The Council of the Dead

I. Forty-One

We are forty-one, and five of us breathe.

No figure of speech, no liturgy: the inventory. Five living crew members in the shells of the head, thirty-six imprints in the memory cores beneath, and between them the machine spirit, which cannot be counted, because it is not one but that in which the others lie.

It does not feel like forty voices. It feels like a very large room in which nobody has spoken for a long time.

We wake in the belly of the landing ship, eleven minutes before touchdown, and the waking proceeds in an order that has been the same for eight thousand years.

First the heart. Two plasma reactors, run up out of idle, and the note they make in doing so is the first note a Princeps learns in his life and the last he loses: a deep, rising pull, below the audible, which one has in the teeth before one has it in the ears.

Then the legs. Odile Brask, steerswoman, forty-three years old, sixteen of them in this shell, lays her hands in the guides and says "Coupling one to four", and we feel our hips settle. It is a sensation like the stretching out of a leg that had gone to sleep, and it lasts twenty-two seconds, and it is every time too beautiful for what comes after.

Then the weapons. Bereth Kolm, Moderati Primus, fifty-seven, three campaigns, one artificial eye. He reports the Belicosa Volcano Cannon on the right arm and the storm bolter turret above the shoulder, and he reports them in the same tone in which a man lays his tools on a bench.

Then the eyes. Marek Ihm, Sensorii, who sounds younger than he is and who does not speak for three days when an evaluation occupies him.

And then Ansgar Teul, Moderati Secundus, nineteen years old, six weeks in office, who still holds his breath every time the connection takes.

We say nothing to him. He will break the habit or he will not.

Last the Princeps.

Princeps Maior Ilva Sarnhelm has lain in the amnion for ninety-one years, and what is left of her body is about the size of a child. That is normal. A Princeps needs no body; he needs a nervous system and a will and lungs, which can also be taken from him. The connection goes in at the neck, six ports, and when it takes, it tastes of copper and thunderstorm air, and for about half a second one no longer knows which hand is one's own.

Then it is over, and one no longer has hands but a Volcano Cannon.

Our name is Pactum Ferreum. Warlord class, year of construction unknown, oldest attested record seven thousand nine hundred years before the present, Legio Servanda, forge world Ferrun.

The name means: the iron covenant.

We did not choose it. It stood on us already when the first woman whose imprint we carry climbed into this amnion, and none of the forty-one has ever questioned it, and that is something one will think about later.

The ramp comes down.

II. Kel-Vantor

Kel-Vantor is a moon, and we are about the size of a small mountain, and neither statement makes the other smaller.

From the landing zone we see twenty-three kilometres, because nothing grows here to take the view. The moon is a forge. It has been one since a time for which there are no reliable figures. What lies above is Mechanicus: converter halls, smoke towers, ore-rails on stilts, the Smelting Cathedral as a black wedge on the northern horizon. What lies below is older.

The ground is slag and sintered dust. It bears. That is the first thing a steersman wants to know, and Brask knew it in the first nine seconds.

"It bears," she says. "Twelve metres of slag on rock. Except at the shafts."

"How many shafts," asks Kolm.

Ihm needs four seconds for the answer, and in those four seconds we hear him breathe.

"By the cohort's cadastre: nine. By ground echo: thirty-one."

The difference between nine and thirty-one is the whole story, but we do not know that at this point. We enter it and walk on.

The cohort called us. That is the proper way: a forge world in distress addresses a request to the nearest Legio base, the request is assessed, a formation is allotted. They allotted us four machines — us, the Reaver Mordax Fidelis under Princeps Deyn Ockar, and the two Warhounds Sagitta and Cursor, which Ockar leads because Warhound Princeps are young and one does not let them run alone.

Four machines for a moon. That is not few. It is also not many. It is exactly the quantity an allotment office assigns when it holds a case neither hopeless nor important.

The enemy are Orks.

More precisely: what still moves through this system of Waaagh Zagdakka. The great Waaagh was broken years ago; what remained are bands under individual Nobs that roam the fringe systems and rob themselves a reputation. One of them took the surface works in the south-west seven weeks ago and has not moved since.

That is the first thing that is not right, and Kolm says it at once.

"Seven weeks. A Nob who wants a reputation does not sit seven weeks on a converter hall. He moves on, or he dies moving on."

"Perhaps he is building," says Teul.

It is his first contribution of his own in the manifold, and it is correct, and nobody tells him so.

On that first day we walk forty kilometres to the south-west, and we do it slowly, because there is no reason to walk fast, and because a Warlord crossing a forge world is a message before it is a weapon. Beneath us Skitarii maniples fan out, left and right, like water round a stone. On the ore-rails workers stand and watch. There are thousands of them. They simply stand there, in their smocks, with their breath cloths, and do not raise their hands and do not call out, and we walk past them.

Vareth Sonn, fourth imprint, Princeps Ultima, three thousand nine hundred years in us, says into the general silence:

Look at them. They believe you have come to stay.

And Sarnhelm answers what a Princeps answers: nothing.

III. The Reservation Clause

It is necessary to explain something at this point, because otherwise everything that follows looks like cowardice, and it is not cowardice. It is doctrine, and the doctrine is right.

A Warlord is not replaceable.

That is not poetry. It is a number. The Legio Servanda maintains seventeen machines of the Warlord class. In eighteen hundred years it has built two and lost nine. On Ferrun stands a hall in which the parts for the tenth lie, and they have lain there for four hundred years, because a joint piece is missing that nobody can make any more.

If we die here, the number seventeen is sixteen forever.

That is why the reservation clause exists.

Article four of the standing order of the Legio Servanda, verbatim, because the wording counts: The Princeps Maior is obliged to break off the engagement and withdraw the machine as soon as the calculated probability of loss exceeds the preservation threshold, unless the objective is classified as Class I or Class II. Classification is not made in the field.

The preservation threshold lies at nought point four.

The objective Kel-Vantor is classified as Class IV.

Class IV means: a loss would be regrettable, a recovery is possible, and the manufacture of a Warlord takes longer than the rebuilding of a converter works. That is true. We have checked the arithmetic. It holds in every direction one calculates.

What does not appear in the classification are the workers on the ore-rails, because people have no line of their own in this calculation. They stand under replaceable operating assets, and they stand there rightly, for a forge world that loses its workforce gets a new one in forty years, and a joint piece nobody can make any more one never gets.

Sonn says nothing to that. Sonn never says anything to such things, and that is why Sonn is the worst voice in us.

But Hadmar Oel (nineteenth imprint, twelve hundred years) always has something to say to it, and he says it now too, unasked, as usual:

I broke the clause once.

We know, we say.

You know it, but you have not done it. Oel's voice in us is dry and a little too fast, the way men speak who were seldom interrupted in life. I broke it on Selenne. I had good reasons. I had better reasons than anyone here will ever have. Three machines stayed there and the world fell all the same, and afterwards the Legio could not field a formation for eleven years, and in those eleven years two further worlds fell that we could have held. Two. I counted them.

And if you stood on Selenne again?

I would break off, says Oel. At once. And I would know the whole time that I am a coward, and I would do it anyway, because I know by now that both can be true at once.

That is the Council of the Dead. That is what we call it. Not officially — officially it is called the imprint choir and is listed in training as an aid, like a slide rule. Unofficially it is forty-one people in a room who have all already experienced exactly what you are experiencing for the first time, and who have all learned something different from it.

Sarnhelm listens to them. It took her ninety-one years to learn how to listen to them without obeying them.

She will need that ability in eleven days.

IV. The First Walk

On the third day we meet them for the first time.

It is not an engagement. It is what happens when a thing thirty metres tall comes round a hall behind which two hundred Orks are standing.

We measured it afterwards at fourteen seconds.

In those fourteen seconds the following happens. Ihm reports heat signatures. Kolm raises the right arm, which for us means that roughly the weight of a tank turns about a shoulder joint, and one feels it in the back. Brask sets the left foot out to the side so that the recoil does not go into the hip. And then the Belicosa fires.

A Volcano Cannon makes no sound one hears. It makes a blow that goes through the amnion and turns the fluid hard for a fraction of a second, and then there is no ground before us any more, but a channel of glass.

Of the two hundred about forty remain, and the forty do not run away.

That is the second thing that is not right. Orks do not run away, that is known, but Orks who see a Warlord run towards it, because that is the greatest conceivable fight and because an Ork who touches a Titan can tell of it.

These run back. In order. To the south-west.

"They are drawing us," says Ihm.

"They are drawing us," Kolm confirms.

We follow them, because it is our assignment, and we follow them slowly, because Sarnhelm wants it so, and in the next six hours we kill perhaps nine hundred Orks and lose nothing.

It is a good day. One has to say that aloud, or nobody understands why people do this. There are moments aboard a Warlord in which five people and thirty-six dead are happy at the same time, and this afternoon is one of them. Teul laughs once, briefly, and is at once ashamed, and Brask says over the internal channel, without turning her head: "Leave it. That is permitted."

In the evening we stand at the edge of the south-west field, and below us lie the surface works the Nob took.

They are cleared out.

Not destroyed, not plundered in the ordinary sense — cleared out. Six converter halls, four ore-rail heads, two repair docks for heavy haulers. From all of them everything has been taken that could be drive, armour or frame, and it has been carried west, into a valley basin we cannot see into from here.

"He is building," says Teul for the second time.

This time Sarnhelm answers him. They are the first words she has addressed to him since he came aboard.

"What is he building, Moderati?"

And Teul, nineteen, six weeks in office, looks at the figures and says: "Something about as large as we are."

V. The Arithmetic Does Not Work

Magos Serevin Achtal speaks to us on the fifth day, over a directed link, without image.

A Magos who speaks without image either no longer has a face or does not care to show one. With Achtal both are possible.

His request is brief and in proper High Gothic, and it runs: the Legio detachment is to hold the Great Ramp.

The Great Ramp is an approach. It is four hundred metres wide, it rises over nine kilometres out of the south-west field onto the cathedral plateau, and it is built so that heavy haulers with ore can drive up it without losing their load. It is the largest single structure we have seen on this moon.

It leads nowhere.

That is the point, and Kolm works it through in four minutes, and then he puts it before Sarnhelm, and all forty-one of us look at the same figures.

The ramp is not an approach to the Smelting Cathedral; for that there are three shorter ways in the north, all of them better to defend. It is not a supply line; no traffic has gone over it for forty years, because the ore-rails took over the transport. It covers no flank. Whoever takes it gains nine kilometres of concrete and a view.

And holding it is expensive, because up there one stands like a man on a table.

"Magos," says Sarnhelm, "I request the justification."

It takes eleven seconds, which for a Magos is an eternity.

"The cohort requests," says Achtal. "The cohort does not justify."

"I am leading a machine of the Warlord class onto an objective of Class IV. Under article four of my standing order I am bound to assess the probability of loss continuously. I cannot assess what I do not see."

"That is accurate," says Achtal.

And then he says nothing more, and the link stays open for ten seconds, and in those ten seconds we hear the hiss of equipment older than our Legio, and then he cuts.

Ihm says quietly: "He did not refuse. He said that it is accurate."

"Yes," says Sarnhelm.

"That is something else."

"Yes," says Sarnhelm. "That is something else entirely."

That evening we lay two things side by side, and we recommend to anyone reading us to do the same, because it is the moment at which this campaign stops being a campaign.

First: Ihm's ground echo found thirty-one shafts where the cohort's cadastre lists nine.

Second: the Great Ramp stands directly over seven of them.

Sonn says in us, without emphasis, the way she says everything:

They do not want us to hold the ramp. They want us to stand on it.

VI. Kael'dun

The Iron Veins come on the sixth day.

We did not request them. Nobody requested them. They come because between that Chapter and this cohort there exists a pact as old as the Chapter itself, and because a pact among the Iron Veins evidently means that one appears without being called.

The Eternal Anvil takes high orbit. What comes down is two companies, a Venerable and a question.

Captain Voss Ilarion puts the question over vox while his landing craft are still rolling out, and it runs: "Legio Servanda, where do you need us?"

Kolm looks across at Sarnhelm's amniotic tank, which is pointless, because there is nothing to see there, and which he does anyway.

"Captain," says Sarnhelm, "I do not know what is being played here."

"No," says Ilarion. "Neither do we. We are here all the same."

We have stood with many Astartes Chapters in forty-one lives. Most speak to a Legio as to a tool — politely, because one maintains tools. The Iron Veins speak to us as to a neighbouring unit, and that is, though we would not admit it, agreeable.

On the evening of the sixth day a Techmarine climbs into our head.

That is unusual. The head of a Warlord is a cockpit, and who may enter is regulated. But Brother-Techmarine Kael'dun comes with the blessing of the Chapter Master and with a servo-arm that our enginseer Solm-4-Ket illuminates appreciatively at first glance, and he stands behind Kolm's shell and says nothing for seventeen minutes.

Then he says: "You have a crack in the third memory core."

We have had the crack for forty years. On Ferrun it has been examined three times and three times classified as harmless.

"It is harmless," says Solm-4-Ket.

"It is harmless as long as nothing goes into it that does not belong in it," says Kael'dun.

And then Sarnhelm asks him why a Techmarine of the Iron Veins is standing in her head, and Kael'dun does not answer at once, and we notice it. All forty-one of us notice it at the same moment, because a manifold is built for such things. This man has been carrying a decision about with him for days.

"Princeps," he says at last. "What has the Magos told you about the Sixth Shaft?"

"Nothing."

Kael'dun nods once, slowly, the way a man nods whose last hope has just died and who had allowed for it.

"Then I am here because —"

And there the captain calls the briefing.

VII. The Plan

Kael'dun does not get to finish his sentence that evening, because at 20:00 the briefing is called and because a briefing takes precedence over a Techmarine who hesitates.

It does not take place in a tent and not in a cockpit. It takes place on the loading bed of a wrecked hauler in the north field, because that is the only level place on which two Astartes, a Skitarii Alpha, a cohort liaison adept and the external speakers of two Titans can be accommodated at once.

Princeps Deyn Ockar speaks for the Mordax Fidelis and the two Warhounds. Captain Voss Ilarion speaks for the Iron Veins, and beside him stands Sergeant Doran Vek and says four sentences in two hours, three of which count.

We lay out the situation as it is.

The enemy holds the valley basin in the west and the cleared works in the south-west. Strength by Ihm's evaluation: around forty thousand, plus six machines of medium size and a thing that measures twenty-eight metres and is not yet finished.

Our forces: four Titans, two companies of Astartes, nine Skitarii maniples, and a population of about two million workers standing on the ramps and watching.

There are three possibilities, and Ockar lists them because he is the elder.

First: fight in the works. The advantage is obvious — cover, short distances, and an Ork running between converter halls cannot attack in mass. The disadvantage is equally obvious, and Brask speaks it before Ockar can: "A Warlord in a works hall is not a Warlord. He is a very large man in a very small room." Between the halls we cannot traverse, cannot evade, and can aim the Belicosa only at targets that have already reached us. In the works we are a target with a reactor.

Second: wait on the cathedral plateau. The shortest defensive line, three approaches to cover instead of eleven, and the plateau can be held with Skitarii while the Titans stand free. Ilarion is for it, and he justifies it cleanly: whoever stands above forces the attacker to come uphill, and Orks come uphill.

And then Sergeant Doran Vek brings out the first of his four sentences.

"Captain. If we go onto the plateau, we give him the works, and in the works stands everything he is building his thing out of."

It goes quiet.

For that is the point everyone has seen and nobody has spoken: the Nob does not grow weaker when one gives him time. He grows larger. Every week Zagdakka Two stands in the valley basin is a week in which a Mek bolts something on. An enemy who builds is the only enemy against whom waiting is dearer than attacking.

Third: the south-west field. Four kilometres of open, sintered ground between the works and the valley basin. No shelter, no cover, an imposition for infantry. For Titans the best ground on this moon, because it bears and because one can see across it.

We take the south-west field.

The plan we build over the following two hours is old. It is so old that the Iron Veins and we have the same two words for it, although nobody taught them to each other.

Anvil and hammer.

The anvil is the Iron Veins. Two companies, dug into the northern works margin, with the assignment not to win. They are to hold and bleed and press the enemy south, into the open expanse where he does not want to go.

The hammer is us. We wait behind the works line, out of sight, until the mass stands in the field — and then we come out of the shadow of the halls and the Belicosa has four kilometres of clear field of fire.

The Warhounds run wide on the outside and do what Warhounds are built for: they frighten the enemy in the wrong place. The Mordax Fidelis stays on our left side, because a Reaver covers a Warlord where the Warlord is slow.

The Skitarii of the Twelfth Cohort get the most thankless task. They secure the ore-rail heads at our back, against an enemy who may never appear there, and afterwards they will stand in no report.

And the workers go onto the plateau. Two million people in eighteen hours over three approaches. Ilarion forces it through, against the cohort's liaison adept, who objects that converter lines nine to fourteen will then stand idle for three days.

Ilarion hears him out. Then he says, without raising his voice: "Adept, I have brought two hundred brothers who in eighteen hours will lie in holes and die so that the fighting happens on this field and not in your halls. I will not negotiate with you about whether it is worth it."

The adept passed the order on.

That is the thing about a plan: it is never the best solution. It is the solution whose cost one knows most precisely.

We knew it. We wrote it down before it started: the anvil will lose sixty to eighty brothers. The Skitarii perhaps three hundred. And the assessment for us stood, in the version of 22:40 on the sixth day, at nought point two two.

It was too low. We had put Zagdakka Two at twenty-four metres.

It was twenty-eight.

VIII. Zagdakka the Second

The enemy did not keep to the plan, and that is the only reproach one can make him.

We had reckoned with the ninth day. The anvil had lain in the northern works margin for fourteen hours and was a third dug in. The workers were about half of them up.

At 02:14 on the seventh night Ihm reports a movement in the western valley basin, and at 02:16 he reports that the movement is twenty-eight metres tall.

The Nob is called Urgak. We learn that later from intercepted bellowing in which he calls himself so twenty-three times, and we also learn what he would rather call himself: Zagdakka the Second. A Nob who carries the name of a dead Warboss has earned nothing yet and wants everything.

What he has built the Skitarii christen on the general channel within an hour Zagdakka Two, and the name sticks.

It is a Stompa, and it consists in large part of Kel-Vantor.

We recognise the spine of a heavy hauler. We recognise the armour plates of a converter hall. We recognise an ore-rail drive block serving as a hip, and a second serving as a shoulder, and above it all a skull of sheet metal into which someone has cut a face with a cutting torch, and the face grins.

They have eaten the forge and built out of it something that attacks the forge. That is the kind of joke Orks have a gift for, and one has to acknowledge it before one kills it.

Behind it come six smaller machines and about forty thousand Orks.

Assessment, says Sonn.

"Running," says Kolm.

The number that stands after eleven seconds is: nought point two seven.

We step out of the shadow of the converter halls into the south-west field, and we do it together with Mordax Fidelis on our left side and Sagitta and Cursor ahead, and then it begins.

We will not describe here what a battle between Titans looks like, because we have tried forty-one times and because forty-one times it has come out wrong. We describe instead what it feels like.

It feels slow. That is the first thing. From outside it is the fastest thing people can build; from inside everything takes a very long time, because one experiences one's own movement as intention and not as event. One wants to raise the arm, and then, about half a second later, an arm rises.

It feels close. That is the second. A void shield that collapses is not a flash at the edge of the field of view; it is a blow in the teeth. We lose the first in the nineteenth minute, the second in the twenty-second, and at the second Teul screams, and nobody reproaches him, because one screams the first time.

And it feels personal. That is the third, and that is the worst. Zagdakka Two has an arm from which a chain hangs, and on the chain hangs an anvil, and the Nob uses it like a man who has smithed before.

He hits us in the thirty-seventh minute on the left hip, and our control system files the pain feedback as what it is, and Brask doubles up in her shell and goes on working.

The plan holds for thirty-seven minutes, and in those thirty-seven minutes it is beautiful.

The anvil holds. Ilarion has his two companies lying in a line of eleven holes in the northern works margin, and the Ork mass runs at it, the way Orks run at everything that shoots, and wears itself raw on it. We hear it on the general channel, in short, unexcited sentences — Hole four holds. Hole seven needs ammunition. Hole nine is dead, hole eight is extending — and among them once Sergeant Doran Vek, delivering one of his four sentences: "We are the anvil, brothers. An anvil does not complain."

And the mass gives way to the south, because it must, and runs into the open field.

At 02:51 we come out of the shadow of the third converter hall.

Four kilometres of clear field of fire. There are about three moments in this profession for which one lies ninety-one years in an amniotic tank, and one of them is the moment in which the first shot of the Belicosa goes into a mass that has no cover and can no longer get back in time.

The first six minutes are a massacre, and we write it down so, because that is what it was, and because anyone who claims to have felt nothing doing it is lying.

Then the Stompa comes.

Cursor goes to meet it, because that is a Warhound's task — not to kill but to compel. He runs across its legs three times and forces it to turn, and every time the Stompa turns, its boiler block stands towards us for a second and a half. Kolm uses two of them.

The third time the Stompa catches him.

Not with the chain — with the left hand, like a man reaching for a dog. It lifts Cursor about four metres, and then the anvil comes from below, and the Warhound breaks through in the middle.

Afterwards the Stompa stood still for forty seconds and bellowed, and that is the moment in which we understood that it is not built worse than we are. It is only built differently. It has no Council of the Dead. It has a Nob who knows that this fight belongs to him.

At 03:29 we face each other at eight hundred metres, and Mordax Fidelis comes from the left.

Ockar does it cleanly. He forces the Stompa to cover to the left so that it shows us the right flank, and we go in with the Apocalypse missile launcher, three times, and the third time the armour tears open above the ore-rail drive block that serves as a hip.

It would have worked.

What we did not know: an ore-rail drive block has three bearings, and a thing still running on two of them does not slow down. It becomes unpredictable.

Sagitta dies in the forty-first minute. A Warhound is fast and thin, and her Princeps was twenty-two, and she does not go down in a fireball but simply falls over, because her right leg was taken away, and then she lies there and goes on firing for twelve seconds, until the reactor runs away.

Her imprint was recovered later. It will be lying now in another machine and telling there what it has learned.

Mordax Fidelis takes the chain arm off the Stompa in the forty-ninth minute, and for that the Stompa takes its head in the fiftieth.

Princeps Deyn Ockar was one hundred and four years old. We knew him for sixty of them. He once said to Sarnhelm, long ago, on the ramp of a landing ship, that she should remember that in this profession one has only two sorts of friends: those one outlives, and those who outlive one.

We kill Zagdakka Two in the fifty-third minute with a shot of the Belicosa into the lower boiler block.

The Nob Urgak climbs out. We see him. At three hundred metres, through a field of view not made for such things — a single Ork climbing out of a burning wreck he built himself, and who stops and looks up.

It is the only time in this entire campaign that the enemy has a face.

Kolm shoots him with the storm bolter. It does not take long.

The number after the engagement is: nought point three eight.

Two hundredths below the preservation threshold.

IX. I

Ansgar Teul dies in the fifty-fourth minute, one minute after the end.

That is not irony and not fate. It is mechanics. The lower boiler block of a Stompa built from a heavy hauler contains a pressure reservoir that has no business being on a heavy hauler, and when it comes apart it throws a piece of wall plating of about two hundred kilograms three hundred metres.

It strikes our head on the left cheek, above the armour, in the area of the secondary cockpit.

Teul did nothing wrong.

What happens afterwards is the reason we are writing this report at all.

A manifold is a device that holds consciousness. That is its purpose. When a Princeps dies, he is taken off in a rite that lasts nine hours and is conducted by three tech-priests, and afterwards he is an imprint: bounded, ordered, addressable, laid into a core consecrated for it.

When someone dies in the manifold, without rite, without preparation, with the connection open, the manifold holds him all the same.

But it does not hold him. It holds the last seconds.

We received Ansgar Teul, nineteen years, six weeks in office, in the form of four point one seconds, and the four point one seconds have been running in a loop ever since, and in them he says a single word.

He says: I.

Not I am dying, not I am afraid, not Mother. Only the first syllable of something he did not get to the end of, and then it starts again.

We have thirty-six dead in this manifold who say we. It is the first thing one learns when one is laid into an imprint core: the individual stops, the formation does not stop. Sonn has said we for three thousand nine hundred years. Oel says I, but Oel says it out of vanity, and one hears the difference.

This is not an I out of vanity.

It is a boy who reached for himself while dying and found nothing more, and the device recorded the reaching.

Solm-4-Ket needed four hours for the finding and delivered it in the flat tone enginseers keep for catastrophes: the unconsecrated imprint sits in the third memory core. In the crack. It cannot be recovered, because there is nothing there that could be recovered, and it cannot be erased without erasing the eighteen imprints lying beside it.

It will stay.

Kael'dun stood by the whole time and said nothing, and when Solm-4-Ket had finished, he laid a hand on the shell of Teul's cockpit and spoke a prayer not intended for machines.

And then he said: "Princeps. Now we must talk about the Sixth Shaft."

X. What Kael'dun Knows

He tells it in eighteen minutes, standing, without embellishing once.

Eleven years ago the Iron Veins and the cohort descended together into the Sixth Shaft of Kel-Vantor, because something down there had responded that ought not to have responded. What they found was a machine intelligence from a time before the Imperium — related to that for which the Mechanicus has a word one does not write.

They destroyed it. That is established and disputed by no one. A Venerable stayed there, an enginseer of the cohort stayed there, and an Initiate came back with something in his head he has not been rid of since.

And then Kael'dun says the sentence for the speaking of which he can be called to account by the letter of the pact.

"It is called the First Warden, Princeps. It took me eleven years to ask myself the question that occurs to any child."

Sarnhelm asks it for him.

"The First."

"Yes."

Ihm says from his shell, very quietly: "Thirty-one shafts."

"Nine in the cadastre," says Kael'dun. "The other twenty-two are not undiscovered. They are not entered. That is a difference, and on a forge world it is the only difference that counts."

For an entered shaft must be reported. A reported shaft of that kind brings an investigation. An investigation of that kind brings Mars, and what Mars does with a moon beneath which lie twenty-two unentered pre-Imperial chambers, Magos Serevin Achtal has evidently estimated very precisely and found worse than anything lying in the chambers.

"And the ramp," says Sarnhelm.

"The ramp stands over seven of them." Kael'dun looks at the ground, which with an Astartes almost never happens. "Princeps, I am now going to say something that will insult you. The Magos does not want you to fight. He wants you to stand."

It takes a moment before we grasp it. With all forty-one of us it takes a different length of time.

A Warlord weighs three thousand tonnes. From keel-laying to commissioning it has been blessed, bolted, inscribed with litanies and sealed with the sign of the Omnissiah at one hundred and nine places, for seventeen years. It is, in the language spoken on this moon, the heaviest holy device a man can move.

Achtal did not request a defender.

He requested a lid.

"And the Orks?" asks Kolm, and in his voice there is something we have not heard for thirty years.

Kael'dun looks up.

"Why do you suppose a Nob who wants a reputation sat seven weeks on a converter hall and built? Orks build when a Mek has an inspiration. Do not ask me where the inspiration came from. I do not know. I know only that his thing was built out of Kel-Vantor and that he dug eastward before he marched eastward, and that beneath the place where he dug lies a shaft that does not stand in the cadastre."

Tonight we have won a battle.

We have won it against a symptom.

XI. The Council of the Dead

The assessment stands at nought point three eight and will not fall again. We are battered, we have lost two of four machines, and the landing ship has stood with its ramp open in the north field for six days, waiting for us.

The reservation clause applies from nought point four.

It will cross it in four days. Anyone can work that out, and Kolm worked it out, and afterwards he put the result on the general channel, because he is a decent man and did not want anyone to learn it privately later.

The following night Princeps Maior Ilva Sarnhelm calls the council.

That is a procedure. There is a formula for it, it is eleven words long, and when it has been spoken, the imprints step forward out of the background noise and one has them singly.

It is, be it said for all who will never experience it, about the most unpleasant thing a person can do with their head.

You have heard what the Techmarine said, says Sarnhelm. I ask for your counsel.

Vareth Sonn speaks first, as always. Fourth imprint. Three thousand nine hundred years. She has held eleven worlds and given up four, and at no point does her voice betray which were which.

Withdraw. At once, not in four days. Classification is not made in the field, and you know why: because a Princeps in the field always believes his field is the most important. It is never the most important. It is only the nearest.

And the chambers?

Have been there ten thousand years. They will be there in ten thousand more. Report them. Let Mars decide. Mars will burn this moon out, and that is terrible, and it is the right decision, and it is not yours to make.

Hadmar Oel after her, nineteenth imprint, the man of Selenne.

She is right. A pause. I say it unwillingly, because she knows it better than I do and because she never paid for it. But she is right. I broke the clause and it cost two worlds nobody ever connected with me. That is the insidious part of it, Princeps: what you win here, you see. What you lose elsewhere, you never see.

Cleia Morn speaks ninth. Second imprint. Seven thousand two hundred years, and of her almost nothing is left; she comes and goes, and mostly it is like hearing someone singing through a wall.

I knew him, says Morn. I knew him when he was new.

Whom, Cleia?

The name. They gave it to him because he was a promise. Not because it sounded pretty.

And then she is gone again.

Of the thirty-six, thirty counsel breaking off. Four abstain. Two are not addressable.

And beneath it all, without interruption, in a loop of four point one seconds, a nineteen-year-old says I.

Sarnhelm listens to that for three and a half hours.

Then she asks a second question, and this second question stands in no training manual, and it is the reason we are writing this report.

I asked you what you would do, she says. I now ask something else. What would you have wished someone had done with you?

It goes very quiet in the manifold. It is the kind of quiet that arises when forty people notice at the same time that they have not been asked a question in forty lifetimes.

And then Vareth Sonn answers, three thousand nine hundred years, eleven worlds, four given up, and her voice is for the first time since Sarnhelm has known her not entirely level.

That they had not brought me home.

XII. The Guest

To find the seven shaft caps beneath the Great Ramp one needs the survey, and the survey of the twenty-two unentered shafts does not exist — not on paper, not in a core, nowhere, because their non-existence is the whole purpose.

It exists only in heads that were down there.

Of those, three are left. One is an Initiate on Aschgrat, eighteen weeks away. One is Kael'dun, who got only as far as the fourth floor. And one stands in the Smelting Cathedral and has pushed a slag cart for nine years.

Kael'dun brings it forward himself. He does it upright and looks at no one while doing it.

The logis-adept who surveyed the Sixth Shaft was called Reva Kastell. She came out, and she brought the Reverberation with her, and what the cohort does with mortals who bring the Reverberation with them has a name and a form and a hall in which it is performed. She has been dead as a person for nine years. Her body is Unit 0774 and was some time ago combined with Unit 0839, because that was more economical, and 0839 was previously a tech-priest who had signed the excavation clearances.

A manifold, says Kael'dun, is the only device in the Imperial inventory that can still get something out of a damaged consciousness.

"You are proposing," says Sarnhelm, "that I connect a servitor to my head."

"Yes."

"Do you know what that is called, what you are proposing?"

"Yes," says Kael'dun. "It took me two nights to propose it anyway, and I will not do it a second time, and I will confess it as soon as I reach a Chaplain. Princeps, I know what I am here. I am the man offering you the chance to use a dead woman once more."

They fetch Unit 0774 on the eleventh night.

It is a servitor. It is no more and no less. Two people have been combined in one hull, which one sees at the seam, and what sits above looks at no one, because there is nothing there that could look.

They connect it to the second auxiliary port. Solm-4-Ket leads, Kael'dun assists, and Kolm stands beside them with a bolt pistol, because that is regulation and because nobody says what for.

And then the guest is in the manifold.

We wish to be very precise here, because in reports of this kind lies are always told at this point.

No person comes up. No voice comes that asks for something, and nobody says a name. What comes up is survey: depth profiles, rock classes, cap thicknesses, seven shafts in a row beneath nine kilometres of concrete, clean, ordered, in a handwriting of thought that would have made any enginseer proud.

It comes in forty minutes, and it is complete, and it is so good that we had to stop in the middle of the assumption because Solm-4-Ket was no longer transcribing.

And right at the end, behind the last depth profile, there hangs a remainder that is not survey.

It is an image. A collapsing arch seen from below, and beneath it a man bracing it with his back, and the image stops before the arch stops.

Sarnhelm says into the manifold, aloud, so that it lies on the general channel and is transcribed:

"That is not her. What we have here is not a person. I want that in the record, and I do not want anyone telling later that she helped us. She surveyed a shaft nine years ago. We took for ourselves what was left of it."

Unit 0774 does not survive the assumption. The hull fails in the forty-first minute, cleanly, without twitching.

Kael'dun carries it out himself.

Somewhere in the Smelting Cathedral someone will have to open a reconciliation of losses for it, and there will be a form, and in that form there will be no field into which this fits.

XIII. Gorrath

On the twelfth day the assessment stands at nought point four one.

On the twelfth day it is also settled what would have to be done, and it is so simple that Kolm needed half an hour before he could say it aloud.

The seven caps lie between eighty and one hundred and ten metres beneath the ramp. The concrete of the ramp bears three thousand tonnes; the rock beneath does not bear it. If a Warlord stops at the surveyed place and takes the weight off its legs — if it sits down, in the sense in which a machine of this class sits down — the cap zone collapses over a length of six hundred metres.

And then three thousand tonnes of consecrated device lie on seven shafts, and above them nine kilometres of collapsed ramp.

It is not a battle. It is a construction measure.

The Venerable comes to the ramp on the evening of the twelfth day.

Venerable Gorrath has not moved since the Iron Veins arrived. He stood in the north field, at the loading hatch, and whoever passed him greeted him and expected no answer. A Venerable of the Iron Veins speaks within the Litany of Wrath; beyond that Gorrath has said almost nothing for decades.

He walks the nine kilometres up himself. It takes four hours. Nobody accompanies him.

At the top he places himself before our left foot, which means that he reaches us to the ankle, and then he stands there and does nothing.

Sarnhelm lowers the head. With a Warlord that is a procedure of eleven seconds and one does not do it out of politeness.

She does not ask him for counsel. She has forty-one counsellors and needs no forty-second. She asks him the one thing he can answer and nobody else here can.

"Venerable. You have it behind you. They laid you in a machine, and you stayed in it." Her voice comes over the external speakers, thirty metres above him, and it sounds very small in them. "I ask you as someone who is about to do it. Is it bearable?"

We checked the recording of this sequence six times afterwards, because we did not want to believe it ourselves.

Eighteen seconds of servo noise.

Then Gorrath says: "No."

And after a further twenty-four seconds, which for him is a whole speech:

"Even so."

Then he turns round and walks the nine kilometres back down.

XIV. The Threshold

On the morning of the thirteenth day Sarnhelm dispatches the report to the Legio, properly, completely, with the survey, with the number of shafts, with the word First and the conclusion one draws from it.

The answer comes after nineteen hours. It is four sentences long.

Assessment noted. An alteration of the objective classification is not possible in the field. The preservation threshold has been exceeded. Pactum Ferreum is to be withdrawn without delay.

There is no no in it. One does not write such a thing. One writes: without delay.

Sarnhelm reads it twice and confirms receipt, which she must do, and then she says: "Kolm. Ihm. Solm-4-Ket. You disembark."

Kolm says: "Princeps —"

"You disembark, Moderati Primus, because someone must carry the report and because it should be the most senior, so that he is believed. That is not a gift. That is the harder assignment and I give it to you because I know you will carry it out."

He needed thirty-seven seconds. We counted them, because in that time we had nothing else to do.

Then he released the connection, and the manifold became one voice smaller, and he disembarked without looking back once, and that was the most decent thing anyone did that day.

Odile Brask does not release.

She does not even say it in any particular way. She says: "A Warlord does not walk without a steersman, Princeps. Nine kilometres uphill, with a hip that is broken. I will drive you there."

"Steerswoman —"

"I will drive you there," says Brask, "and then we will see", and all forty-one of us know that there is no seeing, and nobody contradicts her, because she is right.

Kael'dun and Solm-4-Ket take out in four hours what the rite needs nine for, and they do it at eighteen imprint cores and they do it badly, because it cannot be done well in four hours. The third core will not come loose. The crack runs right through the mounting, and whoever pulls it tears it.

In the third core lie eighteen imprints.

And Ansgar Teul.

Sarnhelm ordered it left. She justified it by the lack of time. We note here that the time was not lacking and that nobody asked her.

Last they lay her down themselves. Kael'dun leads, in a cockpit smelling of burnt cable, with a device built for Astartes sarcophagi and not for this. Ninety minutes for a procedure that needs nine hours. He asked her twice while doing it whether she wanted it, and twice she said yes, and the second time she added: "Not for me. So that someone can tell it who was there."

The walk up takes fifty-two minutes.

Below on both sides of the ramp the Iron Veins stand in ranks, and behind them stand the Skitarii maniples of the Twelfth Cohort, and behind them stand workers. There are tens of thousands. They simply stand there, in their smocks, with their breath cloths, and do not raise their hands and do not call out.

They believe we have come to stay.

At kilometre seven Brask says: "Princeps, may I ask what you are thinking about?"

And Ilva Sarnhelm, ninety-one years in the amnion, says: "About the name. Cleia was right. It was a promise and not an ornament, and in ninety-one years I never once asked to whom it was given."

At kilometre nine we stop.

The survey lies in us like a handprint. Eighty to one hundred and ten metres. Six hundred metres in length. Cap three is the thinnest.

We place ourselves on cap three.

Brask says: "Weight off left leg, weight off right leg," the way she has said it for sixteen years when we settle for maintenance, and her voice does not go away once while she does.

It takes eleven seconds.

The ground gives way first as sound, then as sensation, then no longer as anything one could describe, and the last thing that goes through the manifold before the cores tear away is a voice saying I, and this time someone answers it.

XV. What Remains of Us

Kel-Vantor stands.

The seven caps of the Great Ramp lie beneath three thousand tonnes of consecrated device and nine kilometres of collapsed concrete. The cohort needed eighteen months to concrete over it, and it did so without naming the procedure, and in the cadastre of the Twelfth Cohort there stand today still nine shafts.

Magos Serevin Achtal never answered the Legio's report. Instead he granted the Legio Servanda free access to the production lines of Kel-Vantor for a period of one thousand years, for spare parts of every kind, including joint pieces.

On Ferrun the tenth Warlord hall has not stood idle for fourteen years.

The Legio has assessed the matter. The result is on record and runs:

Princeps Maior Ilva Sarnhelm violated article four of the standing order. A loss in combat did not occur. The machine was not destroyed but decommissioned by the Princeps Maior. Entry is made under this designation.

That is the worst line there is. A loss in combat gets a plaque. Decommissioning by the Princeps Maior gets a line in a register, and whoever reads it thinks of madness or of age.

Moderati Primus Bereth Kolm lodged an objection annually for nine years. He was refused nine times. At the tenth he was dead.

Captain Voss Ilarion made a declaration in the name of the Iron Veins in which the Chapter states that the pact with Kel-Vantor was fulfilled that day by a foreign machine. The Legio noted the declaration and did not enter it into the file, because a Chapter has no authority to sign for a Legio.

Brother-Techmarine Kael'dun confessed. What was laid upon him is his Chapter's affair.

Eighteen imprints and one fragment lie one hundred metres beneath the Great Ramp.

There is no procedure for that. An imprint is not a dead man, because the dead man died beforehand, and it is not a device either, because one does not address devices. On Ferrun they have been listed for fourteen years under occupied.

XVI. Forty-Six Years Later

We are thirty-seven, and four of us breathe.

The machine we lie in is younger than the old one and heavier and better built in three places, and it is called Fides Ferrun, which promises nothing but merely asserts. We stand above a world whose name is of no consequence here, and the Princeps Maior is twenty-nine years old and four months in the amnion, and last night she called the council for the first time.

Her question is the question. It is always the question. Hold or withdraw.

Vareth Sonn counsels breaking off. Hadmar Oel counsels breaking off. Of the thirty-three who are addressable, twenty-nine counsel breaking off.

And then the young woman in the amniotic tank asks something nobody taught her, because she has read the report an old Moderati Primus once carried out of a landing ship, and because that report has for forty-six years been read in the training of the Legio Servanda and not applied in its assessment practice.

She says: Sarnhelm. You have said nothing.

And we answer.

I counsel breaking off.

You?

I. And because she is silent and because silence with a Princeps is an invitation: Princeps, listen to me, and then listen very closely to what I say next.

I am an imprint. I am what is left of a woman who once paid everything that can be paid. There are thirty-seven of us here, and we have all paid, and that is why we all counsel the same. A council consisting only of people who have already paid will always counsel you not to pay. That is not treachery and not cowardice. It is the price one pays for our being kept.

What are you there for, then?

So that you know what it costs, we say. Not so that you do not do it.

She did not address us again for two hours afterwards, and then she turned her machine and left, and whether she withdrew or held is not within our competence and is nobody's business who does not have to bear it with us.

We seldom think of Kel-Vantor. An imprint does not think much; it waits, and in between there is nothing.

But when we do think of it, we think not of the ramp and not of the forty-one seconds of falling and not of the ruling with that line in it.

We think of a Venerable who walked nine kilometres uphill to say two words, and of three thousand tonnes lying on seven lids, and of the fact that a hundred metres beneath them, in a core with a crack, a nineteen-year-old has been reaching for himself for forty-six years.

He says I.

Eighteen others are with him. They say we.

We hope that he hears it.