Sluggish rivers of polluted water meandered through the detritus-citadels. Spectromatic feedback revealed a toxic combination of chemicals oozing from the city, acidic and deadly — at least, to humans. Though he understood the hardiness of the orkoid species, the dominus was surprised to see small towns clinging to the banks of the rivers, breaching the lakes and pools as stilt-villages, as though some sustenance might be clawed back from the oil-slicked flows.
The outer settlements and maze of roads grew thicker closer to the city, like the moons of a gas supergiant unable to escape its pull, not yet consumed by its presence. There was no single point of change, no easy delineation between not-city and city. The citadels started to merge, becoming vaster and taller, yet still only outskirts and buttresses of the urban mountain that rose up beyond.
While he rode on the physical senses of the datacraft pilot, the dominus allowed his central consciousness capacitors to analyse the ongoing stream of other data fed into dozens of the Cortix Verdana’s supracogitators. He traced a near-invisible energy stream, networking through the scattered settlements to the central mass of the city itself. There was certainly no sign of a physical transmission system on the surface, and the surveyors were unable to determine if subterranean lines carried the energy waves. Nor did there seem to be any specific generation point. A few reactors and power plants had been detected in some of the fortresses, but their grids did not extend far beyond their walls.
More confusingly, the energy flow appeared to be towards the city, not out of it. The settlements were feeding the city somehow.
With a growing sense of distasteful revelation, Zhokuv was forced to conclude that the city was built from the remains of a far larger settlement, like a star going nova that was consuming its stellar system to fuel itself. Its near-impossible bulk heaved out of the plain, separated from a high mountain range to the west by a broad river that meandered north-west to a ragged coastline fifteen kilometres from the base of the mountain.
Tecto-sonographic impulses revealed that the heart of the city delved as deep into the crust as it rose, a catacomb of thousands of square kilometres of halls and corridors, the equal of the buildings and streets above.
Unlike the shanty-keeps of the ash wastes, these buildings seemed new. Although the materials were obviously reclaimed, showing signs of corrosion and improvisation, the slab-sided structures had a more considered, fabricated look than the ad-hoc fortifications of the wasteland. The closer to the centre of the city, the more organised the layout. Wide thoroughfares and broad plazas that would be the envy of any Imperial city emerged from the discordant urban clutter of the periphery.
Even as he marvelled at this, Zhokuv registered a vocal input and identified it as coming from Phaeton Laurentis.
‘Remarkable,’ droned the tech-priest. ‘Even a cursory analysis of the structural integrity ratings reveals a complex logarithmic progression.’
‘I see it,’ said Delthrak. ‘It is an exponential inversion. What does that mean?’
‘Order from anarchy.’ Laurentis let out one of his grating chuckles. ‘An urban incarnation of the emergence of will over wild.’
The dominus briefly focused on the other squadrons, to see if they encountered similar circumstances. The other two cities, of which it seemed there were actually many more across the planet, duplicated the structure-from-disorder scale to varying degrees.
‘Manifest order!’ crowed Laurentis. His enthusiasm quickly turned to solemnity. ‘I warned about this from the outset. But I was wrong, no simple will guides this. No volition. No single vision, to be precise. It is the inherency of the native orkoid hierarchy to eventually escalate to a point where upper echelons of order realise endemically out of the semi-random appropriation of their genetic and technological inheritance.’
‘If allowed to grow to sufficient levels, a true Veridi giganticus civilisation emerges?’ Zhokuv mused. ‘A sustainable, organised culture? Is that really possible?’
‘Possibly even sentience to the point of co-existence,’ Laurentis postulated, his vocal synthesisers tremulous with the thought.
‘Impossible,’ snapped Delthrak. The Barbarian’s Advocate snorted. ‘Highly organised, I grant you. Capable of peaceful interaction with other species? Nothing in any study has ever hinted at such a possibility. Structured or not, they would see the Cult Mechanicus and humankind destroyed or enslaved.’
‘No weapons,’ added the dominus. ‘We are well within any security zone, eighteen kilometres from the city centre. No response as yet…’
Long-range visuals started to reveal the innermost areas of the city, while laser-like injection scans sent back more detailed feedback of geological, physical and structural data.
Where the outer precincts seemed heaped upon each other, almost toppling upon themselves in their efforts to cram in as much living space as possible, the city’s inner region was like the eye of a storm.
An instant later Zhokuv’s surveyor-senses felt a surge of power from below, emanating from the outer fortifications. His immediate reaction set sirens squealing through the decks of the Cortix Verdana and triggered alarms across the panels of the other datacraft. The pilot he was monitoring responded within moments, as did the others, but human reactions were simply not swift enough to avoid what happened next.
Energy flared up from the ground, flowing like a shimmering wall from hundreds of generator stations located in the outlying citadels. Four milliseconds after first detecting the eruption, Zhokuv wrenched his engrammatic presence out of the pilot’s body, but even so he felt the contact-shock of the force field’s interaction with the datacraft.
Through his assayer conduits on the Cortix Verdana the dominus witnessed an interspersed energy signature unlike anything he had encountered — part gravitic, part electromagnetic, part radiation, and part something entirely unquantifiable. The same happened in the other targeted cities, with near-instantaneous coordination between the different conurbations.
Part of him experienced the raising of the defensive shield in this detached manner, watching the intersection of the roiling wave with the physical entities of the datacraft, slicing them in half. Simultaneously, his meta-being still encapsulated in the biological systems of the pilot caught the faintest echo of the man’s interpretation of events.
It was as though a giant hand swatted him out of the sky. An impression, nothing physical to be recorded, nothing verifiable. Swatted. It was the exact feeling that vibrated through Zhokuv’s being as the tiniest portion of mortal pain started to flood the pilot’s nervous system and the dominus’ engrammatic ejection completed.
The datacraft and its companions exploded as power plants overloaded, turning each into a scattering of particles that slicked along the shimmering screens of energy that now enveloped the cities.
Wholly back aboard his starship, Zhokuv took nearly two seconds to recover from the shock of engrammatic death. He felt incomplete, disjointed. Flustered, he withdrew his other data-tendrils from the Cortix Verdana’s systems, allowing full control back to the servitors and tech-priests. He detached his auditory and visual inputs to cocoon himself in absolute sense deprivation for several milliseconds while he contemplated the experience.
Mortality. There had been no physical threat to the dominus but even the glancing experience of the orks’ power left him in no doubt that he faced a highly advanced technology. It was one matter to know as much from the reports of the attack moons and other weaponry thus far employed, but it was something far different to encounter it first-hand.