He glanced up from the half-translated cartogenetic instructional he had been reading line by line from storage wafers into the data reliquary. At least, that was mostly what he had been doing.
Genetic readers rumbled as they worked at their endless task, laser diffraction painting the eddying smoke with hazy lines of rainbow colours. The thudding steps of laboratorium servitors and the lilt of chanting hung with the dry fumes. A pair of initiate adepts drifted through it, there but, in some crucially contextual way, elsewhere, red-robed ghosts of flesh and cabling.
Zeta-One Prime was the only thing that was still. She stood while Urquidex sat, watching, her arc pistol holstered under her hand.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked suddenly.
‘I am instructing the cognis units to equivalate sequence and textual data with galactic grid references.’
‘Again?’
‘It must be done each time. The repetition is important.’
The skitarius fell silent a moment.
‘The first time you performed this task it required fifteen minutes and eleven seconds. You have been at this terminal for sixteen minutes, magos.’
With an effort, Urquidex suppressed the anxious tic of his digitools. They made him look guilty. The skitarius’ membranes flickered, some kind of sub-binaric code familiar to the deep biologics of his hindbrain.
I know.
He swallowed, tasted acid.
‘How much longer will this task require?’
‘I…’ He glanced at the reliquary’s scratchy, chrome-edged rune display, the lines of machine code that, though he could comprehend barely one symbol in five, he still knew betrayed a lot more than a cartogenetic instructional. He was resting a great deal on the faith that no mere skitarius, however elevated, would have been initiated into the First Circle of Information. ‘Two minutes.’
‘You have one.’
‘But—’
‘The artisan trajectorae apprised me of your sub-optimal performance in your prior duty designation. I will not tolerate the same here.’
‘But—’
‘Fifty-two seconds, magos.’
Biting his tongue and begging the machine’s clemency for such discourteous haste, he recited the final lines of the instructional via the data reliquary’s stiff ivory keys. As he worked, his digitools slid indepently over the tiers of keys.
‘I am close.’
The runes hovered in the machine’s active buffer, the noospheric equivalent of short term memory, for about five seconds before the detailed instructional he was inputting with his other hand swept them away.
‘How close?’
The question illuminated the electronic firmament. The data-strings were inelegantly composed, the syntax of quantum bits crude and, though the final form was legible, evidence of an inexpert hand.
But Clementina Yendl was no adept.
It had only taken a few days after his transfer from Noctis Labyrinth for her to locate him once more, and though Van Auken’s laboratorium was too well isolated for them to meet in person, they communicated. From her he had learned of the orks over Terra and more, sensed the urgency of her cause in the haste with which she ‘spoke’. He had not asked who she really was or whom she really served. Perhaps because the experience of trusting another person, of believing in their cause, was too precious to risk with such questions.
‘Three days,’ he sent back. ‘Two days if I do not purge the prognosticators of scrapcode, but the accuracy of our results will suffer.’
‘If you had to leave Mars now, could you finish?’
‘Now?’
‘Magos?’ said Zeta-One Prime, making him start.
He had not intended to speak aloud.
‘Stand by,’ he said, trying to make a dry mouth sound confident.
Disconnecting from the data reliquary, he hurried through the whirring stacks of cogitators. The kick of his robes disturbed ankle-deep engine smoke. His heart was pounding though he wasn’t sure why. A fly being watched by a chamaeleonidae.
Surrounded by trembling apparatus, a quiescent hololith table gave off a stilted glow. Urquidex connected himself through a series of peripheral nervous plugs. His fingers were sweating and it took several tries.
He was aware of Zeta-One Prime watching. For now, just watching. This action was abnormal, and the abnormal made her wary.
With a sympathetic impulse, he bade the hololith to awaken.
A three-dimensional map of the Imperium of Man shimmered into being. To his telescopic optics it was a heat map, data-dense regions showing through as yellows and reds, spiral arms separated by dark bands of nothing. Urquidex willed the data-vision to change. Hotspots and stellar landmarks dispersed, to be replaced by the branching lines of a phylogenetic tree. Except that ‘tree’ was too fleshbound a metaphor. Two-dimensional. It was more like the growth of a bacterial colony on a nutrient plate or the filamentous spread of a fungus. Offshoots extended into every segmentum of Imperial space, expanding outwards in three dimensions from a common root somewhere in the galactic core. The data represented it as an amorphous zone, grey and ill-defined, unpleasing on the diligent eye. The uncertainties were being continually smoothed away as the sequence mapping progressed, but it still covered hundreds of light years of congested space, thousands of worlds. His own cortex might be capable of processing it. He shook his head.
It was too complex.
‘Install a high capacity cable-link between the hololith and the data reliquary.’
‘To what purpose?’
‘Because I require it,’ Urquidex snapped, heart fumbling, and then with what he prayed was proper urgency rather than panic, ‘Please. Every second increases the likelihood of data degradation.’
He was aware of the interlink the instant that it was made. It was an erupting singularity of blinding connectivity, light and sound, thought and sensation, that even through the remove of a peripheral plug-in was almost overwhelming. He shunted the upload to a cortical machine sub-consciousness and did his best to disregard it.
‘The orks originate somewhere in the galactic core. It is a dense area. It will take time to isolate the exact world.’
Silence from the machine. The data galaxy spiralled, spiralled.
‘Yendl?’
Nothing.
‘This deviates, magos,’ said Zeta-One Prime, overcoming a pre-programmed fear of these machines and their workings with obvious reluctance. ‘If there is a problem then I am obligated to inform the artisan trajectorae.’
‘No. There is no need for that.’
He looked up.
The skitarius was up close: not angry, she was incapable of that, but as anxious as her emotional clamps allowed her to be. She radiated an artifical cold that needled around Urquidex’s implants and into the bone. Behind her, a woman in plain red robes approached. An initiate adept with a data-slate for inspection.
Odd.
The initiates worked on independent projects. They had never reported to him before.
The crack of a las discharge rang out like a hammer striking a nail. Zeta-One Prime jerked forward. There was another shot and she stumbled into the hololith, making the image shake. Ionised smoke uncoiling from the las-burns to her silvery exoskeleton, she began to turn.
The initiate struck her across the face with the data-slate. The slate bent in two in an eruption of sparks and knocked the skitarius back into the projector. A sharp kick into the shin dropped her onto her knees. A laspistol came up in the initate’s other hand and pushed up against the back of Zeta-One Prime’s skull. With laser clarity, Urquidex noted that the selector had been switched to full auto.