Tech priest, p.1
Tech-Priest, page 1
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It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.
Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.
To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.
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SELECTED: DENTRICA I OF III
ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED
UPLOADING… +DATA STORM+
Omnid Torquora waited for the heavy elevator doors to shudder aside. As they did, the darkened diagnostiquorum chamber was revealed to the magos explorator. The bridge of the Maestrale was the nexus from which the arkcruiser was controlled, but the might of the Adeptus Mechanicus army that fought on the world below was coordinated here.
Torquora strode from the elevator, the car sighing as the tech-priest’s monstrous metal form departed. With the clunk of heavy steps, Torquora crossed the chamber.
While the magos explorator’s organic body was but a cable-interfaced sack of spoiling meat, the Machine-God had made Torquora much more. As he had explored the most lethal corners of the galaxy and fought the enemies of the Omnissiah over trinkets and ancient technologies, the tech-priest had indeed become less and less of a man. He had not only lost limbs and the function of flesh – he had been stripped of his humanity. But what the xenos had taken from Omnid Torquora, the Omnissiah had replaced and enhanced. The magos explorator was no longer human. He had become something beyond such constraints. He had transcended the limitation of base organics to assume an aspect of the Machine-God Himself.
The ghoulishness of Torquora’s cadaverous features sat within the darkness of his robes, hidden by the blinding intensity of his blaze-blue optics. His butchered body had travelled to the far reaches of the galaxy and had been chewed up and spat back at the Adeptus Mechanicus for augmentation. Now it was a punctured nest of cables, pipes and lines. About the stench, the withered flesh and wired bones, Omnid Torquora wore the glory of metal and intricate workings. Like an armoured sarcophagus, a suit of clinker-plate and heavy hydraulics enveloped him. Mechanical legs carried the deck-denting progress of his form. Brute appendage-cradles supported the weight of stowed heavy weaponry. An armoured hood of overlapping plates extended over his cranium like a mechanical headdress.
To some, Omnid Torquora was a metal monster, a servant of the Omnissiah so consumed with the holy Quest for Knowledge that he had forsaken much of his mind for the processing power of supercogitators, auspexes and meme-banks. He had become a stomping, whirring, crackling priest-machine, whose reactor, when it fired, drowned out the insignificance of lesser constructs with its thunder. To others, Torquora was exactly what the Great Maker intended for the galaxy. An itinerant idol. The brutal fusion of flesh, feeble from the womb, and the Omnissiah’s glorious workings.
As the baroque tech-priest wound his way between the runebanks and phylactic console interfaces, he trailed the oil-stained length of his accommodating robes. The chamber was a silent hive of god-fearing industry. Servitors, masked and robed, moved about the nests of runebanks, running cables and plugging their masters into the labyrinthine network of feeds that draped from the ceiling and snaked through the consoles. Cyber-cherubim descended in a small flock about Omnid Torquora. The drones swooped about the monstrous magos on engineered wings, attending to his needs. They varied in size and appearance, from infant cherubs to flapping, foetal constructs. Each dragged an interface or length of cable and began porting their master into the phylactic of information that flowed through the diagnostiquorum.
Magi, logistae and the tech-priests of the diagnostiquorum were hard at work, their minds connected to those of the Mechanicus’s servants throughout the fleet and fighting on the planet below. The dark chamber boasted no ports or windows, for the priests of the diagnostiquorum saw the bloody wonders of battle through thousands of optics, omnispectrals and interfaced eyeballs. Through their runebanks, they devoured the hard data fed to them from vane arrays, tethers and stream umbilicals. The thoughts of skitarii soldiers were theirs to know. The havoc of battle, victory and death was to them a torrent that reduced the pict-streamed, the chemical and experiential to cold data. Data to be processed, amassed and collated.
Unlike the runebank-interfaced tech-priests, Omnid Torquora did not require a throne and console. He was his own walking runebank. His auxiliary appendages slipped out from his robes, and their multi-digits went to frenetic work across the cogitators and logic engines housed within the armoured pulpit that projected from the priest-machine’s chest.
With his flock of cherubim circling, porting and interfacing, the magos explorator came to a halt at the hub of the dark chamber. As his diagnostiquorum of priests monitored the battle below – from every apocalyptic cannon crash to the flash of each targeting reticule – Omnid Torquora in turn monitored them. Through the cybernetic forces of the Adeptus Mechanicus, the priests saw all, felt all and knew all. Through the diagnostiquorum, Omnid Torquora came to know even more. Through them he advised and guided skitarii soldiers. He became a conduit for the Motive Force and – when the occasion demanded such measures – he would become one with the servants of the Adeptus Mechanicus. He was a puppet-master for whom the cybernetics of skitarii officers and soldiers were armour to wear and weapons to wield.
Torquora’s mind became a feverish constellation of thoughts, imperatives and raw data. The tech-priest’s supercogitators tamed the torrent of infostreams, the blizzard of pict feeds and omnispectral miasma. It was a searing privilege to experience the Machine-God’s holy war through so many optics, augurs and targeters. To comprehend the Motive Force through an unfolding data-storm of events, both planet-shattering and inconsequential. It was how Torquora imagined the Omnissiah experienced the galaxy – through the hallowed workings of all true constructs at once and in glorious union.
It had been half a year, Martian-standard, since Omnid Torquora had initiated the attack on Velchanos Magna. As the warp storm of the Great Gyre had retreated, the forge world had been revealed like a treasure over which the Dark Mechanicum and the Traitor Space Marines of the Iron Warriors had fought. Now, the indomitable forces of the Adeptus Mechanicus contested the world. Furnished with the precious data of an expendable and exploratory attack, Torquora’s forces now fought both the subjugated Mechanicum and their Iron Warriors overlords. For 344 days, the Adeptus Mechanicus had taken the fight to the tainted, the machine-corrupted and the Chaos-pledged. For 344 days, Omnid Torquora had taken his station in the diagnostiquorum of the arkcruiser Maestrale and led his skitarii legions, his engines of mass destruction and his priests-militant in battle.
Like plucking a star from a cosmos of consciousnesses, Omnid Torquora selected one of his soldiers. The tech-priest could immerse himself in the skitarius, while at the same time monitoring all others.
Ballistarius First Class Unix 77-Endocek was a gunner riding out the undulations of his Ironstrider engine. The walker, its monotask servitor-driver and Endocek belonged to the Novo Nine-Two Saggitariaq. The unit was making progress through the assembly avenues of the Graia-Mac toria. As the walkers stalked past the wreckage of half-constructed battle tanks and the possessed macromachinery assembling them, they were fired upon by warped gun-servitors and hench-units of the Dark Mechanicum. Still responding to the darkness of their active protocols, the polluted constructs tried their best to defend the smouldering, battle-smashed installation.
Leading the column of Ironstrider engines, Unix 77-Endocek’s roving omnispectral beams stabbed through the smoke and darkness, searching for targets. Dark Mechanicum followers were taking cover behind the shattered shells of tanks, sheltering among the corrugated roof tops and taking aim from within stilt-mounted observation pods that still stood along the length of the assembly avenue. Acquiring each in turn, 77-Endocek despatched them with cold precision.
The Graia-Mactoria echoed with the lonely blast of single autocannon shells. The twin barrels of the cognis weaponry had the capability to turn vehicles and buildings into shot-shattered wrecks with fully automatic streams of devastating gunfire. Such tactics were considered a waste of time and ammunition without necessity, and the ballistarius first class opted for the searing accuracy of single shots, blasted alternately from each barrel. Each round tore through the mangled metal of cover, through buckled doors and the spiked barricades of roof-mounted forts and emplacements.
The rabid gunfire and code-shrieks of the enemy fell silent as, one by one, the rounds turned the tainted into streaks of streaming gore across metal and rockcrete.
Hunchbacked installation thralls burst forth from a reinforced control cabin at the Ironstrider engine’s feet, blasting sickly beams up at Unix 77-Endocek from their baroque lasrifles. The Ironstrider ballistarii would not be stopped, however. Hauling their grips and triggers up and pushing the barrels of the autocannons down towards the ground, the Novo Nine-Two Saggitariaq chewed up the miserable thralls with monstrous gunfire. Urging his servitor-driver and Ironstrider engine on, 77-Endocek stepped down on a malformed menial who was slapping his malfunctioning rifle with a palm. Leaving the mound of pulverised bone and flesh in its wake, the engine strode on with the ballistarius blasting gun-servitors from overhead wire walkways.
Omnid Torquora allowed himself to drift, his phylactic presence moving from construct-consciousness to construct-consciousness. Blinking between the optics and augurs of skitarii soldiers, the magos explorator saw a planet at war. From the ground, through the shaky pict streams and spooling data, Torquora watched the servants of the Dark Mechanicum die. He watched skitarii macroclades stoically advance through the twisted metal, demolished structures and cybernetic cadavers of the ruinous forge world. He monitored the progress of spindly Sicarian ruststalkers and infiltrators as they silently picked their way through the shattered industriascape, stabbing Dark Mechanicum hereteks in the back of their power packs, slitting feeds and cutting hooded heads from the shoulders of code-polluted tech-priests.
Two leagues to the south, the Onager Dunecrawlers of the V Column Adamanica-Phractora had closed on Dark Mechanicum battle tank contingents. The area had been the fabricator districts of the leaning Noctroi Hive but now was a cratered, cannon-blasted wasteland of drifting smoke and crackling energies.
Within the Dunecrawler designated Arachsus-440, Omnid Torquora willed himself into the electro-amniotic tank of the vehicle’s driver. 1-Lotun Cacheca was interfaced with the crawler and its machine-spirit, spearheading an Onager attack on a ramshackle armoured division. The Dark Mechanicum ranks were made up of smoke-belching battle tanks, dozer-bladed conveyers and spider-legged walkers. As the Dunecrawlers made flaming shells of the enemy tanks, scuttling over the derelicts with their crab-like legs, Torquora moved between 1-Lotun Cacheca and Ipsota 6-Dramski, the Onager’s designated gunner.
Rotating his gatling launcher, Dramski hammered rocket after rocket into a battle tank whose lightning cannon had glowed to readiness. Successive explosions tore through the tank, a final blast sending the wreckage skyward in a raging fireball. As the derelict landed and bounced back through the Dark Mechanicum lines, 1-Lotun Cacheca followed it through the flames.
Leading the slow, leg-stabbing crawl of a charge, Arachsus-440 breached the enemy lines, drawing the fury of Dark Mechanicum tank fire down on itself. The vehicle’s Emanatus force field became a globe of rancid light as Dark Mechanicum walkers and battle tanks turned the monstrosity of their energy weapons on the Onager Dunecrawler. Omnid Torquora felt the field integrity of the vehicle’s defences drop even as 1-Lotun Cacheca did.
The Dunecrawler had greater problems, however. As well as the putrescent energy of the heavy beam storm, the Onager’s augurs had picked up an armoured conveyer, thundering towards it at ramming speed. A nightmare of spiked track, serrated dozer blades and cyborg shock troops clinging to its twisted architecture, the conveyer bounced up and over the lips of craters before accelerating straight for the spearheading Dunecrawler.
Stepping back and lifting a single arachnoid leg, 1-Lotun Cacheca allowed the armoured conveyer to pass before his hallowed vehicle. As the conveyer back-tracked, the skitarii driver brought the tapering talon of the leg down to skewer through the conveyer’s roof and troop compartment. Cybernetic shock troopers began to clamber up and across the spiked wreckage of the transport. Ipsota 6-Dramski cycled from gatling launcher to cannons on the turret array before hammering the enemy into blood, oil and frag.
Suddenly, another vehicle was amongst them. While the Arachsus-440 attempted to extricate its leg and blast boarding shock troopers to oblivion, a spindly spider walker had mounted the enmeshed vehicles. The dish of an irradiator burned into the Onager’s armoured shell from a mounting on the walker’s underbelly, while the vehicle’s single, monstrous claw slammed through the side of the driver’s compartment.
Omnid Torquora felt the breached tank empty of its electro-amniotic fluid. The crooked, crackling pincers of the spider walker’s greatclaw had pierced the armour plating. Extended, they arced and spat either side of 1-Lotun Cacheca’s sagging form. The compartment interior showered Cacheca with sparks. Above, Torquora lived the horror of Ipsota 6-Dramski’s death, as a corruption-leaking cyborg stood over the gunner on the roof of the Dunecrawler and ran its rifle-mounted heavy chainblade through him.
With 1-Lotun Cacheca’s biometrics faltering, Torquora assumed control of the skitarius’s workings and failing systems. In his last moments, the driver felt the Machine-God’s presence. The Motive Force acted through him, and Omnid Torquora through the Motive Force. As the crackling pincers closed about him, Torquora willed the bionics of Cacheca’s arm up towards the Onager’s controls. With automotive power and hydraulics fading, every second was a mechanised agony as Torquora reached out with a dying gauntlet.
Slamming a bank of switches down and stabbing at a thick button with an armoured finger, Torquora willed 1-Lotun Cacheca to carry out a final duty. Hauling down on a pair of plunger handles, the skitarius initiated the vehicle’s destruct sequence. Torquora would deny the Dark Mechanicum even the derelict scrap of the vehicle. The tech-priest felt the machine-spirit of the Arachsus-440 purge its precious banks of collected battlefield data along a stream umbilical and up towards the Maestrale. Overloading the vehicle’s power core, Torquora felt the searing pincers of the claw arc-sizzle and close, cutting 1-Lotun Cacheca in two.
Withdrawing, Torquora found his way to Rota Volatis-22, gunner of the Dunecrawler Hermektris-600 that was making its way up behind. As Arachsus-440 exploded, a nova of detonating fuel-rods, ammunition and power enveloped the surrounding vehicles. While the pinned conveyer and a closing battle tank erupted in a chain reaction of detonations, the scaffold structure of the decimated spider walker skittered and sparked in the flames. As the driver of the Hermektris-600 took the Onager on and Rota Volatis-22 ended the enemy walker with a neutron laser stream, the column of Adeptus Mechanicus Dunecrawlers stalked on through the opening in the Dark Mechanicum lines.
SELECTED: DENTRICA II OF III
ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED
UPLOADING… +COLD WRATH+
