The Beast Arises

The request was denied — and as the expedition’s second-ranking priest, Urquidex received a citation for modus-unbecoming from the first. Van Auken reminded his colleague of the Third Law of Universal Variance: the Bystander Paradox. Urquidex had replied that they called it a paradox for a reason.

The alien Beast had unleashed its savage supremacy on Ardamantua and all those upon its surface. None had survived. Only the data — pure and true — remained. It was Van Auken’s responsibility to see that the information found its way back to Mars where it might aid the Fabricator General in his service of the Machine God’s will.

Striding through auspexmechanics and oscillamats that were monitoring the structural damage to the planetary depths, Van Auken ascended the hollow’s slopes to find that Urquidex’s survey crews had planted electrostatic rods in the mulched earth. About the artisan-primus, fields of static electricity had raised the dead. Hulking greenskin corpses were drifting a few feet above the ground on the crackling field, making examination of the bolt-ravaged specimens easier for the magos biologis and his genetor tech-adepts. The Beast’s work on Ardamantua had been so absolute in its ferocity that there were no other remains to examine. The Space Marines and accompanying Adeptus Mechanicus personnel of the Ardamantuan purge had been hacked and blasted to pieces. The monsters had been possessed of a bottomless ferocity that seemed to infect the creatures even down to their diminutive slave and vermin forms.

Knocking the monstrous bodies into a telekinetic tumble, Van Auken’s spindly form passed through the levitated carnage. But for the electromagnetic dampeners built into his torso, the artisan also would have floated effortlessly across the tormented earth. Skitarii from the Epsil-XVIII Collatorax stood sentinel among the sea of bodies, with their galvanic rifles cradled in bionic limbs. They had been assigned as expedition security and for use as execution squads, putting down monstrosities that had not quite bled their formidable life away on the battlefield. Alpha Primus Orozko saw the approaching artisan-primus and marched to meet him.

‘With me, magister, if you please,’ Van Auken requested. The officer said nothing. Orozko wasn’t much of a communicator, favouring binary for orders and transmissions. He simply fell in line behind the ranking priest.

‘Magos,’ Van Auken said as he entered a foil laboratory- pavilion. Neither Eldon Urquidex nor his surgeons and samplers looked up from the gargantuan carcass of the ork they were dissecting on the static field. Slabs of flesh and labelled alien organs floated about them. ‘Magos,’ the artisan-primus repeated. ‘My teams have all but completed their documentation of the damage inflicted by the alien weapon.’

‘And…?’ the barrel-bodied Urquidex said, not taking his telescopic eyes off the brain of the beast he was carving up with a digit-mounted las-scalpel.

‘The enemy’s mastery of gravity manipulation and teleportational vectors is considerable,’ Van Auken said, his understatement devoid of wit or passion. The priest paused; his colleague had a habit of soliciting information when he should be delivering it. ‘The gravitational aftershocks began to subside after the weapon removed itself from the system. Its disruptive influence endures, however, fading incrementally. It will be some time before gravito-planetary equilibrium is fully restored to this world.’

‘Fascinating…’

‘It is like nothing the Machine God’s servants have documented before. It is a weapon the mere presence of which is a force of ultimate destruction. A blade that cuts without being drawn from its sheath; a bolt that blasts without leaving the barrel. If we are to achieve similar masteries, we must understand how the alien accomplishes such wonders. Scrutiny of the workings of their technology alone only reveals that it should not work at all. This is an unacceptable conclusion for our data packet.’

‘Indeed,’ Urquidex agreed.

‘The Fabricator General demands better of us,’ the artisan said.

‘Always,’ the magos replied absently.

‘Magos,’ Van Auken insisted, ‘I must have your hypotheses.’

Urquidex looked up from the alien brain, his telescopic eyes retracting and refocusing.

‘Why rush such important research?’ the magos said with a withering gaze.

‘There is a time for everything,’ Van Auken said, ‘and for everything a time.’

‘Has this time been allocated for wastage?’ Urquidex asked. ‘Since it seems to be achieving little else.’

‘The Subservius has been ordered on,’ Van Auken insisted. ‘We are to rendezvous with several signum-stations before moving corewards to establish observations above Macromunda.’

‘To watch another unwarned world offered up before the alien for slaughter?’ Urquidex said.