The Beast Arises

The Channel was the largest road in a three-dimensional labyrinth, and the main route taken by supplicants to the Synod of Mars. The edifice had been constructed aeons ago during Old Night by a Fabricator General of questionable sanity, the legacy of costly experiments to mimic the ineffable deductive powers of pure energy through the medium of humanity. Techna-liturgia moving around the circuit were supposed to operate in a manner similar to the sub-atomic particles of the holy Motive Force. It had not of course worked, but where it had failed as a computational device, it succeeded as art, and remained a sacred place.

The Channel bored through the mountain in a las-straight line to the audience chamber of the Fabricator General, and Urquidex was worried.

Urquidex’s mechanical face was misleading. Behind the steel and the telescopic eye stalks lurked a very human brain. Not so long ago, Urquidex would have welcomed an appointment with Kubik as an opportunity to secure advancement with the Synod. Manipulation, flattery, spurious logic — these tools were Urquidex’s to deploy as easily as the fine manipulators on his additional limbs. That was before he became a traitor. Fear chilled the fluids in the tubes of his augmetics. Urquidex had worked himself to the centre of Kubik’s plans, and had come to disagree with them entirely. With news of the Last Wall’s arrival at Sol, and their dash for Terra, Kubik’s intelligence core and native brain alike would be slaved entirely to political scheming. It would take the slightest misstep to expose Urquidex. What small patches of skin remained to him were slick with the unpleasant excretions of anxiety.

The heavy tread of Kubik’s cybernetic guardians rang ominously on the metal plates of the Channel. Everything Urquidex saw, his nerves imbued with a sinister aspect. Servo-skulls and vat-constructs darting through the air became spies following his every movement. The chants of magi and electro-priests droning from the factory-chapels and techno-basilicae carried counter-melodies of accusation. The hisses and whines of holy manufacturing processes barely concealed their contempt for him. Laurentis, his emotions so heavily circumscribed by the surgery necessary to save his life after Ardamantua, lurched along placidly on his tripedal motive assembly, the thoughts whirring through his rebuilt brain secret from all.

Urquidex was no Ultima Mechanista, wishing away his humanity; for him and the members of his sub-cult, balance was to be sought between mechanical and organic. For was not the flesh nothing but the wet machinery of the Omnissiah? Finding such a balance was a cause of much worry to Urquidex. He thought back to Ardamantua, torn between the cold logic of the Subservius

’ mission and the horror he had experienced at the annihilation of the Imperial Fists. Ruminating on that weakness, he envied Laurentis his new-found detachment.

Too soon they came to Kubik’s audience chamber. The doors were a pair of cogs set in series, one bearing a skull, the other a mechanical face: the machina opus split into two wholes. The cyber-constructs stopped and slammed their power glaives into the metal floor.

With mouthless voices they announced the magi’s arrival. ‘Magi Biologis Eldon Urquidex and Phaeton Laurentis request audience with his high logician the Fabricator General of Mars.’

Urquidex found that rich. There had been no request, they had been summoned. He would rather be anywhere than in Kubik’s presence today. Did Kubik know? Had that giant intellect uncovered his involvement with the agents of the Officio Assassinorum?

The doors rolled apart in opposite directions. Urquidex and Laurentis were ushered in. The audience chamber was designed to intimidate. On his best days, Urquidex found the vast space, crisscrossed with giant, crackling power conduits and humming with data-streams emanating from the diagnostiad, to be unnerving, and today was not one of his best days. Urquidex steadied himself and put his emotional feeds on temporary hold, redirecting his thought processes through the far steadier mechanisms of his intelligence core.

‘O mighty and most wise Fabricator General Kubik! Prime of primes, artisan without compare,’ said Urquidex, spreading his multiple limbs and executing a complex obeisance. ‘I am your humble servant. State your bidding, and I shall comply to the letter, without the error of signal loss or personal interpretation.’

Laurentis said nothing, but executed an awkward three-legged curtsey, his single organic eye blinking incongruously in the centre of his facial mechanisms.

Kubik sat in a high-backed, ovoid chair that floated a metre above the ground on a snapping grav-field. The dusty smell of high-energy discharge washed out from it as he floated forward to stop not far from the two biologians, the repulsor unit of the chair buffeting at their robes.

‘Magos Biologis Eldon Urquidex, Magos Biologis Phaeton Laurentis.’