Tales of the Amber Vipers Chapter 248
Zar-Quaesitor broke from the warp like a hurled javelin, punching through the veil between Immaterium and Materium with violent force. Corposant spilled from her blunt bow as impossible strands of energy dissipated while cloying hands and tentacles slithered over her Gellar Field, trying to prevent the great ship from returning to the realm of sanity. She shook them off as her drives burned bright, breaking away from the rent in reality and leaving it to slam shut.
Zar-Quaesitor had emerged above a barren moon of Cippum, a mere few hours from the planet's orbit. Normally such a feat was deemed impossible, Imperial vessels travelled for weeks to find a stable jump point in the outer reaches of a stellar system. A few systems boasted fixed warp-gates deeper into the star's gravity well, rare and precious beyond measure, but Cippum had no such boon. By all rights Zar-Quaesitor should have been torn apart by her reckless translation, but Belisarius Cawl had access to secrets no other dreamed of. The Archmagos had studied intensely the interactions between space and time, matter, energy and gravity, dreams and portents, he knew paths unmapped and ways uncharted even by the finest Navigators. Cawl could use the smallest dimple of spacetime, such as a moon's gravity well, to translate, though even for him it was deemed risky and reserved for moments of dire need, or when he wanted to show off. This was the former.
Deep within the ship an army was preparing for war. Ranks of Skitarii and Thallax robots being inspected before deployment. They stood to parade formation in a vast marshalling yard, so high its roof was but mere shadows and its walls running into the distance where the eye watered. High above mechanical gargoyles leered, moving from perch to perch and cackling at the many soldiers standing to attention. An auto-operatium lurched along the lines on brass legs, the many cylinders in its back wheezing out a tiny tune as an embedded servitor worked ivory keys worn yellow by countless performances.
In serried ranks the Skitarii stood as servitors trundled back and forth, carrying biers of weapons in mechanical arms. A red-robed Tech-Priest marched at the fore, collecting weapons with reverence and laying them out on a bier with whispered psalms of appeasement unto the Machine Spirits. In their place new weapons were issued, Radium Jezails and Rad-pistols, Irad-cleansers and Gamma bombs. Precious canisters of Phospex were brought forth with infinite care, weapons the Mechanicus vehemently denied still retaining the lore to produce and never admitted to owning.
Kerubim watched all this from the sidelines, charting the Motive Force with his new eyes. In his view streams of command-code flowed between the Tech-Guard, instructions sent over vox waves seen as shimmers in the air. Even standing still they were a constant discourse of observations and tactical strategising, combat protocols updating moment by moment as their situational awareness shifted. To a normal eye they were blank and mindless warriors, little better than automatons but in the Noosphere they were a tornado of thought.
Kerubim himself had changed too. He now bore Mark X armour, freshly issued from Cawl's stockpiles. He found the plate strange, subtle changes to its motive fibre making a marked difference from his customary Mark V. His old plate had been ancient, reworked many times and filled with odd quirks and strange foibles. He'd grown used to the janky plate, but this new armour was pristine. Its ceramite surface was the deep red of Techmarines, but the breastplate bore a skull and cog icon declaring fealty to Mars. The Pauldrons were amber-hued, with the snake and goblet icon of his chapter, but the edges were silver. He was proud to wear it and pleased that when he donned the helm his altered visage was hidden, his life was already looking better.
A gruff voice rasped over his ears, "We gonna make the planet glow with this sorry lot."
"Brontes is most insistent," another said.
"Damned trash-compacter, making demands and not explaining a word."
"I thought you were friends now?"
"We have a common enemy to kill, don't mistake that for liking the thing."
Kerubim looked about and saw Wulfe and Jordig watching the ceremony. It was supremely strange to be looking Jordig in the eye, the two at last equal in height, but Kerubim supposed he'd get used to it. Wulfe was Wulfe, as dense and obdurate as ever, his wounds were almost healed and he seemed eager to get into the fray. That desire Kerubim understood all too well.
A Tech-Priest approached with a selection of rad weapons but Kerubim patted his Adrathic rifle and said, "I'll stick to this."
"Take what ye can get," Wulfe scoffed.
"I don't see you giving up your Gravity hammer."
"A Rotundus would die before being parted from his weapon," Wulfe snarled irately.
"We'll all take red-grenades," Jordig butted in firmly, reaching out to claim a trio of canisters. Kerubim and Wulfe followed suit, attaching grenades to their persons at various points. Kerubim didn't know why they had to take the items, but determined to find out as he saw Brontes appear. The Cadmus robot entered the arming chamber, flanked by Cawl and Pycelo. The trio were twice the size of any other, yet lost under the soaring roof, it's arched ceiling so high Kerubim had to crane his head back to view it. Brontes bore his customary Fission-blasters but his companions had been refitted with Irad-cleansers, the potent weapons attached with cables to additional generators bulging off their frames.
Cawl skittered up to them and cried, "Good news! We have translated exactly as I predicted and are mere hours from Cippum."
"And the Traitors?" Jordig asked.
Pycelo answered, "The Tezla has been picked up in orbit, trying to hide among Tithe-ships. She may be fast but she rode the same warp-currents we did, she can't have arrived more than a few days before we did."
"Are we planning to board her?" Jordig asked.
"We shall send a boarding party to seize the ship, but I intend to press on to the surface and capture the Hereteks," Cawl proclaimed.
"About that," Kerubim interjected, "It's about time we knew what we are going up against."
"You know what you need to know," Brontes growled.
"Don't give me that, only a fool goes into battle without a thorough understanding of the plan."
Cawl waved his hand to say, "I have been fully briefed on the threat, rest assured we have a strategy to counter it."
But Jordig refuted, "You cannot leave us fighting in the dark, we are not the Imperial Guard to be expected to stand in a line and shoot on command. Combat is fluid, ever-changing, we may be split up or required to act at a moment's notice. The Codex Astartes demands front-line units must be aware of the strategic goals of their commanders and the challenges that await them, else collapse into disarray at the first brush with the foe."
"Damn," Brontes muttered, "I was hoping it wouldn't come to this."
"If you dannae tell them, I will," Wulfe snorted.
Brontes sighed, "No, you weren't there, you wouldn't understand. If you must know it all began when the Hegemony developed Omniphages, world-killing Nanoswarms programmed to devour matter and build more of themselves. They could scour a planet down to the mantle, an Exterminatus unlike any you can imagine. They were unstoppable, but ultimately nothing but a means to destroy. The Hegemony dreamed of more, of a tool to repair and build instead."
"Your Nanocytes?" Jordig prompted.
"That was the next step," Brontes confirmed, "Tools that could rebuild at the atomic level, but it still wasn't enough, they were limited to one form at a time, one template. Our finest minds conceived a means to store information in a Nanoswarm, exponential data storage, limited only by their numbers, the more of them there were the greater their capacity to remember. We could teach it templates for lush paradises, machines, cities, starships, anything you can imagine. Such a dream, to drop a Nanoswarm on a dead ball of rock and watch it become an Eden, complete with cities and transports all waiting for settlers to move in. We could terraform dead worlds at a whim."
"Or wipe out an enemy," Wulfe growled.
"That too," Brontes sighed, "But it was not to be."
"What went wrong?" Kerubim asked.
Brontes' voice became hollow as he lamented, "To teach the Nanoswarm basic templates our scientists introduced objects for it to disassemble and memorise. Tanks, planes, shuttles, guns, buildings, the Nanoswarm deconstructed them one molecule at a time and absorbed them into itself... but it didn't stop there. You see at an Atomic level there isn't much difference between living tissue and machinery and the Hungering didn't understand what it was meant to deconstruct, and what it wasn't. The Nanoswarm took the templates provided and started looking for more, starting with the scientists themselves."
"It ate its makers?" Kerubim gasped.
"Absorbed them," Brontes corrected, "Took the atoms of their bodies into itself and produced more Nanocytes, but it wasn't only matter. The Hungering absorbed their memories too, their thoughts and intellect. Men, machines, buildings, the land and the oceans, even the very air itself, it spread across the planet and devoured an entire world. All it saw was more data to be consumed, it devoured all matter, driven to learn all that could be learned... by absorbing it."
Cawl interrupted to say, "Archeotech capable of exponential growth, able to spread and grow without limit. The more of it there is, the faster it grows and the smarter it gets. A Von Neumann machine, spreading across the galaxy, and beyond. Growing faster and faster until it consumes the universe. All matter would become the Hungering, the Nanoswarm would be... everything."
"Frak that, I assume you fought back?" Wulfe prompted.
Brontes continued, "I was part of the fleet sent to stop the rampage. We'd already lost a planet to it and were damned if we'd lose anymore, but when our Soulbound opened fire, the Hungering fought back with our own people. It sent them back at us."
"Wait... what?!" KErubim exclaimed.
"The Hungering, it retains the templates of anything it absorbs, and can recreate them from its own mass. Our scientists and civilians, our soldiers and machines, even our starships, the Hungering reproduced them exactly and sent them back against us. We were fighting facsimiles of our own people. Not just their weapons, but their intellects too, their knowledge of tactics and strategy. The Hungering fought us with our own damned people. We lost so many to its spread, Worlds fell, a sector lost..."
"How did you stop it?" Kerubim asked keenly.
"Mercilessly," Brontes confessed, "Our Soulbound Apophis dedicated his runtimes to understanding its processes and found a weakness. The Nanoswarm had a slight vulnerability to radiation, interfering with the connections between Nanocytes. So, we unleashed our deadliest arsenals, weapons the Hungering had never seen before: Nucleonic furnaces, Neutron Eradicators, Bottled Stars and Gamma-wave Fountains. It had fleets and armies, but it had not absorbed anything like the weapons we sent forth. I stood on the hull of Apophis and battled constructs as we scorched worlds to ash, an entire sector burned to the bedrock, turning a hundred worlds into radioactive slag to drive it back."
"That explains why we carry rad-weapons," Wulfe sniffed, "But why the hell didn't you wipe it out completely?"
"We didn't dare," Brontes confessed.
"Too afraid?"
"Too ashamed."
"I don't follow," Kerubim said.
Brontes sighed, "The Hegemony held science had all the answers, that technology could solve any problem. It was more than a creed, it was self-evident truth. The Hungering undermined that concept, it struck at the root of all we believed. Technology run amok, uncontrollable, inherently flawed. We couldn't accept that, we couldn't admit we'd make a mistake on so grand a scale. If the Hungering couldn't be mastered then our whole way of life was wrong. So we buried a portion of it, somewhere deep, somewhere it couldn't get out. We couldn't control it, but perhaps someone, someday would develop the means to correct our error. It was about preserving our ideology."
"I didn't know if you were arrogant or stupid, but now I see you're both," Wulfe snorted.
"I said it should be destroyed, but I was overruled," Brontes snapped.
Kerubim interrupted, "So we land in force and try to stop Ruuka from letting loose this Hungering, and if that's too late we drown it in radiation?"
Wulfe nodded, "Nice and simple, like all good plans. But doesn't this ship have Titans on board?"
"No," Brontes growled, "Too slow, too vulnerable."
"But..." Kerubim protested.
"Listen fleshbag, the Hungering absorbs what's sent against it. If it consumes a Titan, you can expect a dozen perfect replicaes to come back at you. You don't want to face a Titan Legion in the field, this will be hard enough as it is. Which is also why Cawl can't come."
"Unacceptable!" Cawl squawked, "I must come."
"Pay attention!" Brontes snarled, "If you get absorbed the Hungering will know everything you do, everything! Technologies, strategies, fleet deployments, strategic hubs. We cannot afford to let you be taken. You have to stay in orbit as a final line of defence in case we are too late... what Exterminatus-class weapons do you carry?"
"Zar-Quaesitor does not officially carry any such..." Cawl started,
But Jordig interrupted, "A full complement of Virus bombs."
"Useless against the Hungering," Brontes muttered.
Cawl sullenly muttered, "Memo to self: bless Zar-Quaesitor with Neutron Eradicators at the next refit."
Kerubim lifted his head and said, "Then we will have to be swift. Stopping Ruuka is our best chance to avert tragedy. We need to find out where he's gone and go in all guns blazing."
Brontes growled, "We had better get there in time, or this galaxy is doomed. It took the full Hegemony fleet, led by a Spartak world killer, to stop it last time. If the Hungering recovers its strength your feeble Imperium won't stand a chance."