The Master of Mankind Read online

  There was an irritating habit emerging among the Legions of calling it the ‘Land Raider’, with no regard for the distinction in its rediscovery. Arkhan had penned a long and detailed essay in rebuttal of the trend, entitled Worthy Notes and Treatises of Direct Relevance to Land’s Raider-Pattern Main Battle Tank: The Rebirth of an Ancient Miracle.

  And then when he’d returned to the surface of the Red Planet with the extensive – and thoroughly decoded – plans for the Crawler-pattern agriculture harvester, his awed superiors had requested he give a presentation to various worthies from various forges. The machine wasn’t merely efficient in its use, it was also an icon of that trifecta of mass-production utility: inexpensive to construct; simple to maintain; easy for untrained users to safely control.

  The Crawler, his patrons assured him, would revolutionise life on the emergent Imperium’s agri worlds.

  Arkhan Land knew that, though. He didn’t need to be told. Why else did they think he’d worked so hard to bring its plans back to the surface?

  His presentation speech at the symposium had lasted almost three hours. Some of his peers and patrons considered that degree of self-congratulation to be excessive, but Arkhan Land was a pragmatic man. The Crawler was already seeing use on several hundred reconquered Imperial worlds. Until his peers had also revolutionised the human race’s approach to agriculture, he couldn’t care less for their views on what constituted speechworthy achievement.

  He had always been a creature of vision. A prodigy, beyond doubt. By the time he’d turned five Terran standard years old, Arkhan was fluent in fifty Gothic-variant languages and was passable in several dozen more. When it came to augmentation he was something of a purist; at age eleven he refused mnemonic implantation and cognitive bracing because he didn’t want his thoughts to be ‘slowed down by someone else’s engineering’.

  He’d augmented himself as he aged, of course. Every hierarch of Sacred Mars indulged in the practice of engineered evolution. Only through bionic and augmetic improvement could adepts bring themselves closer to the purity of the Omnissiah. However, he kept his modifications subtle to the point of invisibility, seeming to relish his human form in its original incarnation.

  The best reason he gave to support this decision was the example of the Emperor.

  ‘The Omnissiah,’ Arkhan would say in response to his critics, ‘shows little in the way of outward augmentation. For those of you that worry about my piety, consider just who I emulate with my restraint.’

  That tended to silence his critics.

  His penchant for collecting archeotech was legendary, as was the length and breadth of his collection. Herein lay his true passion rather than the extensive body reconstruction that enraptured many of his peers. Arkhan Land was deeply fond of his tools, gadgets and instruments, many of which defied current Terran and Martian understanding.

  One of these weapons – quite possibly the delightful capstone of his armoury thus far – was a bulky sidearm with a curious array of focusing lenses, rotating magnetic vanes, spiralling accelerator coils and the capacity to spit solid micro-atomic rounds the size of a child’s fingertip. He’d re-engineered the weapon with aural dampeners to offset how horrendously loud it was when fired, then attached it to a mounting fixed to his shoulder so he could carry his favourite war relic around without needing to bear it at his hip or in his robes like some tediously self-aware gunslinger out to impress his lessers with a martial aspect.

  As a final touch he’d slaved the harness to his hind-thoughts, so once the weapon was activated by a thought command it would then follow every tilt and turn of his head, aiming wherever he looked.

  Yes, he considered himself a man of peace, even though he possessed a firearm capable of weaponised nuclear fission every time it fired. In no way did he see this as hypocrisy. The very suggestion would have made him balk; Arkhan Land took his personal integrity almost as seriously as he took his duty.

  These days, he was a very busy man indeed. There was, after all, a war to win – and being asked to help win it by the guardians of a living god was rather flattering. He’d been instrumental in designing the gravitic suspensor plates in Legio Custodes’ battle tanks, as well as their – rather beautiful, in his opinion – Paragon-pattern jetbikes. How those engines howled! A noisy engine was a sacrament to the Omnissiah. A machine with silent function was a machine with a weak soul. That’s simply all there was to it.

  Quite when he had been reduced to the whipping boy of the new Fabricator General was beyond him, but the situation was what it was, and he suspected that complaining about it now would be considered arch and petty.

  The new Fabricator General. How fresh that title still seemed, despite Kane bearing the mantle since the fall of Mars. Perhaps that’s because he has done so little with the position, Land thought. He knew the thought was uncharitable the moment it occurred to him, yet it felt righteous enough. Nor was he alone among his kind in thinking it. As long as Sacred Mars turned in the Archtraitor’s grip, no number of triumphs elsewhere in the galaxy mattered to the priests and seers of the Martian Mechanicum.

  Sapien rode on Arkhan’s shoulder, the artificimian watching the people of the Palace with wide, clicking eyes. Occasionally it hissed at passing servitors, baring its blunt teeth. The little fellow was in a foul mood of late, the reason for which eluded Arkhan completely. Sometimes he regretted constructing his nimble companion with no method of binaric cant or human communication. But then, that would have been a deviation from the historical ledgers in his possession, which clearly described just what a monkey had and had not been, back when there were such things on Terra.

  He’d argued with several scholars – Terran, Martian and out-system alike – regarding the veracity of those archives. It seemed everyone had their own viewpoint, backed up by their own research, on just what monkeys had actually been. A particularly misguided rival of Arkhan’s had insisted the creatures could hang from trees by their tails, which was patently nonsense. Any serious scholar could see the beast’s tail was designed as a lash and a puncturing weapon to deliver venom.

  Arkhan’s boots echoed across the skyway gantries that linked one tower to another. The bitter Terran breeze was weak even this high, thousands of feet above one of the hundreds of flat plains that had been geoshaped in order to lay the Imperial Palace’s foundations. It was said that the Palace had taken almost two centuries to build. Arkhan could believe it.

  That meant Rogal Dorn and his Imperial Fists had remade it in less than one-twentieth of the time, turning the regal Palace into a fortress bastion, which – again – Arkhan found easy to believe. Space Marines were ever industrious when they set their limited minds to something.

  And therein lay the problem, the very heart of the whole matter. The galaxy burned because of that very fact. The Omnissiah’s great vision was under threat, all because of the jealousies of lesser beings.

  Arkhan himself had enjoyed the tremendous honour of working with the Omnissiah once. It was at once the most notable and mystifying experience of his life. The summons had come to him on Mars, necessitating a brief journey to Terra, which he’d gladly undertaken. Rather than make planetfall at one of the many star ports, the specific instructions in the summons led his landing craft to the war-scarred tundra of the farthest northlands.

  There, he had the supreme privilege of entering one of the Omnissiah’s secret, sacred laboratories at the heart of an inactive volcano. There, he had navigated a maze of sealed doorways and active defensive systems, at several points picking through the bones of failed, fallen intruders, until he stood in the Emperor’s presence. And there, for the first time, he had seen the Machine-God with his own eyes.

  ‘Do not bow,’ the Emperor had said. His voice was as machine-like and pure as Arkhan had imagined, devoid of all tone and emphasis. Such monotone purity usually only came with significant augmentation.

  Arkhan rose,
as instructed. He didn’t see a warlord, as so many claimed to see. He saw a scientist. Gone was the armour of the brazen Terran conqueror, replaced by a protective hazard suit suitable for work in sterile and hostile conditions alike. The Emperor stood in the heart of His great laboratory, where fluid bubbled in racked vials and organs pulsated in cylinders brimming with preservative gel. Machines and engines whose use defied common understanding purred and rattled and hummed. To the untrained eye they would seem to be operating independently, but Arkhan saw the truth at once: they were slaved to the Emperor’s will, each of them functioning as part of a harmonic chorus in order to do the Omnissiah’s intellectual bidding.

  Several of the tables housed meticulously written notes upon fresh paper, neatly layered with printed schematics and thin plastic sheets of blueprinted plans. Others were monuments to the past, with ancient scrolls and parchments held open at the corners by whatever served to hand as a paperweight. Arkhan had expected an eclectic mix of orderly High Science and the disorder seen in the sanctums of many geniuses, and that’s exactly what he saw.

  ‘Please accept my gratitude,’ said the Machine-God, ‘for attending me.’

  ‘The honour is mine,’ Arkhan replied, feeling the bitter annoyance of tears threatening to ruin the moment. How irritating emotions could be, sometimes. Still, there was strength in overcoming them, not scraping them away with bionics. In this as well, he emulated the Omnissiah above all else.

  ‘I need your expertise, Arkhan.’

  There was something in the way the Emperor said his name. His aural sensors registered no sound, yet he heard his name spoken aloud. Arkhan found it somewhat unnerving and terribly fascinating, promising himself he would enquire as to the nature of the effect. He never did.

  The Emperor worked alone, sole lord within this sanctum of forbidden, forgotten knowledge. Lightning drew scars across the night sky far above, followed by guttural peals of thunder. Despite the chamber’s depth underground, the lights of the laboratory flickered in gothic sympathy with the storm.

  A body lay on the central slab. A hulking thing, a creature of overdeveloped musculature and thumb-thick veins that had deviated as far from the template of humanity as imaginable while still being able to lay claim to mankind as its root species. In truth it closer resembled something from myth: the frost giants of the Ancient Nordycii clans, or the godborn of the pre-Dark Age Jarrish conclaves. What was human about it had been swelled to grotesque and militant proportions. Even in death its scabrous face was twisted into a rictus leer, as if, in life, it had known nothing but pain.

  The Emperor, clad as any scientist might be clad, stood by the central slab with one hand upon the obscene muscle topography of the monstrous man’s chest. His attention was directed towards several nearby monitors and their constant scrolling data. Each screen showed a digital, binaric or runic variation of biodata in an unfolding stream. Arkhan realised then that the body on the slab wasn’t a body after all; it still registered a pulse and a confused distortion of brain activity.

  The technoarchaeologist moved from the shadows beyond the harsh glare of downward lighting aimed at the body. He found he couldn’t look away from the patient’s face, and the crude, vicious cybernetics implanted upon the unconscious monster’s skull.

  ‘Teeth of the Cog,’ he swore softly.

  The Emperor seemed too distracted to note his blasphemy. Minute circuitry on the fingertips of the Omnissiah’s bloodstained surgical gloves pressed to the giant’s chest. They generated an aura of ultrasound – wherever they touched, crude internal scans of the spine and surrounding flesh drew themselves upon several of the nearby monitors, at various angles. The slumbering body gave a heavy twitch and a grunt as pain spiked through its nervous system.

  Arkhan moved around to the giant’s pained features. The metal teeth. The furrowed brow. The scars upon scars. The cables tendrilling out from his scalp like cybernetic dreadlocks.

  ‘Angron,’ he breathed the name.

  ‘Yes,’ the Emperor confirmed, inhumanly toneless. ‘I am trying to undo the damage that has been done to the Twelfth.’

  The Emperor gestured a free hand, similarly smeared with blood, to three screens that still projected a flickering hololithic of the giant’s skull, brain and spinal column. The image was riven with dozens of slender black tendrils that were anything but organic. Arkhan stared at the scanned images in slow-dawning understanding. His comprehension of human anatomy was absolute, given his experience and education, but the images on the screens weren’t entirely human. Nor were they in accordance with the sacred and approved pathways to augmetic ascension.

  This was rather more profane.

  ‘It is my belief that you have seen this device before,’ said the Emperor. ‘Is that so?’

  ‘Yes, Divine One. In my expedition down to the Hexarchion Vaults.’

  ‘Vaults that were resealed by your own decree, ratified by Fabricator General Kelbor-Hal and all findings within unrecorded.’

  ‘Yes, Divine One. The lore within represented a moral threat and a potential perversion of cognition.’

  The Emperor’s fingers pressed to the unconscious primarch’s temple. ‘But you saw a device like this.’

  Arkhan Land nodded. ‘The profane texts entombed within the Hexarchion Vaults named it a cruciamen.’

  The Emperor continued his fingertip scans, saying nothing.

  ‘I have never seen one implanted and operational,’ Arkhan confessed. ‘And never of this specific pattern and intensity, in the repose of stasis or storage. The devices in the sealed vault were rather more crude than this construct.’

  ‘That is to be expected.’

  ‘Why, in your infinite wisdom, would you implant this device inside a primarch?’

  ‘I did not do so, Arkhan.’

  ‘Then… with great shame, I confess that I am not certain what I am looking at, Divine One.’

  ‘The Twelfth and its Legion call them the “Butcher’s Nails”.’ The Emperor kept staring at the screens. ‘You are looking at modifications to my original template of the Twelfth. More precisely, you are looking at modifications of primitive genius. Before these examinations, I had believed the enhancements performed upon the Twelfth on Nuceria were the source of its emotional instability. My hypothesis was that they stirred the Twelfth to a sense of perpetual but ultimately artificial rage. Yet the opposite is true. With the alterations made to the limbic lobe and insular cortex, the surgeons have impaired the Twelfth’s ability to regulate any emotion at all. Furthermore, they have rethreaded its capacity to take pleasure in anything but the sensation of anger. They are the only chemicals and electrical signals that flow freely through, and from, its brain. All else is either dulled to nothingness or rewired to inspire a supreme degree of agony. It is a testament to the durability of my primarch project that the Twelfth has managed to survive this long.’

  ‘His own emotions cause him pain?’

  ‘No, Arkhan. Everything. Everything causes it pain. Thinking. Feeling. Breathing. The only respite it has is in the rewired neurological pleasure it receives from the chemicals of anger and aggression.’

  ‘That’s vile,’ said the technoarchaeologist. ‘Perversion of cognition, rather than purification.’

  The Emperor showed nothing but passionless interest. ‘Such rewriting of physiology certainly hinders the Twelfth’s higher brain function. The device is cunningly wrought, for something so crude.’

  ‘Can you remove it?’

  ‘Of course,’ the Emperor answered, still looking at the screens.

  Arkhan did his best to hide his surprise. ‘Then, Divine One, why would you leave it there?’

  ‘This is why.’ The Emperor rested both hands on Angron’s head, one with the fingertips pressed to the primarch’s temple and cheek, the other pressed to the crown of his shaven head where the cable-tendrils joined the flesh and bone.
The images on several screens immediately resolved to a clearer imprint of a brutishly dense skull miserable with crude cybernetics and the bone-scarring of powerful surgical laser cuts.

  ‘Do you see?’ the Emperor asked.

  Arkhan saw. The tendrils were sunk deep, rooted in the meat of the brain, threaded to the nervous system, and down in roughly serpentine coils around the spinal column. Every movement must have been agony for the primarch, feeding back into the base emotions of anger and spite.

  Worse, the brain’s limbic lobe and insular cortex were more than just savaged by the pain engine’s insertion; they had been surgically attacked and removed even before implantation. The device hammered into his skull hadn’t ruined those sections of the brain – it had replaced them. Ugly black cybernetics showed on the internal scans, in place of entire sections of the primarch’s brain tissue.

  ‘They are the only thing keeping him alive,’ Arkhan said.

  The Emperor lifted His hands from the somnolent primarch’s skull. Most of the screens instantly went black. He spoke as He removed His surgical gloves. ‘This has been educational.’

  ‘I don’t understand, Divine One. Can I be of use to you?’

  ‘You have been of immense use, Arkhan. You have confirmed what I suspected regarding the cruciamen’s origins. No one else could have done so. I am accordingly grateful.’

  Arkhan had expected the Omnissiah’s dispassionate demeanour, but to witness it in so intimate a context was inspiring in the extreme. So neutral. So inhumanly neutral.

  ‘Divine One,’ he said, before he knew he was going to say anything at all.

  ‘A compromised primarch is still a primarch,’ the Emperor mused, still distracted. ‘What is it, Arkhan?’

  Land hesitated. ‘You are more sanguine than I would have imagined in this moment, even knowing of your holy detachment from emotion.’

  ‘What would the alternative be?’ The Emperor laid the bloodstained gloves on a nearby surgical trolley, where red-marked knives and other instruments lay wet and freshly used. ‘That I might mourn the Twelfth as though it were my injured son, and I its grieving father?’