In the warp, only the dead may dream.
‘Not your best work.’ Marcus glances at his brother, gaze lidded, tertiary optics cataracted with new overlays. They still give him a headache, this honeycombed perception of the universe, high-resolution imagery parallaxed with an eternity of mathematics scrolling into storage.
Data. Always more data. Always, always. To be passed onto the next generation and the generation after that, preserved in alphanumeric hieroglyphs and computational hymns. But their receptacles? Their shepherds? Nothing but interchangeable circuitry, anonymised and anonymous, no more important than their functions they fulfil. And oh, how Marcus despises the fact.
‘The knife fits the ritual,’ comes Cornelius’ warbling tenor, a boy’s voice, snapping Marcus from his melancholy.
Marcus shrugs, watches as his brother pares the skin from his face, documenting the neatness of it all. Of the two of them, Cornelius has always had the defter touch, the steadier hands.
‘I don’t understand why this is even necessary.’ Marcus exhales. ‘Skin’s porous. Microfilament technology exists. I – it’s just so inefficient, Cornelius.’
‘Ritual, Marcus.’ The Omnissiah would break before his brother’s composure. ‘It’s about the ritual.’
‘A waste of time. We should be preparing for the Nepenthe…’ He shivers as the name unknots along his tongue. The things they’d said of the ship, of what had transpired in its gut, what they’d done inside it, what they’d done to it. ‘… the Nepenthe’s arrival. We should be researching. We should be doing something useful.’
‘We’ve done everything we need to do. We are here, are we not? If we had failed, Veles wouldn’t have permitted us this indulgence. We’d still be in the bowels of the ship, slaving over pointless minutiae.’
That hasn’t yet changed, Marcus thinks sourly. They’re still rotting in the belly of their vessel, still consigned to the smallest laboratory, still forgotten. He flexes his hands, takes note of the fluids clotting in his wrists and, not for the first time, Marcus feels like the old man he’s become.
They’d lied. They said there was forever to be found in the machine but there was nothing, nothing but rust and rot and ruin. But the Nepenthe could change all of that.
‘I wonder if she’s as beautiful in real life.’ Cornelius sighs, cheeks ruddy from the heat. The laboratory is kept repugnantly humid for the benefit of his studies, his speciality being the study of microfauna, complementing Marcus’ own area of expertise, his fascination with the monolithic.
‘If she was truly created in the Dark Age of Technology, I doubt it. Mankind was still so new to the idea of everything. They wouldn’t have had time to make her beautiful.’ Marcus rises, suddenly belligerent. Something about his brother’s romanticism chafes. He rolls his shoulders, one at a time, then flexes the matrix of prosthetics cresting his lumbar region. A threat display, he supposes. ‘And you presume too much of what is likely a dead abomination.’
‘You’ve no poetry in your heart.’ A long-practised sigh, pitched to irritate.
‘I have several hearts,’ Marcus retorts. ‘I’m sure there’s poetry in some.’
His brother doesn’t reply, only cocks a grin before he fits a rebreather over his denuded skull.
‘You are aware that if the Magos finds out, we’ll be branded as traitors, hereteks. There’s no coming back from this,’ Cornelius whispers, voice slurred. Under the mask, Marcus imagines that a metamorphosis is beginning: larynx and somatic nerves, sinuses and visual system, auditory function, every one of them examined and edited in turn, unstitched and revised where required, a library of heuristic algorithms optimising future output to the brain.
‘We are just fulfilling our duties. We’ve identified a possible threat. We’re moving to dispose of it.’ A familiar minuet: argument and counterpoint, reiterated so many times that ritual has become reflex. ‘That we wanted to wait until we were sure of the legitimacy of our claim, I’m certain no one can fault us for.’
His brother says nothing.
‘And if we are right, would you leave her alone in the darkness for another thousand years? She called to us. She begged for us. After all this time, after we’ve gotten so close, you’d turn tail and abandon her?’ Six long strides take him across the laboratory to his brother Cornelius, younger and much taller, marionette limbs and a thorax conjoining steepled torsos, one organic, one entirely synthetic. He claps a hand around his brother’s shoulder.
‘We might find nothing. It’s true.’ Marcus’ voice quiets to a whisper. ‘But it is also possible that we might find her alive in that ship, waiting, our very own madonna of meat and machinery. And can you imagine, brother, the secrets we could gouge out of her bones?’
Magos Veles Corvinus’ immense shadow drags behind him like the hems of his claret cape. His subordinates watch, their machinery in symphony, an arrhythmic clack-clack-clack of moving parts, telemetric devices logging the Magos’ moods. Over the years, they’ve learned to be cautious of his emotional states.
‘There’s nothing here.’ His voice is a hiss, refracted by his respirator into something monstrous, pupils aperturing as his attention fixes itself onto Cornelius’ face.
Or so Cornelius’ picters report, at least. He isn’t certain. This new reality, while transcendental, is dizzying, limbic system still unconvinced of the profit of his recent mutilation. His neural circuitry mutinies against this darkness, the negative space where chemoreceptors once held court in the antechamber of the neocortex, describing the world in electrical staccato. Now, they’ve been bought out, made redundant by technology, and the brain, for all that it might be folds of shrivelled tissue, is unhappy.
‘These are our best estimates. Temporal continuity is hardly a rule in the immaterium. Furthermore, the ship–’
‘Enough.’
Cornelius lapses into silence.
‘Accounting for errors, what is your current prediction?’
‘The Nepenthe, according to records, has been in transit.’ Cornelius pulls up his records, visions saturated with data tables. Mathematical theorems pirouette through possibilities, while Cornelius consults star-maps, black box transcripts in sodium hieroglyphs. Behind all of it, diffused, her song calling him. ‘Since the Dark Age of Technology.’
‘Might it not be a wiser idea to call the Adeptus Astartes’ attention to this? An Ultramarine company is on a hive world only a solar system away. It wouldn’t take them long.’ A voice interjects, low and deferential, but only an idiot like Veles might mistake its sycophantic cadences as sincerity.
That damned enginseer again, Cornelius thinks, jolting from his calculations. They’d missed their last window of opportunity because of him. And the one before that. Ten years, and Lupus Agelastus fought them at every juncture, weaponising protocol and legislation; the common sense of the coward. If it weren’t for Veles’ own greed, this mission would have been butchered at its inception.
Even so…
‘We don’t have the time.’ Cornelius modulates his response, runs a macro to regulate cortisol production. He isn’t angry, yet, but precautions are necessary. The lizard brain is faithless, accountable only to its own agenda and it wouldn’t take much, not after all these years, for it to snap. Such a slip-up would be more damaging to the brothers’ machinations than anything that Lupus could author. So, Cornelius breathes in. Breathes out. Saves the interval to a loop that he then tethers respiratory function to. ‘According to the Lexmechanics, we have sixteen hours, if that. Less, if we factor in the intrinsic instability of the warp. Magos, I beg you. Consider the logic. Ignore Agelastus’ interjection. If we wait for the Adeptus Astartes, we risk losing the ship–’
‘Space hulk. Genetor, I wish you’d cease ignoring the fact that this is a derelict husk that has been floating in the warp for centuries. There is a term for it. It is called a space hulk and precedent shows that–’
‘The vessel is completely functional.’
‘As are many space hulks, judging from reports.’
