Ra’s blood sang. Eyes wide, he felt riven by sudden hope. It struck him with physical force.
‘Sire… How…’
‘The how does not matter. Hold, Ra. Fight. I will join you in the Mechanicum’s tunnels.’
‘But, my liege, all your work…’
The Emperor silenced him with a stare.
Behind Ra, the discoloured webway portal vomited incandescent flame into the throne room. He felt its searing heat, just as he had on that long-ago day. He watched himself with exalted, distracted eyes, moving to the Emperor’s side, forming a shield of Custodial auramite to protect his monarch from harm.
The machines were detonating around them now. Many of the humans were on the floor, clutching at their bleeding eyes. The hateful radiance emerging from the webway had stolen their sight.
Those still standing were no safer. Shrapnel flew in a lethal, burning blizzard, cutting them down in their dozens, shearing limbs from bodies, severing heads from shoulders. Wreckage clattered against Ra’s armour now, just as it rained against the same armour he had worn five years before. A dagger of jagged metal speared into Amon’s side, causing the Custodian to grunt across their shared vox.
A bleeding, desecrated behemoth melted through the webway portal. It dripped with the blood of the souls it had sacrificed to reach this point in space and time. Laughter haloed its terrible form, the laughter of mad entities pantomiming as gods. Their laughter formed the silver strings of puppeteers, pulling at the creature’s limbs and thoughts.
It said one word, one terrible proclamation with enough psychic ferocity to slay half of the panicking humans still breathing. They warped and thrashed and burned beneath the pressure of that single telepathic damnation, their flesh losing all integrity, their essences devoured from the inside out.
+FATHER.+
Valdor was firing. Amon was firing. Ra, then and now, was firing. He and the image of himself reloaded in temporal harmony, slamming fresh sickle magazines home in their guardian spears, resuming the torrent of upward bolter fire.
The pain of Ra’s wounds was gone. He didn’t think, didn’t care, that this was a memory. He unloaded his guardian spear into the daemonic avatar of Magnus the Red, just as he had done on that fateful day. He screamed through clenched teeth – again, just as he had done before, just as he was doing not two metres away now.
+Awaken, Ra,+ said the Emperor. +Fight on.+
And as ever, His Custodian obeyed.
Twenty-One
That most sacred duty / The end of many roads / Awakening
The Archimandrite calculated with all haste. There were doubts, of course. Hesitations. On some level it mused over the heretical nature of its choice, but to consider its actions heresy would be the result of flawed and limited perception. The Ten Thousand and the Silent Sisterhood, proving themselves untrue to the word given to the Fabricator General himself, were the guilty ones. The route back to Mars had to remain viable. The Aresian Path must stay in Imperial hands. Ensuring that circumstance was as far from heresy as could be conceived. Indeed, it was a sacred duty.
And if it could not, would not be fulfilled by those responsible? Then the answer was not to flee back to Terra. Terra was safe. Terra didn’t languish under the traitorous grip of the false cult. Terra needed no reinforcing.
No, there was only one logical answer that conformed to the relevant needs of Martian primacy. Only one course of action to take.
<Home.>
With the webway’s cartography playing out in repetitive reassurance within the Archimandrite’s thoughts, it had been no hardship to plan the dispersal of the war servitors, robots, Protectors and Myrmidon war-priests that answered to the Archimandrite itself rather than the Ten Thousand. Those that the Archimandrite didn’t personally lead were sent with the earliest sections of the evacuation convoy, then granted enough insight into the Archimandrite’s mental map to deviate from the line of retreat and journey through secondary tunnels to double back. They drifted away at key junctions, navigating the webway via their overlord’s exloaded data.
It had been easier still to filter through the layers of their loyalties through unspoken code exchanges, holding noospheric conversations with hundreds of them at once to ascertain their use and potential within the Archimandrite’s growing forces.
It was under no illusions. It couldn’t retake Mars with the force accrued inside the webway. No matter. Holding the Aresian Path would be enough. The Omnissiah would commit far greater forces to the web in the next crusade, and the Archimandrite’s war convocation would be waiting, indefatigably in command of the most vital passageway in the entire network.
If only Ignatum had been a viable consideration. Even one of the few remaining Titans would have been an beneficial omen, but the Archimandrite had known better than to even make the attempt of gaining their aid. The Titan crews of Ignatum were more flesh than metal, and the Archimandrite sensed their loyalties were as tightly bound to Terra and the Ten Thousand as to the Martian ideal. They ached for home as much as any of the displaced Cult Mechanicum, yet they held warrior-bonds with the Imperials and personal, inviolate oaths with the Omnissiah.
Their skitarii, however, had proved far more receptive. Simple, weaponised creatures that they were, the Archimandrite had siphoned them away from around the ankles of the god-machines they protected, drawing them into secondary conduits and capillary tunnels, keeping them from the destruction being levied upon the Sisterhood and the Ten Thousand.
The Archimandrite had canted its avowal to stand with the last convoy, warding them from harm – and then, as the final Imperials had battled their way into the tunnels beneath the Impossible City, it had performed its most calculated gamble and powered down amidst the devastation. Now it seemed to be nothing more than yet another wreck, another robot going tragically unsalvaged in the hours after this terrible battle.
And it had worked. No warp beast had come to tear it apart in daemonic anger.
A sliver of life remained within its core during this slumber, enough to maintain its few biological components. Those precious shreds of viscera that had once been Magos Domina Hieronyma couldn’t be allowed to rot.
In the deep caves of the Godspire’s wraithbone foundations, sealed within a vault established by the Unifiers to house volatile materials for their reconstruction work, the Archimandrite reactivated slowly, sending power throughout its form in a trickle charge.
Home, it thought.
It. She?
It.
Though again… there were doubts. Logically, this yearning for home – could it be the corrupting influence of the core of Hieronyma within the machine? And if so, did that stand as testament to the purity of the Archimandrite’s cause, or was this an emotive flaw, a stutter of the precision of its plan?
Furthermore: consider the role of external manipulation. Had this been anticipated? Expected? Planned by the Fabricator General? Had she been chosen to become It in the knowledge she would put her emotive loyalty to her homeland above the needs of the Ten Thousand?
The Archimandrite cast these considerations aside as irrelevant to its calculations. They were of no consequence now. The Cog, as it was sometimes said, was already turning.
The Archimandrite’s first order of duty was to re-establish its noospheric network with the alphas and unit leaders it had won to its cause. And from there, on to the Aresian Path.