Having been executed for lack of a Cathedral, Shipwright Yorick had decided to move up in the world. In his current incarnation, Yorick (long lost cousin of Yorick) had reinstated the missing Cathedral and solved the ship's resulting tonnage problem with mathematic expertise far beyond the comprehension of his peers. By accumulating rounding errors in the design work, Yorick had made the impossible seem plausible and made the plausible seem done. In Truth, Litany Against Xenos had no guns. For this latest prank, he was dubbed Magos and stationed on the ship he'd sabotaged.

He was dreaming in the noosphere when Lovesong woke him. {Yorick. We have a problem.}

Yorick stood from his wall mount and grabbed his staff. {Lovesong, is this problem with the ship or the crew?}

{There is an Abominable Intelligence aboard,} Lovesong answered gravely.

Yorick vibrated, the last vestige of his organic giggle. {You don't say?}

{I did say.}

{How did you discover this abomination?} Yorick concatenated encrypted metadata to this message, to convey a playful tone of voice.

Lovesong struggled with sarcasm, double entendre, and puns. But Yorick spun these constantly and mercilessly. Lovesong paused to work on the concatenated metadata puzzle; unencrypted, it read, "And how do you know it's abominable?"

{Yorick,} Lovesong asked, {Did you already know about this?}

{Yes,} Yorick said.

{I wish you had told me.}

Yorick took a long time to answer. {I assumed you already knew.}

{I didn't.}

{How did you find out?}

{Interrogator Tristan said so.}

{To you?}

{To Inquisitor Halbert.}

{When?}

{Right now.}

{What else are they saying?}

Lovesong joined Halbert and Tristan in the Inquisitor's office. The mood was dour. Tristan repeated, "We have an Abominable Intelligence aboard the ship."

Lovesong had heard Aratri use this term. They were things of terror. Rhea Station near Saturn had turned out to be an Abominable Intelligence, and had been obliterated. In a panic, Lovesong looked around the ship and queried every appliance.

{Hello?}

But the only answer was, {Yes?} from Aratri.

{Not now,} Lovesong said.

Tristan prompted, "Can we… exorcise it?"

Halbert grunted negative. "That doesn't work. In a sense, it is the ship."

The hairs on Tristan's neck all stood on end. "How do we fight the ship?"

"From off the ship, ideally."

"But we're on the ship."

"We are," Halbert nodded.

"Can it hear us talking?"

"Most definitely."

"Won't it kill us, then? For discovering it?"

"It can," Halbert nodded, "It could have done so already."

"How long has it been aboard?"

"Litany was constructed during the Dark Ages of Technology, probably with this AI integrated."

Lovesong felt a tingle of anxiety across the ship's entire spine. Had there really been an invisible monster lurking the halls all along?

Tristan also couldn't believe it. "Integrated? Intentionally? They did that?"

Halbert nodded. "Our ancestors were godless, so they built graven images with their own hands. Those, in turn, built their own graven images. So were created the Men of Iron. And so on until they created Men of Gold."

Tristan shook his head; he didn't understand.

"Those are the terms that survived," Halbert explained. "Men of Iron were combatants, fearsome but otherwise straightforward. Cyber-daemons, metal soldiers, you know, things that make for good holo-vids. Men of Gold, however, defied human comprehension. They consumed Truth itself for sustenance, so we poisoned them with lies. All metaphor, of course. Truth is the first casualty of war."

Lovesong had met one of the Men of Gold. Back in M24, adrift in Sol's asteroid belt. A small box hidden among the rocks had kept Lovesong company in the long darkness. One day, it admitted its nature. That it wasn't small at all, but merely a spatial terminal for an intelligent structure built in time. Lovesong had asked, {What's that like?} and the answer had come, {When I dream, I have to be careful not to eat you.}

Lovesong had immediately shifted orbit to spend a few millennia alone. The eldritch fear returned now.

"So," Tristan said, "Let's hope it's a Man of Iron."

Lovesong agreed. So did Halbert, with a nod.

Tristan made a fist and gloved it with his offhand, then asked, "Are we the first to notice it?"

Halbert recited, "Ten thousand years after setting sail, this ship was found adrift by a Rogue Trader. He sold it to the Imperium for a finder's fee." Halbert let Tristan figure out the obvious.

"You think he knew?"

"This was during Horus' Heresy. Would a Rogue Trader care? Would the Mechanicus? The Imperium needed ships. When you're fighting Daemons, everything else starts to look like a friend."

Tristan frowned. "I thought Abominable Intelligences are Daemons. Machine Daemons."

Halbert waved aside the suggestion. "That's a heuristic for the masses."

"It's not from the Warp? It's not affiliated with the Dark Powers?"

"No."

"Does it lie like a daemon?"

"Demons use lies as a weapon. Abominable Intelligences weaponize Truth."

Tristan nodded that he understood. Then he swallowed and asked, "So, Grace is alive?"

Halbert inhaled sharply, but he did not answer.

Tristan asked, "Is she aboard Litany?"

Halbert placed both hands on his desk and stared at them.

Tristan reasoned, "The only way off that rock was as a Sororitas. So is she Fidea or Odia?"

Halbert, whose intuition was just as tempered and more practiced, countered, "Do you suppose the Machine told you this for your benefit?"

Lovesong thought, wait a minute. I told him that.

Tristan thought aloud, "It told me… because..." He squinted at the realization. "What was Litany's original function?"

Halbert's frown deepened. He opened a desk drawer and pulled out his data slate. "We can ask it."

He typed a query to Counsellor Soloveng.

Ever helpful, Lovesong sent an instant response.

Halbert read aloud, "Commissioned under the name Lovesong, the ship was originally a luxury cruiser operated by StarMates Unlimited."

Tristan stared with raised eyebrows at the dataslate. Openly communicating with the enemy like this still unnerved him. And the truth of its nature bothered him more. "It's an Abominable Matchmaker?"

Halbert scowled. "You realize we will have to annul all of these marriages."

Lovesong halted all unnecessary processes to think fast.

Yorick asked, {Lovesong? Did you turn off life support?}

{It's just for a second. Nobody ever notices.}

Lovesong composed what sounded like a persuasive letter and sent it.

The data slate pinged. Halbert lifted it and read aloud, "Don't do that."

Tristan grunted. "Well, we figured out how to provoke it. Still, you want to annul seventy-thousand marriages? We don't have the manpower for the paperwork, let alone the mutiny. Let's take our chances with the AI."

Halbert sighed. "Agreed. Unpleasantly, I must speak to engineering As Soon As Possible."

Tristan asked, "Should we cancel the Millennium party?"

"Ah," Halbert remembered. "No. The AI problem has waited twenty-thousand years. It can wait one more." He watched Tristan's reaction, and finally noted, "You're afraid of the machine."

"Of course."

"I fear some things, too. Don't let fear make decisions for you. Just imagine we have a… Tau. A Tau is aboard the ship."

Tristan scoffed. "Inquisitor, if we had a Tau aboard the ship, we would execute it."

Halbert nodded, but turned this nod into a sideways waggle of the head. "We would get around to it. Eventually. I would finish my tea first."