The Cabal had seen some particular quality in those mammalian hominids. They had recognised that the hominids would one day rise, inexorably, to play a pivotal role in the scheme of all things. Mankind would become the greatest weapon against the Primordial Annihilator, or it would become the Primordial Annihilator’s greatest weapon. Either way, the Cabal decided that the unprepossessing mammalian hominids developing on that backwater world were not a species to be dismissed.
Grammaticus knew that this fact frustrated most of the Cabal’s inner circle. They were Old Kinds, every damn one of them, and regarded all the upstart species of the galaxy as inferior ephemera. It pained them to accept that their destiny, all destinies, lay in the purview of creatures that had been simple, single-cell protocytes when the Old Kind cultures were already mature.
Gahet had once told Grammaticus that the Cabal had made its first subtle advances towards the human species long before the advent of the Age of Terra. Gahet had said this bitterly, and more bitterly still had admitted the Cabal’s repeated failure to apply influence on human development.
‘You’ve always been feral, stubborn brutes,’ Gahet had said, ‘shockingly dogmatic in your self-worth. We tried to direct you, and influence your course. It was like…’
Gahet had paused, allowing his mind to select an appropriately humanocentric simile. ‘It was like commanding a tide to turn back,’ he finished.
Grammaticus had smiled. ‘We
are
a headstrong people, aren’t we?’ he had replied, with no little pride. ‘Did you not think it might have been easier to cull us before we grew teeth?’
Gahet had nodded, or at least, he had flexed his secondary nostrils in a mannerism that equated to a nod. ‘That was not our way then. We all deemed such notions as gross barbarism. All of us except Slau Dha, of course.’
‘Of course. And now?’
‘Now I regret we did not abort you when we had the chance. Destruction has become our only tool in latter days. I miss the subtle methods.’
Almost all of the humans recruited down the years had proved to be unviable or flawed. Most had been disposed of. Grammaticus believed that he had succeeded where so many others had failed because of his gift.
John Grammaticus was a high-function psyker.
‘T
HE UXOR WILL
see you, Het Heniker,’ the subaltern in the fur shako announced.
‘Thank you,’ John Grammaticus replied, and got up off the wooden chair at the end of the corridor. He walked down the hall towards the briefing room door, straightening his double-breasted jacket and cape. He undid the collar buttons of his shirt. It was almost noon and the terracotta palace was sweltering. Situated fifteen kilometres outside Mon Lo Harbour, the palace had been commandeered as a control station for the advance. Its ancient walls held the day’s heat like an oven. Reed screens soaked in water had been fixed over the windows to keep the palace interiors cool and fresh, but they were beginning to dry out.
John Grammaticus had no physiological need to perspire, but he permitted his body to do so. Every other human around was sweating freely, and he didn’t want them to notice that he wasn’t like them.
He knocked at the door.
‘Come!’
He went in. The chamber was long and broad, with pillars flanking the walls to support the tiled ceiling. The tops of the pillars had been carved to resemble the fronds of reeds, or snapping crocodilia, both common features in Nurthene architecture. A folding steel table had been set up in the centre of the room, and Uxor Rukhsana stood at the head of it, her four aides ranged on either side of the table beside her.
‘Uxor,’ Grammaticus said. ‘Good to see you.’ He tapped his throat. ‘I apologise for the unbuttoning, but this objectionable heat.’
‘Quite all right, Konig,’ she replied. Her aides all nodded accordingly. They were all female, all aged between thirteen and sixteen, uxors in waiting. Their ovaries had already been harvested for the Geno Five-Two Chiliad stock banks. They were now honing their ’cept powers, and acting as a support buffer for their assigned uxor.
Grammaticus found the operational structure of the Geno Five-Two Chiliad quite fascinating. Formed during the savage continental wars that had engulfed Terra at the end of the Age of Strife, the geno had proved to be a most effective and adaptable force. No wonder the Emperor had permitted them to endure after Unification. No wonder he had looked upon their system and stolen from it.
The geno practised gene mustering. Grammaticus had been thoroughly briefed on this. Gene mustering had been an essential tool during those caustic years of atomic hurricanes and drifting rad clouds. The core of the regiment was the uxors, a bloodline of latent psychically sensitive females. The females had their eggs harvested at puberty, and from them the heavy-built uterine soldiery of the unit were vat-grown, using the genetic codes of several proven, robust agnate gene-pools notorious for their martial merit. The geno grew tough warriors, but they complemented their brute strength and kept the pool clean by importing smart, proven field commanders from other forces. The hetmen were always non-stock individuals who excelled at tactics and strategy.
The uxors, at the top of the Chiliad’s command tree, were no longer capable of carrying children of their own to term. This, in ways not entirely understood, freed their minds, and allowed them to operate as perceptives, operational coordinators who could appreciate, as Gahet had put it during the briefing, ‘the behaviour of their children’.
At best, the uxors were weak psykers. Each one was capable of a rudimentary talent known as the ’cept, enough to enable their forces in the field and supply them with some insight. They burned out quickly. By twenty-six, twenty-seven, they were done as uxors, and restricted to other duties. During their active phase as perceptives, they were always accompanied by aides, uxors in training, whose raw psychic talent bolstered the ’ceptive power of their uxor even as they learned from her.
None of the females in the chamber possessed a fraction of John Grammaticus’s talent.
As he sat down at the end of the table opposite Uxor Rukhsana, he reached out. Instantly, he tasted feeble, immature ’cepts, chitter-chatter minds, the moist, unwholesome mental architecture of the pubescent aides. The technical inability to conceive made most uxor-aides gruesomely promiscuous. Grammaticus was repelled by the lurid, shallow thoughts that washed towards him. The aides were all thinking about the next soldier boy they’d hump, or how fabulous it was going to be to become an uxor.
Rukhsana was different. Grammaticus looked down the table towards her. For a start, she was a woman, not a girl; a startlingly appealing woman. Her lips were full, her long, straight, blonde hair centre-parted, her eyes heavily lashed and exotically grey. A master sculptor could not have improved upon her cheek bones. She was also twenty-eight, and at the end of her uxor service. He could feel that she hated this fact. She was broken by the thought that she would soon be something else: a medicae, a Munitorum commander, a cartomancer, an
uxor emeritus
.
Her powers were ebbing. Her ’cept was waning and weakening.
‘What do you have for me, sir?’ she asked.
Quite a voice. Even the aides took notice. Husky. No, silky, like honey. Grammaticus knew he was a little in love with her, and allowed himself to relish the fact. It had been a long time, seven hundred years, give or take, since he had permitted himself to respond to a human female in any way other than physical need.
‘Well, I have plenty, uxor,’ he replied, taking out the document case from under his arm and opening it.
‘You’ve actually been in Mon Lo Harbour?’ asked one of the aides, looking right at him. Grammaticus felt a wash of admiring lust.
‘Yes… what’s your name?’
‘Tuvi, sir,’ the girl said. She was the most mature of Rukhsana’s aides, about nineteen. Tuvi clearly found the idea of a daring intelligence officer quite intoxicating.
‘Yes, Tuvi. I made cover as a merchant called D’sal Huulta, and spent the last four days gathering evidence in the inner quarters of the town.’
Amongst other things,
he thought.
‘Wasn’t that terribly dangerous?’ asked another of the aides.
‘Yes, it was,’ said Grammaticus.
‘How were you not unmasked by the infidel enemy?’ asked Tuvi.
‘Be quiet,’ Rukhsana told her girls. ‘Intelligence operatives are hardly required to give away their tricks.’
‘It’s all right, uxor,’ Grammaticus smiled. He looked at Tuvi and said, ‘El’teh ta nash el et chey tanay.’
‘What?’ Tuvi replied.
‘It means,’ Grammaticus told her, ‘
I speak the local language as a native does,
in Nurthene.’
‘But—’ Tuvi began.
‘My dear, I’m not going to tell you how, so please don’t ask. If I might continue?’
Tuvi looked as if she was going to say something else.
‘Let the man speak, Tuvi,’ Rukhsana snapped. ‘Heniker?’
‘Oh, of course. Well, the location itself… as we know, the Nurthene have no orbital or interplanetary technology, nor have ever possessed such means. However, the area known as Mon Lo Harbour, though flooded and used for maritime shipping, was originally constructed as a setting down point for starships.’
Uxor Rukhsana blinked. ‘For starships?’ she echoed.
He was taking a slight risk in sharing this information, but John Grammaticus’s mind was finely trained to sort and appraise data. He knew exactly what he could give up and what he couldn’t. He believed it mattered very little if the Imperials found out that Mon Lo had once been an extraplanetary set-down. It was a halting site, in fact. The Cabal used to visit here, long ago. That’s why they knew about the Nurthene culture.
‘For starships, uxor.’
‘Are you sure?’ Uxor Rukhsana asked.
‘Absolutely,’ Grammaticus replied. ‘I have excellent sources.’
‘And when you say “originally”, Konig, what does originally mean?’
‘It means something between eight and twelve thousand years ago, enough time for sea-levels to change, for flood plains to rise, and for a massive, stone-cut extraplanetary harbour to fill with water and become a harbour of a more traditional nature.’
It was eleven thousand, eight hundred and twenty-six years, in fact, and the construction work had taken eighteen months. Grammaticus felt it wise to fudge the precision of his knowledge.
The aides started speaking all at once.
‘That would place construction during the Second Age of Technology,’ said one.
‘Around the time of the First Contact Event, and the first Alien Wars,’ said another.
‘Is there any evidence as to which xeno form might have been responsible?’ asked another.
‘Do the Nurthene know of its provenance?’ asked Tuvi.
‘Tuvi frames the best question,’ said Grammaticus, shutting down the chatter. ‘Do they know? Well, I don’t believe they do. They possess myths and legends, as all cultures do, and some of them contain elements that might be interpreted as containing some race-memory of xeno contact or intervention. But until the 670th Expedition came along, the Nurthene believed they were alone in the galaxy. Remember, the Nurthene don’t even realise they were originally colonists from Terra.’
‘That is the true misery of this war,’ Rukhsana nodded. ‘They do not recognise us as kin.’
Grammaticus felt her discomfort. Kinship meant so much to the geno uxors. Indeed, he found this aspect of the Emperor’s Great Crusade especially troubling. In its youth, mankind had spilled out across the stars, colonising thousands of worlds, forming the first human stellar community. Then the Age of Strife had come down, like the blade of a guillotine, and for the better part of five thousand years, warp storms had rendered interstellar travel impossible. The out-reaches of Man had become cut off, beleaguered, isolated. In that turmoil, many offshoots had entirely forgotten who they were or where they had come from. Such was the case with Nurth.
When the Emperor, a figure long foreseen by the Cabal, had finally unified the anarchic fragments of Terra, he had undertaken a Great Crusade – oh, how telling was
that
title! – to seek out, and reconnect with, the lost outposts of the human race. It was astonishing how often the lost worlds resisted those overtures of reconnection. It was unconscionable how many times the roving expedition fleets had been forced to go to war with the very cultures they had set out to rescue and embrace, just to bring them to what the Emperor had euphemistically called
compliance.
It was always, so the official line went, for their own good.
John Grammaticus had met the Emperor once, close on a thousand years before. The Emperor had been just another feudal warlord then, leading his thunder-armoured troops in an effort to consolidate his early Strife-age victories, and pave the way to eventual Unification. Grammaticus had been a line officer in the Caucasian Lewies, a significant force inveigled by truce and pact to support the Emperor’s assault on the territorial holdings of the Panpacific Tyrant, Dume.
After a bloody conquest at Baktria, Grammaticus had been one of a hundred Caucasian officers invited to a Triumph at Pash, hosted by the retinues of the thunderbolt and lightning army. During the festivities, the Emperor – even then he had been known only by that objectionable epithet – had grandly toured the tables to personally thank his foreign allies and the leaders of the mercenary clans. Grammaticus had been one of hundreds present to receive his grateful handshake. In that moment of contact, he had seen why the Emperor was a force to be reckoned with: a psyker of towering, unimaginable strength, not really human at all by any contemporary measure of the fact. Grammaticus, who had never met anyone else like himself, had shuddered, and felt like a drone insect in the presence of its hive king. The Emperor had felt Grammaticus in the same passing second of contact. He had smiled.
‘You have a fine mind, John,’ he had said, without having to ask Grammaticus his name. ‘We should talk, and consider the options available to beings like us.’