Aaron Dembski-Bowden - The First Heretic

Lorgar’s smile was pyrite-false. ‘Is that how you see our Pilgrimage?’

‘No. Never. But seven worlds died in fire, and we were almost destroyed after leaving the eighth.’

Lorgar’s grey gaze didn’t waver for a moment. He was seeing with his sixth sense, looking into his son’s heart, and sensing the second soul gestating there.

‘Enough of this maudlin remembrance,’ Lorgar’s tone betrayed his impatience. ‘Speak of the world we found.’

‘Do you remember,’ Argel Tal asked him, ‘when we first reached orbit?’

The floor was trembling in a most specific way.

Xi-Nu 73 processed this. Beneath his metal feet, the rumble of the ship’s deck had a very particular pulse – neither the arrhythmic flow of warp flight, nor the heartbeat tremor of sustained guidance thrust. Instead, murmurs coursed through his artificial bones, faint but blessedly metronomic.

Orbit.

Orbit, at last.

The last journey had been a long one. Xi-Nu 73 wasn’t a being given to indulging in speculation beyond the present, but his calculated projections were grim. The warp storms battering the fleet would certainly have claimed more than the three ships they’d already taken, had the 1,301st pressed on even farther past this world.

Xi-Nu 73 had heard one of his menials tell another that ‘the storm outside was hurling itself at the ship’s shields’, and he’d berated the worker for grafting human attributes onto an inappropriate subject. Such anthropomorphosis would harm the servant’s chances for future elevation within the Mechanicum.

It was a violent storm, no doubt there. But there existed no passion, no anger, no intent in the warp’s tides.

Elsewhere on De Profundis, the decks were alive with activity, as Astartes and human crew made ready for planetfall.

Xi-Nu 37 was largely immune to the brain chemistry necessary to feel excitement, having reengineered himself beyond such sensation. Instead, he focused entirely on his work, which stimulated the pleasure centres of his brain – a minute amount for each subroutine performed with absolute accuracy and ergonomic efficiency.

His fingers – fifteen of them spread across three mechanical hands – worked in the armoured bowl of Alizarin’s skull. It was a process of restructuring globs of bio-plastic, each one dripping with nutrient-rich juices, within the robot’s head. Each tract of spherical relay globes needed to be fixed and sealed into position, then connected to the slave systems they controlled, as well as the fail-safes they relied on in incidents of battle damage. Such were the workings of the robotic mind: an intelligence in mimicry of life, grown in a gene-lab to be used in a machine body.

The smell rising from this bowl of artificial cerebrospinal fluid was a revoltingly spicy reek reminiscent of rotting onions, but of course, Xi-Nu 73 had taken himself beyond the capacity to react to that as well. He only knew of the smell at all because his perceptive sensors streamed data onto his retinas, describing the stench in bland screeds of binary.

Despite the intricacies of his task, Xi-Nu 73 reserved a median five per cent of his focus to monitor his surroundings. Internal sensor arrays, perceiving the world through echolocation, first tracked the door to his workshop opening, then the movement of a figure traversing the chamber. The figure emitted an unmistakable power signature: armour, Mark III, Astartes.

Several other signals joined the first. Five Astartes in total.

These details flashed up as runic symbols on Xi-Nu 73’s vision display. He paid them little heed, knuckle-deep as he was in organic slime, plugging tiny interface feeds into segmented spheres of bio-plastic. Each sphere was a part of the cortex program. Each fibre-optic link simulated synapses.

The Astartes had the good grace not to interrupt. They waited the three point three-two minutes until Xi-Nu 73 had finished the current phase of ministrations. A satisfaction pulse wormed through Xi-Nu’s datacore. Dampened pleasure receptors fired. Work was complete.

At last, the Mechanicum adept turned from the workshop table. Ooze dripped from his fifteen metal fingers.

‘Subcommander,’ he said, neither acknowledging the senior sergeants at Argel Tal’s side nor offering the kind of respectful bow usually given by mortal members of the crew. ‘You are present to commence preparations on Incarnadine .’

Argel Tal was armoured for the coming planetfall, as were the officers with him. Xaphen, clad in black, Dagotal, Malnor and Torgal – all wearing the Legion’s granite grey.

‘It is time,’ said Argel Tal.

Xi-Nu’s three lens-eyes took a few seconds to refocus. ‘This way,’ the adept replied.

The warriors followed the machine-priest into the red-lit chamber beyond.

It wasn’t that Xi-Nu 73 felt any shame in Incarnadine’s induction into the Word Bearers Legion. Such an honour was tantamount to the highest accolades in the Legio Cybernetica, and evidence of the commanding adept’s mastery – such a machine clearly had a spirit of fierce intensity, and was worthy of recognition.

It was just that since the induction into the Serrated Sun, since the Chapter’s sigil had been etched onto the robot’s forehead, the Conqueror Primus of 9th Maniple was a touch more... erratic. The machine’s spirit had the error-laden propensity to act unpredictably, and that was unacceptable.

Even to a veteran adept like Xi-Nu 73, this made no sense outside of his deepest, darkest suspicions. He’d run several hundred diagnostics, as was his meticulous duty, but the discrepancies (the flaws? The aberrations?) in Incarnadine’s cortex would resurface after each maintenance.

On one occasion, never to be repeated, Xi-Nu 73 had taken the greatest, gravest risk, purging Incarnadine’s bioplastic brain. After flushing every trace of matter from the robot’s skull bowl, he rebuilt the cortex over the space of four months, using spare parts, ritually cleansed after being taken from his supply caches.

The robot had a new brain, for Cog’s sake. And still, still, it was...

Well. There was another problem. The Martian code-tongue lacked adequate description to summate the problem. Xi-Nu 73 had ventured the closest human term to describe the situation was that his Conqueror Primus was glitched. He considered this a symptom of his assignment, not just to the 1,301st Expeditionary Fleet, but to the Word Bearers Legion itself.

The war machines and expert technical crews of Carthage Cohort were spread across the many Word Bearers fleets, rather than housed on their own Mechanicum vessels the way the Titan Legions were. Lorgar’s own insistence made it thus. Decades before, when the Legio Cybernetica had first approached the Word Bearer lord, Lorgar had generously offered to modify his vessels to accommodate the specialist needs of his new Mechanicum allies.

‘We are all brothers under the same god’s gaze,’ he’d said to the Fabricator-General, during his first visit to the surface of Mars. Apparently, a concordance was reached soon after. The Carthage Cohort, one of Cybernetica’s proudest armies, would march with the XVII Legion, and dwell in the bowels of their vessels.

Xi-Nu 73 had not been present at the time this ancient oath was sworn – had not even been flesh-born back then – and this contributed to his doubts about the tale’s veracity. The reason it never cogitated as pure truth to Xi-Nu’s perceptions was simple: despite how useful the Carthage Cohort was to the Word Bearers Legion, the Astartes simply did not like the Mechanicum element in their midst. Relations were closer to cold than cordial, even taking the Mechanicum’s inhumanity into consideration.