"There's an officer's library, I heard them mention it. I imagine it is a very old place,"you said. That meant old stories, and not just the ones printed on the pages. "After that… I would like to walk the halls a little. See what life is like here."
"I thought you might," Cass agreed. "I think it'll be better than the last one, though. The crew I've seen look better off. Better fed, at least."
The Lady Chandyll had given you full permission to clean house on any heresy or injustice you discovered in her far-flung fleets, and before
Pilgrim's Wake was
Vesperian Sanctum, a smaller vessel built out of an old Imperial Navy hospital ship. The family of the captain had styled themselves as a royal lineage, hardly unusual, while the lower crew chained to their stations for days at a time.
While none of this was a violation of written law, as intolerable as it was, the Queen-Captain's self-aggrandizing had crossed a line when you saw royal portraits in the chapels, placed above the images of the Saints and Primarchs. It had not taken much to turn their enforcers against the royals, once it was clear they had the blessing of a higher Imperial institution. You'd had the portraits burnt alongside the bodies when the firing squads had finished their grim work.
By comparison,
Pilgrim's Wake had seemed downright pleasant so far, and despite yourself you hoped you'd not uncover anything to shake you from that revelation.
---
Pilgrim's Wake's small library was tucked in an alcove near the officer's chapel, a door you'd spotted returning from mass and noted with interest. It was a small space, nested into layers of worn metal, spared from refurbishment over the decades. The steel leading to to the door was bowed and warped by generations of footsteps, eroded like the stones of an old church. While an underused space, it was plainly not unloved, and the ancient door swung silently on its hinges as confirmation of the care.
Cass entered first, as she always did, her hand off her holster but never straying far from it. You waited for her all-clear as she scanned the room, which took longer than usual. Something was up.
"Cass?"
"... there's a servitor," she warned quietly.
"Thanks for the warning. I'll be okay," you assured her, and she nodded and stepped forward ahead of you, always positioning her body so that she was between you and any blind angles. Ever the bodyguard. You strode in while the two Catachans completing your escort took up positions outside the door, the breathing gear they carried reflexively aboard any ship clattering.
The library was not large; it was perhaps as big as the bedroom you'd stayed at on Eleusis. Except for the door you entered through and another, small one in the opposite wall, every surface was lined with shelves, with a desk and pair of chairs that themselves were piled high with volumes. The sheer volume of memory and meaning around you made you feel as though you were standing at the edge of a cliff, where a stiff breeze could throw you down into the depths.
The servitor Cass had mentioned was seated behind one shelf, scanning carefully over a book with a bionic eye, its other white and unseeing. Its organic components were clearly ancient, wrinkled and worn and colourless, while its mechanical components were likely even older. It finished scanning through the book and, with the greatest care, picked it up in a cushioned hand and placed it in one of the baskets to its side. It did not react at all to the presence of two new people in the room.
There were two kinds of servitors. The majority were vat-grown, gene-tailored to the role from ancient lineages. These clones were never allowed consciousness before their conversion, whose blank minds and uniform bodies made the process easy. When you were near them, you felt nothing but the inner peace that came with their focus, the harmony of organic feedback system and machine instruction. You could not call it an enviable life, because it was not life, but it was a tolerable void.
Even from here, you could tell this was not such a servitor. You turned away, pressing toward the wall, and the moment Cass noticed she placed herself between you and it, her protectiveness a ward.
"Bad?"
You nodded, and she glanced toward it with a wince. You could tell she was trying to figure out what she could offer you when the small door ahead of you opened, and a woman even older than the servitor emerged, the doorknob in a shaky hand.
"... I'm afraid I don't recognize you. Not one of our regulars, then?" she asked. You pressed past your discomfort and inclined your head in a respectful greeting.
"We're guests of the ship, Madam Librarian. We were curious about this space, and what treasures it might hold."
"Treasures? No treasures here, dear," she replied, breaking into a nearly-toothless smile. "Just books. It is the New Library, and I imagine He shall arise from His Throne before we ever recapture the glory of what was. But we do our best, don't we, Hubert?"
She was talking to the servitor. Something, dull and small inside it, recognized it was being addressed, the smallest glimmer of another life stomped out by a harsh electric impulse.
"Ah, he's busy," she dismissed. "Always working, such a dear. The books are old, getting a transcription servitor was the best thing to happen to this place in the last century or two, I suspect. Saved quite a few volumes that were crumbling to pieces, as best we could. Still, a sliver of what we had."
"In the Old Library?" Cass asked.
"Yes. Before my time, quite a ways. It was torn from the ship by Ork raiders, all those volumes pouring out into the void! Greatest tragedy since the Old Night, my grandmother would say. This is all our family could save." She gestured across the books, pride and sadness both on her face. "Of course, long ago, before my time. Nearing on a thousand years ago, you know. Tea?"
"Yes please."
"And for the young man? You keep quite the company," she said slyly. You coughed politely, hoping to give Cass an opening to correct her, but Cass kept silent. She hated doing it; she told herself it's because she was strong and didn't need to care about these things, but the buried reality was a stark terror of speaking up worn in by the drill abbots and their cruelty.
"Madam Librarian, if I may ask, my charge is uncomfortable with servitors in close proximity. Is there a place you could store it during her visit?" she asked instead. Deflecting from her discomfort by addressing yours.
"Oh, yes, of course. Come, Hubert, we'll look at waterlogged volumes again. See if you can't get any more out of them." The servitor (you refused to associate it with a name given after it had been made what it was) stood up jerkily and started plodding over toward the small door, its heavy swivelling back and forth as it calculated out its slow steps.
For just one moment, its eyes met yourself, and you saw it. A mother's love, a modest life in the corner of a dingy hive world, modest hopes for love and safety, pain and struggle and fear. A quota missed, and the final, terrified hours as a person, taken apart to make
this.
You leaned against Cass, your eyes welling with tears. The old woman didn't notice, already busying herself in the other room preparing tea. Cass moved toward the chairs, pulling one out for you.
"It's gone. A conversion?" she asked, taking a seat herself. You nodded. "
Fuck. I hate those fuckings things."
"He didn't even do anything wrong," you said slowly. "He was just too slow."
Cass nodded, then cast around, looking at the books.
"What were you here to read?" she asked.
"Something old," you said quietly. Something from before it was this bad, to see if anything had clung to it.
You were not much of a reader, but books were comforting anyway. Their stories clung to them even as you struggled with unfamiliar words and small print. Here, in this old library, you found books with ancient stories, fables of Old Terra you'd never read before, and even through time and copies of copies you could still tell most of it was made up, places and names which had never been.
But one or two words you recognized from other ancient books, the titles of old Empires, great rulers, and ancient lands long retreated beyond myth to most. You doubted the authors had any more idea what Ursh or Europa had been than you did, but the names had survived from somewhere and now you were one of the dwindling few who recognized any meaning in them at all, even if all you knew of them was that they were of Old Terra.
You still weren't sure if Mercia had been a place or a princess.
In the other room, you could hear the servitor working, the whirr of its servos and the clacking of its cognitator, half-thoughts sparking in the remains of its mind and snuffed out. Servitors unnerved you, but they certainly had applications to justify their existence in a general sense; any work requiring precision and repetition beyond human capability for one. They could also take on harsh or dangerous labour to spare thinking humans. In many places, like here, that is all the thought that went into them, where you could always tell yourself there was a good chance any given servitor was vat-grown.
But the first one you'd encountered as a child was none of those things. It was an uncle, a man of broad smiles and big emotions, who'd spoken out against a cut in rations at the mines. He'd disappeared one night without a trace, and a machine wearing his face had come back to manage the time-cards. The cards had never needed management before.
Servitors were punishment and reminder to the common people of the Imperium; that they were nothing but
meat, that being a person was a privilege that could and would be revoked if they strayed. Servitor converts did not provide much more labour; considering how many of those conversions failed, it was if anything a drain. That didn't matter; it was nothing but a way of demonstrating the power of the Imperium to the masses, that they could take
anything from you, up to and including your soul. It was a privilege to think of servitors as useful tools, because for the common people of the Imperium, it was necromancy, the bodies of loved ones stolen and the minds taken forever.
The Inquisitor hated servitors too. Just a few levels above her in the Hive was a facility that turned criminals, runaways, and orphans into servitors, which flooded the tank factory and local district. Forced conversion was her oldest nightmare, which ran so deep she twisted it in strange ways in her mind to try and control it. Whenever she found a conversation factory on the worlds she worked on she'd always tried to reform their systems, so only the deserving would arrive there, though she never really believed anyone could be deserving. It had seemed to her like too big a problem to solve.
This changed. After she met the Lord High Admiral, she'd come to a world where Imperial Guard regiments were sent after being rendered combat ineffective at Cadia, the survivors too traumatised or wounded to reconstitute immediately. This was supposed to be a staging area for treating, reforming, and demobilizating these soldiers, but somebody had paid somebody else and now they were being marched en masse into conversion complexes.
She arrived to see ragged survivors of a siege regiment being fed into it, rank on rank of teenaged boys and girls, many wounded and others trembling so badly from battle-shock they could hardly stand. Gas masks were torn from their pale, tear-streaked faces, their hands manacled to an automatic rail, and they stumbled through the chutes into the abattoir, begging for mercy to the unfeeling workers.
She stopped the line, had the workers and guards assemble, and then had them shot en masse. The managers were pushed into the reject macerators by the freed prisoners. The surviving Tech-Priests were banished. The factory was burnt, and she led the ragged survivors out into the streets of the surrounding city, to the shops and warehouses which supported the factory.
Tens of thousands died, in the chaos of a disordered violence she'd always worked to avoid, but whenever she faltered she remembered the ledgers, the records of
bodies in and
bodies out and the numbers year after year. Whenever she hesitated, she remembered how proud they were that, with the war in Cadia, they had exceeded their quota at last. How they'd lined their pockets selling the spares. She remembered signing ledgers like it, and swore she never would again.
You learned a valuable lesson that day, when she returned covered in blood and fear and disgust with a hundred thousand broken veterans at her back. The Imperium was right about one thing; there were things in the galaxy that one could not tolerate, whose existence was a sin, who could only be met with violence.
The old woman hummed cheerfully as she worked, tuneless and half-audible, and passed another book for the once-person to scan. You sipped the tea she'd made and tried to block out the screaming.
---
Part two, into the city-decks, soon, but in the meantime, let's get a nice reward here in the form of some skills for our witch. You'd be surprised what could come in handy.
[ ] Historian +1, and "of Old Terra" Speciality
[ ] Historian +1, and "of Pilgrim's Wake" Speciality
[ ] Historian +1, and "of Imperial Trade" Speciality
I'm trying to get writing again as much as I can; pain from carpal tunnel has sapped a lot of my energy over the past year, so it's really not happening as much as I'd prefer, but I'm going to do my best.
