Master of Mankind excerpt

Minute circuitry on the fingertips of the Omnissiah's bloodstained surgical gloves pressed to the giant's chest. They generated an aura of ultrasound - wherever they touched, crude internal scans of the spine and surrounding flesh drew themselves upon several of the nearby monitors, at various angels. The slumbering body gave a heavy twitch and a grunt as pain spiked through its nervous system.

Arkhan moved around the giant's pained features. The metal teeth. The furrowed brow. The scars upon scars. The Cables tendrilling out of his scalp like cybernetic dreadlocks.

"Angron" he breathed the name.

"Yes" the Emperor confirmed, inhumanly toneless. "I am trying to undo the damage that has been done to the Twelfth"

The Emperor gestured a free hand, similarly smeared with blood, to three screens that still projected a flickering hololithic of the giant's skull, brain and spinal column. The image was riven with dozens of slender black tendrils that were anything but organic. Arkhan stared at the scanned images in slow-dawning understanding. He comprehension of human anatomy was absolute, given his experience and education, but the images on the screens weren't entirely human. Nor were they in accordance with the sacred and approved pathways to augmetic ascension.

This was rather more profane

"It is my belief that you have seen this device before" said the Emperor, "is that so?"

"Yes, Divine One. In my expedition down to the Hexarchion Vaults"

"Vaults that were resealed by your own decree, ratified by the Fabricator General Kelbor-Hal and all findings within unrecorded"

"Yes, Divine One. The lore within represented a moral threat and potential perversion of cognition"

The Emperor's fingers pressed to the unconscious primarch's temple. "But you saw a device like this"

Land nodded. "The profane texts entombed within the Hexarchion Vaults names it a cruciamen"

The Emperor continued his fingertip scans, saying nothing.

"I have never seen one implanted and operational", Arkhan confessed, "and never of this specific pattern and intensity, in the response of stasis or storage. The devices in the sealed vault were rather more crude than this construct"

"That is to be expected"

"Why, in your infinite wisdom, would you implant this device inside a primarch?"

"I did not do so, Arkhan"

"Then...with great shame, I confess that I am not certain what I am looking at, Divine One"

"The Twelfth and its Legion call them the 'Butcher's Nails'. The Emperor kept staring at the screens. "You are looking at modifications to my original template of the Twelfth. More precisely, you are looking at modifications of primitive genius. Before these examinations, I had believed the enhancements performed upon the Twelfth on Nuceria were the source of its emotional instability. My hypothesis was that they stirred the Twelfth to a sense of perpetual but ultimately artificial rage. Yet the opposite is true. With the alterations made to the limbic lobe and insular cortex, the surgeons have impaired the Twelfth's ability to regulate any emotion at all. Furthermore, they have re-threaded its capacity to take pleasure in anything but the sensation of anger. They are the only chemicals and electric signals that flow freely through, and from, its brain. All else is dulled to nothingness or rewired to inspire a supreme degree of agony. It is a testament to the durability of my primarch project that the Twelfth has managed to survive this long."

"His own emotions cause him pain?"

"No, Arkhan. Everything. Everything causes it pain. Thinking. Feeling. Breathing. The only respite it has is in the rewired neurological pleasure it receives from the chemicals of anger and aggression."

"That's vile" said the technoarchaeologist. "Perversion of cognition, rather than purification"

The Emperor showed nothing but passionless interest. "Such rewriting of physiology certainly hinders the Twelfth's higher brain function. The device is cunningly wrought, for something so crude"

"Can you remove it?"

"Of course" The Emperor answered, still looking at the screens.

Arkhan did his best to hide his surprise. "Then, Divine One, why would you leave it there?"

"This is why." The Emperor rested both hands on Angron's head, one with fingertips pressed to the primarch's temple and cheek, the other pressed to the crown of his shaven head where the cable-tendrils joined flesh and bone. The images on the several screens immediately resolved to a clearer imprint of a brutishly dense skull miserable with crude cybernetics and the bone-scarring of powerful surgical laser cuts.

"Do you see?" The Emperor asked

Arhan saw. The tendrils sunk deep, rooted in the meat of the brain, threaded to the nervous system, and down in roughly serpentine coils around the spinal column. Every movement must have been agony for the primarch, feeding back into the base emotion of anger and spite.

Worse, the brain's limbic lobe and insular cortex were more than just savaged by the pain engine's insertion; they had been surgically attacked and removed even before implantation. The device hammered into his skull hadn't ruined those sections of the brain - it had replaced them. Ugly black cybernetics showed on the internal scans, in place of entire sections of the primarch's brain tissue.

"They are the only thing keeping him alive" Arkhan said.

The Emperor lifted His hands from the somnolent primarch's skull. Most of the screens instantly went black. He spoke as he removed His surgical gloves. "This has been educational"

"I don't understand, Divine One. Can I be of use to you?"

"You have been of immense use, Arkhan. You have confirmed what I suspected regarding the cruciamen's origins. No one else could have done so. I am accordingly grateful."

Arkhan had expected the Onnissiah's dispassionate demeanor, but to witness it was so intimate a context was inspiring in the extreme. So neutral. So inhumanly neutral.

"Divine one", he said, before he knew he was going to say anything at all

"A compromised primarch is still a primarch" The Emperor mused, still distracted. "What is it Arkhan?"

Land hesitated. "You are more sanguine than I would have imagined in this moment, even knowing of your holy detachment from emotion."

"What would the alternative be?" The Emperor laid the bloodstained gloves on a nearby surgical trolley, where red-marked knives and other instruments lay wet and freshly used. "That I might mourn the Twelfth as though it were my injured son, and I its grieving father?"

"Never that, Divine One". Arkhan chose his words with care. "Though some might expect that"

The Emperor unlocked the sealed vambraces of His hazard suit, then removed the surgical mask that had covered his face until now. "It is not my son, Arkhan. None of them are. They are warlords, generals, tools bred to serve a purpose. Just as Legions were bred to serve a purpose"

Arkhan looked down at the sleeping demigod, watching Angron's facial features twitch and tense in painful harmony with a ravaged nervous system.

"With your blessing, Divine One, I would ask something of you"

The Emperor turned his eyes upon Land for the first time. Falling beneath the Omnissiah's gaze made the Motive Force in Arkhan's bloodstream flow faster, tingling like weak acid.

"Ask"

"The primarchs. It is said they have always called you father. It seems so...sentimental. I've never understood why you allow it"

The Emperor was silent for some time. When He spoke, his eyes had returned to the hulking form on the surgical slab. "There was once a writer" he said, "a penner of children's stories who told the tale of a wooden puppet that wished to be reborn as a human child. And this puppet, this automaton of painted, carved wood that sought to be a thing of flesh and blood - do you know what it called its maker? What would such a creature call the creator that gave it shape and form and life?"

Father. Arkhan felt his skin crawl. "I understand, Divine One"

"I see that you do"