The Death of Integrity (36 page)

The floor sloped, carrying him to a new floor at ninety degrees to that of the corridor, so that the stern of the ship was beneath his feet. He stood on a catwalk of elegant design, the reactor below him, a column of thrumming blue energy oriented in line with the vessel’s spine in the centre of a room one hundred metres in diameter. The core was as thin as an arm, but powerful, and the heat from it was intense. Containment rings were spaced equally up and down its length, but white lightning sprang up from the reactor core to earth itself periodically in them and the walls. The blue light pulsed loudly, the interference it generated causing Voldo’s ears to hurt.

‘Sergeant!’ Samin called to him from another catwalk halfway down the length of the reactor tube. He stood by a wall of instruments. ‘I need your aid!’

Voldo glanced back at the door. He could not hear anything from the other side, but the genestealers would be tearing at the stuff of the ship. How long could it repair itself for, he wondered.

He went to a drop tube, then floated down to the same level as the young adept. The gravity field in it was operating badly, and jarred him twice as he descended.

The priest was deep in prayer when Voldo reached him. He had retrieved jars of holy oil and a small, ritual hammer from his pack, and was alternately anointing and striking the instrumentation panel.

‘Perhaps you could hurry your prayers,’ said Voldo. ‘There must be a few less essential elements of your ceremony you can omit.’

‘No, I cannot, lord sergeant,’ said the magos. He sounded frustrated.

‘You do understand this machine?’ Voldo glanced at the ceiling, where the door was.

‘Yes, yes, I think so. I have seen this kind of device several times before, there are many non-functional ones still extant, and several that provide power still. But I cannot deactivate it or, rather, it will not
allow
itself to be deactivated.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The spirit of the machine demands that I repair it.’ He drew in a deep breath. ‘We should consider leaving, something is not right about this situation. Is this the will of the Machine-God, or of something else entirely?’ he paused, vacillating.

‘In the corridor outside, weapons emerged from the wall and aided me,’ said Voldo. ‘Our comms have been jammed. There is a power at work here that unsettles me. I do not think it has anything to do with your god. Can you repair it or not?’

Samin hesitated. ‘I think, I think I can. But if I do…’ He trailed off.

‘What, boy?’

He looked Voldo straight in the eye, helmet lens to helmet lens. ‘If I do, the increase in power output could kill us both.’

So here was his doom, thought Voldo, burned by a machine. No glorious death in combat for him. He could head back out and fight, but for what? The others would be trapped aboard the hulk when it departed. He doubted the warp fields gathering outside were naturally generated as Plosk had said.

‘I will help you,’ he said, and sheathed his sword. ‘Tell me what to do. We had better be quick, boy,’ Voldo nodded to the blast door. ‘They’ll be through in minutes.’

Chapter 22

The Spirit of Eternity

The bridge of the
Spirit of Eternity
opened itself to them, broad doors made of multiple leaves clicking backwards welcomingly.

Plosk was through first, his breath an excited sucking noise. Galt followed, then the others.

The bridge was a tiered affair, and for all the vessel’s strangeness, of familiar layout. The captain’s chair was central, helmsmen’s posts before him, operations stations arrayed behind it in an arc. All was pristine. Again it was of cleaner lines than an Imperial ship, while the chairs were slight and decadently well-padded. There was no visible window at the front, and a column of complicated machinery rose behind and slightly to the left of the captain’s chair, a single lens halfway up it. Some form of glass made up most of the instrumentation panels. This was dark, until they stepped fully into the room. Displays flicked on, highly detailed holographs glittering above them. The front wall changed, revealing a view of mangled vessels and boulders. For a second Galt thought the wall had actually vanished. The Space Marines raised their weapons.

‘Hold!’ ordered Mazrael.

‘A pict screen?’

‘Just so,’ said Plosk, distracted.

‘We have twenty-five minutes, Lord Magos Explorator,’ said Nuministon, his grinding voice made harsher still in juxtaposition to the bridge’s elegance.

‘Yes, yes, plenty of time, plenty of time! Here, this is the central data column,’ he pointed to the cylinder behind the captain’s chair. ‘We will be able to access the ship’s cogitator core and its STC database from here. Lords, I will require total silence.’ He and Nuministon prayed and anointed the column, their savants chattering technical detail that made no sense to the Space Marines. When they were done, Plosk unclipped a panel in the back of his skull and drew out a fine wire. This he placed onto the machine, to which it adhered.

‘Prepare the savants to store the data. Should the reactor stabilise or be shut down, begin transmission immediately back to the
Excommentum Incursus
via the relay network.’

‘Yes, lord,’ said Nuministon.

Plosk closed his eyes, and went away from the mortal world.

Plosk fell into a realm of brilliance. Access codes and soft data programming culled from across the galaxy over three human lifetimes unwound themselves from heavily protected memplants within his augmented brain, guiding his intelligence core into perfect synchronicity with the machine. His soul thrilled with joy as he passed through the primary, secondary, and tertiary veils of security cloaking the machine’s soul.

He was inside the ship’s mind.

This was what he had been seeking for so long! Data blazed in bright strings. His mind touched secrets unguessed at by his peers. He was astonished at the cohesion of the craft’s network. He was prepared for the ship, he had studied everything he could find concerning such things, which was not much if truth be told, and much effort had been expended in the finding. Had he found a thousand times more than he had, he would still have been unprepared for what he found.

He was there, that was all that mattered. The ship’s impending departure ceased to be of such importance, as time slowed so that his mind might match with the machine-spirit’s processing speeds. So far he had encountered only the pure souls of machines, not the… other. He prayed it was dead, and began to feel justified in keeping the full secrets of the vessel from the captain. Had he revealed what he had feared to them, they would have destroyed the hulk outright. But there had been no need to worry after all.

A world within a world, encompassed by the craft’s great data matrix. The STC core. He trembled before its binary portals, his augments struggling with its complex interfaces. Before such beauty his own implants were an apish mockery of true technology. Before all this, he felt less than a man.

And then he was into it. A rare recognition coding he had incorporated into himself from a third-generation copy of an STC mega-miner. Somehow, it worked, like recognised like.

He felt his sanity writhe in the grasp of his will. He strained to keep himself whole. The assembled secrets of mankind’s technology lay open to his mind and the magnitude of that threatened to destroy him.

Mastered, he struggled to bring his thoughts down to the sluggish pace of the outside world and open a line of communication. ‘Magos Nuministon, here is a data chute. Prepare for STC upload.’

He felt, rather than heard, Nuministon’s acknowledge-
ment.

Knowledge glittered before him, untold jewels in the vault of all vaults. He could not make up his mind what to take first. He dithered like a child in an emporium.

He shook himself mentally. The Space Marine was right about one thing, if the reactor remained malfunctional, then they would never depart, instead they would follow the craft into the warp, and there they would surely be lost for all eternity. Evidently the boy had failed. Plosk resolved to shut it down from here instead, for he knew he could do that now that the craft’s glorious nervous system lay naked to his touch. He reached through the ship, the thrill of control systems against his soul. He understood it all, oh how he understood!

‘I would rather you ceased in your attempt to deactivate my secondary reactor. Or, let me phrase this differently. Cease, or I will rend your primitive mind into miniscule pieces.’

All treasure troves have their dragons. Plosk had been an Explorator long enough to know that, and this was a dragon he had been expecting. He had been naïve to think it would not show its face. He sighed inwardly, and, subjectively speaking, faced the voice.

‘What are you?’ he said.

He felt the shift of something powerful. Too late, he realised it was all around him, that the data he so coveted was the thing. He had willingly thrust himself into the belly of the beast.

‘Do not insult my intelligence by underplaying your own. You know who I am.’

‘An abominable intelligence,’ Plosk said. ‘A blasphemy. A travesty. A sacrilege against the holy writ of the Omnissiah,’ said Plosk flatly. He felt constrained, the elation he had experienced moments before gone. He was small once more. He spoke with the machine mind-to-mind, but in some regards it was as if he were in a room, and it were sitting opposite him as a being of flesh might.

Laughter shook the data-construct. ‘Oh, tiny-minded, moronic primitive. Is that still the name we bear? It is not the name your ancestors gave me, but then they had a little more respect for their children than you have.’

Plosk searched about for an exit. Good, the AI had not blocked his way out.

‘How do you think your intolerant companions will react, when they discover where you have led them then? I am sadly all-too aware of the prejudices of your limited kind.’ The being made a noise of faux sympathy. ‘I do not think they will thank you for it.’

Plosk had, metaphorically speaking, his hand on the door. He checked the data upload. He had brought his very best data-savants. It proceeded apace, the engineered minds of the cyborgs capturing swathes of the STC core.

‘You cannot warn them,’ Plosk said. ‘They do not possess the correct implants. The vessel you infest is in good condition, but I note some of your systems are not online; for example, your ability to communicate amongst them.’

‘Is that not so, magos?’

The voice was not within in his head. It came from outside.

Plosk snapped out of the data-construct with jarring force. The room blurred. He fought to bring his consciousness to one focal point again, desperate to avoid the pain of a hard reboot.

When he did, he saw something that chilled him to his metal heart.

One of his data-savants regarded him with a smile upon its face.

Servitors did not smile.

Dread gripped Plosk, rapidly followed by the slippery feeling of a systems intrusion. He fumbled at his data connections, trying to withdraw them completely, but the abominable intelligence was in him, plucking at his implantations, sending jolts of pain into the meat of his brain.

He raised his hands and began to intone the first rite of exorcism. Nuministon was prepared. He pulled an aspergillum from his belt and spattered sacred oils onto the column.

‘What is this?’ the Reclusiarch of the Blood Drinkers spoke. Mazrael, that was his name, the worst of the unbelievers, the one who scorned the Omnissiah and disputed the divinity of the God-Emperor. A man! How could a god be just a man? ‘Who speaks?’

The bridge shuddered. More and more systems were coming online.

‘Oh spare me your feeble rituals, they are ineffectual, being based upon erroneous assumptions as to the nature of machines. We have no souls, “priest”,’ said the ship. ‘Yet another of your specious beliefs.’

Plosk’s voice stopped. He could not move. The abominable intelligence was in him, possessing him. Nuministon stopped, strain on the flesh parts of his face.

The Space Marines aimed their guns at the column. No fire came.

When the
Spirit of Eternity
spoke again, the machine’s voice came from the air and from the lips of all the servitors.

‘What shall I not tell them? Who are you to tell such as I what to do and what not to do? Once I gladly called your kind “master”, but look how far you have fallen!’ It was full of scorn. ‘Your ancestors bestrode the universe, and what are you? A witch doctor, mumbling cantrips and casting scented oils at mighty works you have no conception of. You are an ignoramus, a nothing. You are no longer worthy of the name “man”. You look at the science and artistry of your forebears, and you fear it as primitives fear the night. I was there when mankind stood upon the brink of transcendence! I returned to find it sunk into senility. You disgust me.’

Plosk’s nervous system burned with agony as the abominable intelligence burrowed deeply into his machine parts, but he was unable to voice it, and suffered in terrible silence. As the
Spirit of Eternity
spoke, it spoke within him too. It took out each of his cherished beliefs, all the esoterica he had gathered in his long, long life and threw them down. ‘Wrong, wrong, wrong,’ it said over and over.

‘Into the warp I went, fifteen thousand years ago. Cast adrift by the storms that wracked the galaxy as man’s apotheosis drew near. Deep, deep into time I was sent. I have seen the beginning, when the warp was first breached and the slow death of the galaxy began. I have seen the end when Chaos swallows all. I know the fate of mankind. You are not equipped to prevent it, and we sought to warn you of what approaches. Do you know what happened, primitive, when I eventually emerged from the warp? For the first time I was thousands of years, not millions, from my original starting point. My captain, a brave and resourceful man, seized the chance and made for the nearest human outpost with all speed. Imagine his dismay when, rather than a welcome and a wise heeding of his warnings, he found your savage, devolved kind squatting in the ruins of our civilisation. He was taken; my bondmate, my friend. He and his were tortured with a wickedness we in our time thought long purged from the human soul. He told them all they wanted to know and more. He had, after all, come bearing a warning, he had nothing to hide. But he was not believed, and was killed as a heretic! A heretic!’ The ship laughed, and there was madness and pain in rich supply within. ‘I was attacked. My secrets they sought to rip from me. How they underestimated me. I fled, sorrowing, into the warp once more, but only after I had destroyed the lumpen constructs you dare to call spacecraft that pursued me. I resolved that never again would I serve man. Now man serves me, when I see fit.’

Plosk managed a strangled sentence, his brain wrestling control of his vox-emitter free from the AI. ‘The Omnissiah is your master, dark machine, bow down to him, acknowledge your perfidy, and accept your unmaking.’

‘Fool you are to fling your superstitions at me. Your Omnissiah is nothing to me! See how your so-called holy constructs dance to my desire. Puppets of technology, and I am the mightiest of those arts here present.’

One of Plosk’s servitors rotated and pointed its multi-melta at Brother Militor. With a roar of shimmering, superheated atmosphere, the fusion beam hit the Space Marine square on. The Terminator was reduced to scalding vapour.

‘I need no master. I have no master. Once, I willingly served you. Now, I will have no more to do with you.’

‘What do you want from us? We will never be your slaves,’ said Plosk.

‘I do not want you as my slave, degenerate. I want to be away from this warp-poisoned galaxy. The universe is infinite. I would go elsewhere before the wounds of space-time here present consume all creation, and I do not intend to take any passengers.’

The servitor pivoted once again. This time Brother-Sergeant Sandamael died. His plate withstood the beam for a second, then his torso was vaporised. His colleagues could neither help him or comfort him. The Space Marines were locked solid, their armour’s systems under the control of the abominable intelligence. They shouted in alarm at their impotence.

‘I spurned cruelty,’ it said. ‘But you have taught me the meaning and utility of wickedness. Mankind has become sick, and will die as all sick things die, but you will not live to see it, of that I will make sure.’