The creature’s crude, vicious sentience rebelled at being considered prey. It shifted and changed and drifted, starving itself in the heat of war in a bid to go unnoticed. It ghosted away from the running battles, avoiding those where it sensed the tides of its kindred crashing against the leeching resistance of the Soulless.
In hiding, it took forms beyond the sphere of mortal sight. It became a disease. Then a breath, a death rattle, wet and clicking in a man’s throat.
A promise.
A whisper.
A fear.
A regret.
A thought.
It trickled itself into several minds, dividing its consciousness with amoebic mitosis, seeking, seeking, seeking. Many minds were inviolate; they would take too long to overwhelm. These, it left alone. Stars would die before it mastered one of the Golden.
The grey machine-men provided simpler conquests, yet they were uselessly fragile to husk-ride. It settled in the minds of war servitors at barricades across the city, forcing them to turn their weapons upon one another and – in rare, precious instances – to fire into the backs of the Golden advancing ahead. But the Golden destroyed these threats as soon as they became aware of them, and far worse, there was a paucity of thrill, guilt or any emotion at all in servitors made to murder one another. They felt too little; they killed without passion or panic. Thus, they offered no sustenance.
It drifted onwards, plunging at last into a mortal mind that had known enough bloodshed and battle to drench every one of its own memories in bitter red. This man – not one of the Grey nor one of the Golden – was enthroned within cold iron. The daemon looked through his eyes, seeing the compact confines of a piloted vehicle’s cockpit; males and females chattered in their human tongues and machine codes around him, creating an aura of noise. These weaker mortals looked upon their master as a king.
The daemon threaded itself through the man’s thoughts, twining around the man’s aggressive hungers, riding through the lactic tingle of adrenaline in his system. Many of the voices and emotions within his skull weren’t even his own; they goaded him with artificial rage, coming from some synthetic source.
The machine, it knew. The vehicle itself. These were the bond-machine’s emotions colouring the man’s mind with artificial rage.
The daemon knew, then, where it was. It closed its invisible tendrils around the meat of the man’s organs, gently squeezing. Life and lore trickled from the pressured organs, haemorrhaging language and knowledge and insight into the daemon’s cavernous perceptions.
‘Moderati,’ he said, speaking with the mouth of Princeps Enkir Morova of the Reaver Titan Black Sky.
‘Aye, my princeps?’ replied Talla, a woman shorn of hair, haloed in cables, hardplugged into her own control throne.
Enkir bared his teeth in a wet smile. In harmonic response to its master’s amusement, Black Sky blared its war-horns across the embattled city.
Seventeen
The covenant of Terra and Mars / Tribune / Unspoken Sanction
The commanders convened at the Godspire. Those who couldn’t withdraw from the field were forced to appear in hololithic form, their life-size images diluted of colour and flickering with interference. Whatever purpose the circular chamber had served in the age of the eldar empire was overshadowed by the machinations of its current Imperial occupiers, who met amidst chattering cogitators and medicaes working on the wounded. A central table ran on low power, projecting a thin green holo of Calastar’s maddening tubular geoscape. Anti-air turrets hammered their payloads skywards in a ceaseless song, sending shivers through the wraithbone tower.
Even as Diocletian drew breath to address the gathered officers, the image of Princeps Feyla Xan shrank back in her control throne and blinked out of existence. Several of the gathered officers made the sign of the aquila or linked their knuckles in the sigil of the cog, gravely acknowledging Xan’s evident demise.
‘The city holds,’ said Diocletian. There were nods around the table. Most were desperately weary. ‘We all have somewhere to be, so let’s be swift. Archimandrite?’
The Archimandrite stood hunched over the holotable, the Domitar-like chassis that had become her new form towering above all others present. Her murky faceplate offered an unreliable suggestion of the face within.
‘I have inloaded a complete and constantly updating awareness field of the Mechanicum’s present forces,’ she vocalised from the bronze speaker-gills in her chest. ‘This information is drawn from the exloaded sensories of each alpha unit active within Calastar. Lacking any orbitals for requisite scanning and atmospheric intelligence, I am devoting significant data runnage to maintaining an active tactical sensory overview for each of these alpha units.’
‘Can you render this information usable by the rest of us?’ asked Diocletian.
‘Yes, albeit in primitive form.’ Unmodified humanity lacked the biomechanical enhancements required to see things in the ’spheric datastreams available to the cultists of Mars. ‘Vocalisation and crude holo-imagery will have to suffice.’
‘It will,’ the Custodian replied.
‘I speak with the aforementioned insight in mind,’ the Archimandrite augmitted. ‘Summation – the Mechanicum has access to the most accurate, evolving overview of the field of conflict, accessible by all unit leaders. Result – cohesion and performance will be accordingly improved. Judgement – as the disposition of forces currently stands, the city will fall. Enemy reinforcement will only hasten the process. This is an unacceptable outcome.’
Dense servos and fibre bundle muscle-cables whirred as Zhanmadao of the Tharanatoi gestured to various points of scathing conflict on the holo. ‘They’ve gained precious little ground so far. Ignatum holds the choke points leading into the repaired arterials, with the majority of the skitarii and the Unifiers’ war servitors. Tribune Endymion has the Sisterhood and the Ten Thousand deployed in defensive positions along major thoroughfares, denying the city to the enemy.’
‘So the city holds,’ Diocletian repeated.
‘The city holds for now,’ declared Zhanmadao. He was a pale figure, almost unhealthily so, clad in the bulk of his shining Cataphractii armour. His black hair didn’t quite hide the faint markings of blue tattoos on his scalp, legacies of a childhood among the coastal tribes of the faraway world upon which he’d been born.
‘But the Archimandrite is right,’ he continued, ‘and this is a shadow of what’s yet to come. Outrider reports have been filtering in for the last two day cycles. Troop transports, Titans, hordes of the warp-wrought. The reinforcements you have brought us today, along with those sent ahead in convoys for the last month, are allowing us to stand our ground. But gone is any realistic vision of crusading forth. This entire sector of the webway is flooded with the foe. We can’t hold the Impossible City for more than three or four days.’
The Blood Angel finally lifted his gaze from the revolving holo. ‘Where, may I ask, is Tribune Endymion?’