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  Esha silenced her deputy with a look, before returning her gaze to the Vox Omni Machina. ‘You should have awoken the Great Mother,’ she said to Chrysophane. ‘It was her choice to make, not the priesthood’s. She is Bellatrix Altus. The Legio is her command.’

  ‘She decides the war, whereas we should only look to the spiritual and physical needs of our engines?’ said Chrysophane, somewhat patronisingly. ‘If only the Machine-God had seen to set the mechanisms of the Machina Cosma to a lower complexity grade, but life is not so simple. Would you have the Legio defy the lord commander of the entire Imperium and the Fabricator General because of protocol?’

  She stared back at him.

  ‘I understand. You have divined that under normal circumstances, she would have been awoken. In this instance, I decided it was better to let her sleep. She is fine, I assure you. I took precautions because of her age, and meant no disrespect.’

  ‘If she is ailing I should have been told,’ said Esha. ‘And I should have been told of the orders. While the Great Mother is asleep, I am determined Second, and was elected princeps seniores of this Legio before the voyage.’

  ‘Princeps seniores is a battlefield rank of brevet status. It has no standing in the determination of Legio deployment,’ said Chrysophane.

  ‘It is the best we have. I should have been consulted.’

  ‘There was no need. She is fine,’ repeated Chrysophane firmly. His telescopic legs extended, taking him up into the air. He began directing his minions with databursts and gestures of his supplemental limbs. ‘Now, we really do have work to do. Please do not lapse into argumentative mode again – you are close to modus unbecoming.’

  ‘I am not a tech-priest,’ Esha said.

  ‘You are a servant of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and therefore subject to its laws,’ he said.

  The priests took up station around the room, some swinging censers, others relieving the more junior enginseers from their stations in the cloisters, who bowed and departed silently. Devices were wheeled in and hooked up to machine banks and struck with golden spanners to the time honoured rhythms of good function. The pitch of noise in the room changed. The harmony of machine song was disturbed. Peace retreated from the room. Luxor Invictoria’s steely wrath took its place.

  ‘I’ll be lodging a formal article of dissatisfaction about this,’ Esha said.

  ‘Forgive me for saying, but it is not for you to decide anyway,’ said Chrysophane.

  Esha stepped down from the walkway. Instinctively, her maniple sisters reformed around her, spreading out along the walkway as if they were machine-bonded to their engines and providing covering fire from high ground.

  ‘You are wrong,’ said Esha.

  Chrysophane was not insensible to Esha’s concern for her mother, and wise enough in the ways of baseline humanity to see that her fear caused her behaviour more than the potential break in the chain of command. He bowed in conciliatory fashion. ‘Well. Soon we shall see. When awoken, the Great Mother of the Legio will have her say. That really is the last of it, for I must terminate our discourse and communicate directly with Luxor Invictoria.’

  The chanting grew louder. Servitors strode in bearing heavy metal boxes. A whoosh of methalon blasted from a venting pipe behind the Titan’s neck ring. Metal creaked as it contracted in the cold. Lights in the head blinked in rapid sequence.

  ‘Very well,’ said Esha. She bowed and clicked her heels together. ‘Your holiness.’

  ‘Princeps majoris,’ said Chrysophane.

  A klaxon blasted twice. A machinic whine built. Mechanisms engaging beneath the floor shook the naoz. Flashing lumens blinked into action around the rear of the chapel. The back wall cracked along hidden seams and swung open upon the drop-ship hangar bay behind the naoz where the First Maniple god-engines stood bathed in an orange sodium glare. The air in the engine hold was stale and carried the gunpowder stink of the open void. Compared to the rich interior of the naoz, the hangar space was miserly in decoration, all bare plasteel and plain undercoat. The jewel-box glory of the temple was diluted by its utilitarian vastness. The holy became mundane, more of a factory than a fane, though both were places of worship to those of the Cult Mechanicus.

  The other princeps came off the walkway, except Toza Mindev, who tarried and craned her neck to look into the hangar. Klaxons honked as Luxor Invictoria’s head slid backwards on rails revealed by the chapel’s transformation.

  ‘Princeps Mindev, we are leaving,’ said Esha. ‘We should not disturb the Great Mother’s final moments of peace.’

  ‘One more minute, please, princeps majoris,’ said Mindev. ‘I wish to look upon the myrmidons a moment. It has been too long since I bonded with my own engine, and the god-engines of First Maniple are the exemplars of our Legio.’

  ‘No. Now,’ said Esha more forcefully. ‘You will see the gods of war walk soon enough, and through Procul Videns’ eyes.’

  ‘Yes, princeps majoris,’ said Mindev contritely, and came down. Esha waited for her to get into line with her comrades, before turning smartly on her heel and ushering her maniple out of the chapel through the bustle of priests awakening the Grand Master of the Legio Solaria.

  Three

  The Way to Theta-Garmon

  Mohana Mankata Vi bathed in a liquid warmth so different to the caress of sunlight on bare skin. She was blind, and for a moment did not know where she was. She opened her mouth to speak. Liquid moved around the aching stub of her tongue. It was already in her lungs. She was drowning without dying, but she did not panic. Many thoughts were coursing through her mind. One came to prominence, and expressed itself as a line of text across the darkness of her mind.

 

  Disembodied chatter answered Mohana Mankata Vi. A hundred voices, human and machine, all gabbling at once.

 

  There was no soft breeze, no sensation but that conveyed by alloy skin and wire nerves. No taste but the aseptic amnion that filled every cavity of her body. No cold air to rouse the lungs. Her flesh was soft with years of immersion. Her environs were precisely the same heat as her internal temperature, blurring the boundary between her body and the medium she floated in. She kicked her legs. They were feeble, and she realised she could not have walked were she free. She lifted a hand before her. Its outline was a blur in the thick liquid. She clenched her hand into a fist, and let it open. Her fingers were withered sticks.

  She asked a question every old woman who had once been a girl asked herself.

  Her heart raced. A second voice answered her, exactly the same as the first.

 

  Outside the tank a chime rang, the first external stimulus she processed. Although the noise was muffled by armourglass and the liquid, as soon as she became aware of the chime other sensations reached her, conveyed by waking machine senses and the motion of the liquid she floated in. The head of Luxor Invictoria was moving. She drifted through the liquid, belatedly changing direction as the head shifted. The head came to a stop, and she carried on moving into the tangle of hardlines jacked into her spine, brain and the remnants of her gut. She knew where she was. After the false veracity of her machine memory, her condition came as a shock all over again.

  The voice was her voice, a part of and yet separate from her. Similar voices spoke from other scripts, detailing external change, systems readiness, and a myriad other things. Many of the voices chattering in her head were her own.

  She did not wake like a woman any more. So much of her being was meshed into the war engine’s soul that she was already processing multiple strands of data before she wa
s fully conscious. The effect made her feel like a passenger in her own skull, and that her consciousness had been reduced to some glitchy artefact in an enormous mechanism. She was becoming data-lost, close to being one with the Machine-God. The feeling excited and appalled her equally. At no time was it stronger than when she awoke.

  She sorted the incoming information. Logistics chattered in her mind. Data screeds rolled down the fields of her coopted imagination. Vox emanations sounded in her mind. Machine voices competed with them. From these she isolated the voice of her primary data font and consigned the others to temporary oblivion.

  the data font stated emotionlessly.

  This troubled her. The chronographs of Luxor Invictoria suggested an arrival four days later, though of course any projected journey time in the warp was at best a guess.

 

 

 

 

  The data font was a simple-minded thing, a conglomeration of semi-sentient systems and a sliver hived off from Mohana Mankata Vi’s own intellect. It could be annoyingly obtuse, and needed frequent prompting.

 

  The boom of metal clamping on metal rang through the hull, quivering the thick preservative amnion of the tank. Mohana’s ancient body felt the head being lifted high.

 

  responded the data font.

 

  The chattering data font gave no reply, but churned out a mess of numbers describing the head’s movement through the air.

 

 

  she demanded.

 

  she repeated.

  stated the data font.

  commanded Mohana Mankata Vi.

  The opening message was short and terse. The more complicated the message, the more likely the content of whatever vision the astropaths exchanged would be incorrectly translated. This one seemed to be accurate. The Legio’s astropaths were of the highest grade, and an astrotelepathic temple-relay of the Carthega’s size guaranteed message-visions would come through with clarity. Secondary corroboration meant it was reliable. A long stream of psycho-cyphers and inviolacy coding that ran through Mohana’s mind afterwards suggested it had not been intercepted or altered by the enemy.

  asked the data font.

 

  The last she noted in her log as an act of defiance. She was bound to be sidelined eventually. There were two possible reasons: betrayal, or imminent death. She discounted the first. The Imperial Hunters and their Mechanicum priests were loyal to the core. That meant the latter. They would never tell her she was about to die, but if the priests were beginning to usurp her authority she probably didn’t have long left in this life. She could feel her mind fragmenting. At some point in the near future, they’d disconnect her from the mind impulse unit after action, and her consciousness would not return from enmeshment with Luxor Invictoria. To all purposes she would be dead, her body inconvenient organic waste fouling the cockpit.

  repeated the data font.

  She ignored it.

 

  There were a few seconds of silence. The flow of data input grew physically noticeable as an electrical tickle at the top of her neck. Luxor Invictoria’s cogitation systems were performing calculations in concert with her brain. The two systems, machinery and mind, worked indivisibly as one.

 

  All hail the machine indeed, Mohana thought to herself, although there was not really such a thing as ‘herself’ any more. Luxor would hear the bite in her thoughts. She was glad he had not woken fully.

  she thought.

 

  She shut the data font off and paid only cursory attention to the information streaming through her cortex, but she saw that no ships were lost in the warp. The great Ruinstorm had weakened further while she had slept. The Astronomican shone brightly once again and the passage had been smooth compared to the horror jumps of the last few years. The empyrean had calmed. All this gave her hope.

  The smaller movements of Luxor Invictoria’s head were barely perceptible to her human senses, but she felt every motion though the Titan’s sensorium. The sensations grew in intensity as the machine’s animal sentience stirred. He was being brought to life by the ministrations of the priests as they prepared to resocket the head in the gargantuan body. Luxor Invictoria had a minimal sense of touch and only a crude grasp of pain, but other senses took place of these inferior human faculties. She felt everything he did. How could she not? She was Luxor Invictoria.

  As the head swung out high over the deck of the drop-ship hangar where the Titan’s body waited, her mind went back to the plains of Procon, and Hamaj. The sensation of commanding a Titan was akin to riding a horse – at least, the feel of two minds responding to each other was similar. The machine bond was more intense, deeper, more intrusive. The mind of a princeps and her god-engine meshed in a way that no other partnership could match. Unlike riding a horse, it was a cold intimacy. There was nothing of friendship in the bond with the Titan. It was a marriage of convenience in which both sides bickered for dominance.

  She reengaged with the flow of information coursing into Luxor Invictoria’s manifold from the Legio infosphere.

  she commanded. She might not have long, but she could make her last days count.

  As the data font began to lay out the details of the battle plan, a momentary feeling of what Mohana had been overwhelmed her. She looked at the rueful contrast between herself then, and herself now. What she had become was the direct result of that reckless moment two hundred years ago, when she had taken the cog from the men of her house and held it up in defiance of every constraint placed upon her. The clean-limbed girl with clear eyes and strong bones lived only in her mind. For pride, Mohana had condemned her
self to a life of a kind she could never have imagined, yet in doing so she had gained power beyond the dreams of the most ambitious Knight of House Vi.

  The gods of war walked to her command.

  The bounds of reality stretched. Space inflated. Fixed points of stars became circling smears, their light dragged out by a dimensional singularity of uttermost black. A crawl of multi-coloured lightning jagged from fringes of the null-point, limning the darkness with lines like the radial muscles of an iris surrounding the pupil of an eye. With a sucking roar that defied the airlessness of the void, the pupil swelled and burst, opening up a vista on the howling madness of the reality just beyond the awareness of mankind. For a moment the rift billowed, threatening to swamp everything with lights of no natural hue before it stabilised.

  Opposite the rift, the inky blackness of the materium stood immutable. The innumerable stars of the Machine-God’s great work shone steady and true away from the corrupting effects of the warp-void interface. Burning brightest of all the stellar lights was a vast field of stars and gas. A nebula largely done with childbearing, it provided an ordered mirror to the disorder of the immaterium roiling on the other side of the hole in space and time. It was an adornment on the machine of creation, a jewel wrought by a god with an eye for beauty. Luminous gas clouds fixed in predictable, cellular patterns of fractal dispersion operated to the sacred laws of physics. A few stars were still forming at the points of the greatest remaining mass, but though wreaths of gas arced gracefully over the central part, in the main the core was fully wrought from the cosmic clay of dust and light. There, the curls of matter, though captivating to look upon, were mere afterbirth of the dozens of fully-fledged systems glowing in the wide black gaps, where, aeons ago, the nebula had collapsed into life. This rich, globular star field went by the name of the Garmon Cluster, and thence the Legio was bound.

  Through the heaving gap a mighty fleet proceeded. Ship after ship poured from the warp rift. Dozens of metallic glints raised by immaterial storms and hard starlight scintillated on the angles of their hulls, multiplying by the second as the Legio Solaria made its translation from madness to order.