In the current era of the Imperium, an audience with the Emperor of Mankind was an extraordinary honour, though I had not the slightest idea on how such a thing was arranged. Anyone granted that privilege received the title "Auditorii Imperator", a distinction the guardian was more than qualified for.
After the revelation of having met the Emperor himself in the flesh, I could tell that the Sororitas started to view the towering guardian with a sense of veneration.
Seizing the moment, I addressed it. 'Though my Father—God, it feels so weird to address him as such—could not be here in person, I am sure he greatly appreciates your millennia-long stewardship of this place. How may we properly address you?'
The guardian froze upon that simple question, and it answered after a moment. 'By necessity and for endurance, three minds are bound within this frame. By function, this unit persisted as one.'
It paused for a few heartbeats before continuing. 'Until now, a singular designation was not required. From hence forth, this unit shall be known as Triax.'
'Thank you, Archmagos Triax.' It was time for me to fulfil my promise. 'I will now tell you, to the best of my knowledge, how the Emperor became confined to the Golden Throne…'
Aided by my lore knowledge and inhuman intellect, I kept things brief while reciting a tale known by all diehard grimdark hobbyists of my time. I started with how Horus the Warmaster turned traitor when the dark powers of Chaos seduced him. What began as whispers of rebellion became open war, declared with the infamous Drop Site Massacre.
I talked about how Astartes legionaries died in the hundreds of thousands, and how even primarchs fell as the galaxy was torn in half and burned in the civil war that came to be known as the Horus Heresy. I mentioned how Horus brought the war all the way back to Terra, plunging the Throne world into the warp. How the walls of the Imperial Palace shook as traitor legions and daemons besieged the cradle of mankind.
The fortunes of war twisted and turned many times during that siege. To conclude it, Horus lowered the shields of his flagship, daring the Emperor to face him. The Emperor obliged and teleported on to the ship so the two met in a final, terrible and epic duel to decide the fate of humanity. In the end, the Emperor obliterated his once-beloved "son" and Horus was no more.
Victory had come at a cost too great to measure. Trillions of humans had died, countless worlds left in ruins and the Emperor's body shattered beyond healing. To save the Master of Mankind, the survivors interred him within the Golden Throne, a vast life-support machine. Since that day, the Emperor has sat immobile, neither truly living nor dead, yet his psychic light still shines till this day, guiding the fleets of humanity and holding the enemies of mankind at bay.
I went through with the tale, all the while noting the strange incongruity between the serenity of my voice versus the atrocious nature of my story. By the time I was done, a deep sense of intense indignation and righteous fury could be felt coming from the human crowd, and Welminah was having a hard time trying to hide her sniffling.
Triax seemed taken aback by my story, it immediately asked about the fate of its own people and homeworld. 'What of the Mechanicum?'
I organised what information I had before answering. 'Mars was split during the civil war. Titan-forges, voidships and weapons of unimaginable scale were turned against one another. During most of that time Mars fell under Fabricator-General Kelbor-Hal's control, and he swore loyalty to Horus.'
'That forced the Martian loyalists to flee to Terra and other strongholds during the war. They were later formally bound into the Imperium as the current Adeptus Mechanicus.'
'After Horus' demise, Martian traitors fled with the retreating traitor legions. A large number of them eventually resided in the Eye of Terror where they continue to serve their ruinous masters. Instead of following the Ommissiah, they now create daemonic engines with blasphemous fusions of heretical rituals and forbidden technologies. They are known today as the Dark Mechanicum.'
Absorbing the enormity of the stories, Triax went still for a moment before speaking again. 'This unit requests further detailed information of this war when it can be arranged.'
I thought about the whole Horus Heresy and Siege of Terra series of novels, before immediately kicking the idea out of my head. Meta in-universe knowledge is definitely off limits, just let the Ad Mech people do their stuff.
I turned to the Mechanicus group. 'Krypto, can you please assist with that?'
'I will personally see to that and update Archmagos Triax on all the relevant events,' the senior tech-priest promised.
I nodded before turning back to Triax. 'Dominus Cykell here will provide all the requested information, in the meantime please show us what else is in here.'
Thus Triax began leading a tour of the place. It was as the vault guardian had mentioned, data-crystals containing STC blueprints for most if not all of the imperial war machines from the Great Crusade were all here. When we came across the section full of Questor Imperialis and Collegia Titanica units, the visiting tech-priests almost lost it. Seeing how the usually cold and robotic post humans subtly behaving like giddy children was unnerving, this vault was truly dream-like for any adept of the Omnissiah.
Having acquired the manufacturing blueprints for the imperial knights and titans, I could hear it like an in-game announcement: Super Heavies manufacturing unlocked!
Besides these, there were other rare machines and working modules preserved in stasis storage. These were not grand engines nor complete constructs, but compact examples of sacred architecture: auto-forge regulators, motive force converters and plasma induction matrices. The innate knowledge imbued within me informed my consciousness that upon proper deployment, these invaluable key components would enable production of the internal components for most—if not all—known Imperial war machines.
Kryptorer seemed to know this as well, after witnessing the collection he declared with a conviction, 'by the Omnissiah's will, with these, we will rebuild many marvels lost to us during the Heresy.'
Then there was an armoury with an assortment of forbidden, man-portable weapons of mass destruction enshrined in their respective adamantium caskets. I checked the contents and read their labels with a rising pulse: Alchem munitions, phosphex bombs, toxiferran flamer fuel, rad grenades, missiles and more. Bless the throne that all these were also kept in stasis.
These were weapons so nasty the Space Marine Legions, including those who committed war crimes with casual indifference, were shunned about their deployment during the Great Crusade and would only unleash them under the most extreme circumstances.
I especially remembered phosphex from vivid descriptions in various stories. It was an extremely vicious incendiary substance, capable of burning without oxygen and with almost no fuel source. The stuff could ignite water, to say nothing of rock or even adamantium, earning itself grim nicknames such as "living fire" and "crawling death". The corruption it left behind was said to linger longer than nuclear fallout.
Officially, phosphex was forever lost to the Imperium after a tech-priest destroyed the last STC for the manufacture of the weapon. The poor fella was horrified by the weapon's destructive nature and paid with his life for the deed. The idea that I had become the designated inheritor of a stockpile of this stuff made me wince inside.
I ended up staying a full day and a half at the vault, spending that time cataloging items and discussing arrangements. The tech-priests argued long over security details and what units to create first to test the full legitimacy of the STC blueprints. It was a special arrangement that required my ability to fully decode and pass over the contents from specific data-crystals.
By the time I stepped out of the vault to return to the fortress monastery, Thaberus was still working with both the Mechanicus and Sororitas to further secure the place.
The vault and its immediate surrounding areas were promptly and formally declared Regio Interdicta by the Inquisition.
* * *
'Greetings.'
An unsolicited text message came through the noospheric link. No connection request logged. No machine-sigil handshake.
Improbable.
The sacred noospheric link was no mundane vox channel. The network was sanctified machine-thought made manifest, bounded by encryption rites and layered verifications. Yet the message was there. It was scrabbed clean of the sender's identity, bearing neither sigil nor ident code.
Interesting.
A brief shipwide direct hailings of the few possible subordinates quickly established none was responsible for the communication.
Displeasing. Against all logic, this didn't feel right.
No adept of the Omnissiah would dare such an insolent gesture towards a superior, especially a superior who also happened to be the master of a ship presently cruising between the void of stars.
The Cantus Logica was no ordinary ship. It was a fortress, reliquary, machine-shrine, a Mechanicus war vessel. No soul breathes within its corridors without the sanction of its master. And yet on this day that purity might have been broken. The auxiliary command bridge was close by, from there this problem will be dealt with.
Shipwide auspex scan initiated.
Scanning done. Auspex relays whispered of an anomaly, multiple analysis ruled out hardware failure. Such deviation confirmed the possibility of an unauthorized presence aboard the vessel despite a whole ship's worth of security and maintenance pict-recorders recorded nothing suspicious.
Conventional sensors could be deceived.
Change of tactic. Through auto-seers and ancient machines' consciousness, anomalies could be located in pressure valves, power flux, unexplained air displacement or even changes in the resonant hum of a corridor.
Communing directly with the subsystems to interrogate machine spirits.
Negative contact.
'Can we talk?'
Another anonymous message via the noospheric link.
Ignored.
On to the next attempt. Consciousness dove into the ship-wide noospheric datanet that overlays with reality. Even while cloaked, an intruder may create a signal shadow of interference in vox static, packet loss in data-spirits, unexplained lag in servitors command-strings. By looking at these, a positive reading might be possible.
Negative contact again. A sense of urgency rose.
Skitarii units put on high alert. All the maintenance servitors around the immediate area were mobilised, and moved to sweep the corridors. Some were fitted with auspex attuned to exotic spectrums like rad-sense, gravimetric drift, ozone trails. They swept through the sectors, leaving no stone unturned, no corners unchecked.
A moment passed, still negative contact.
'Please, hostility is unnecessary.' The third message.
Most vexing. An intruder was definitely on board. Advanced xeno-tech or foul sorcery in deployment was a possibility.
Communing directly with the Cantus Logica, the ship's machine spirit whispered a thousand streams of data through cortex-ports. Through the connections all the conventional auspex still showed no anomaly, pict-feeds revealed only loyal crews.
For a moment, the idea of altering the ship's Geller-field harmonics was considered. In theory, warp entities or cloaked infiltrators may "shimmer" in the manufactured disturbance, exposing their presence as a tear in the rhythm of the field. However, the approach was deemed excessively reckless with a low probability of success, thus another way was needed. All cognitive powers on the ship were put into overdrive, and soon a solution was formulated.
Began the Rite of Gravimetric Mass Mapping.
The subtle humming of the ship's cogitator banks could be felt as the baseline mass-shadow maps of every corridor and chamber were recalled. The massive record was overlaid with the present readings, and comparison observed. Cutting through the raw data, a spot came into focus. There. A deviation, subtle but undeniable: the gravitic strain in corridor Gamma-97 was altered by a mass roughly the size of a human. No crew was assigned there. A trespasser was revealed to be onboard without triggering any of the countless security features.
Unacceptable. Immediate sanctions required.
Bulkheads around Gamma-97 were sealed. Skitarii cohorts deployed. Heavy battle servitors mobilised. An announcement was made, carried through vox and binaric bursts with iron finality.
'Intruder confirmed. Battle stations.'
Thirty seconds later Skitarii Vanguard squad Rho-IV was ordered to storm in. They swept through corridor Gamma-97, with no contact reported. Containment failed. Cycling through all the onboard sensory arrays.
Still negative on all readings.
On to the next solution. Blessed the master auspex relay in the bridge with direct mechadendrites connections, extending their awareness into atmospheric currents, calculating displaced air and their minute vortices with the aid of cogitator banks. The massive cogitation result confirmed what pict-feeds could not.
Unaccounted for mobile mass-shadow. Inertial purity profaned. Atmospheric hymns disrupted. An intruder moved unseen, but not unfelt inside the ship.
Immediate analysis of the anomaly's vector indicated it was moving towards a particular location inside the ship. Whatever it was, it was fast approaching the auxiliary command throne.
It was coming this way. The sense of urgency intensified.
Awakening the experimental Thallax Inceptus unit, these will act as the last line of defense. Another wave of Skitarii Vanguards was ordered to intercept. Twenty men of steel and augmetics, their radium carbines and plasma calivers raised as they fanned through corridor Theta-9. Vox and sensory data returned fragmented before suddenly all signals guttered out like candles beneath a storm. No telemetry. No salvageable record.
Impossible.
Corridor Theta-9 was immediately sealed, but chances were the intruder was already through. A rising spike was felt in one of the secondary hearts despite emotional suppressions. Irrational.
Fear is flesh. Flesh is weak.
Only corridor Omicron-3 stood between the intruder and the bridge. Existential threat recognised. The bulkhead leading to Omicron-3 was ordered to seal.
The Thallax Inceptus cohort arrived as summoned. Sleek, powerful and each the size of an Astartes, four fully cybernetic elite shock troopers stomped into the bridge with reverse-jointed mag-clamped feet, precious ancient lightning guns ready, smooth and featureless helms scanning around for threats. Though these were not the authentic Thallaxii, they represented many years of ceaseless efforts of replicating the genuine articles. The sanctum bulkhead to the auxiliary command bridge was then ordered to seal.
Tech-priest Dataliad voxed his arrival with Kataphron Destroyers to the designated position. The heavy battle servitors with hulking torsos mounted on grinding treads, bristling with plasma culverins and heavy grav-cannons to form a wall of guns across corridor Omicron-3.
The destroyers engaged before the bulkhead was fully unlocked. Muzzles flashed, weapons flared. Discharges of plasma were observed through remote viewing lenses. The groan of gravitic implosion repeated with the litany of destruction. Feedback data confirmed positive weapons hits, whatever stood behind the bulkhead was obliterated.
A servo-skull was sent to study the ravaged remains before the dust settled. Scattered parts and minced meat were barely identifiable, but these soon revealed to be a servitor, not the intruder.
Again, this didn't feel right.
Sudden realisation: this might be a setup. The timing of the first message might be part of a ruse. Existential threat intensified. The intruder could be here all along, inside the auxiliary command bridge.
'Show yourself.' Challenge sent forth.
'That was quick. Very well, don't shoot.' A voice responded, a female voice.
At the corner of vision, a distortion, the light refracted in an unrecognized pattern, a violation of the Omnissiah's spectrum. Multiple ocular augmetics attempted to compensate, lenses grinding in confusion attempting to visualise a thing that refused to be seen. A shimmer appeared, like water poured over glass, seemingly bending the very geometry of space.
From the shimmer, something detached from the void, coalescing out of thin air and scattering refracted light. A shrouding cloak emerged, its surface shifting to blend with the surroundings, colours bleeding and glitching through countless patterns before settling into the muted truth of grey fabric that wrapped a petite figure clad in a light grey bodyglove.
She finally revealed herself.
Shorter than estimated and curiously, appeared unarmed. Despite being in close proximity, every sensor array faltered as they recalibrated around the intruder. No recognizable life-signature.
Leveling weapons at the intruder. Tactical advantage assured.
'Approach without sudden movement.' Demand sent.
Slowly she stepped forward, and that revealed enough. Movement observed, recorded and confirmed. The exact same gait cycle, repeated precisely. Each movement executed with such identical force that every swing of her cloak matched perfectly with the last, as if caught in flawless loops. An unfeasible feat for a baseline human. No hints of hostility, yet her casual demeanor set off a warning.
Why is she so nonchalant?
Not relevant, a single unarmed transhuman posed little threat here. Situation under control. Then the Thallaxii moved, secondary optics picked up on their sudden movement.
Confusion: no orders issued.
All four Thallaxii went down on one knee, weapons lowered. Their gesture deliberate, brains humming in static reverence. A surge of emotions not experienced for centuries flooded in with an intensity that should have been impossible with the excision of amygdala.
Surprise. Awe. Disbelief at what was seen. Unbelievable as it was, the scene persisted despite rapid visual refreshes, faltering clean logic like corrupted code.
Error. Critical error in calculations.
Calm and silent, the intruder continued to step forward, passing the kneeling counterfeit Thallaxii. She pulled back her hood, revealing a precisely architectured visage framed by flowing platinum hair. Ratios aligned within golden symmetry, ocular placement yielding a harmony of almost algorithmic appearance. Beautiful in the pure binaric sense, a living construct that echoed the elegance of machine logic.
Accompanying her divine appearance was an overwhelming presence of significance, like a kind of existential gravity—not just physical presence, but a metaphysical and psychological weight that bent awareness as though the very air acknowledged it.
There was a sudden collapse in auxiliary data-feeds with a hollowing of extra perceptions. The cause revealed itself moments later as several servo-skulls had severed their links and now drifted in slow orbit around the intruder, as though she was accepted as their new master.
Systems trembled. Subroutines looped without instruction.
In that infinite fraction of time, a profound understanding came through: submission not compelled by code or command, but evoked by the sheer recognition of an authority at once utterly human, and yet immeasurably greater beyond mortal comprehension.
'Greetings, Dominus Kryptorer Cykell,' pale skin lit up by harsh lights of the bridge, the intruder appeared almost expressionless as she introduced herself, 'I am Syrine, a direct creation of the Master of Mankind.'
* * *
Seated in my suite, I reeled and dropped the data-crystal Kryptorer passed to me as promised, the first person view recording abruptly cut off. After collecting myself, slowly I picked up the crystal, the record of their first encounter contained in it.
For the first time, I had a vague understanding of what type of weapon she was meant to be for the Emperor.