Armed with an expanded parameters of diagnostic checklists, the four Adaptive Combat Cores reconvened within the primary maintenance hub.
The units divided into pairs: the first group was dispatched to locate the star port's independent sapient core, while the second set a course for the master control hub of the wider metropolis.
Compared to the methodical, room-by-room boarding actions executed by Imperial forces clearing a Space Hulk, the automata utilized a far more direct, systematic approach. By interfacing directly with the building's functional sensor grids, Axion could trace the literal topography of the facility's data flows.
Beneath the main ingress of the star port lay a dedicated data-routing vault. If an isolated sapient core governed this sector, this transit junction was its most mathematically probable location. Meanwhile, the secondary detachment was ordered to bypass the compressed spatial barriers entirely and push toward the absolute geographical center of the city to initiate a physical intrusion of the central mainframe.
With their directives synchronized, the four Adaptive Combat Cores immediately went to work.
A concentrated blast of super-heated plasma burned through the heavy security blast doors sealing the rear of the maintenance hub. For the first time, the true, unvarnished interior of the warp-bound metropolis was exposed to Axion's optical sensors.
Symmetrical rows of cavernous, hive-like vertical loading bays lined the avenues, packed with hundreds of heavy mag-lev transport chassis bearing the faded structural heraldry of Federation research divisions.
The iron decks were choked with twisted structural debris. Several sky-car transports had plummeted from their upper berths, breaking into jagged, mangled piles of scrap upon the roadways. In the shadow of these ruins, strange, semi-translucent silhouettes of absolute black shifted and coiled like living things, drifting listlessly through the wreckage.
The sweeping primary transit avenues were entirely barren, sheltered beneath the colossal shadow of an artificial metal crust that formed an upper tier of the city. This was a highly specialized research settlement, completely divorced from the standard urban blueprints recorded in Axion's historical archives.
No aerial chassis drifted through the upper atmosphere; the entire metropolis sat frozen beneath the unnatural, undulating glare of the surrounding Empyrean, projecting an aura of profound, spectral malice.
There were no signs of cultivated flora or structural greenery along the avenues; the settlement was entirely devoid of ecological domes or bio-gardens. Every single tower and monolith appeared to have been constructed with a strict, hyper-functional purpose, suggesting that the entire city was, in essence, a singular, monumental experimental machine.
Even in its current compressed, folded state, the metropolis maintained a physical diameter spanning thousands of kilometers.
Navigating the meticulously mapped geometry of the streets, the two central-bound combat units accelerated. After a continuous transit of several hundred kilometers, they reached the outermost precipice of the hyper-space folding zone.
The core administrative spire of the city lay directly beyond this boundary.
To the raw optical sensors, the central spire appeared to sit mere meters ahead, yet the spatial mathematics indicated that the physical distance separating the transit vehicle from the hub still spanned several thousand kilometers of compressed reality. Given their total lack of operational data regarding this specific malfunction, Axion chose the most direct method of physical verification.
One of the combat units detached a localized cluster of nanites from its chassis, reconfiguring the mass into a compact, icon-guided probe propelled by a micro-ion pulse drive. The missile was deployed directly from the undercarriage.
The conical probe, measuring less than thirty centimeters, rapidly accelerated, leaving a distinct trail of super-heated plasma as it streaked toward the spatial boundary. It crossed the threshold of the folded perimeter without resistance, instantly vanishing from the local coordinate plane and reappearing at the steps of the central spire.
The folded space effectively ceased to exist for objects traversing it.
While the composite scanners aboard the Heart of the Forge had detected slight fluctuations in local physical constants, it was now undeniable that the folded zone remained entirely permeable. The slight sensory leakage was almost certainly a direct consequence of the spatial apparatus operating in a degraded, malfunctioning state. This data led Axion to hypothesize that the warning alarms locked within the network referred specifically to the bending mechanism itself, or that the primary access junctions had been digitally locked down.
As the central detachment accelerated toward the administrative core, the remaining two Adaptive Combat Cores followed their designated data-traces to their own objective.
At the geographic heart of the star port complex stood a highly specialized monolith. Its upper tiers were entirely comprised of monumental energy-capacitance arrays, while its lower foundation dropped into a sheer, vertical elevator shaft plunging four hundred meters into the bedrock. The physical data lines harvested from the reception hall routed directly down this shaft, terminating in the abyssal dark below.
The Adaptive Combat Cores had no need for a functional elevator platform.
Reconfiguring their nanite mass into heavy, industrial anchors, they clamped themselves securely to the reinforced alloy decking. A pair of massive, electromagnetically driven gantry hooks deployed from their chassis, violently wrenching away the armored alloy blast covers safeguarding the top of the shaft.
Without a moment's hesitation, the two mechanical entities detached and initiated a sheer free-fall into the dark.
Even their brief, preliminary contact with the warp-saturated metals of the upper facility had initiated localized molecular fusion across their outer hulls. Plummeting directly into the abyss was not only mathematically faster, but the catastrophic impact at the termination of the fall would deliberately trigger a localized temporal rewind, systematically undoing the material corruption and restoring the units to pristine baseline parameters.
Axion's logic processors could scarcely calculate what manner of research the Federation had conducted within this place.
The entire metropolis appeared fundamentally inimical to the survival of any organic species. Every piece of matter originating from the material universe was subjected to immediate, violent warp-saturation the moment it crossed into the perimeter. Every bulkhead, pylon, and circuit was forged from recycled, twisted materials completely thoroughly impregnated by the raw power of the Immaterium.
Conventional methods of Geller-scale shielding or warp-dampening were utterly useless here.
Yet, what puzzled Axion's analytical arrays above all else was the complete, mathematical absence of any daemonic entities within the ruins.
Thoom!
The two falling combat units struck the absolute basin of the shaft, the sheer kinetic violence of the impact gouging two massive craters into the iron floor. To ensure the temporal rewind triggered with absolute certainty, the nanite matrices had dynamically shifted their primary processing nodes to the exact point of structural impact.
Within a split second, the temporal regression concluded, and the two metallic spheres rose from the dust, entirely restored.
The layout of the subterranean vault was stark. The elevator shaft terminated in the center of a sweeping, vaulted chamber, the distant bulkheads pulsing with a dim, residual luminescence.
Seventeen meters ahead of the landing zone sat a monumental sphere, twenty meters in diameter, webbed by a dense network of heavy, thousands of power cables and fiber-optic trunks. The outer shell of the sphere was intricately perforated with geometric cutouts, through which a faint, rhythmic internal light flickered.
Axion had no record of a sapient core possessing such structural design.
The moment the two combat cores advanced, a thick blast wall ground upward from the deck with sudden velocity, completely severing the line of sight between the intruders and the giant sphere.
[Unrecognized signatures detected. Error.]
[Defensive automata activation protocols initiated. Error.]
[Unsanctioned intrusion logged. Data transmission failed. Error.]
[Requesting support from active security detachments. No response.]
[Emergency defensive measures engaged.]
Following the rapid succession of synthetic alerts, the deck plates groaned. Across the sweeping bulkheads of the chamber, dozens of armored gun-ports ground open.
Yet, as the defensive arrays deployed into the viewports of the two Adaptive Combat Cores, they revealed nothing but a collection of catastrophically degraded automated turrets. The primary pulse assemblies of a heavy defense turret had been completely torn away; the moment the ancient grid routed energy into its shattered weapon matrix, the catastrophic power surge triggered an instantaneous, violent internal detonation, reduction the weapon to a smoking ruin before it could fire a single shot.