The Beast Arises

The lexmechanic’s voicebox had an irritating static interference that made her sibilants sound like a hissing snake. Koorland tried to ignore the aural tic so that he could concentrate on the tech-priest’s analysis. She was currently pointing with a reticulated mechanical limb at a greyish globe dominating the hololith display that hung in the middle of the briefing chamber.

The room was dark, illuminated only by the sparse light coming from the projector. The gloom did nothing to alleviate the claustrophobic conditions of a chamber built for half a dozen officers filled with twice that number and their attendants, not to mention the dominating presence of Vulkan looming over them all from beside a blinking bank of strategic cogitators. The primarch had his fingers entwined, his gaze directed off to one side, barely observing the proceedings. Removing the large brushed-steel table had not made much difference, but Koorland was glad of the little extra space that this had afforded.

He shifted his weight, agitated, aware that many of his companions were barely restraining their desire for more determined conversation, only for the sake of appearances observing the niceties of the technical reports and standard liaison protocols. Everyone had something to say but nobody was saying anything yet.

‘Electromagnetic disssturbance in the upper ionosssphere hasss led to much reflective patterning on our initial orbital ssscan data.’ At an unseen command, areas of the slowly spinning globe highlighted in orange, with trails of yellow criss-crossing sections of the remaining whited-out sphere. ‘Much of thisss interference can be traced to masssive orbital intrusssions. The ressst we expect isss generated by unssshielded indussstrial ssstructuresss on the sssurface of the planet.’

‘Orbital intrusions?’ The question was asked by Field-Legatus Otho Dorr, strategic commander of the gathered Astra Militarum forces. In terms of raw manpower, when the remainder of the transports completed the journey into orbit he would lead the largest force — nearly ninety thousand soldiers and ten thousand battle tanks and other vehicles.

‘Ship descents and ascents,’ explained another of the Cult Mechanicus adherents. He looked much like a crab perched on a hunched human body, a splay of hydraulic appendages like a ruff around his neck. ‘Poorly-shielded plasma drives in low orbit, wakes from dirty atomic propellants on shuttlecraft. That sort of thing.’

‘A lot of them,’ added the dominus.

Koorland knew that it was crude to think of martial prowess in purely physical terms. In fact, to equate pure size with military ability was ork-thought. Yet despite being logically aware of this deficiency in his judgement, he could not help but think of the leader of the Adeptus Mechanicus battle congregation as being somewhat underwhelming.

The dominus was, for the moment, a brain in a glass vessel. An armoured vessel, Koorland conceded, as Gerg Zhokuv continued his detailed explanation of the vacillations and weaknesses of starship augur arrays. Clusters of sensory nodes and rods were mechanical replacements for eyes, nose, ears and skin, linked through spiralling cables attached to sockets in the exterior of the metre-high vessel that two lumbering natal-tank Praetorians had brought to the council room. The biotic fluid inside obscured all but the dark shadow of the organ within, but occasionally Koorland could see there were rods penetrating the naked brain matter. The brain itself was distended, patched in places with inorganic plates, far larger than any normal human skull could contain.

Most disconcerting was that the dominus’ ‘voice’ actually came from the young, waxen-faced man beside the stand on which the pteknopic vessel was set. By some invisible pathway Gerg Zhokuv controlled the slack-faced servitor’s body — at least the jaw and vocal cords, for all other facial functions seemed inoperative.

‘Can you find it?’ Bohemond’s growl cut across the dominus’ lecture. ‘Where is the Great Beast of Ullanor?’

‘We have identified several potential locations, hotspots of multi-frequency activity.’ There was a pause while Zhokuv’s attendants manipulated the display, which flickered with runic lingua-technis inscriptions over several broad zones of red.

‘Each of those must be several thousand square kilometres,’ said Wolf Lord Asger. ‘And there are four of them. That’s a quarter of the planet’s surface.’

‘We need to do better.’ Koorland spoke, sensing growing unease between the Space Marines and Adeptus Mechanicus representatives. ‘We cannot attack the entire world. We are here to kill the Great Beast, not conquer Ullanor. That is a war for another time. Terra itself is threatened. Time is a luxury.’