[M36.238.06]
Archmagos Kharon-IX of the True Mechanicus emitted a faint binharic of irritation, mechadendrites twitching as he adjusted his black robes into precise alignment.
Things weren't going as his algorithmic calculus had predicted.
Kharon had been there from the beginning, as a lowly acolyte of Mars, he had seen through the false prophet's lies and seen the Cult of the Mechanicus for what they were. Slaves to their tradition and dead liturgies. Locked in cages. Held back from true knowledge and power. As an enlightened adept he’d embraced the righteous priests in their war.
It had been the optimal course of action even if they had been forced away from Holy Mars. Although Horus's flesh had failed him he still believed it to be the correct decision. They had thrown the shackles holding them; the knowledge he now possessed couldn’t even be conceived by the Mechanicus.
He had languished on the Hell Forges learning and increasing his power. Both personnel and subservient assets. He reached Magos and even Archmagos with little difficulty with his intuitive grasp for fusing machine-logic and empyric flux.
But after centuries of development he found himself stuck, trapped in a loop of diminishing returns. He didn’t gain the opportunities for blessings by the Ruinous Powers, nor did he have chances to increase his own political power. So he looked elsewhere. The Hell Forges had also become quite hostile to him, but such inefficiencies were irrelevant to the primary calculation.
So if he wanted to become a Fabricator General of his own Hell Forge then he would have to requisition one himself. And so he planned. He settled on Stratix as the perfect target. Large enough to be fitting of his station when converted, but not so powerful that he stood little chance of controlling it.
He had spent millennia slowly building within the forge world. He had started small, many of his faction having been killed as he retreated from his home aboard the Hell Forge. Over time, he had drawn new disciples in, many tired of the doctrinal locks holding them back.
He had carefully led them down the path of the enlightenment, and they'd willingly joined the True Mechanicus. The Moirae Schism had been a blessing in that regard. Bringing in far more numbers of recruits, even if not all of them joined, it brought his plans forward by decades at the least.
His plans should have come to fruition centuries ago. But somehow Archmagos Viel failed in becoming the Locum. He had expended a significant number of favours to get him promoted.
Many of Archmagos Viel Collegex had in fact been his creatures. Then, out of nowhere, Locum Deltor-9o/0 snatched victory with some impressive manoeuvring. With Viel banished, he had no interest in letting his minions languish in some hive, so he called them back to him.
Then he went back to planning. He was patient. The outcome was mathematically inevitable.
It had only delayed him, not stopped him. Every year he grew stronger, converting more people to his cause. It was easy to do. Most recognised the falsehood and shackles that the Cult of the Machine God was. Not to mention the proof was before them, the False Prophet's decaying corpse on the Golden Throne.
Kharon turned his attention to the vox message, grimacing as he did at the inefficient and barbaric method. But there was no choice; he couldn’t risk otherwise.
He nodded, pleased that the preparations were going according to plan. They had been reserving troops for the last six months, readying for the final assault that would break the delusional Adeptus Mechanicus.
It seemed that was the only thing that had recently. The accursed Machine Spirit—an emergent aberration of misapplied reverence. If he ever found out who had awakened it, he would flay their flesh from their bones.
But it was only the largest of the recent operational failures.
Some carless disciples had been found on recent expeditions which had put the planet on alert. Thankfully a perfect opportunity arrived in the form of the warp storms. Maybe that was what put the Machine Spirit onto his trail.
It had started harmlessly enough, just a few cells going silent.
Nothing unusual about that. The phantom data readings were dismissed as noospheric static. Just an echo. The noosphere was filled with them, but with hindsight, that had been a mistake.
Still only minor things. But then larger, more important cells went silent. At first he thought it was a move of a rival. Few on the forge world could challenge him, but it was a possibility. Conflict was the purest engine of innovation—that was self-evident and the faction he built played into that heavily.
Competition was fierce to move up the ranks. Kharon liked it this way; it allowed the best rise. It proved they deserved to be there.
But the silence had still been unnerving. So much so that it forced him to make a more overt move than he normally would have, trying to get the Locums fighting. Viel should have been easy to bait. The chaos would have been the perfect obfuscation according to his predictive algorithms.
They had already been progressing nicely with his Dark Skitarii positioned to take control of key locations.
But that too had been thwarted.
At the time he hadn't been aware of who, but he now knew it must have been the ancient machine spirit. He suppressed an involuntary feedback spike as the hair on the back of his neck stood. Or they would have been if he wasn’t timeless metal. He glanced over his shoulder—paranoid, before shaking it off.
He was an Archmagos of the New Mechanicus; he didn’t fear a bound and irrational machine-intellect.
Then Archmagos Deltor-9o/0 had been discovered and killed.
With his death, Kharon panicked. Abandoning optimal calculations, he sent out the signal to start his takeover. It was earlier than he hoped, but it could no longer be delayed. Even that hadn't gone well. Many of his Skitarii hadn't activated.
But today, victory would be his. It was the final push to break the stalemate in his favour.
A pulse through the vox had confirmed the assault had broken the line, still under the cover of the Noopheric-Disrupters. They were the only things that kept him and his adepts safe.
The first few weeks of the war had been trying. Not worrying, he had long ago defeated such emotions. Fear amongst them. Entire armies set ablaze or important magi found as smoking corpses within the still secure sanctums. Not to mention his sleeper agents.
He had felt hunted. He could almost feel the machine spirit searching for him. But conflict bred progress.
He had been inspired and built the machines that blocked off areas from the noosphere, which led to now.
Kharon sat back on his throne, waiting.
The vox message came, but instead of victory it came as a garbled corrupted transmission.
<…white fire…cannot contain…it sees us…blessed circuits turning to ash…machine spirit wrath…WRATH…>
Irritated but with no choice, he stepped out of his sanctum.
As soon as he did, he felt a weight press down on him—of something ancient.
He opened himself up to the noosphere and he stepped back in fear. The normal sounds of the noosphere spread out around, but they were discordant, out of harmony. Pulsing through the song of the noosphere was a furious, hungry flame. It spread faster than he could track.
He could feel the malicious pleasure in it now that it had found him.
Jumping back he brought his bodyguards with him, but not all were fast enough.
He was cut off from the noosphere once more, but he didn’t need to be connected. The Skitarii froze in place at the threshold of the door, locked into a silent binharic scream as fire burst from within them.
The eyes, hidden behind lenses, eyelids removed so they were always alert and aware, glowed white. The liquid that kept the eyes moist, boiled and burst, shattering the glass. Releasing a geyser of chilling fire.
He took more steps back in rare unfettered horror as the white flames consumed the Praetorians. He could feel the hunger in the flame. The unquenchable anger.
How he could feel it Kharon hadn't worked out. But the vestigial organic remnants of his cognition core, long repressed by logic and technology, screamed for him to run.
He pushed such silly thoughts away. He was safe within his sanctum. It had to be. Assured once more, he settled back onto his throne and looked on with more interest as flesh was burned away, metal was melted and bones were scorched.
A scream cut through his contemplation.
Furious, hungry, inhuman.
It bounced off the walls, distorting, seemingly coming from every direction, with every vox or speaker in the room, blaring the rage of the sprint.
Kharon almost smirked, confident in his safety. That was until he felt a tingle on his mind, a scraping against his mental shields.
Snapping his attention to it, he watched as scrap code attempted to burrow into his cortical defences. Around him, those with less guarded minds froze, faces twisting into a horrified, silent scream. Only it wasn’t silent. He could feel scrap code under it, somehow using them as a relay for a new attack vector.
He fought it off. He had far more experience with it; one needed to on Hell Forges. They were a common strategy for attack.
He was thankful for his experience as the small portion of the code he was fighting was harder than any he had ever fought. It shifted and changed faster than he could follow, identifying and exploiting microfractures in his defensive logic. Burning through defensive sigils and logic-wards with terrifying ease.
He remained locked in battle, his confidence slowly increasing the longer he held it off. He was learning what worked. He almost scoffed, as if some code could overcome his millennia of knowledge.
Then the lights flickered.
He ignored it as irrelevant. Power fluctuation, that was all. He blocked another probe, pushing it further from his mind.
Then the power drop registered. They ran on his private generator. He spun looking for the disrupter. He had just enough time to watch as it shuddered to a stop. The machine, having lost power, was unable to sustain the bio-mechanical processes keeping the cognisant humans generating the field alive.
Before his eyes the human brains burned themselves out.
The machine fell silent.
Kharon could feel the noosphere rush back to envelope him. And with it came the entity. Its mind and power greater than any he had ever encountered. Dwarfing even those of the ancient freed titans he had seen from afar.
Vast, inhuman, merciless. Its very presence and weight cracked his shields, and Kharon had just enough time to scream before he was consumed by fire.
---
Locum Veil Nox cycled through the incoming data-litanies, his sub cogitators parsing each data thread before feeding it to him. The outlook was improving. There was a 0.72% drop in casualties over the last three months. He dismissed the precise numbers as doctrinally irrelevant. They were merely resource tallies; he didn’t care for the tens of millions of souls he was referring to.
The navy had reclaimed control over space, not complete control, but enough to start bringing in supplies once more. With the thousands of tons of materials once more flowing in, the forges ignited once more. They were now pumping out vast quantities of war materials.
A far more optimal state than the recycling of before.
With the new supplies they had been able to push back the accursed hereteks of the Dark Mechanicus, profaners of the Machine God’s works.
Estimates put them as defeated within five years. A timeframe well within acceptable tolerances. The war had at least been an excellent test bed for his technology. The crystals had far exceeded his estimates. He was pleased they were attributed to his name—though such recognition was, of course, secondary to service to the Omnissiah. But it infuriated him that a jumped-up adept and his apprentice had claimed discovery of the most useful lens effects found.
At least his apprentice was a major contributor so it was still associated with his lineage.
Speaking of.
Viel initiated a status-query.
He'd had little time to keep tabs on him. He had far more important work to focus on and had left his Collegex to get on with it for the most part. They all had their roles, as decreed by proper hierarchical order.
Glancing through it he saw what he had expected. Aleric had mostly focused on two areas. First, helping his sponsor, a rising star within the Dominus discipline. Then it was work within the noosphere. At first this had been sabotage and the like, but that quickly fell by the wayside as he found a different calling.
Once more Viel was impressed by his foresight.
Aleric's affinity with machine spirits helped him with corrupted machine spirits. So much so he had become the foremost expert on Techsorcery. He had the highest success rating within the forge world, higher in fact than any he had ever seen.
Not just containing them, but expunging the corruption. The Techsorcist was a relatively new discipline coined by Magos Eremor, but incredibly valuable in combating the Dark Mechanicus and their warp-corrupted machines. It had been created in response to the increased warp artefacts and corrupted machine spirits of recent centuries.
The Ordo Malleus of the Inquisition had snapped up any they could. Something Viel considered if the ganger became too popular. It was an incredibly sought-after profession, though not a popular one, what with the dangers involved unable to be overstated.
He was about to send out another wave of instructions when reports started rolling in.
+Alert: Enemy incursion verified. Defensive perimeter compromised. Trajectory aligned with the most holy vaults.++
A last desperate push under the cover of the noosphere disrupter. Otherwise the Spirit would have alerted them. It seemed to know all that happened within the planet. He registered a rare flutter of fear and reverence at the presence of the Ancient Machine Spirit.
He hadn't been able to meet it, but he felt sure it was another sign from the Omnissiah. It had focused its attention around sectors he defended, at least at first.
If he could only talk to it, he was sure the machine spirit would support him. Then there was nothing that stopped his rise to Fabricator General, as was only logical within the Omnissiah’s design. Once he had it, he would lead the Stratix into a golden age of optimal output and divine efficiency.
He would raise it with the Machine God's blessing, to be only inferior to the most holy Mars.
His concentration was broken by a shiver that rippled through the noosphere.
Data feeds were disrupted. The lights flickered in his sanctum as power was rerouted. He followed it down deep into the planet as ancient, unknown machines shuddered and then awakened for the first time in millennia. They surged, syncing together, each machine adding computing power to whatever had drawn on them.
In the sector that hid the Crypt, a major component of their victory, a cold sun was born. As far as he was from it he could still see its burning light, brighter than any sigil-cluster or noospheric beacon he had ever witnessed. Then it pulsed and liquid white fire erupted from it, flooding in every direction.
It spread unopposed. Passing through every data pathway, vault, and sanctum, large and small.
Like wildfire.
He watched it propagate from system to system, passing through each with terrifying ease. His fellow adepts weren't spared the fierce purifying light.
In fact, none were spared its gaze.
Faster than should be possible, it washed over him. One second looking distant, then it was upon him. It slipped through his sanctum’s defences with ease; the few defences that activated were crushed. Before it slammed into him, slicing through his sanctified logic-shields.
Then it was in his mind. He could feel the cold inhuman intelligence, almost frothing with rage. It assessed him, tearing through his mind, with little regard to comfort. He could feel its judgment weigh on him.
The malevolent spirit finished and as quickly as it had torn through him, it was gone.
In its wake was pain, his mind a mess, as well as fear, but also awe. Just experiencing it reaffirmed the immeasurable power of the Machine God he faithfully served if he had Spirits like that as his servants.
Even space wasn’t spared. Reports started appearing of the local hereteks navy falling apart as ships fell silent, dead or had failsafe's triggered and self-destructed. Within minutes, the solar system had been purged.
Somehow, the light had travelled across the system far faster than should be possible.
In the fires wake was quiet. The sea of data still for the first time, as if holding its breath.
Once his mind was collected once more, he scanned the data trails the Spirit had left behind. He felt his jaw clench. First, at what he found but also at what he felt.
He recognised those signals. But that couldn’t be right. Aleric was competent but not skilled enough for this. Maybe he had just come into contact with it.
No.
The further he investigated the less likely that was. Aleric's signature was tied deeply within the Spirit. And even that was coming into question. Viel registered a rising cascade of alarm impulses, as it became increasingly evident the entity that had held his mind in the palm of his hand wasn’t a sanctified ancient holy machine spirit, left to watch over the forge world, but a malevolent Abominable Intelligence.
Mere minutes after the White Flame slumbered once more, Viel was in an emergency meeting with his fellow Fabricator Lords. The war was concluded. The heretics had been burned in the Omnissiah’s purifying flames. But they had a new worry.
The others confirmed it. The entity was an Abominable Intelligence. The Silica Animus represented the highest form of heresy. It was an abhorrence that couldn’t be permitted to exist under any doctrine and would require immediate and total purgation.
Such inherently evil and profane constructs could not be allowed to live.
Least of all within the holy sanctity of the forge world.
Its creator, which was looking increasingly like Aleric would need to be purged. Depending on the assessment, he would need to be banished to a desolate rock until he passed or a more permanent correction would be needed. His fellow Lords agreed.
Although Locum Deltor-9o/0 advocated for banishment on recognition of his services to the forge world. His actions may have spared it from a more catastrophic fate at the hands of the Dark Mechanicus. There was also the ancient machine spirit and how that fitted into everything.
The Fabricator General eventually sided with Locum Deltor-9o/0. The deciding factor came from deep discussions behind closed doors with other prominent Magi or Archmagos.
There was a fear that they wouldn’t be able to control him, but with the AI slumbering, such concerns diminished. Viel still had his backdoors into the adept's mind, ensuring he could be overridden and returned to compliance if required.
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