The Master of Mankind Read online

  No, one must always evolve. To consider the stasis of satisfaction was nothing more than a vaguely amusing heresy.

  Nor did Alpha-Rho-25 find himself burdened with the weight of superstition. These creatures he had fought now for five years were hardly ‘daemons’ in the terms referred to in human mythology. They were entities of incorporeal origin, breaching the barrier between the unmapped tides of the aether and the material universe. Aliens, then. A xenos breed from the warp. It was quantifiably true.

  If pressed to be truthful on the matter, he found the relentlessly warlike entities no more or less disgusting and unnatural than the perfidious eldar, in whose ruins the Imperial Vanguard had made their fortress. All alien breeds suffered from the unholy imperfections of their forms. That was the beginning and end of the matter.

  Still…

  Still.

  These ‘daemons’ were violent beyond any other species Alpha-Rho-25 had encountered. And they took a great deal of effort to extinguish. The fact they bled was no guarantee they would die. Many of them refused to even bleed at all. That was quite galling.

  He hunted alone in the dayless and nightless flow of time that shrouded the Impossible City. His hunting grounds on this operation were far from the Godspire, a full forty kilometres away, where the eldar ruins grew ever more decayed. Contact had been lost with the boundary servitors guarding one of the many thousands of capillary tunnels leading deeper into the webway, which was by no means unusual.

  However, questions remained. These boundary servitors had been guarding a far-flung passageway with significant defence batteries and gun emplacements. It shouldn’t have fallen at all, let alone so swiftly and with so little warning. Subsequent contact had been lost with the reinforcement servitors, their handler and then again with the three squads of Thallax war machines sent forwards from the tunnel’s second barricade to ascertain the gravity of the situation. All of this was less than typical.

  And so, while the rest of the Imperial vanguard withdrew and abandoned the outward tunnels, Alpha-Rho-25 went hunting back through them.

  He loped onwards, lens-eye scanning, panning. The sloping walls of this tunnel were glossy white, something that seemed a cousin to clean marble and polished enamel, yet was entirely unrelated to either.

  Like walking through the marrow of something’s bones, thought the Protector, finding the notion disturbingly organic. Who had they been, those that ruled here before the interloping eldar colonists had even dreamed of setting down foundations? Had the original creators of this realm used the bodies of their immense, fallen god-foes as material for its construction? Nothing would surprise Alpha-Rho-25 about those long-dead entities’ intentions or methods. He had seen too much in the last five years to cling to surety about anything here.

  En route he passed Mechanicum Unifier priests and their battle-servitor defenders in droves, returning to Calastar. The mist swirled with the passage of bulk conveyors and tracked lab-platforms, yet it never dissipated.

  Even the vastest tunnels, their sides invisible to visual or echo­locating perception, had a clinging oppressiveness that sat ill within the Protector’s mechanical guts. As honoured as he was to have been activated and deployed within the labyrinth of the Great Work, he would not miss the eerily human pressures it placed upon his thoughts. Discomforts he’d believed himself long past pulled at his perceptions every time he left the web’s Mechanicum-engineered sections.

  Troubling reports crackled across the vox of warden servitors in other outward tunnels committing sacred prayers of violence and failing to destroy their target. Something – a single entity – was testing their defences, then drawing back each time. Tunnels that had long since been repaired and which had seen no battles in years were reporting the expenditure of horrendous amounts of ammunition. Many then ceased reporting at all. Other Protectors were being released to cover the webwide retreat, but Alpha-Rho-25 was the first, already close to his destination by the time the Godspire unleashed more of his kindred.

  With his back-jointed legs propelling him into a ragged sprint capable of outrunning a Triaros conveyor, he reached the outward tunnel barricade swiftly after setting out from the Godspire. A series of Mechanicum-constructed barriers and gunnery platforms faced away into the tunnel’s mist, the empty cannons tracking on unoiled mechanics, panning left and right over a vista of eldar rubble. Perhaps it had once been a smaller outpost far from Calastar, in the age of eldar supremacy. There was no way of knowing. There would never be a way.

  He found AL-141-0-CVI-55-(0023) first, which was fitting. She had been the lead servitor of the boundary team. Her torso lay across a low broken wall of eldar architecture – wraithbone, they called the material, with their species’ pathetic sense of melodrama – with her skull cracked open and leaking into the ground mist. The mist possessed some kind of preservative properties for the destruction had occurred hours ago, yet the cranial residue was still wet. Another reality deviation that wasn’t the Protector’s duty or place to analyse and codify.

  Alpha-Rho-25 crouched by the remains, the claws in place of his feet finding easy purchase on the rubble and his piston-legs hissing as he lowered himself. His cloaked robe rippled briefly in a sourceless breeze. Another anomaly. He ignored it, drumming his taloned metal fingers on his sphere-jointed knees as he mused.

  The nearby passageway leading deeper into the webway was ringed with what seemed to be eldar bone plating and their ridiculous gemstone circuitry. Alpha-Rho-25 had seen the Mechanicum’s ana­lyses describing the extent of eldar colonisation within the web. The original creators of this realm had constructed the webway from psychically resistant materials that defied corporeal understanding, but evidence of eldar habitation and restructuring was evident throughout the web. The sprawling necropolis of Calastar was only one of its kind, albeit the largest yet found, and eldar ruins lay throughout many dozens of outward tunnels.

  The bodies of the other battle-servitors were in similar states, as were the Thallaxi robots several dozen metres to the north. Intriguingly their lightning guns’ chainblade attachments, fallen from slack hands into the mist, still sniggered in idle activation.

  The servitors were dismembered but undefiled by further punishment. The Thallaxi’s body-shells were broken, their cranial domes shattered, and the organic cognitive slurry within now ran out, congealing greasily in the golden fog.

  The daemon sensed movement. Motion prickled at its perception, jabs knifing against the searing muck of its thoughts. It abandoned its idle prowl, turning away from its explorations through the outward tunnels, drawn back to the site of its first hunt in this cold realm. It had to feed. Already its flesh steamed with the slow smoke of threatened dissolution. Stalking the infinite tunnels was, thus far, achieving little. Boundary servitors were chemical-blooded and grey of soul – their deaths offered scarce sustenance, yet they flooded the tunnels in numbers beyond the creature’s crude reckoning.

  The soul it sensed now was brighter than those it had devoured before. The light of this new spirit gleamed through air and stone alike, a beacon amidst oily black vision. The pain of starvation lent conviction to the creature’s movements. It moved faster and faster, wraithing through the tunnels, between the ruins that populated them.

  With no one else nearby – no one capable of intelligent conversation, at least – Alpha-Rho-25 allowed his annoyance to show across his angular and not particularly attractive features. In public, he looked like a man always on the edge of scowling. In private, he crossed over that edge and consistently indulged.

  Servo-skulls drifted around him, scanning, always scanning. Their anti-gravitic gliding dispersed some of the higher tendrils of mist in their wake. Alpha-Rho-25 paid scant heed to the drones’ empty readings scrolling in Martian hieroglyphs across his vambrace monitor. If the osseous probes found what had done this, well, then he’d pay attention.

  Instinctively, the prehens
ile mechadendrite attached to his spine slipped free from the bottom of his robes. The tail-whip gleamed with an armoured dataspike at its tip, more than capable of punching through a daemon’s ectoplasmic corpus. Alpha-Rho-25 let the coccyx-bonded tail rise up, scorpion-like, over his left shoulder.

  Five years, he thought, stalking away from the Thallaxi and back to the slain servitors. Five years since he strode across the red dunes of Sacred Mars. Five years since he filled his respiratory tract with the metal-tasting holiness of Martian air.

  And soon the conflict would be over, one way or another. All the violence and loss of life and materiel to reach beyond the Mechanicum’s sections of the webway, at last establishing a fortress at Calastar – meaningless. Each crusade vanguard that pushed out from Calastar to fight through the outward tunnels – meaningless. Tribune Kadai Vilaccan had led the most recent foray, and all calculations had signified a crushing victory. Yet not every qualifying factor had been available to insert into those equations. How could they have known what was streaming towards them through the outward tunnels?

  Triumph had been torn from their grasp by sheer weight of numbers.

  Severe casualties had been expected given the nature of their foes in this fascinating realm, but Alpha-Rho-25 had high enough clearance to know the truth. Their losses were far beyond the point of sustainability. The last five years had practically bled the Mechanicum’s Unifiers and their defenders dry, while the Ten Thousand could – at best – call upon perhaps a thousand remaining warriors. The Silent Sisterhood kept their numbers a mystery to all outside their order, but it was irrelevant – they had always been the rarest of breeds. They, like the Legio Custodes, like the Unifiers themselves, were a precision blade. Not a bludgeon.

  Tribune Endymion had sent ambassadors to the surface but Alpha-Rho-25 was a pragmatic being. Reinforcements from outside the Imperial Dungeon, if they were even acquired, would be from weaker souls far less trustworthy than the vanguard’s current elite.

  The fact that they would have to be extinguished for the secrets they had seen in the webway was irrelevant to the Protector. Let them die. There was no greater testament to a life than to lay it down for the Omnissiah’s Great Work.

  Still, they might make useful daemon-fodder. Reborn as he was for the holy act of slaughter, the possibility of more briefly warmed him.

  And the daemon sensed that warmth. It hunted a soul that knew death, one that had reaped life in the long years of its existence. Every butchered life was a scent and a flavour in its own right, needling at the meat of the daemon’s mind.

  The creature latched its senses upon those memories of violence now, reaching for those bloodied edges of the soul’s aura, and its stalking sprint became a shrieking wind.

  Alpha-Rho-25 crouched by AL-141-0-CVI-55-(0023) once more, scanning her with the ectoplasmic detectors in his palm-auspex. The cyborged woman had been thoroughly dismembered. Torn apart not by bladed weaponry but by brute strength. The wounds were rife with aetheric signifiers.

  Alpha-Rho-25 began the process of harvesting her final cognitions, which necessitated sawing through the brain pan and plunging a dataspike into one of her internal cranial connectors. Intriguingly, in all the info-feeds that spilled out in numerical echo of the servitor’s last thoughts, there was nothing identifying her warp-born assailant. She hadn’t been able to make out any visuals of her killer. For all intents and purposes, AL-141-0-CVI-55-(0023) and her cohorts had been firing at nothing.

  There was more – somehow, the lobotomised woman’s very last thoughts had been of her human life, and the weeping children that had been pulled from her hands as she was hauled away, screaming, on her way to reprocessing. Alpha-Rho-25 discarded the data as irrelevant: a tediously emotional misfire of a dying, imperfect biological engine.

  The Protector rose and stalked over to the next slain servitor, his bloodied saw still whining.

  One of the servo-skulls ceased its circling, turning to stare out across the eldar ruins. A few seconds later it started emitting a lengthy vocal chime. A screed of data spilled across Alpha-Rho-25’s vambrace screen, none of it giving any insight beyond the detection of unspecified inhuman movement, though in this case that was detail enough.

  The Protector stood straight, closing his human eye as he focused through his chunky bionic lens. His false eye immediately began to flash with warning pulses of its own, vision filters clicking and purring as they overlaid one another. All he could see was the detritus of the dead eldar settlement scattered across the tunnel. Its low, time-eaten walls were an amusing monument in the webway to a race too arrogant to realise it was dead.

  Although it had deeply offended his sense of competency, Alpha-Rho-25 had brought some companions with him via Triaros conveyors. Without looking, he keyed a series of commands into his bracer’s runepad. The cohort of nine Castellax battle-automata at his back began active seek-and-destroy protocols, circling him with their great iron strides shaking the ground. The belt-fed cannons on their shoulders panned around with hydraulic whines. He didn’t like them – the smoother-hulled Kastelan robots were far more reliable and not born of erratic mongrel intelligences – but a man worked with what he had at hand. He’d recognised the potential need for firepower, and the automata provided it.

  Movement drew his gaze to the east, though his focusing lens wouldn’t align and his scanning reticule kept slipping its locks. Something was there in the distance, defying his scrutiny.

  Alpha-Rho-25 cycled through vision filters, overlaying display upon display, negating those that showed no new data. During this round of perplexed and increasingly irritated staring that took, by human perceptions, almost no time at all, he deployed all four of his primary weapons from all four of his arms: two long-taloned chordclaws thrumming with hostile sonic fields, two transonic stabbing blades scraping against one another in anticipation. The propulsion vanes on his back-mounted power unit began to spin, setting his cloak rippling.

  The last vision filter he tried was a confused blend of thermoptical intensifiers with echolocation results rendered as precise binaric data instead of a visual impression.

  That one worked.

  Behind him, with their sensory feeds linked to his, the Castellax automata saw what he’d just seen. They reacted with the savage crashing of nine mauler-pattern bolt cannons opening up in brutal harmony.

  The daemon took form at the hunt’s apex, coalescing into a thing of claws and blades and spines – the idea of evisceration made flesh. It roared its name as it descended on burning wings, a name that was a sound and a memory as much as a word. It screamed the hot-blooded yells made by the first man ever to take another man’s life, and in the same chorused cry was the gurgling death-rattle of the first man ever to fall to murder.

  Alpha-Rho-25’s aural receptors registered the sound as a shrieked series of syllables very close to language.

  His first and last action upon seeing the entity he had come to hunt was to beam audiovisual data through a tight-lance signal back to his overseers in the Godspire. Sending the pulse took less than the span of a human heartbeat, yet he had no time to do anything else. The jaws and claws of the creature closed in an impossible alignment of rending snaps, wrenching him into almost thirty pieces even as he was being swallowed.

  The component chunks of Protector Alpha-Rho-25 tumbled into the monster’s several gullets, throat-muscled down to splash into the acid of its guts, still twitching and bleeding as they started to dissolve. Unfortunately for Alpha-Rho-25 there was just enough of his consciousness left to know a brief, searing, transcendent moment of pain as digestion began.

  The Protector’s message reached its destination less than a minute after it was sent – simultaneously as his destroyer was standing amidst the wreckage of nine Castellax battle-automata, regurgitating the melted slag of the Protector’s bionics.

  The message spurted from the speakers either si
de of a blank viewing monitor, manifesting as a distortion-flawed approximation of what the daemon had shrieked as it descended for the kill.

  The speakers crackled and squealed with the same words roared three times, eerily close to a bellowed chant from some heathen ritual. They came with the rhythm of a heartbeat, in no language known to humankind.

  The Echo of the First Murder attacks

  I

  Harvest

  This is not now. This is then. This is when she was seventeen years old.

  Moonlight bathes her as she lies in the long meadow grass and stares up at the stars. Around her, the night insects sing their clicking songs.

  The wind is faint tonight but she hears the voices within the breeze, their murmured lilt at the very edge of her senses. Her father’s fathers and her mother’s mothers are murmuring softly this eve, the spirits lulled by the calm night. It isn’t always this way. The dead are rarely quiet. Sometimes – even often – the voices plead with her or rage at her, desiring that she carry their wishes to the living. A rare few even threaten her, though she doesn’t know what a mere spirit might do to cause her harm.

  The girl stares at the three moons in their ascendancy, at their familiar, cratered faces. Thunder peals far away, rumbling over the southern mountains and drowning out the evening’s subdued voices.

  She rises, turning south, seeking the storm. Instead of the black-grey thunderheads she expects, the sky over the mountains glows with flames. The clouds churn, orange-bellied as they writhe above the peaks, flickering with inner torment that lights up the distant night.

  A spaceship, she thinks. A spaceship is landing.

  It streams through the clouds, black-hulled and streaming smoky fire, shaking the entire world as it roars overhead. A castle in the sky, descending, drifting down towards the villages and the great city beyond.

  The spirits coalesce around her, their murmuring voices coloured by an emotion she has never heard in their tones before. She didn’t know ghosts could feel fear.