Her second step shook the chamber, the same as the first. As did the third. As did the fourth.
As the weeks passed after the Archimandrite’s rebirth, Diocletian found himself alone more often than not. Kaeria was gone. He knew not where, only that she was dealing with the secret intricacies of her silent order elsewhere in the Palace. He had little to say to Baroness D’Arcus and her knightly kindred, nor did he find much worth in the stoic computations of the Mechanicum’s various overseers.
Two souls consistently sought out his company: the pleading figure of Arkhan Land, and the serenely lost presence of Dominion Zephon. Now that the Archimandrite Venture had succeeded, Diocletian had no further use for the former. He would likely allow the technoarchaeologist to join the expedition back to the Impossible City, even if only on the rare chance the explorator’s knowledge would prove useful. And as for the Blood Angel, the so-called Bringer of Sorrow would serve well enough merely by accompanying them into the webway when the time came.
It was the delay that wore at the Custodian’s patience. The Mechanicum’s requisitioned supplies were already proceeding through in a convey stream, thousands of battle-servitors, tracked conveyors, robots and even the rare sicarii funnelled through to their fates within the Great Work. The first shipments would already have reached Ra by now, reinforcing the Impossible City.
And yet Diocletian waited. Impatient, but without any show of temper. House Vyridion drew ever closer to war readiness; the Archimandrite was adjusting to its new form and its enhanced cognition. Things were proceeding as expected, even if not with a swiftness Diocletian would have preferred.
His place was to oversee every item of requisition, and he wouldn’t return to Calastar without doing so. He felt no frustration in doing his duty, only the vague concern that he could better be serving the Emperor elsewhere. Next to Ra on the walls of Calastar, perhaps, or slowing the foe in the outer tunnels, making them pay for each metre of misted ground they took. Something proactive. Something where he felt as though he were contributing to the defence of his master’s vision.
The one thing he was not, however, was bored. He spent much of his time isolated within the Tower of Hegemon, the command core of the Legio Custodes’ efforts in the Emperor’s defence. Here Diocletian watched the continual streams of population data, materiel transport, and the aerial and orbital traffic entering and exiting the Solar System, maintained by bank upon bank of cogitators and life-bonded savant-serfs in robes of Imperial scarlet. These data-artisans – each one tattooed with the aquila – dwelled within the Watchroom, where only those lifesworn to the Emperor were permitted. Rather than the dregs enslaved and augmented by the Machine Cult of Mars, none of the Ten Thousand’s serfs were cyborged to their stations or bound to live and die in their life support cradles. These men and women had sworn themselves to the All-Seeing Eye of the Emperor’s Custodians; they wore jewellery of sculpted bone made from the bodies of their mothers and fathers who served before them, and of the grandparents before them. In time their mortal remains would be harvested and ritual trinkets of their own bones gifted to their specifically bred children. To serve the Custodian Guard wasn’t merely a life sentence, it was an eternal, generational one.
Much of the Watchroom’s information centred on the Palace itself, with Unified Biometric Verification feeds forming a living web of several million souls entering and exiting the Palace’s myriad districts.
Diocletian watched this calculation of life taking place. Perhaps another soul might have seen something harmonic or musical in the display. Even among the Ten Thousand, such vigils usually took note of the hundreds of potential infiltration threats that might somehow slip past even the Imperial Fists. Yet Diocletian saw something unexpected in the patternless mess.
He saw diminishing supplies even as Terra itself was broken down for materials, even as the Himalazia Mountains themselves were ground down for rock and ore. He saw fewer and fewer convoy fleets reaching the Solar System as the war raged on. He saw Terra strangled beneath the weight of off-world refugees, devouring their way through ever-diminishing resources. He saw fewer and fewer successful attempts to land reinforcements on Mars or bring materiel back through the Imperial blockade. He saw all of this written as plainly as the eight hundred and seventy-one words of his full name, laser-etched upon the inside of his breastplate, as familiar to him as the weight of the spear in his hands.
Defeat. He was looking at defeat. The rebels were winning the war. Though their conquests across the galaxy were far from absolute, Horus didn’t need wholesale victory among the stars; the Warmaster needed only to amass enough support on the way to Terra and deny Imperial reinforcement reaching the Solar System. And, overwhelmingly, these ugly calculations painted a portrait of the Warmaster doing just that.
Diocletian spent several days immersing himself in the reports and cogitations, seeking a wider view of the escalating conflict. It was in studying the movements of the rarest of all Imperial resources – the Ten Thousand and the Silent Sisterhood not currently deployed in the webway – that he discovered something tentative in the millions of cogitations. Something in the pattern was flawed, and it gnawed at Diocletian. Silent sections of code revealed shadows in the streaming figures. Equations were buried in the cogitations that returned half-truths as answers.
Data deletions? he first wondered. But no, no. These weren’t holes in the pattern, merely patches of occlusion. Shrouded, not deleted. Hidden, not forbidden.
Diocletian followed the patterns, watching them unfurl with a savant’s understanding of mathematic and algebraic principles. At first it seemed the serfs were themselves ignorant of the patterns, but soon enough he realised this wasn’t so: they were clearly aware, they were simply not flagging the curious elements for archival examination.
He saw fleets of ships in the numbers. We have an entire fleet out there, scattered across three segmentums. Sailing the stars, avoiding the war.
And more than that. Displacement calculations and void logistical data suggested these ships would descend on loyal worlds in the days and weeks before Horus’ forces committed to an invasion, yet they extracted nothing of any military significance, they landed no reinforcements and they evacuated none of the established regent-governments put in place by the Great Crusade.
What, then, are they doing?
None of the vessels were accounted for in the Great Crusade’s tallies, each one unattached to any expeditionary fleets. Nor were their dealings translated off-world, with no word transmitted by common routes, nothing from the divisions of the Astra Telepathica, and–
There.
Word had come in the form of a cursory transmission by a modest rogue trader fleet returning from the spiral arm of the Halo Stars. Her family’s armada had been negotiating for orbital resupply above the capital city of some nameless backwater still going by its allocated colonial code, when one of these logistically occluded vessels showed itself. Despite its obvious Imperial allegiance, it had refused all communication, completed several planetary operations, and left orbit for the system’s Mandeville point without illuminating the rogue trader fleet as to its purpose.
The trader scion’s report concluded with a message from the planet itself, stating what little dealings its provincial quorum government had managed to have with the ships’ commander, including the vessel’s intent.
‘They came for our psychically attuned citizens.’