Chapter 21: Chapter 21

There was no will at all to protest against the fabricator-general’s surrender. All of the Omnissiah’s faithful in their forges and work shrines saw the catastrophic result of the defense. The Nexus had made a persuasive show of expending little effort to crush the tech-priests and the war relics of the machine-god. The titan legions had been all but eradicated, the number of remaining Ordo Reductor and Legio Cybernetica warforms were down to a fraction of their optimal stock levels, and the faithful had been slaughtered to such a degree that it might be more efficient to just shut down half the forges of Mars and consolidate its human resources.

 

To call the debacle a humiliating blow against the Omnissiah was an understatement.

 

The victorious heathens wasted little time to enforce their demands. As the price of their surrender, Mars would bare all its knowledge for the Nexus’ perusal. Any sign of stalling the plunder, or hiding or denying any information in any way would result in the immediate resumption of hostilities, with the new war goal of obliteration.

 

Adept Koriel Zeth held back her anger as she watched the soulless automata flit through her forge and callously access every data vault, archive and cogitator bank under her authority. The most secret workshops had to be unbarred for the monsters to scan her prototypes and painstakingly developed schematics. Koriel took some solace that the raiders only made copies instead of actually ransacking and tearing through her forge.

 

No doubt the other forges were undergoing similar desecrations, and it seemed that even the broken remains in the Rust Wastes were being picked through. Even now, a huge swarm of the soulless robots were moving towards the ancient, continent-spanning catacomb that was the Librarius Omnis. A small cognitive partition in her neural banks hoped that the terrors of the Dark Age of Technology would be more than a match for these plunderers, yet another, more curious part of her wondered just what might be uncovered. Yet the more cynical part wondered just what would be left of the great subterranean archive once the Nexus was done with it.

 

Worse, the Nexus Unity didn’t seem likely to share their discoveries. An unfortunately logical result, after the recent hostilities.

 

One consolation gained was that Koriel and most of the priesthood of rank that were absent in the failed defense were ‘invited’ to join Sev in the opening of the Noctis Labyrinthus. The journey to the dark storied region was unnerving from the start, merely because she and the other members of the priesthood had to quietly endure the presence of their soulless bodyguards. 

 

Up close, Koriel’s processors quickly found that the Nexus’ automata and vehicles were borderline impossible things. Nevermind the sanctity of the soul, the ‘Sentinel’ hovering robot should not be able to house a power core sufficient enough to power all the (hidden!) anti-grav units that allowed it to be so nimble. Eldar jetbikes wished they could be as agile. 

 

The hulking ‘Strigoi’ constructs too should not exist, not with how light they appeared; a quick calculation showed that their jetpacks and hulls alone should make them at least as heavy as a Castellax automata, yet Koriel distinctly noted the shallowness of their footprints in the Martian soil. It was as if they were entirely made of lighter, far less durable materials. Yet, the pict surveillance from the Ring of Iron showed them ignoring ordnance fire that would have easily shattered a Dreadnought chassis.

 

Even the oversized grav speeder that transported them was an impossibility. Koriel had imprinted the dimensions of the craft as she boarded it, and the sheer madness of it mystified her. Logic dictated that the glass canopy was definitely too thin to be able to withstand flying into Martian debris at Mach 3. The vehicle was also lacking any memory banks or interface units to guide it, yet it ferried them with unerring certainty. 

 

Unless the Nexus somehow mastered the hallowed secrets of miniaturization? That…that would explain a distressing lot of their capabilities…

 

A glance to the other priests showed that they too were trying to piece together the mysteries around them. Some adepts betrayed their unease, their emotive codes all but sparking off their personal networks.

 

Beyond the general unease of the tech heresy surrounding them, there was trepidation about the journey into the deep canyons of the Noctis Labyrinthus. The place had been deemed an extreme environmental hazard for centuries, and every few cycles fresh stories would spread about a doomed expedition failing to return.

 

Koriel saw no signs of the supposed corrosive contamination as the canyon walls rose up around them. Still, as their craft’s illumination lit the way through the thick darkness, the adept felt a growing sense of foreboding rising in her. Her colleagues felt the same as well, judging from the nervous flickering of Magos Biologis Vetka Phi’ optics, to adept Ve-Ching’s mechadendrites clicking away like a scribe-servitor. There was a distinct wrongness, one felt deep in the core codes of Koriel’s very being.

 

They disembarked at the mouth of an ancient mine complex without their organic or mechanical components melting from the much warned about contamination. The darkness around them felt illogically hungry, as if the lighting was all that kept the tech-priests from a primal doom. With lumen posts forming a perimeter, the Nexus party casually greeted their conquered guests. Their ruler, Sev, was easily differentiated by his lack of armor.

 

“So, anyone know about this place?” the deceptively normal looking man asked.

 

There were a few negatives softly blurted out, but beyond that, the assembled tech-priests only offered puzzled silence.

 

“Eh, not surprising I guess.” Sev gestured with his hands, and the Martian priesthood collectively flinched as Sentinels swam close to them, offering dataslates in their clawed tentacles. “Here’s what I’ve pieced together from the archives in Terra and Mars.”

 

Koriel tentatively took a dataslate and looked at the surface contents. The compiled information within was formidable, but nothing any respectable member of the Cult Mechanicus would spend more than an hour deciphering. Cautiously, the adept used the interface key in her left index finger to access the full contents of the dataslate.

 

Ancient history and even more ancient fairy tales flooded her mind, all centered around the myth of a great beast…a dragon. How it was defeated was irrelevant. So was the identity of who defeated it…until she came across newer, less delusional documentation. 

 

There was a copy of a classified treaty between the old rulers of Mars - before the ascendance of the Cult Mechanicus and even the collapse of the planet’s terraformed ecology - and an entity known as Georgius. It ratified the establishment of a quarantine zone around the Noctis Labyrinthus. That piece of ancient history was impressive, but what caught Koriel’s augmented eyes were the signatures ratifying the document.

 

It started as stamps and scribblings from gene-coded ink, along with a time-worn date sometime in the 15th millennium. Subsequent signatures and stamps on Mars’ part followed after, each re-ratification dated centuries or even millennia after the previous one. A part of Koriel marveled at the evolution of the proofs of authority. Dried out gene-ink became circuit-laced etchings, which then devolved to a simple seal stamp, and so on, and so forth, until it finally evolved to the familiar cog seal of the ruling magi council of the Cult Mechanicus.

 

All through the millennia, the signature of Georgius remained constant, a simple handwritten pattern of carbon-based black ink, up until the 29th millennium. Then the signature was replaced with the familiar seal of the raptor and crossed lightning bolts, which itself  was replaced soon after by the seal of the two-headed eagle in the 30th millennium.

 

Koriel let out a binaric curse, both verbally and through aetheric data burst, at the revelation. She ran through the document again and then once more to confirm its authenticity. The digital copy contained the correct ident pattern of Terra’s archives, which lent some credence to its veracity. The adept looked to the magi present, but someone else beat her to the question.

 

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“Is this true?”

 

The high-ranked priests seemed just as dumbstruck as the rest of the gathered priesthood. “The…attached certification is authentic to Terran archiving,” Lexicano Arcanus Enok canted quickly in binaric, “The code markers are most certainly of Terran design, as chronologically distant as they may be. Access idents also match to the file’s imprinted timestamps... If this copy is a forgery, it is unnecessarily over-elaborate.”

 

Before more questions can be posed or disbelief aired, Sev interjected. “I take it from your excitement that you’ve all reached the relevant part. Now, would you like to witness what the dragon the Emperor of the Imperium kept locked down here?”

 

They were made to wait on the surface as Sev and some of his armored soldiers disappeared into the mines. “You’re not adequately protected from the thing below,” he had casually explained, which somehow served as an excuse for the peculiar circle and primitive patterns drawn around the gathered tech-priests. Koriel noted the use of old Terran runes and pictographs, and part of her cringed badly.

 

The Cult Mechanicus was humiliated by a highly advanced yet still deeply superstitious civilization? It sounded like a bad joke.

 

The priests shared unflattering remarks about their captors through the binaric shortwave, but could do little else considering the guards around them. The chatter died to concerned silence as the ground beneath them began to rumble. The localized quake was clearly unnatural, and estimating from its muted strength, had to originate from deep below them. The tech-priests were kept in their quaint circle by their armored guards, who seemed only lightly perturbed.

 

Then without warning it felt as if the world exploded all around them. With a roar that threatened to overload even the most advanced audio augmetics, the mine entrance exploded upwards in a cataclysmic geyser of dirt, rock and minerals. Magi and adepts fell back in a mix of surprise and fear as the debris cloud flowed around an invisible dome that was defined by the circle they were in.

 

Perhaps it was more than superstition then, Koriel absently corrected as her vision and hearing was drowned out by the massive displacement of Martian soil. She could make out the flickering of energy from the unmoving Nexus soldiers nearby, probably protected in a similar fashion.

 

As the rain of dirt receded, Koriel found the Mechanicum assembly surrounded and half-buried in three meters of blasted earth. The circular boundary around them betrayed the otherwise intangible forcefield. It was a mystery for another time though, as no sooner did the tech-priests reorient themselves did they all hear a roar that Koriel could only describe as unholy. 

 

The dome around the Martian priests glowed as an ancient, primal rage was expressed through sharp, offensive scrapcode. Koriel felt her organic body tingle with revulsion, while her diagnostics alerted the adept to a sudden torrent of irregularities and errors in her cybernetic augmentations. Her mechadendrites fell to the ground unresponsively, and several of her bionic functions were overclocking or stalling dead. A shuddering turn of her head revealed that her colleagues were suffering similarly.

 

Mechadendrites twitched and flailed uncontrollably, and metal bodies convulsed and twisted to the point where metal plates and frames creaked in protest. Some had their optics whirred and sparked before shorting out, others began exhaling smoke as their oxygenators overheated. Koriel and the tech-priests were suffering a slow, agonizing death, or they would have if not for the timely arrival of their Nexus guards.

 

The armored figures jumped in amongst them and quickly began setting up a strange crystalline device in the center of the circle. The green and blue crystals glowed brightly and the malfunctions immediately ceased.

 

“Sorry,” one of the soldiers said. “But at least now you know why you had to stay out here.”

 

Another discordant roar drew Koriel away from the smirking soldier, and she turned up to the source of it…and immediately regretted it.

 

There was a massive amorphous blot in the sky, now visible with the canyon torn apart. As Koriel picked up more details, her eyes and brain actually began to hurt as they struggled to process the reality before them. It was silver and black at the same time, shifting and heaving and folding in on itself. It was an undefined metallic blob, but at the same time Koriel could not help but register its form to look like a great winged beast regardless of how impossible it shifted and folded. A great winged creature with city-rending claws and a slavering maw of lightning and oblivion. A great dragon of gold circuits and obsidian pixels.

 

It was clearly a solid object, yet there was an emptiness to it, like staring into an abyssal pit. It stretched and flexed as if straining against the constraints of three dimensional reality, and Koriel had to turn away as a deep vertigo overtook her.

 

She forced herself to calm down, using the prayers vocalized by some of her colleagues around her as an anchor. Steadying herself again, the adept looked up again. This time, she didn’t focus too hard on the phenomena, but instead fixed her attention to the small humanoid form in weaving in and out of the shapeless dragon.

 

Somehow, Sev was darting around the thing, and somehow, Koriel understood that the dragon was reeling in pain, or the closest simulacra such a thing could understand as pain. He struck with blades of the same crystals that glowed and hummed near her, shearing off chunks of black silver that quickly evaporated. 

 

It did not take long after that for the amorphous being to let out an electro-shriek that cracked the ground around the tech-priests before it fell from the heavens. Sev was riding atop it, blades buried in the central mass and an image formed in Koriel's mind of a giant, shredded heart being skewered by them.

 

The crater where the old mines used to be exploded in a cloud of dirt and rock once more as the undefined dragon crashed into its former lair. Koriel and the others instinctively made to run towards the point of impact, but were stopped by the Nexus soldiers. “You’re not warded correctly to leave.” 

 

Nevertheless, Adept Ve-Ching managed to slip out, taking all of four steps beyond the protective circle before letting out an aborted scream as the metal in his body began flowing like wax out of his body to form a fractal mandala of triangles and hexagons. His fleshy remains hovered in the air as the symmetrical pattern expanded out of him into wire-thin strands, until finally the filigree just snapped and both metal and bloody flesh fell onto the ground in a messy splatter.

 

Koriel and her colleagues stopped trying to get past their captors after that. Instead, they tentatively left the safety of the circle drawn on the ground after each was daubed in green crystalline powder. They meekly followed after the Nexus soldiers to the edge of the new crater, feeling an unfathomable pressure, an unknown power radiating as they drew closer.

 

Peeking over the edge, the adept found the other Nexus soldiers scanning the perimeter, while Sev stood over the flickering, pixelating form of a humanoid giant. Sev noticed the audience above and floated up to meet them. Koriel took several involuntary steps back as she realized that the overwhelming power radiated from the ruler of the Nexus. Something inside her told her to kneel, to prostrate herself, to beg for mercy as his radiant gaze fell upon them. 

 

His voice was mocking and contemptuous. “Kindly wait while the site is cleansed of metanatural pollution. You will have access to your Omnissiah soon enough.”

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