Hammer And Anvil by James Swallow

Author:James Swallow
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2012-03-10T20:10:38+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

There had been a time – so many centuries gone now that it was almost a dream and less than a memory – when Tegas had been fully human.

Then, barely a youth, he had been recruited out of the schola progenium where the evaluators of the Adeptus Mechanicus had found him. Recruited, if one were to use that word as a synonym for taken.

Young Tegas had been foolish, stupid. It embarrassed the questor to consider him now, regarding that frightened boy as little better than an infant, fouling itself and incapable of feeding without assistance.

On the way to Mars he had tried to take his own life, utterly ignorant of what glories the Machine-God would open to him upon his arrival. He had eaten poison aboard the transport ship, and almost succumbed to the potency of it. In the end, the toxins had only hastened the need for the excision of many of his internal organs and the implantation of newer, better replacements.

The only sense-memory he still carried from that moment was how the poison felt as it ran through him. The sickening disconnection it brought between his thought and his action, the sense of a body dying outside of his control. The fear.

He remembered that clearly, all these years later, as Adept Lumik fretted over him, plucking at him to help him rise from where he had fallen.

Gathering his wits, Questor Tegas swatted her away and got up, shaking off the ill-effects of… What?

He reviewed his internal program loops. He had made this happen. In his eagerness to probe the secret of the iron scroll, something Tegas had done had released a surge of electromagnetic energy unlike any he recognised. The alien radiation swamped the interior of the laboratorium, and the efficient ray-shields that so cleverly protected the module from outside surveillance or imaging had trapped the force of it inside.

The questor’s timebase was so corrupted he could not immediately ascertain how long he had been inert. Parts of his internals were still off-line, cycling through reboot phases. He grunted and staggered to the workstation.

The scroll was still there, sheathed in an emerald glow, mocking him with its complexity. I did do something, he told himself. The back-shock had not been some kind of security measure, but the side-effect of a larger event. Tegas knew what he had seen in the holograph glow of the scroll’s interface. Control. The virtual switches he had tripped, they had sent signals along quantum filaments, the electromagnetic surge spilling out around them. I did something. He smiled. I summoned something.

A fear reaction would have been more logical at this juncture, he reasoned, but strangely, even the smallest glimmer of that emotion escaped him. This was experimentation, he told himself. It was not without risk, even to one’s self, and whatever data or effect was generated from the result, he was confident he could address it. Tegas did not consider this arrogance.

What is that ancient axiom I have heard soldiers spout at moments of extreme crisis? Tegas cocked his head, thinking aloud.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.