds. They, like the Legio Custodes, like the Unifiers themselves, were a precision blade. Not a bludgeon.
Tribune Endymion had sent ambassadors to the surface but Alpha-Rho-25 was a pragmatic being. Reinforcements from outside the Imperial Dungeon, if they were even acquired, would be from weaker souls far less trustworthy than the vanguard’s current elite.