THE EMPEROR WEPT
Simon Dyton

PLANET-FALL WAS a long time ago. Adept Biologis Hieronym Rottle could remember marvelling at the enormous barbs and blisters punching through the lower atmosphere like islands in an ocean of curdled milk. Under scalding clouds, continental forges glittered and winked over magma fields and core plunges. He could remember vast tectonic fractures splitting the dim surface of the planet.
It was all such a long time ago.
He could remember the drop-ship swooping over the vast, viscous northern sea, black, stagnant, rolling slowly on rotten tides. He could remember the gene-tor facility looming out of the mist, towering towards the pale sun like a barbaric totem to the Omnissiah. That was all he could remember of his arrival.
Such a long, long time ago.
After the cortical splicing of his own brain, Rottle couldn't remember why he was transferred from the chemical sinks of Mars. But he didn't need to remember. Reason was logic enough; his transferral was the consequence of cause - all premised upon service to the blessed Machine.
He could remember that the data conduit onboard the drop-ship did not register the research laborato-rium's identifying code or the existence of the planet below. It was as if the fortress-like facility hung in cold, lonely space, unknown and utterly knowable but for his presence.
There had been rumours during the long journey from Mars. He had heard in his one remaining organic ear that the planet had no official name, which was long ago expunged from Explorator records, Imperial Navy charts and Terran libraria by deletion orders from the highest offices of the Adeptus Terra, from the High Lords of Terra themselves. Even the Inquisition had been persuaded to overlook its existence. The only off-world record of the planet was on Mars, deep within the most ancient data-cores, buried beneath the iron-plated flanks of Olympus Mons. The rumours said that the Adeptus Mechanicus were the sole overlords of the genetor facility here - and of the unnamed planet that it called home.
One talkative initiate, his humanity still partially intact before neural enhancement, had told Rottle that the planet was once Umbracogg's World, named after a pilgrim who settled the world after explorator fleet Majestechnicum discovered the ball of rock, fire and bile thousands of years ago. But no one knew why the Adeptus Mechanicus reclaimed it. Another initiate, fearfully awaiting cerebral spooling, told Rottle that the name Umbracogg was only intended to remind the planet's handful of inhabitants that they lived in the shadow of the Cog, in umbra Coga in low Gothic, where the Omnissiah's most dangerous knowledge might be hidden. Perhaps the initiate was raving, Rottle had thought. Cerebral spooling was a trauma to the flesh. For Rottle, knowing did not need naming; that the Omnissiah's intent was known unto Himself was data-sufficient.
Hieronym Rottle had wanted only to begin his work. There was no higher worship of the Omnissiah than the sanctification of a gene-vat with a binary hymn, the holy mechanistration of a techvigil, or the ignition of a blessed lumosphoid. Rottle sought no learning for himself; he sought only to celebrate the Omnissiah's knowledge, the sanctity of data preserved and cherished.
When the drop-ship landed, he never saw the initiates again. They vanished, taken swiftly into the facility's lower levels. Years later, Archmagos Biologis Vaeyvor would tell Rottle that such initiates became monitoring servitors, vital parts of the research station's security network. Rottle recorded this information in his memarchive. By then, he had long ceased to contemplate the fleshed.
Hieronym Rottle was nothing if not a servant of the Omnissiah.
His work was its own salvation.
For such work it was.
On this anonymous planet, in an unnamed Mechanicus fortress-laboratorium, Hieronym Rottle made the Life-Eater.
The Life-Eater. One of the hallowed munitions of Exterminatus, the Killer of Worlds, the direst sentence brought to bear by the Holy Ordos of the Emperor's Inquisition against a planetary population whose crimes against the Throne of Terra deserved annihilation, absolute and entire. Wholesale planetary destruction.
This planet was where servants of the Adeptus Mechanicus made the Life-Eater virus for the great fleets of the Segmentum Obscurus. In an age when Cyclonic and Incineratus torpedoes were widely used for Exterminatus, and when even some members of the Inquisition frowned upon the Life-Eater for reasons the Mechanicus had long forgotten, the magi biologi of the Adeptus Mechanicus still made one of ancient Terra's most prodigious weapons. Flesh was imperfect, as Archmagos Biologis Vaeyvor had said so many times, and the engine of its annihilation was praise indeed to the Omnissiah.
And the Omnissiah was praised with unceasing industry. Tox-flues and convection stacks ran through the towering facility like veins, steering noxious waste into the rotten atmosphere and the curdled sea. In secure laboratoria, some even surrounded by void shields, wizened genetors created what natural biological processes could never devise. Their chemical creations were processed and refined in vacuum-sealed cauldrons, stretching across vast vat-galleries, which looked out over dead oceans. In filtration and infusion chambers, servitors were hard-wired into endless banks of support and monitoring machinery. Their organics were all but eroded by the corrosive toxins and, despite the durability of steel and plasticide tissue, many disintegrated within days of exposure.
Rotde's cortical splicing had not only robbed him of knowing why he left Mars, but why he was part of this magnificent process. He calculated that his service in Martian genetoria had qualified him or perhaps won him preferment. Upon arrival, he was responsible for overseeing the purity-choirs that kept the Life-Eater's toxins dormant during refinement, for calibrating gene-vats, and igniting the lumosphoids to ensure uncorrupted organics - all in the blessed name of the Omnissiah. He could no longer remember the risks involved. Glory unto the Omnissiah was all.
Adept Biologis Hieronym Rottle was one day promoted to Magos Biologis. It was his status when he interfaced with the core data-net. He did not remember when this happened.
He did remember that Archmagos Biologis Vaeyvor said that comprehension of risk was directly proportional to apprehension of self - and members of the Mechanicus were but the tiniest teeth in the smallest cogs of the Machine God's infinite artifice. So it was during a moment of weakness when Rottle recalled his self that his story began. It was a moment of humanity, of which Rottle had little left, that burned the remainder away.
He had long ceased to calculate the passage of time in Standard Imperial increments - years, days, hours, and so on - because time had long ago become a measurement of only viral gestation, germination, and genetic refinement. But Hieronym Rottle did remember that planet-fall was a long, long time ago when he finally left his humanity behind.
THE VAT-GALLERY stretched across the entire spire's width, capped at either end by great bulbous windows of strengthened plexi-glass. Despite the roaring thermals outside, the wind's scream barely fdtered into the gallery. At one end, Rottle inspected a gene-vat, checking ignition nodes and the gene-spool assembly. Sickly light yellowed the very air. Further down the gallery, darkness engulfed the endless rows of vats and cauldrons. Here, shadows fell away sharply before the shimmering plexi-glass.
The light suddenly changed. Darkness fell across Rotde's back, swooping across the floor before him. He turned, servos whining with the discomfort of unfamiliar speed. He was reminded of Vaeyvor's admonitions: the Machine God's cogs need only turn the holy P'i-solute, they need not be quick. Rottle was unaccustomed to speed.
Beyond the plexi-glass, drifting towards the facility on boiling thermals, was a leviathan. The leviathans were native to the planet. They were enormous creatures, the size of a cargo lander, with great gas-filled sacs that gave them enough buoyancy to graze the upper atmosphere above the planet's pollution. Vaeyvor said they were harmless, like the extinct whales of Terra. In the high thermals, they grazed upon krillions, microscopic bacteria that synthesized less poisonous pollutants and toxins. This allowed them to survive the vast extinctions that mankind's presence had heralded on the planet, and instead they thrived. No other life existed, yet Rottle would occasionally consider the resilience of such weakling flesh with something akin to surprise - or at least what his remaining emotive centres recognized as the residual synaptic shudder of astonishment.
Yet this leviathan was dying. It had sunk into the bilious toxins of the ocean's convection currents. Its skin was flaking and cracking as it slewed towards the facility. Its gas sacs were swollen and distended, livid and ugly. As Rottle watched, it wheeled round, flexing and gleaming in the sun's pale light. One sac burst. A gout of watery gore fell away, then another, and another. The leviathan lunged at the facility, crashing like an orbital blimp.
There was very Hide humanity left in Magos Biologis Rottle, but there was enough to feel fear. His mandible-tines fluttered and his plasticide jowls quivered. One augmetic eye opened to unnatural size, telescoping polished lenses towards the oncoming leviathan. He calculated mass, acceleration, torque and trajectory. His throat had long ceased to conduct air through his mouth and his olfactory and nasal filters whined awkwardly. Rottle had lost the ability to scream long ago.
His augmented legs juddered as he determined the optimum direction for flight and the most hopeful place of safety. Strengthened plexi-glass might withstand bolter fire, but not a crashing leviathan. The entire spire could collapse. The servitor overhead continued to murmur its binary catechism, unaware of the imminent impart. Rottle leapt towards the overhang of the nearest gene-vat.
But that tiny part of humanity in Rottle was enough - just enough to cloud the cold certainty of calculation, to blur his tightiy angled path of flight. Rottle struck the gene-vat head-on. Though only the size of a modest man, he weighed far more. Duras-teel fittings and plasticide and rubbrete tissue all weighed much more than human organics. Rotde's humanity was but a humble fraction of his mass. His momentum was immense.
The gene-vat shook, swayed, and setded - its legs buckled and the suspensor field growled and fizzed. Rottle staggered, almost losing sentient operable function - consciousness - and his auditory sensors shrilled with the impact.
In that moment, he never saw the long-dormant spire defences growl into action as gyros swivelled onto the incoming target. Several racks of Hurricane bolters - three linked boltguns - opened up and a furious torrent of hot metal strafed the leviathan. The Hurricanes blew great chunks of rancid meat from the creature, disintegrating it in a blizzard of shells. To the targeting scanners, the target simply evaporated. When Rotde looked, staggering and reeling, he saw nothing. Neither did he see three drops of dormant Life-Eater drop to the floor from the vat's sizzling lip. Outside of the vat's stasis field, the Life-Eater awoke.
'A miracle,' Rotde hissed weakly, marvelling at the leviathan's disappearance. Then he collapsed, which was when the miracle really began.
CANYONS SAT BETWEEN the cog's teeth. They stretched into the distance to join the cog's body, a great plateau made of iron. Across this burnished vastness, great engines and machines reared up against the horizon. The sky was pink, stained and slashed by swathes of coppered cloud. Rottle noticed the towering majesty of Olympus Mons, larger than he would ever have believed and, above it, in a strange orbit -that hardly calculated correcdy - was Terra itself, all gleaming steel and chrome. Everything turned slowly, inevitably, reclaiming perfection from a forgotten past. From the greatest pounding of the giant cogs' teeth to the sympathetic vibration of the tiniest gear, a binary hymn thundered into eternity.
It filled Rotde with life - even as what remained of his mortal body disintegrated in the vapours of the Life-Eater.
The great cog boomed its impossible rotation, its teeth grinding like glacial ice across the world before him. Arcane machines rumbled and screeched their praise to the Omnissiah. Bulbous pistons and grand, gargoyled chimney stacks belched forth great clouds of incense. Endless lines of venting spines spat out superheated air that roared into the thin atmosphere. It all echoed against the iron buttresses that towered above him like cliffs and the vast data-stacks that scratched the blooded sky like obsidian claws.
Above it all, the teeth of every cog and gear clicked and hammered their praise to the Omnissiah; endless arrangements of teeth, some sharp, some blunt, some jagged tessellations of impossibly complex angles, all sang their praise - like mouths of the Machine-God made manifest, like the Omnissiah speaking the binary truth of knowledge itself.
Rottle began to listen for meaning.
The binary thunder skipped a beat and lowered its tone. It gained awkward pitch and asymmetric rhythm.
It was then that the Omnissiah spoke to Hieronym Rotde.
'My servant,' the voice emanated. 'You have come to me.'
Rotde's mandible-tines fluttered. His vox failed him.
More words flowed from the endless majesty of Mars's machinery fields. 'I have watched you. I have come to make your destiny. I have come to teach you the weakness of flesh.'
Rottle's vox-piece couldn't compete with the sheer scale of sound that the Omnissiah vocalized. All he managed was a prolonged and pathetic Yes.
'I have come to show you the destiny of all flesh, Hieronym Rotde. I have come to turn your Life-Eater into the death of fleshed and living form. I have come to show you knowledge! There was a strange ecstasy in the Omnissiah's words. Rotde recognized it: the adoration of uncorrupted information, perfect data, purest knowing. That is, Hieronym Rotde, if you will listen.'
Rottle's neck sheath flexed as he nodded. His beard of trim mechadendrites lapsed into flaccid obeisance as he listened. While his mortal remains liquefied in the vapours of the Life-Eater, the Omnissiah showed Rottle everything.
'A miracle,' said a hushed voice.
'Indeed,' conceded another, his speech falling away into a grating fizzle. 'But permissible?' The intonation turned into an electronic whine like a vox-caster switching channels.
'2.05%, Archmagos Biologis Vaeyvor. His remains constitute the Lex Organicum, He is still human. The chassis cybernetics and servitor systems have not compromised his humanity.'
'Extraordinary, adept. The probability of his survival was less than a deciota underpowered to the fifth quarter. A mathematical miracle - something I believed that the Omnissiah spurned.'
'My lord?' Wonder and disbelief mingled in the adept's voice. There was too much humanity there for Vaeyvor's liking.
The Omnissiah works by knowledge alone,' the archmagos replied severely. This is an unprecedented incident, but a numerically permissible one.' It was only unprecedented in so far as the Holy Ordos remained ignorant of Rottle's accident and recovery. Other permissible incidents had occurred in the past - such as the flensing of Reppertrix Straynge on Crux II or the ascension of Enginseer Heliope - but the Ordos would descend upon the Mechanicus and eradicate all records and recollections. Vaeyvor rarely regretted such culling, but it was such a waste of tech-priests and magi. Only Vaeyvor knew of these incidents by the gaps in his labyrinthine memory, the names without things that were like negative impressions of an ancient pict-stealer. What he knew was that the Holy Ordos had worked against the glories of the Omnissiah, and that Umbracogg was now one of the few places in the galaxy that such a miracle might take place undiscovered because it simply didn't exist in the wider records of the Adeptus Terra. Perhaps that was the miracle: it was secret, permissible.
'Should we proceed?'
'Yes. Activate his higher functions,' grated Vaeyvor.
Thy will be done, in the name of the Omnissiah.'
An electrostatic charge filled the air and power routers thrummed. With Rottle now largely a being of ceramite and steel, his power core required a great jolt of energy. His remaining flesh was kept preserved within external flexi-glass suspension wafers that insulated it from the power core's energy field.
The facility's chirurgeons had remarked upon the strange quality of Rottle's remaining flesh. Contaminated by the Life-Eater, it should have broken down into the chemical sludge that was capable of devouring more resilient proteins, such as keratin and chitin, as well as bone. But Rottle's remaining soft tissue was oddly resilient, if rotten and suppurating, and the chirurgeons only dismissed the puzzle because they assumed Rottle to be dead. That any flesh had remained was perhaps the greatest miracle of all.
The flexi-glass wafers shuddered as the charge continued to build. A great, low frequency groan broke across the vaulted apothecarion. For Rotde, it was the noise of consciousness. He returned to the materium shaking with the trauma of his own rebirth.
The light was harsh. He felt lumen-filtrators slide over his ocular lenses as they focused. His lenses were more mobile than before, as if mounted on lenticular armatures or mechadendrites. His companions fell into focus. There was an adept, very much bound by flesh, whose only modifications were neural braces and socketing arrangements that poked sorely through the flesh of his jawline. His eyes, both organic, peered back at Rottle nervously. He was young; there was too much humanity in his pale face.
The other figure was Archmagos Biologis Vaeyvor, hooded in his familiar cowl. As he spoke, vox-tendrils swung into sight below his hood. They curled and flowed with something akin to curiosity, or uncertainty.
'Magos Biologis,' Vaeyvor said, rasping as softly as his vox-tendrils allowed. 'Welcome.' He looked at the adept and nodded. The adept punched a button. Rottle noticed a cantilevered arm swing into his peripheral vision before it plunged into his chest. He expected pain, but felt only the smooth impalement of a broad-breadth data spike. He didn't know that he had a data-port there, but before he could feel the shock of intrusion, before his ocular lenses could flare in surprise, he was engulfed by the sheer pleasure of a data-stream download far faster than he had ever experienced before. Everything became clear.
There was less humanity in Magos Biologis Hieronym Rottle than most servitors, but he was still a man. His sentience had been preserved and his humanity remained in the flexi-glass wafers that dotted his ceramite chassis. To isolate his humanity like this was... liberating. He fluttered his mandible-tines with satisfaction.
Then it happened. The memory of Olympus Mons, Terra's strange orbit above the machine-fields, of Mars's piston-and-cog hymn to the Omnissiah, and of the Omnissiah Himself - it all flooded back into Rottle's consciousness with a data-torrent that blew back across the data-spike and destroyed most of the power routers.
The gloom of Archmagos Biologis Vaeyvor's deep hood flashed with a constellation of lumen-alarms, optic-bulbs, and visual sensors. He peered forward, looking intently at the prostrate form of Rottle's body-chassis.
'Magos Biologis,' Vaeyvor hissed. What is this7.' He gestured at the smoking power routers and the data-spike sizzling in Rottle's new data-port.
With the memory of his vision returned to him, along with his consciousness, Rottle felt something akin to delight - and it was with elation that he realised his memories had reached out through the data-spike into the local system network. They now existed independently of his own mind, merging with the apothecarion's machine-spirit. Vaeyvor now shared in their glory and knew the answer before Rottle even spoke.
'My miracle, archmagos,' Rottle said weakly. The Omnissiah spoke to me.'
'I...' Vaeyvor paused, his vox-piece grinding into a deep growl of scepticism. 'I see!
'I have been told a great secret, an idea, beat out by the holy machinery of Mars. The Omnissiah conveyed knowledge to me from the forgotten past.
'I can improve the Life-Eater, my lord. I can perfect it. I have been blessed by a revelation of pure knowledge that only the Omnissiah could bestow. I can create the instant destruction of our enemies by robbing the living of life itself, by taking from existence the weakness of being!'
We do not have the technology to replicate vortex weaponry, magos,' responded Vaeyvor. 'Using such a weapon against a planet would create dangers beyond our understanding. The Life-Eater need only sterilize, not obliterate. We seek only to take life, not matter.'
'My point exactly, archmagos. The new Life-Eater will take only life, not matter, nor any creation of the materium. It will attack the very spark of life and destroy only those beings whose being marks them as living!
The archmagos paused, gears grinding quietly until a hiss indicated the release of internal coolants. Vaeyvor was calculating probabilities, possibilities, solutions and scenarios. The very spark of life?'
'Yes, my lord.'
'From the god-like Astartes to the lowest of the underhive?'
Rotde nodded his prehensile optical sensors. The sensation was strange.
More coolants hissed from inside Vaeyvor's voluminous cloak. 'From the highest aquila of the Terran sky to the deepest ocean scumling?'
Rotde nodded again, aware that Vaeyvor was intoning the Catechism of Cleansing. He knew what came next.
'From purest sentience to bestial instinct - the eradication of living existence?'
'Oh yes, my lord,' responded Rottle with certainty. 'I can promise the very eradication of life. The Life-Eater has never been so hungry as I shall make it.'
More coolant hissed from under Vaeyvor's cloak as he continued to process the situation. As archmagos, his own operational systems were soft-wired into those of the facility. He had seen Rottle's vision himself, shown to him by the apothecarion's own machine-spirit.
He nodded, small puffs of decompressed gas escaping from the lip of his hood as he did so. 'It seems that the miracle of your survival, magos, is but part of a greater whole, something far more miraculous indeed.' Vaeyvor's vox was hushed, reverential, litde more than a mechanical croak. His vox-tendrils soothed the shape of each word. 'It is our purpose to pursue knowledge, to reclaim ancient learning, to forge the perfection of the blessed Machine, to fashion the Omnissiah's very divinity for Himself. Is it not?'
'It is, my lord,' responded Rottle. The adept remained silent.
Vaeyvor continued to assess the situation. Many of the chirurgeons and tech-medicae had been unaware of Rottle's identity. They assumed he would become little more than a mechanical corpse in the service of the Machine God. To let Rottle live now would risk unwelcome attention; to let him die might betray the Omnissiah Himself. But he could be buried in shielded laboratoria for years, hidden in the facility's poisonous depths, where few dared tread, or trod without dying. The secrets of the Machine-God could be made manifest secretly, and one day unleashed in the glorious name of the Emperor. No one knew of Rottle's recovery. Except the adept.
Vaeyvor's vox-tendrils caressed each other and hissed as he made his calculation. The risk of Rottle's discovery, like the miracle of his survival, was indeed permissible.
'You have my permission, Magos Biologis Hieronym Rottle, to continue your experimentation upon the Life-Eater,' Vaeyvor intoned solemnly.
Thank you, my lord.' Rottle hissed.
"You have my assurance that your work will be conducted in secret, beyond Mechanicus oversight. I believe that the Omnissiah is your guide, and the Emperor your saviour. None need know of this.'
Rome's mandible-tines fluttered, as if anticipating the consequences of the statement. Vaeyvor extended his own mechadendrite limbs from below his cloak, each chrome tentacle tapering towards a particular instrument: an electrosaw, a data-fork, an informatic barb, a razor-glaive. The tentacles curled upwards, stroking each other silendy in their ascent. They corkscrewed over the adept's head, turning upon themselves in a tightening web of metal - and then, with neither warning nor visible effort, they sliced down, cutting the adept into wet slices of meat and steel.
Now no one else knew about Magos Biologis Hieronym Rottle. No one at all.
FROM THE VIEWING gallery of The Emperor's Despair, Carnage hung in space like a polished pearl. The thick, ammonia-rich atmosphere reflected the local sun's light and it winked in the void, its brightness eclipsing the surrounding starfield for thousands of kilometres. The Segmentum Obscurus had rarely looked so dark.
The planet's vast mines, each of which was driven into the tectonic jigsaw of its cracked surface like a spike, tapped the planet's super-heavy core. Each was populated by a billion souls: miners, their families, enginseers, tech-priests, and Administratum officials. Not a single hive-mine had been operational for months.
For Carnage had been struck by plague and civil war. The suffering had been terrible and the bonds of civil society had collapsed. War followed and the survivors of the plague destroyed each other in a campaign of internecine conflict that pitched continent against continent. But the inhabitants of Carnage would not destroy each other before destroying what remained of their mining wealth and the very mines that gave their world meaning. The Administratum petitioned the Departmento Munitorum, which sent emissaries to the Holy Ordos of Terra. The Ordo Hereticus assumed command of the situation and approved the ultimate sanction: Exterminatus. It was why The Emperor's Despair hung silendy in high orbit. Carnage would be sterilized.
Within days of Ordo Hereticus involvement, astro-pathic communications with the Adeptus Mechanicus and several Adeptus Astartes Chapters secured a solution. The Emperor's Despair now sat loaded with a test strain of a new Life-Eater virus. The Doom Warriors Chapter was chosen to administer the Emperor's mercy to the lost planet of Carnage.
With a noble history stretching back thousands of years, the Doom Warriors had long specialised in campaigns of cleansing which appealed to their saturnine turn of character - the result of a defect in the Catalepsean Node, some said. Not only was it said that Doom Warriors did not sleep, but they required no hope, nor cause, to fight in the name of the Emperor. They were a morose, moody Chapter, bound together by a mutual misanthropy for those members of the Imperium who failed to see the galaxy's hopelessness. The nearest a Doom Warrior came to happiness was revelling in this hopelessness by immersing himself in its bloodshed and destruction. They made as formidable warriors as existed in the galaxy.
There were few Space Marines amongst the Doom Warriors as dour as Captain Grimmer Slayne. Carnage's opalescent brilliance sparkled against his half a dozen service studs as it wandered its lonely orbit thousands of kilometres away. Little else on Slayne's face caught the light. Heavy brows sat over hooded eyes. Hollow cheeks framed thin lips upon a cut-glass jaw. Dozens of scars had long ago knitted together into a patchwork-story of wounds and injury. His skin was little more than beaten leather. Light fell from his features like spilled water. He contemplated the scene before him with resigned sympathy. He knew death and embraced its necessity; every Doom Warrior did. His vox crackled into life.
'Captain Slayne.' The static hissed and fizzled. 'Come to the launch arcade.'
'Aye,' he responded, in the blunt accent of their homeworld. 'Coming.'
'Squad Qannix has returned. Their evaluation is to proceed. Launch imminent.'
The cleansing of worlds was a bleak necessity in the Imperium of Man, and something which Slayne had undertaken before. Mardun X, Gephistux, Truub II and III, the Stuum Cluster. Each reminded him that the Emperor's Mercy could bring life to all, or take it, whole worlds, and sometimes systems, at a time.
His route took him quickly towards the launch arcade of The Emperor's Despair. In his parched-yellow power armour, almost the colour of desiccated bone, he strode swiftly through the ship, passing maintenance crews and ancillary servitors.
At the entrance parlour, Slayne was met by Squad Qannix. Sergeant Qannix made the sign of the aquila against his chest plate, slapping the ceramite with his gauntleted hands. Slayne returned the gesture, just as forcefully, and the other four squad members repeated it. Despite the cruel menace of the squad's Mark VII helmets, Slayne sensed the brotherhood between them and, as the unhelmeted officer, nodded appreciatively. They stepped inside and vast launch galleries panned out before them. Along each gallery sat a great metal tube, fitted with buffering insulation, powerful coolant flues, and organic dissi-paters. At intervals, there were banks of servitors, wired into each great barrel to monitor breach integrity, targeting solutions and kinetic trajectories. These were the firing cylinders for viral torpedoes.
'Report, Sergeant Qannix,' said Slayne.
The population is dead or dying, captain.' Qan-nix's vox played directly into Slayne's implanted ear-piece. The survivors are killing the diseased before they're dead, or else each other, as well as destroying the mining infrastructure of the planet. Three hive-mines have already collapsed into the planet's core and more will do so within days. Hive-Mine Mogma'crun will fall within hours because every bastion spire has failed. The situation is critical, captain.'
Then let us commence, sergeant.' Slayne motioned to signal the launch. Hours of prayer had preceded this moment. Stale incense hung thickly in the air.
Though the Doom Warriors cared little for the precise nature of the viral payload they would launch, or its specific consequences, there were those that did. To Slayne's surprise, the parlour doors hissed open.
Stepping across the threshold first of all was Nakon Tagor, the ship's weaponsmaster. Handsome in his navy uniform, with tassled and trimmed epaulettes and brocaded panels, his high cap sat severely upon his sleek head. He was dwarfed by the giant Astartes before him and his grim demeanour fell away before their own sullen expressions. Slayne had seen his type before and was, if anything, unimpressed by his appearance. It was his presence that surprised him.
'Weaponsmaster, why the interruption? Only Astartes attend the launch arcade at this time. Launch protocols forbid anyone else.' Slayne eyed the weaponsmaster calmly, conveying only the expectation of his will obeyed. 'Return to your station. Leave us.'
'My lord-' Tagor began, but stopped as a bulky servitor followed him in, pushing him out of the way. It looked liked a lightweight dreadnought, if there was such a thing, with refined angles and sloped, graceful plating. Its gende shuffle mimicked that of an old man but spoke of sophisticated internal suspension. It was no dreadnought. It swivelled on rotational hips and faced the Doom Warrior captain. Its shoulder guards retracted, revealing a cliff-like, ceramite trapezius with a sunken collar. From this crept a group of mechadendrites, each tapering towards a sensor of some kind. Neither a servitor, then, nor a human.
The collar split and sunk into the chest-plate, revealing a panel of vox-tines. They clamoured together as the machine spoke.
'Captain Grimmer Slayne, I assure you that our presence is warranted.' The voice was a gravelled, purling stream of binary, fashioned into words. The captain of The Emperor's Despair has in fact requested our attendance. I am Archmagos Biologis Hieronym Rottle of the Adeptus Mechanicus, successor to his most blessed Archmagos Biologis Nefarion Vaeyvor, may he calculate exponentially the glories of the Omnissiah.'
Slayne brisded at the Mechanicus tin can. The being must have been but a fraction organic - and it was only after he inspected its ceramite exterior that he noticed the wafer-thin glass casings. They presented the proof of its humanity. Slices of flesh were presented like seals of authority. The flesh was putrescent, rotting, as if it had died long ago and simply existed upon the machine to vouch for its humanity. 'What are you doing here?' Slayne asked coldly.
'My friend,' warbled the binary harmony of Rottle's vox, 'I come in peace, as indeed do we all.' He gestured towards Carnage, through the nearest viewing bay, and shuffled into the launch arcade. A number of heavily-augmented Mechanicus adepts, tech-priests and servitors followed behind him, along with several skittering spider-scribes and a thrumming servo-skull. 'Do you know what you are launching at Carnage?'
The Life-Eater,' answered Slayne.
Rottle's response was a digital cacophony. Slayne thought it was laughter. Another mechadendrite snaked its way from the sunken collar and, curving in upon itself with a curious sense of display, winked out a holographic image of a phosphorescent liquid. Though the image occasionally shook and shimmered, the liquid was beautiful, a viscously glittering fluid that caressed the insides of its tank gently, even compassionately. It looked alive, and kind, and good.
The Emperor's Tears, Captain Slayne,' Rottle continued. 'An evolved Life-Eater that attacks not meat and bone, but the spark of life itself. The old Life-Eater devoured protein, multiplying exponentially as it did so, turning all organic matter into pyroplosive sludge that burned away the very elements capable of sustaining life. The Emperor's Tears takes away life itself. A far more efficient means of killing, I think you'll agree.' There was a moment of rapturous fidgeting from Rotde's retinue.
The Emperor's Tears is a fine name, archmagos,' answered Slayne. 'It conveys the great compassion of our God-Emperor.' He paused, eager to conclude the conversation. The Emperor protects,' he said simply, crossing his gauntleted hands and striking his chest-plate with the sign of the aquila.
'And He destroys,' continued Rottle, with a flutter of short, prehensile tentacles that flowered around his collar like a grandiose ruff. 'Shall we?'
Slayne wondered if the ship's captain would object to Squad Qannix putting a few hundred bolter rounds into this Rottle-machine, his retinue, and weaponsmaster Tagor. If only they weren't standing in such a sensitive area of the ship, such impertinence would have been punished.
But the time had come. A prayer siren sounded, soon followed by the heavy chimes of consecrated launch bells.
All around them, and along the length of the launch arcade, servitors awoke from their offline slumber to begin nursing the control slates of the great firing cylinders. Squad Qannix stood still, watching impassively, while Rottle's retinue could barely contain their curiosity. Archmagos Biologis Hieronym Rottle was especially animated. Sensory proboscis, antennae and aerials unfurled from his open collar to savour the moment.
Slayne's enhanced sense of smell soon detected more incense in the air. Purity rituals were being observed in the distant arming chamber. The air extraction system initialised and oxygen was suddenly pulled from the room, and replaced, at great speed. Unprepared for the turbulence, Rottle's servo-skull was dashed against a bulkhead and destroyed. Rottle was too busy following the launch protocols to flinch. Slayne simply didn't care.
Several of the servitors slowed their calculations, aware that targeting solutions were now confirmed and the torpedoes in place. With the Emperor's Tears ready for launch, it was with grim satisfaction that Slayne considered the notion of the Emperor weeping. A weaker man might indeed cry, he thought, wryly pondering the scope for munitions error. A new weapon was always interesting until it jammed, overheated, or was copied by those Throne-damned orks. A thunderous shudder broke his contemplation.
Deep in the bowels of the ship, a rumbling fury swiftly built towards a throbbing, ear-cracking crescendo - and then vanished. With a silent blossoming of light, a salvo of viral torpedoes began their swift descent towards Carnage. They winked in the light of the distant sun, brilliant before the blackness beyond.
The torpedoes struck the upper atmosphere like splashes of quicksilver. Through the viewing bays of the launch arcade, their disintegration was beautiful, their payloads sparkling and glinting in the sun's light. Though dwarfed by the sheer scale of the planet, and soon lost in its thick atmosphere, the Emperor's Tears had an immediate effect. As the lower atmosphere was punctured, great, dark clouds of dead matter billowed into space. It was the dying bacteria that lived in the planet's ammonia-rich atmosphere. As life increased in complexity and frequency towards the planet's surface, such dark clouds became stains racing across the planet, like oil upon water, contaminating every iota of life with death, robbing all existence of being. Clouds of dead and decaying matter mushroomed into space, propelled by the violence of their own destruction. The hive-mines became still within moments.
Carnage became a place of peace.
Orbital scans indicated that death had descended upon the planet. Servitors croaked and drooled as they calculated the awesome power of the Emperor's compassion. Slayne raised an eyebrow. What the old Life-Eater virus could accomplish in hours was happening in moments. The universe had just become a little darker.
Within minutes, Carnage was dead. And then it happened. Carnage came back to life.
Servitors reeled off impossible data-readings. Reams of script and punched parchment spooled onto the deck in untidy heaps. Lights blinked and klaxons roared throughout the launch arcade. Elsewhere on The Emperor's Despair, the ship's great logic engines struggled to compute the surge in planetary life-sign. The ship's very machine-spirit cried out in confusion, causing whole galleries of hard-wired tech-adepts to die instantly. Most of the ship's astropaths, prepared for the planet's psychic death, died in the aftershock of its rebirth.
Slayne was unsure what he was watching, but he didn't like the roiling atmosphere. It swirled across the planet at such speed that much of it escaped the planet's gravity sink and dissipated into space. Bruised swathes of remaining cloud hung over the planet's dark continents. Storm systems reared up in great thunder-heads like vast scabs. Slayne had never seen a planet look so wrong outside of the Eye of Terror.
'By the Golden Throne,' he muttered, touching his breastplate softly.
Rottle laughed, his binary inflection suddenly thick and organic. A cry of triumph. It was even audible over the sound of the oxygen exchangers.
Despite the proximity of the ship's outer hull, Slayne was the first to raise his bolter. Squad Qannix followed a moment later, reading their captain's reaction. They opened fire as one. A hail of bolter shells pummelled the ceramite of Rottle's chassis, but he continued to wail with laughter - inhumanly guttural and congested. The bolter shells cracked his ceramite and plasticrete shell, but it was clear to Slayne that Rottle's over-augmented carapace was the least of their worries.
Slivers of Rome's original dssue swelled and distended, cracking their flexi-glass seals and sending shards of strengthened glass scattering across the deck. As Rotde's chassis staggered under the hail of fire and began to disintegrate into flakes and then fragments, his original flesh bloated and blew into great hunks of fatty meat. Where bolter shells blew chunks of the rancid tissue away, more unfolding fleshy matter fell into place, creating a great bulbous, quivering mass.
Rottle's vox-tines had been shot to pieces but his triumphal cry still reverberated around the launch arcade. Now it was a throaty, rich roar, as fleshy and deep as any bass-vox song-servitor. The sound carried its own stench. Slayne's implants strained to stop him gagging. Most of Rottle's retinue were either vomiting up their own wiring, killed in the crossfire, or ripped apart by ricocheting mass-reactive rounds.
The broken chassis suddenly cracked wide open, spilling out new organs, sheaths of muscle and fat, as well as the internal workings of Rottle's mechanical form.
'Fire at the flesh, Doom Warriors!' cried Slayne, closing in on the mass of blubber and meat. It was already gathering itself together.
'Doom ye! Doom ye! Doom ye!' cried his battle-brothers, advancing step-by-step to the Chapter's war-drum chant. Bolter fire intensified. Explosions of sound, reverberating Shockwaves, and magnesium flashes shook the air as well as the very structure of the ship.
Despite chunks of flesh being blown apart from the mass of meat surrounding what remained of Hieronym Rottle, a recognisably humanoid form had coalesced and congealed into shape. There stood a grinning figure of pestilential depravity. It was a bloated, swollen creature whose cancerous entrails fell from its own torn stomach. It was truly obese, rolls of rotting blubber wrapped around a vast frame of suppurating tissue and rancid meat. The concentrated bolter fire was slowly eroding its vile mass, blowing it apart, gobbet by gobbet of flesh.
It just stood there, grinning rejoicing in its own undoing.
'Doom ye\ Doom ye\ Doom ye\' cried the Doom Warriors, advancing to point-blank range. Muzzle fire blackened and crisped some of the creature's extremities. The smell of charred meat hung heavy in the air. When the creature finally collapsed, it was a flaccid bag of torn and broken skin. Lumps of tissue, muscle and organ lay everywhere. Steam, stench and cordite hung thick in the air.
It was an emissary of Nurgle, a name known only to servants of the Ordo Malleus, of the Holy Ordos of the Emperor's Inquisition, who would only utter it behind psychic wards of protection. Embodying despair, decay, disease, and death, the Unclean One was beyond the recognition of anyone aboard The Emperor's Despair. Even Captain Slayne had never encountered a daemon of the Plague God.
Upon the floor, amongst the congealing gore, lay the daemon's cankered lips. They moved.
Slayne was lost for words and looked at Sergeant Qannix. As Doom Warriors often did, he shrugged his great shoulder guards. Other members of the squad did the same as they checked their bolters.
The lips were alive, sucking sounds from the air and spitting them forth: 'You have pulled me inside out, my children,' the lips chuckled. 'Meet the wasted flesh of poor, poor Hieronym Rottle. So keen to escape his living meat. He never quite understood.'Slayne opened fire once more, ripping the lips apart once again. Chunks of rancid flesh skittered across the deck. And yet the lips continued to speak, flapping obscenely amidst the gore. 'Look no further than the body of my vessel to pay homage to the host. You think you can kill Hieronym Rottle, my children? Imagine looking out of his eyes for all those years like I did - and then through his unfleshed lenses.' The lips dribbled a stinking wad of rotten phlegm. Slayne nearly gagged at the stench, despite his implanted olfactory filters. There is nothing beyond the flesh, my children. Flesh is life, alive or dead.'
Slayne brought his great ceramite boot down with a crack. He felt the deck buckle. The lips were no more.
Well, that's some dead flesh there, captain.' Qannix was unable to resist contradicting the being's final words.
'Silence, brother,' Slayne said. Servitors still gibbered   and   drooled   impossible   calculations.
Parchment swirled onto the deck from overheated logic-engines and corrupted data-feeds. The machine-spirit of The Emperor's Despair still groaned and wailed. Klaxons, chimes, and horns filled the launch arcade with overwhelming dissonance. Something was still very, very wrong.
Slayne bolstered his bolter and made the sign of the Emperor's aquila. With his thumbs locked across his breastplate, he beat his chest. It was the sign of a battle to come.
Slayne imagined the Emperor weeping upon his Golden Throne. He vowed to bring doom to the darkling planet below.
Carnage had come back to life - and billions of undead built altars to the Lord of Decay.