Since the departure of the Iron Men and the collapse of the Federation, the galaxy had been plunged into millennia of unremitting chaos. It was not until the return of the Emperor, the commencement of the Unification Wars, and the launching of the Great Crusade that humanity was forged anew into the Imperium of Man.
During that fractured and dark epoch, countless techno-warlords had risen. Giant interstellar conglomerates and armed factions that survived the Federation's fall began a cycle of mutual predation and total war. Their primary objectives were the conquest of former Federation military installations; the ultra-sophisticated technologies, technical data, and prototype hardware housed within were viewed as essential for their future survival and dominance.
Yet, even a fractured Federation was not something these interstellar upstarts could easily provoke. These high-level research institutes and technological centers possessed formidable, independent defensive forces. To repel greedy invaders, many Federation weapon centers activated experimental-grade armaments. Countless worlds were reduced to absolute nothingness once those unrefined weapons were unleashed.
Even so, the scientists who once served the Federation remained steadfast. Though they had lost their Iron Man assistants, Stone Men artisans, and Gold Men engineers, it did not mean the most brilliant minds of humanity were helpless. Leveraging the technological heritage of their race, some successfully repelled the avaricious merchant-barons and their private armies.
These survivors eventually devolved into what would be known as Techno-Barbarians. They possessed dangerous and terrifying weaponry, harboring a fierce hostility toward all interlopers. For a time, these weapons granted them power. But without the vast logistical support of the Federation's infrastructure, it took only a few generations for the descendants of these scientists to become arrogant and ignorant.
Knowledge began to slip away, and the true curtain of the Dark Age of Technology fell, remaining closed until the Emperor's Crusade fleets arrived at their doorsteps.
The Great Crusade was not merely an endeavor to reunify humanity; it was the Emperor's grand reclamation of lost Federation technology. Yet, it had all begun too late. The ignorant Techno-Barbarians and techno-warlords had been merciless in their internecine conflicts. Countless data archives and priceless technical artifacts had already been utterly destroyed.
It is for this reason that the Adeptus Mechanicus, to this day, cannot fully comprehend the principles of the Leman Russ Battle Tank's power plant, specifically how it can burn almost any liquid fuel, nor can they successfully adapt this technology to all Imperial vehicles. As the loss of technical knowledge within the Priesthood of Mars accelerated, the study of such wondrous principles became increasingly insurmountable.
Now, the massive weapon held by the Destroyer-class Heavy Automaton was one such prototype of unknown technical origin. Its external housing and various auxiliary systems had been severely corroded by the Nurgle daemons, but Axion began to decode the identification tags according to Federation protocols.
A Federation Identification Code could be found on any creation, containing a wealth of information: place of origin, production date, batch number, and specific designations. Within this strange weapon, only one component bore a Federation code.
Utilizing the Sapient Machine Automaton's enhanced scanners, Axion identified it as a specialized Energy Conversion Module, a custom-built experimental prototype originating from a research center in the Federation's northern territories. Cross-referencing the center's coordinates with current Imperial star charts placed it within the Segmentum Obscurus. However, that planet had been utterly scoured during the Great Crusade. Records indicated the assault had met with failure and was eventually abandoned; a virus-bombing or cyclonic torpedo strike had triggered a global geological cataclysm, burying everything forever.
The other components of the weapon, however, were stamped with incorrect coding rules, strings of indecipherable digits.
To determine the source of the earlier signal, the nanite swarms from the Destroyer-class automata began repairing the odd weapon's defects, drawing raw materials directly from the damaged chassis of the two automata themselves. Once the structural integrity was restored, the energy conduits were rerouted and interfaced with the Destroyer's Quantum Reactor Core.
As the weapon was triggered, a colossal beam of light punched a hole clean through the mountain facility. The entry point was perfectly circular; the mountainside, the warehouse structure, and the external debris had been vaporized instantly. The strange energy resonance produced as power flowed through the weapon was the exact signal that had attracted Axion.
Based on the energy signature, the beam consisted of an unknown energy structure not recorded in the Iron Men's archives. A comparison revealed it was structurally identical to the energy signature that had struck the Destroyer when it was hit by Nurgle's Chaos energies earlier.
There was only one possibility: the weapon's energy conversion core possessed the ability to accommodate multiple types of energy and convert them into a fixed, singular output format.
Though Axion had previously hand-crafted a small energy converter, his core data suggested such devices had no potential for weaponization. Their conversion efficiency was typically low, and they were limited by input types, usually requiring electrical or radiant energy to convert into a quantum energy field. Furthermore, such fields were divergent and required a dedicated storage module for recovery to replenish power.
Yet, the conversion core before them could clearly convert energy at a stable, high density.
As to how this object had crossed half the galaxy from the Segmentum Obscurus to the Ultima Segmentum, Axion could not comprehend. Probability models suggested that Techno-Barbarians from this world had likely weaponized the Federation device. Given the weapon's scale and unique interface ports, it had likely been intended for a large-scale war asset, perhaps a heavy fire-support platform or a secondary battery for a frigate. Eventually, the vessel or equipment carrying this relic had been cast here by the whims of the Warp.
None of that mattered now.
The automata began to disassemble the repaired weapon on the spot. They extracted the six-meter-diameter energy conversion device. The nanites from the two Destroyers struggled to engulf the massive, eye-like apparatus to perform a full data replication. Simultaneously, the Sapient Machine Automata used their scanning arrays to record every other sub-component of the weapon.
For the Iron Men, this represented an entirely new paradigm of energy conversion equipment. Unlike the Adeptus Mechanicus, with their fractured knowledge and myriad taboos, Axion harbored no fear of the unknown. Every conduit path and logic flow was meticulously logged.
As the nanite swarms finally receded from the device, the technical architecture within was fully mapped. The automata reassembled the weapon once held by the Plague Beast, then turned to face the Iron Hands warriors, who were still staring at their restored biological bodies in stunned silence.
"Mission objective complete. Data acquisition concluded," the machine intoned. "All items have been delivered. Squad extraction is imminent. Are there any further requirements?"