‘What is this?’ said Kalkator. ‘The cult of the Emperor as god has grown so strong it has you in its clutches?’
‘What of it? I will not deny my faith! See, warsmith.’ Magneric raised a mighty metal fist and rotated upon his waist gimbal, showing the devastation of the battlefield triumphantly. ‘How can you deny it? You have witnessed the glory of the Emperor first hand, and that the strength of the Emperor is paramount over all things! Even sorely wounded upon His Golden Throne, He wields a power that cannot be denied! Nothing can stop Him, nor those who serve Him truly with faith within their hearts. One day He will rid the galaxy of all evil, for unlike the creatures you threw your lot in with He is just. Justice comes for you, Kalkator, the Emperor’s justice, and all your wicked betrayers will be destroyed for your treachery. Look upon this battlefield, look upon the slaughter. This was done by His will alone. That is why we follow Him.’
Kalkator gripped at the parapet, looking down on the enemy who, so long ago, had been a friend.
‘I am genuinely at a loss for words. Do your loyalist brothers know you have caught the madness of the puling herds and have turned your back upon the Imperial Truth, the lie you fought so hard to protect? That you are casting it aside for the greatest heresy of all?’
‘The Emperor protected us with His lie,’ said Kalkator. ‘He protected us further by denying His godhood. We have had the scales lifted from our eyes. He is a god. The proof is around us everywhere, here on this battleground.’
Lights appeared in the sky, growing brighter. The Thunderhawks were coming.
‘You are abandoning everything you vowed to honour, and you call me a traitor?’ said Kalkator. ‘Such irony is a rare thing, Magneric. Do all your warriors follow this insane creed?’
‘Each and every one,’ said Magneric proudly.
‘Then you are treading the same deluded path as Lorgar. How will the other Space Marines look upon this great naiveté? Common humanity already worships the Emperor, and I say again, against His express wishes. All that is, Magneric, is an expression of their weakness and desire to be dominated, and proof of the Emperor’s desire to be worshipped despite His protestations. It appears Lorgar was but a little too early with his devotion. What would your Emperor make of you now? Would He hold out a hand for you to kiss while you grovel upon your knees? Or would He smash your face in with a mailed fist as He did to Lorgar?’
‘We would take either gladly,’ said Magneric, ‘if it meant our Lord would walk among men once more.’
Engine noise rumbled. The extraction craft approached, seven of them, and began to set down one after the other in the wreckage of the field. Kalkator’s Thunderhawks opened their hatches, and his men began to leave the building. The Black Templars made no move to stop them. They remained kneeling, heads bowed in prayer as the Iron Warriors passed between them.
‘Such devotion. Perhaps the Emperor is a god, after all, if He can inspire sane men to worship Him so,’ said Kalkator.
‘Embrace this truth, and your soul will be saved!’ said Magneric eagerly.
Kalkator laughed. Before he left the roof to join his warriors aboard their craft, he shouted down to Magneric. ‘I am not going to convert to your pathetic creed, Magneric. For if I cannot trust a man who lies, I trust a god who does so even less.’
Ralstan came to Magneric’s side, his wargear dripping gore. Kalkator’s gunships were taking off and heading for the sky. The Black Templars were preparing to leave, honouring their dead with silent prayer as they gathered up the wargear of the fallen and extracted gene-seed to safeguard against the future.
‘We could order them shot down as soon as they break atmosphere,’ said the castellan.
Magneric’s torso tilted backwards, watching the Iron Warriors gunships recede, becoming glowing balls of fire rising high into the night.
‘No. Let the hunt begin anew. We honour the oaths we make in battle, castellan, or we are no better than they.’
Twenty-One
Three partings
Kubik arrived in the temple of the diagnostic covens as the interrogation was ending. In a chamber deep underground, the dead Assassin was suspended from the ceiling, hands and feet fully enclosed in manacles. Portions of her skin had been removed, exposing bloodless muscles. Spaces in her anatomy hinted at the devices removed from her body. A domed helmet enclosed her head, studded all over with conical spikes from which curled multiple silver wires.
A lone genetor interogatis worked the machines probing the dead Assassin’s brain, accompanied by coil-handed servitors whose sole purpose was to adjust the magnetism of two tall field modulators.
‘Ah, Fabricator General, you arrive in time for the climax of my investigation. Most of the information I have extracted has been through the memorandum parsers. It should be ready soon. Bear with me as I finish this final interrogation.’
The genetor was a repulsive thing, a skinny flesh torso supported on limbs of slender sliding rods. His voice was papery, eager. He was a man who enjoyed his repellent work. ‘One moment, and I shall have the information you desire.’ He returned to his howling machines.
Kubik waited behind a buffering screen, lest his own bioelectrical field destroy the data being culled from the woman’s memory. He did not have to remain there for long. The machines cut out. A wet crack preceded the withdrawal of the helmet from the woman’s head. Wormy cyber-tentacles wriggled from her skull, dripping matter. The corpse shuddered.
‘I have all the raw data,’ said the genetor interogatis. ‘It will take a little while to transpose the last few fragments into binharic instructions my cogitators might process, and thence to image and sound…’ The genetor trailed off, absorbed in his task. Kubik waited twelve minutes. ‘There, I have it.’
‘Show me,’ said Kubik.
‘The image quality will be lacking, Fabricator General,’ said the genetor apologetically. ‘The woman was fresh, but drawing information from an unmodified brain is always the hardest. Editicore processors are the best, but even the least intelligence core can offer up a mind’s secrets. Alas, here we must rely on the primitive wiring of the flesh.’
He threw a lever with one three-fingered metal hand. An elliptical screen flickered on the wall.
‘There. The most recent memory I could recover, and I believe the most relevant. To go through her entire life will take time, even those few fragments that survived her death. But I think this will be helpful, great prime.’
Kubik ignored the prattling of the genetor, and watched the picts run, a jumble of images in no particular order. A lesser mind would have made no sense of them, but Kubik’s augmetics automatically recorded the images, and began to re-edit them into something approaching usability. He watched a scene from a few days ago, the gathering of an Assassin cadre. They stood around the loading ramp of an automated haulage barge in an obscure section of the Olympian landing fields. Where exactly, Kubik could not tell. There were five of them. The dead girl, three more on foot, one in a cryo-containment unit. Kubik seethed to see them meeting in the shadow of his own seat of power. The images jumped, running out of sequence, the scene changing to the vagaries of imperfect human recollection.
Four Assassins remained at liberty. Five was an unusually high number for one cell. Kubik had sat in the Senatorum for hundreds of years and had been involved in the authorisation votes for several high-level assassinations. One Assassin could topple the government of a world. But five? Deployment of such a number within the Imperium was reserved for the holders of the very highest offices, those who could call upon substantial resources — rogue admirals, corrupt cardinals, the renegade lords of star systems, or perhaps even a High Lord of Terra…
Kubik appraised the images, using what little he knew of the Officio Assassinorum to fit the operatives with the temples. The metronomic tick of his augmetic regulators stuttered when he identified the Eversor Temple adept within the cryo-containment pod, a creature so violent it had to be kept in suspended animation.