Focus.
We’re all cogs in the machine.
He realised with a twinge of guilt that he was chuckling beneath his breath at the thought of his father’s famous “machine” oratory. It had been intended as a cunning metaphor: a fitting symbol of unity, of all parts relying on all others. Cogs and chains and pistons and levers, all as important as one another. A stirring speech and a resounding, enduring allegory for the tau’va.
Kais wondered what his father might think of him now, standing before the most colossal machine of all and seriously contemplating its destruction.
The gun felt heavy in his hands, its unfamiliar balance more than made up for by its usefulness. The journey to the hangar had not been without incident.
The weapon was vaguely reminiscent of a pulse rifle: a long barrel and squat stock with little obvious room for firing mechanisms. It was almost completely smooth but for a long groove running the length of the muzzle on either side. Unlike its rifle counterpart, it was black, a glossless matt darkness that made it seem unreal — a lance of shadows obstructing the paleness of his gloves. He’d seen weapons like it before: vast things slung to the stalwart undersides of Moray-class gun-ships, or else mounted massively on the wide shoulders of Broadside battlesuits.
It was a railgun, in miniature, and he’d already used it to punch holes through Traitor Marines with as little effort as sliding a needle through fabric. Tiny gravitic accelerators running the length of the barrel hyperaccelerated a single shell to unimaginable speeds: a linear concentration of energies that negated recoil and left its target blindly clutching at itself, senses far too slow to even register the impact until it was too late.
New technology, he guessed. Experimental, maybe. A prototype infantry version of an artillery weapon, fielded by test-shas’uis as a final assessment of its abilities. They’d died.
Too bad for them.
Kais squared his shoulders, locked off the auto-load on the coal-black gun, and stalked forwards towards the titan’s feet, ignoring the piles of dead gue’la technicians the littered the ground.
“Captain Ardias? Come in, Captain Ardias.”
“Come-in?”
“...WW...”
“Ardias? Reply, please.”
“...what is...? What?...”
“Captain Ardias? Lord, is that you?”
“...uungh... Emperor’s grace... what happened?”
“Lord? Are you all right?”
“Nothing serious. A few new scars.”
“Lord, this is Ensign Corgan, with the Purgatus.”
“This had better be important. I’ve just lost two entire squads. I haven’t time for navy trivialities...”
“My lord... We think we’ve found the epicentre.”
“The epicentre?”
“The centre of the warp portals. Like an... uh...”
“An HQ?”
“Yes... Yes, I suppose so. Commissar Gratildus with the Third battalion managed to discuss things with an enemy prisoner and—”
“Skip it. Where?”
“East, my lord. The mountains, to the east. It looks subterranean, some sort of pit.”
“Send me the co-ordinates.”
“Bu—”
“Ensign. Fifteen of my brothers are dead. My communicator is damaged, I can’t patch through to the rest of my company and even if I could, I’m cut off from them by a fire like an Inferria-Prime summer. My land speeder is all but destroyed, I’ve lost two fingers from my left hand and at least five of my ribs are broken. Do not waste my time.”
“S-sending co-ordinates now...”
Plaguelord Siphistus, Disease Marine of the Death Guard Legion, twitched his carrion lips into a lopsided impression of a smile and hissed pleasurably A strand of spittle, uncollected by the gyrations of his prehensile tongue, collected in bubble-flecked viscosity at the corner of his mouth and began the slow journey across his ulcerous chin.
Of his entire face, the only features not actively degrading in malignant pestilence were his eyes, burning with crystal intelligence: icebergs adrift in a polluted ocean. He giggled like a schoolchild and drummed his fingers— encased in millennia-old armour — against the armrests of the throne.
Old Grandfather Nurgle, most ancient and intractable of the Chaos Gods, had been truly generous this day. Siphistus’s excitement overcame him briefly and he coughed a thick soup of infected fluids, bubbling and wheezing glutinously and not bothering to wipe away the sputum.
“Power at sixty per cent...” one of the scurrying plague-priests gurgled, leech-like hands sucking raw information from the consoles around the command nave. “Ready now, lordship, yes.”
“Good. Good. Mm.” He sneered in pleasure, pink tongue flitting briefly from his mouth to clean his irises, lizardlike. “Do it. Do it now.”
Two more plague-priests — once-black robes of the Adeptus Mechanicus now stained with green mould and pus-like contagion — shuffled forwards in a chorus of creaking joints and rasping breaths, carrying the mindcrown. They settled it over his bald skull reverently, tightening clasps and inserting connector cables with clumsy, sluglike fingers.
“Connecting now, lordship,” one hissed, twisting a valve wheel.
Unfamiliar sensations rocked through the plague lord; a barrage of information and uncertainty, challenging his self-perceptions and opening conduits of thought and movement unconnected to his physicality. He could see from any one of a hundred internal cameras, each revealing the tight confines of the titan’s interior. He wondered if this was how flies felt: compound pupils flitting across myriad views at will.
He could gaze through the city machine’s eyes, hundreds upon hundreds of alternative angles and filters endowing him with complete wraparound sensory overload. He could hear what it heard, taste the air itself with electronic sensitivity, detect odours and gases and pheromones, feel its power emissions like a warm glow in his own guts-He was the titan-god.
He was the first machine child of the factories of Dolumar IV, an incarnate engine of destruction, holy vessel for the nascent machine spirit Imperio Prince-Nebulae Draconis, which moved through its logic engines with youthful exuberance, perplexed and invigorated by the presence of its first pilot.
Siphistus giggled again.
“Hello, my pretty-pretty...” he whispered, thoughts coiling insidiously around and through the confused spirit. “Won’t you come share with me...?”
Princeps? the machine thought, logic engine consciousness filled with slow analysis.
“Yess...” he hissed. “Yess, your princeps. Lord Siph. Me. Yess. Won’t you come share?”
The god-mind surged with power and dissolved into his thoughts, tasting and melding sensually, trusting in the sincerity and morality of its pilot guide to provide its moral compass. A child, placing its trust in a doting parent.
They intertwined and ran together.
When the two thought streams detached, Siphistus’s consciousness withdrawing slowly to behold its work, the Imperio Prince-Nebulae Draconis was changed. Radically changed.
“Lordship?” a Traitor Marine flanking his throne leaned closed to him, concerned. “Is all well?”
“No, brother...” Siphistus chuckled, dragging a maggot finger across his boil-encrusted brow. “All is vile.”
Like tendrils of decay, twisting and reticulating, black thoughts spiralled through the machine-spirit; pestilent conceits and amoralities swelling throughout its logic engines with a groan of displaced circuitry. All things rot, it accepted with childlike wonder. All things perish and decay and fester. Why fight against nature?