“Next! All crew chiefs will line their men up in the inspection area!” the Classiarus barked, gesturing with his massive assault shotgun at an ominously pockmarked bare metal wall. The grilles in the floor leading to open drains and sturdy guardrails surrounding the space told Galiel that consequences for failing an inspection here were a little more severe than a citation.
Dutifully, the next few dozen men and women in the long line shuffled forward. The variety in clothing was staggering, from the barest minimum of tattered rags to crisp overalls complete with a small Cog Mechanicum on the shoulder. Some of the workers were more or less intact bodily. Others betrayed tell-tale signs of cruel overseers, ration allotment oversights, and insufficient anti-rad measures. Others still were heavily augmented, failings of weak flesh replaced with utilitarian machinery. These were not the refined works of art sported by even the lowest of her ordained siblings in the cult. They were crude, functional designs cobbled together in the hasty workshops of the menial quarters. Some had not even felt a Techpriest’s practised touch; they were ramshackle monstrosities of wood, rusting steel, wire, and re-salvaged bio-material. Almost too painful to look at. She could only imagine the suffering their neglected machine spirits were going through.
The Skitarius officer at her side turned his head slightly, waiting for confirmation. She sighed. “I told you, you can keep going. You don’t need to ask my permission for every single batch.”
“As you command, my lady,” his synthesized vox rasped. An unspoken command passed between him and his men, and the inspection began.
Roughly, the Classiari turned the menials around and shoved them against the wall. Complex machinery extended from the severed arms of utility servitors, deftly disassembling and removing all clothing items to expose their grimy flesh. Many of them bore the suitably dense musculature of hard labour. Others were thinner and more compact, evidently used to work in tighter spaces. Those from the Generatoriums were thin and bony; their high labour turnover meant that it was a disutility to assign them any rations beyond the bare minimum. Some, especially those with the more expensive clothing, had actually managed to put on some fat. Possibly office staff.
All this information passed as a barely-noticed haze of observations and inferences through her cogitators. While she had not yet gained the capability to completely split her consciousness like the Magi, Galiel was still capable of multitasking. She made a Manifold note to reduce carbohydrates and increase vitamin intake for administrative menials and transmitted it to the Officio Lachrimallus bridge-link, while her sensoriums roved over their bodies, looking for the faintest trace of micro-trauma or lingering machine-idents. Anything to tell her if the spinehuggers had been in the vicinity. At some level, she suspected it was useless. She did not understand the Cog Obscurus technology fully; most of it was hilariously beyond the clearance of her crypto-sanctis designation. But she knew enough to understand that if the machines had learned how to fully utilize it, the best scanners she had would be completely useless.
Nevertheless, the Archmagos had ordered her to inspect the Purgatus menial quarters before he would command her to appear before him and his advisors. The stress of paying attention to the inspection while also trying to think up a cohesive plan for the meeting made her optics sting with the phantom pain of tear ducts. If not for the diligent ministrations of her metabolic regulator djinns, she would have hyperventilated herself into an early grave already. Thank the Omnissiah she had had time to push those changes to her optimization code. Disrupting the delicate oxygen balance her supra-neuronal conduits needed would have only made a bad situation worse.
There was nothing in this batch. She made another pass for certainty, bombarding their nude forms with every scan profile she had in her libraries. Still nothing. With another sigh, she flicked a mechadendrite slightly. One of the sub-optics on the Skitarius swivelled to track the movement, and an instant later, the menials had been pulled roughly from the wall and shoved towards the turnstiles marking the exit. They bore this manhandling with the practised passivity and humility that came only from relentless service before the Omnissiah, only pausing to re-collect their labelled and indexed clothing from servitors. The Mechanicus wasted nothing.
With a twitch of her haptic controller, Galiel removed another few identification codes from the census records she had requisitioned for inspection. Once again, her eyes darted across the expansive cobbled-together visual aggravation that was the menial quarters. Low-fidelity prefabs mixed seamlessly with jury-rigged tents of plastic, which in turn melded into massive pits and forts made from discarded clothes and rusting scrap: communal wallowing pits for the poorest among them. The shadowy, ad-hoc streets that weaved through the tangle of housing would usually have played host to a variety of characters savoury and unsavoury: delinquent adolescents dodging work round-ups and patrols, enterprising businessmen cooking and selling what rations they had managed to save, buy off, or steal, and, of course, dealers hawking whatever untested concoction they had managed to pawn off from the less scrupulous adepts working in one of the more exotic Laboratoriums. Right now, they were empty except for burly armsmen stalking around and glancing through windows; in exchange for better rations and living conditions, many among the Adsecularis were surprisingly willing to help police any disaffection among their kin. Whatever holdouts were being found were being hauled to the rapidly growing line near the inspection area.
“Next crew! Line up! Now!” another Classiarus called. Another few dozen workers pulled away from precious labour and service.
The number of inefficiencies and backlogs this inspection was causing all across the Purgatus facilities, and possibly beyond, made her skin crawl. She had single-handedly managed to delay and possibly ruin one of the most important workflows aboard this vessel. Just perfect. If she had the mobility augmetics for it, she would have bent herself over her own knee and spanked herself.
“I wouldn’t mind helping you out.”
She yelped as the Noospheric bleed darted unbidden into her info-sphere. Her communication cogitators parsed the metadata in an instant.
“Val! How did you break the Purgatus noo-quarantine?”
“Same way I broke the physical one, I suppose. Turn around.”
She whirled around to stare directly into a friendly interface mechadendrite. Immediately, her own extended to match, the two tendrils connecting and intertwining in a greeting far more intimate than words or even blessed code could have allowed. Some of the more knowledgeable menials immediately averted their gaze; they knew enough to understand what this equated to in fleshling terms. The Skitarii remained studiously opaque, as was their custom, but she knew the gossip would spread through the barracks like wildfire later. For now, though, Galiel did not care.
“What are you doing down here?”
Valacon rubbed his mechadendrite against hers one final time, the gold rings rubbing together with a pleasingly harmonic ring, before he withdrew. “Well, I heard about your screw-up, and just knew I should come down here before you decided to throw yourself into one of the waste disposal units. By the looks of it, I was right on time.”
“But you can’t! Your clearance, Val! Did you bully the Skitarii again?”
“I wasn’t bullying that guy, he just knocked over my best vial of sanctified oil! But no, not this time. Thanks to you, all of the Scientia Purgatus section has been declared a potential combat zone. By convention, that means the Divisio Mandati has full clearance to enter this part of the ship as long as the emergency lasts. It took a fair bit of grovelling, and some bribes in rare earth metals, but my captain agreed to send me as the sole liaison until any additional units are required. Which means…” He leaned in closer and whispered directly into her auditory sensors, “If you can find us as an empty room…”
She giggled under her breath and pulled away. “I thank you graciously for your offer of intensive maintenance, Enginseer Valacon. But I don’t believe it is currently safe to perform any activities that would leave us vulnerable, especially without an escort.”
“Oh, well…” He eyed up her Skitarii minder. “I guess he can watch.”
“Val! If you’re here to help, help me!” She nodded at the newly naked menials waiting patiently against the wall.
“What, a physical exam? Just let them do it.”
“No, I can’t!”
“Gal, come on. This is grunt work for servo-skulls and servitors. Even putting Skitarii up to this would be an insult, let alone a Techpriest, and the personal protégé of Artisan Ouden at that! At least think how it makes him look.”
“You don’t understand!”
Madness must have been visible in her gaze, even through the glass and steel of artificial optics, because Val backed up a little. “What… don’t I understand?”
“The Archmagos put me up to this himself! He told me he’ll only let me depose before the council once I’m done here! Me specifically!” She ran another nervous hand over her hood, though the intelligent fabric of Mechanicus robes required no smoothing. “There’s nothing here! I don’t know what he wants from me…”
“Alright.” Val used one of his mechadendrites to gently pin her arms down. “Calm, now. Remember your training. Emotion is only going to frazzle your calculations further.”
“Yeah. Yeah.”
“My lady?”
She turned to look directly into a bent old man dressed in an ancient, fraying jacket, kowtowing with his cap in hand.
“My workers stand ready for inspection. Forgive my impudence, but I must implore haste. We must get back to work, or the sacred quotas will not be met! The Omnissiah will withdraw his favour from our heads! Please!”
The Skitarius unleashed a low mechanical snarl. “How dare you interrupt an exchange between your betters? Five hundred electro-whip lashes! Take him away!”
“No.” Galiel flicked a finger to dismiss the advancing armsmen. “State your identity, Adsecularis.”
The old man bowed deeper. “My name is Rogal, my lady. I am the floor chief for the work crews in this quarter.”
“Your full name, Rogal?”
“I have none, my lady. I abandoned all ties when I dedicated myself to the Machine God’s service.” He pulled back his sleeve to show the electoo numbers etched into his wrist, alongside a small red cog. A volunteer. Press-ganged menials only had ink numbering.
“I thank you for your dedication, Rogal. But I’m afraid the issue at hand far exceeds the importance of work orders.”
A gasp of disbelief went up from the assembled menials. Of course. The closest they could ever be to the Omnissiah was when they knelt in their small Machine-shrines to receive the day’s task-list from their Techpriest overseers. Complex theo-technical debates and hyper-aesthetic religious observances had no meaning here. In these decks, divinity was to be found in work. A basic precept many among the priesthood had regrettably perhaps forgotten.
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“Orders for this inspection come directly from the Adepts Majoris,” Val added, subtly backing her up. “The Archmagos himself commands it.”
As quickly as the crowd had pulled in, it dispersed, all going back to their assigned positions. For work crews, the chief was king. But a command from a conduit of the Omnissiah was the word of the gods themselves.
Rogal bowed even deeper, almost grovelling on the floor. “Please, punish me. I have interrupted the most holy of sacraments.”
The Skitarii all around her transmitted an almost hungry approval into the Manifold, but she stilled their desires with a curt burst of admonishing code. It felt distressingly good to be able to order men and materiel around like this. How the senior Magi could ever control this flesh-vice of petty arrogance, she had no current way of understanding. She added a note to her internal scheduler.
Study data-tomes on Cult-ancillary human capital management.
“There is no harm in doing what was not known to be wrong. But tarry any further, Adsecularis Rogal, and I will hold you in contempt of the Omnissiah’s will and charge you as an apostate.”
The menial’s eyes flickered between the Skitarii’s weapons and the small but ornate sidearm that hung at Val’s waist. It was one of his few non-integrated weapons, and one of even fewer he liked to display publicly.
Unlike their more abrasive superiors, trainees of the Divisio Mandati were advised to maintain a low profile. This kept the full extent of their capabilities a secret even from their closest friends. What they lacked in brute force, they made up for with the advantage of information. A sound battle tactic and ecclesiastical lesson about the importance of Knowledge, in one simple package. The wiser trainees knew to follow this dictum as rote, if only to save themselves from the random assassination attempts by their mentors.
But even the most ignorant member of the labour gangs would know not to cross a priest flaring with Mandati identifiers, weaponry or no weaponry. Yet, Rogal was not yet sure. She could see it in his micro-fidgeting, taste it in his stressed hormone extrusions, and divine it in the bioelectricity leakage of his unshielded neurons.
“Do you have anything further to contribute?”
“My life will be one of contribution to His cause, my lady. But I beg your mercy. Please, can you tell us what manner of sin we have committed to be pulled away from labour?”
Galiel sighed. “There is a parasitic—”
“There is a parasitic infection spreading through the menial decks on the ship, floor chief,” her Skitarii officer interrupted. Val gave him a subtle nod. “The Divisio Biologis estimates a double-digit drop in productivity if infected resources are not immediately identified and quarantined. Now, are you done, or do you wish to question the Omnissiah’s voice further?”
Everybody within earshot gasped at the possibility of such a significant drop in production. The Classiari canted harsh warning blurts to order them to silence, punctuating their directions with a few demonstrative prods from their taser goads.
Rogal bowed as he shuffled his way back into the teeming masses. “To even think of it is sin, sir.”
“Blessed one,” the Skitarius urged, “it would be best to keep the information regarding the xenotech restricted from the Adsecularis.”
Galiel gave him a sharp look. “Shouldn’t they know what to look out for?”
The soldier immediately bowed his head. “This one only advises. The maker’s will is our will.”
“He’s right.” Val crossed his arms. “We can’t let panic spread through the work crews, especially now. We may need them to mobilize at a moment’s notice if some rude surprise decides to crawl out of that rotting hulk. Besides, if you don’t know what to look for, how would they?”
She sighed. “The spinehuggers incorporated technology from the Cog Obscurus. That means they are more or less immune to any sensory augmetics we have the Technicus clearance for. But if their biological eyes were able to see something…”
She trailed off as a horrible thought intruded onto her primary processors. It had been in plain sight all along. The answer. Was this why the Archmagos had assigned her personally for the inspection? Had he expected she would know what he was expecting? Was this a test? Then she could have failed already.
“Val?” she whispered slowly.
“What is it?”
“I think I may have screwed up, uh… made a grievous oversight again.” She switched to binharic, canting in tight-beam to her Skitarius commander. “Soldier, I never did catch your name. State designation.”
“This unit is identified ‘Theta-4-0’, blessed one.”
“Theta, call back the previous batch. Right now.”
She was sure to let some priority flags creep into the transmission. Theta-4-0 immediately perked up, transmitting noiseless orders across their local Manifold. She could have listened in if she wanted to, but it was unnecessary. Immediately, his men barked at the menial armsmen, goads sparking with a vigour that was at once commanding and panicked as they gesticulated at the quarters of the last work crew. The guards immediately rushed off, slinging their crude stub guns across their back as they vaulted over makeshift tents and barricades. Meanwhile, she switched to the wide-area Noosphere, retroactively revoking clearance for checked crews to leave the sub-quarantine area. They could not interact with anyone else. Not until she had figured this out.
“Rogal! Bring me Adsecularis Rogal! Now!”
Valacon extended one of his Manifold boosters, remotely activating the floor chief’s electoos for geo-tagging. Before anyone had to drag him out, however, he himself appeared from the mass of bodies seething at the inspection station, adjusting his jacket as he half-galloped, half-hobbled his way over to her.
“I obey, I obey, my lady! How may I serve?”
“I need your help, Rogal. Right now.”
The Classiari shoved the previous batch, naked once again, against the wall. They murmured in shock and confusion, but made no effort to disobey.
“Anything.”
Galiel pointed at the inspection line. “Look at those menials. They’re your work crews. You know them well. Do you see anything unusual?”
Rogal bowed deeply again. “Forgive me, lady Enginseer, but my feeble biological eyes could not possibly see anything your sanctified augments could not.”
“Drop the grovelling and do as you’re told!” she snapped. There was no time to be polite. Not anymore. The danger could be growing as they spoke.
“At once.” He leaned forward and squinted at the men and women, scrutinizing their bodies dutifully. He was dedicated, if nothing else.
“Look for aberrations on the posterior of their cervical spines.”
“I, uh…”
“Their nape, Rogal. Look at their nape.” Val shot her a reproachful glare. She dared not open her data-link to the barrage of jokes that would have followed.
“The nape? Then the lumps are cause for concern?”
“Lumps? What lumps?” Galiel’s digestive bionics settled at the pit of her abdominal cavity.
“We presumed they were new blessings from the generatorium’s cleansing light.”
“For the last time,” Theta growled, “those are cancerous growths.”
“If the Omnissiah wills that we be gifted with flesh, who are we to deny him?”
“As the overseers would have informed you about 12,332 times by now, floor chief, unstable mutations are not sanctified in the eyes of the Machine God.”
Galiel canted a screeching noise from her augmitters to bring them back to the issue at hand. “Val, do you have the null-codes for the Obscurus tech?”
“Sharing now.” His presence filled the area Manifold, uploading a golden stream of complex hexamathic barriers and novabyte firmware to the local network. She could almost hear every Skitarius’ processors cycle up as they processed the update packages. Her sensoriums immediately refreshed, restarting all sensory feeds to channel them through the newly compiled parsers. For a second, there was calm.
Then, updated imagery began to make its way to her optical processes. Every worker lined up against the wall had a massive lump growing at the base of their neck. Quick sensor pings showed they were firm and solid inside. Just about solid enough for a spinehugger chassis. Within milliseconds, she was interfaced with every automaton and servo-skull in the local network, linking their optics to her own. Her parsers spooled larger buffers and split parallel processing threads off the main cogitators to convert and merge outputs. Her vision expanded until she was looking at everything in the room at once. A cursory calculation showed at least eighty percent infection in the assembled population of menials. An assembled population of more than ten thousand.
Val and the Skitarii noticed this at the same time she did.
“My lady,” Theta warned.
Something changed immediately in the demeanour of the Adsecularis. It was almost as if they knew they had been discovered. Slowly, they turned around, expressions of pure hate fixed on their faces. A few of the uninfected menials tried to caution them against disobedience. Immediately, their former peers fell upon them, ripping them apart with their bare hands. The Classiari roared warnings through their augmitters as they raised their weapons, but the infected menials continued unabated, rising up like a tidal wave against them. Some of the armsmen twitched as they, too, fell under the spell, turning their stub shotguns against the Skitarii soldiers. Their crude weapons could not penetrate war-plate, but it was all the distraction the others needed to rush into a range where the Classiari rifles were no longer effective. Immediately, they fell back under the influence of rapidly inloaded riot control libraries, drawing assault shotguns and flechette-equipped autoguns to stem the tide in close quarters. Others activated unseen circuitry in their vambraces, projecting hard-light tower shields that zapped and burned the menials’ naked bodies when they slammed against their unrelenting faces. The few that survived were boiled alive by the arcing sparks of taser goads, electro-thief prongs reclaiming the energy with near-100% efficiency. Where the sacred motive force was concerned, wastage was not an option.
Val squared his shoulders, coolant vents hissing hot steam from under his robes as rows of macrostubbers, flamers, and boltguns extended from his hardpoints. “Finally.”
“Blessed one.” Theta stepped in front of her, activating the Icon of Warding around his neck. The intricate necklace generated a shimmering protectiva, knocking thrown rocks and the occasional stub round out of the air before it could reach her. “This one humbly suggests a retreat.”
“Suggestion accepted. Val, grab that one.” She marked Rogal with a retrieval identi-tag. “He will be a useful liaison.”
“Got it.” He propelled himself forward with the unnatural speed only combat augmetics could provide, myomers and servos flexing at maximum effort as he blitzed right into the enemy mob. The momentum alone turned the first few lines into paste, and knocked the next few into the air, sending them crashing into those behind in a tangle of blood and broken bones. Rogal had somehow managed to find a sharpened wooden stick, and was now using it as a makeshift spear to fend off a few of his former men, who were snapping and snarling as they tried to claw at him.
Two of Val’s flamers swivelled to face them, unleashing a gout of promethium that charred the attackers instantly. His mechadendrites lashed about, extending assemblies of blades and spikes to rapidly clear the area around him. He grabbed the old man’s arm. “Your spine strong?”
“By the grace of the Omnissiah, I am healthy still!” With a sudden burst of strength, he drove the stick through the jaw of a burly armsman, killing him instantly. “I can still fight for you! Go! I’ll hold them off!”
“Cute. Alright, hold on.” The next moment, they were on the move, speeding away with enough force to put a dent in the resilient plascrete-ceramite floor. The Classiari closed their retreat with their shields, slowly backing away towards the sole remaining exit. The quarantine squads had already sealed the others. The hard-light shimmered and melded together in close proximity, amplifying each other’s strength into a portable barricade. The infected menials howled and threw themselves against the barrier, while the few uninfected screamed for help somewhere in the midst of the crush. Even if there was someone to help, they were not important enough to risk the resources.
Only twenty percent salvageable population. Too little. Though the loss of the adolescent breeding stock would be suboptimal, the Lachrimallus had to understand. They would have breeding pairs available to reassign.
Val got to the other side of the exist, tossing the old man’s shaking figure to the guards. She opened a private channel to him.
“Val, inform the overseers,” she canted. “We need to liquidate the resources in this habitation.”
As soon as Rogal came to a standstill, he doubled over, holding his sides as he emptied the day’s rations onto the floor. A waste of scarce resources, but it could be excused in these circumstances.
“Theta, order a retreat. Now. And prime the failsafe liquidator arrays.”
“As you command, my lady.” He bowed slightly. A slight prickling passed over her skin as the instructions flew through their command channels.
“Rogal,” Val said, “you’d better say their prayers.”
“Why would they rebel? Why?” he murmured, almost in tears. “I swear, if I had detected any apostasy, I would have informed the overseers. I am a loyal and faithful servant of the Omnissiah! And so are they! I don’t understand…”
“No one casts doubt on their loyalty. But this… infection… This is how it works. Their time has come, Rogal. They will find peace in the arms of the Trinity forever. Help them to Their side.”
The old man exhaled, shakily. “All of them? They must die?”
Val looked at her, questions in his eyes. She nodded slightly.
“Yes.”
“As you command.” He turned to the seething masses of his former workers as the doors began to seal, thumping his chest in what she would only assume was a traditional workman’s salute. “It was an honour serving with you, men. May we meet again in the lap of the Motive Force. As the Omnissiah wills.”
“As the Omnissiah wills,” they all echoed.
“Blessed one.” Theta moved closer to her side.
“Liquidate.”
Pulling a small golden amulet of the Cog Mechanicum from his pocket, Rogal kneeled in front of the door, bowing his head as he murmured a prayer in the name of his fallen. Inside, the roar of pyrophoric promethium and the hiss of omni-phage toxins echoed off the metal walls. The only screams came from the few uninfected. The lost bore it with stoic silence. She could only imagine their faces, frozen in silent and mindless hatred, as the phage chemicals melted their flesh from their bones.
“Enginsser Galiel Tunakha,” a voice announced behind her. It was a vox-caster servo-skull, gilded with the identifying crypto-ornamentation of the Adepts Majoris secretariat. “Archmagos Aldren Nevis and his advisory council will see you in inquisitorial chamber Alpha-Alpha-1-1. Attend with all possible expediency. Delay and disobedience are blasphemy against the Machine God.”