A/N: So, I've done a few changes, you guys might want to check them out!
So... Yeah, I'm alive, nope, I didn't give up first person writing, yes, I'm trying out new characters and perspectives, no, I don't plan to make any drastic changes to my writing style, yes, Mal is a walking cliché, no, I don't care, yes, most of my characters follow the same archetype, no I'm not angry, yes I'm having fun with this author's note, no, I have nothing better to do and yes, I'm done. On to the story!
Killiane is no medic, but she's smart and she's a fried, so I'm not surprised to feel her mechadentrites holding me down upon waking up. No need to open my eyes or hear her voice, I've been with a handful of women in my life and Kill's touch is the most memorable sensation I've ever felt.
Not just the dentrites, the emotions behind them; softness, care, hidden behind a stubborn confidence that she's right and everyone else is wrong… Maybe I'm just too sentimental.
"Feeling alright?" Killiane's voice is light her touch, soft and confident, same as her face.
I'm in a bed. Beds are rare in the desert, so I decide we're some other place. "No, I feel like Squats are mining my skull." Truer words were never spoken… What a stupid figure of speech.
The room looks nothing like the ones in the fort and it's not Kill's quarters, I've been there and they don't have this much… Cloth.
Velvet drapes, silk curtains, wool carpets, all red, orange and black, all padded… "This place looks like the inside of a vagina…"
Truer words… Oh nevermind.
My clothes, cheap green trousers, are clean, same for the bed and myself. Whatever wound I collected on the job are all patched up now, at least eight bandages that I can see and a big one somewhere on my back.
Kill smiles and the dentrites slide off my chest to disappear back in her robes. She has very few mechanical parts, believe me I checked, but it's not out of conviction or personal taste, she just can't risk too many metal bits as long as she's assigned to this backwater sinkhole, too few spare parts if the sand clogs something, I think…
"Charming as ever." Says Killiane, not smiling anymore, "Do you have any idea what you stepped into?"
That I… Don't. Skak, most likely, but my feet are clean…
The Magos' palm emits a sharp sound as it hits her forehead. Yeah, I did hit my head pretty hard.
"I mean you're in trouble." I knew that. "That skull you found, it talked to you, didn't it?"
A big part of me, the biggest one, the stupid one, hoped that had been a dream… "Yeah… Didn't make much sense, though." Her eyes speak more than the Servo skull did. I'm doomed, a dead man walking, and that flying bit of corpse started the timer.
Then again, I've been dead for twelve years now.
"Where is it? Did it talk to you?" I rise and she lets me, looking at my feet, her face blank.
It doesn't look as though she heard me and I'm about to ask again when she nods, a short bob of her head that sends a strand of rebellious brown manes over her mechanical eye. "It's advanced, unlike anything I've ever encountered. The Genestealers were trying to crack it open when you arrived…" Her words are drowned in the 'Wahwah' of blood leaving my brain as I stand. "…Won't say what, but it must be important. You can't speak a word of it to the others, either they'd crack open your skull to get the chip… Or get you shot… Are you listening to me?"
A single nod gets her talking again, "Look, I'll get you a new arm, get you some decent gear, but that's it…" Yup, she's definitely getting melancholic on me, "I don't know what you plan to do and I don't want to know, this is Inquisition business, I'm a Magos, I can't…" He voice breaks and she clears her throat before getting off her chair, her back to me.
"What's wrong, Kill?" Not that I care much… It just seems appropriate.
She turns her organic eye to me and I see a lone tear roll down her freckled cheek. Somehow, that tugs at my heartstrings. I'm a sentimental, deep down… Then again, my favourite activity involves slitting a man's throat to see how far out I can yank his tongue.
"There's no way out of this, Mal, you kicked the hornet's nest and now you're way too far gone for me to yank you out… Whatever happened in that train, Omnisiah, your whole career, people are going to pay attention to you now."
I know what she means: As a legionnaire, I've lived much too long, seen too much and now I've done too much. Less trouble for everyone to disappear me. Friendly fire, a trigger happy commissar, maybe…
Except the only commissar in our section sees me as the incarnation of the Emperor's will… Or, at least, the only thing standing between her and a painful end… Funny that she'll soon turn out to be the same for me.
Kill doesn't know I've been assigned as Angley's aide, and I don't mention it because she doesn't want to be involved any more than she already is… And I don't know if our pretty little commissar survived the blast.
We're in the planet's only town, in the brothel, because it's the closest thing they have to a motel. The town's peoples don't live like we do, behind tall walls and auto-turrets, instead, they barricade themselves indoor at night and come out in the morning, letting the monsters roam their one street unhindered.
The town's called Cursed and I believe it has the least homeless population in the imperium, for obvious reasons.
Outside the brothel, a bunch of girls, cheap whores in expensive dresses, turn to look at me. They take in the scars dotting my chest, the massive prosthetic, the pale green trousers and my complete lack of body hair, beard and eyebrows and decide they want nothing to do with me. Kill exits next and drags me to a shark-nosed hovercar a few steps ahead.
The inside of the car is bare, plastic seats, nylon belts which Killiane forces me to fasten, and chrome finish everywhere. It smells like Parvovirus, but if you've never smelled an outbreak of Parvo, I guess it just smells like metal.
Cursed is on our camp's doorstep, which on this planet means we have to go almost an hour before reaching our destination. We don't talk. As I said, I'm a talkative little bastard, but most of what I have to say is either uninteresting or heretical. Kill is no better, mind you, she was affected to this mudball for techno heresy or something like that, because she tried to filter Adeptus Mechanicus rituals and keep only useful, practical actions, like oiling the chainsword so it will work and hitting the on button so the electrical circuit will be completed and it will start revving.
She talks a lot about it, but only with me, because I took an oath to never reveal she taught me what she learned.
See, Killiane grew up on a steam world, as she likes to call it, where everything was powered by steam and gears and cold logic. She was good at building and fixing machines and when she turned twenty, the cog heads offered to teach her about even more advanced machines, so the curious little backwater girl jumped on the occasion and learn she did, a bit annoyed by how blindly religious her mentors turned out to be, but happy nonetheless.
I think she bought into the whole machine spirit thing for a time, performing the rituals to the letter and such, but soon enough, she began to see the Mechanicus' advanced technology as nothing more than steam-powered machinery, following simple rules and possessing no free will of its own.
An example she provided to her superior is when she took a stick and asked them if it had a machine spirit, to which they replied it did not. She then bent the stick and attached a cord to both end. Once again, no mechanical soul. She used the device to fire an arrow and the question became somewhat tedious, but the answer was, again, no.
Kill then attached a board perpendicular to the bow and added a hook linked to a small lever, just a piece of metal pushed through a slit in the wood, if she pulled the lever, the hook would retract in the plank. She hooked the cord to it, placed another arrow on the device and fired it as well.
Then, the question became more than tedious and many just stormed out of the room, outraged. She carried the logic further, asked if, seeing as none of the individual pieces could be considered as sentient and the mechanic behind the device's functioning could be reasoned and understood without attributing them to some individuality, perhaps the same could be said of stubbers, autoguns, bolters and, even, lasguns…
Short answer: No.
Long answer: Noooooooooooooooooooooo!
Or so they told her.
I have no opinion on the matter. The universe in a complex place and truth, as I've learned many times, is not an established fact. For instance, did I kill all those people they say I killed? Sure did! Stabbed, shot and burned every last one of them.
But if you think about it, was my body really my own, with that chip in my skull to inhibit any free thought, an upbringing that had me convinced I was on the right side and absolutely no education whatsoever? Can you blame the kid I was any more than you could blame Plato's knife for the people he gutted?
That's why the legion tries to keep us busy at all time, otherwise we start talking about stuff and that can be dangerous…
The burnt corpses around our fort indicate they had a rough night, but the walls still stand and officers still shout orders to whoever still cares. Most of those who do bother to follow the contradicting instructions are the fresh recruits, still wearing their collars and somehow convinced they'll live long enough to earn forgiveness.
Kill goes right past the tents and prefabricated structures to drive straight for her workshop, a concrete slab with two chimneys and a single garage door, right in the center of camp.
As we enter the dark, oppressive structure, Kill begins talking about my arm and flash cloning. She says I have a choice between flesh and blood or carbon fiber and carbon nanotubes. I love being able to crush things with me metal hand, but flesh and bones require no maintenance… Then again, swapping prostetics is a matter of minutes, while growing a new arm would take the whole day.
I can also swap prosthetics on the field, come to think of it, the stump Kill outfitted me with a decade ago is meant to interface with any synthetic limb that uses imperial manufacturing methods, though I never came across any…
"I'll take the fake one." Thinking back to the train episode, it seems like the best choice.