‘That is, my lord?’
‘Any and all materiel and technology taken in the battle must be collected by my subjects, and delivered here to Mars.’
‘For what purpose?’ asked Koorland.
‘Its study is vital to the defeat of the orks.’
‘I will agree to this, in exchange for all information pertaining to the ork threat you have already gathered.’
‘We have provided what we know to the Senatorum,’ said Kubik smoothly.
‘There are explorator fleets all over the Imperium,’ said Koorland. ‘Many of your forge worlds have been attacked. I have seen some of the intelligence you have gathered. It seems a little… thin.’
‘It is all we have,’ said Kubik. ‘Delivery of materiel will speed our analysis. We shall share what we learn when we have learnt it.’
Koorland stared a long moment at the Fabricator General. ‘Very well, but we shall oversee the transfer.’
‘Agreed,’ said Kubik.
‘We will speak again soon, on the day of our victory.’
Koorland’s image vanished as Kubik cut the link. The whispering of the diagnostiad members rose and fell like the rush of wind in the leaves of a forest. Kubik took to his throne again, and commanded it to descend. Gracefully it sank away, bringing Kubik to rest upon the only flat surface in the sphere, and the only part free of the cavities of the diagnostiad’s cells — a platform a hundred metres across, a raised road of Martian bronze leading across it to a huge pair of doors, guarded by a phalanx of stooped cyber-constructs. Kubik glided out of his throne. The doors opened before him. Outside stood the primary members of the Synod of Mars, waiting on his orders. Bowing profusely, they took his commands.
Eldon Urquidex was marched alongside Magos Laurentis up the Channel of Motivational Energies as Performed by the Flesh, a broad processional way laid out in mimicry of the internal workings of a cogitator’s logic boards. They were deep within the forge temple of Olympus Mons. Passages left at irregular intervals, each one guarded by bio-constructs and barred by heavy grilles known as the Gates of Logic.
The Channel was the largest road in a three-dimensional labyrinth, and the main route taken by supplicants to the Synod of Mars. The edifice had been constructed aeons ago during Old Night by a Fabricator General of questionable sanity, the legacy of costly experiments to mimic the ineffable deductive powers of pure energy through the medium of humanity. Techna-liturgia moving around the circuit were supposed to operate in a manner similar to the sub-atomic particles of the holy Motive Force. It had not of course worked, but where it had failed as a computational device, it succeeded as art, and remained a sacred place.
The Channel bored through the mountain in a las-straight line to the audience chamber of the Fabricator General, and Urquidex was worried.
Urquidex’s mechanical face was misleading. Behind the steel and the telescopic eye stalks lurked a very human brain. Not so long ago, Urquidex would have welcomed an appointment with Kubik as an opportunity to secure advancement with the Synod. Manipulation, flattery, spurious logic — these tools were Urquidex’s to deploy as easily as the fine manipulators on his additional limbs. That was before he became a traitor. Fear chilled the fluids in the tubes of his augmetics. Urquidex had worked himself to the centre of Kubik’s plans, and had come to disagree with them entirely. With news of the Last Wall’s arrival at Sol, and their dash for Terra, Kubik’s intelligence core and native brain alike would be slaved entirely to political scheming. It would take the slightest misstep to expose Urquidex. What small patches of skin remained to him were slick with the unpleasant excretions of anxiety.
The heavy tread of Kubik’s cybernetic guardians rang ominously on the metal plates of the Channel. Everything Urquidex saw, his nerves imbued with a sinister aspect. Servo-skulls and vat-constructs darting through the air became spies following his every movement. The chants of magi and electro-priests droning from the factory-chapels and techno-basilicae carried counter-melodies of accusation. The hisses and whines of holy manufacturing processes barely concealed their contempt for him. Laurentis, his emotions so heavily circumscribed by the surgery necessary to save his life after Ardamantua, lurched along placidly on his tripedal motive assembly, the thoughts whirring through his rebuilt brain secret from all.
Urquidex was no Ultima Mechanista, wishing away his humanity; for him and the members of his sub-cult, balance was to be sought between mechanical and organic. For was not the flesh nothing but the wet machinery of the Omnissiah? Finding such a balance was a cause of much worry to Urquidex. He thought back to Ardamantua, torn between the cold logic of the Subservius’ mission and the horror he had experienced at the annihilation of the Imperial Fists. Ruminating on that weakness, he envied Laurentis his new-found detachment.
Too soon they came to Kubik’s audience chamber. The doors were a pair of cogs set in series, one bearing a skull, the other a mechanical face: the machina opus split into two wholes. The cyber-constructs stopped and slammed their power glaives into the metal floor.
With mouthless voices they announced the magi’s arrival. ‘Magi Biologis Eldon Urquidex and Phaeton Laurentis request audience with his high logician the Fabricator General of Mars.’
Urquidex found that rich. There had been no request, they had been summoned. He would rather be anywhere than in Kubik’s presence today. Did Kubik know? Had that giant intellect uncovered his involvement with the agents of the Officio Assassinorum?
The doors rolled apart in opposite directions. Urquidex and Laurentis were ushered in. The audience chamber was designed to intimidate. On his best days, Urquidex found the vast space, crisscrossed with giant, crackling power conduits and humming with data-streams emanating from the diagnostiad, to be unnerving, and today was not one of his best days. Urquidex steadied himself and put his emotional feeds on temporary hold, redirecting his thought processes through the far steadier mechanisms of his intelligence core.
‘O mighty and most wise Fabricator General Kubik! Prime of primes, artisan without compare,’ said Urquidex, spreading his multiple limbs and executing a complex obeisance. ‘I am your humble servant. State your bidding, and I shall comply to the letter, without the error of signal loss or personal interpretation.’
Laurentis said nothing, but executed an awkward three-legged curtsey, his single organic eye blinking incongruously in the centre of his facial mechanisms.
Kubik sat in a high-backed, ovoid chair that floated a metre above the ground on a snapping grav-field. The dusty smell of high-energy discharge washed out from it as he floated forward to stop not far from the two biologians, the repulsor unit of the chair buffeting at their robes.
‘Magos Biologis Eldon Urquidex, Magos Biologis Phaeton Laurentis.’
‘Prime of primes, alpha of alphas,’ said Urquidex.
Laurentis said nothing.
‘Tell me,’ said Kubik. ‘What do you know of Second Captain Koorland of the Imperial Fists, lately returned to this system?’
Urquidex’s mechanical body parts sagged with relief. ‘Whatever you wish to know, Lord of Mars.’
Kubik’s chair turned, its energy field spitting, and he performed a slow circuit around the magi.
‘Laurentis first, you spent much time with him on Ardamantua.’
‘He was kind,’ said Laurentis, his vocal modulator thoughtful. ‘Honourable.’ Laurentis paused. ‘Fabricator General, it is often wise in such circumstances as these, where mismatch exists between the relative hierarchical status of two participants in an exchange, to provide an opinion not necessarily held by the responder. To give informative discourse couched in the subjective language that tallies with the result the interlocutor wishes to hear. I calculate you wish to hear the bad, but I cannot voice it. He saved my life.’