Vorax

Matthew Farrer

Ratiomancer Rhaal’s legs are heavy-boned machines, bulged at the hip and bent backward at the knee, cored in a nickel-steel alloy. Their mechanisms whine softly as they walk, with splayed, cloven feet clanking on the deck.

His arms are longer than his organic arms were, moving smooth and silent on universal joints and faced with silver. When they were first grafted to him, the palms and backs of the hands were etched with patterns describing the sacred formulae of Old Mars. When he threw down his oaths on the steps of Kelbor-Hal’s shrine and renamed himself from calculus to ratiomancer, he took an engraving tool, drilled it into his torso to anoint it with his own blood, and then filed all those old designs away. He can still remember the teeth-gritting vibration coming through the metal into his flesh-body.

It was not long afterwards that the smoothed silver plating began to tarnish and rise in organic-looking blisters that Rhaal could neither understand nor explain. Now his hands look like blighted human limbs instead of the perfect mechanisms that they are. The growths seem to be forming new patterns of their own.

This excites Rhaal, although he is not sure why.

It excites him even more to see those hands wrapped around the neck of Enginseer Arrys, their festering patina staining the man’s red collar and hood. He gives him a little shake as he drags him backwards down the crawlway, as though testing that he is still alive. He knows Arrys is still alive, of course – he is monitoring the enginseer’s vital signs with a battery of inhuman senses. The shake is just to see if he can get a reaction.

He does. Arrys’s jaw works and a brief attempt at speech is choked off somewhere down in Rhaal’s grip.

‘No, no, no, nooooo,’ Rhaal croons, rocking the enginseer as if soothing a baby rather than gripping an enemy by the throat. His flesh-voice is reedy and wavering from lack of use. <Like this,> he cants, and sends a hoarse bark of scrapcode into the enginseer’s ears.

Even as he continues to pull the half-dead man along, he watches the code hit the aural processors as sound waves, turn into micro-impulses in his mechanised senses and flit into his augmented nervous system to join the infectious code already there. Arrys’s systems writhe with metastasising scrapcode structures, building and rebuilding themselves, eating away at him from within. Some of the growths have begun to fight amongst themselves over access to the handful of as-yet unspoiled systems. Rhaal giggles to see that. He can’t wait to see it happen again, writ large across the Imperial manifolds that he can dimly sense around him.

Somewhere in the distance there is a whoosh and clang as some component of the great Ring of Iron realigns itself, the vibration briefly palpable even through Rhaal’s heavy metal legs.

Or maybe a ship has docked, or a piece of the vast orbital debris field has caromed off the Ring’s armoured hide.

No matter. The Ring is an artefact of the old Mechanicum. Rhaal doesn’t expect it to last long into Kelbor-Hal’s new order – not once this war is all settled and Mars is free to begin remaking itself in earnest.

Rhaal’s work is part of the very earliest stages of that great work. Small, but not trivial. As peripheral and yet important as… filing the sacred designs off a silver augmetic. What a comparison! Rhaal almost code-chuckles at his own audacity as he drags Arrys’s limp body along.

Along and ahead, deeper into the humid and electric smoke-filled darkness.

There’s one driver-lock still working, even though there’s so much potential to misuse them.

Rhaal finds that hilarious. The locks are not a military asset, and they surely are of no use to the blockade the Terrans are trying to impose around Mars. They are waste disposal sites, nothing more, designed to shoot reject-mass out into space with enough force to make sure it doesn’t simply orbit back in and clutter the void around the Ring.

Well, the orbit is well now and truly cluttered anyway. The view from every port that Rhaal has passed is choked with wreckage from the first fighting, and from the early attempts to run the blockade.

And yet someone is so obsessed with proper trash disposal that they have kept one of the locks. As if it were just for him.

Rhaal code-chuckles again. A working driver-lock is a wonderful thing for a man in his position to have. No end of uses. It has dispatched the corpses of Imperial functionaries he has murdered off into the debris field where they will be safely lost. It has launched out any number of saviour-suits from the Ring’s emergency stations, packed not with desperate, evacuating station crew but with special payloads that Rhaal has cooked up in his little lair on one of the Ring’s depopulated decks. Maybe they won’t all be found, but surely a couple of them will. Found and brought in by an Imperial ship crew who think that maybe they’ve found some missing comrades, men and women who will be taken in by the fake life sign indicators and who will get a wonderful toxic surprise when they break the suit seals. Rhaal has become very inventive with the creation of chemical and biological payloads. It has become one of his favourite pastimes.

And then there is Enginseer Arrys. What a wonderful treat! His systems are almost completely in thrall to the scrapcode now, and the predatory un-logic structures incubating in this fertile vessel are hungering to burst out and find new machines to overwhelm. Rhaal can hear and feel them rioting in the transmissions coming out of Arrys’s augmetics. As he waits for the driver-lock to open its hatch, he gives the twitching man a quick and affectionate pat on the head. Having one of his former Mechanicum brothers to work upon is a treat that grows ever rarer as the Terrans’ grip on the Ring of Iron becomes more solid. Rhaal is almost sorry that it is time to part company with him.

<You’re such a lovely opportunity – oh, you are!> he tells Arrys. There’s a clang from the lock shaft and the little window mists with condensation for a moment. <You’re well made, you are. You’ll last for who-knows-how-long out in the cold! You’re going to be in such pain.> He chuckles again. <Everyone will hear you, too, even if they don’t realise it. Oh, all around the Ring you’ll go, all among the ships and shuttles, and you’ll leave your mark on every little system that hears you. You’ll say thank you, won’t you, to our dear Mechanicum brothers, for making you with such useful systems and then sending you to me?>

Rhaal bounces on his sprung metal legs, shaking the enginseer’s body with glee. It will take a few more moments for his lock-picking codes to open the hatch in such a way that won’t alert the Imperial controllers, and then he will have to say goodbye to his new friend. Better make the most of these last few moments together.

The hatch opens. Rhaal has his back to it and his senses focused on Arrys. It is only some unnameable instinct that makes him turn and look into the face of the thing that crouches in the driver-lock, watching him.

Everything seems to go silent for a moment.

And then Rhaal is screaming with his flesh-voice as the shining mantis-like face lunges forward into his own, springing backwards in a blind reflex leap as cutter-mandibles shear the air where his skull was only a split second ago.

He lands, no time to think. Part of the distance his leap bought him has been eaten away – the thing is already half out of the hatch and into the passageway. Rhaal takes another step, but his shoulder clips a stanchion and he whirls in the air, falling facedown on the deck; He is listening to his claws scrape and scrabble as he tries to stand himself up again.

There is a deeper, heavier tread underneath that noise. The thing is coming for him.

With a single, brisk chug of actuators, Rhaal’s arms extend and shove him back to his feet. He whirls to face it, bringing his arms up, shrieking. Behind it, a second one is folding itself through the hatch, trampling the ruin that the first one has made of Arrys’s body.

The moment of distraction almost kills him as the thing pulls its arm cannon up close, aims and opens fire even as it strides inexorably forwards.

Rhaal screams again, in both flesh-voice and code this time; the sound blows the emergency dismount on the access panels all down the corridor. Suddenly the passage is a mess of steam, vapourised coolant and clanging metal squares swinging out from the walls and dropping from the ceiling. There are just enough of them between Rhaal and the metal monster to deflect the first of its rounds and fill the passage with cracking, whining ricochets.

By the time it has readjusted its aim, the passage is empty.

With Rhaal’s legs folded under him and his arms hyperextended, he scurries down the maintenance crawlspace on all fours like a hyena, yammering one word over and over.

‘Vorax! Vorax! Vorax!’

He can’t hear his own voice over the constant scream of metal. The lead battle-automaton is keeping pace with him in the passage beyond – tearing away panels, shearing through the bulkhead with its blades and pumping cannon-rounds through any obstacle it cannot rip aside with more than a moment’s work. Rhaal’s 310-degree vision is getting glimpses of the second beast folding itself into the crawlspace and clawing its way along after him, somehow reshaping itself from a striding mantis to a terrifying armoured worm. The grippers pulling it along are wet with Arrys’s blood.

That brings a thought to Rhaal’s mind but, in the instant it takes him to try and process it, the lead Vorax drags the slashed bulkhead open and exposes him, lunging in with no word and no pause.

Rhaal pushes off the crawlspace wall in blind terror, and rolls forward under its lunge. Then he is crawling, crawling and skittering, finally scrambling through the hatch at the other end of the passage, howling the lock code in terror-corrupted binaric. But the blades lash out, blocking the hatch from closing, and the Vorax is already head and shoulders through.

It is right on his heels. Feedback fogs Rhaal’s senses as a hooked blade takes one of his metal feet away below the shin and the power burst ripples through his systems.

He is choking with rage. Rage at himself – stupid, stupid – the one working driver-lock, of course it was a trap. They were waiting nearby like predators in the waterhole! He was supposed to be the predator here. They would regret thinking that they could just come and take him. He feels the heat and strain in his shoulder joints as his arms drag him onwards. It is only a matter of–

He is rolled over onto his face again as the floor plating booms upwards, the second Vorax bursting from the crawlspace where it had kept pace with him. Rhaal felt the impact as he rolls away again, the point of its bladed gun-limb gashing his side, the first machine marching almost on top of him, its insectoid face staring down at him. Rhaal leaves a trail of bright blood as he watches the gun muzzles come up.

It is only a matter of time.

Both machines step through the hatch and onto Arrys’s body, walking straight through his noospheric link – even as the link dies with Rhaal. The children of his scrapcode infestation will be erupting in the Vorax like cancers and abscesses, cysts disgorging parasites and poison into their systems. It cannot be more than seconds away, now.

The code will have them. The Vorax will bow to him or they will burn. Even just to slow them for a few seconds…

As the two machines stand over him, Rhaal runs a wrenching reconfiguration pulse through his external transmitters, and then pours all the power he can muster into the code blast. It is a killing blow, a curse from the gods, a Chaos-syntaxed death shout that should shock any system it strikes into immobility. It is what will buy him the time he needs.

The ceiling lights blow. The power regulators in the walls squeal. Rhaal even feels a quick shift in his equilibrium as the gravity plates falter for a moment. He has time for a pleased little noise – <Hehh!> – before he reaches into the heads of the automata to see what damage he has wreaked.

He finds no damage.

No system indexes. No complex consciousness emulation. His senses, attuned to the near-mystical flows of subtle code, can barely perceive the functions that have driven the machine-beasts so relentlessly after him. There is nothing in the Cybernetica cortex for the scrapcode to drive mad, no web of logic to break down.

There is only the seamless instinct to kill, protected by the purity of its own malice.

Rhaal’s last thought is: Wait, I–

Then the lead Vorax stamps its foot, and the second skewers his now headless corpse on its bladed limb. And without a second’s pause the two of them swing about and march away, tracking Rhaal’s blood in ever more faint footprints through the passageways of the Ring of Iron.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Matthew Farrer is the author of the novella ‘The Inheritor King’, which appears in Sabbat Crusade. He also wrote the Warhammer 40,000 novels Crossfire, Legacy and Blind, along with numerous short stories, including ‘The Headstone and Hammerstone Kings’ for Sabbat Worlds and the Horus Heresy tale ‘After Desh’ea’. He lives and works in Australia.

Two Space Marine veterans strike deep into the heart of the Dark Mechanicum’s territory, seeking the enemy’s most valued asset: the mysterious Kryptos...

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