The Beast Arises

He incorporated Yendl into his complement of electro-priests and enginseers when he returned to the Noctis Labyrinth. The complex was an inverted hive city of laboratoria. The experimental centres functioned like the cells of an organism, at times working in isolation, at others linking with many in the service of larger projects. Urquidex’s party descended through levels of catwalks and tunnels into a world pulsing with arcane energy and technological ferment. Yendl could not understand the import of most of what she saw. It was too fragmentary. Through doorways, she saw vast machines engaged in dances complex, massive and strange. The scale of the endeavours was too huge for any one consciousness to encompass, and she came to a greater understanding of why the worship of the Machine-God had such a hold on Mars. What was constructed here, what was brought to mechanical life, and what was unleashed were far beyond the human. The spark of the numinous crackled in the giant forges.

Though Yendl couldn’t guess at the function of each piece of the puzzle that she witnessed, she had a sense of all the cells working in concert. A single project, perhaps the greatest undertaken, united the laboratoria. The cells were the mind of Mars, and it had but one goal.

Hundreds of levels down, at the end of a tunnel that twisted and spiralled and sprouted branches like ganglia, they reached the most gigantic nerve centre. It was bowl-shaped. Concentric circles of workstations and control thrones encircled a fifty-metre column of pict screens. Thousands of adepts were at work, mechadendrites plugging them into thrones and, Yendl guessed, to each other. The air was filled with the screech of binary cant.

Urquidex led his retinue to a post two-thirds of the way down the bowl. He settled into the throne, mechadendrites rising from it to sink into the base of his skull. Before him was a control surface stretching several metres in both directions. There were more ports and mechadendrites here too, enough for about half of Urquidex’s subordinates. The rest turned to devices that Yendl knew were mechanisms of some kind, though so foreign to the ways of flesh with their clusters of rods and dials and energy discharges that to her eyes they resembled jointed metal sculpture more than any form of instrumentality.

‘Bear witness to the Grand Experiment,’ Urquidex told her.

She stood beside the throne. There were other attendants, up and down the bowl, who stood guardian beside their magi, on hand to assist but not assigned particular duties. Yendl adopted that role. She slowed her breathing. She achieved machinic inertness. She watched the screens on the column.They showed feeds from numerous locations. She studied them, but could glean nothing from them. They were fragments, glimpses of vast and powerful mechanisms. Other screens showed very little. In the corners of one frame Yendl recognised the dry docks of the Ring of Iron, but the imagers were centred on empty space. The remaining screens, easily a third of the total, showed Phobos. The image of the moon repeated at intervals along the height of the column, rendering it clearly visible to every tier.

For the best part of an hour, all that happened was a gradual increase in activity. The movements of the adepts became more frequent and faster, as if greater numbers of variables were demanding attention. The chitter and scrape of binary intensified. Yendl didn’t move. She did as Urquidex had instructed. She waited to bear witness.

The event began. The energy in the laboratorium spiked. The machinery in some of the pict screens began to glow and spit arcs of lightning. The air vibrated with a subaudible hum. Yendl had the sense of being in a cathedral as a service moved towards its climax. Machinic prayer rose in a stuttering crescendo. Readouts climbed into red.

Then the vibration was not just in the air. It was in control surfaces, in the bodies of the adepts, in the floor, in the planet itself.

Phobos vanished.

The pict screens that looked at nothing flared. The image dissolved into static, returned, broke up, settled into a pulsing, jerking, tenuous existence. Tocsins sounded. More gauges red-shifted. In the centre of the frame, where there had been nothing, now there was Phobos, surrounded by a violet, violent corona.

A few seconds later, the ground shook. The earthquake lasted a few seconds. Its magnitude dropped off quickly until there was just the vibration again. Then that too stopped. The priests of Mars ceased all movement. It seemed to Yendl that they slumped with exhaustion, though there was no discernible change in their posture.

Urquidex said nothing to her then, nor during the four hours that followed as damage to the planet and machinery was assessed. Yendl remained as she was, processing what she had seen, assessing courses of action.