The boy nodded, mute. Zephon replaced his helm. His voice emerged through the harsh, drawling rasp of his vox-grille. ‘Look after your sister, Darak.’
Darak moved to his aunt and sister, the latter weeping softly after the scare Diocletian had given her. Diocletian walked on with Zephon at his side. If the refugee herd’s stares had been an irritant before, they were practically boring through the Custodian’s armour now.
‘You are a creature of pointless sentiment,’ Diocletian voxed to his new companion.
He heard Zephon’s sigh as they walked onwards. ‘You said I disappointed you, Custodian. I assure you that the feeling is mutual. I had not imagined conversing with one of the Ten Thousand to be such an exercise in soulless discourse.’
Diocletian didn’t believe that deserved a reply.
He hoped Kaeria was having better luck with the Fabricator General.
Intruder.
That was Kane’s first thought. Not the intruder’s identity, nor how long it must have taken this defiler to reach his inner sanctum. He didn’t even consider the severity of any event that would drive an outsider to venture this far into the catacombs. The trespasser’s materialisation alone occupied his first, hostile thought. The audacity of her presence.
Intruder.
Intruders disrupted the music. They were flawed notes amidst the rhythm of crashing hammers and the breath of the forge flames. And this one was a disruption uglier than most.
Zagreus Kane let himself drop from the harmony at the heart of the foundry’s song of iron and fire. It was a detachment that took place on three levels – spiritually, physically, cognitively. First he exloaded his conscious focus from the noospheric dataclusters that allowed him to oversee the administration and management of several thousand menials at once. The abrupt loss of infinite information was a hole in his soul, as the Voice of the Great Work was sucked into sudden silence.
Then he physically removed himself from his command cradle, hauling himself along the overhanging steel beams using his four mechanical arms, and lowering himself into the waiting tank treads that comprised the lower half of his body. The lancing pressures of connection/reconnection stabbed dully through his nerve-numbed innards as the metal tendrils of union snaked their way into his augmented guts. The racked volkite and graviton weapons snaked their linkage feeds into his back, shoulders and spine. Each one of them powered up, folding close to his tracked thorax or aligning against his hunched back.
Lastly, as the armoured tank treads ground their way along the gantry, bringing him on his juddering way closer to the visitor – the intruder – he readied himself for the tedium and inevitable inaccuracies that came with dealing with those unenlightened souls forced to communicate through the impurity of uncanted language.
As the foundry hammered and roared and clanked and crashed around him, the overseer came to a shuddering halt before the slender figure of an Oblivion Knight. She wore the overlapping gold armour plating of her order over the traditional bronzed mail bodysuit, which was to be expected. Her hair was crested into a warrior’s topknot, which also ran according to his expectations; similarly, her portcullised rebreather mask was entirely in keeping with the equipment customarily attributed to the Sisters of Silence. She had marked her face with designs of ink – an Imperial aquila tattooed in red upon her forehead – as if her allegiance were in some way not entirely obvious.
What he found interesting, however, were the signs of wear and tear upon her wargear. The sensoria cluster in place of his left eye flickered a brief hololithic beam across the Oblivion Knight’s armour plating, recording signs of unfamiliar damage inflicted upon the various layers. Intriguing. Very much so.
She greeted him with a series of hand gestures. He was impressed that she included all twelve of his long-form titles. That was a formality few outside the Martian Mechanicum would know to offer.
Zagreus Kane looked down at her. His voice emerged from an augmitter in his neck, shaped from human teeth mounted in a framework of black steel and polished bronze. It gave him a snarling grin in the middle of his throat.
‘State the necessity of your intrusion.’
She made three brief gestures with a single hand.
‘I do not consider myself to have “changed” at all,’ said the Fabricator General of Sacred Mars. He adjusted his forge-blackened, ash-darkened red hood with one of his four hands. ‘Change implies the possibility of degeneration. My alterations are evolution, Oblivion Knight. Each one a step towards divinity. Now, I repeat, state the necessity of your intrusion.’
She told him her name without saying a word. Her identity was an irrelevancy, but one that Kane let pass. Still, frustration burned. Had they been linked to the noospheric data array, this exchange – and every single nuance within it – would already be over, rather than lurking at the very beginning of the pleasantries.
‘I am overseeing the disposition, deployment and armament of several million troops and several hundred fleets, Kaeria. In addition, Fabricator Locum Trimejia is transbonded to me in accordance with the New Precepts of Mars. I am aware of all that took place at the hierarchs’ council and the loss of Adnector Primus Mendel. Your expositional formality is a drain on my time.’
She replied in hand gestures, none of which were an apology. At last, they were cutting to the matter’s core. As her hands moved, Kane’s iron-sealed mouth – his true, human mouth – trickled oil-lubricated coolant saliva as he wheezed, briefly taking over from the auto-respiratory processes of his cyborged lungs. The gesture made the heavy graviton cannons wired into his spine cycle in a brazen sign of his speculation.
‘I understand,’ he said. ‘Supply me with the specifics.’
Kaeria offered a data-slate, which Kane took by deploying one of his many secondary multi-segmented abdominal servo-arms. Three thin fingers snatched it from the Oblivion Knight’s grip and immediately drew it into the folds of his robe, slotting it into a data-inload cavity between his ribs.
For the ghost of a second, information danced behind his eyes.
And for the first time in many months, Fabricator General Zagreus Kane hesitated. ‘This is a significant order of requisition,’ he stated. He made no move to return the data-slate in the wake of his understatement. In a single requisition demand, she was requesting as much battle-iron and war-flesh as the Mechanicum had supplied to the Great Work in the last two years alone.
Kaeria nodded, asking a question with her hands.
‘Yes,’ was the reply. ‘Ammunition is the easiest to provide, and it will be done. We can also harvest forge workers for the thralls and battle-servitors you require. A recall of Cybernetica cohorts will be issued at once from all unthreatened systems within Segmentum Solar, and a clarion call can be raised to attract Myrmidia cultists in nearby systems, in order to replace the significant drain you are proposing. But it is of immense import that you understand what you are requesting. This will severely and potentially gravely deplete the Mechanicum’s forces on Terra, as well as our involvement in the active spheres of conflict in the Solar War.’
Kaeria signed her understanding, resolute in her motions.
Kane paused, calculating, calculating…
‘The divine armours you request can also be provided, though not in the numbers you require. Those numbers simply do not exist on Terra. And they will be salvaged or otherwise remastered from war spoil, requiring reconsecration in the Omnissiah’s name. Even House Terryn has sent its divine armours into the stars to engage the Warmaster and the false Fabricator General.’