It would find the horde. It would join the war. It would hide among its lessers, and it would survive.
Twelve
Sacristan Apex / Starved of ammunition / Renewal
Weeks into the realignment process, Jaya was still struggling. She slid the last five metres down the ladder, tearing off her helmet and breathing in the crisp, hot metal tang of the hangar bay. Torolec, her Sacristan Apex, was waiting for her.
‘It’s the pressure valves in the left knee’s pneumatics,’ she said to the robed figure. ‘It’s affecting the turning circle.’
Torolec was tall and slender beneath his hooded robe, proud to wear the black and laurel-green and rearing pegasus of House Vyridion. He was beribboned at all times by devotional parchments, often fluttering in the heat wash of engine exhaust as he attended to his sacred work. As Sacristan Apex he was the house’s foremost machine-seer, and at three hundred years of age, he had known and served Jaya her entire life. He’d refused to return to Highrock with the rest of the fleet, and Jaya had respected the wishes of her family’s oldest retainer. Given the circumstances and how events had played out, she was doubly grateful for his presence.
‘I have re-attuned them twice now,’ the old man replied. Around his words, the breath of the ventilation systems roared on. Air filtration gargoyles breathed in the forge scent and exhaled recycled air, dragon-keen, doing little to diminish the sweltering heat. ‘And I say again, baroness – the flaw is with the Merging. You are blaming consecrated metal and obedient mechanisms when all evidence points to a disconnect between scion and Knight.’
Two servitors walked forwards to remove her breastplate and pauldrons, but Jaya warned them back. ‘I spent all of last night in meditative reflection,’ she argued. ‘I feel no such disconnect.’
Torolec moved away, heading towards the idle Knight, giving Jaya little choice but to follow. The sacristan held up two bionic hands extending from the same elbow, placing twin palms on the unpainted Knight’s armoured toe-plating.
‘You resist its noble spirit. It resists yours. Two stubborn souls locked in discord.’
Jaya pursed her lips. Only Torolec would be allowed to speak to her so. ‘My spirit is at ease,’ she lied.
‘Then I shan’t argue with you, baroness.’ Torolec looked up at the towering war machine in all its bleak glory. Where proud and bright house colours should show, only bare and scratched metal met the eye. Where war banners should hang, depicting the Knight’s own deeds and the honourable service of its scion pilot, there was nothing at all. Soon they would march to war in these cast-offs and jury-rigged exiles from still-living houses, and do battle for the first time without Vyridion’s pennants waving in the wind.
‘I find you in a mood of rare charity if you are unwilling to argue,’ said Jaya.
Torolec’s amusement showed on his wizened features, sparkling in his eyes. ‘You should reboard, baroness. Perhaps the next exercise will work towards merging you with your new armour. We are scheduled for weapons trials.’
‘I have dry-fired that decrepit thing’s guns a hundred times.’
‘Indeed! Today, however, you are to be loaded for live fire.’
Jaya stared at him. They had been waiting over a week for the anticipated shipment from House Mortan. ‘We have ammunition?’
‘At long last, being ferried to us as we speak.’ He paused, his amusement darkening. ‘You will of course be expected to make an appropriate display of gratitude to House Krast for the sharing of sacred resources from their forges.’
‘Krast?’ Jaya’s tone rang with disbelief. ‘Those vainglorious…’
‘Ah, ah,’ Torolec chided. ‘Those generous and noble souls, you were about to say?’
‘…but of course. What of their earlier refusal?’
‘The Sigillite is said to have leaned upon them in this matter.’
Jaya watched as another gunmetal grey and badly dented Knight stalked past, shaking the hangar ground with its tread. The machine was in dire need of cleansing and re-oiling; the whining of protesting iron was torture on the ears.
Torolec saw her wince. ‘Perhaps you might easier win the suit’s regard if you stopped referring to it as “that decrepit thing”. The others of our court seem to be adapting well.’
Jaya had the grace to accept the rebuke. ‘Most are, yes.’
‘Your resentment is understandable, baroness. But I know you do not need me to caution you on the vice of ingratitude.’
Again, she nodded. At least they had suits. Even these unmarked and untended exiles were a treasure any Knight House would consider a fortune in their own right. But to have fallen so far, so fast, to be relying on the scrapyard charity of indignant and indifferent houses…
Jaya took a breath. ‘Summon me when the ammunition shipment arrives.’
Torolec said nothing. He merely bowed.
The throne rocked beneath her, its suspensors worn down through a gestalt of time, damage and poor maintenance. Jaya’s spinal plate locked into a groove along the chair’s backrest, the connection triggering a flare in the cockpit’s red lights and kindling three more monitors. Her weighted boots crunched into their stirrup-locks. Her gloved hands gripped the guidance levers that rose up from the throne’s armrests.
Torolec had ascended the gantry ladder after his mistress, and now crouched his emaciated form at the airlock door above her. He reached in with several bionic hands, locking buckles and inserting penetrative interface cables into the baroness’ helm. But the sacristan didn’t linger beyond his murmured blessings. He bade her well and sealed her in with a ringing, echoing clang.
Jaya watched the hangar through her vision feeds, waiting for the gantries to be pulled away. Three Errants, unmarked and unbannered, were marching back to their boarding cradles for maintenance and reblessing, and far more importantly, for rearming. One of them turned to her as it passed with its ground-shaking tread, its hunched shoulders and faceplate grinding down in approximation of a brief half-bow. Jaya couldn’t return the gesture with her boarding gantries still locked in, but she reached for the vox-plate to send an acknowledgement pulse back to the pilot.
She didn’t know who it was. Gone forever were the days of knowing each scion by the heraldry their Knights wore and the banners they bore. Even the painted artistry of kill-markings was absent.
Shame burned fresh. House Vyridion and Highrock itself had died under her guardianship. And, with dark hilarity, her shame couldn’t even be recorded in the familial archives, for they were ash along with the world that had been Vyridion’s home for thousands of generations.
I am becoming maudlin, Jaya thought with a sigh. Less than a month ago I was expecting execution.
Torolec was right. Ingratitude was an impious vice.
The cockpit’s bleak redness flickered once, twice, then the light around her was suddenly pale yellow instead of oppressive scarlet.
‘Gantry cradle clear,’ came Torolec’s voice across the vox.
Jaya clenched the control levers and eased them forwards. The cockpit tilted forwards in sympathy, leaning with the motion. Jaya’s throne stabilisers lagged a few seconds behind, but the heavy tilting and lurching as the Knight began its stride was nothing more than a vague irritation to a scion who had lived her life in the saddle.
And yet, everything was different. The machine didn’t walk as her baronial Lancer had walked. Its piston-tendons compressed and extended with different air-hisses and at different speeds. Its gait rattled and clanged and clanked in an entirely different chorus of sound. The throne reacted differently to her weight and movements. The Knight’s posture and rhythm required different compensational adjustment when moving at speed. The visual monitors were in different places, and slaved to feeds and target locks and aura-scryers that operated on momentary circuit-lags, or detuned if exerted a certain way. The cockpit even smelt different; rather than the sacred incense of Highrock’s iluva herbs, no amount of Torolec’s consecrations could rid the cockpit of that scorched blood and burned-metal scent lingering beneath the smell of old corrosion. Every one of Vyridion’s new Knights had been acquired from wreckships and unused war spoil from local, loyal houses, and each one of them smelt exactly as one would expect a machine from such a fate to smell.