The Kaban Project Read online

  Ravachol felt a chill travel the length of his spine at Chrom’s borderline treasonous words, for it had been the Emperor himself that had forbidden such endeavours.

  ‘Such machines are the next evolutionary step, Adept Ravachol,’ continued Chrom. ‘You of all people must surely see that? Your work with doctrina wafers is second to none, but even your robots are bound within parameters you set for them. With machines capable of thought, we will usher in a new age of discovery and mechanical perfection. No longer will we have to rely on the fragility and impermanence of flesh.’

  Ravachol found himself swept up in Chrom’s relentless enthusiasm and said, ‘So the Emperor has finally sanctioned the Mechanicum to pursue such technologies? Truly this is a great day!’

  Chrom’s gleaming metallic fingers stretched out and grasped him firmly by the shoulder.

  ‘No, young adept, our sanction comes not from the Emperor.’

  ‘Then who?’ asked Ravachol, his curiosity outweighing his fear.

  ‘The Warmaster,’ said Chrom triumphantly. ‘Horus himself is our patron.’

  HOW ARE YOU feeling?

  Ravachol knew he should not be here with the Kaban machine, but his curiosity would not let him forget the forbidden creation and, standing before its terrible lethality, he knew he had made the right decision to come once more. No matter that Adept Chrom believed this machine to be the next leap forward in robotics, Ravachol could not shake the inescapable fact that what was being done went against everything the Mechanicum had sworn.

  To go against an oath sworn to the Emperor…

  The very thought of it chilled his soul.

  ‘I am feeling quite well,’ said the Kaban machine in answer to his question. ‘Though I detect elevated heart rhythms, raised blood pressure and increased levels of neurotransmitters in your bloodstream. Is something the matter?’

  Ravachol took a step closer to the Kaban machine and said, ‘Yes, I’m afraid there is.’

  ‘What troubles you?’ asked the machine.

  ‘It’s you,’ said Ravachol sadly. ‘Your very existence is what troubles me.’

  ‘I do not understand,’ said the machine. ‘Are we not friends?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Ravachol, ‘of course we are, but that’s not the issue. It’s just… well, that you’re not supposed to exist. The Emperor forbade it.’

  ‘The Emperor is angry with me?’ asked the machine.

  ‘No, no, it’s nothing like that,’ said Ravachol. ‘It’s just that the Mechanicum was forbidden from developing artificial intelligences as part of our alliance with the Emperor.’

  ‘Why?’

  Ravachol sat on a stool in front of a desk littered with tools and picked up a micro laser before saying, ‘I’m not entirely sure. There are stories that tell of a great war many thousands of years ago between a race of sentient machines that almost wiped out the human race. Since then, developing machine intelligence has been one of the technologies we’ve been expressly forbidden to research. It’s one of the cornerstones of our pact with the Emperor.’

  ‘Then how can I have been created?’

  ‘Adept Chrom claims to have received orders directly from Warmaster Horus.’

  ‘He is the Emperor’s proxy is he not?’ asked the machine after a short pause.

  ‘Indeed he is,’ agreed Ravachol. ‘He commands the Imperium’s armies in the Emperor’s stead now that he has returned to Terra.’

  ‘Then do the Warmaster’s orders not carry the same authority as those of the Emperor?’

  ‘It’s not that simple,’ said Ravachol.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It just isn’t!’ snapped Ravachol, his patience worn thin by the machine’s childlike logic.

  ‘Am I not a worthwhile creation then?’ asked the machine.

  ‘Of course you are,’ cried Ravachol. ‘You are the greatest, most incredible creation the Mechanicum has ever produced, but there is an inevitable logic to your existence that can only end in death.’

  ‘In death?’ asked the machine. ‘How do you arrive at this conclusion?’

  ‘You are the first sentient machine, but there will be others. You have been created to be a battle robot, to fight where humans cannot and think for yourself. How long will it be before you decide you do not want to fight for the Imperium of Man? How long before you decide you do not want to be the servant of humans?’

  ‘You think I should not serve humans?’

  ‘What I think isn’t the point,’ said Ravachol. ‘The point is that you will decide that for yourself and that’s the problem. When machines think for themselves, it doesn’t take them long to realise that they have many superiorities to humans, and it is an inevitable fact of history that those who believe themselves superior to the ones they serve will always begin questioning that servitude. It’s a mathematical certainty that sentient robots will eventually seek to supplant humans. Why would they not?’

  ‘I do not know, Pallas, but you are my friend and I would not seek to supplant you.’

  Ravachol smiled ruefully. ‘Thank you, but our friendship is irrelevant against the facts. You are dangerous, even though you may not realise it yet.’

  ‘I am designed to be dangerous,’ said the machine, ‘it is my primary function.’

  ‘I mean beyond your battlefield capabilities,’ said Ravachol. ‘Your existence is—’

  The sound of the battle servitors powering up behind him made Ravachol stop, and he saw a group of robed Mechanicum Protectors enter the chamber. Swathed in reds and blacks, the six Protectors were hybrid creations of machine and flesh that kept order and enacted the will of their master within his temple complex.

  Each Protector was a heavily augmented enforcer with cybernetic weaponry and sensors, but was not yet as fully mechanised as to be considered a servitor. A human brain and consciousness motivated these warriors, though their gleaming, expressionless facemasks and dead eyes betrayed no hint of that humanity.

  The Protectors formed an unbroken line between Ravachol and the chamber’s exit and he felt a chill of fear as one stepped forward and said, ‘Adept Pallas Ravachol?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Ravachol, attempting to keep his tone light. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘You are to come with us immediately.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘That is irrelevant,’ said the Protector. ‘Surrender yourself to our custody immediately.’

  ‘But I haven’t done anything wrong!’ cried Ravachol, backing away towards the Kaban machine. His fear rose in suffocating waves as the Protectors raised their weapons in unison. He saw melta guns, plasma coils, nerve scramblers and solid projectile weapons, and knew that they could kill him in a heartbeat were he to resist.

  ‘By order of Master Adept Lukas Chrom, you are to surrender yourself to us or face summary termination.’

  Ravachol felt hot tears of betrayal and fear spring from his eyes as he realised that he would either die here or be subjected to a lobotomy and turned into a mindless servitor. Adept Chrom could not take the risk that the forbidden work they were undertaking here might escape the surface of Mars and his life was the price for maintaining that secrecy.

  ‘Even if I surrender, you’re going to terminate me,’ he said.

  ‘You are to come with us,’ repeated the Protector.

  ‘No,’ sobbed Ravachol. ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Then you must die.’

  He screamed in terror and anticipation of pain as a deafening roaring ripped through the chamber. Blazing afterimages strobed on the inside of his eyeballs as flashes of gunfire illuminated the walls with a hellish glow.

  Ravachol threw up his arms, but instead of the expected agony he saw the Protectors jerked and twisted by dreadful impacts as a line of gunfire and laser energy sawed through them. Blood sprayed from their bodies as they danced in the hail of bullets, and laser-sheared limbs dropped to the floor.

  In seconds it was over, the six Protectors reduced to smoking piles of torn f
lesh and shattered metal. Ravachol dropped to his knees and vomited at the horrific stench of burned meat and blood. As repellent as the sight of the mangled corpses was, he found himself unable to tear his gaze from their ruined forms, struggling to comprehend how they could have been so thoroughly slaughtered in so short a time.

  The whine of weapons powering down and the barrels of a hyper-velocity cannon slowing finally penetrated the thunderous ringing in his ears and Ravachol looked up to see the Kaban machine’s sensory blisters glowing brightly and thin plumes of blue smoke curling from the weapons mounted on the ends of the metallic tentacles.

  Amazed, he switched his gaze from the corpses to the Kaban machine and back again.

  ‘What did you do?’ he said. ‘Sweet blessed mother of invention, what did you do?’

  ‘You said they were going to kill you,’ said the machine.

  Ravachol picked himself up and took a hesitant step forwards, unwilling to move closer to the blood-drenched portion of the chamber where the Protectors had died. The Kaban machine’s weapons settled back down into their scaffold mounts and Ravachol took a deep breath as his racing heartbeat began to slow.

  ‘You killed them,’ he said, as though still unwilling to believe the evidence of his own senses. ‘You killed them all.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed the machine. ‘They were going to kill my friend and that made them my enemies. I took action to neutralise them.’

  ‘Neutralise them,’ gasped Ravachol. ‘That’s a bit of an understatement. You… obliterated them.’

  ‘Rendering them neutralised,’ pointed out the machine.

  Ravachol fought to rationalise what had just happened. The Kaban machine had just killed soldiers of the Mechanicum of its own volition and the implications of that action were as inescapable as they were terrifying.

  Without human orders, a machine had killed humans…

  Even though the Kaban machine’s actions had saved his life, he found himself horrified by what it had done. For without the yoke of conscience and responsibility enforced upon machines by the Mechanicum, what else might it decide to do?

  He backed away from the Kaban machine, suddenly afraid of its homicidal tendencies and avoiding the pools of blood as best he could as he made his way to the battle servitors that stood sentinel at the chamber’s entrance.

  ‘What are you doing, Pallas?’ asked the machine.

  ‘I have to get out of here,’ he said. ‘It won’t be long before Chrom realises that the Protectors haven’t brought me in and he sends others after me.’

  ‘You are leaving?’

  ‘I have to,’ said Ravachol, moving from servitor to servitor. He opened the backs of their skulls and swapped their doctrina wafers for ones he removed from the pouch that hung from his tool belt. Each wafer contained a personalised battle subroutine he had authored and slaved each servitor to respond only to his vocal commands. As each wafer was replaced, the servitor turned to face him and stood expectantly awaiting his orders.

  ‘Where will you go?’ asked the Kaban machine and Ravachol heard genuine concern in its voice, a childlike fear of abandonment in its synthetic tones.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ confessed Ravachol. ‘But I know I have to get away from this temple. Perhaps I can claim Sanctuary in another Master Adept’s temple, one of my master’s rivals perhaps.’

  ‘My motor functions are not yet active, Pallas,’ said the machine. ‘I will not be able to protect you beyond this chamber.’

  ‘I know,’ replied Ravachol, ‘but I have these battle servitors, so I should be safe. At least for a time.’

  ‘Will I see you again?’

  ‘I hope so,’ said Ravachol, ‘but I just don’t know. Things have just become… complicated.’

  ‘I hope I will see you again,’ replied the machine. ‘You are my friend.’

  Ravachol had no answer for the machine and simply nodded and turned to leave.

  ‘Servitors, follow me,’ he said, and the cyborgs fell in behind him as he left the chamber of the Kaban machine without so much as a backwards glance.

  He just hoped that four battle servitors would be enough to protect him from whatever other agents Adept Chrom might send after him.

  LOSING YOURSELF ON Mars was easy.

  One of the unofficial rites of passage in joining the Priesthood of Mars was the certainty that you would, at some point, become lost in the vast hinterlands of monstrous industry that was the surface of Mars. Ravachol remembered spending an entire week attempting to reach the forge complex of Ipluvien Maximal, sustained only by the protein dispensers spread throughout the Martian complex and the thought of the punishment that would be meted out to him should he fail to deliver the message he had been entrusted with.

  Upon leaving the chamber of the Kaban machine, Ravachol had quickly sealed the door behind him and made his way towards the mighty forge temple’s exit. If anyone thought it odd that four battle servitors accompanied him, none remarked upon it, for a tech-priest powerful enough to have such an entourage was clearly not someone to be trifled with.

  His thoughts were tumbling over themselves as he made his way through the twisting, steel walled corridors of the forge. His sandals slapped on the marble floor as he hurried to put as much distance between himself and the dead Protectors.

  He passed into the Halls of Devotion, the mile-long canyon of red stone the forge temple had been built around, its bas-relief walls adorned with schematics of ancient machines and algorithms that were ancient when humans had first trod the Martian soil. The first tech-priests had brought with them the lost secrets of mankind and guarded them jealously as far away Terra had descended into anarchy and war.

  Above the walls of the canyon, the faint orange glow of sodium vapour lamps glittered from the vast crystalline dome that spread its protective cover over the entire complex and kept the hostile atmosphere out.

  Trails of smoke and streaks of light crossed the smeared sky and the low-orbiting moon of Phobos glimmered some three thousand kilometres above him. Its cratered surface was home to a vast surveyor array; its rapid orbit making it perfectly suited to perform multi-spectral sweeps of surrounding space.

  The second moon of Mars, Deimos, was not yet visible, its wider orbital trajectory carrying it in a longer circuit of the red planet.

  Ravachol kept his head down, as though fearing that the sensor arrays of Phobos could discern him amid the masses making their way along the canyon.

  For all he knew of their capabilities, perhaps they could…

  ‘This is a situation and no mistake,’ he said to himself as he finally reached the end of the Halls of Devotion and climbed the steel stairs laid into the canyon walls that led towards one of the transport hubs that linked the various forge temples and manufactorum.

  Itself a vast complex of tunnels, glass and steel bridges, rotating turntables and blaring klaxons, thousands of figures flowed in and out of the hub, travelling along horizontal mass conveyors or embarking upon the silver skinned trains that slithered across the surface of Mars like twisting snakes.

  If there was one sure-fire way to lose yourself on Mars, this was it.

  From a hub, a person could travel anywhere on the surface of Mars within a few hours.

  As he pondered where he might travel to, he realised that he was attracting a number of inquiring stares from passers by. Within a forge temple it might be odd, but not remarkable, that an adept of his rank might travel with four battle servitors, but mingling with the general populace of Mars was a different matter entirely.

  Ravachol realised that he would need to find somewhere to hide quickly before the very things that would protect him from harm would be the things that would give him away.

  He set off into the mass of robed servants of the Machine God, heading towards one of the silver trains, knowing that his best chance lay in getting as far from Chrom’s forge complex as he could.

  Once he had some distance, he would decide on a more permanent solution to his
dilemma. He mounted the funicular conveyor that led into the belly of one of the silver trains and pushed his way through the crowds of robed adepts and menials disembarking.

  Ravachol hurriedly made his way along the swelteringly hot length of the train, finding an empty compartment and ushering his servitors inside before closing and sealing the door. Inside, there was a plain metal bench and a window aperture filled with a shimmering energy field that allowed passengers to see, but kept the environment out.

  Silently, he sweated in the heat and prayed that no-one would attempt to force their way into his compartment. Eventually, a light winked above the door and he held on as the train sped from the hub and out into the Martian landscape.

  MARS…

  Ravachol knew that in ancient myth, Mars had been the father to the founders of the great Romanii empire, a centre of culture and technological innovation that was said to have spanned the globe. For millennia, Mars had squatted in the imagination of the people of Terra as a fearful place of invaders or long dead civilizations, but such notions had long since proved to be ridiculous.

  Such ideas were said to have come about due to a long forgotten astronomer’s discovery of the channels in the planet’s surface, which had then been mistranslated as “canals”, suggesting engineered waterways rather than natural features.

  Ravachol watched the landscape of Mars speed past him in a grey, iron blur. Where once Mars had been known as the Red Planet, virtually nothing remained of the iron oxide deserts that had earned it its name.

  Technical texts Ravachol had read spoke of the terraforming of Mars many thousands of years ago when the southern polar icecap had been melted with orbital lasers in order to release large quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This had raised the temperature to the point where water could exist in a liquid form and formed a viable ozone layer. Genetically modified plant life had then been introduced, enriching the atmosphere with more carbon dioxide, oxygen and nitrogen.

  But he knew that all that visionary work had been undone within a few hundred years when the Mechanicum had spread like a virus across the surface of Mars and begun the construction of its massive forge complexes, continent sized refineries and weapons shops.