The Master of Mankind Read online

  ‘Never that, Divine One.’ Arkhan chose his words with care. ‘Though some might expect that.’

  The Emperor unlocked the sealed vambraces of His hazard suit, then removed the surgical mask that had covered His face until now. ‘It is not my son, Arkhan. None of them are. They are warlords, generals, tools bred to serve a purpose. Just as the Legions were bred to serve a purpose.’

  Arkhan looked down at the sleeping demigod, watching Angron’s facial features twitch and tense in painful harmony with a ravaged nervous system.

  ‘With your blessing, Divine One, I would ask something of you.’

  The Emperor turned His eyes upon Land for the first time. Falling beneath the Omnissiah’s gaze made the Motive Force in Arkhan’s bloodstream flow faster, tingling like weak acid.

  ‘Ask.’

  ‘The primarchs. It is said they have always called you father. It seems so… sentimental. I’ve never understood why you allow it.’

  The Emperor was silent for some time. When He spoke, His eyes had returned to the hulking form on the surgical slab. ‘There was once a writer,’ he said, ‘a penner of children’s stories who told the tale of a wooden puppet that wished to be reborn as a human child. And this puppet, this automaton of painted, carved wood that sought to be a thing of flesh and blood and bone – do you know what it called its maker? What would such a creature call the creator that gave it shape and form and life?’

  Father. Arkhan felt his skin crawl. ‘I understand, Divine One.’

  ‘I see that you do.’ The Emperor turned back to the body on the slab. ‘The Twelfth’s lifespan and tactical acuity may be reduced but the pain engine amplifies its effectiveness in other ways to compensate. I believe I will return the Twelfth to its Legion. You have my gratitude once more, Arkhan. Thank you for coming.’

  It had been the first and only time he’d stood alone in the Omnissiah’s presence. He could have clutched at the singular honour of the moment, bringing it to light and riding the resulting fame. But he hadn’t. Arkhan Land, for all that his detractors called him vain and pompous, kept the truest honour of his life a secret from all others. It would’ve cheapened it to milk the moment for personal gain. He was content to keep it as his private hour of joy, that glorious evening when a living god had needed his knowledge.

  The rattling of the elevator brought him back to the present, where the descent into the Ordo Reductor’s stronghold had finally ended. The tri-layered doors unbolted with an opera of metallic crunches, then moaned open one by one. Hazard striping slid away in every direction as the last of the airlock doors finally parted.

  Kane was waiting for him on the concourse beyond. The Fabricator General had sanctified himself with severe weaponisation since Arkhan had last been in his presence. It suits you, Arkhan thought, in your blunt and uninspired approach to existence.

  ‘Fabricator General,’ he greeted the exiled ruler of Sacred Mars.

  ‘Arkhan Land,’ replied his lord and master. ‘Come with me.’

  ‘At once, dominus.’ You tedious gargoyle. ‘May I enquire as to your need?’

  ‘All will be revealed.’ Kane turned, backing up on his grinding tracks, curling his arms close to his red cloak. ‘Follow.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘To converse with the Bringers of Blessed Ruin. No more questions for now. Merely follow.’

  Kane juddered along on his armoured tank treads, roving between the power generator columns. The air was thick with incense, and humming filtrators pumped carbon dioxide and argon into the entire complex, thinning the nitrogen and oxygen to unpleasantly breathable levels analogous to the terraformed Martian atmosphere. Kane greedily sucked the artificial smog through his respiratory filters. Each breath he took was a holy observance.

  The temperature had a tendency to fluctuate this deep in the complex’s innards, with the climate controls regulated by overworked processors running to figures that changed by necessity from chamber to chamber. In this particular vault, the shift from forge heat to cryonic cold was stark enough to be felt as a physical barrier. His torso shook in its cable-thick cradle as his treads ran over the uneven floor.

  Arkhan Land, that monumental irritant, walked at his side. Really, it was a grievous shame that the technoarchaeologist was necessary at all, but Kane would have been a fool not to use every tool at his disposal. Land was a vainglorious and self-serving wretch, but he was a vainglorious and self-serving wretch with an insight – and vital schematics – possessed by few others.

  And, crucially, he had been instrumental in the anti-gravitic designs favoured by the Legio Custodes’ war machines. The respect granted to Land by the Ten Thousand was more valuable to Kane than any imaginable currency.

  Once inside the next vault, Kane pulled back his hood. The wires and needle-cables that replaced his hair were tugged none too gently by the movement. He drove on, red-dot sights beaming here and there as he turned his head, seeking by eye and scanning by internal auspex.

  The inhabitants of the chamber scattered before his rolling advance. Miserable things still consisting mostly of flesh, their robes stained by beggars’ filth, they should have been beneath the Fabricator General’s notice. On Mars they wouldn’t have dared approach him, but the loss of their homeland had ruined their sense of decorum as it had harmed the cognitive processes and emotional restraints of so many other Mechanicum adepts. Several of them tried to pray to him as he trundled past, believing him to be the Omnissiah Incarnate, descending into the purgatory of their lives.

  Kane caught sight of Arkhan Land’s smile. Evidently the blasphemy on display amused him.

  If these forge-vermin believed in their weeping praise that their Fabricator General intended to save them, they were grotesquely mistaken. He drew an elegant phosphor serpenta pistol of pseudowood and Martian red gold and casually shot one of the braying miscreants through the chest. That sent the others fleeing.

  Kane was far past the ability to smile, but he felt warmed by silencing their petty, mistaken little blasphemy all the same. The rush of brain chemicals triggering a sense of all-too-human satisfaction was a guilty pleasure indeed. He holstered the slim pistol beneath his robes, the secondary arm that had drawn it curling back close to his torso.

  ‘You are such an inspiring leader,’ Arkhan Land noted. Kane glanced towards the man, reading his facial features for any sign of amusement. He detected none, though the artificimian on Land’s shoulder made a chittering sound resembling primate laughter.

  Once we have retaken our homeland, Kane thought, I will end you.

  ‘You think me ignorant of your sarcasm?’ the Fabricator General asked, gambling that it had been a disingenuous comment.

  ‘No, dominus. Never that.’

  Land seemed sincere. Kane suspected a deception but refused to engage with such petty behaviour. On he rolled, the technoarchaeologist at his side, eventually reaching another airlock. They both endured an aura-spray of cleansing chemicals in a fine mist before they were permitted to enter the next chamber. Kane’s treads gripped the contoured gantry slope as he descended through the sloped workshop-laboratory that spread before him in a vast expanse. Arkhan’s boots thud-thudded on.

  Here, hundreds of menials and thralls laboured at the slabs of deactivated automata, building, repairing and resealing armoured carapaces of blessed iron and sacred steel. Adepts and priests, low of rank yet still commanding positions eclipsing their thrall minions, bent their expertise to the construction and rethreading of complicated internal circuitry, or managed the integration and installation of bio-mechanical organ container tanks.

  Ranks of half-built war robots lined the walls, slouched by work tables or lying in disassembled repose upon surgical slabs. The recreated Martian air was beautifully spiced with the reek of blood, oil and toxma, the holy synthetic petrochemical blend that served in place of either natural fluid.


  Head after head turned to regard him. Some of the adepts bowed, some murmured greetings in binaric cant or exloaded welcomes onto the noospheric net as data across the Fabricator General’s visual feed. He ignored most and canted back greetings to a few, moving between the hive of dead robots lying on their surgery tables. Emblazoned on every wall in great sigils of dark metal and Martian red gold was the fortress and lightning bolt symbol of the Unmaker God’s blessed artisans of destruction, the Ordo Reductor.

  He spurted a binaric query to Land, who, to the Fabricator General’s irritation, kept choosing to reply aloud in unaugmented vocalisation.

  ‘No,’ said Land. ‘I’ve never ventured here before.’

  ‘Impressive, is it not?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Very impressive.’

  ‘The delay and tone of your reply suggests deception.’

  ‘You should learn to accept a polite lie for the value it has,’ Land replied, adding Kane’s title after another conversationally significant pause.

  Sapien clicked its tongue and chittered, a sound quite unlike anything Terran monkeys had ever made, many thousands of years ago when they’d still drawn breath.

  Kane’s internal curse was a screed of binaric invective that he was far too dignified to transmit.

  A circular elevator platform in the floor took them even deeper into the complex. The fortress symbol was repeated on the walls of the elevator shaft, and Kane expressed a moment of revelatory admiration across the noosphere for just how deep his people had dug into Terra’s crust, and how tenacious they were in their resolve to have accomplished so much in their brief banishment from the Red Planet.

  Land evidently had a different perspective. ‘Look how we spread our tendrils, gripping tight to the soil of our exile, the way trees spread roots, never to be moved.’

  Kane felt a flicker of camaraderie, at long last. An alignment of vision. ‘You fear we will never see Sacred Mars again.’

  Arkhan nodded. All sons and daughters of Mars knew that he had left a lifetime of work unfinished. For once there was no suggestion of a snide comeback or disrespectful glance.

  ‘I fear we are becoming comfortable. Complacency will only make this exile permanent.’

  Kane vocalised a code of solidarity, the canted equivalent of a reassuring smile, and moved onwards. Another accord between them. This was good. This was promising.

  They descended another nine levels, leaving the platform at the bottom of the shaft. Bulkheads whined and groaned open, admitting them with gearborn mechanical songs. Another workshop stretched out in every direction, indistinguishable from the first but for one utterly significant aspect – the temperature was glacial, maintained thus by mist-breathing climate processor units in the low ceiling.

  Here the adepts and their minions worked on the most complicated brain function cogitators of the ordo’s siege engine automata and anti-infantry hunter-killer machines. Their work involved the preservation and linkage of delicate biological components, bonding man and machine at an inseparable level. The craft on this sublevel was of the highest, most precise quality, and it was here that Kane finally found the adept he had been seeking.

  Hieronyma was working alone, which was no surprise; Kane knew her idiosyncrasies well. She stood bent over a surgical slab, all four of her mechanical hands devoted to a bowl of preservative soup that contained a nest of wires and cables binding a human brain. Kane always enjoyed watching her work. Her fingers were designed to divide into three slender sections at the tips, each able to move independently from its neighbours, giving her a level of precise digital control few tech-priests could begin to match.

  A great hunch marked her curved back. Whatever augmentations lay beneath her robe were enthusiastically inhuman in nature. Kane greatly approved.

  She didn’t look up, though she canted a very polite greeting from beneath her red hood. The stream of code not only welcomed the Fabricator General to her workstation, but also expressed the honour of being deemed worthy of a visit. Would that all of his people were so dutiful, Mars would never have fallen. She greeted Arkhan Land with a much briefer vocalised spurt. The technoarchaeologist returned a shallow bow.

  Kane canted, spilling the numerical code of her name aloud on an almost subsonic frequency. The barest flicker of her divided fingertips showed her surprise as she worked on delicately puncturing the soaking brain. Around them both, work continued on.

  ‘The event I bring to your attention cannot be trusted to the noosphere,’ he clarified, quenching her dignified confusion.

  Her reply was similarly quiet, pitched and transmitted for his personal receptors and Land’s ears. In the heart of the Mechanicum’s fortress on Terra, the most secure way to converse was the most primitive: they whispered.

  Her hood twitched as she tilted her head, still focusing on her work. ‘What brings you here, Lord of Mars?’

  ‘The Great Work,’ he said, trans-shaping the reply so muted, so fine, that it was barely even subsonic.

  He was gratified to see another hesitation in her divided fingertips. She was too dutiful, and too aware of the Mechanicum’s depleting resources, to risk abandoning her work for lesser hands, but her fascination with Kane’s presence was becoming a very real distraction.

  ‘You honour me,’ she said, bluntly honest. Her private tone was yearning, practically starving for more data.

  ‘I do,’ Kane confirmed. ‘The Omnissiah’s war rages on. The Ten Thousand and the Silent Sisterhood, praise upon their names for their most glorious of duties, bring the Machine-God’s will to us in the form of a requisition list.’

  Land raised a thin eyebrow but said nothing. Hieronyma turned her hooded features to face the Fabricator General, eyeing him with a shadowed visage of variously sized green lenses. To compensate, a mechadendrite uncoiled from her spine and aimed its eye-lens tip down at her work. With her vision doubled, she examined Kane and continued working at the same time. Bio-sign monitors hanging from the ceiling in a loose ring showed a spill of data detailing the brain’s function as Hieronyma manipulated it beneath her tender touch.

  She said nothing, for she needed to say nothing. Not yet. The Fabricator General of Sacred Mars wouldn’t come here to trouble her for a requisition order consisting of crates of bolt shells and robots to serve as blade fodder for the enemy. This was something else. Something unexpected.

  ‘And,’ Kane added, ‘opportunity has arisen at last. Adnector Primus Mendel has fallen. His demise leaves a void in the Unifiers’ leadership.’

  Still Hieronyma said nothing. Kane appreciated her appropriate reverence and attention. Instinct almost had him exload the requisition manifest directly to her, but he was not ready to trust the noosphere. As united as Mars and Terra were, they were still two empires beneath the same banner, two kingdoms sharing a king. Their interests were not always strictly and perfectly aligned, and Zagreus Kane was a man short on trust these days. Being forced to flee one’s home world in panicked disgrace could have that effect on a soul.

  Land’s psyber-monkey hopped from the explorer’s shoulder onto Hieronyma’s workstation. It watched the motions of her slender bionic fingers, chittering to itself. Its antics went ignored, even by Land himself.

  The Fabricator General continued, ‘In addition to thousands of new troops and a forge-harvest’s worth of materiel, the Ten Thousand, with the Omnissiah’s blessing, have requested the Mechanicum provide their new army with a general to replace Mendel. To meet this demand, your disciples of the Unmaker God will proceed with the Archimandrite Venture.’

  Now, against all code and creed, Hieronyma ceased her ministrations. The mechadendrite tentacle lashed back beneath her robe, and her four hands snicked and clicked back into clawed completion. Every single one of her eye-lenses, the only features of her face, whirred and refocused.

  ‘You require this of me, Fabricator General?’


  Kane blurted a forceful shunt of code.

  Hieronyma bowed deeply. ‘You honour me,’ she said again with appropriate reverence. ‘As you will it, it shall be so.’

  ‘Your work honours the Mechanicum in kind,’ Kane replied. ‘Harvest the materials you require to enact the process and infuse yourself with the Motive Force. May the Omnissiah bless you upon your ascension.’

  Arkhan Land cleared his throat with disgusting humanity. ‘As fascinating as this is…’

  Both archpriests turned their eye-lenses upon the still-human, far shorter member of their triumvirate.

  ‘…what do you need of me?’

  How it galled Kane to admit this. ‘Your vision. Your insight into the process of forbidden weaponisation. Your knowledge of the secrets within the Hexarchion Vaults.’

  Arkhan turned his head slightly, eyes narrowed. ‘What you ask is sealed unto eternal silence, by order of the Fabricator General. You know this.’

  ‘I am the Fabricator General!’

  Land chuckled. ‘The real Fa–’

  ‘Abandon your attempts at humour,’ Kane warned. ‘Do not even breathe such a sentiment, Technoarchaeologist Land. My patience has its limits.’

  Land acquiesced with an amused nod. ‘Even so, they ask much of us and offer little.’

  Kane responded with a negative/abort chime equating derisive laughter, mocking the very idea. He no longer had enough of a human face remaining to smile, which was, briefly, something he regretted. The effect of biological smugness had its usefully deployable moments.

  ‘They ask much, this is true. Yet in exchange I have secured their word that an avenue to Mars will remain within Imperial and Mechanicum control.’

  ‘Home,’ Hieronyma said, hissing and urgent. ‘Red Mars. Sacred Mars. Mother Mars.’

  Arkhan Land seemed rather less impressed. ‘Hollow promises. The Imperium can offer us no such guarantees. We cannot return home while the skies of Mars remain caged.’