Chapter 6: The Probe
Countless whispers surrounded him as he too prayed. When whispered by thousands, they become a sort of white noise, a blanket isolating the mind from its surroundings, and letting it focus on the worshipping. It created a strange feeling in Serapis as he sat there, almost like loneliness but more intense. Serapis joined in the whispering, letting his words drown out in the sea of noise. He searched his mind, finding new ways to express himself in his prayers, always trying to outdo himself in his praise, getting better and better for each holy gathering.
The whispering stopped, and Serapis opened his mechanical eye. The light was sharper than he was used to, straight from a sun, shining in mighty rays through the tall windows of the cathedral. The cathedral was located on the upper deck of the vessel, just under the main bridge so that it may get the most of the natural light outside. Now it lit up hundreds of heads, silent, as they waited for the ecclesiarch to speak.
"Pray with me children of the master of mankind" The ecclesiarch spoke, his voice raspy and altered by the mechanical components fused to his flesh, in order to strengthen and amplify his voice. "Pray with me, and let our voices in unison carry out our message" He continued. He was dressed in layers of coats and robes, ornamented with ancient relics of all kinds of shining metal. He is himself was a sort of temple, scriptures attached with chains to his body, so that he may at any time utter the canticles in prayer to the holiest God-Emperor.
"In faith his Imperium is united, and in faith shall it be preserved. In loyalty, we gain his sacred favour, and in labour, we redeem ourselves of any sin. The Emperor guides us, he lights the way in a universe of darkness and pain. Through our labour and toil, our lord gains the means to strike down the enemies of Humanity, and through our undying love, he protects us. Remember always, that he protects. The Emperor protects us from the mutant, the vile Xenos, and most importantly, he shields us from the horrors and heresies of the cursed immaterium. Through the Emperor's vigilance, humanity is allowed to flourish and blossom, as we have for ten millennia. Under the Emperor's shield we live, our children live, and our grandchildren will live under the divine protection of him upon the throne. Ave Imperator. The Emperor protects." "The Emperor protects" They answered as one, and the room felt as it surged with power for a moment. The acoustics of the great cathedral carried their voices with great strength, and it's echo lingered for a while before fading.
"My lord, the last prayer is carried out. The Emperor is with us in our endeavour. We are ready to initiate the first stage of testing." The adept told Regulus as he stood watching the void outside the large windows of the bridge command. "If we are ready, initiate protocols. May the machine god be with us."
Lights blinked and sirens wailed as the ship warmed up its warp-engine. Countless adepts and other crew members worked all kinds of machines and controls to properly stabilize the ships inner workings. The hull creaked as the vessel made ready. But it was not the cruiser that was to enter the warp, no, it focused its energy on a small object just below. An augur probe was being prepared to be thrown into the immaterium carrying all kinds of sensors and instruments.
The void violently tore itself open, collapsing in on itself as the warp engines ruptured the very fabric of space and time. The fires of the warp burned through more and more of the space in front of the cruiser until it had scorched an opening, like a portal to the warp, bathing the darkness in strange lights and chaotic illusions.
Now the probe below the cruiser started accelerating, gaining more and more speed until finally, it was dragged and shot into the opening by some unseen force, and just as it did, the portal imploded and disappeared, as though it was never there from the start. Now, the Magos could only wait for his precious answers.
Millennium M36
"It cannot be!" He exclaimed, baffled as he looked at his sensory equipment once again. "It is impossible!" For hours he had processed the same data over and over again, trying to get a different, more logical answer to his questions. "Come here Apostia, watch this," The young Stradivaria asked one of his Tech-Adept colleagues.
"What is it Regulus, more messages from the future? Or maybe from the Past?" She asked him sarcastically, not convinced of the legitimacy of his discoveries. "Actually, both it would appear. I cannot wrap my mind around it." Apostia rose from her workbench and sat down beside Regulus, reviewing his datapad and cognition archives. "Isn't it curious?" He said as he watched Apostia read through the files. "Curious indeed" She answered as she continued to read and decipher various encodings and encryptions. "I have decoded it several times, and the signatures do not seem as they have been corrupted." "But Regulus, it is impossible, it cannot be. It says here that it was sent in the early Forty-Second Millenium, but that is nearly six millennia in the future, yet here, the code has degraded severely, as though the signals have ionized away over hundreds of thousands of years." Now she was equally as blown away as her colleague, both of them cycling and recycling through the information searching for flaws or signs of chaotic corruption, but none could be found. "How can a signal come from the future, and yet be possibly millions of years old?"
Present-day
The warps effect of the material world had always fascinated Stradivaria. The change from something impossible to something possible always had another outcome than expected. Numbers changing from gibberish to facts in milliseconds as the world struggled to translate it into the language of physics. He had noticed that time had always been the hardest as if time was one of the most basic and fundamental laws everything followed. Time was unbreakable, and after forty millennia, still could not be tinkered with. It happened sometimes that ships travelling the warp sometimes managed to slip its iron grasp and move through its cracks, but it had never been done intentionally. The workings of the time were unknown to humanity and seemed to be to all other races as well. Even the Necron, with their vast pools of eldritch and heretical knowledge, and seeming mastery of the material realm, had not managed to change the flow of time.
Regulus felt his mind drifting into aimless thinking. Improvable hypothesis and incalculable equations. His thoughts wandered as if he were young again, unrestrained by his bionic enhancements and religious beliefs in the importance of efficiency and hoarding of data. But those times were passed, and he snapped out of it as he once again came to his senses. This daydreaming was wasteful, and there were more pressing things that required his mental presence.
"Stradivaria, it has been some time my old friend!" Regulus twitched, he wasn't used to being spoken to in such a manner. Few would ever dare to call him a friend. "I heard you have achieved great things here Regulus. News is spreading, and you have gained the attention of some important people." The man continued as he walked across the bridge towards the Grand Magos. Stradivaria turned. "Inquisitor. I did not imagine I would have the pleasure of your presence aboard my vessel."
The Inquisitor was a tall, well-built man. He was old, but his age didn't seem to affect him in any negative way. His clothes were as proper as his posture, all according to the military code and latest fashion. He wore a large coat, hiding all kinds of equipment that could come in handy in his secret work for the Emperor. At one side, he carried a master-crafted and fine tweaked ornamented las-pistol, and on the other his force-blade, ready to strike at a moments notice. Over his shoulders, he carried a great canine pelt. A trophy from a campaign long ago, when he had served in the Guard. But the Inquisitor did not come into the room alone. He was closely followed by an escort of two Astartes from the Ultramarines chapter. The lumbering beings spread awe among the various adepts and crewmen operating the many controls on the bridge. Most of them had never seen one of the Emperors own angels of death, and almost none would ever get the privilege to see one again.
"The nature of your experiments here intrigue me and the ordo, in fact so much so that I have been granted an entire company of these fine warriors" The Astartes came to a halt behind him as he stopped next to Regulus, joining him in gazing through the bridge window. "Why are you here Inquisitor. How does the ordo know of my work." The Inquisitor chuckled in a cold tone. "Forgive me Grand Magos. I thought you had learned by now. Nothing escapes the eyes and ears of the Inquisition. You are not as omnipotent as you believe."
"What have they sent you here to do Inquisitor. If you are to be aboard my cruiser, I must know the extent of your potential interventions in my work." Although his voice was mechanical and calculated, you could sense some distress in his monotone language. "Oh, I am not here to hinder your achievements lord Magos, I am simply here to observe as you accomplish your goals. I am but the eyes of the Ordo. But to be able to comprehend the scope of your work here, I need your compliance in helping me understand. And as a servant of the throneworld, you owe me that compliance Regulus."
Stradivaria stood thoughtful for a while. Thinking about how he should translate his thoughts into words. "Four Millennia ago I intercepted a strange signal on the edge of Imperial space. It was not chaos corruption, nor was it the blasphemous signals of any vile Xenos. No, it was, in fact, an Imperial transmission with strange encryption which I cracked in minutes. It was strange in those days, for the encrypted was designed in such a fashion, I felt that it had been made for me to crack. But stranger yet was that embedded in the transmission, were memories. Memories from my life of moments that had yet to pass. The transmission also carried one final text. It can be done." Regulus stopped, once again watching the stars through his window. "Continue Magos" The Inquisitor followed. "Upon further research, I deduced that the signal was incredibly old and had travelled trillions of lightyears. And that is when I understood it. And that is when my work began. The summaries of my research indicated that in the future I had done it. That I had achieved the unachievable. Not only will I travel through space, but I will also travel through time. So for the last Millennia, I have searched for the fracture in space and time. I have searched for the warp anomaly that will guide us to a galaxy incomprehensibly far away, and to a time aeons in the past."
"So if we have found it, what exactly are we waiting for Regulus? Are you afraid of destiny?" The Inquisitor asked sarcastically, not expecting an answer. "There is no concept such as destiny, Inquisitor. There are only mathematics and the Machine-Gods plan."
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