‘Proceed, magos.’
The voice was female, piped into the chamber like gas through the walls.
A clunk sounded from the far end of the cubicle, followed by a whoosh of evacuating air. Urquidex winced as it flowed over his sunburned flesh and the door ground open. His ears popped under the change in pressure.
A biologis laboratorium, then: the design adhered to schemata laid down by arch-magi from an era before the Dark Age of Technology, and to Urquidex was more familiar than his own surgically modified face. A slender needle of curiosity pricked his skin of fear. Such a place was an unlikely venue for an interrogation, or even an execution.
He walked through the door to be met by another skitarius. This one was female, that much of her original body plan evident even through her heavy robes and obtrusive techno-refinements, and was covering the door with an arc pistol. Her left hand had been retrofitted with a combat glove with an integrated transonic razor. Urquidex absorbed those prosaic details at a glance, for her most unique feature was too stunning to devote time and attention elsewhere. Head to toe, the skitarius had been physically remodelled in dazzling silver. Other agencies of the Imperium exploited that precious metal for its anti-psychic properties, but the Adeptus Biologis archives retained many fragmentary references to its ancient bactericidal application.
She watched him sceptically, and Urquidex, fearfully, said nothing.
‘Stand down to readiness level, Zeta-One Prime,’ came the deep, breathy voice of Artisan Trajectorae Van Auken, each word enunciated with a puff of mechanical diaphragms.
Eldon stiffened and froze.
The artisan trajectorae emerged from the incense pall that cloaked a bank of shuddering ruminators. His spindly shoulders were slumped under the weight of a servo-harness and multitools, and his forehead had been broadened and deepened with the installation of a thick plasteel plate. He emitted a hiss of pistoned air and dismissed his sterile and glittering adjutant with the flex of a mechadendrite.
‘You have no questions, magos? Do you forget the Eleventh Universal Law?’
Urquidex answered by rote. ‘The universe is uncertain until it is observed.’
‘Your locum trajectorae expressed concerns regarding your state of mind. It was her conclusion that you were distracted, that the Grand Experiment was in some way insufficiently fulfilling.’
Urquidex opened his mouth, but there was no subjective rebuttal to the locum trajectorae’s objective conclusions. He remained silent, mouth dry. Van Auken knew. The thought ran round and round his higher functions like a scrapcode algorithm on a recursive loop.
‘You are frustrated by the lack of progress,’ Van Auken continued for him. ‘I understand. It is not your proper specialism. You have been unable to devote your full energies to this grand task.’
‘Yes, artisan,’ he said carefully. ‘But my lapse of purpose is inexcusable.’
‘Indeed so, but the Fabricator General has another task more meritous of your talents, magos.’
The artisan trajectorae turned and for the first time, Urquidex took a proper look at the glorious scale of the laboratorium.
Instruments filled the floor, spaced apart from one another, as machines of their type were known to be jealous of their status within the schemata, and could be cantankerous when the proper attention was not afforded them. Adepts of the first level chanted soothing psalms, scattering the straining machines with crystals from their aspersoria, carbon dioxide produced and sanctified in the manufactories of Marcotis Temple. Even so, electrical smoke seeped from the instruments’ backs and pooled on the metal tiles. Wheezing scrubbers did their best to filter the pollutants from the air.
Servitors clumped from instrument to instrument carrying plastek plates indented with tiny wells containing organic serum. Attendant techno-magi received the sample dishes, commended them to the all-seeing attentions of the Omnissiah, and fed them into the machines under their care. And through the semi-transparent plastek view-plates that overlooked the sterilisation chamber, the exact repetitive routine was enacted over and over, identically laid out levels stacked one atop the next high into the smog layer.
‘Samples are brought to this laboratorium from across the Imperium,’ said Van Auken. ‘You can understand the demand for secrecy. And for biological integrity.’
Urquidex nodded.
A magos was loading a set of plates into the ornately inscribed chrome housing of a prognosticator, triggering seizures of clacking and shuddering and frenzied bursts of laser light. In parallel, hundreds of sequence graphics sputtered up on the networked displays. Each was an assemblage of coloured lines representing As and Ts, Cs and Gs, and Xs. After about half an hour of chewing noises the machine expelled the spent samples and emitted an insatiable peal for more data.
‘You hope to find a solution to the Grand Experiment in their genetic code,’ said Urquidex. ‘It won’t work. Veridi giganticus’ genome is structurally unstable. It is a mosaic of recombinatorial sequences and mobilisable elements, continually on the cusp of one speciation event or another. Veridi giganticus should not be at all.’
‘It is your specialism, magos, not mine, and I do not pretend to understand it. But no, that is not our goal.’
With his human hand Van Auken directed Urquidex’s attention to a neighbouring screen. This one was packed with moving code lines, the backing cogitator plugged via a heavy-duty shunt into a run of cabling that disappeared into the ceiling. The system’s program wafer had the machine data-mining the Martian noosphere, pulling up astropathic logs, engagement reports, every bit of data relevant to the Veridi giganticus samples that came with a grid stamp and a time stamp, and then cross-referencing them against the sequence output.
A map.
The artisan trajectorae was making a map.
The very genetic instability of Veridi giganticus was the way in. A population would be expected to accumulate sequence alterations over a very short period of time. As they moved on and established new populations, those unique alterations would be carried forward and added to, and so on. With enough samples those changes could be tracked back. The Adeptus Biologis did it all the time. Mapping the spread of viruses through hive worlds, extrapolating the evolution of newly discovered Homo subspecies at the request of the Inquisition. Thus was the grace of the Omnissiah made manifest in the base material of Its organic machines.
Urquidex could see sample tags referenced to Ardamantua, Undine, Malleus Mundi. Hundreds, thousands of names: worlds from the breadth and span of the Imperium. The ork incursion was more widespread even than he had realised.
‘You are looking for the orks’ home world.’
‘One successful test does not complete the Grand Experiment. Phobos has a diameter of twenty-two kilometres. Mars is more than three hundred and ten times larger. In effect, the Grand Experiment has become an issue of scale.’
‘Scale…’
Urquidex tested the word, measured it, weighed it. The Grand Experiment had not stalled because of him or Yendl. It was a technical problem. Yendl was probably still alive, going over his last communiqué and wondering what had become of him. He swallowed, his sudden relief somehow more powerful even than his fear had been, and clasped his hands behind his back to obscure his quivering digitools.
‘Veridi giganticus has somehow managed to overcome the discontinuity between efficiency and scale,’ said Van Auken. ‘Or otherwise devised a solution to circumvent the Omnissiah’s constants.’
‘It sounds as though you admire them for it.’
‘They are a superbly constructed species, individually adaptive, collectively diverse. They are an apex species, magos, as once we were. There is much to re-learn from them, and yes, we are not above admiration. We have narrowed their point of origin to six or seven candidate sectors. A few thousand systems at the galactic core of Ultima Segmentum.’