Sapien rode upon his shoulder, the irises of its eyes endlessly click-click-clicking as it recorded picts that appealed to its primitive brain. Frequently Land paused to make auspex scans and take readings – Sapien would leap from his shoulder during each stop, plunging through the mist, doing the Emperor alone knew what. Land regularly pried the beast’s cranium open to review the psyber-monkey’s pict-feed, but the images were of nothing but circuit-inlaid walls and floors, or the featureless spread of colour-bleaching mist.
Arkhan was entitled to travel at the head of the procession alongside the Archimandrite and the unwelcoming presences of Kaeria and Diocletian. More often he chose to travel alone, moving here and there throughout the convoy, sometimes even falling back far enough to walk alongside the rattling strides of Baroness Jaya and her marching Knights. They were an inspiring lot, in their own way.
A Vigilator clade of Protectors brought up the column’s rear, their claws thrumming with waspish, sonic lethality, curved talons clicking out of rhythm with their augmented tread. He knew better than to seek to engage them in conversation. On Sacred Mars they were known as the sicarii – a dune-stalking, inhuman transmogrification of lesser skitarii warriors – and few of them possessed enough personality to be considered companionable.
At no point did they make camp. The servitors required no rest and the convoy never ceased. Land himself was used to the discomfort of months-long expeditions into subterranean vaults, so stealing a few hours of sleep in the back of a Triaros conveyor or his own Raider tank was luxury enough. Sleep didn’t come easily, but it offered the only opportunities to forget what waited behind the curved walls.
The Mechanicum’s sections of the webway were much as he expected them to be, albeit with the added occlusion of the strange and sourceless mist. Tunnel after tunnel of sanctified metal, the walls lacerated by gleaming lines of precious circuitry. The wiring was complicated enough to be almost hieroglyphic in nature, covering every surface of the tunnels’ insides. Unerringly the procession marched forwards, never pausing even when the passages forked or branched, never journeying along a route that would be too confined for House Vyridion’s towering silhouettes. There were several of those.
‘Where do these passages lead?’ he’d voxed to Diocletian from his Raider’s command console.
‘Nowhere,’ was the inevitable reply.
The tunnels are unfinished, then. Or never rebuilt. Or construction was never started after the very first foundations. Curious.
Even so, there was a definite scale to the operation. Arkhan knew from the Archimandrite’s map that the Mechanicum-engineered sections were nothing more than tentative tendrils binding Terra to the true web. It justified the modesty of their efforts, including why he could perceive the ceilings of most tunnels through a haze of mist. Yet was it not said that the Legio Ignatum had committed Titans to the Great Work? How could they have walked their god-machines along these routes?
The answer came to him as soon the question occurred. The Great Workers must have brought any larger Titans piecemeal, their disassembled components shipped along these paths upon grav-convoy slabs to be reassembled deeper in the webway.
What delicious sacrilege. And what would be the fate of any machine-spirit given life in this strange realm? Would it display tics and deficiencies unseen outside the webway? Would Titans constructed within the webway fall victim to the realm’s unnatural juncture in reality?
So many questions. So few answers.
Kane, dear respected Zagreus Kane, hadn’t opposed Land’s decision to devote himself to the Great Work. The Fabricator General’s accommodating position on the matter had come as a surprise, to say the least. He’d anticipated refusals based on notions of expertise and primacy. He was after all a technoarchaeologist, wholly unsuited to war, no matter how respected he might be in his vocation.
Land had his suspicions on just why Kane had agreed, however. Oh, yes. He had his suspicions.
Sapien bared his little teeth and emitted a series of chittering clicks. Land turned, looking back over his shoulder as a tall shape emerged from the mist, becoming the Blood Angel Zephon. The twin turbines rising from his back like brutal machine wings swayed with the warrior’s gait. Battle-servitors trundled past, blind to anything beyond the Archimandrite’s guiding signal at the front of the column.
‘Greetings,’ said the pale Blood Angel. His portcullis-faced Mark III helm was under his arm, leaving his face bare.
‘My Baalite compatriot,’ Land replied. He scratched his scalp, where hair had long since lost the war to maintain a colony on the barren landscape.
Zephon slowed his pace to walk alongside Land. ‘You must be proud,’ he said. ‘To see what the efforts of Mars have wrought.’
Proud? thought Land. Yes, I suppose. In a way. Though the true wonder, the true lore, waits beyond.
‘I am indeed,’ he said aloud.
‘And it was good that your high priestess survived her surgery.’
‘Hieronyma? She isn’t my high priestess. She falls within the circle of a far different aspect of the Martian covens. She worships the Omnissiah as Destruction Itself. As the Unmaker God.’
‘And you?’
‘I revere Him for what He is – a genius. I don’t hold any one aspect of His genius sacred above any other.’
‘I see.’ Zephon raised an eyebrow. ‘Though I note that you corrected my terminology rather than express relief at the priestess’ survival.’
‘Insightful fellow. The Archimandrite Venture is a glory, good sir. But it isn’t a fate I would ever crave. Trapped inside that hull forevermore? Nerve-stripped and muscle-riven and bone-scraped, bound into amniotic soup to sustain a brain and spinal cord?’ Land shuddered theatrically. ‘No, thank you.’
‘I see,’ the Blood Angel said again.
I doubt that, Land thought. You didn’t witness the surgery.
Zephon turned gentle eyes upon Sapien. The psyber-monkey took it as an invitation. It leapt onto the warrior’s pauldron, clinging to the white wing symbol of the IX Legion before scampering up between the jump pack’s turbines.
‘I trust this creature will not urinate on me?’ the Space Marine asked. ‘I am not certain my dignity could survive such a blow.’
Land looked up at the Blood Angel, one eye narrowed. He stroked his pointed beard in thought. ‘Sapien takes nutrients intravenously. What little waste he excretes is via gel-sac deposits. Therefore, the answer to your question is no.’
Zephon chuckled softly. ‘Charming. Here.’ He reached a bionic hand back over one shoulder; the psyber-monkey allowed itself to be lifted by the scruff and handed back to its master. It looked at the immense warrior as it settled upon Land’s shoulder once more, and clicked an inquisitive little chirping sound.
‘I note the instabilities of your bionics,’ said the technoarchaeologist. ‘Flicker-twitches at the metacarpophalangeal knuckles. The work of a poor surgeon?’
Zephon’s smile was gone. ‘Graft rejection.’
‘Indeed? I didn’t think that could happen with your kind.’
‘Now you know otherwise,’ the Blood Angel replied mildly.
‘I’d like to study your bionics at some point, to glean an understanding of their exact deficiencies.’