The Beast Arises

A three-dimensional map of the Imperium of Man shimmered into being. To his telescopic optics it was a heat map, data-dense regions showing through as yellows and reds, spiral arms separated by dark bands of nothing. Urquidex willed the data-vision to change. Hotspots and stellar landmarks dispersed, to be replaced by the branching lines of a phylogenetic tree. Except that ‘tree’ was too fleshbound a metaphor. Two-dimensional. It was more like the growth of a bacterial colony on a nutrient plate or the filamentous spread of a fungus. Offshoots extended into every segmentum of Imperial space, expanding outwards in three dimensions from a common root somewhere in the galactic core. The data represented it as an amorphous zone, grey and ill-defined, unpleasing on the diligent eye. The uncertainties were being continually smoothed away as the sequence mapping progressed, but it still covered hundreds of light years of congested space, thousands of worlds. His own cortex might be capable of processing it. He shook his head.

It was too complex.

‘Install a high capacity cable-link between the hololith and the data reliquary.’

‘To what purpose?’

‘Because I require it,’ Urquidex snapped, heart fumbling, and then with what he prayed was proper urgency rather than panic, ‘Please. Every second increases the likelihood of data degradation.’

He was aware of the interlink the instant that it was made. It was an erupting singularity of blinding connectivity, light and sound, thought and sensation, that even through the remove of a peripheral plug-in was almost overwhelming. He shunted the upload to a cortical machine sub-consciousness and did his best to disregard it.

‘The orks originate somewhere in the galactic core. It is a dense area. It will take time to isolate the exact world.’

Silence from the machine. The data galaxy spiralled, spiralled.

‘Yendl?’

Nothing.

‘This deviates, magos,’ said Zeta-One Prime, overcoming a pre-programmed fear of these machines and their workings with obvious reluctance. ‘If there is a problem then I am obligated to inform the artisan trajectorae.’

‘No. There is no need for that.’

He looked up.

The skitarius was up close: not angry, she was incapable of that, but as anxious as her emotional clamps allowed her to be. She radiated an artifical cold that needled around Urquidex’s implants and into the bone. Behind her, a woman in plain red robes approached. An initiate adept with a data-slate for inspection.

Odd.

The initiates worked on independent projects. They had never reported to him before.

The crack of a las discharge rang out like a hammer striking a nail. Zeta-One Prime jerked forward. There was another shot and she stumbled into the hololith, making the image shake. Ionised smoke uncoiling from the las-burns to her silvery exoskeleton, she began to turn.

The initiate struck her across the face with the data-slate. The slate bent in two in an eruption of sparks and knocked the skitarius back into the projector. A sharp kick into the shin dropped her onto her knees. A laspistol came up in the initate’s other hand and pushed up against the back of Zeta-One Prime’s skull. With laser clarity, Urquidex noted that the selector had been switched to full auto.

The skitarius’ head lit up like a soldering iron and she slumped to the ground, head slagged and fused to her shoulders.

A blurt of interrogative binaric came from behind the cogitator stacks and the second initiate came running.

The first was already dropping, minimising her profile even as she cast aside her emptied laspistol and with mercuric grace drew Zeta-One Prime’s arc pistol. The running initate was armed with basic digital weaponry and spat low-powered laser bolts from his extended arm as soon as he spotted the fallen skitarius. They all missed.

The female took her moment, aimed and then fired. A crackling fist of electricity punched the initiate from his feet and slammed him into the brass cladding of a codifier.

Urquidex gaped.

‘Not later,’ said Clementina Yendl, manually tearing his plug-ins from the hololith projector. The abrupt separation was as extraordinary as the connection had been, and almost wiped him out with pain.

‘Now.’

Seventeen

Prax

The orbital command substation was an immense agglomeration of cylindrical towers dish arrays and landing platforms that in better days would have serviced light jurisdictional compliance craft responsible for inspection and enforcement of orbital traffic. The facility was surrounded by a crumpled wire fence, and was all just within sight of Princus Praxa’s outer walls. The city was a thumb’s-width smudge on the horizon, a coppery pall of particulate pollution that glimmered like living crystal from the final-stage escape boosters of orbital lifters.