The Ritual of Temporary Cessation of Electric Induction
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A posting to an Expeditionary Fleet was a cherished assignment for one sworn to the mysteries of Mars. Beyond the boundaries of Forgeworlds - every bare inch of which were mapped and plotted and measured - lay a galaxy of a hundred billion stars. More often than not, sapient life infested the worlds that accompanied those stars in their long orbits and the artifice of minds both human and alien spanned unnumbered aeons. Expeditionary Fleets plied the ways of the Warp and with each lightyear claimed by the inexorable march of humanity's future, countless wonders and treasures (and horrifying dangers) were revealed, each begging to be interrogated, dismantled, reassembled and catalogued.
To be posted to one of these far-flung fleets, to rub shoulders with Magi Explorators and masters of biology, archaeotechnology, xenobiology, astroarchaeology and exotic mysteries of the metal, machine and energy, was a conduit to ascension to the deeper mysteries of the Cult Mechanicus. Every technology, regardless of origin, revealed more of the great mysteries of the universe and the shape of the face of the Machine God. Xenotech, though proscribed, still required understanding so as to learn how best the Astartes and Excertus might best their foes. The ways of the alien were mapped and remembered as cautionary warnings to remain upon the proper path.
And out there, hidden in ancient vaults beneath empty skies, in jealous hoards and deep-warded arcologies redolent with slumbering guardians, were the highest and most precious of relics. Standard Template Constructs. Hungered for with a passion unmatched, desired with a yearning indescribable, mourned for with a sorrow unending. Each STC, even a scrap of a scrap, represented the dizzying pinnacles the ancients once bestrode, heights that the Cult ever desired to ascend.
In the course of an adroit Adept's operable span within the bounds of an Expeditionary Fleet, the average number of alien and lost human cultures encountered was numbered twelve. Twelve distinct civilizations, each with many thousands - if not millions, at times - of years of history and development. Each might have followed a wholly unique pathway along the mystery of the machine and spawned wonders and terrors none could dream of. Abominable Intelligences, locked within sub-glacial vaults at the chilling edge of absolute zero, commanding artifice macro weapons that could pluck a battleship from the sky. Warp-bound songcraft machines that harnessed the empyreal footprint of captives to raise glittering, silver spires in cities born of sin. Automat foundries that chewed deep into the mantles of worlds, pockmarking planets like cystic worms as they left behind trinkets of wondrous complexity and unfathomable purpose.
A wise Adept, subordinate to a learned mentor, could expect meaningful advancement and acquisition of many holy improvements and implants, paring away the flesh and gaining clearer commune.
Thus: assignment to an Expeditionary Fleet was a coveted position, yet for all the teeming squadrons that darkened skies from Terra to Baal to the Halo Stars, the numbers of the Mechanicum were yet limitless. Few could ever forecast such an appointment. Fewer could petition.
Ash-Salt//Nine served her duty proudly and faithfully for seventeen years, after her first augmentations on Konor. The first of her birth-flesh to be removed was a span of her spine; the thoracic from T4 to T9. Replaced with a complex cognolink package, she stepped into her first tasking as a minor Lexmachanic aspirant, specialization dialecta. Her augmentations grew in years from there, as her cognolink spread up her spine, bulking out and adding a mild hunch to her posture, corrected later by full replacement of both legs, from the hip. She proved adept at navigating and dismantling autoclave protocols often laced within exotic import technologies.
She enjoyed the byplay of binaric warfare, staying ahead of executioner-worms and leachline-trojan surges. Her cohort on Konor grew in renown, through some contribution of her own, as they removed mortis-switch commands and logiclock scrapcode corruption from relics and trophies returned to the Five Hundred Worlds by the grand starfleets under Guilliman's command.
In time, as the fulcrum of Ultramar shifted, Ash-Salt//Nine found herself relocated, with her cohort, to one of the newest worlds on the forefront of expansion, a world whispered to be ascending at a heady pace toward matching the original anchor-worlds of Ultramar itself. Under the stern glare of Veridia, on verdant Calth, she left behind her days as an aspirant, elevated to the rank of Dialecta-Veritas Minoris. She was tapped at times to consult on the growing noosphere of Calth, anchored on enormous data-engines stamped with the seal of her very own Forgeworld - nostalgic, as she smiled (with half a flesh smile, half her skull having been refit to support a wet-link cognoscythe processor) and ran fingers over the proud markings of Konor.
Certainly, she had not been the only consultant, and was but one input among many hundreds, but she was pleased to serve, even if struck by occasional melancholy watching might battleships and wallowing troopships depart the yards above Calth. Out into the stars they went, to bring illumination to the dark corners of the galaxy, where they would find the sorts of technologies that would be delivered, in sterile and itemized packing crates, to her laboratorium. She wished, at times, to be party to those departing vessels, so that she might select projects of her own, or better yet, to hone her growing talent against mightier examples of hostile cyberwar, perhaps in the very orbits of a recalcitrant world.
Thus she was on the surface of Calth, within the sterile and decoupled confines of her laboratorium, carefully warded from the greater noosphere and decoupled from interface links when the Word Bearers brought treachery. Her first and last warning had been when the roof fell in, burying her under several tons of rubble.
That had been unpleasant, nonoptimal, and wasteful to boot, as it had thoroughly ruined a particularly delicate piece of xenotech that she was convinced was a historitor cogitator. She had been nearly through its complex defenses, too.
The rest of that baleful day mattered very little and in truth, Ash Salt//Nine had stored away most of the recollections on an ancillary drive, as there was little to regard of those long hours of infamy and the hazard of even tangential scrapcode influence was quite unacceptable.
She did not like to think of Calth, because there was no need to evaluate a thoroughly exhausted subject (one already plied by far more experienced minds than hers) when at her fingertips and dendrite-grips was not an average of twelve worlds and civilizations, but twenty-five thousand years and a million species of wonderful, wonderful new things to experience.
She had never expected a tasking with an Expeditionary Fleet, and though the fig-leaf of the declaration of the 4711th remained obvious, the fact remained that by all measures that mattered, Ash-Salt//Nine now veritably drowned in a paradise few of Mars could dream of.
Explorator Dominus Orichi-Mu (who was nominally her superior, in that he alone remained of sufficient rank and authority, though of a branch entirely perpendicular to her own original) whisked as many of the Mechanicum from Calth as he was able, and as many was not enough. Of trained Magi, inducted into mysteries beyond that of base novitiate, there were three hundred and seventy-four. A perilously small number, far less than the Dominus' barque should ever have, even at a skeleton crew.
Perfidious and ruinous scrapcode had ravaged the servants of the Machine God at Calth and Ash-Salt//Nine knew it was only her initial decoupling from the greater networks of the doomed world that saved her. She might have been Dialecta-Veritas Minoris, but the grave logic-weapon unleashed by the traitors of the Seventeenth had felled senior Tech-Priests, Rubricatus Superior, Digitalis Hermeticons and Enginseer-Primus alike. She had been lucky, a word she quite despised, along with most others in the red of Mars.
Stretched perilously thin, with novitiates being accelerated through instructional programmes and rapid augmentation, Orichi-Mu hand-selected a cadre he declared to be his Technarius Xenoidae Primaris. That is - those given the honors to feast themselves gluttonous on the endless, endless procession of technology from this 'New Republic' in the strange galaxy the 4711th found itself within.
And Ash-Salt//Nine planned to gorge herself.
Though, at the moment, such plans were on pause. She ran cycle again through somatic and augmentive-mechanic interfaces, prodding with diagnostic ritual. She added her fleshvoice to each, murmuring proper canticles and entreaties for resumption of intended function. Again, the cycles returned the same results: hale of body, flesh and machine, by all metrics she could consider. She could speak still, with her modified mouth and past vocal chords that had been relocated, but her voxcaster remained silent. Very curious, that.
And she remained stock-still, frozen like a statue, with only the trailing edges of her robe gently swaying in the breeze of climate processing.
As she had remained frozen for the past quarter hour, ever since she had placed the small, cylindrical device over her right breast. It had sealed most readily - her sensoria detected a tiny mote of electromagnetism - and for a moment, it had merely sat there on the smooth steel pectoral plate before emitting a clear tone (Corax Flat, in fact), a tiny diode blinking green.
At which point, Ash-Salt//Nine found herself quite unable to move or do anything else.
Very curious.
While her diagnostics ran, she had taken a moment of self-reflection, flicking through memories of the previous few months and ensuring that for all the restraining bolt had been able to physically constrain her, it had not appeared to intrude upon any other of her systems.
Was it poor practice to apply the bolt to herself? Perhaps. It had been endlessly fascinating to experiment on the 'droids' of this galaxy with the tiny and ubiquitous devices. She had expressed serious disbelief when they first passed by her notice. Mass produced, simplistic, yet apparently universally applicable? Across manufacturer, model and age? Yet the empirical results spoke for themselves. She took a cross-section of droids from Eboracum, as well as selected from disposal pits, and applied the same bolt to each.
To the last, the droids were rendered insensate and nonfunctional. Via a minor control mechanism, she could enable or disable a swathe of functions of the droids, from vox to locomotion, meaning she could quite easily select what a droid could and could not do at the press of a key. Of course, it had been simplicity itself to reverse-engineer the signals from the remote, so that she could herself blurt the codes and signal out at the rapidity of thought without needing the crudity of a digit pressing a physical rune, which was partially to blame for why she had been curious to test the bolt upon her own body.
On one of the perilous few automata she had been allowed to experiment on, the bolt appeared to accomplish nothing at all, but on a servitor, it had mostly functioned as it would on a droid.
Ash-Salt//Nine had figured she would be quite easily able to command the bolt upon her own person through blurts of command signal, except that it disabled her vox-broadcast entirely, along with all other radiative interfaces.
Most frustrating.
More irritating was that if she could not revoke the bolt's access, it would be Ubato-Chorus who would find her, and should he be the one to remove it his taunting would be inescapable. She had some time until the other Adept was due to deliver her further samples, so she redoubled her efforts to return a query ping off the intractable device.
The bolt continued to steadfastly ignore her.
Tremendously frustrating.
She could already imagine three ways to inoculate her own systems against the bolt in the future. Its operation was simple, but remarkably ingenious. From the inside, she was able to see how the somatic connections to her augments allowed for feedback into her flesh-neurology. The bolt apparently managed to work its way into that flesh-machine interlock, projecting essentially static between her mind and her machine-body, preventing her from giving reflexive commands. In a way, it disabled her proprioception, severing her brain from sending any commands to limbs and parts that now 'did not exist'. The automatic systems continued running, of course, without any further inputs, just as she observed with droids.
Very intriguing.
Redundant connections between flesh and machine would likely override this interface static. Perhaps she could design neural capacitors that would modulate neurological signals. Cloned dendrites seeded through the circuitry of her augmentations could act as buffers.
It was not a mistake to apply the restraining bolt. She was gaining valuable insight, after all. No matter what Ubato-Chorus might say, she had the situation entirely under control. There was no discovery without risk.
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If he made a scene of it, perhaps she'd gain further results by applying a bolt to him, next he passed through a rest-cycle.
She ran another diagnostic cycle, this time attempting to control the bolt by whistling commands as best she could through half a mouth. The bolts were robust, after all, and accepted a variety of inputs.
That was something she had noticed often among the myriad samples of Republican technologies. Much of it was robust and designed for ease of use. She had dismantled 'blasters', after tasking servitors to demonstrate the usage and power of the infantry weaponry. Much like lasguns, blasters were durable in construction, built with easily replaceable parts and often sported expansion capacity with rails and attachment points for personalization to a particular task. Digging deeper into blasters, she had been quite astonished to recognize them as plasma weaponry.
A very, very far cry from the potent plasma projectors of Mars, whose sun-hot darts could vaporize a being or execute an armored vehicle, but plasma weapons nonetheless. Martian plasma used large quantities of highly reactive gasses, compressed, combusted and shaped by magnetic bottles to deliver hydrogen-fused plasma onto a target with devastating power. In many ways, blasters were a compact, miniaturized version. They were economical: only small amounts of gas were agitated and energized by an electrical charge before being accelerated in a very similar fashion by a magnetic focusing array.
The firepower was as drastically different as an infantry lasgun was to a Shadowsword, in her opinion, but the principles of design within the blaster had her almost dizzy with possibilities, even if she was not an Artisan by training.
Her diagnostic ended and her latest gambit delivered no results. The bolt remained resolute. Perhaps another angle.
Repulsorlifts were her favorite. Though Eboracum's port had been surgically destroyed, a great many 'landspeeders' remained on the world, most of which made their way into Mechanicum hands. Ash-Salt//Nine had managed to requisition one to dismantle, working on it with the always irritating Ubato-Chorus, until they had isolated and excised the repulsor panels from beneath.
Oh, but how incredible they were! According to information filtered in from locals, there were several variations that all derived from the same principles. The ones she and Ubato-Chorus removed from the landspeeder were of the smallest and simplest design - one that required next to no inputs of energy to maintain! The barest trickle allowed for total abrogation of the fundamental laws of gravity! Ubato-Chorus, stickler and intractable as always, was less impressed, but Ash-Salt//Nine made a point of climbing aboard one of the panels and propelling herself around the laboratorium atop it, relaying enough energy to maintain the effect merely through radiative charging from a mechadendrite.
Ubato-Chorus had been forced to finally admit the endless utility of repulsorlifts, after he had intercepted her circuits of their shared space. Even devoid of energy input, the repulsor panel held enough of a charge to continue to float for a further several days! Such a robust design!
It was on her internal schedule to replace her lower limbs with repulsors of some design. She had several schematics drawn up. Ubato-Chorus called it pointless, which only reinforced that no matter how many cognition implants he gained, his administrative processes would always remain inferior.
Ash-Salt//Nine fully intended to be able to fly, as there were no circumstances she could simulate in which that capability would not be a benefit.
In fact, she considered quite rightfully that repulsors were of far greater importance than the Republican hyperdrives. Those devices were far beyond her position to examine, kept instead for the small cadre of senior Tech-Priests directly under Orichi-Mu, but the Imperium already knew how to sail between the stars.
In a rare moment of empathy, she fully understood why Republicans appeared to attach repulsorlifts to every conceivable thing they could. She would too. It was simple logic. Movement in three dimensions represented infinitely more utility than movement in two. It was unassailable, even if Ubato-Chorus kept composing treatises otherwise.
Because his administrative capacity was limited.
Again, her attempt to interface with the restraining bolt met with failure. The stubborn little device blinked up at her, mockingly. Had she had an entirely flesh limb, she could simply grab the cursed thing and remove it. Mentally, she designed a fourth method of defeating the bolt, should the situation arise again in the future.
Really, it was remarkable how obvious it was, from the inside.
Also, she appended a task to refit the laboratorium's servitors to accept flesh-voice commands as well as binharic blurt. That was rather obvious, in retrospect.
At least while she ran tests, she could still access her cogitation banks and review notes. The bolt hadn't been able to interfere with that at least, given that it was wired directly into the grey matter of her brain. If it had…
She appended another tasking, which was to ensure Ubato-Chorus knew that she had simulated the possibility of the restraining bolt severing the callosummic bridge. Which she had. After attaching the bolt. The order of actions was not something Ubato-Chorus needed to be aware of.
Repulsorlifts, blasters, the peculiar droids…
Holograms! Another technology the Imperium already boasted, but miniaturized and made rugged and simple. Masterful hololiths could easily match a Republican hologram, but those required dedicated tanks and a complex, hard-wearing machinery. Republican holograms could be produced in cubes and discs no larger than a few centimeters in diameter, though the size of the projection was commensurate. Full-color holograms were much rarer, requiring dramatically larger machines, which Ash-Salt//Nine had not yet seen, only heard tell of.
The laboratorium now featured many holographic displays, able to at least project three distinct colors (albeit at the cost of being more grainy and having slower refresh), and with subtle adjustments to her augmetics, she was able to directly interface with the projections via her mechadendrites and left hand.
To her knowledge, Republicans had not considered the obvious improvement of haptic integration. This was no doubt due to their limited understanding of the mysteries of technology. A pleasant thing, then, that the Omnissiah had seen fit to send the Magi of Mars to this misbegotten corner of the universe.
Her holograms were a hobby of hers - they were one of the first technologies to be vetted and accepted by her betters. With so few true Magos in the 4711th, Orichi-Mu called conclaves to debate philosophical, technological and theological disputes. All three were essential, of course, in sanctioning or banning xenotechnology.
After all, while the 9th Law decried the alien mechanism, the 7th Law also demanded understanding. Debate continued to be rife among the Mechanicum contingent of the 4711th and Ash-Salt//Nine knew there were more than a few who argued vociferously against the Dominus' more liberal views. They espoused orthodox beliefs, especially leaning on the 16th Law as if it were a crutch. There was a growing factionalism that dismayed her, but such things were not new. On Konor there were thousands of branch-cults both orthodox and syncretic, and sometimes in-between.
Another oblique pass at the restraining bolt delivered no results. She sighed.
On the subject of droids, she was much in agreement with the more orthodox. At best, droids were extraneous and unnecessary. At worst, they were mockeries, aping intelligence and the soul with disgusting facsimiles of personalities. Better they all be destroyed and more clean servants devised, like servitors.
Yet on the other hand, those of the 4711th's Mechanicum who rejected the workings of the Republicans were clearly blinded and hidebound. The principles and theory behind the making of a repulsorlift were not alien. No more than the refraction of visible light through a prism could be considered 'alien'. It was part of the universe, a quantifiable phenomenon which could be replicated, recorded, and repeated. The harnessing of this phenomenon might be alien, as made by alien hands - but an alien might shape a prism from a crystal and thus refract light, but the alien could not claim dominion over the rainbow.
That, she knew, was to give the alien an appalling authority.
No, much of what she had seen she knew would, in time, be declared acceptable, even if it fell to artisans and technologicus to devise proper, sanctified Martian applications of underlying theory.
She pondered if it would be worth continuing to study the principles of the restraining bolt, given its lack of function on Imperial automata and the Dominus' decree that all droids are to be destroyed. Without droids, there would be little use for the little devices, as curious as they were. Still, at the least, it would behoove the Mechanicum to at least learn how to combat them more properly, due to this unexpected interaction.
Of course, she now had five methods to inoculate herself from the bolt, in the future. Once she shut it off.
Her remaining eyebrow drew taut. She hadn't realized she could still emote with her remaining face. Another datapoint.
She had to shut off the bolt…another thought occurred.
It would be risky, but Ubato-Chorus should be arriving soon. Her internal chronometer spoke of time trickling away. The protocol was an ancient one and one that often proved sufficient for inexplicable ailments of the machine spirit. All novitiates learned it by rote, along with dozens of other cantrip protocols, long before they were given leave to work with machinery more complicated than a biocycler.
Ash-Salt//Nine began to recite the Ritual of Temporary Cessation of Electric Induction. So ubiquitous, so universal a ritual, that even her own augmentics were designed to answer to her own personal incantation. Be it in flesh-voice, binharic blurt, noospheric tasking, Ash-Salt//Nine bore her own personal ritual key, as did all technology she had constructed.
A wave of dizziness swept her, a frightfully mortal thing and a feeling like a wet rag squeezing around her brain made her wince. From her chest, the constant low hum of her generator spun down and, bereft of power, her left hand, which was still gripping the restraining bolt on her chest, went limp and dropped to her side. Of course, she did not topple over - her legs were designed to autolock joints and stabilize through internal gyroscopics. It would be poor form for an Adept to fall flat on their face from a power surge, after all.
Her breath tasted metallic and half her vision fled.
The bolt, quite obnoxiously, remained clamped to her pectoral plate.
She grinned her half-grin. She'd read the electromagnetic lock when she applied it to herself - and the other droids besides. The exact strength bounced through her mind and she intoned the Ritual of Resumption of Electric Induction.
Her internal gaussian engine - a Konorite Dyad-Naught vnC design, gifted by her original mentor - pulsed briefly as it stabilized its own electromagnetic containment bottle. For a brief moment, every metal part of Ash-Salt//Nine polarized.
The retraining bolt popped off, polar magnetic forces launching it with mild force.
Ash-Salt//Nine assuredly did not stretch and did not wipe the previous thirty-six minutes of internal laboratorium observation from the lab's cogitators. She gathered up the restraining bolt, eying it thoughtfully, before shutting it off and tucking into an internal pocket of her robes. A new idea had occurred to her, which was that if the mechanism behind the bolt could be discerned, then replicated at large, the Dominus might well be interested in a means to deactivate large quantities of droids through the emanation or projection of the signal at macro scale. Perhaps it could even scale large enough to encompass an entire world.
Also, even though she had six means with which to inoculate herself against the curious effects of the device - and as a loyal and faithful Adept of Mars, she would share these with her superiors - Ubato-Chorus did not have those means yet.
The next time he derided her repulsorlift designs without a formulated argument, perhaps she'd see if his limited administrative capacity could handle a new challenge.