The Beast Arises

The boundary layer. It had to be there. And it had taken exactly the thirty minutes that Kalkator had said it would.

The core’s greater density reflected the seismic shockwaves back upwards like sunlight hitting an ocean’s waves. The effect on the surface was cataclysmic. Tremors had become quakes and quakes upheavals that tore the world asunder, crust and core between them amplifying the seismic waves and rebounding them until the entire globe rang like a bell and the crust was a shattered ruin.

That was what Zerberyn was watching now: the penultimate phase.

He wondered how many souls had been on Prax. Ten billion? A hundred billion? It was the one variable amongst the specifics of time and forces, and it ate at him.

‘Back from me, abomination,’ he snarled, kicking back with the stump of his leg.

The servile construct screwed back on its single caterpillar track, trailing the measuring tape with which it had been sizing his foot for prosthesis. Its head was a small human skull with a parchment covering of mummified flesh, suspended above a whining motive unit by an articulated metal spine. Its ears were large, encouraged to grow along a cartilage matrix the better to receive spoken commands. Its eyelids had been removed, its mouth stapled shut. It stared at him blankly until Zerberyn, unnerved by the emptiness he saw reflected in its eyes, turned back to the viewport. With half his weight on an iron crutch, he allowed the servitor to return to fuss about his foot as if nothing had transpired.

‘My Apothecaries could furnish you with an augmetic far superior to anything your own might have access to,’ said Kalkator.

Zerberyn chose not to reply. Bad enough to have been picked up by the traitors’ gunships in the first place.

‘I will think about it. But not now.’

‘Does watching make it better, or worse?’

‘It is an act of penance.’

He could feel the warsmith’s sneer. It had a vibration all of its own that carried it across the rigorously atmosphere-controlled viewing gallery.

‘One day, Kalkator. One day you and I will be called to account for every life we destroyed here today.’

‘Not destroyed, little cousin. Sacrificed.’

In absolute silence, a flash of amber light rose up from the planet’s core and engulfed it. It happened in a split-second. Zerberyn grunted, eyes narrowing against the sudden, short-lived glare. By the time his vision recovered Prax was gone, a fading red stain on his retinas.

Sacrificed for the Imperium.

He hoped that the reward would be worth it.

Twenty-Three

Terra — the Imperial Palace

The vid-recording was grainy and poor, the field dark, the capture soundless. The borders fluctuated, spawning flurries of black snow that intermittently cloaked the figures in central view.

There were two of them. The first was clothed in heavy vestments, the skin grafts and bionic attachments of his face swollen out of proportion and stretched around a curve to fill the round of the visual feed recorder’s lens. The second was standing back, visible in profile as she glanced intermittently over her shoulder. She was a woman, slighter than the first figure, robed in Martian red and bodiced with bronze plates, her face masked by filtration tubes and optic sensors. One arm was appended with a bionic brace that twitched with digital manipulators and beam cutters and in the other she handled an arc pistol with uncommon adroitness. She looked tense. Her rebreather apparatus made it impossible to make out her lips, but from the movement of her exposed cheekbones and neck, it was clear that she was saying something. The distended curvature of her companion’s mouth opened and closed in response.

Green bars tracked the movement of his lips. Runes flickered, superimposed over the bottom of the screen, as linguistic algorithms struggled and failed to provide a translation.

The front figure turned slightly, a digital black ghost image hanging in the air for several seconds after. He said something more. The woman replied.

‘—recording yet?’

Audio as bitty as the image scrunched up from nothing to fill the feed. The laboured in-out rasp of the man’s breathing, too close to the pickups, the rhythmic sigh of industrial machine noise.

‘I… I think so,’ he said, tapping at a console.

The woman drew him back. Their afterimages mingled for a moment, before the uncooperative recording device cleared the bandwidth confusion and showed just two figures once again.