Hellsreach - Aaron Dembski-Bowden [21]
‘Hold,’ he said to his brothers. Troops, their features covered, filed from the archways into the Titan’s limb-innards. The knights’ attempted entrance was blocked by Mechanicus minions.
The soldiers facing them were called skitarii. These were the elite of the Adeptus Mechanicus infantry forces – a fusion of integrated weapon augmetics and the human form. Grimaldus, like many Astartes, regarded their unsubtle flesh-manipulation and the crude surgeries bestowing weapons upon their limbs as making them little more than glorified servitors, and equally wretched in their own way.
Twelve of these bionic creatures, their skin robed against the wind, levelled thrumming plasma weapons at the five knights.
‘I am Grimaldus, Reclusiarch of the Black Tem–’
—Your identity is known to us— they all spoke at once. There was little unity in the chorus of voices, with some sounding unnaturally deep, others inhuman and mechanical, still others perfectly human.
‘The next time I am interrupted,’ the knight warned, ‘I will kill one of you.’
—We are not to be threatened— all twelve said, still in unison, still in a chorus of unmatching voices.
‘Neither are you to be addressed. You are nothing; slaves, all of you, barely above servitors. Now move aside. I have business with your mistress.’
—We are not to be ordered into submission. We are to remain as duty demands—
A human would have missed the division within their unified speech, but Grimaldus’s senses could trace the minute deviations in the way they spoke. Four of them started and finished words a fraction of a second later than the others. Whatever mind-link bound the twelve warriors, it was more efficient in some than others. While his experience with the servants of the Machine-God was limited, he found this a curious flaw.
‘I will speak with the princeps majoris of Invigilata, even if I have to shout up to the cathedral itself.’
They had no orders pertaining to such an action, and lacked the cognition to make an assessment of how it would matter to their superiors, so they remained silent.
‘Reclusiarch…’ Priamus voxed. ‘Must we bear this foolish indignity?’
‘No.’ The skull helm scanned the skitarii each in turn, its red eyes unblinking. ‘Kill them.’
She floated, as she had floated for seventy-nine years, in a coffin-like tank of milky amniotic fluid. The metallic, chemical tang of the watery, oxygen-rich ooze had been the only constant in almost a century of life, and its taste, its feel, its intrusion into her lungs and its replacement of air in her respiration had never ceased to feel somewhat alien.
That was not to say she found it uncomfortable. Quite the opposite. It was forever unsettling, but not unnatural.
In moments of battle, which always seemed too few and far between, Princeps Majoris Zarha believed with cold certainty that this was what gestation within the womb must have felt like. The cooling fluid supporting her would become warm in sympathy with the plasma reactor at Stormherald’s core. The pounding, world-shaking tread echoed around her, magnified like the beat of a mighty heart.
A feeling of absolute power coupled with being utterly protected. It was all she needed to focus on to remain herself in those frantic, bladed moments when Stormherald’s broken, violent mind knifed into her consciousness with sudden strength, seeking to overpower her.
She knew that there would come a day when her assistants unplugged her for the last time – when she would be denied a return to the machine’s soul, for fear its ingrained temperament and personality would swallow her weaker, too-human sense of identity.
But that was not now. Not today.
No, Zarha focussed on her simulated regression to the womb, and it was all she ever needed to push aside the clinging insistency of Stormherald