Indomitus, p.9
Indomitus, page 9
Zozar had wanted no part of it. What was the point of wasting the last of one’s life in despair? The end came all the same, and Cleophatia had taught him that it was better to embrace what life there was than to spill it meagrely through one’s fingers in bitterness and hostility.
A tug at his tunic brought Zozar’s attention down to his daughters, Azella and Isoris. The twins looked up at him, so pure, free of the sun-curse.
‘Will it hurt, Father?’ asked Isoris. ‘The biotransference?’
‘It will free us from pain, my dear,’ answered Cleophatia while Zozar still contemplated the answer.
He realised that the truth did not matter. His daughter was only seeking assurance, which their mother was so quick to provide. Zozar wished he had that easy emotion, to feel the situation rather than think about it. But then it was the complexity of his intellect that Cleophatia said she loved, drawn to and celebrating their differences, of course. And her warmth passed to him so that sometimes, just sometimes, his engineer-brain was set free from the shackles of logic and just floated on moments of joy. Moments like this one.
‘Will it hurt though, Father?’ said Azella, the one never quite satisfied by her mother’s answers. She was more like him, though possessed of a far more forgiving disposition. ‘You helped build it, you should know.’
He looked up at the Evermount and the Great Machine that had been erected at its summit. It was true that he had devised some of its angled walls and projecting antennae, stretching like hands towards the rising sun, but of its real workings he knew little.
‘I think it will tickle,’ he said, prodding both daughters to elicit squeals of shock and joy. Cleophatia’s look of happiness intensified and Zozar’s heart throbbed with pride, knowing he had done well in her eyes.
As nobility, albeit of low rank, they would be among the first to enter the biotransference halls. Zozar took his daughters’ hands and led them up the marbled pathway, while other families gathered ahead at the gates. He realised he was trembling with excitement and they could sense it too. So close to the end of the pain. Zozar could scarce believe that he had played a small part in the creation of their salvation.
He was torn from his reverie by a strange sensation, like grit in his hands. He rubbed his fingers together, realising he no longer held onto his children. It felt like sand falling from his palms.
Zozar looked down at the two girls. Each was falling apart, slowly disintegrating into dull, ruddy crystals. Flesh became dust, slipping away from a shining metal skeleton beneath.
He looked at his own hands, the gnarled, cancer-ridden digits falling on the breeze too. The sensation crept up his arm, freezing for a moment, leaving a chilled numbness in its wake.
Cleophatia gasped in horror.
He turned his eyes upon his beloved but she looked back not with eyes of love and warmth but the cold red stare of optical lenses.
All three had become animated statues, embodiments of death that he had laboured hard to escape. The Great Machine was meant to free them from the burdens of the flesh, but not like this.
His own body melted away, leaving unfeeling living metal.
Zozar’s consciousness found movement, still traumatised by the dreams. The scream inside him stopped before vocalisation. It took a few moments to orientate himself out of the dream state, pushing the terrible vision away.
With comprehension came awareness of his physicality inside the stasis chamber. A tripodal body, skeletal beneath plates of armour. Multiple arms, each beweaponed with gun or blade, pulsing with hatred-turned-energy. The skorpekh lord felt no flesh nor organ, and deep within the construct of his form throbbed an emptiness where his half-remembered soul should have been.
The last tattered vestiges of his loved ones fluttered from thought and the emptiness inside swelled with a different strength. Rage. A rage powered by a loss magnified through the lens of aeons. Rage fuelled by a guilt only known to one that had doomed his love by his own hand.
Rage and hate flowed, crackling across metal bones. All living things would perish in the inferno of his anger. All was ruin and all would be rendered unto ruin for all time.
His despair needed venting or it would consume him.
Zozar the Destroyer had woken.
CHAPTER THREE
The Destroyers created an empty zone in the heart of the stasis decks, like a wound in Simut’s extended cortical field. To prevent any potential spread of the Destroyer malaise that made them such unrepentant slaughterers, they were isolated from the rest of the cryptek network. Simut did not care to think what pseudo-emotions thrashed about beyond the boundary zone between his consciousness and that of Zozar and his followers.
A dedicated swarm of canoptek constructs attended to the wakening ceremonies. They too were sequestered from the main body of Simut’s minions and would accompany the Destroyer legion down to the surface. Only through several layers of secure canoptek nodes did the data flow of the process reach the overlord, passing through triple-redundant decontamination protocols and a final check by Phetos’ subsystems.
When all was prepared Simut received the burst-signal from Zozar, demanding he be released from the final quarantine bonds.
‘Power up the translocation arrays!’ announced Simut, taking his place upon his throne after some time spent inspecting the display screens. The command pulsed through Phetos and into the tomb ship’s computational banks. Dimensional grips sank into the subspaces between the spheres, drawing on a limitless supply of power. Deep within the interior levels of the immense vessel pyramidal transformers stirred into action, turning raw power created by the drift between dimensions into energy that thrummed along the circuits of the mastaba, bathing the lord and his royal warden in its jade glow.
The Destroyer tombs crackled with unleashed power, false lightning leaping from chamber to chamber, coursing along corridors to spear from one canoptek attendant to the next. Within moments the whole zone was awash with molecular distortion as the boundaries of space-time collapsed under the will of Simut.
This was what it meant to be a lord of the necrons. He rejoiced in the feeling of control, the very atoms of existence to be pulled apart and reshaped by his will. Simut paused for the tiniest instant, overcome with the sensation of omnipotence. Once his people had worshipped the star gods, but they had enslaved the deceitful C’tan and stolen that power. Thanks to Szarekh and his dynasty, now it was theirs to command. They had become the gods!
RELEASE ME NOW. LET THE PURGE OF THE LIVING BEGIN.+
Even through banks of defensive rubrics the demand of Zozar was a flash of heat coursing into Simut’s cortical field. Made suddenly aware of his momentary delusional lapse into megalomania, the lord was overcome with horror. Such was the route to the mind-death that stalked many of the greatest of the necrons. It was potentially the last abandonment of the search for the flesh-gift they all sought to regain. Embarrassed, though no others had witnessed his moment of weakness for he’d disengaged from direct contact with Phetos, Simut activated the translocational array.
Zozar and his legion became a cloud of particulate matter and information. Carrier waves that ran along the fault lines between dimensions flashed down to the surface of the world to reassemble their datastreams into cogent artefacts, the translocation near-instantaneous.
Nearly instant, but not quite. As beings that now regularly part-existed in the quantum world, even the tiniest fraction of time could be spun out to feel like an eternity. Simut despised translocation and chose to descend physically to his conquered worlds rather than suffer the ignominy – and risk – of atomic dispersal and rebonding. He did not fully understand the process and could never shake the suspicion that the entity that was created at the other end of the carrier wave would not really be him. How could everything that made him Simut, Stormhawk Commander of the Winter Stars, Grand Ruler of Anthothekis and Akapris, survive the translocational journey?
‘Translocation is complete, Eagle of the Void, Master of the Unending Stars,’ intoned Phetos. He approached the screenwall, head tilting to one side. ‘The slaughter has begun.’
There was a slight undercurrent of protest in the words and cortical demeanour of the royal warden. Though his personality protocols ensured he was absolutely loyal to Szarekh, and through that loyalty connected to Simut, there were sub-protocols that gave him leave to critique and advise where needed. Simut had suppressed those reasoning loops as much as he could but it was impossible to eradicate them entirely. Why anyone would want a minion second-guessing their commands was a mystery to him, but apparently some of his fellow nobles did not have his infallible intellect to rely upon.
‘There is a problem, Phetos?’
Simut leaned forward, magnifying the image of the wall as he did so. He saw smoke already rising from several buildings close to the centre of the human settlement. Zozar’s Destroyer-tainted warriors had begun their attack without delay. Zozar led the march, his weapons spitting bolts of gauss fire, his tripodal guard following close behind. Other warriors had transformed themselves into floating monstrosities, eschewing motive limbs altogether. Gauss rifles and cannons crackled disintegrating jade beams through the shuffling mass of the human population, flaying their atoms apart as the beams passed from one target to the next in a near-continuous assault. Behind the most altered members of Zozar’s cabal came a phalanx of slaved skeletal warriors, driven by the same urge to slay as their master but dispossessed of the individual sense of self that drove other Destroyers to modify their bodies away from the necron norm. They split into squads, empowered by the skorpekh lord’s imperative to slay, and roamed at will through the streets and buildings killing everything they encountered.
‘The Destroyers are slaying the general populace, my lord.’
‘It was impossible to translocate Zozar within the energy fields and astromantic bubble of the citadel,’ replied Simut. ‘Some collateral damage was inevitable.’
‘The loss of lower life is no cause of regret, my lord. While King Szarekh has ordered that the lower beings are preserved where that does not place unnecessary delay on the expedition, they are plentiful. My concern is that Zozar’s legion seems to be moving away from the citadel, not towards it.’
Simut saw that this was the case and wondered how he had not realised immediately. Phetos must have distracted him. The general trail of destruction ran perpendicular to the required axis of attack, at best, and in places the Destroyers were getting further and further from their objective.
‘I want a secure communications link with Zozar now!’
He continued to watch while Phetos parted the dimensions to create a nil-space connection between the tomb ship and Zozar’s cortical field. The bigger weapons of the fortress were firing on the Destroyers, but with little effect. Their living metal bodies and the unifying presence of Zozar made them highly resistant to even the heaviest armaments of the humans. Even those that were struck directly only suffered temporary incapacitation. Canoptek attendants moved from casualty to casualty, rebinding shattered bodies, slewing together fragments of living metal to reconstitute the fallen.
The other humans were starting to react in a vague, herd-like way, responding to the threat on a base level that even the overnull effect could not eradicate, driven by unsuppressed chemical interactions in their brain stems. Most reacted too slowly to evade the strobing gauss beams, but as a mass the populace was moving outwards from the site of the attack, like a slow but inexorable ripple from a rock dropped in a pool.
THE SLAUGHTER HAS COMMENCED. NO SURVIVORS. ALL SENTIENCE WILL BE EXTERMINATED.+
‘No!’ Simut slammed a hand down on the arm of his throne, the gesture turned into a pulse of rebuke across the communications link. ‘You will attack the citadel! Adjust your assault tangent, you slaughter-brained fool!’
ALL MUST BE DESTROYED. ZOZAR IS THE DESTROYER.+
‘Attack citations transmitted, my lord,’ the royal warden reported as a pulse of data flowed across the link. ‘Zozar, the enemy within the fortress cannot escape you but they will try to fight you. They must be destroyed. All resistance must be quelled.’
RESISTANCE MUST BE QUELLED. THE FORTRESS MUST BE PURGED OF LIFE.+
‘Yes,’ crowed Simut. ‘Destroy the defenders of the citadel. All of them!’
IT SHALL BE DONE.+
Guided by the renewed will of the lord, the Destroyers changed direction immediately, pulling back from their attacks to focus on the shield-swathed fortification. Squads of warriors and teams of Destroyers returned to the vicinity of Zozar, accompanied by their floating and scurrying canoptek allies.
‘See, they are ready now,’ said Simut, looking at Phetos. ‘By my will the citadel shall fall.’
‘Masterful, my lord,’ replied the royal warden. ‘Your victory is assured.’
When the energy screens fell, the citadel was doomed. Towering above his feeble opponents, Zozar led the final charge into the heart of the humans’ armoured nest. His slaved warriors advanced around the base of the fortress, cutting off all escape from the gates, while anti-gravitic Destroyers rose along the walls to intercept any craft attempting to leave.
The corridors within were lit by erratic electrical circuits, flickering from the interrupted energy flow. The blast of laser and flash of chemical weapons discharge strafed brightly across Zozar’s senses, every glimmer bringing a momentary flicker of remembrance. He saw her face in reflective surfaces, lit by the plasma hail of his foes. He even saw it on their distended, unworthy bodies, their disgusting features twisted to her beautiful looks.
It was all false. It all had to be destroyed to preserve the memory etched into his engrammatic matrix. That was truth. All else was lies, an affront to her purity.
He fired pulses of condensed energy into their flesh, turning bonded molecules to flares of radiation and spreading matter. His energy-edged blade split apart their organic components without resistance, cell shock spreading like a virus from the wound site to evaporate their bodies. Phased to a different dimensional resonance than that occupied by their physical bodies, even those humans that bore a semblance of armour had no defence against the lethal sweeps.
Lifeblood painted the walls in splashes of vivid dissipating heat but there was no pleasure to be taken from the carnage, no artistry in the killing. There was only the rage, no joy. When all was slain, when the memory was safe at last, there would be peace. Until then there would be no relent, and Zozar would be the scourge of all sentient life.
His Destroyers were an extension of his hate. Each had been touched by his grief and found a loss of their own, a seed of anger from which his will could spring unfettered into their thoughts. Their worlds had orbited stars millions of times since they had lost their loved ones, since they had been shamed, since they had been fooled by the promises of the star gods and their own nobles. An eternity to their former selves, rendered a deathless sleep by the artifice of the soul-theft.
Emptiness. Emptiness ruled. Not to be filled by the designs and desires of the ghoulish flesh-wearers, nor ignored by the transcendent post-life canoptek engine-folk. What was lost could never be regained. It was not flesh and blood, to be put on like a fresh robe. The sanctity of being, the soul that had carried their lives and their meaning, had been taken away. Only nothingness held refuge, but there could be no oblivion while life still remained.
A highly energetic pulse caught Zozar on the arm. The star-heat briefly glistened across artificial bones, melting the limb.
He turned, focused the ire of his cannon on the human wielding the armament. Ultrasenses detected the magnetic and radiative pulses coming from the gun’s harnessing chamber. Rudimentary fields kept ravening energy at bay.
A captured star in miniature.
The reminder set a fresh tide of rage piling up through Zozar’s cortical field, flaring from his weapon as a bolt of disintegrating force. The human disappeared, the wall behind seared in a faint outline of their running form.
There was only the most basic strategy to the attack. Defensive walls had become the jaws of the trap, and it was simply a matter of time before annihilation was accomplished. Counter-attacks and stiffer resistance shaped the Destroyers’ advance, but they gave no heed to their own preservation except with the thought that total destruction would be delayed by their demise. Those counter-attacks that threatened to stall the slaughter were met and quashed with overwhelming force. The pockets of resistance were surrounded and extinguished.
Zozar had a faint sense that the higher he climbed, the higher the ranks of the foes he would face. Humans often conflated hierarchy with physical position. He no longer cared for such things. Kings and slaves still perpetrated the crime of life in equal measure.
The noticeable consequence was an improvement in the armour and weaponry of those that fell before his attack. Several times he was forced to pause for canoptek assistance, his assumed form suffering increasing amounts of critical damage.
Each delay served only to spur on his rage.
ALL MUST BE DESTROYED.+
He came upon a broad hall decked with unruly astromantic symbols. Since biotransference, he had possessed no psychic presence, his soul severed by the means with which his consciousness had been biotransferred into the construct of living metal that had sustained him over the aeons. He mourned its loss, though he could not recall what it felt like to have a soul. It was the principle of the theft that had driven him insane.
So it was with purely cold intellect that he surveyed the inscriptions on the domed chamber, following their symbols and spirals towards a faceted crystal lens at the summit of the ceiling. His senses registered a lack of heat in comparison to the rest of the citadel. Light-detecting arrays picked up stray sparks of high-wavelength emissions. Through the anger he reasoned that perhaps a being with a soul might feel something about the environment.
