Mechanicum

Kelbor-Hal could feel the scrapcode invading his systems like a virus, his inbuilt protective subroutines and aegis barriers helpless to halt the systemic infection. He could feel the dark code worming its way into the very essence of his physiology, and though the few organic parts left to him shuddered at its touch, the core of him exulted in the sensations.

His audio-visual systems flickered and greyed as they adjusted to the new reality they perceived. Static hash fuzzed his vision and the roaring of an impossibly distant sea sounded in his aural receptors.

The Fabricator General's internal Geiger counter detected elevated levels of radiation - a form he could not identify - and his chromatographical readers picked out numerous compounds in the air that could not be positively identified.

A hazy mist drifted from his body as peripheral systems overloaded, and when his vision cleared, Kelbor-Hal saw that the door to the Vaults of Moravec was open.

His newly awakened senses detected the dreadful power of the things that lay within, whispering energies that were not of this world and which spoke of secrets long forgotten, but were now ready to emerge from their long slumbers.

'Can you feel it? The power?' asked Regulus, his voice no longer the blurted cant of pure binary, but the hashing, static-laced beauty of scrapcode.

'I can,' confirmed Kelbor-Hal. 'I feel it moving through my system like a panacea.'

'Then we are ready to begin, my lord,' said Regulus. 'What are your orders?'

Freed from the last vestiges of human loyalty, Kelbor-Hal knew the time for guile and subterfuge had passed. Since the Warmaster's agents had first come to Mars, a war of words and ideals had been waged on the planet. Debate, schism and dissension had waxed and waned across the surface of the red planet for decades, but the time for words was over.

Now was a time of action, and he knew what order he must give.

'Contact Princeps Camulos,' said Kelbor-Hal. 'It is time for Legio Mortis to walk.'

1.07

Work on the Akashic reader progressed swiftly, with everyone working around the clock to ensure their component parts of the project were produced to Adept Zeth's exacting standards. Dalia refined her designs for the theta-wave enhancer, each refinement building upon the last and allowing an exponential improvement in the machine's overall performance.

Dalia had only the dimmest sense of how remarkable such a thing was or that they were operating on the frontiers of scientific advancement, for it was no more than the application of the things she had learned in her readings and the things she… just knew.

Before meeting Koriel Zeth, Dalia had not understood how she could have known these things, but with the revelation of the aether and her innate ability to tap into its edges, she felt a growing excitement as each piece came together.

Why she should have such an ability and not others was a question that had occurred to her each night as she lay in the tiny, one bed hab she had been assigned. Adept Zeth called it a stable mutation in her cognitive architecture, the evolutionary result of generations of growth and development in her brain's structure that had begun thousands of years ago.

Zeth's answer seemed too rehearsed, too quickly given to be entirely true, and Dalia had the sense that the Mistress of the Magma City did not understand her gift - if gift it was - as completely as she made out.

However Dalia had come to make this connection, she sought to develop it each night, studying technical data Adept Zeth supplied. She read texts on fluid mechanics, particle physics, mechanical engineering, biotechnology, warp-physics and countless other disciplines, finding - and often filling - the gaps in each one where the research was either missing or had not been taken to its logical conclusion.

None of the texts made any reference to the Machine-God or contained the prayers of supplication to the machine-spirits, a glaring omission she found all the more startling given her many years spent under the harsh, unwavering supervision of Magos Ludd.

In the Librarium Technologica, Magos Ludd had a prayer for even the most mundane of technical issues, from the changing of a fused capacitor to the awakening of a logic engine at the beginning of a shift of transcription.

Dalia found none of this in the texts supplied by Koriel Zeth and had asked her about this once as they discussed further refinements to the Akashic reader.

'The Machine-God…' nodded Zeth. 'I wondered when you would bring this up.'

'Oh… was that wrong?' asked Dalia.

'No, not at all,' said Zeth. 'It is good that you do so, for it is central to my work here.'

Dalia looked up into Zeth's mask, wishing she could see her mistress's face, for it was difficult to read her moods with only the tone of her voice to go on. Dalia didn't know how much of Koriel Zeth was bionic, for her armour covered any trace of flesh or machine enhancements. Her body language was largely neutral and gave little away.