V2 Chapter 49: The Alien Megastructure: The Stargate
Duvette cut the encrypted Astra Militarum standard channel.
He notified his regiment: effective immediately, all personnel and equipment of the Ash Watchers-Eisenmark 112th Regiment were to detach from the Sabbat Crusade order of battle and proceed as a seconded asset to the Martian Archmagos's Ark Mechanicus to await orders.
He did not address the questions and confusion coming back through the channel from his veterans. He simply used the tone of a commissar who does not explain himself, ordered every person to complete boarding preparations within one standard hour, and cut the connection.
Duvette drew a slow breath, dropped the communicator on the metal table of the detention cabin, turned, and walked toward the flagship's hangar bay. A shuttle fuelled and waiting specifically for him was already there.
Along the corridor, naval officers and Astra Militarum staff on both sides offered salutes to the Colonel-Commissar bearing the Star of Terra on his chest. Duvette's gaze did not stop on any of them.
His mind was working through what Belisarius Cawl would actually ask him aboard that enormous Ark.
Was he walking into a trap of his own making?
If Cawl genuinely intended to eliminate him and seal the secrets of the Primaris project and the Sangprimus Portum at the physical level, a man who had lived ten thousand years would not use a method this conspicuous or complicated.
Cawl could simply have cooperated with Maysondaire's approach back in the conference room: classify Duvette as Warp-contaminated technical heresy, let the Inquisitor's bolt pistol handle the rest without Cawl needing to raise a hand. Dead with no evidence, and whatever knowledge Duvette carried would die with him.
The fact that Cawl had not only failed to let that happen, but had spent significant resources and political leverage purchasing both Duvette and the 112th from supreme command, established one thing clearly.
Cawl wanted to extract information about Roboute Guilliman and the secret plan. Duvette's value as a source currently outweighed the risk of letting him live.
As for Lord Inquisitor Heinz Werner, the heavyset Thorian who maintained a pleasant expression over something that functioned like obsessive fanaticism, Duvette allowed himself a brief internal assessment and set it aside.
The man was extremely dangerous. But for the immediate term, based on the current situation, he was not the most pressing problem. Heinz was functioning as a surveillance instrument forcibly attached to Duvette's movements, a pair of eyes that would be watching everything he did. A problem to be managed, not a knife to dodge right now.
"This is going to be genuinely difficult to navigate."
Duvette stopped at the edge of the empty hangar, exhaled, and rolled his neck until the joints cracked.
One thing at a time. One problem at a time. Cawl first.
He boarded the black-painted shuttle without further deliberation.
The vector engines carried it away from the flagship's gravity deck and toward the Ark in the void.
The transit was not long. But as the distance closed, the visual weight of the Ark increased at a rate that outpaced the reduction in distance. When the shuttle finally entered the Ark's belly hangar, a space that could have accommodated dozens of cruisers simultaneously, Duvette felt something in his chest compress the way it does when something very large reminds you of your own scale.
The landing struts met the metal deck with a heavy impact. The shuttle settled.
Duvette came down the boarding ramp and found, without any surprise, Qvo-77 waiting for him.
When Duvette descended, the pale human face produced its carefully constructed mechanical smile. Qvo-77 inclined his head, said nothing unnecessary, and indicated with a standard gesture for Duvette to follow.
The interior of the Ark was not something human legs were designed to traverse in full. Qvo-77 directed Duvette onto an internal high-speed transit vehicle of the floating variety.
It moved at speed through corridors of steel that descended like chasms, through a jungle of interlocking pipework that had no visible end. Around them, heavy forging equipment roared, servitors repeated commands in a flat, continuous monotone, and plasma coils flashed red warning indicators in all directions.
During the long, oppressive transit, Qvo-77, standing at the vehicle's forward controls, broke the silence in a way that Duvette had not anticipated. He turned the pale human head and asked a question.
"Are you frightened, Colonel-Commissar?"
The words were entirely incongruous with the industrial noise filling the vehicle around them.
"There are generally only two things I'm afraid of," Duvette said, with the mild tone of someone discussing the weather. "Orders I can't read the logic of, and Mechanicus priests who are being too polite."
Qvo-77 looked at him for a moment, and what crossed that pale face was something recognisably human.
"You will be quite busy today, then, Commissar."
The transit vehicle halted in front of a set of exceptionally heavy alloy doors. They slid open with the deep hiss of hydraulic pressure releasing.
Duvette followed Qvo-77 into Belisarius Cawl's private core laboratory.
The space inside was vast. Cooling fluid pipes of extraordinary thickness covered every available section of the surrounding walls. Two entire walls were occupied by Cogitator Arrays of a scale that dwarfed anything Duvette had seen on a standard warship. Data streams scrolled across the screens in continuous sheets.
Qvo-77 brought Duvette in, inclined his head with complete formality toward the centre of the room, and withdrew without a word. The heavy doors sealed behind him.
Duvette paid no particular attention to the danger of his current position. His gaze swept the laboratory quickly.
On one examination table enclosed in a high-intensity stasis field, he saw something he recognised immediately.
A small piece of rock. Deep black, with unusual energy patterns running across its surface.
Black stone. Duvette registered this without reaction.
Of course. At this point in the timeline, Cawl had been collecting material with anti-Warp polarity from across the galaxy, but had not yet fully decoded how it worked. The method of constructing nodes, of using it to suppress the Warp, that was knowledge the Aeldari prophet of the Death God would eventually give him directly. That revelation had not happened yet.
The instant Duvette's gaze settled on the black stone, the metal-mountain figure at the analysis table stopped moving.
"You have not displayed a measurable fear response."
Cawl's electronic composite voice filled the laboratory. He turned his enormous frame and looked down at Duvette. "Given that you are currently inside a Martian Archmagos's private laboratory with no external force capable of intervening, this is inconsistent with the standard psychological and physiological data model for a conventional mortal officer."
"Have you determined, in your base-level logic, that I will not conduct an irreversible physical and memory dissection of you here?"
Duvette met the pressure of Cawl's augmetic eye without moving back, and allowed a slightly sardonic edge into his expression.
"You are not going to kill me right now, Archmagos." His voice moved through the laboratory with complete steadiness. "Because if I died here today, Heinz Werner would be extremely pleased to ask you why. Marshal Blackwood and the expedition's supreme command would also ask you why."
He held Cawl's gaze.
"And what you least want at this particular moment is to draw excessive attention from the Inquisition and the Departmento Munitorum, and have them start asking the right questions."
Cawl's lower limb systems engaged. The enormous frame moved to stand directly in front of Duvette, bringing its shadow down over the commissar completely.
"In fact, I am entirely capable of extracting your memories without killing you."
Cawl leaned forward. The half-mechanical face, with the primary augmetic eye burning deep red at this range, came to within half a metre of Duvette's. "I have a considerable number of methods for removing the cortical data from a person's cerebral structure while preserving the biological function that makes them breathe."
Cawl held Duvette's gaze for a moment, then straightened.
"However. My logic array has just calculated that this remains an extremely high-risk action. You are not only an individual in possession of sensitive knowledge. You possess some quality that my instruments cannot resolve. You yourself are dangerous, Commissar."
"To the enemies of humanity, I would hope so," Duvette said, and gave an entirely relaxed shrug.
Cawl did not respond immediately. He brought himself upright, the mechanical appendages moving without particular purpose. He observed Duvette for a sustained interval, as though attempting to read whatever was actually present beneath the mortal exterior.
Finally, he produced the question that had been waiting behind everything else.
"How do you know these secrets?" Cawl's synthesised voice dropped into a register that carried unusual gravity. "About him. About our plan. What was the source of this information?"
Duvette did not hesitate. The account he had prepared long ago came out smoothly, a reliable and well-constructed version of the same explanation he had given to Cawl's remote projection.
Cawl repeated the key phrase back to him.
"Warp visions."
Then his tone hardened into immediate and total rejection.
"Incorrect usage." Cawl did not soften the refutation. "Warp visions are not a valid information source. They are, before anything else, an acutely lethal contamination vector. Any attempt to extract knowledge from the whispers of Chaos leads invariably to irreversible madness."
"Which is why I reject the idea that I sought them out."
Duvette answered immediately, the defence precise and without gaps. He met Cawl directly. "I never asked for those images. They were fragments of the Great Crusade's echoes, or pieces of some higher will, forced into my mind during extreme Warp storm conditions. What I saw was broken, non-sequential visual fragments with no coherent narrative structure. Not a complete script of the future."
He paused, and allowed a note of genuine persuasion into what followed.
"What I actually know is far less complete than you are assuming, Archmagos. If it were otherwise, I would not be standing here being questioned by you like a man waiting for a decision to be made about him."
Cawl went quiet for an extended period.
When he spoke again, his voice carried a different quality, one that was searching rather than testing.
"From the information stream transmitted by your cold-crystal chip, I understood that you told my remote node something. You said you could help me save that existence. Save... the gene-sire."
"Yes." Duvette confirmed it without evasion. This was his most significant leverage and he did not understate it.
He drew a slow breath and began releasing the information he had prepared.
"In those fragments, I saw the son of fate open his eyes inside the sacred stasis field on Macragge. I saw your enormous frame at the edge of that great awakening, placing the armour of destiny on him with your own hands." Duvette's voice shifted into something harder. "But I also saw, in those same fragments, that it was not you alone. The completion of that moment was not something Martian technology could achieve by itself."
"What?"
Cawl's frame came down toward Duvette again with sudden force. There was indeed a technical obstacle he had not been able to overcome: the lethal wound at Roboute Guilliman's throat involved damage at the level of the soul, and that dimension was outside the reach of any tool Cawl possessed.
"I do not know the specific nature of what is missing." Duvette produced the lie smoothly, deliberately making the information fragmentary while keeping it weighted with inevitability. "I told you: I only have fragments. What I know is that the missing element capable of completing the awakening is not something you can manufacture. It is not something within Mars's reach."
He held Cawl's optical sensors.
"It will present itself at the worst possible moment, in the form of the worst possible ally. What you will need to do, when that moment arrives, is accept what it offers."
Cawl fell into silence again.
"The wrong ally..." The internal servo systems in Cawl's frame produced a very faint hum. He turned away from Duvette and moved to the wide holographic projection table nearby.
"I am," Cawl said, his back to Duvette as he worked the projection controls, "extremely interested in the secrets you are concealing, Duvette Erdmann. From a position of absolute rationality, I could have arranged for you to simply disappear, to ensure that humanity's ten-thousand-year plan of renewal was not disrupted by any uncontrolled variable."
The holographic projection table came to life with a cold blue luminescence. A star map expanded in the air between them.
"But the Thorian observer is himself an unpredictable variable." Something in Cawl's voice was, for once, purely analytical rather than flat. "His forced intervention has limited my options with respect to you, but from a probability standpoint, it has simultaneously improved your survival significantly."
Duvette looked at the broad mechanical back across the table and allowed himself a dry response.
"It sounds as though I should be thanking Lord Inquisitor Heinz."
"Incorrect." Cawl corrected him without turning. "You should be thanking his greed."
Duvette dropped the light tone and moved to the opposite side of the projection table, facing Cawl across it.
"So. Given that I am apparently not dying in the immediate term, what is it you went to all that considerable trouble to buy me and the 112th for? Laboratory subjects?"
"I had a plan." Cawl raised a mechanical appendage and moved it across the star map. "I intended to have you track and engage the heretic Asphodel, and observe your anomalies in a live combat context. But..."
Cawl turned his head toward Duvette. At the same moment, the holographic display shifted. The star map was replaced by something else entirely: the image of an enormous alien structure that filled the space between the two of them.
"I received a transmission recently." Cawl extended one finger and touched the projection of the colossal construct. "At the edge of the Halo Zone, in a region designated the Koronus Expanse, an enormous alien megastructure has been discovered by Imperial forces."
The synthetic voice, for the first time, carried something that sounded genuinely difficult to suppress.
"It is an ancient construct resembling a Warp transit gate. Preliminary data returns indicate that vessels entering its internal passage can, without any exposure to Warp storm erosion, cross a distance that would require conventional plasma drives several centuries to cover, and emerge in an entirely unfamiliar star region tens of thousands of light-years distant, within half a standard solar second."
Cawl's voice went to a register that was unmistakably close to excitement.
"This is a construct that exceeds the Imperium's entire current understanding. The closed-minded fools on Mars would not be capable of comprehending or analysing something of this nature. If I can understand its operating principle, Imperial navigation will no longer be held captive by Warp storms."
"So I changed my plan. I will take the fleet there personally." Cawl's optical sensors fixed on Duvette. "As an observation subject under my authority, you and the 112th will accompany me."
Duvette looked at the gate-form megastructure in the holographic projection and felt something shift hard in his chest.
He knew what this was.
The Imperium did indeed make its first discovery of this type of stargate relic at the edge of the Koronus Expanse late in this millennium. Decades after the initial discovery, the Imperium would launch a major expedition into the unknown region beyond it.
But right now, that region was complete darkness. It was full of things that did not welcome visitors: Tyranid splinter fleets, daemon worlds, Chaos reavers who had abandoned the Imperium, and the Tau.
Wait.
Duvette's mind accelerated.
He had just caught something. An angle in a place like this, lawless and beyond the standard reach of Imperial authority, where leverage could be applied in a way that was not possible anywhere else.
He raised his head and addressed Cawl directly.
"Archmagos. Are we going to the Koronus Expanse purely to conduct technical research in the vicinity of the structure, or are we required to pass through the gate and reconnoitre whatever is on the other side?"
"Both." Cawl's answer was without elaboration. "No data of value will be left unrecovered."
Duvette drew a breath.
"Then if we are going into an unknown star region, I may be able to provide you with a very useful resource."
Cawl's mechanical head tilted fractionally, apparently registering mild surprise that a mortal was proposing something worth considering.
"When it comes to opening unfamiliar star regions and managing the risks of exploration, there is no one in the galaxy more capable than Rogue Traders operating under ancient warrants." Duvette put his position on the table plainly.
If he could bring the Carpé dynasty into this as an operating partner, he would have at least one ally in this situation who, while not unconditionally reliable, could be useful. The only question was whether the characteristically suspicious Archmagos would accept outside involvement.
Cawl did not dismiss it immediately.
"Rogue Traders." Several seconds passed before the assessment came. "High probability of deception. No ethical limit when profit is the objective. High probability of information leakage. Significant risk of them selling my discovery to the Inquisition or other parties. Net assessment: moderate practical value."
Duvette caught the opening in Cawl's framing immediately and pressed the supplementary case.
"They also come with frontier navigation charts, Navigator contacts, a commercially viable public-facing rationale, and a logistics flexibility that the expedition structure cannot match."
Cawl was silent for a brief moment.
"Acceptable. Subject to my review."