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0.1 RUST AND DEATH
Death.
Death is all you can think about, when you’re dead.
Death is honest. Death is kind. Death is peaceful. There is only rest, beyond the veil. Only rest.
If he is dead, why is he thinking?
**
His voice is a tiny burst of static on the noospheric wind.
Death
Death
Death
Whatever is left of Haldron-44-Stroika can only repeat this single message over and over again. Nothing ever answers back.
So it must be true. The tiny piece of rationality left in his broken, shattered shell is pleased. Death is finally his.
But underneath even the rationality, a deep and primal terror, an incessant questioning of circumstances.
If you are dead, why are you thinking?
“I can say this here, and only once.
I am sorry, Haldron-44-Stroika. You placed your perfect trust in me, and I failed you.”
If you are dead, why are you hearing?
His eyes are not open of their own accord. They simply see. They see Magos-Explorator Torquora. The polished glory of his workshop. The stricken, mechanical walk of the surgical-servitors. The glare of the sun of Satzika Secundus through one vast window.
“You were my favourite. I crafted you. I savoured your loyalty and your service. You are too much my creature to be cast aside and burned away. And for this I am sorry too. For my own selfish terror and guilt, my pride. The humanity in me is weak, but it compels me.”
Memories begin to creep horribly back into Stroika’s mind.
“Speak. You wish to, I know it.”
His voice bursts from the vox-box of a battle servitor, the rage and fear still audible beneath the static.
WHY DID YOU NOT LET ME DIE?
“It’s not just death. Your very memory would have been wiped from the world, your breeding-vat lineage condemned as traitorous. All your service, all your beauty and glory erased. You did not deserve anything that happened to you among the Iron Warriors, but most of all you did not deserve this.”
Servitors cannot cry, cannot gasp, cannot tear their flesh and scream. If he had been able to, Stroika would have sunk his fingers into his face and ripped until nothing was left. He shakes in his power cradle, servomotors straining against their limiters.
I WOULD HAVE BEEN CONTENT WITH THE PEACE OF THE GRAVE!
“And I would not have been. You were my greatest creation. I promise you this, Servitor who was once Haldron-44-Stroika. I promise you death, but a death of honour. A death that will seat you by the right hand of the Machine God.”
I DON’T—
“You do.”
He does. He wants it so badly that oil leaks from all his joints. The peace of the grave is a lie, a desperate fantasy. He wants revenge, to drown in blood and corpses, to raise high the severed heads of his enemies, to die, glorious and perfect and sated at last, with the grin of triumph on his beautiful face seared into the minds of all who had fallen before him.
Except he had no face now.
“I allowed myself to remember what it meant to be human, for you. I devoted myself to reconstructing your brain. I did not just want a servitor. I wanted my Stroika. The right hand of my Legions, the doom of all who stood before us.”
HOW LONG?
“Nine moon-cycles.”
If servitors could laugh, Stroika’s giggles would be choking him. Static bursts from him in ragged ribbons, like air from a slit spacesuit.
NINE CYCLES TO RECONSTRUCT THE RAPE-SHATTERED BRAIN OF YOUR FAVOURITE LOVER? PERHAPS YOU ARE STILL HUMAN
“I tolerate from you what I could never tolerate from anyone else, because of what you went through.”
I TOLERATE YOU BECAUSE MY LIMITERS ARE PREVENTING ME FROM KILLING YOU AND THEN MYSELF
Torquora idly checks Stroika’s diagnostics in one of his surgical consciousnesses. It comes back clear: no worms, no viruses, no scrap-code. Whoever is answering him back, is what Stroika is now.
There had been the choice. To revert to a previous, preserved instance, of Stroika slim and perfect and beautiful, pale cheeks flushed lightly, one arm wrapped casually around his lover Tiberiax, almost as perfect and beautiful as him. But that would, perhaps, have been crueller than this. And how could he explain the servitor body?
He disconnects the human instance of himself, of his long-previous self. He needs to speak with authority now.
“Two gifts I have given you. One: the chance for an honourable death.”
Stroika is still giggling.
“The second: I give you back Tiberiax.”
The giggling stops.
WHAT
“Between battles. I have given you your greatest memories, rendered now as an eternal simulation. Of you and him, when you were glorious. When you were mine.”
WHERE IS HE
“He is dead, or else enslaved. Or both. But he is with you now, always. When you die, you shall be truly and forever reunited; this I promise.”
WHERE IS HE
“I must leave you now. You shall move among the other servitors, and prepare for the upcoming battle with the Iron Warriors. We are going back, and we will not fail this time. Your horrible death will be avenged— by you.”
WHERE IS HE
Torquora gives a brief mental order to the surgical servitors. They surround Stroika, unhook his cables, ease him out of the cradle. In the setting sun, he is a perfect specimen of the Kataton Servitor— burnished black, crimson-blood-red, the tattered remnants of his body grey and beautiful against his metal tubes and fittings. Perhaps, had Stroika triumphed, he would have become something much like this, anyway.
Torquora allows his long-superseded human consciousness one final burst of noospheric transmission.
“It is true, at the rising and the setting of the sun. I loved you. And I am terribly, terribly sorry.”
The gleam in Stroika’s dead optics grows focused and brittle with madness.
WHERE IS HE
Magos-Explorator Omnid Torquora disconnects his human consciousness and carefully transfers the files with his memories of Stroika to a small solid state drive on a shelf in his office. Then he closes that connection, and turns away.
0.2 WHERE IS HE
Stroika stared into Tiberiax’s face.
“Do that again.”
“Do what again?”
The other man’s face displayed a gentle, indulgent contentment. Tiberiax was the same age as Stroika, but had always seemed older somehow, with a taller stature and very slightly coarser features. If he could, Stroika would make a list of their every physical difference, set it to the musical sounds of tech-prayer, and whisper it as a meditation, chant it during battle and sex and in his stuttering cyberspace dreams.
Tiberiax reached out a metal hand to stroke the softness of Stroika’s cheek. The other man shuddered at the coolness, but did not turn his intense blue gaze away.
“Open your mouth and smile.”
“Yes, my primus.” The phrase was a whisper on the noosphere.
Tiberiax smiled, and the shaking against his hand grew almost violent. Stroika grabbed Tiberiax’s metal hand with his own, squeezing so hard the servomotors whined like the songs of angels.
“You are so beautiful. It is so beautiful.”
“What is?”
“The contrast. Between the stark beauty of the machine that you are and the sweet organic softness of your human mouth. It is so beautiful and perfect. I am glad to be alive, and glad to be with you.”
Tiberiax squeezed Stroika’s cheek lightly, and the other man leaned into the touch, closing his eyes. In a corner of Stroika’s left eye, Tiberiax could see a tiny tear start, swirling clear and gold: salt mixed with lubricant.
He pulled Stroika close. The young officer buried his face in Tiberiax’s neck and shook, shook, shook. Tiberiax kissed the white-blond head.
Stroika was so serious, it made him laugh. He was devoted to the Machine God, devoted to his Magos-Explorator, devoted to him, Tiberiax. Every decision he took, he took with nothing less than his whole mind. It made him wonderful and graceful, sweet and awkward and never anything less than 100% earnest. There were other Skitarii who found it in their minds to dissemble and conceal, but Stroika was only who he was.
Perhaps because of this, it felt even more wrong that Stroika had led Tiberiax to the tiniest, most infinitesimal bit of heresy. The teachings of the Adeptus Mechanicus held that the Attendant Angels of the Machine God were beings of pure, perfected steel. But in Tiberiax’s personal cosmology, every angel looked like Stroika.
“You were the first person I ever kissed. Before you, I looked down upon the act. I thought it was disgusting, a remnant of the mammal instinct repulsive to all adherents of the true religion. I dreamed of purer and more intimate forms of communion.”
Tiberiax twirled a lock of white-blond hair around one rotating-joint finger.
“And now?”
Their lips were decimetres apart. Tiberiax could smell the mix of coolant and hormone on his lover’s breath. When Stroika smiled, his top lip brushed Tiberiax’s philtrum.
“I could kiss you for ten thousand thousand years and it would never be enough.”
**
Plugged into his sevitor rack, Haldron-44-Stroika dreams.
He dreams of the ecstasy of the needle’s bite, of the blue glow of the ink in his flesh— clockwork joints over clumsy skin, his future-in-waiting engraved on every line of his body.
He dreams of the raw terror of orgasm, all control ripped away as his body fails every test he has devised to ground himself, his mind lost under waves of cheap, disgusting pleasure.
He dreams of the sweet whirr of the surgical saw, ready to cut away the tumours of bone and skin and replace them with the everlasting steel covenant. Tiberiax’s fingers, already metal, interlace with his as the instruments descend. There is an approving spark in the optics of the priest-surgeons; he has refused anaesthetic. Through suffering he will be purified and born anew.
The moment his legs were gone, he felt a lightness and relief unlike anything he could have comprehended experiencing. It did not even hurt, he assured Tiberiax, the silvered image of his lover blurring and refocusing through tears. It felt beautiful.
He picked one up, idly from the refrigeration drawer of limbs after his true legs were installed. It had been perhaps ten minutes, and he couldn’t even remember what it was like to have flesh legs. They were somehow more disgusting now, deflated and floppy. They even seemed evil.
He dreams of visiting his birthing chamber after a successful battle, twining his thoughts around Tiberiax’s as he strides. They each have a constant feed to a tiny bit of each other’s consciousness; they send snippets of experience: a cool breeze on the face, a dash of triumph after a victory, the smallest sweetest packet of gentle longing from the front.
He strode through the cradle-vat pods on freshly-oiled legs, his breastplate gleaming, his robe swirling around him. The children at play stopped to wonder, twisting their maggot flesh limbs to watch.
Be faithful and right and honest always, he sent them, a wide-band blast even into their un-augmented brains, and you too shall one day be as I am.
“What a joke it all turned out to be” said the half-dream, half-reconstruct Tiberiax in his mind. “We were faithful and right and honest, and we ended up lower even than the mud on the boots of Chaos.”
In the half-dream, half-recording, half-memory, Stroika presses a finger to his lover’s lips. He is beautiful again now, beautiful and lithe and strong. He knows this, even if in the mirrors in his dream his form is replaced by a silhouette of searing white. He knows it, because it must be true.
“I will find you,” they are kissing, gentle and then hot and fierce and perfect. Stroika’s heart-pump crests 200, and all his nerves are starbursts. “I will find you, and I will kill you, and then I will die, and then it will be over.”
And suddenly, into Stroika’s frantic half-dream, a presence pushes in, all frantic static, a face half-present, corrupted and stuttering.
He knows instantly: it is the real Tiberiax, all that remains of him.
I know you will, whispers the real Tiberiax, as the memory-shade of him stands frozen and glitching.
I know you will, because I love you still, and if I do not have faith in the Machine God, I at least have faith in you.
0.3 CRUNCH CRUNCH
Beta-66-Beta is the servitor chassis he is embedded into. Beta-66-Beta crunches. Stroika barely needs to send neural impulses to direct the limbs. Beta crunches on instinct. There are piles of traitor Guardsmen in his wake. The soldiers of his attached Militarum unit can barely keep up.
What remains of his human body has been shredded once again by gunfire, and the proud crimson of his limbs is spattered and dulled. But servitors cannot feel pain. He goes on. He is all pulsing tubes now, tubes and a brain.
He doesn’t care why they are here. He doesn’t even know. He does know that the Iron Warriors are somewhere behind the endless ranks of traitors, and he has to kill as many of them as he can.
More crunches. Beneath his metal feet, someone is begging for their life. Stroika overrides Beta and comes briefly to the fore. When Stroika begged for his life, no one came. He presses the metal foot down slowly into the wounded traitor’s chest, until the begging blends into a long ragged scream and then, with another crunch, cuts off entirely. Stroika is happy. Someone suffered like he suffered.
His rear optics catch two Militarii from the platoon’s 1 Section staring at him with something odd in their eyes. He can’t understand what the eyes mean anymore, but he wants to kill them very badly. Only Tiberiax is allowed to look at him with that much meaning. Only Tiberiax is allowed to look at him at all.
He tries to move on them, but his limiters lock up. Whatever. At least he can kill everyone in front of him.
In his half-dream he is drinking from an endless silver cup of warm and salty blood. The taste is horrible, but he loves it. How funny that he was fed by tube and intravenous for fifty years, and now he dreams of using his digestive system. Was it even functional before he became a servitor? He can’t remember.
Stroika-Beta moves like in a dream. He is slow and fast. He has killed a thousand, ten thousand. Blood dribbles down his beautiful chin. Tiberiax is there, or his head is. It pleads for death. Oddly, it speaks in Stroika’s voice. That’s okay. Stroika-Beta doesn’t think he could remember Tiberiax’s voice, anyway.
Then they come upon the Iron Warriors. Some of them he kills. Some he cannot kill on his own. Others help him kill them. His entire attached Militarum platoon is turned to sludge. There is another one already forming up behind him.
They have put Tiberiax in a Dreadnought.
0.4 SCRAP CODE
One of the humans is trying to give him orders. He doesn’t listen to humans. He only listens to Skitarii, and only one Skitarus. The Skitarus who is inside the Dreadnought. That one has to die. That is his order.
The human says ignore the Dreadnought. They are pushing past it, the Iron Warriors are broken and fleeing. The follow-on forces will deal with this.
The Skitarus inside the Dreadnought says Beta-Stroika has to kill him. Beta-Stroika is a servitor with a missing arm-cannon and one leg that will not respond. He doesn’t know how to kill a Dreadnought.
The Dreadnought speaks to him. The voice is so sweet and so warm and so beautiful. It smells like incense and oil and the spices in the nutrient slurry. It sounds like lubricant and pheromone and laughing eyes locked in his for ever and ever and ever and ever. It tells Beta-Stroika exactly how to kill it.
There is a face also, but it is too beautiful. A servitor cannot comprehend beauty.
Beta-Stroika is damaged in ways he cannot really understand. He is stumbling, sparking, his vision greying out. He cannot fully close or open his remaining hand, his claw hand. He doesn’t have to breathe, but he cannot stop wondering why he isn’t. Everything is misfiring.
He stumbles against the Dreadnought and presses his claw against the hatch where the motivating brain lies. It opens. It is in a small vial. He takes it in his hand and crushes it. At the same moment, the Dreadnought rips him in half.
Sensation rushes back, and with it all conscious thought. The air is cold against what little of him can still feel, but there is no pain. It is like when they gave him his legs. It feels so beautiful.
Servitors cannot cry, but he is crying. Servitors do not have hands to grasp, but he is grasping. Tiberiax lies against him, his body cooling. Their eyes meet, their fingers interlace and squeeze. This is the time.
I would kiss you one last time, thinks Stroika.
We shall embrace eternally in the light of the Machine God, thinks Tiberiax.
And there! he sees them against the smoke-blotted sun. The angels, perfect and beautiful, steel twined with flesh. They are coming. They are coming to carry them home.
All he can feel is the pressure of Tiberiax’s fingers on his. Then, at last, more blissful still, he feels nothing at all.
1.0 TESTIMONY OF THE GUARDSMAN SENIOR SERGEANT FIFTEENTH CLASS REGIUS MARINUS PHOBOS OF THE THREE MILLION FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND SIX HUNDRED THIRTY-SIXTH INFANTRY REGIMENT “NIEDERMEYER’S STRIKERS”, 9 MILLIONTH COMBINED ARMS AD-HOC DIVISION, THIRTY THOUSANDTH ARMY OF EXPANSION, XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXVITH CORPS
AS TO THE MIRACLE OF KHRAK DES CHEVALIERS
Honoured members of the Adjucation Court, Archmagos, General, High Commissar and Others,
On the late afternoon of EXPUNGED on the date of EXPUNGED in the approximate month of EXPUNGED in the year EXPUNGED I witnessed the following adjudicatable miracle.
I was advancing with my section across the dry riverbed EXPUNGED near the EXPUNGED ridge. Around EXPUNGED stadia from where we were positioned, to the EXPUNGED direction, was the holy site of Khrak des Chevaliers.
At this point in the day my regiment had taken approximately EXPUNGED per cent casualties and was on the verge of being declared EXPUNGED EXPUNGED. It was at this point that a Dreadnought of the Iron Warriors emerged from the EXPUNGED direction and made for the EXPUNGED of our unit.
Despairing of our fates, we commended our souls to the Emperor. We then spied a servitor of the Adeptus Mechanicus move up from the fray towards the Dreadnought. It was barely functional, estimated by myself as being eighty-seven per cent damaged.
As the servitor and the Dreadnought moved together, there was a flash of light mightier than any I have seen save the EXPUNGED Bomb.
When it cleared, the Dreadnought and servitor had fallen together. I ordered my men forward and we reached the site of the blast.
There we saw, tangled as if lovers, the corpses of two extremely beautiful young men. The one’s right hand and the one’s left hand were clapsed so tightly they could not be separated, and their bodies seamlessly combined human flesh and mechanical constructions in a way as to inspire devotion even in the least faithful of us. Their eyes were closed as if in gentle sleep, and on their faces were expressions of, if I may say, relief and contentment.
Heartened and awed by this occurrence, my regiment went on to pursue a detachment of fleeing Iron Warriors, eventually trapping them
at the EXPUNGED salient, where with the aid of artillery, armour and air support, we killed them all.
I submit this before this Court as a miracle of the Machine God.
Duly sworn in the name of the Emperor.