Raskian-7

The man who no longer is. Raskian does not exist in a form that a mortal would recognise. His consciousness is distributed across a network of augmetics, servitors and continuously running production lines—the so-called Raskian Pattern. What replaced a man began sixty years ago with mechadendrites above the shoulders; today the bare frame, eight metres in height, is merely the visible anchor point. His actual presence extends across three forge districts of Agripinaa, bound into the noosphere, into transmission cables, into the machine spirits of two hundred and thirty production machines. When one stands before the frame, one is not speaking with Raskian. One is speaking with a component of him—the part that can still see, still hear, still speak. The remaining intelligence is dissolved into metal circuitry and Binary Cant. What remains of his voice is a collection of vox-outputs that can sound, time-shifted, from five different workshops at once.

Raskian does not work with a fighting force, but with a periphery.

A data-scribe named Korvic—age unknown, probably over ninety, with a fully organic body. No one remembers when Korvic came to Raskian; it is rumoured that he joined her during the Moirae Schism, but according to register analysis that was four millennia after his demise. The theory is that Korvic belongs to Raskian because Raskian belongs to Korvic—that each needs the other in order not to vanish without trace. He does not speak. He writes everything into a soiled leather card index. What he documents cannot be explained, even if it is legible.

Then the servitors: three electro-priests, cybernetically so far advanced that the human in them is merely a memory. They wait beside the frame. They always wait. The youngest of them was once an Enginseer of rank, before Raskian absorbed him—whatever the verb may mean.

The workshop itself extends across twelve levels beneath the manufactoria of Zentrum Ost. On the first: benches on which machine parts lie in a partially assembled state, sometimes for years. On the fifth: a vessel from which liquid drips, not blood, but an oil whose colour shimmers. On the ninth: three series of gears, each hidden beneath a cloth, each inscribed with a different warning symbol. The smell is burnt metal oil and something that smells like ozone-rot—not rot, but Decay.

A container on the twelfth level bears no label. Even the servitors do not go there. Raskian has it watched by a servo-skull—an old one, bent, with an engraving that is not binary code but a handwritten note: "Not to be opened, not to be asked, not to be spoken."

Within the priesthood:

Raskian works regularly with Archmagos Venzolo-23, the highest magos of production oversight. They distrust each other. That is a functioning foundation. Venzolo has noticed Raskian's heresies; Raskian notices that Venzolo looks away. The balance holds because both know it must hold: Raskian's production lines equip five regiments. Venzolo cannot afford to lose them.

Raskian hates Magos Helix-91, the Thesaurus of the Black Libraries of Agripinaa. Helix has twice blocked Raskian's archive access. Raskian responded by making Helix's own access codes public—not to the Black Library, but to enough others that the shame became real. They no longer speak.

Xasandera Valdet—now Fabricator-General of Mars—was an obscure adept on Agripinaa six thousand years ago, in Raskian's workshop. No one knows how long she was there or what she did. Valdet never speaks of it. Raskian does not speak of it either. But they both know that it happened. This silence is an oath.

Outside the priesthood:

The colonel of the local Astra Militarum is Lord Castellan Vorth-Heth. He needs Raskian's weapons. He does not ask where they come from. She does not ask where they go. The liaison works.

There was a Techmarine of the Salamanders who came to Raskian in M34.2 and asked for a rite that violated the code of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Raskian did not refuse—she simply did not do it. The Techmarine left. She has not seen him again.

An Inquisitor named Klastria Sorn holds a thick dossier on Raskian. She has never opened it.

Raskian keeps three things she will not reveal:

The first: A cantilena, handwritten by Belisarius Cawl, on parchment, in a language that is neither Binharic nor standard Lingua Technis. It is neither a rite nor a command. It is a question. It reads, as far as Raskian can understand: "To whom does the form belong?" She does not act on it. She does not burn it. She rereads it every eighth shift.

The second: The interface from Temporia. The fragment from the offer she refused. She does not understand what it is—a weapon, an instrument, a fragment of a thought-script. She knows only that it is of no human provenance and that it functioned sixteen thousand years ago. She will never log it. She will never report it.

The third: A servitor skull in a container of preserving oil. The cavity is tattooed with binary code—not by knife, but by electrical etching. No one else can read the markings, because no one else has the ocular array frequency that makes them visible. Raskian prepared the skull herself. She does not remember whose skull it was.

The date she fears most:

That the Men of Iron are not dead.

That Belisarius Cawl does not merely find them, but that he does not find them, because the search itself is a form of finding—that the act of searching already means that someone is there who searches back.

That if this is true, Raskian does not have much time left.