by Ghurlag » Thu Apr 18, 2013 11:43 pm
Madak
Madak fished the gold chain from the drawer and eyed it with some distaste. The golden 'T' had often struck him as the least inspired of all the various motifs the Council bestowed. 'T' for telepath. Even the open hand of the lower-order empaths had more style to it. Orders were orders, though. He slipped the ornament over his head and turned to examine himself in the mirror.
Aside from a slight fraying of the embroidery on his left sleeve, he looked fine. Well, not quite fine - the rich formal dress robes looked strange on him, there was no mistake about that. Airy, and easy to stumble in, exactly what should be avoided in the labs. He now felt an odd appreciation for the practical comfort of his normal working clothes. But he was presentable, and that was the key thing.
As if to defy that thought, a stray lock of dark hair caught his eye. He swept it back into place, knowing as he did so that it was a futile effort. By the time he reached the facility, it'd no doubt look as uncombed as any other day. It was rebellious stuff.
Checking his chronometer, he realised he was several minutes early. This was the jitters. The morning broadcasts had only reported that an Imperial dignitary was to deliver a message to Parliament, but it was obvious to every Seer that something important was going on behind the scenes. Few outside the Council knew what the hubbub last night had been about, but after the hurried instructions from Segehart this morning, Madak suspected that he soon might be getting some insight. He was abuzz with curiosity.
Seeking some calm, he turned to his view. The apartment's wide south-facing windows afforded him a view of the morning sun breaking across the Azati foothills. It was a great sight; soft, golden light playing over the wheat smallholdings -- so much more picturesque than the giant, flat cornfields of the agri-plains -- and interrupted only by a few scattered buildings, mostly unoccupied country houses belonging to Parliamentarians. Madak had lived in the city, and he had lived in the Seers' training caverns in the northern Belasian mountain range, and this suburban paradise was undoubtedly better than either. Whatever the prole opinion of them, Magos Anthemius and his team sure knew how to breed loyalty in their workforce.
A gentle chime sounded from the door. The groundcar was here.
Ertelt was the first person Madak saw when he arrived at the facility. He was facing away, bent over the front desk at the tasking office, tapping furiously at a data-slate.
"You're wanted in the reception hall," the empath related immediately upon Madak's entrance, putting down his stylus as he turned around. Ertelt didn't need to see you to know who you were.
"Now?"
"Not right now, they're setting up," said Ertelt, "but I think they'll want to do a run-through with you if they have time."
There was a pause as they both looked at each other.
"Emperor's bowels, we look weird," Ertelt commented. Madak pursed his lips and nodded in agreement. He'd never seen Ertelt not wearing his trademark stylish green shirts, but dammit, the man seemed to look snappy in anything. His robes, pinned by an open-hand brooch, looked brand new. Sure, they lacked the richness of embroidery that Madak's had, but what they lacked in ostentation they made up for with a distinct lack of fraying and a fresh-pressed cleanliness that spoke of the good laundry habits Madak had never acquired.
"Do you know what's going on?" Madak asked, cutting past the pleasantries. It was the only question he was really interested in the answer to.
Ertelt waved him closer, hunching conspiratorially.
"Segehart didn't want me to know," he said, "but Adept Mordax let it slip. It's an Inquisitor."
Madak blinked in surprise. An agent of the Holy Inquisition? Here? A basket of worries ran through his mind, each more outlandish than the last.
"Yeah, right?" Ertelt said, widening his eyes to emphasis the shared disbelief. "Apparently that's the dignitary addressing Parliament - and there's more. "
One of Madak's worries flickered to the fore. There were hints from various tech-adepts that Magos Anthemius' research wasn't viewed that positively by some in the Mechanicus hierarchy. Did the Inquisition investigate accusations of heresy against the Emperor-as-Omnissiah?
"They say he's come to demand some kind of tax," said Ertelt in a foreboding tone. "A really big one. We'll be feeling it for years, they say."
The outlandish concerns evaporated, but the relief was tempered by a futile sense of indignation.
"Surely they can't just do that?" Madak asked rhetorically, his brow creasing. "There's got to be some sort of... of limitation."
Ertelt shrugged, indicating simultaneously his powerlessness in the face of received gossip and his lack of understanding of the Imperial taxation system as applied to Balfayre. He looked about to say something further, but the clatter of a side-door interrupted him.
"Praise the Omnissiah, you're wearing your robes," came Magos Anthemius' greeting as he bustled in, a servo-skull buzzing through the door behind him.
"I could say the same," Madak quipped politely. The affable tech-priest was resplendent in the rust-red robes of his order, and the steel surface of his bionic arm looked to have been polished. He didn't seem to notice the content of Madak's reply, his mechandrites were twitching about, a clear sign of agitation.
"I was just coming to tell Ertelt," the Magos began, somewhat excitedly, "the schedule's been altered -- apparently our guest was very curt at Parliament -- so we need to ready right away. I take it Segehart told you? Of course, why else would you be dressed like that? Ertelt, did you make the alterations?"
"Just about," Erterlt responded, picking up the data-slate which had occupied his attention before Madak arrived.
"Let me read it," said Anthemius, plucking it from the empath's hands impatiently with a flexible mechandrite. "Madak, can you go to the reception hall? Adept Mordax is bringing a specimen through from the yard, do make sure it's not a defective."
Madak nodded, and hurried to comply, the Magos already distracted by some error in what he was reading.
From Madak's brief close-up of him, the Inquisitor seemed a surprisingly unremarkable person; a plain, well-tanned face with an expensive-looking bionic eye, a medium-built body hidden beneath a large cloak made out of a strange brown hide. He didn't say very much, but Madak overheard him asking for the heating to be turned up. It was early autumn, and warm, so it seemed he must have come to Balfayre from somewhere with a more tropical climate. The temperature difference didn't seem to affect his companion, however. The hulking, aggressive-looking man -- Madak guessed he was a bodyguard, probably hopped up on combat stimms -- refused to take a seat for the presentation, and lurked menacingly by the entrance to the reception hall. The only person to be seated with the Inquisitor in the audience was a nervous-looking guide whose jacket identified him as affiliated with the spaceport.
After Magos Anthemius had lead the disinterested Inquisitor down the line of staff for inspection, Madak was dismissed to the right of the stage to await his role in the presentation. Obviously still somewhat flustered, Magos Anthemius took the stage and approached the podium. The reception hall, which could seat a good two hundred guests, looked bare.
Anthemius looked down at his notes. He looked up at the mildly-disinterested Inquisitor. Then, a little awkwardly, he began.
"We began, of course, with human material," he said, his voice a little tinny, "the process of connecting the human nervous system to the Most Holy is a well-known, even commonplace affair..."
Oh, so it was that speech. Madak reflexively tuned out the introductory waffle, turning instead to thoughts of this tax. It was within his power to reach out and examine the upper reaches of the Inquisitor's mind, to find out if Ertelt's rumour had any basis in fact. Strictly speaking, such behaviour was prohibited under the Seer Council's guidelines, but that presumed they caught you doing it, and Madak was quite good at going undetected.
"...the telepathic projection of thoughts is a well-observed phenomenon amongst duly-sanctioned psykers such as are commonplace here on Balfayre," Anthemius went on.
That was a good point. The Inquisitor must've known he was coming to a planet with an unusually high psyker population. He would've come prepared, defended somehow. Madak didn't want to find out what an agent of the Inquisition did to those caught intruding on his private thoughts.
"...Trials indicated that operators were made uncomfortable reaching into the minds of the criminally insane," Anthemius continued, his voice now having settled into an emotionless drone, probably to hide the nervousness he'd shown earlier, "so we switched to vat-grown material."
Madak smirked, 'uncomfortable' was an understatement. Some of those minds wrestled with you, raging even through the cocktail of drugs keeping them vulnerable. The Seer Council had insisted all new psyonic servitors were vat-grown, out of consideration for the delicate sensibilities of the Seer population. Some sheltered souls had been shocked to learn that the drones working for them had once been violent offenders.
Anthemius was up to the nymph-nodes now. As he continued to talk, Ertelt managed a demonstration behind him, reaching out with relatively clumsy empathic strokes to activate the larvae brains attached to a series of lights. The nymph-nodes were a real hit with empaths, because they meant they could use their relatively trivial gifts to do something other than cheer people up or calm them down. The empaths were easily the largest section of the Seer population, though, so the nymph-nodes were great selling points.
His demonstration done, Ertelt slunk off-stage. Now Madak had to pay attention.
"Having found some success in co-opting the local fauna," Anthemius said, "we turned to another creature - the Capaldo treerat. This treerat does not have the prodigal fecundity of the locust, but it has a number of other features which draw attention. Firstly, it is intelligent, and a tool-user, suggesting it can handle tasks of the level that might be entrusted to a servitor..."
That was his cue. Madak walked out on stage behind the droning Magos, reaching out with a mental instruction as he did so. The treerat's brain was responsive, and the scraping of metal feet drew the attention of the two-man audience from Anthemius' now-unstoppable monologue. Madak halted halfway across the stage and watched as the treerat servitor approached him. The original rat was tiny in comparison to this machine, barely a foot long if you excluded the bushy tail. This mechanical exoskeleton's skull -- Adept Mordax, on a whimsy, had put together an inflated mold based on the rodent's original features -- came up to his chest. It would've come higher, but the treerats were only used to limited bipedalism, and this instinct meant that they still tended to hunch over when walking, even with a metal spine. Its forearms were equipped with clamps, but Mordax had warned him that the resistors in their circuitry were 'temperamental', so Madak confined the display to having the servitor walk around the stage at his silent commands.
"...appropriate fertility treatments, combined with an automated insemination technique, have remarkable effects on brood size and reproductive rate," said Anthemius, inserting a rare pause. "Our work in this area is as yet incomplete, but soon we hope to demonstrate the benefits of cheaply-manufactured and readily available psychically-receptive servitors, an achievement which marks the unique capabilities afforded to us here on Balfayre as well as the glory of the Omnissiah's will working through the instrument of the Magos Biologicus Neuralis."
That was it. There was no applause, polite or otherwise. The Inquisitor's bodyguard was staring rather suspiciously at the servitor, so Madak got it off the stage. He was glad to follow it.
The rest of the day following the Inquisitor's visit was somewhat of a blur. Magos Anthemius thanked everyone for their effort, making no mention of the complete lack of interest shown by their guest, who appeared to have left without passing much comment. Nobody seemed to be in much mood for work, so Madak buried himself in the nymph-lab, where he could pretend to be working on the message-retention problem nobody had much hope for, and turned on the wireless transceiver.
It was with some incredulity that he heard the news which broke after lunch. The Inquisitor's tax was not money, or even men.
He was here for their children.
He had come with a Black Ship to collect Balfayran children to feed to the Golden Throne on Terra. Even now, Parliament was in an emergency session. The unremarkable man Madak had danced a servitor around for had issued an ultimatum to the planetary government. The broadcasters could hardly conceal their horror. Parents were taking their children from the scholas to prevent them being rounded-up.
Madak listened to the spiral of reporting. It got worse. A report on an urgent petition from the Seer Council was cut short. Some sort of incident had happened in the temple district, a man was dead. The Inquisitor was said to be involved. A riot had broken out in the city centre. Accounts were going around of the Inquisitor gunning down civilians in cold blood.
By the time Madak was reluctantly pulling himself away from the lab, the word was that a mob was at the Imperial compound. The Arbites were out in full force and Parliament was sanctioning the deployment of the Peerguard to 'contain the situation'. He didn't see anyone as he left. He wouldn't have known what to say if he had.
The air outside was fresh, still warm from the dimming sun. From outside the facility's main gates, you could see the city in the distance. There was no sign of the unrest Madak had heard, no indication that children everywhere were in peril. It was just a growing cluster of lights, serene as always.
Last edited by
Ghurlag on Fri Apr 19, 2013 4:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.
As the misty veil of Albion is cast aside, we turn our gaze to the war-torn island of Albany, where the Red King vies with his former master for the control of a realm in dire threat.