V2 Chapter 43: Belisarius Cawl's Anchor Point
In the black of the void, an Ark Mechanicus of a scale that exceeded the comprehension of ordinary minds floated in silent high orbit above the planet below.
This was the Ark of Omen, Belisarius Cawl's personal flagship, a vessel whose sheer mass dwarfed even an Imperial Glory-class battleship.
The Mechanicus exploration force it carried had just withdrawn from the surface.
What had driven them back was a brutal and entirely covert engagement. Buried alien constructs had awakened without any warning. To cover the Archmagos's retreat, three full cohorts of Skitarii were stripped down to base atoms by sickly-green gauss disintegration rays before the force managed to pull back inside the Ark's shielding.
Deep inside the ship, in the most secure stasis laboratory at the vessel's core, an immense presence stood motionless.
Belisarius Cawl's lower half, a mass of multi-jointed mechanical limbs, supported his swollen mechanical torso. The countless optical sensors concealed beneath his heavy red robes were fixed on a massive clone-cultivation vat humming steadily before him.
During the surface withdrawal, Qvo-76 had been destroyed entirely while holding back one of the alien constructs. For Cawl, this was not a loss beyond recovery.
He initiated the data-transfer protocol again, downloading the digitised memories of his old companion with careful precision into the blank substrate waiting inside the cultivation vat.
Through the thick glass, the vat was filled with pale amniotic gel that gave off a faint luminescence. Submerged in the gel was nothing more than a single pale human skull and brain.
This was the compromise Cawl had devised to circumvent the Imperium's absolute prohibition on researching abominable intelligence: clone the biological head of his companion to serve as a physical substrate for the mind, then graft it onto a purely mechanical body, giving that immortal digital soul somewhere to live.
The sharp hiss of hydraulic pressure releasing broke the silence. The amniotic gel drained rapidly from the vat. The heavy chamber door slid open on both sides.
A cold, precise, entirely mechanical torso with no superfluous biological components stepped forward. At its neck interface, a freshly connected biological head slowly raised itself.
The pale face was threaded with mechanical respirators and dense neural cabling. The pair of human eyes in it cleared from brief disorientation and focused.
"Archmagos. Memory synchronisation complete." The stitched-together creation of flesh and steel inclined its head slightly and reported its existence in a steady voice. "Qvo-77, online."
Cawl said nothing beyond what was necessary. His mechanical limbs carried him across the laboratory to the wide workbench nearby, servo-motors humming low as he moved.
"Go to the lower storage levels." Cawl's voice, a layered composite of multiple synthetic tones, filled the chamber. "Retrieve the black stone specimens with anti-Warp polarity that we recovered from the surface at the cost of the Skitarii. I need to analyse them immediately."
Qvo-77 accepted the order without hesitation, turned, and walked out of the core chamber. The sound of pure metal feet on the deck plating faded into the corridor.
The core chamber door sealed behind him.
One second later, every surface in the otherwise dim laboratory blazed with the crimson of emergency warning indicators.
The chamber's Cogitator Array had triggered an alert. Without any hesitation, Cawl crossed to the vast Cogitator Array that covered most of one wall. He extended several thick data-cables from beneath his robes and plugged directly into the primary interface.
His high-grade signal receivers had intercepted an anomalous data stream.
It was a precisely directed, planetary-scale pulse signal encrypted at the highest tier of classification. The energy output was staggering. Whatever had generated it had clearly used an enormous plasma reactor as its power source, forcing the signal through Warp storm interference across thousands of light-years to reach the Ark of Omen's receivers.
From the encryption type embedded in the signal header, Cawl's base logic circuits identified it immediately. This was an emergency communications protocol of his own design.
He confirmed receipt. A torrent of binary data flooded his central processors like a dam giving way. He closed down most of his external perception and directed every available unit of processing capacity toward decoding what had crossed the void to reach him.
In the next instant, this ten-thousand-year-old Archmagos found himself in a state of extreme shock.
Buried in the decrypted data, he found an extremely familiar name. Astra Militarum, Ash Watchers 112th Regiment. Colonel-Commissar. Duvette Erdmann.
Cawl's vast memory storage began rewinding with precise, mechanical exactness.
Three hundred and fifteen million, three hundred and sixty thousand seconds ago, ten standard Terran years prior, he had received a weak signal from the Pyrite system. It had come from one of the many Mechanicus remote nodes he had seeded across the galaxy.
The Warp conditions at the time had been extremely hostile. The signal arrived severely degraded and fragmented.
He had decrypted only a small portion of it. What he recovered told him only that the highest-classification event involved a human Commissar, and that it bore some hidden connection to the gene-sire currently sleeping in sacred stasis on Macragge.
Out of absolute loyalty and caution where the Primarch was concerned, Cawl had contacted the relevant Imperial authorities and indicated that once his current black stone research was complete, he would travel to that sector and verify the situation in person.
But this new signal, the one that had just driven itself through thousands of light-years and into his mind by brute force, was something categorically different.
The signal made it unmistakably clear that this Commissar named Duvette not only had complete knowledge of the plan Cawl had been conducting in absolute secrecy, he had also accurately named a term that even the High Lords of Terra had never heard spoken.
The Sangprimus Portum.
"101101011?!"
A binary exclamation escaped Cawl's vocaliser without conscious authorisation.
For ten thousand years, through uncounted days and nights, in the deep underground of Mars and in the sealed chambers of the Ark of Omen, he had been conducting the greatest gamble in human history.
None of them knew. Not the High Lords sitting in authority on Terra. Not his fellow Archmagoi of equal rank on Mars. Not the Inquisition's hunters. Not one of them had any knowledge of the project he had been conducting in secret, the scale of what he was building, the nature of what he intended to accomplish.
It was the work the Primarch had personally entrusted to him. The ultimate secret on which the survival of humanity depended.
How did an entirely ordinary Astra Militarum Commissar know any of this?
The shock gave way to something else: immediate and uncontrollable political terror, and calculation.
Who was this Duvette? Was he an agent of the Inquisition sent to probe him? Some manner of Warp entity capable of stealing memories and wearing a human face?
If the Sangprimus Portum and the Primaris project were exposed now, humanity's only hope of renewal in ten thousand years would be obliterated with them.
Enormous and cascading theories of conspiracy tore through Cawl's logic circuits.
He fixed his optical sensors on the coordinates the Cogitator Array had resolved from the signal, and considered whether he should immediately redirect his entire fleet's guns toward that planet and use cyclonic torpedoes to erase this Commissar who knew too much, along with the continent he was standing on.
While those thoughts were churning violently through ten thousand years of conspiracy and crisis response, the heavy alloy door of the core chamber produced the sound of friction again.
Qvo-77 returned to the laboratory, accompanied by several heavy cargo-servitors. The servitors' thick hydraulic arms were carefully carrying a set of containment boxes shielded by force fields, the alien black stone specimens inside them.
The sound of the door snapped Cawl's thoughts back from ten thousand years of grand memory and present survival calculation, his logic circuits having been approaching the edge of overload.
He watched the familiar figure directing the servitors to position the specimens. The enormous quantity of data was pressing against his capacity for rational thought.
"Fridisiax..." Cawl raised one mechanical limb. "Open the analysis array on the left side for me."
The name had left his vocaliser before he understood what had happened. In the same instant it did, Cawl's enormous frame went completely rigid. He recognised immediately the severe logical error he had just committed.
At the workbench, Qvo-77 stopped what he was doing.
He turned slowly. On that pale human face, forcibly attached to the cold mechanical body, an expression appeared that was profoundly at odds with the Mechanicus aesthetic: something fully human, saturated with quiet sorrow and resignation.
He looked at the vast, mountain-like figure of his old companion. The human eyes in that face held a deep and genuine grief.
"Please, Archmagos."
Qvo-77's voice moved through the empty chamber, carrying the particular weight of something that cannot be undone.
"I am not Fridisiax. He died. He died ten thousand years ago. I am Qvo-77."
Those words cut through Cawl's overloaded logic circuits like a blade.
The chamber fell into a suffocating silence. Only the coolant flowing through the Cogitator Array moved, its sound monotonous and uninterrupted.
Cawl said nothing. Beneath the hood of his red robes, his augmetic eye contracted sharply.
Yes. Ten thousand years had passed. Long enough that even his vast semi-mechanical mind, struck by the news of the Primarch plan, had produced a severe collision of memory and cognitive overlap.
He should address his memory storage. Clear it. Restructure it. It had become disordered in ways he had not attended to.
Cawl slowly withdrew the data-cables from the Cogitator Array interface. His heavy mechanical limbs produced a dull rhythm on the metal floor.
"You are correct, Qvo-77."
Cawl's voice returned to its baseline: layered synthetic tones with no emotional modulation, absolute in their rationality. He opened the highest command frequency connecting to the Ark's bridge.
"Cease current system survey operations. Notify the Navigator house. Re-plot the Warp route." He turned his enormous frame, optical sensors locking onto the coordinates extracted from the decoded signal. "Adjust the Ark's heading. Our next destination is the Sabbat Worlds sector. I am going to find this Colonel-Commissar named Duvette Erdmann."