The Horus Heresy: The Master of Mankind

It drew closer. Their clockwork-simple machine thoughts whispered against its essence. It tasted the warp-scent of their weapons – not the fyceline primer or the vibrating magnetic coils, but the weapons themselves. Instruments of destruction with their own spiritual reflections. They were caresses of pressure prickling at the monster’s mind. The daemon sensed anything that had shed blood or taken life. A creature of murder knew its own kind, whether it was formed of aetheric ichor, mortal flesh or sanctified metal.

‘Tracking,’ said AL-141-0-CVI-55-(0023) again. Three of the others repeated the word, slightly out of sync. Her head snapped this way and that on an augmented spinal column, seeking, hunting. Prickles of sensory data buzzed at the sides of her slow consciousness. It was enough. ‘Engaging,’ she voiced.

‘Engaging,’ the other three repeated, still out of time, as the sensors in their skulls registered the approaching creature a moment later.

AL-141-0-CVI-55-(0023) devoted her stunted brain processes to two subroutines. The first was to pulse a three-beat signal of white noise across an unclosable vox-link, notifying her handler of her heightened state of alertness. The second was to brace her bionic foot against the unseen surface of the tunnel’s floor. The immense heavy bolter that replaced her right arm clunked twice, weighty with purpose. An ammunition feed rattled from the weapon’s body to where it connected to her bulky backpack.

The daemon – still nothing more than a nebulous threat throbbing at the edge of her sensory input feeds – ghosted through the shattered buildings thirty-two degrees to the left. The servitor pivoted with a snarling melody of mechanical joints and opened fire with her heavy bolter. It bellowed its roaring staccato, shaking her entire body with the force of a seizure. After a second and a half the crude recoil compensators fused to her muscles and bones kicked in to keep the weapon aimed true. The cracked fragments of her teeth had already crashed together with enough force to start her gums bleeding. She felt no pain from this. The nerves in her gums had been stripped away to immunise her from that very reaction.

The other servitors followed her lead, bracing their feet and opening up with their own salvos of explosive bolts. None of the four units registered the impacts of accurate fire. Each of them recorded their misses in the simplified data engines at the cores of their skulls.

When their weapons cycled down with the target lost, the total number of successful hits tallied at zero.

‘Committing to scout-predation subroutine,’ AL-141-0-CVI-55-(0023) vocalised. She walked ahead, her auspex vista narrowed and focused in search of the surely wounded foe. Even her blunted brain could process the anomaly at play. Her targeting computations suggested the creature should ha, ve been struck by between twenty-nine and forty-four .998 calibre shells. It should no longer be moving at all, let alone moving swiftly enough to ghost away into hiding again. AL-141-0-CVI-55-(0023) vox blurted this anomalous detail to her handler.

She never acknowledged the reply. The daemon propelled itself from somewhere beyond the detection of her sensory array with a single contortion of its unnatural muscles, burying a claw-spear of ichorous cartilage into her torso, destroying every mono-programmed engine acting in place of her removed organs and annihilating her sole biological lung, which had miraculously survived unaugmented for over a decade.

‘Enemy sighted,’ the servitor tried to say. Blood and chips of broken teeth left her lips instead, gouting across the taloned arm that had killed her. The claw-spear lashed back from her body with a whip-crack of abused meat. The servitor fell to the ground in several wet, suffering pieces.

‘Enemy sighted,’ the largest of her component pieces tried to say once more. Her torturously primitive thought processes couldn’t fathom why her primary weapon wasn’t firing. She lacked the capacity for diagnostic function and her nervous system had been chemically rethreaded after her sentencing, so she had no idea that she had been torn asunder.

Bolters roared, utterly silent to the daemon, whose senses knew nothing of sound. The beast lunged three more times, jaws grinding shut on flesh spiced with artificial oil, claws lancing through brittle armour plating to the softer tissue beneath.

The blood that ran was impure and unsuited to beat through a human heart, corrupted by the nature of the cyborging procedure, but these impurities were irrelevant to the creature. It savoured the sensation of murder, wearing different skins and shapes until it adopted a form capable of crouching over and nuzzling at the streams of blood snaking their way across the mist-shrouded ground.