The Beast Arises

Nictitating membranes flickered across the empty, machined eyes of Zeta-One Prime. It was the cold, infinitely patient stare of a reptile, a chamaeleonidae watching a fly. Urquidex tried to abstract her from his consciousness, but the cold sense of her silver presence on the back of his neck was an order of magnitude worse. He shivered and pulled up the collar of his robe. Presumably, the skitarius’ build had been designed to elicit exactly that kind of biological response. Cold-blooded to warm. Predator, prey.

He glanced up from the half-translated cartogenetic instructional he had been reading line by line from storage wafers into the data reliquary. At least, that was mostly what he had been doing.

Genetic readers rumbled as they worked at their endless task, laser diffraction painting the eddying smoke with hazy lines of rainbow colours. The thudding steps of laboratorium servitors and the lilt of chanting hung with the dry fumes. A pair of initiate adepts drifted through it, there but, in some crucially contextual way, elsewhere, red-robed ghosts of flesh and cabling.

Zeta-One Prime was the only thing that was still. She stood while Urquidex sat, watching, her arc pistol holstered under her hand.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked suddenly.

‘I am instructing the cognis units to equivalate sequence and textual data with galactic grid references.’

‘Again?’

‘It must be done each time. The repetition is important.’

The skitarius fell silent a moment.

‘The first time you performed this task it required fifteen minutes and eleven seconds. You have been at this terminal for sixteen minutes, magos.’

With an effort, Urquidex suppressed the anxious tic of his digitools. They made him look guilty. The skitarius’ membranes flickered, some kind of sub-binaric code familiar to the deep biologics of his hindbrain.

I know.

He swallowed, tasted acid.

‘How much longer will this task require?’

‘I…’ He glanced at the reliquary’s scratchy, chrome-edged rune display, the lines of machine code that, though he could comprehend barely one symbol in five, he still knew betrayed a lot more than a cartogenetic instructional. He was resting a great deal on the faith that no mere skitarius, however elevated, would have been initiated into the First Circle of Information. ‘Two minutes.’

‘You have one.’

‘But—’

‘The artisan trajectorae apprised me of your sub-optimal performance in your prior duty designation. I will not tolerate the same here.’

‘But—’

‘Fifty-two seconds, magos.’

Biting his tongue and begging the machine’s clemency for such discourteous haste, he recited the final lines of the instructional via the data reliquary’s stiff ivory keys. As he worked, his digitools slid indepently over the tiers of keys.

‘I am close.’

The runes hovered in the machine’s active buffer, the noospheric equivalent of short term memory, for about five seconds before the detailed instructional he was inputting with his other hand swept them away.

‘How close?’

The question illuminated the electronic firmament. The data-strings were inelegantly composed, the syntax of quantum bits crude and, though the final form was legible, evidence of an inexpert hand.

But Clementina Yendl was no adept.

It had only taken a few days after his transfer from Noctis Labyrinth for her to locate him once more, and though Van Auken’s laboratorium was too well isolated for them to meet in person, they communicated. From her he had learned of the orks over Terra and more, sensed the urgency of her cause in the haste with which she ‘spoke’. He had not asked who she really was or whom she really served. Perhaps because the experience of trusting another person, of believing in their cause, was too precious to risk with such questions.

‘Three days,’ he sent back. ‘Two days if I do not purge the prognosticators of scrapcode, but the accuracy of our results will suffer.’

‘If you had to leave Mars now, could you finish?

’

‘Now?’

‘Magos?’ said Zeta-One Prime, making him start.

He had not intended to speak aloud.

‘Stand by,’ he said, trying to make a dry mouth sound confident.

Disconnecting from the data reliquary, he hurried through the whirring stacks of cogitators. The kick of his robes disturbed ankle-deep engine smoke. His heart was pounding though he wasn’t sure why. A fly being watched by a chamaeleonidae.

Surrounded by trembling apparatus, a quiescent hololith table gave off a stilted glow. Urquidex connected himself through a series of peripheral nervous plugs. His fingers were sweating and it took several tries.

He was aware of Zeta-One Prime watching. For now, just watching. This action was abnormal, and the abnormal made her wary.

With a sympathetic impulse, he bade the hololith to awaken.