The Horus Heresy: The Master of Mankind

Alpha-Rho-25 began the process of harvesting her final cognitions, which necessitated sawing through the brain pan and plunging a dataspike into one of her internal cranial connectors. Intriguingly, in all the info-feeds that spilled out in numerical echo of the servitor’s last thoughts, there was nothing identifying her warp-born assailant. She hadn’t been able to make out any visuals of her killer. For all intents and purposes, AL-141-0-CVI-55-(0023) and her cohorts had been firing at nothing.

There was more – somehow, the lobotomised woman’s very last thoughts had been of her human life, and the weeping children that had been pulled from her hands as she was hauled away, screaming, on her way to reprocessing. Alpha-Rho-25 discarded the data as irrelevant: a tediously emotional misfire of a dying, imperfect biological engine.

The Protector rose and stalked over to the next slain servitor, his bloodied saw still whining.

One of the servo-skulls ceased its circling, turning to stare out across the eldar ruins. A few seconds later it started emitting a lengthy vocal chime. A screed of data spilled across Alpha-Rho-25’s vambrace screen, none of it giving any insight beyond the detection of unspecified inhuman movement, though in this case that was detail enough.

The Protector stood straight, closing his human eye as he focused through his chunky bionic lens. His false eye immediately began to flash with warning pulses of its own, vision filters clicking and purring as they overlaid one another. All he could see was the detritus of the dead eldar settlement scattered across the tunnel. Its low, time-eaten walls were an amusing monument in the webway to a race too arrogant to realise it was dead.

Although it had deeply offended his sense of competency, Alpha-Rho-25 had brought some companions with him via Triaros conveyors. Without looking, he keyed a series of commands into his bracer’s runepad. The cohort of nine Castellax battle-automata at his back began active seek-and-destroy protocols, circling him with their great iron strides shaking the ground. The belt-fed cannons on their shoulders panned around with hydraulic whines. He didn’t like them – the smoother-hulled Kastelan robots were far more reliable and not born of erratic mongrel intelligences – but a man worked with what he had at hand. He’d recognised the potential need for firepower, and the automata provided it.

Movement drew his gaze to the east, though his focusing lens wouldn’t align and his scanning reticule kept slipping its locks. Something was there in the distance, defying his scrutiny.

Alpha-Rho-25 cycled through vision filters, overlaying display upon display, negating those that showed no new data. During this round of perplexed and increasingly irritated staring that took, by human perceptions, almost no time at all, he deployed all four of his primary weapons from all four of his arms: two long-taloned chordclaws thrumming with hostile sonic fields, two transonic stabbing blades scraping against one another in anticipation. The propulsion vanes on his back-mounted power unit began to spin, setting his cloak rippling.

The last vision filter he tried was a confused blend of thermoptical intensifiers with echolocation results rendered as precise binaric data instead of a visual impression.

That one worked.

Behind him, with their sensory feeds linked to his, the Castellax automata saw what he’d just seen. They reacted with the savage crashing of nine mauler-pattern bolt cannons opening up in brutal harmony.

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The daemon took form at the hunt’s apex, coalescing into a thing of claws and blades and spines – the idea of evisceration made flesh. It roared its name as it descended on burning wings, a name that was a sound and a memory as much as a word. It screamed the hot-blooded yells made by the first man ever to take another man’s life, and in the same chorused cry was the gurgling death-rattle of the first man ever to fall to murder.

Alpha-Rho-25’s aural receptors registered the sound as a shrieked series of syllables very close to language.

His first and last action upon seeing the entity he had come to hunt was to beam audiovisual data through a tight-lance signal back to his overseers in the Godspire. Sending the pulse took less than the span of a human heartbeat, yet he had no time to do anything else. The jaws and claws of the creature closed in an impossible alignment of rending snaps, wrenching him into almost thirty pieces even as he was being swallowed.

The component chunks of Protector Alpha-Rho-25 tumbled into the monster’s several gullets, throat-muscled down to splash into the acid of its guts, still twitching and bleeding as they started to dissolve. Unfortunately for Alpha-Rho-25 there was just enough of his consciousness left to know a brief, searing, transcendent moment of pain as digestion began.

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