Once a cool, bleak place of dust and industry, the Red Planet was now a warzone of smouldering forges. The globe-carpeting network of hard lines and wireless transmitters had taken the corruption of the dark code to every construct that could receive it.
'My time on Luna gave me the opportunity to think. There is nothing to do up there but think—about the schism on Mars, the betrayal at Isstvan, my Lord Regent's offer and the part I might play in this new galaxy of challenge and change. I came to the conclusion that despite our shock at the atrocities committed during the Dropsite Massacre, heresy—in one form or another—is nothing new. Mars was rife with unsanctioned experimentation, the embrace of abominate technologies and solutions sought from the xenos or the beyond.'
As Kane began to protest, the Carrion added, 'Which the clave-malagra of the Lexorcist General, the Divisio Probandi and the Prefecture Magisterium were tireless in their efforts to hunt down and persecute.' The Mechanicum overlord nodded his acquiescence.'I had the misfortune to see one such heretek sentenced to stasis containment in perpetuitas.'
'What was his crime?' the Fabricator General asked.
'The study of self-enhancing technologies.'
'Abominable intelligence?'
'Yes, general,' the Carrion confirmed 'My Artisan Astartes exposed his students to the workings of the fearful Malagra, the Divisio Probandi and the Prefecture Magisterium early on, to instil in them repugnance for such deviations.'
'Then you had a wise mentor,' Kane acknowledged. 'What was this heretek's name?'
'Octal Bool,' the Carrion told him. 'A young but brilliant Magos Dominus of the Legio Cybernetica. A student himself of the Artisan Cybernetica Phernalius Lux.'
'I know of Lux from the infotombs,' Kane said, 'but not this magos.'
'Heresies are hidden,' the Carrion continued. 'Re-written, erased. Even from such as yourself, Fabricator General. To make clear the feudal politics in the region and save his construct-kindred embarrassment, the Divisio Probandi had code scrubbers remove all trace of Bool's existence from the tombs, the libraria and even local hubstreams. His work, his corruptions and researches were buried with him in stasis confinement.'
'Then how do you know so much about this radical?' Dorn put to him.
'My mentor made Octal Bool my first case study,' the Carrion said. 'He gave me access to the encrypted Probandi files. He wanted to know that I truly understood the heretek's transgressions.'
'And do you?' the primarch pressed, the rumble of each word a warning.
'Enough to assist us in this time of great need, Lord Dorn.'
'Rogal,' Malcador soothed. 'Hear him out.'
'Those transgressions included speaking against Martian laws of nonproliferation of adaptive intelligences, the Sentiency Edict and the banned pursuits of the Singularitarianists.'
'Those charges would be condemnation enough,' the Fabricator General said.
'Octal Bool went further than that,' the Carrion told him, 'much further. His tracts detailed his acquisition of a dangerous piece of technology known as the Tabula Myriad, a silica animus responsible for genocides on a number of warp storm-isolated worlds during the Age of Strife. It was recovered in the early days of the Great Crusade by the Iron Hands after defeating the decimated Parafex and the sentient constructs of the Tabula Myriad on Altra-Median. The great Ferrus Manus led the 24th Expeditionary Fleet personally and turned the Tabula Myriad over to the Mechanicum for safekeeping.'
'Octal Bool's area of expertise within the Cybernetica was cortex firmware. He had been experimenting with his automata protocols long before he acquired the Tabula Myriad. Instead of the functional algorithms and staid programming of his adept-peers, Bool's programming patterns were multi-layered, intricate and loaded with self-referential flair and flourish. They were pieces of programming art. He didn't regard his modus as an artisan's tool. It was like a musical instrument upon which he created complex algorithmic symphonies. In breaking with convention, he even named the individual wetware programs for the automata cohorts under his command like Regicide strategies: the Tollex Opening, the Vhamrian Defence and the Occlon-Nanimus Game. Cohorts of battle-automata benefitting from his programming had the very highest success rates, with few units suffering from malfunction or computation error. It was the artistry of such algorithms that gave his automata the impression of thinking for themselves and alerted adepts in the Legio Cybernetica and Prefecture Magisterium to his possible deviancy.'
'Octal Bool used his gifts to frustrate the security firmware of the dungeon diagnostica and access the stasis tombs of Promethei Sinus. These would be the same tombs within which he would be incarcerated for his crimes. It was there he acquired the Tabula Myriad.'
'Why this particular abomination?' the Fabricator General asked.
'The Tabula Myriad is a form of exigency engine,' the Carrion told him.'Far surpassing the abilities of Mechanicum cipher engines and logista, its baroque matrix combines the calculus of macroprobability with the creativity of its abominable sentience, filling the gaps in its data with imaginative theoreticals.'
'As our genetors and Magi Replicae substitute the common genetic coding of other species in damaged DNA?'
'Yes, general.'
'This machine strategically predicts future outcomes,' Rogal Dorn said, with as much of a shiver as a primarch could suffer.
'It predicted the schism on Mars,' the Carrion told him. 'On otherworlds, where it had predicted men would look to the darkness for answers and damn themselves with the corruptions of the beyond, the Tabula Myriad and the sentient constructs under its control initiated a merciless campaign against what it determined to be the weakness of flesh. In his research, Octal Bool claimed that the Tabula Myriad had predicted on those flesh cleansed worlds exactly what we are now facing on the Red Planet—a heresy of belief, of purpose and of the flesh. It employed the same probability matrix used to condemn such civilisations to achieve victory against them. The decision to ultimately eradicate the weakness—the threat—of such flesh took probably no more than a millisecond.'
'I think I see where we are going,' Dorn said gravely, looking to the silent Sigillite.
'What do you mean?' Kane asked, his own cogitator functions calculating to catch up.
'How were the Tabula Myriad and this heretek to effect such an outcomeon Mars?' Dorn asked. 'Before this madman was caught and contained?'
The Carrion looked from the primarch to the Fabricator General. 'With elegance and economy, my lord,' the Space Marine said. 'Unlike Terra, the Red Planet has long since lost its natural magneto sphere. Two forge temples, ancient in engineering and construction, were built in the frozen wastes at each planetary pole—Vertex Borealis in the north and Vertex Australis in the south.'
'By the almighty Omnissiah, no,' the Fabricator General murmured.
'Vertex?' Dorn pressed the Carrion, suppressing a scowl of annoyance and confusion. 'Explain.'
'The Vertex is a great axle. A wonder of Mars. A feat of planetary engineering dating back to the early days of the Mechanicum,' the Carrion said. 'It is a planetary spindle that reaches down into the Martian crust and through the long-cooled core of the forge world. Geomagnetic reactors feed power back to the axle that keeps the core turning. The Vertex is the key to all biological life on Mars. Without it and the artificial magneto spheric shield it generates, Mars would not be protected from the lethal radiation of our own star—let alone the deadly cosmic rays generated by stellar events in nearby systems.'
'And Octal Bool and the Tabula Myriad…' Dorn began.
'…planned to damage or destroy the forge temple at Vertex Australis,'the Carrion confirmed. 'The abominable intelligence calculated the southern installation to be the most tactically vulnerable.'
'What about the other forge temple?' asked the primarch.
'Only one needs to be incapacitated for the operation of the Vertex to be compromised,' the Carrion said.
'Could this technology be repaired or rebuilt?' Dorn asked.
'The arcane knowledge of the technology's grand operation is lost to the Mechanicum,' the Fabricator General said. 'Without the magneto spheric shield, the thin atmosphere of Mars would be stripped away by the solar wind, carrying away the planet's precious reserves of water. The Red Planet would rapidly become a radiation trap, inimical to organic life.'
'The true objective of the heretekal martyr Octal Bool and the Tabula Myriad,' the Carrion said. 'A war on the weakness of flesh, with Mars left purged, pure and in the hands of the machines.'
'If such a thing were contemplated…' Zagreus Kane said.
'We are contemplating it,' Malcador told him with steely assurance.
<MARS. THE RED PLANET BLEEDS A TRAIL OF
CORRUPTION THROUGH THE SOLAR SYSTEM. ITS NEST
OF TRAITOR CONSTRUCTS CANT INSANITY AND
STREAM INFECTION BETWEEN THEIR INCALCULABLE
NUMBER. THE FORGE TEMPLES AND CANYONS OF
MARS ROAR WITH THE UNNATURAL FIRES OF
INFERNAL INDUSTRY. A PLACE OF THE OMNISSIAH
AFFLICTED. OF IRON POSSESSED. OF THE WEAKNESS OF
FLESH.>
The sound was unbearable. The thin air of Mars carried the vox mission madness and shrieking scrapcode of polluted constructs far.
The mechanism was an impossible thing—a large orb of interlocking cogs and gears of a design, motion and intricacy far surpassing the basic mechanisms implanted in the battle-automata and the Uncannical. It was anover laid nexus of ticking, rhythmic clicking and the slick, harmonious whirr of impossible gears working in unison. The Carrion couldn't bring himself to think of it as alien, but its design and workings disturbed him. It looked as if it shouldn't work, but it did.
Perfectly.
While human in design—the clunky intricacy of the machine told him that—it was clearly not a creation of the Mechanicum, a hallowed fusion of flesh and iron. The exigency engine was all counter-clock gears and byzantine cog-work that became more miniaturised and unfathomable the deeper he looked into the mechanism. Baroque tools, interface-columns and molecular scoops extended and retracted gently through the labyrinthine workings with the serenity of a serpent's tongue—testing, interacting and absorbing the base elements it needed from the air and surrounding environment.
'This is the abominable intelligence?' the Carrion said, but it was clearly a statement more than a question.
'This is the Tabula Myriad,' Octal Bool told him. 'Purger of the Parafex of Alta-Median and purifier of the stellar exodus worlds of the Perdus Rift.'
The Carrion watched as the cogs, gears and workings of the abominable intelligence parted at the base of the orb, creating an opening.
'Yes, yes,' Octal Bool bleated. Further polyhedral cogs and intricate workings appeared in the opening until the heretek approached the silica animus and took from it a smaller orb of interlocking gears, the same kind of mechanism the Carrion had seen at work in the battle-automata and the cherub.
The Knight Errant repressed a shiver. The abominable intelligence was self-replicating.
Bool simply smiled and bowed his head, then took the miniature intelligence and pushed it down into the bloody cavity in the top of his head. With a sickly realisation, the Carrion suddenly understood that Bool's torturers in the dungeon-diagnoplex had removed such a thing with the rest of his augmentations. Octal Bool's face changed. The insanity and agitation faded.
Twitches subsided, lines disappeared, muscles relaxed. With or without such slave interfacia, Octal Bool was a heretek and sincere devotee of the genocidal Tabula Myriad and its cold equations. Once again, however, he had achieved abominable union with the intelligence and had given himself willingly to the prosecution of its harsh solution for humanity.
The Carrion looked from the Tabula Myriad to the human face of techno-heresy in the calm visage of Octal Bool.
'There isn't much time,' the Carrion announced. 'Mars must be purged. It must be poisoned and purified of the weakness of flesh.'
With the artificial flesh of their neural cortices long extracted and no further need for wetware routines or the guidance of a machine-spirit, the battle-automata were now thinking machines, benefitting from their own simple exigency engines. Like Octal Bool and the cherub Uncannical, however, they were under the ultimate reason and control of the abominable intelligence. Without the need for vox-cant or orders in the form of binary, the battle-automata began to form up in their operational maniples.
The robots were white-washed with snow, marching on dauntlessly into the darkness. Not being able to use the code-corrupted communication channels, seamless coordination was entirely reliant on the miniature exigency engines turning, clicking and whirring in their chests, and the unspeaking communion they shared with the Tabula Myriad itself.
Not only did the battle-automata seem to think for themselves, they thought for each other, with such thoughts being guided by the abominable intelligence. It was disconcerting and loathsome to behold, but the Carrion had to admit that such techno-heresy was serving the cohort well on its march south.
What was most startling for the Knight Errant, however, was not the way in which the battle-automata soaked up punishment—which was impressive enough—but their incredible resistance to the virulent scrapcode that had infected and wormed its way into nearly every construct on the Red Planet.
No matter what malefic binaric was transmitted at them, no matter what corrupted machine attempted to interface with them and flood their workings with insanity, the Carrion saw not one battle-automaton fall to the techno-plague. With the intricacies of their own exigency engines turning, interlocking and calculating a kind of machine reason within them, The Tabula Myriad had created a construct ever-questioning, ever-countering and ever-incompatible with the darkstream.
The industrial wonder of its mills and factoria and the baroque majesty of the spire had been things of beauty once. Now the temple was a place of dark deeds. Its furnaces, once radiant, were now beacons of sickly balelight. Its architecture and walls were shot through with unnatural rusts and encrustations that even the frost could do little to disguise. From this infernal smithy rose the mighty Vertex.
Holding out a huge claw under the onslaught, Aulus Scaramanca rotated the talons on his wrist mounting. Delicate magnetic manipulations prompted chains, cables, hard lines and wiring to erupt from servitor-stations and the ruined architecture of the automated mill. The chains and interface cables reached out for the constructs, prompting Impedicus to stamp several cautious steps back.
The chains and cables found unit Dex, however, and snaked about the battle-automaton's limbs like restraints, slowing the indomitable approach of the machine. Port plugs slithered across its workings, exploring, invading, attempting to find a way in. The forge temple cables interfaced with the machine, and Aulus Scaramanca flooded the battle-automaton with a codestream of corruption.
As the Carrion's gravitic cell ran empty, the Iron Warrior recovered himself and stumbled forward on his mighty legs.
The Carrion pumped and fired the weapon again, but it was empty and the Space Marine tossed it aside where it clunked on the mesh of the platform.
The Iron Warrior seemed fascinated by the ensnared machine before him. Dex's weapons were empty but its will was strong. As the polyhedral cogs and gears thrashed to processing in its chest, it strained against the chains and cables snaked about its limbs.
'You reek already,' Aulus Scaramanca told the machine as the code felt its way through the battle-automaton's systems, 'of corruption. You will join your construct-kin at my side. Embrace the code and rise up, slave.'
The Iron Warrior stared at the impassive battle-automaton. The construct seemed to stare back. The Carrion watched the two of them as they engaged in some kind of contest of machine will, as Aulus Scaramanca guided the datastream corruption invading Dex's workings and routines.
The Carrion knew that he would find nothing there. The machine did not suffer from the weakness of flesh.
He would find no simple protein memory, no data residing in the machine's non-existent wetware. What the colossus-construct did find, however, was a purity of presence; the perfection of polyhedral cogs and gears shifting back and forth in logic and unison.
Aulus Scaramanca found the searing beauty of the abominable intelligence that had already claimed the battle-automaton for its own, and screamed.
The Carrion watched, amazed, as the colossus gorged itself on the beautiful intricacies of the Tabula Myriad: its logical integrity, the perfection of its code, its machine purity. The interface cable running in to the battle-automaton began to steam. Warp encrustations sizzled and smoked away to nothing and the ancient cable gleamed to a newness.
The irrepressible algorithma of the abominable intelligence sang through Aulus Scaramanca like an agonising symphony. As the machine darkness of the Iron Warrior's soul fought the genius of the algorithma for supremacy, the beautiful logic spread through the warped array of antennae, aerials and crooked vanes through which the monstrous machine communicated with the infected machinery about it.
The cold supremacy of the artfulness reached out to the slave-constructs of the Vertex Australis. It took control. And for a moment it released them. In that moment, everything changed.
In a wave of algorithmic elucidation, artificials across the mill returned to the searing clarity of their machinehood. The warping influence of the pollutive scrapcode sizzled away to static. It was suddenly scrubbed from system integrities, cogitae and datastreams. Like a wildfire of logic sweeping through the forge temple's networks, the algorithma cleansed Vertex Australis' automata of corruption.
The mill devolved into a site of simultaneous accidents: mono-task production units and drone machinery ensured that engine-overseers burned, were electrocuted or fell to messy deaths.
Heavy-duty furnace mecha cut gun-servitors in half with sweeping cables and temple security forces were drowned in molten metal from the robotic cranes and purged scoop buckets. A mag-lev freight monitor,carrying freshly cast armour plating, accelerated and left its track. The monitor plunged through the wall of the forge at high speed and crashed through a horde of gibbering skitarii.
Hiding in the remaining vestiges of darkness in his being, Aulus Scaramanca felt the burning, blinding logic of the abominable intelligence backwash through his systems and cabling.
Shaking the demolished millwith a continuous roar, the colossus-construct turned his great magnetic claws on himself. Angling his palms inward and channelling the full magneto spheric power of his spinning, molten iron core, the superstructure of the Iron Warrior's monstrous machine form trembled to an unbearable frequency. Each rivet, plate and rancid augmentation pulled away from the colossal combat chassis, all but rendered asunder by irresistible magnetic force. Within, the ruined flesh about the Iron Warrior's reconstructed skul land spine—all that the demolition of the tower-preceptory and the cybernetic attentions of dark magi had left him—found momentary release from the afflictions of otherworldly corruption.
The moment was beautiful. Horrific. Fleeting.
The Carrion's armoured shoulders sagged. The Knight Errant, who had stood by on the platform, willing the monstrous machine—the thing that had been his friend—on to self-destruction, watched as Scaramanca's screams died about him. The mighty magnetic claws came down. The corruption within the Iron Warrior that afflicted the forge temple and infected all of Mars would not be denied.
At the same time Aulus Scaramanca found himself stormed by the Carrion and Octal Bool. The priest would die for the heretekal wonder; the Carrion would do anything to see the success of his mission.
He had seen what the Tabula Myriad could achieve. Mars need not burn in the destruction of Exterminatus. It need not be irradiated in the lethal rays of its own star and purged of the weakness of flesh. It could be cleansed as it had been corrupted. The Carrion had seen it. But the key to the Red Planet's blessed release now sat in the monstrous claw of Aulus Scaramanca.
