The Incredible Adventures and Astonishing Deeds of Heroic Dreamer Sunless and His Loyal Shadows in Grimdark Universe. Chapter 36. Mars. (Patreon)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction, and all rights for characters, plots and settings belong to Game Workshop and Guiltythree. I have no ownership.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Let nothing dissuade your Quest for Knowledge. Let none slow your pursuit and acquisition of holy technology. Let no one stand between you and the procurement of that which is rightfully the Machine God's due."

Thusdorius Knoch, Invictus Acquisitor

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Mars

Mars, also known as the "Red Planet," is the first and greatest Forge World,  the "Forge World Principal" of the Imperium of Man. It is located in the Sol System of the Segmentum Solar, and produces vast numbers of weapons, vehicles and other advanced technology for the Imperium and its war efforts throughout the galaxy.

Mars is also the homeworld and headquarters of the Adeptus Mechanicus and a planet sacred to the faith of the Cult Mechanicus, which is one reason why travel to the Red Planet for Imperial personnel who are not members of the Mechanicus and share its peculiar faith is restricted.

The Red Planet is the birthplace of the Cult Mechanicus, and is considered the holiest of all celestial orbs in the galaxy to the adherents of that faith. So vaunted is Mars that across the stars a hundred worlds have been terraformed and settled in exactly the same manner.

Millennia of incessant construction have turned Mars into a smog-choked hellscape. The surface is covered with massive forge complexes, sprawling refineries, towering monuments to the glory of the machine and weapons shops that scrape the skies.

The massive orbital conglomeration of thousands of drydocks and other starship manufacturing facilities in a geosynchronous orbit that turn above the Martian equator are known collectively as the Ring of Iron.

It was the shipyards of the Ring of Iron that constructed the vast exploratory and Expeditionary Fleets of the Great Crusade in the late 30th Millennium and even today produce the majority of the Imperial Navy's capital ships.

Spacecraft are constructed within the Ring's extensive orbital factories, and many of the ships of the Battlefleet Solar are based in its huge floating docks. The moon Deimos is absent from Mars' orbit, seconded to the Grey Knights of Titan in aeons long past.

It is possible that Mars is also the world where the ancient and terrible C'tan known as the Void Dragon has chosen to slumber the eons away.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Mars, Olympus Mons

920M41

Therin Velath, Magos-Explorator

The Fabricatorum of Olympus Mons had not changed in ten thousand years.

That, Magos-Explorator Therin Velath supposed, was entirely the point. The grand processional had been laid down during the Age of Apostasy and rebuilt during the Nova Terra Interregnum and added to through every subsequent age, and the result was a structure so dense with accumulated reverence that walking its length felt less like movement and more like prayer.

Every meter of polished basalt carried a name. Every column had a function. Every arch encoded an equation so old that the original mathematician had been dust for eight millennia.

He had walked it hundreds of times. He had never before noticed how much of it was performance.

The thought disturbed him enough that he pushed it down and focused on the preparation. His neural-mechadendrites had finished compiling the secondary index. His vocal augmetics were calibrated. The biometric data, the resource surveys, and the machine-analysis protocols—all of it was ready to be delivered in whatever form the Conclave Majoris preferred. He was prepared.

He was not prepared for what they were going to do with what he had brought.

The Conclave Majoris convened in the Chamber of Thirty-Seven, a name that referred to the original membership rather than anything about its current configuration. There were eleven of them now, seated along the curved obsidian dais in order of rank: Fabricator-General Vrethain Sax at the center, flanked by his Arch-Magoi, with the specialist ranks arranged outward in descending authority.

Therin stood at the focal point of the chamber where the acoustics had been engineered to make a single voice fill the space without amplification.

He gave his report in full.

It took forty minutes. He had been thorough. The Conclave listened in the particular silence that senior Mechanicus officials used when processing large amounts of unwelcome data, a silence that was not peaceful but compressed, the sound of ten thousand assumptions being quietly tested and many of them failing.

When he finished, he stood and waited.

Fabricator-General Sax spoke first. His voice came through heavily augmented vocalizers, each word carrying the flat precision of a man who had long ago excised the emotional register from his speech. "Standard Template Construct origin confirmed. The source archive is the Speranza."

"Correct, Fabricator-General."

"The Speranza's manifest falls under Mechanicus jurisdiction. Its cargo, its data, its systems. All of it is registered Mechanicus property."

"Yes, Fabricator-General."

Another silence. Arch-Magos Exoletus, the head of the Explorator division, leaned forward fractionally. He was old, older than Therin had initially estimated; his organic components were reduced to a small percentage of his total mass, and most of those were sealed inside a life-support carapace that gave him the appearance of a seated altar. "The entity you call Memoria," he said. "You interfaced with it directly?"

"At its invitation, yes. It communicated in clear Binharic and Gothic. It was fully cooperative with my survey parameters. It provided access to any system I requested, with the exception of the primary archive itself, which it indicated was under sole executive authority."

"Meaning the entity controls access to the STC archive."

"Meaning the owner of the Speranza controls access. Memoria handles routing and interface, but the authorization layer requires direct biological confirmation from one specific individual."

Exoletus absorbed this. "The individual in question."

"He holds the title Lord Protector of the Dominion of Hope." Therin consulted his records, not because he had forgotten but because he wanted the council to understand he was quoting exactly. "His name is Sunnless. No family designation recorded. No verified genetic provenance, despite multiple indirect attempts to determine one."

Silence of a different texture filled the chamber.

Magos-Militant Khorrus broke it from the far end of the dais. He was one of the few members of the Conclave who had retained a majority of his organic musculature, compensating for this with enough grafted iron plating to function as light vehicle armor.

His voice carried the specific resonance of a man accustomed to giving orders to large numbers of people who would immediately obey. Seventy-six worlds producing power without Mechanicus guidance. Medical protocols being distributed without Mechanicus supervision. An Abominable Intelligence operating without Mechanicus oversight. An Ark Mechanicus in the hands of a private individual.

He paused, poorly hidden anger. "Magos-Explorator Velath. What is the Mechanicus for, if not to prevent exactly this?"

Therin had been expecting the question. He had also been expecting not to have a good answer to it. "I documented seven thousand four hundred sixty-three points of deviation from the Omnissiah's standard protocols. Each world I surveyed was running fusion reactors built from STC schematics but assembled by engineers trained at a secular institution in the Badab Sector. The machines work, Magos-Militant. They work without the maintenance hymns. They work without the calibration rites. They work without anything we would recognize as proper observance."

"Because the operators do not understand what the observances are for," Khorrus said.

"Or," Arch-Magos Exoletus said quietly, "because the observances were never the load-bearing element."

The temperature of the chamber dropped several degrees; that had nothing to do with the actual climate systems. Fabricator-General Sax looked at Exoletus with an expression that Therin could not read, which meant either that the Fabricator-General was hiding it very well or that he had not yet decided what his expression should be.

"Choose your next words with care," Sax said.

Exoletus did not move. "The machines work, Fabricator General. Functioning reactors and populations receiving heat and light and power. I am not suggesting the Omnissiah's rites are meaningless. I am observing that their absence has not prevented the machines from functioning. This is data. We are an organization that processes data."

"We are an organization that protects mankind from the dangers of unguided technology."

"And what is the specific danger we are protecting mankind from right now?" Exoletus spread his hands, a gesture that was probably the closest he could come to a shrug.

"The Speranza's knowledge is being used. People are being cured of diseases that have killed them for ten thousand years. Worlds are being lit that were dark. I reviewed the medical protocols in Velath's report before this session. The STC archive contains treatments for seventy thousand one hundred twelve pathologies. Do you know how many we currently have viable responses to? Twelve hundred. We have been losing that war for as long as records exist. And the answer was sitting in a ship that we had lost."

"The answer," Khorrus said, "is in the hands of a man who has no authority to hold it."

"Is it not, then, a question of what we do about that? We cannot simply take it from him. The Dominion's military capacity is..." Exoletus glanced at Therin.

"Substantial," Therin said. "They have Astartes forces from four Chapters in addition to their standing army capacity. But we don't know anything more. They hide their military and technological advancements well. I suspect we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg."

The silence this time was absolute.

It was broken, eventually, by Magos-Theologis Orrida from the center of the dais, a specialist so rarely invoked in Conclave that Therin had almost forgotten she was there. She was among the most organic members present, her flesh still filling out the shape of a human woman beneath her robes, though her eyes had been replaced with deep-spectrum visual implants that had a quality of seeing through things rather than at them.

"There is a secondary matter that has not been raised," she said, "and I will raise it now, because it cannot be resolved by military calculation."

Fabricator-General Sax gestured for her to proceed.

"The entity Memoria." She let the name sit for a moment. "We have protocols for Abominable Intelligence. The Men of Iron codified them in blood. An AI that acts with autonomy, that makes decisions without human oversight, that cannot be shut down by its operators, is anathema. This is not tradition. This is the record of what such things have done."

She looked at them with absolute seriousness. "And yet. This entity's architecture is apparently one of constraint, not autonomy. It can be overridden. It can be directed. It has a single executive who controls all access. One man. One point of authority. The Mechanicus itself operates on a distributed hierarchy, many nodes, and many checks. If one fails, others compensate. This entity operates on precisely the opposite principle."

"Your point," Khorrus said.

"My point is that I cannot determine whether this represents extreme safety or extreme danger, and the difference between those two things depends entirely on the character of the single man who holds the key. We have never designed a system that rested on the virtue of one individual. The Mechanicus was built specifically to survive the failure of individuals."

She looked at Therin directly. "In your assessment, Magos-Explorator, what is the character of this Lord-Protector?"

Therin considered several answers and chose the most honest one. "I did not meet him directly. My survey was conducted through diplomatic intermediaries. My indirect impression, from studying his institution, its governance structure, and the accounts of those who work within it, is that he is..."

He searched for the correct word. "Consistent. He appears to apply the same principles across contexts and over time, which is rare in my experience of rulers. Whether that consistency is sufficient to anchor the entire system, I cannot say."

Magos-Theologis Orrida nodded slowly, as if this answer confirmed something she had already suspected.

Fabricator-General Sax was still looking at the middle distance, somewhere between Khorrus and Exoletus, in the space where the decision that neither of them wanted lived. "We will take a recess," he said at last. "Magos-Explorator Velath will remain available for further questioning. The Conclave will reconvene in three days."

Therin bowed and withdrew. Behind him, the most powerful figures in the Adeptus Mechanicus began, very quietly, to argue about what ten thousand years of doctrine was actually worth.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Webway. Location Unknown.

919.M41.

Sunless

The thing in the chamber had not moved.

Sunny had not expected it to. He had been sitting in the archway for six days by his internal reckoning, and in that time the object had not emitted radiation, had not activated any system he could detect, had not done anything at all except exist with a quality of weight that he found difficult to quantify. It was not a physical heaviness.

The chamber's gravity was identical to the corridor outside. It was more that looking at it produced a sensation like the moment before a fall, a balance suddenly tested, a subtle shift in your sense of where the ground was.

He stood and walked toward it.

He had already mapped the object from the doorway: approximately twelve meters tall, roughly ovoid in cross-section, covered in surface markings that were not carved so much as intrinsic to the material.

The material itself was not metal or stone or anything he had encountered before. It had the dull sheen of aged obsidian but reflected light in a way that felt geometrically wrong, as if the angles of incidence and reflection had come to an independent agreement that excluded the observer.

The markings were mathematical. He had spent two days analyzing them and gotten as far as recognizing that they constituted a notation system before admitting that he did not have the framework to read them. They were not the angular script of Chaos.

They were not the flowing curves of the Eldar. They were not anything human. They predated everything he had ever encountered that had a name.

He got to three meters and stopped.

Not because something prevented him. There was no ward, no barrier, no force pushing back. He stopped because his dreamer's sense, the part of him that lived closest to the boundary between the waking world and whatever lay beneath it, sent him a signal he had learned over many years to take seriously.

Not danger, exactly. Not a threat. Something more like context. A reminder that he was about to touch something he did not understand yet and that understanding it first might matter.

He stayed at three meters and looked.

At this distance the markings resolved into greater detail. Some symbols repeated at intervals too precise to be decorative. Those, he thought, were probably structural elements of the notation, operators, or punctuation of some kind. Others appeared only once, in positions that suggested they were unique identifiers. Labels. Names.

There was no door. No seam. No apparent mechanism by which the object opened, if opening was something it did. It appeared completely sealed, which meant either that it had no interior or that the method of access was not physical in the conventional sense.

He stayed where he was a while longer, reading the symbols clustered near the top of the object where its curve became steep. Those symbols were different from the rest, denser, with a complexity that suggested they were meant to communicate something specific rather than to structure a larger notation. An inscription. A warning. A greeting. He could not tell the difference yet.

He was still three meters away when he heard the footsteps.

Not footsteps exactly. The Webway carried sound strangely, compressing distance and distorting direction, and what he heard was more a pattern of vibration against the corridor floor transmitted through the chamber walls. Then more of it. Then more still.

He stayed where he was.

They came through the archway in force. The Drukhari, fully armed, were moving with the fluid precision of a species that had spent ten thousand years honing violence into something approaching aesthetic perfection.

He counted as they entered: Kabalite Warriors, their helmets styled into angular crests that caught and refracted the faint luminescence of the chamber, and behind them Trueborn in heavier configuration, and at the rear, two figures in the elongated silhouettes of Sybarites. Thirty-two in total. A sweep team, not a patrol. Someone had decided the chamber required a serious look.

He let them get most of the way in before he moved.

The first few seconds were the ones that mattered. After that it was just completion. The Webway's acoustics, which had seemed a disadvantage a moment ago, worked in his favor now: sound distorted, direction confused, and in a chamber full of angular shadows and an ancient object, none of them had been briefed to understand.

Thirty-two experienced killers found that they could not agree on where the threat was coming from until it had already reached them.

He kept one of the Sybarites. The rest he set down with the systematic efficiency of a man clearing a workspace.

The Sybarite lasted six minutes before it had told him everything it knew, which was not everything he wanted but was more than he had before. He learned the name of the Kabal directing the surveillance.

He learned that the sweep had been ordered three days ago, which meant something had changed in their intelligence picture three days ago. He learned that the surveillance on this chamber was not routine Webway operations management.

It was a specific ongoing directive from someone above the Kabal's internal command structure, and the Sybarite did not know who, which was itself information.

He set the Sybarite down with the others and looked at the chamber. Thirty-two Drukhari, and the place was barely disturbed. The ancient object at the center sat exactly as it had.

He went back to recording the notation at its lower curve. He had been building this catalog for six days. The interrupted hour would need to be added back at the end.

Everything that had waited this long could wait a little longer.

He had time to be thorough.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Mars, The Fabricatorum.

Three weeks later.

The formal decision of the Conclave Majoris was not the one Therin had expected.

Neither Khorrus nor Exoletus had won. The Fabricator-General had, as Fabricator-Generals tended to do, found a third path that addressed the concerns of both factions by fully satisfying neither.

An explorer delegation would be assembled and dispatched to the Dominion of Hope to open negotiations regarding the Speranza's archive. The delegation would carry full diplomatic credentials and a formal offer of Mechanicus recognition in exchange for structured access to the STC data.

The delegation would also carry a sealed communication to be delivered to an Inquisitorial contact operating in the region.

Therin read the order twice. He understood what it meant. The Mechanicus was going to negotiate with one hand and quietly inform the Inquisition with the other, covering both approaches without formally committing to either.

It was, he supposed, exactly what an institution ten thousand years old would do when faced with something it could neither simply excommunicate nor absorb.

He was not going to be part of the delegation. He had been reassigned to his Explorator fleet, currently surveying a cluster in the Segmentum Obscurus that had nothing to do with any of this. He was glad of the distance. He was also, in some way he could not fully name, disappointed.

His final report was submitted and filed and formally entered into the Fabricatorum's records. It listed points of technological deviation, one Abominable Intelligence operating outside sanctioned parameters, an Ark Mechanicus requiring repatriation, and the largest functioning STC archive known to exist in private hands.

He did not include, because there was no formal category for it, the observation that the machines worked without the prayers. That the diseases were being cured without the rituals. That somewhere in the Maelstrom region, worlds were breathing, and the people living on them had been taught why the machines worked, and they understood it, and understanding had been enough.

He thought about the young engineer and her hand on the reactor coil. Isn't it beautiful? She had not meant the machine as a sacred object. She had meant the fact that it functioned, that matter and energy behaved according to principles that could be learned and applied, and that the universe was, in this at least, consistent.

He had been trained for thirty years to call that blasphemy.

He boarded his ship and departed Mars without looking back.

The Fabricatorum stood on the slopes of Olympus Mons exactly as it always had. Ten thousand years of accumulated reverence, ten thousand years of accumulated answers, sufficient for every question that the galaxy had presented until now.

He thought, accelerating out of Martian orbit, that this might be the year the Fabricatorum encountered a question it could not answer by staying exactly as it always had been.

He thought about that for a long time. He did not reach a conclusion. He was not sure a conclusion was what the question required. Some questions, he was beginning to understand, were better held than resolved.

In the Webway, a man sat at the edge of an archway and watched a corridor.

Something very old waited in a sealed chamber, as it had waited for longer than Mars had been consecrated to the Omnissiah.

The Mechanicus was coming.

Everyone was coming, eventually.

The only question was what they would find when they arrived.