The servile construct screwed back on its single caterpillar track, trailing the measuring tape with which it had been sizing his foot for prosthesis. Its head was a small human skull with a parchment covering of mummified flesh, suspended above a whining motive unit by an articulated metal spine. Its ears were large, encouraged to grow along a cartilage matrix the better to receive spoken commands. Its eyelids had been removed, its mouth stapled shut. It stared at him blankly until Zerberyn, unnerved by the emptiness he saw reflected in its eyes, turned back to the viewport. With half his weight on an iron crutch, he allowed the servitor to return to fuss about his foot as if nothing had transpired.
‘My Apothecaries could furnish you with an augmetic far superior to anything your own might have access to,’ said Kalkator.
Zerberyn chose not to reply. Bad enough to have been picked up by the traitors’ gunships in the first place.
‘I will think about it. But not now.’
‘Does watching make it better, or worse?’
‘It is an act of penance.’
He could feel the warsmith’s sneer. It had a vibration all of its own that carried it across the rigorously atmosphere-controlled viewing gallery.
‘One day, Kalkator. One day you and I will be called to account for every life we destroyed here today.’
‘Not destroyed, little cousin. Sacrificed.’
In absolute silence, a flash of amber light rose up from the planet’s core and engulfed it. It happened in a split-second. Zerberyn grunted, eyes narrowing against the sudden, short-lived glare. By the time his vision recovered Prax was gone, a fading red stain on his retinas.
Sacrificed for the Imperium.
He hoped that the reward would be worth it.
Twenty-Three
The vid-recording was grainy and poor, the field dark, the capture soundless. The borders fluctuated, spawning flurries of black snow that intermittently cloaked the figures in central view.
There were two of them. The first was clothed in heavy vestments, the skin grafts and bionic attachments of his face swollen out of proportion and stretched around a curve to fill the round of the visual feed recorder’s lens. The second was standing back, visible in profile as she glanced intermittently over her shoulder. She was a woman, slighter than the first figure, robed in Martian red and bodiced with bronze plates, her face masked by filtration tubes and optic sensors. One arm was appended with a bionic brace that twitched with digital manipulators and beam cutters and in the other she handled an arc pistol with uncommon adroitness. She looked tense. Her rebreather apparatus made it impossible to make out her lips, but from the movement of her exposed cheekbones and neck, it was clear that she was saying something. The distended curvature of her companion’s mouth opened and closed in response.
Green bars tracked the movement of his lips. Runes flickered, superimposed over the bottom of the screen, as linguistic algorithms struggled and failed to provide a translation.
The front figure turned slightly, a digital black ghost image hanging in the air for several seconds after. He said something more. The woman replied.
‘—recording yet?’
Audio as bitty as the image scrunched up from nothing to fill the feed. The laboured in-out rasp of the man’s breathing, too close to the pickups, the rhythmic sigh of industrial machine noise.
‘I… I think so,’ he said, tapping at a console.
The woman drew him back. Their afterimages mingled for a moment, before the uncooperative recording device cleared the bandwidth confusion and showed just two figures once again.
‘Grand Master. This is Clementina Yendl of Red Haven, transmitting from Pavonis Hive. With me is Magos Biologis Eldon Urquidex.’ She gestured behind her. The figure nodded at his name. ‘I regret that this will be my last report. The Mechanicus know where the orks are coming from. They have had a good idea since Ardamantua at the least and probably before that.’ She glanced over her shoulder, then turned back, speaking more urgently. ‘My attempt to extract the magos and bring this information to you has failed. I can only hope this transmission reaches you before the Mechanicus shut down this section. Urquidex.’
The magos looked up sharply. The fear in his face defied the resolution quality.
‘Tell them what you know.’
He stepped forwards, then checked back as a phosphor flash lit up the background image and a loud bang crumpled through the audio.
‘They’re h—’
Koorland studied the frozen image in the data-slate: the magos looking over his shoulder in horror, the woman blurred in the act of aiming her pistol. He set the slate face down onto the large, figured wooden table, pushing aside the stack that had accumulated there over the course of the morning. Without the slightest change to his grim expression, he glared into the imagined distance.
The Cerebrium overlooked the Palace roofscape from the heights of Widdershins Tower, atmospheric and orbital craft crisscrossing the fortress skyline. Tech-crews hung in cradles from deltaform lifters in the mottled khaki of the Departmento Munitorum, servicing defensive installations that had not experienced proper maintenance since the last great programme of rebuilding instigated by Roboute Guilliman in the aftermath of the Siege. Pot-bellied troop transports shipped in Astra Militarum regiments from Triton, Ganymede, Venus, and from training bases throughout the system. Shining like a lake under sunlight undiminished by any semblance of an ozone barrier, armour units massed in the thousand-hectare rockcrete square of the Fields of Winged Victory. Lastan Neemagiun Veritus, the Inquisitorial Representative, had told him that the Emperor Himself had watched Horus Lupercal’s first landing boats come down from this very spot.
Koorland certainly felt something from the ancient Albian oak panelling and book-lined shelves. Power. Responsibility. An almost spiritual bond to his genetic heritage. But he had selected the room as his private study in large part for the view, an instinctual desire to take and hold the high ground.
Drakan Vangorich stood patiently, hands curled over the back of one of the twelve chairs tucked under the table, eyes narrowed against the sunlight streaming through the open shutters.
‘How long have you had this recording?’ Koorland asked.
‘Moments. I brought it to you as soon as I received it, lord.’
‘Your expediency is appreciated.’
‘I trusted you to do the right thing with it.’
‘Is there any more?’
‘What I know, you’ve just seen.’
Koorland clenched his jaw. If the recording had divulged the location of the orks then for the sake of unity he would have contented himself with that, and put the Adeptus Mechanicus’ actions down to simple heel-dragging. He would have dealt with them later, content in the knowledge that there might be a later. Now, that deal was off.
‘Is the Fabricator General still in the Palace?’
‘I believe that his personal shuttle departed from Daylight space port with his entourage about,’ Vangorich smiled thinly, ‘moments ago.’
Koorland sat back and scooped up another slate. It was one that he had already read and memorised earlier in the day, the sort of detail to which the human High Lords had likely never devoted themselves. He looked through it, thinking, without needing to read it again.
‘Some good news?’ asked Vangorich.
‘Astropath logs from Oort Base. Alcazar Remembered translated into the system two hours and fifteen minutes ago, immediately relaying a request to Mars for docking codes and emergency repair. A request that one hour and three minutes ago was granted with a berth cleared for them at Demus Manus port in the orbital ring. You have more than this one operative on Mars, I presume?’