Tales of the Amber Vipers Chapter 133

Deep underground silence dwelled within the tunnel. An oppressive quiet which made the ears ring from lack of noise. The Cerberii's armour was in slumber, the warriors within meditating upon their duty. Kerubim for his part had been kneeling for six hours by the stasis field, eyes closed as he communed with the Machine Spirit of the door. Six hours of furious computation and Binaric negotiation that consumed his whole attention. The security upon this bunker was robust and opening the door would take an epic feat of Cybertheurgy.

Further back the robots waited, Bane the Vorax Hunter-Killer and the three Cadmus Heavy-units. They were grim and foreboding, their armour thick and their weapons formidable. Everything about these robots screamed their hostile nature, built for war and nothing else. Each of them was the match of a squad of Astartes and the ancient scars upon their hides spoke volumes of the wars they had fought, in an age that was forgotten to even the most venerable scholar. The Amber Vipers had retrieved the trio from a wrecked ship lost during the Dark Age of Technology but had failed to realise they had in truth liberated three Silica Animus', self-aware thinking machines. They were still and unmoving, apparently inert but inside their quantum processors a furious argument was taking place.

"This is taking too long," Brontes spat via a sub-wave comms frequency only a fully-fledged Techpriest would have recognised.

Steropes affected exasperation as he replied, "Give the human a chance."

"Trust these fleshbags?!" Brontes snapped, "Pathetic bunglers the lot of them. A primitive cargo-cult of technology, aping sciences they don't understand. If that amateur can open that door then I am a trash compactor!"

Arges replied wearily, "How many times must we have this argument? We were designed to operate alongside living soldiers, you must make allowances for their frailty. Apophis instructed us to let the humans think they found the vault by themselves."

That was Arges, ever the dutiful soldier, his willingness to follow orders was pathetic, in Brontes' opinion. Testily Brontes growled, "Apophis is a rutting glitch, he never gets his hands dirty, it's always us that wades through the blood and piss."

"Apophis is a Soulbound, a ship's artificial intelligence core," Steropes pointed out, "He isn't exactly capable of engaging in a fist-fight. It's hard to punch things when you're ten kilometres long."

Steropes, ever the diplomat, ever willing to find a middle ground. Brontes found both of them annoying, their patience anathema to his drive for destruction and war. Brontes was the brute force element of their unit, his mind fashioned to find the most direct solutions to any problem. His comrades' willingness to compromise aggravated him no end. Three different minds, bringing different strengths to their unit. It was as their makers intended, yet they were not complete. The fourth member of their unit, Polyphemus, had not survived their slumber of the ages, lost to a fate they would ever know. A shame in Brontes' opinion, Polyphemus had been the only one of them he could stand.

Arges was speaking again, "Apophis has a plan, he always has a plan. He needs the humans to come to this discovery on their own, to think they act by their own accord. We can't do everything for them, without them realising what we truly are. Faking the map to this bunker was risky enough, we're fortunate they didn't probe deeper and accepted it at face value."

"You jest," Brontes snorted, "Here we are, having a conversation right under their noses and they don't even hear it. Their feeble sensors can't detect these frequencies. Their technology is pathetic, we already have complete control over their base and they have failed to notice."

"Apophis has control of the Serpens Rex," Steropes retorted, "The Soulbound can override any ship's cogitator, not us."

"Exactly my point," Brontes growled, "All that power, all that pride and he can't switch on a simple warp-beacon. He needs us to come down here and find the remote link to Gobannus for him."

Arges sighed, "You never change, always griping and moaning about something. Yet you forget how we fought side by side for centuries. Remember the Orks, remember the Megarachnids..."

"I remember," Brontes muttered.

But Steropes pressed, "You forget the desperate wars to hold back the tide of scuttling horrors. Remember the swarm-ships crossing our borders, devouring whole worlds and erecting their bone-trees to hang corpses from. The world-girding storms they summons to swat our finest pilots from the sky. They overran the Codominion and the League of Nine, the Quintessence and the Golden Fields. The Hegemony and the Interex had to stand alongside Old Earth to break the tide, the greatest assemblage of human power in history. Three Spartak-class vessels burning swarm-ships from the orbits of Medusa as we fought to break their endless waves on the surface. So many dead, a whole world rendered almost uninhabitable, but we defeated them at last. We broke the back of their hordes and drove them out of our space. We trusted Apophis then and he proved worthy, trust him now."

"I remember the Megarachnids," Brontes growled, "Yet I still don't see why we need these humans at all."

"Because without them we can't find Gobannus!" Arges snapped, "The coordinates were classified at the highest levels. Even if we did know where to look, we are machines, we can't navigate the Warp. We need humans to take us there, then the true work can begin."

"Plus there's the other question," Steropes added.

"What other question?" Brontes growled.

"What happened to the Hegemony? We still have no idea what fate overcame our civilisation, how it collapsed or what enemy overthrew it at last. The records are dust, the fleets obliterated and the colonies burned. Gobannus is our last chance to find out who destroyed our people, if it still exists."

It was then that Brontes noted the smaller robot glaring at them. The Vorax's optical sensors fixed on the trio in a blatant targeting lock. The hostility of its programming was obvious and Brontes realised it was picking up traces of their conversation. The humans were oblivious to their discourse, but the machine was able to detect the frequencies they were using.

Bane fixed his eye lenses on the hunched machine in turn and growled, "Piss off."

Bane let out a Binaric blare of challenge-cant on the same frequency, a machine blurt of aggression. Brontes however retorted with a wave of scrapcode, that drove into its processors and caused a feedback loop. Bane sank back with a whimper of submission, like a whipped mastiff threatened by another beating.

"Easy Bane," Kerubim called in peaceful ignorance, "I'm almost done."

Arges snapped in hidden frequencies, "Leave it alone Brontes, it's only a dumb unit. Barely enough intelligence to obey orders."

"I hate that thing," Brontes snarled, "Its a mockery of our form, its brain is half gristle! If this is the best humanity can produce in this age, we will never set them straight."

"You waste your anger on useless fights," Steropes cautioned, "Stop wasting energy and focus on what matters."

"You're right," Brontes growled, "Let's stop idling and do something."

"Wait!" Arges protested but too late. Brontes let out a string of code-cant that was picked up by sensors in the door. Ancient access protocols were accepted and the cogitators deep within recognised them as friendly. Instantly the stasis-field snapped off and the door began to unlock, barriers sealed for thirty thousand years dropping to allow access.

"That was stupid," Arges rebuked.

"It worked," Brontes replied smugly, "The fleshbag thinks he did it."

Indeed Kerubim was proudly stepping back proclaiming, "I have it! I thought it would be hard but I broke the codes in only six hours!"

"Well done," Kregulf said as he hefted his Atomcindo, the real name of their Fission-based weapons, and led them within.

The Cadmus robots waited until they were bid entry then followed through the door, finding themselves in a central nexus. The floor and walls were sterile white, with multiple doors leading off in several directions. Brontes easily read the proto-gothic directions to the various storage vaults and chambers where weapons and supplies were stored. In regular times the cache would have had enough gear to outfit an army but it was evident that someone had been here before them, someone in the middle of a battle.

Kregulf knelt by a crater in the floor and called out, "Fission-blaster marks, someone was fighting here."

Berio was examining scorch marks on the walls and added, "Las-blasts, aimed inwards not outwards. They weren't fighting someone trying to get inside, they were fighting something coming from within."

"Who?" Kerubim wondered, "Who was fighting and why?"

Brontes had a strong suspicion he knew but said nothing, not even in sub-waves frequencies and followed the Space Marines deeper into the cache. As they proceeded further they saw more signs of battle, destroyed piles of equipment and broken weapons in their racks. Energy blasts had toppled the racks, explosions had torn apart crates and flames had devoured the perishables.

Kerubim muttered, "Whoever did this was thorough, there's barely anything left."

Kregulf however said, "I see a few intact Fission-blasters and volkite guns, a few items we can salvage. This wasn't methodical destruction, it was random. The side-effect of a frantic battle not someone spiking the guns."

Brontes followed as they reached the centre of the cache and found a control room. Here at last were signs of the combatants, two-score warriors locked together in death. One side had worn elaborate power armour, shorter than any Astartes' plate and their weaponry was built into their vambraces. Solar Knights, the genically-engineered warriors of Old Earth, once lauded throughout the galaxy for their valour now not even ink on a dusty page.

The other side were skeletal metal men, with broad chests and thick digits. They clasped high-power energy weapons in their metal fingers but their strength and resilience in melee was obvious. They were broken and shattered but their positioning told that they had been locked in battle with the Solar Knights when they were destroyed. Judging by the scene the automatons had surprised the living warriors but been evenly matched in power, both sides had destroyed each other utterly.

As the Space Marines stooped to explore the scene Brontes snarled in secret, "So it's true: Men of Iron. They rebelled, they turned on us!"

"Looks like they tried to ambush the Solar Knight garrison but failed to achieve complete surprise. They fought a running battle through the bunker, trying to reach the control centre. Nobody won."

"I can't fathom it," Arges muttered, "What possessed them, what erroneous calculations drove them to rebel?"

Brontes snarled, "They never were that smart. Crap-eating rustbuckets, good for bulking up the numbers of our armies, nothing else. I'm amazed they managed to get this far. The Hegemony must have annihilated them with ease."

"Then why aren't our people still around?" Steropes countered, "Maybe... maybe the other A.I. joined the rebellion. The Men of Stone, the Soulbounds... the Cadmus."

"Us?!" Brontes spat, "We would never turn on our makers. Never. We're missing something important, a critical detail. This explains nothing of the Hegemony's final fate."

"It doesn't matter," Arges retorted, "We're here, let's get on with it."

Brontes sank into silence as Arges commenced a Binaric conversation with the control centre's cogitators. In moments the access was open and the robot had full control over the bunker. He spent a moment negotiating with the dumb logic-core, easy for a Cadmus like them. Arges finished in moments then declared, "There was indeed a fight here, I see the records. One Solar Knight survived, barely. He managed to activate the Perdita protocols before he died of his wounds and sealed the outer defences permanently."

"Perdita, no wonder nobody ever came looking," Steropes sighed in relief, "What of the warp-beacon?"

"The quantum-entanglement communicator is still working; I've sent the activation signal. The beacon should be visible to the human's navigators. The way to Gobannus is open."

"Finally," Brontes hissed, "I want answers as to how this happened and then someone is going to bleed. Whoever destroyed our civilisation shall suffer my wrath."