Predictably Ortega chose to stay with Hadrian as I split off and headed down to the lower levels. Urien’s Clansmen followed me, looking unimpressed with the massive foundry works before us which I suppose is to be expected if your daily working environment is monolithic cathedral halls of a starship. I moved along between vast machines which hissed with steam as they shaped hot steel into whatever it was they were making, passing teams of workers pulling levers and monitoring arcane gauges. Now and again we passed lay members of the Mechanicus with their cog wheel symbols around their necks. They moved between machines, murmuring prayers and applying unguents and prayer scrolls to junction boxes and cable splices. I could taste the metal in the air, somehow greasy in spite of the heat, it was intermingled with the stink of steam produced from unclean water. I stopped at various stages to inspect workers, though always under the guise of watching a particular process. All seemed to be the standard dull eyed manufactorium worker, either completely focused on their task or scared enough of disruption to their routine to appear so.


[i]/Anything?/[/i] Hadrian’s voice sounded in my mind. 


I turned away from the latest group of workers in disgust, about to reply in the negative, when my eyes snapped back to one of the workers who stood over a tray of tools. For a moment I couldn’t tell what had drawn my attention to  him. Then I realized that the ties on the back of his leather hood were not fastened, a hastily donned disguise. The ersatz worker, looked over his shoulder, caught my gaze, and then  picked up an industrial staple gun from the table. I was knocked from my feet as one of Urien’s men crashtackled me a moment before a series of pneumatic cracks fired thumb thick staples through the air I had just vacated. The improvised projectiles plinked musically off the wall and clattered to the ground. The spacer who had tackled me grunted and rolled off as I came to my feet. I saw he was grasping a long cut across his forearm, ragged and leaking blood. His brethren rushed forward, short clubs appearing in their hands. The other workers were scattering in screaming panic as the would be assassin gave up trying to reload the staple gun and hurled it into the face of the on rushing spacers, then he turned and bolted. I pulled my weapon, a slender Hecuter Executive, from my coat pocket and pointed it, then cursed. Shooting the man wasn’t going to get us any answers. I shoved the gun back into my coat and darted after him, following the spacers as best I could. 


In a conventional race I have no doubt that the spacers, used to rushing along walkways and access ladders, would have run the man down in moments. Unfortunately our concern for taking him alive was not reciprocated. As soon as he was free of his pose, the worker ripped off his hood and hurled it at one of the spacers, then produced a las pistol and sent several bolts snapping back in our direction, causing us to dive for cover. I pulled my gun and fired in his general direction, more to keep him from placing aimed shots than in hopes of hitting him, and again he retreated, hoping up onto a conveyor belt shifting raw ingots and then leaping over onto an adjacent gangway.

“Keanon, Chlain,” I called to two of the spacers, “try to head him off!”

[i]/Hadrian/[/i] I thought/spoke.


[i]/I see him/[/i] came the reply.


Reluctantly, I followed the fleeing tribesman, jumping up onto the conveyor and nearly losing my footing, then sprinting ten feet down it, feeling the odd sensation one gets on a powered walkway, before leaping onto the gangway and following the fleeing quarry. I wished I trusted my marksmanship enough to shoot him in the leg or something, but with my luck I’d either kill him or somehow manage to blow off my foot. My quarry paused long enough to send a trio of lasbots my way, forcing me to duck behind a massive ceramic anvil that reflected the shots off at a series of crazy angles. Something above me lit off with the whuff of a low order chemical explosion and alarms began to ring. The deep full throated roar of riot guns and screams of panic and pain joined the tumult, though barely more than an accent to the mechanical booms of the foundry. Sparks blizzarded down around me like fireflies and I pulled my hood up to protect my hair.  I risked a peak from my shelter long enough to see my assailant vanishing through a doorway. My boots rang on the metal walkway as I ran after him, ducking occasionally as he took hasty potshots to discourage my pursuit.


The room beyond the cavernous door was filled with vast brass boilers emblazoned with the Mechanicus cogwheel. Forests of ductwork rose into the firelight distance above, twisting and intermingling without seeming purpose. Dozens of servitors lined a long narrow hall between the boilers. They were scribe units, their legs removed in favor spinally welded cogitator thrones.  Neural plugs sprouted from their skulls and vertebrae like the spines of deep sea predators. Spools of parchment vomited from their open mouths, tiny autoquills attached to their optic nerves scratching constant notations of pressure and temperature. Excess ink ran from the corners of their frozen screams, dripping to the floor below in an irregular, black, rain. The fleeing tribesman was about halfway along the corridor flanked on both sides by the macabre honorguard of chittering man-machines. At the end of the hallway were several stairs that led to a vast warehouse which contained a twisting labyrinth of shelves, storage bays, and wire cages.  If he made it in there, we would never dig him out before the manufactorum’s security, whose riot guns I had heard earlier, intervened. I did the only thing I could think of. I reached out with my mind and placed a simple suggestion into the foggy minds of the servitors.


/This man is an error/


If you have never had the pleasure of dealing with the Emperors most blessed Administratum, firstly, congratulations, secondly, you should know that there is nothing in all the universe they despise more than an error. I did not, at this moment, fully appreciate that. The moment the thought formed in their minds the servitors went berserk. They emitted a terrifying roar of binaric gibberish as every single one of them attempted to rip their way off their cogitator thrones. Several succeeded, pulling themselves free in a noisome spray of stinking biofluid and organic lubricants. They hauled themselves towards the cultist with atrophied limbs, accustomed to nothing more than clearing the occasional paper jam. Those that were close enough struck out with their autoquills, or tried to bite with toothless calloused jaws. The cultist screamed and thrashed as the things came for him, opening scores of black inky wounds on his body as they gouged him with the instruments of their, until now, simple trade. Paper spewed from their mouths at an astonishing rate, carpeting the floor in an effect eerily similar to a sluice filling with water. A normal man might have gone down, but the tribesman roared with the mad ferocity of a feral worlder, firing his las pistol on full automatic. Servitors burst like ripe fruit as he scythed a path in front of him, accepting cuts and blows to his back in order to press on. Stray las fire ignited the great mass of parchment into sooty black flames that spread along the trails of lubricants. Incredibly the tribesman made the stairs, his back slicked with ink and blood as he staggered up the stairs, the mobile servitors desperately trying to follow, undeterred by the flames beginning to lap around them. The stink of ink and fire and burned flesh was unimaginable. He turned when he reached the top of the stairs, glaring back at me with wild defiance and a grin splitting his bloody face and so he missed it when Ortega stepped from the room beyond and slammed the shock maul into his chest. The actinic crackle of the weapon arched the man over as he flew into the air like a kedgeball being struck home. I heard ribs crack as he was flung into the air on the momentum of the power assisted blow and his own convulsing body. His arms windmilled spasmodically as he plunged down into the mass of writhing burning servitors and burning pieces of parchment tape.

“No!” I screamed at the top of my lungs and drew my pistol, firing into the ruck indiscriminately as I tried to reverse my previous mental goad. It was no good, servitors were not susceptible to subtlety, the concept of uncorrecting a mistake simple didn’t exist in their abraided cerebral architecture . Three of Urien’s men ran past me, one of them wisely plucking the pistol from my hand as they tore in with their clubs, driving a wedge into the chaos. A moment later they retreated, carrying the wreck of the cultist between them, his body an undifferentiated mass of wounds. He was clearly dead, either from the shock maul blow which had set fire to the front of his garments and cracked his ribs, or from the mindless attack of the servitors. Well not mindless, they had made a credible attempt to draw a line through him, just following their subroutine for collecting an error.


“Frak.”