Persephone tattoo [Commissioned piece]

Invitation

Lynnworm World Map [Commissioned piece]

From the hearths of East Haven to the far reaches of Illan Cullain . . .

Citizens of the Hive

Spire noble

Menials are permitted 3 smiles after their shifts if they fulfill the Hegemony's daily quota. Excessive smiling indicates a lack of commitment to the Concordium and is to be always discouraged.

Chorister Hestia Pax, witness to a crime

Kolgrima character studies

Phoebe sketch

Character study. Phoebe XXVII, cyborg assassin, also a crew-member on board the Boundless Curiosity

Arch-Militant Jericho, ready to pounce. [Commissioned piece]

Power-suit design experiments

Jericho study

Iola down

The first hellgun round to hit Iola shattered her right fibula, dumping her down onto the stair-case wall. Her las-pistol skittered away, out of reach as the second shot lodged in her lower ribs, the plasma so hot it ignited her flesh. Strips of skin melted away, exposing raw flesh and scalded nerves. Limbs thrashing, Iola's potentia coil overheated and her implant systems shutdown in a rapid cascade. Had her organic brain not been utterly suffused in pain, she would have perhaps recalled that most common of Mechanicum credos: "The flesh is weak; there is never certainty in flesh, only inconstancy and death." The maxim, for all its validity, could not have snuffed out the searing agony which engulfed her consciousness . . .

Iola interfaces with the cryo-casket

The cryptic schematic guided them down to deck 12 and through a maze of increasingly narrow walkways, to a dead-end that did not appear on the route. Closer inspection revealed one of the bulkheads was false and functioned as a concealed door. Just as the schematic had been received unexpectedly, the door screeched open on corroded runners and they warily entered a stale-smelling chamber, the place crammed with cogitation banks and control stations, all faintly lit by a congregation of diodes and three dim auxiliary lamps. The coolant mist lingering in here enveloped Iola as she respectfully approached the damp, bulky object which formed the center-piece of the dormant apparatus. Despite the cryo-casket's age, a man slept within it, sealed in timeless suspension beneath its frosted canopy.

Iola engaged the casket's binary channel and it responded by opening one of its panels to present its interface port. She inserted her cranial plug into the machine and it chattered lazily, it's spirit sluggish from years of inattention. It took several seconds to compile the preservation report she requested. Being the oldest machine Iola had ever melded with, the cryo-casket made her uneasy, its coding an obscure form, markedly different from the modalities required to program and command the mono-task units back on Scintilla. Final calculations shuddered and rattled through its innards and it relayed the results via the link: bio-signs indicated that what remained of the man inside it was alive and in stable hibernation.

Iola Echo IV, initial designs. More updates soon