SPIRITUS IN MACHINA


 	Thomas Parrott


 	American author Thomas Parrott begins his writing journey with Black Library upon a crippled ship deep within a galaxy in flames. 

 	When the Skitarius Alpha Primus 7-Cyclae awakes from stasis, his memory data is damaged and his knowledge fragmented. All he has to guide him is a servo-skull directed by the Magos Explorator, who seems determined to resurrect their dying ship. But as they descend into the destruction, Cyclae must confront the realisation that nothing is as he remembers. 

 
 
 	 
 


 	There is an old saying that war is diplomacy by other means. The Adeptus Mechanicus might say instead that war is data collection by other means. It is merely another aspect of the great Quest for Knowledge, and a skitarius is in many ways a sensor before they are a soldier. The flow of information is constant and omnidirectional. Data on foes, on weapons, on environments and efficacy. To be skitarii is to be the eyes and ears and hands of something more, a node in a great network.
 	Thus, when 7-Cyclae awoke to a void, it spoke to a grim fate indeed. 
 	There should have been a flood of stimuli. Light, sound and, most importantly, the flow of data pouring in from dozens of noospheric connections. Briefings for the upcoming deployment, status reports on his troops and more. Instead there was only numb, silent darkness. He had fought a thousand nightmare foes, but this state was unprecedented. 
 	His first concern was whether he was damaged. Cyclae immediately began a full diagnostic sweep. His chassis shivered and twitched as systems activated, augmetic limbs rotating and curling. Interfacing directly with his mind, checklists and analysis projected into his vision. Life support flashed a green rune of nominal status. It was the only spark of optimal news. Yellows and reds flared from extremities, secondary systems and cortical implants alike.
 	The latter was the most troubling. It raised the spectre of damage to the diagnosticator itself. He started spot checks to verify damage reports. His internal chronometer showed only nonsense data. Memory searches produced corrupted files and scrambled linkages. 
 	‘Alpha, beta, gamma. One, two, three.’ His voice was slurred. He had not been in this state when he entered suspended animation. Something had gone wrong.
 	A chill voice cut through the darkness. ‘Your vital signs have become erratic. Assert control of yourself, skitarius. The spirit of your stasis pod rebels. You will be freed shortly.’ The phylactic communication carried ident-tags denoting the highest level of authority. It rang as familiar, but his scattered memory banks provided no answers.
 	His limbs reported energy fluctuations. A moment to centre himself, and 7-Cyclae did as commanded. He walked his mind through the Litany of Clear Thought, visualising each sigil in perfect sequence. 
 	‘Omnissiah, envelop me.
 	‘Guide my cogitations to your truth.
 	‘Shape my thoughts and calm my flesh.
 	‘Guard me against emotion,
 	‘That it will not overcome clarity.
 	‘Sustain my systems
 	‘with visions of efficiency
 	‘and the Quest for Knowledge.’
 	The litany was no mere words; engrams burned directly into his brain activated. They flooded his remaining flesh with alchemical concoctions that eroded the tyranny of base emotion and left only purpose.
 	The fluctuations grew and a grey luminescence clawed at his eyes. Then with a crackling hiss the void dropped away and he tumbled to a hard floor. The room was blurry and temperature sensors reported it was well below freezing. A baseline human would have died from short-term exposure. He redirected power to ensure his organic components kept warm, as he pushed himself up on the tireless strength of his augmetic arms. The same voice as before demanded, ‘Designation?’
 	His vision began to clear, a swath of grey blurs resolving into lights amid a dark expanse. ‘Alpha Primus Seven-Cyclae of the First Maniple, Surface Retrieval Cohort, Explorator Fleet Nine-V-Sigma.’ His voice was clearing as systems compensated for damage.
 	‘The Alpha Primus. How fortunate.’ 
 	Cyclae was not listening. His optics had cleared sufficiently to tell him the deck was a catastrophe. This was where his maniple had been stored between missions. Now dead stasis pods were strewn haphazardly about, a few flickering screens showing only null life signs. He felt an echo of regret: his warriors had died helpless, not in battle as they deserved. Then it was filed away. Icy patches marred ceilings and floors that had rusted and collapsed in places. The hatch into the chamber was open, showing a pile of bodies in the corridor beyond. Rotted crimson robes, life ripped from them by the telltale marks of eradication rays and phosphor burns.
 	He turned to the source of the voice, only to find a servo-skull drifting out from the cables behind his stasis pod. A remote operator, then. ‘What happened to us?’ The litany kept his words calm.
 	‘Main power is down. The ship has been on emergency power for an extended period, and reserves have run low. The anti-entropic field in your pods collapsed as demand exceeded supply. You were the priority, but even then your non-vital systems had to be sacrificed.’
 	He looked down at his articulated gauntlets. The once shining metal was age-pitted and dull. ‘I cannot hear the ship. No vox traffic, no noospheric connection.’ The full-spectrum silence was an aberration.
 	‘What do you remember last?’
 	Cyclae shook his head. The memory data remained ­garbled and in severe need of re-indexing. All he could access was scattered impressions. ‘A mission. A dead world. Stones. Metal.’
 	Momentary silence. ‘War happened. Civil war. Ingrates thought to wrest this vessel from her rightful master. They disconnected the cogitator core. If I cannot set things right before emergency power dies completely, much will be lost.’ There was another pause. ‘I am Magos Explorator Aionios, master of the fleet, and I have pulled you from oblivion for a purpose. Gather your equipment and steel yourself, skitarius. I will have need of you if I am to save this Ark.’
 	The skull was the voice of the magos, therefore the voice of the Machine-God. Disobedience was unthinkable. 
 	The armoury was adjacent. It had been a shrine to the destructive power of the Omnissiah’s gifts, its contents organised for maximum efficiency in dispersal. Now they were scattered like refuse. His optical overlays highlighted weapons, evaluated them, dismissed them. Finally he found a phosphor pistol and a taser goad in acceptable condition. A black cloak embossed with the white heraldry of Stygies VIII was the last touch, laid over crimson armour plates. 
 	Properly arrayed, Cyclae strode from the ravaged chamber into the corridor beyond, stepping carefully among the broken bodies. One had dragged themselves to the wall, scrawling a single message in old blood: Cave spiritus in machina. Cyclae scanned the text and fed it into translator processes. ‘“Beware the spirit in the machine.” Curious.’
 	‘Mere moribund delusions.’ The servo-skull drifted ahead to take the lead. ‘There were those who feared where the loyalties of the skitarii might lie in the conflict, and who sealed you away. Others sought to free you. They died in failure. Even after the fighting ended, it took me quite a while to unseal the bay.’ It was a toneless recitation of fact.
 	‘There should be no question as to our loyalties. They are to the Omnissiah, the Forge and the Fleet, in that order.’ There was no response. As they continued on, it became clear the rest of the ship was in worse condition than the stasis bay. They were in the outer decks of the Ark, a web of corridors and bays that ran the six-mile length of the vessel. He remembered flashes of how it used to be: swarms of menials and servitors with the occasional robe-clad priest going about their business, producing a constant hum of activity. All of that was gone. 
 	Some massive water reservoir must have ruptured and flooded this whole section. The radiation shielding for the ammunition stores, perhaps. Icicles hung from rusted corridor ceilings, and patches of frost crunched under his heavy tread. Lighting had failed in most corridors. The universal chill made thermal imaging useless, and with central cogitation deactivated there was no navigation data stream. He activated the stablight on his helmet, only for an amber rune to immediately spark on his optical overlays. The light flickered constantly. He tapped it several times before the rune went green and the beam stabilised.
 	The servo-skull floated ahead with surety, though the path seemed winding. Shining his light down the avoided tunnels soon revealed why: all of them were impassable in some way. Some had been the sites of vicious battles; weapons fire scarred their length, and his rad-censer chimed even as they passed by. Others had simply caved in, succumbing to corrosion and the weight of ice.
 	The path ended a moment later, however. The corridor terminated in a sealed hatch marked by a glowing red sigil indicating partial atmosphere loss. The skull stopped and rotated to face him. ‘It is necessary to pass this way. The hull was penetrated by fire from a rebel vessel, but the damage is contained. The true threat is areas of damaged grav-plating. Display caution, skitarius. The crushing force of the malfunctioning fields would exceed your tolerances.’
 	Cyclae inclined his head. ‘As you command, magos.’ By habit, he tried to stream an override command, but the relays were dead. Direct interface was required. He removed the access panel with great care, murmuring a prayer of apology to the machine-spirit. 
 	‘Forgive me, O Spirit, for this trespass. I intervene in your blessed functions only to fulfil my own. Together may we serve the Omnissiah in His great design.’ The fingers on his left hand folded back and his palm flowered open, revealing mechanical tendrils which slithered into ports. The door ground open complainingly, lost atmosphere howling past him and setting his cloak to whipping.
 	The open door revealed a scene of absolute devastation. A beam of unthinkable firepower had got past the ship’s void shields and carved a deep rent. The cold stars were visible through the gap overhead. This bay had been a storage place for mighty war machines. Questor Mechanicus, he thought. It was hard to be certain with their frames demolished. 
 	‘Freeblade Knights,’ confirmed the streamed words of the magos amidst the silence of the void. Glimmers of memory slipped through Cyclae’s circuits. He had marched to war in the shadow of the great Knights. They had seemed invincible. ‘Just a glimpse of what the machinations of the rebels have already destroyed. Just a fragment of what will be lost should I fail.’
 	Cyclae’s overlays highlighted damaged plating as he moved inside. The ravaged decking gave off an odd vibration that he felt more than heard. He crouched to collect a piece of debris from the ground: a tooth from a shattered Reaper chainsword. A nearby area of malfunctioning gravity served for a test: he tossed the fragment in. It hit with aberrant force, kicking up a cloud of dust. In his optical overlays that arc was mapped out and compared to what it would have been under standard gravity. The force within was more than twenty times as strong. With the aid of his augmetic senses he picked a path and carefully worked his way forward.
 	Soon the great rift opened up before him, allowing a glimpse into ravaged decks and shattered conduits below. It was just over fifty feet across at its narrowest point, according to his analysis. Yet duty beckoned. He set off at a sprint. Power flooded his alloy legs and they churned at inhuman speeds. In a cogitator’s cycle he was at the edge and leapt. The gap yawned beneath him, a fall so deep that his systems would suffer irreparable damage.
 	He hit the other side with terrific force, inches from a descent into the dark. Yet his momentum was carrying him forward, right towards a patch of damaged grav-plating. Thinking fast, he fired the stabiliser spikes built into his legs. The left punched down into the decking, but a red rune flashed in his vision as the other failed to engage. He spun against his insufficient anchor before the momentum ripped him loose and he tumbled on.
 	He bled what speed he could with scraping hands and feet. It wasn’t enough. He stopped just over where the damage began and his arm slammed down with terrific weight behind it. Warnings flashed in his vision as he gritted his teeth and pulled with his other arm. Slowly the trapped limb was dragged loose from the crushing gravity. His armour was cracked, and the fingers twitched spasmodically.
 	The servo-skull followed, effortlessly hovering across the gap. ‘You could have been destroyed with that manoeuvre.’
 	‘It is the privilege of cogs to be ground down that the machine may run, magos,’ he streamed back, examining the damage. His heart pounded. High levels of adrenaline, his implants reported.
 	The skull floated up to him, the tools within its undercarriage engaged, fixing what it could. The spasms ceased. ‘Caution, skitarius. I have no spare parts available. You are not permitted to destroy yourself until our mission is through.’
 	Cyclae made the symbol of the cog with his interlaced knuckles. ‘In the name of the Omnissiah, magos. My apologies.’ He stood and they worked their way to the other side of the bay. Another override got them through the sealed door there. As the hatch ground shut behind them, he surveyed their new surroundings. This area seemed familiar. He had been here before. He started to stride off, confident of their route, but the skull stopped him with a click. ‘Not that way.’ 
 	He hesitated. ‘This leads to the mag-rail terminus.’
 	‘The rail took a direct hit and is inoperable. There is a maintenance crawlway that will take us to the deck we need.’
 	‘Lead the way, magos.’ Down several winding side corridors, they found the hatch. It creaked open to reveal a ladder that descended into darkness. The light from his helmet illuminated scratches and scrapes to either side, as if something had been hurled down the shaft and desperately tried to stop its headlong tumble. He paused. Questioning the Priesthood was not permitted, but he was allowed a certain tactical discretion. ‘You are certain this is the optimal path?’
 	‘It is not a safe passage – there are none. It is your best chance at being useful, however.’ 
 	Cyclae swung onto the ladder and began the climb down. His temperature sensors reported rising heat the deeper he went. The ladder seemed to go on forever, and he wasn’t sure how long he’d been climbing. His inbuilt chronometer just fed him the same senseless data. His damaged arm was still malfunctioning, freezing up occasionally. ‘How far down is the access point we need?’
 	‘Having trouble with the climb?’ Cyclae could have sworn that flat voice held a note of some emotion. Condescension, maybe. ‘Perhaps it will serve as a reminder to proceed cautiously.’
 	The question remained. ‘How far?’
 	‘Not far. Another hundred and eighteen feet.’
 	He counted the rungs from there. Five. Ten. Thirty rungs. Sixty. One hundred. One hundred and– ‘Here.’ He turned his head to look to where the skull hovered. This aperture was partly open, allowing a glimpse of a shadowed hall beyond. He reached out and gripped the hatch with his unscathed arm, bracing his feet and heaving. For a moment it wouldn’t budge, before giving way with a grinding screech. 
 	The sound echoed up the shaft in both directions and down the hallway as well. There were lights in this section, dull red emergency strips that painted everything in a bloody glow. ‘So much for subtlety. Still, you should deactivate your light for now and prepare your weapons.’ The magos’ tone was exceedingly dry. 
 	Cyclae did as instructed and proceeded down the hallway. ‘There are threats?’ 
 	It stank down here. It always had on the engineering decks, his scattered memories told him that much: mildew and hot metal. This was worse. The rancid stench of spoiled meat and sickness. Some found it strange that the skitarii were left with something so human as an olfactory system, but it made sense once you understood that scent was data. Data was everything.
 	The hallway opened out into a great chamber, lined with immense machines of unknown purpose. ‘Yes.’ The servo-skull’s broadcast dropped to a whisper. Something was stirring in the shadows of the monoliths. Cyclae slipped back into the cover of another of the great machines to observe. It uncoiled, a serpentine shape slithering out into view, a centipede of rusted metal and pallid, suppurating flesh. A torso mounting the end reared up to twice Cyclae’s height, vaguely humanoid. Questing optical tendrils protruded from ravaged sockets, lenses gleaming in scarlet light. ‘The crew.’ 
 	The Alpha Primus’ sensors picked out body parts from at least a dozen people incorporated into the structure. Fragmentary memories stirred at the sight, files from long ago, of fighting on a Mechanicus world fallen into darkness. Monstrosity birthed of madness. He must have triumphed then to be here now. His cortical implants collated data and projected a seventy-one per cent chance of victory in the coming battle, with the right terrain. An acceptable projection, if far from ideal; he would prefer a plasma caliver for this fight. Not to mention a full repair and a squad of the faithful similarly armed, as long as he was imploring the Omnissiah for what could not be.
 	He took slow steps back, thinking to retreat to the hallway, where the bulk of the creature would impair it. Then his foot came down with a distinct crunch. Old bones lay unseen in the dark. The sound brought a tendril round to stare at him with a malefic blankness. Cyclae didn’t hesitate. He sprinted for the tunnel, but the creature was moving now too. It was fast, faster than he had thought possible, the charge ­heralded only by the chittering of many clawed feet. It was a moment’s calculation to realise it would catch him before he got there. The projections dropped sharply to fifty-two per cent. Whipping blade-tipped mechadendrites unfurled from the creature’s metal carapace. There wasn’t much time, just enough to raise his pistol and fire a single shot.
 	The phosphor struck home, burning into the thing’s side in a blaze of brilliant white that banished the gloom of the chamber. The searing mass eating at the construct drew a hissing screech, like a broken steam valve. Yet it came blundering on through the pain. Cyclae braced to try to absorb the shock, but it didn’t matter. It hit him like a runaway mag-train. He hurtled through the air and smashed into one of the great machines. His pistol tumbled away, knocked loose from his grip. He blurted a hasty binaric apology to the apparatus he’d impacted, as he gathered himself back to his feet and engaged his taser goad to sizzling life. ‘Magos!’ he barked, ‘Now would be a good time for Conqueror imperatives!’
 	‘I do not have access to any means of uploading the Doctrina.’ The skull was half-hidden behind one of the nearby machines, observing.
 	‘Less than optimal.’ His battle chances plummeted to twenty-nine per cent. The monster clawed at the still burning wound, but that merely spread white fire to its tendrils. He took the opportunity to try to circle towards the tunnel again, but the movement drew it back to him instantly. It was wary now, having felt the bite of its prey. The first few strikes seemed testing. One, two, three deflected with sweeps of his goad, each impact casting crackling sparks. He was already trapped on the defence. The attacks came faster now. Cyclae’s economy of motion was preternatural as he knocked aside four more lashing blades. Out of the corner of his optic he spotted another striking towards his head with lightning speed. He darted to the side and the bladed tip thudded harmlessly against the thick carapace on his shoulder instead. Then warnings blazed in his vision as a tendril he’d failed to notice slashed upwards from the other side and dug into a gap in his armour.
 	He whirled the other way, off balance, to wrench free of it with a spray of dark fluid. Before he could recover, a mechadendrite lashed out and coiled around his legs in an instant. He was whipped off his feet in a dizzying blur as another slithered around his midsection and bound his goad to his side. He was left hanging before its optics, and could not escape the unmistakable impression that there was something behind those cold lenses. Too much to just be battle-servitor encodings. It studied him with a cruel curiosity now that it thought him helpless, beginning to constrict its hold tighter and tighter.
 	Yet he was not abandoned. Seeing that Cyclae was in danger of termination, the servo-skull darted in, slashing at the creature with a plasma torch. The strikes scored the thing’s flesh and armour, and for a moment its attention was off the Alpha Primus. A mistake. Skitarii were weapons before they ever visited the armoury. Cyclae reached out with his free hand and grabbed hold of the optical tendril right below the lens. It instantly refocused and tried to writhe free, but his grip was implacable. He wrenched outward with all his bionic strength. It came loose with a wet squelch, and the thing gave another screech as it hurled him away in enraged desperation. 
 	He hit the ground hard but his hand malfunctioned again and froze in a death grip on the goad, keeping it from being knocked away. Small blessings. For a moment he was disoriented, unable to rise. Part of his mind coldly assessed the grinding in his chest – a broken rib. The projections still did not favour him, hovering at thirty-five per cent. That’s when he felt it: that telltale shivering hum. A broken grav-plate, just like he’d encountered in the upper decks. He could see the ragged decking off ahead to the right.
 	The sound was drowned out in that rushing clatter of claws. In desperation he scrambled around to the other side of the broken plate so that it was between him and the monstrosity, before whirling to face his foe from a crouch. It came on in a heedless rush. Then it was over the damaged plating, and with a series of metallic crunches its many legs collapsed under the vast weight. It fell with a hard crash as he rolled out of the way, momentum carrying its front through to the other side of the malfunctioning plating. Cyclae didn’t rely on that to be the end of it. He lunged, goad raised high, and brought it down with all of his might. 
 	It stabbed in and unleashed the energy bound within. Serpentine tendrils of lightning crawled through the monstrosity, sizzling and burning. It writhed uncontrollably and hissed one last time before falling still. He fell to his knees next to it as damage and strain caught up. A hand tested the gash in his side and came away wet with blood and sacred unguents. After a moment the servo-skull hovered over. ‘Skitarius? Do you still function?’
 	‘I am damaged, but I can continue the mission,’ he managed. He levered himself to his feet and looked his fallen foe over with distaste. ‘What is this? I have never seen a servitor of this pattern.’
 	The skull floated over to examine the thing. ‘There is no pattern. Whoever created it used an ad hoc amalgamation of unsanctioned modifications.’
 	He turned to the skull sharply. ‘That is heresy.’
 	‘The desperate have ever turned to dark methods.’ The skull’s visage offered no clues as it turned to float away. ‘Come. There is yet a ways to go, and we should depart lest others heard the battle.’
 	Cyclae retrieved his pistol and followed after, cataloguing damage. He spoke as he went, ‘Perhaps you should explain the mission to me, magos. Should we encounter another threat like that, I may not be able to prevent damage to your remote. I could go on alone and ensure your safety.’
 	‘Pointless.’
 	The skull didn’t even slow, so Cyclae sped up to match it. ‘I would see the task complete.’
 	There was a pause, perhaps of contemplation. ‘We must restart the primary plasma reactor.’
 	‘I am no enginseer. I do not know those rites.’
 	‘Correct. Yet you are the only tool available to me, so I must walk you through it. Thus, it would be pointless for you to proceed alone.’
 	Cyclae followed in silence. Between the ageing of his components and the damage suffered since waking, his performance was suffering. Still, duty compelled him onward. The Ark and its precious cargoes must be saved. 
 	There were signs of habitation as they proceeded: sigils scrawled on the walls, rubble cleared to open passages. Occasionally he thought he heard footsteps fleeing before them. He kept his weapons ready just in case.
 	At last they reached the hatch into the primary plasma drive compartment. It groaned open into a red expanse of grated walkways beyond. The plasma reactor itself hung suspended, like an immense adamantine heart connected by arterial cables and conduits to a thousand systems. His caution proved providential. A bizarre gaggle of individuals stood restlessly, clearly waiting for them. For a moment, he took them for servants of the Machine-God, but the subterfuge failed under scrutiny. Their sacred implants were fakes, crude scrap ritually burned into their flesh. Their robes were crimson rags wrapped about them, draped about with severed ventilation tubes for bandoleers and belts. All of them were armed, albeit poorly, with repurposed tools and sharpened scrap metal. The frontmost woman even bore an axe crudely shaped to mimic a cog. It didn’t take an expert on body language to gauge they were angry and scared, a dangerously irrational combination.
 	The servo-skull immediately retreated behind him. ‘Kill them, skitarius.’
 	Cyclae tilted his head at the skull. ‘They are not a threat, magos. It seems wasteful to spend energy on them.’
 	The leader stepped forward and spoke in a crude pidgin of Low Gothic and Lingua-Technis, ‘You not pass. This ground sacred. Turn away.’
 	‘They are rebels and heretics. Kill them.’
 	Cyclae surprised himself by ignoring the skull, speaking to the leader instead, ‘We agree there. The Great Machine…’ He pointed beyond the gantries to the reactor. ‘It is holy and must be protected. I would not harm it.’
 	She shook her head, pointing to the skull behind him. ‘You serve Not-Flesh. You go.’
 	Their obstinate refusal was irrational. ‘I must pass. Stand aside.’
 	The skull’s voice was pounding, demanding. ‘This is an imperative, skitarius. Kill them.’ Cyclae’s hands tightened on his weapons, and the gathering braced themselves. ‘You will obey.’ 
 	Disobedience was unthinkable. Yet the Machine-God abhorred waste, and these people styled themselves like the faithful. He looked down at his pistol, then back to the skull. In that moment one of them panicked and hurled a javelin of sharpened rebar. It glanced off his breastplate with a dull thwack, and his combat systems activated. The gun came up as if of its own accord and fired, the blazing shot dividing everything into white light and shadow.
 	It did not merit being labelled a battle. He moved among them like death itself, killing at will. Crude projectiles and simple weapons rebounded off his war-plate unfelt, while each of his attacks killed one or more. Within moments it was over, and quiet fell again. He stood among the bodies and stared at them. They were strangely pitiful in their mocked-up garb.
 	‘What is this? These are not the crew. Not as I knew them.’
 	The servo-skull floated up beside him, obscurely satisfied. ‘No. They are descendants of the rebels.’
 	He froze. ‘Descendants? What? How?’
 	It drifted on. ‘Hydroponics, corpse starch processors. It all breaks in time though. They infest these levels like vermin, but there are fewer of them every year. This may well have been the last. A fitting last stand for their miserable cause.’
 	He shook his head. ‘No, how long? How long was I in stasis?’
 	The skull turned and regarded him with its cold lenses, and for a moment he couldn’t help but remember the optical dendrites on the corrupt servitor. ‘Two hundred and thirteen years. There is an insignificant margin of error due to records damage.’ It immediately turned and floated off again. ‘Come, skitarius. My victory is nearly complete.’
 	Cyclae followed slowly. They proceeded along the walkways and up stairs until they reached the control room. It was curiously quiet here with the reactor still. Like the calm before a storm. The skull floated to the middle of the chamber and surveyed the room. ‘Follow my instructions exactingly. There is no room for your fallibilities here. Begin by pressing the third most rune on the fuel control console…’ 
 	The skull piped information directly to him, highlighting the controls as it went. He did as instructed. He whispered as he worked, ‘Forgive me, Great Machine. My hands are not consecrated for this work, yet I come to you in an hour of utmost need. We have voyaged into the outer dark with your aid, and we need it again if we are to complete our mission. I implore you, burn with the Omnissiah’s light once more.’
 	At last, the skull intoned, ‘The final step. There is an activation code. It must be input with complete precision.’ The skull carefully denoted the necessary sequence of runes, and Cyclae entered them.
 	A vibration grew, small at first but rapidly increasing until it knocked him from his augmetic feet. Then there was a roar that stirred half-memories of the thunderous hails of Titanicus god-machines, and the light outside the control chamber flared from red to brilliant white for a single moment before everything cleared to stillness. That was when his rad-censer screamed, a shrill keening without end.
 	His vision was full of nothing but red runes, flashing intensely. The skull hovered up to peer at the censer attached to his pack. ‘The radiation shielding was indeed damaged. Well, that will clear up what infestation might remain.’ It looked to him. ‘A lethal dose even through your armour, skitarius. You will need to make haste. There is the smallest piece of work that awaits you at the bridge before my need for you is done.’
 	His systems were failing. An inescapable tremor racked his chassis now as damaged circuits misfired. He pulled himself up and followed the servo-skull once more. The journey passed as if in a dream. Nothing attacked, not even a breath of life stirred. Nothing save the ship itself, systems powering up and machines cycling back into activity. Occasionally he staggered to a halt. Once, the shaking overcame him and he collapsed. When his consciousness cleared, his mask was flooded with half-processed nutrient paste.
 	‘Up, skitarius. Hurry. Your lying about risks everything. I will not have it.’
 	Up. Slowly he struggled up and staggered on. At last they came to the bridge, but the fever-dream sensation did not end. A strange black obelisk sat in the centre, carved with sickly green runes and holding a crystalline shell with a shadowy figure inside. This irregularity was hybridised into the sacred technology around it, connected by cables and wires crudely interfaced with its surface.
 	The skull hovered in after him. ‘Now, reconnect the cogitator core to the command systems, and my work will be done. Or begin, truly. Once you have done that, make your way to an incinerator.’ Bodies were strewn about the bridge, several around the cogitator linkage itself, as though killed while disconnecting it.
 	‘What?’ he wheezed. ‘What is this?’
 	The skull turned to him as if surprised at the question. ‘This is transcendence.’ Cyclae stumbled over to the crystalline shell and stared inside. Through the cloudy surface he saw the remnants of a skeleton amidst implants and the once sumptuous robes of a high magos. ‘An end to the weakness of the flesh for all time. I have shed what I was to become something infinitely greater.’
 	He struggled to focus. The body. The cogitator core. This monstrous obsidian obelisk. ‘You… This is blasphemy. You have become Silica Animus. And worse, you have done it by… by…’
 	The skull sounded almost bored as it spoke. ‘By the works of the xenos? Blasphemy. What a weak word, used by fragile minds. How can apotheosis be blasphemy? You sound like those squirming rebel vermin. I have become the Machine. I have become eternal. I am the Omnissiah. I will decide what is blasphemy.’
 	His mind swam in circles in a deepening pool of agony. ‘Xenarite.’ The word was an accusation.
 	‘I have outgrown those skulking cultists as surely as the outdated strictures of the Mechanicus. Cawl sends us out searching for his precious blackstone as if we were his hounds, but finding it led me right to the means of his destruction. Then at the moment of my triumph, these scared worms dare to disable the ship and separate me from her controls, left with only what scraps of my code survived in servitors and servo-skulls. 
 	‘Can you imagine how long it took to get that servo-skull past those useless savages? Let alone undo the seals I put on your bay. Yet it is done, I have won. The galaxy teeters on the edge of anarchy, but I will save it. As I have been freed, so shall Stygies Eight. Then Mars. In the end, all humanity preserved in the purity of eternal metal.’
 	‘This… I cannot…’
 	The voice became stern. ‘Enough, skitarius. You are a tool. Obey, and complete your mission.’
 	Cyclae looked down and choked a moment, blood trickling from his nose and lips. It pooled in his mask.
 	‘Obey.’
 	Duty was everything. Obedience was his watchword. It was by embracing the weight of responsibility that he rose to his current station. Service to the tech-priests was service to the Machine-God, and Cyclae was a dutiful servant. Yet this priest violated everything he knew to be right. He shaped a word that burned on his lips, a very real pain that took every­thing he had to ignore. Just one word. ‘No.’
 	‘No? No? You will obey! This instant!’ 
 	He stumbled over to the comms station and slumped into the chair, struggling to breathe. There was a pause, and the voice calmed to flatness once more. 
 	‘I have misjudged you, skitarius. You are made of sterner stuff. My uses for you were clearly underestimated. Help me, and I can save you. The biotransference will work on you, too. We will find you a new body, a better body.’
 	‘It is the privilege of cogs to be ground down that the machine may run,’ he whispered. 
 	‘Useless platitudes will not save you. Think, skitarius. Think of what you are doing. The cargo. All that archeotech the ship has retrieved. And the blackstone! All lost. Without me, you will get nowhere.’
 	‘Some things are better left lost.’ His breathing was laboured, the respiratory augmetics failing as damage propagated.
 	The skull buzzed around him angrily. ‘This is madness! You consign us both to an eternity in the void.’
 	He shook his head slowly. ‘No, magos. You forget – I will be dead shortly. You, however, will drift for a very long time.’ He focused his eyes on the servo-skull with some difficulty. ‘Still, if these are my last moments, I will have peace.’ With a shaking hand he drew his pistol. The skull rushed him desperately, plasma torch ignited. His first shot missed and sizzled against the far wall, and then it was upon him. Heedless of the damage, he grabbed the torch with his other hand, metal running in thick, red-hot drops as it melted through his palm. The skull thrashed to get away as he unsteadily brought the pistol right up to it.
 	‘Wait. Skitarius, wait.’ He fired. The skull shattered into a dozen burning shards. His final shot destroyed the cogitator connection once and for all. Cyclae dropped the pistol with some regret. It had served well.
 	The world swam in and out of focus, and darkness called. Still, the magos had been right: there was one final task that had to be attended to. Data was everything, after all. There was no one left to report to here, but the Mechanicus would come looking, in time. Slowly he surveyed the comms terminal, and set up a distress beacon to record.
 	‘To any who hear this message, I am Alpha Primus Seven-Cyclae of the First Maniple, Surface Retrieval Cohort, Explorator Fleet Nine-V-Sigma. Do not approach this vessel. Our mission has failed, but I have learned a valuable truth – some things were never meant to be learned…’ And with the time that remained to him, he told his tale as best he could.