Chapter 116: Cawl's Sub-Avatar
The silence of the chamber was not silence anymore.
From deep inside the alloy walls, something mechanical was waking up. The sound it made was not the sound of a system powering on. It was the sound of a system preparing to stop.
The Mechanicus Explorator's announcement reached everyone in the hall at the same moment.
"The facility's base-level protocol has triggered a self-destruct sequence! Three minutes before this entire space is filled with molten rock and structural collapse! Everyone here will be entombed!"
The walls had already begun their testimony. Somewhere in the construction surrounding the chamber, mechanisms were engaging that had been waiting for exactly this authorization to engage. Ash and fragments fell from the ceiling. The floor vibrated with a particular sustained intensity that the structure had not produced before.
"Withdraw! Everyone back the way we came! Now!"
Venus Carpé's face had gone white. She did not hesitate. She was already running, her household troops falling in around her, the group driving hard back toward the passage entrance.
Duvette did not move.
He ran the calculation in the time it took to say it.
The return passage was over three kilometers. Three minutes. There was no version of that calculation that produced a survivable result.
"Don't retreat! You can't outrun it!" He put everything he had into the channel. "Anderson! Get that door open! The one ahead! Now!"
"Are you insane, Duvette?!" Venus's voice came back from forty meters away, still moving, bewildered and furious. "That's deeper in!"
The 112th's veterans heard their order. Their faces communicated something honest about what was under their feet and over their heads. But they did not break. They had been following this commissar out of impossible ground since Farrak IV, and something in the accumulated record of that history was doing its work.
"Confirmed, sir!"
Anderson's roar was already behind his action. He was at the door in the time it took most people to register the order, the heavy melta gun leveled at the center of the sealed alloy.
He pulled the trigger.
The beam that emerged from a melta gun at full discharge did not stop for alloy of standard grade. The door received it directly, and the section it hit resolved into liquid metal and vapor in approximately one second. The hole it left had edges that were still dripping when the beam cut out.
Duvette was through it before the temperature at the edges had finished being dangerous.
He emerged into a space of roughly twenty square meters. The floor was metal grating. Through the grating, several meters below, something immense was running: a deep mechanical hum, and a blue luminescence that came up through the grid in columns.
In the center of the room: a cogitator array. Ancient construction. The design language of something that had been made by someone who did not share the Imperium's relationship with age as a limiting factor.
Alarm lighting in deep red.
He crossed to the cogitator in four steps and looked at the inactive screen.
He had one bet to place. He placed it with everything in his lungs.
"Belisarius Cawl!"
The screen lit.
Characters cascaded across the ancient green display, dense and rapid, Binary at maximum output. The Mechanicus Explorator, who had followed Duvette through the molten doorway, clearly having arrived at the same calculation about the return passage, was at his shoulder, his vocal synthesizer running at full speed.
"Identity verification...error. Activation code...error. Gene-scan signature...no match."
The words were definitive. The countdown's physical effect on the surrounding structure was accelerating. The Explorator looked at Duvette with the red optic lens of someone who has determined that the only available option is to attempt the impossible.
He threw himself at the cogitator.
Data cables and interface tendrils extended from his mechanical digits and cranial connections and drove themselves into the ancient interface ports. His logic core went directly against the facility's firewall with everything it had.
The feedback was immediate.
The sound the Explorator produced was not a word in any language. It came from somewhere in his vocal systems that was not designed for language, and it lasted for the duration of the discharge that moved through every connection he had established with the machine.
Blue-white electrical discharge erupted from every mechanical seam in his body. Machine oil hit the cogitator's screen in arcing jets. The biological components that had not already been converted to augmetic over his years of service were addressed directly by the current, and what they became afterward was no longer biological in the functional sense.
The Explorator's body hung at an angle from the interface he had died connecting to.
The psychic pressure that followed his death hit the room like something that had been waiting on the other side of a barrier.
There was no warning to account for and no preparation sufficient. Duvette felt the impact at the base of his skull with the specific physical quality of something that had bypassed every intermediate layer and arrived directly at the structure of consciousness. His vision fragmented. His legs received the information a fraction of a second after his balance did. The power sword's hilt hit the grating and held him at a diagonal for a moment, and then he was on one knee with both hands on the blade and the room conducting itself somewhere past the edge of his current processing capacity.
Veteran's Frame ran its passive function. Indomitable ran its passive function.
Both of them together were sufficient for the vision to return, and for the ability to register what he was looking at, and for the decision to keep going.
The floor was opening.
A ring of sealed housings in the grating had begun their mechanical separation, and from the space beneath them, transparent cylindrical tanks rose in a slow circle around the cogitator's base. Each tank was filled with a pale green liquid that moved with small continuous bubbles.
In each tank: a human head.
Twenty of them. The heads floated in the nutrient medium with data cables and life-support conduits penetrating through the top of each skull, the connections dense enough that the distinction between the organic tissue and the machine architecture sustaining it had ceased to be visible. The faces, if they had ever expressed anything, expressed nothing now.
They opened their eyes simultaneously.
The eyes were white. No pupil. No iris color.
The mouths opened. No physical mechanism in the room was producing vibration in the air at the register of what Duvette heard. The sound came through another channel entirely.
[Identity verification...error. Activation code...error. Gene scan...error.]
[Unauthorized logic intrusion detected. Emergency Protocol K2312/A fully active. Reactor overload confirmed.]
[Maximum-grade physical and informational self-destruct sequence. Final countdown: thirty seconds.]
The numbers on the wall began.
Duvette put the pain in the relevant category and used everything he still had.
"Wait." The word came out raw. He made himself use his full height against the grating. "Belisarius Cawl. I was sent by Lord Roboute Guilliman. I come at the Thirteenth Primarch's direction to inquire after the Sangprimus Portum."
Everything stopped.
Not the countdown display stopping. Everything. The sound of the mechanisms in the walls. The quality of the air in the room. The movement of the nutrient liquid around the heads.
The countdown on the wall produced one more red pulse.
Then it held.
The twenty heads had gone still in a way that was different from their previous stillness. The blank white eyes were all directed at the space Duvette occupied, and there was something happening behind them that the exterior gave no clear indication of except for the pause.
The overlapping synthetic voice returned.
[...Highest-classification codeword detected. Primarch's name detected. Highest-classification asset query detected.]
[Judgment: uncontrollable logic variable present.]
[Self-destruct sequence...suspended.]
[Initiating primary logic log self-check...information retrieval failure.]
[Comparing timestamps...interval since last log update...14,601,168,000 seconds.]
[Time-anchor failure. Deductive conclusion: significant duration has elapsed in external physical time.]
[Security protocol priority class: downgraded. Cawl sub-avatar...awakening.]
Outside the hole Anderson had cut in the door, the sounds from the walls stopped.
Duvette sat down on the grating.
Not deliberately. His legs made the decision and he registered it after the fact. His chest was moving with considerable urgency, and his shirt under the coat was soaked through. He looked at the ceiling and let the air do its work for several seconds.
He was not going to be buried under several hundred thousand tonnes of hive infrastructure today.
He turned his head and looked through the melted opening into the chamber beyond.
Every standing figure in the hall outside was on the floor.
Anderson. Stroud. Finn. Every one of the veterans who had held position at the door when the psychic discharge erupted from the cogitator. All of them down, in various arrangements of unconscious soldier. The tactical display showed their vital indicators as stable. The shockwave had put them under without stopping their hearts.
He looked back at the Explorator's body hanging from the interface port.
The Mechanicus Explorator, who had never told him his name, who had understood the calculation in the same second Duvette did and had made his choice as a direct consequence.
"Thank you," Duvette said quietly. "May your spirit reach the halls of the Omnissiah."
The cogitator array activated.
The twenty heads turned toward him.
What came from the multiple vocalizers combined was not the alert voice from before. It was slower. Colder. It carried the particular weight of something ancient becoming aware of a present moment after a very long absence.
[Cawl Sub-Avatar Node 3218/B online.]
[Unauthorized intruder. You have referenced the ultimate covenant between my creator and the Primarch.]
[Query: Who are you?]