it took us several weeks to reach the forge world, jumping in short hops each time. After each hop, we'd spend several days testing and checking for any faults before jumping once more and then repeating the process. And for once, I agreed with their caution.
I had no interest in meeting a daemon or any other denizen of the warp.
I didn't spend as much time exploring as I would have liked; most of my time was spent in the Archmagos's or Theta-61 presence. Mostly Theta-61 which I preferred. When I was with the Archmagos he constantly tested me in small ways, which was fucking nerve-racking.
Regardless, it was worth it. I was officially a tech-adept and a part of the Mechanicus. Almost a year from joining the organisation and becoming an adept was abnormally fast. Although my documentation would say I had been with them for decades, so in that I would be unremarkable.
I stood on the bridge when we completed the jump into the Stratix System.
I was partially submerged in the noosphere so I could feel and see the data bouncing around me, as various packets of information came pouring in and out. Systems chiming green or throwing out warnings, auspex's feeding in data, confirming our location against star maps and any threat detection matrices assessing the surrounding area.
Over this sea of data, sat the minds of the tech-priests manning the bridge. All linked together in an almost gestalt consciousness as they worked effectively as one. Finally, above it all was Archmagos Viel. When the flurry of data died down, having been confirmed we were at the correct location and weren't in danger. Viel nodded, standing as he did so.
"Praise the Omnissiah."
We chanted the same back. Underneath this prayer was another message, in binary. Undetectable by most humans, but our sensors picked it up with ease. It took me a moment to parse through it.
I was fairly sure, although I had no idea how he did it, that each person received a separate set of orders.
With my marching orders, I stood to the side and waited. I would be joining Archmagos Viel's landing party when we reached the forge world.
Not that I needed to rush, we had days to weeks before the ship reached the planet from the Mandeville point where we arrived.
Underneath this code, I picked up another pattern. I noticed something similar months ago and had started to see them everywhere. Mostly amongst the senior priests, where they hid another message under the normal conversation.
Unless you knew it was there, it was almost undetectable, and even if you did, it was heavily encrypted. As something to do to pass the time, I tried to break it, but hit a wall, making zero headway. I would need way more computer power, or more likely, the key to break the cypher.
I ignored the hive of activity as various magi scurried in and out of the room, as well as more chimes from the workstations with data still trickling in.
Turning away from all the activity, I looked out the viewing port to the solar system and my home for the next few years. Like Gravis Expanse, my home system, it was bustling with activities, with thousands, if not tens of thousands of ships ferrying goods and supplies around.
Actually wait.
I pinged the ship's systems and got a reading.
++341,089 Vessels ++
And this was only the ships of sufficient size to be picked up on our augers (long-range sensors) this far out. There were undoubtedly many more smaller ones that couldn't be detected just yet. There were 3 other planets of note apart from the Forge World.
There were two feudal worlds, managed by Knight houses and then a death world.
The remaining five planets were exclusively for mining, all to be shipped back to the forge world. There was also extensive asteroid mining as well, fulfilling the same purpose.
The feudal worlds weren't especially interesting, just green balls with the surface covered in crops. The only interesting one was the death world. It too was green, with huge sprawling jungles, the trees reaching miles tall. The wildlife was just as extreme as the plants, from the massive creatures to the smaller ones, but all of them deadly.
I would have expected this planet to be left or burned to the bedrock and strip mined. But it was actually used to test combat forms and as good training for aspiring dominus adepts, the combatant tech adepts.
The sketarii also used it for training, to keep them sharp. I could see eighteen ships hovering around it for that purpose.
Finally, there was the forge world itself. Not much could be seen this far out, just the black swirling clouds that were a constant on the planet. Again, I reached through the noosphere and pinged the ship's data banks.
++Stratix++
++Fabricator General: Fend-Bho/1\12++
++Main export++
++Production Grade: I-Tertius++
++ Population:++
++Menials - 3,702,034,002++
++Servitors - 5,880,060,706++
++Tech-Priests - 1,044,910,005++
++Initiates - 1,076,408,003++
++Skitarii - 2,024,202,009++
++Knight Auxilia - 40,030,701++
++Orbital - 56,440,098++
That was a lot of information that didn't really help me much. Cross-referencing the grade I knew it was high, making the forge world one of the best, but still a step or two below the truly powerful ones.
With the corridors much clearer, I shrugged and headed for my quarters. I still had things to prepare before we made landfall. Besides, I needed a cuddle with Snuffles. I had been gone for most of the day and wanted some time with him. Omnissiah knew I wouldn't have much time soon.
---
A week later, the frigate had entered into orbit around Stratix, parking at the largest space station that was in orbit above the largest forge city or forge temple, as it was sometimes called. Snuffles and I were standing amongst the several hundred-strong party of Archmagos Viel. I was just thankful I was able to bring him; I had my doubts, and more importantly, I was glad it was safe to do so.
Snuffles was part of my false identity that Viel and I had put together. While I wasn't better than him in the noosphere or with machine spirits, centuries of experience being pretty hard to compete with, I did have a more rounded understanding, which allowed me to do some parts better than him.
I was pretty happy with the results. I was an underseer who also worked with mastiffs, creating and maintaining them. So Snuffles had supposedly lost his main handler and turned almost feral. He was almost put down when he took a liking to me, so he was accompanying me in the hopes of appeasing the mastiff and being able to put him back to work.
Snuffles' value as a hardcase and years of knowledge made it a realistic option, whereas a servitor was more likely to just be recycled.
Then it was just my decades of service as a perfectly average tech adept, under the name Aleric-007.
I didn't want to change my name too much, and I couldn't resist the number when I was asked.
We boarded the shuttle, which shuddered as the clamps let go and burned for the planet. I muttered a chant and patched into the local noosphere, using my permission given by Viel to access the vid-caster and auspex feeds. With them, I could see the planet rapidly approaching below.
Or at least see parts of the planet. Most of it was covered in a near-constant superstorm, with black polluted clouds whipping around the planet. The eradiated sand and waste were whipped up in these winds, making the surface nearly impossible to live on.
Poking up through these clouds, I could see the tip of the main forge complex, our destination. It was called Axis Stratavar, and it was where the most important buildings lived, like the leader of the planet, the Fabricator General's sanctum and the main grand cathedrals.
From what I could see of the spire, it was a similar design to the hive city I grew up within, but clearly more dedicated to the Mechanicus. Rising from the top of it was a gigantic statue, hundreds of metres tall, of the Cog of the Adeptus Mechanicus.
In front of that could only be the Emperor of Mankind; he too was a massive golden statue, his iconic sword clutched in his hand, the tip resting on the floor.
The shuttle vibrated harder and jerked to the side as it entered the cloud structure of the superstorm. Its engines picking up in pitch slightly as they struggled to maintain its heading. There was the occasional thump of some debris hitting the shuttle before it all suddenly went quiet as we entered the hangar.
The hangar was as massive as expected, but eerily silent. A crowd was waiting, each one almost completely motionless. Setting down before the lead figure, Viel immediately marched out to greet them, specifically that lead figure, a finely clad man. If he could still be called a man.
He was huge and twisted, with extensive bionics, such that no organic flesh could be seen through the coils of cables, pipes and metal. Where some bionics tried to maintain human looks, his clearly weren't. He had legs that looked like a crab, and his upper body was hunched and bloated. Far from the human he started as.
He didn't really have a head anymore, with his cybernetic eyes sitting in the middle of his torso. For all that he looked monstrous, the bionics were clearly of incredible quality; even from here, I could see that. He was clad in a deep ruby robe, modified to sit on his body comfortably.
On his side and shoulders were pins showing off his rank.
I was lost amongst the hundreds of people disembarking the shuttle, moving to stand in formation behind Archmagos Viel.
Once we were in position, the room lit up in a cacophony of sound, and the noosphere lit up as well, with data flying all over the place. Taken separately, it was a mess, but taken as a whole, it was a complicated greeting and welcoming ritual, aimed at both Viel but more importantly the STCs he had on him.
It didn't last long, thank god and soon came to an end.
As if a switch had been flipped, the assembled priests marched to the doors to carry on with their day. We followed Viel, who walked with the Fabricator General Fend-Bho/1\12 side by side. They exchanged rapid binary messages, moving too fast for me to truly follow.
Even if I could follow, significant parts of it were encrypted, mostly as a layer underneath the binary conversation.
We eventually split off from the Fabricator General, Viel then entering a deep conversation with many of his close allies as we walked to our quarters. They were all situated around the Archmagos no… Fabricator Locums' new sanctum. I was thankful we were following him, with a maze-like structure of the tunnels, I had little hope of finding my way quickly.
From huge arching hallways, beautifully decorated with the Adeptus Mechanicus iconography, to tiny service tunnels, barely large enough for some of the larger magi's bulk to move through. One persistent thing was the oppressive heat, with sweat slicking my brow as soon as we started walking.
The air was almost too hot to breathe in, and it quickly dried out my skin with its arid dry heat. I was just glad for my grill, so it wasn't scalding my lungs.
Not something I thought I would say.
Possibly worse was the tingling of chemicals on my skin. This pollution only got worse the deeper we moved into the city. The acrid taste of industry, incense and powdered metal became stronger and stronger. I was just lucky that I had the chemical filter in my lungs; otherwise I shuddered to think how long I would last before I gained a constant cough.
I hid a grimace as I was once again reminded of the bionics.
We passed through several cathedrals, many of which had priests kneeling behind altars, chanting prayers for the Machine God. Then we entered a new section, clearly nicer than those we had been walking through. The air was cleaner, as were the walls, mostly clean of the constant stains many corridors had.
Although this wasn't from lack of trying. We had passed thousands of servitors fruitlessly trying to clean the walls of the larger tunnels from the pollution that stuck to them, which coated everything in a thin film of sooty sludge, staining everything. I'd brushed past it once, and apart from making my robe start to smoke, the fabric melting, it was impossible to get off, with the consistency of tar.
We had arrived at the Viel's fortress and housing complex within this world, and only accessible to a select few. Around his private sanctum, which was at the end of the corridor, accessed by thick blast doors, were rooms and workshops for his followers. This close to his sanctum, it was only Archmagos or Magos that had quarters there, although the various workshops and vicinities could be used by others.
I, along with the rest of the senior adepts or fresh magi that didn't quite make the cut to gain a room near the Sanctum, spread out heading for our rooms. Me and many others headed dozens of levels down, the air quality steadily getting worse as we did. Still better than some of the areas we had walked through to get there.
Reaching a heavily sealed blast door, I pinged my credentials across to the system, and the servo skull tied to the door warbled, opening the doors, which slid open with a grinding hiss.
Following Snuffles, I entered my new quarters, the door shutting behind me. It was a generous size. Again, my connection to Viel had paid off, as the room was significantly better than a tech priest of my level should have. Particularly one recently raised from an acolyte, even one with decades of service like my fabricated identity had.
With the doors shut, the room fell into stillness once more, just the constant humming through the walls and floors of the machinery all around us. The air was heavy and stale, almost sending me into a coughing fit. The strongest scent was of burnt incense.
There were several rooms, two small workshops, a shrine and then tucked away in a corner, clearly an afterthought, was the bedroom and bathroom.
The rooms themselves were barren, with no creature comforts, just cold, hard metal wherever I looked. I made the mistake of brushing up against the walls. A thick coating of grease, gunge and incense oils covered my hand. As thick and sticky as treacle.
Grimacing, I headed for the bathroom to try to wash it off, but took one look at the water and decided I might be better off not. Wiping my hands on my robe instead, I carried on inspecting my new home.
I could just about pick up the smell of electrical burn over the almost overpowering scent of incense. Something I needed to check out.
A soft wine from the door distracted me. "I know Snuffles." I said, moving over to scratch his head. "Good boy. We will make it work."
I put away the few possessions I brought with me and checked the time. I still had twenty-four hours before my shift. I would need to rest before than as it would be a gruelling shift, almost sixteen hours.
It was going to be a long day.
But first, my room.
I swept my room for any surveillance equipment. I wasn't expecting to find any, and I didn't, but I was glad I did it nonetheless. Next, I pulled out some tools from the workshop and got to work repairing what I could. First were the vents high up near the ceiling.
Muttering the chant of appeasement and unlocking, I unscrewed the screws and peered into the vent. A bit of poking later, and I found the problem. A blown wire and fuse. But I still went through the arduous process, muttering and performing the right chants and rituals.
The room came fully stocked, both with the tools but also the candles, oils and incense I needed. I set a note for myself to find out how to get more.
It was a botched job and not truly repaired, but the fans kicked to life, sucking the air out of the room and replacing it with new air. It still had the same chemical taste, but at least the heavy scent of incense was gone. I would take the wins I could.
With several hours wasted, I dived into the noosphere, again my access far higher than I probably should. I would work in the future to get even better ones, but for now, I pulled up and saved the various maps of the forge world, transferring what I could to Snuffles.
With them in hand, we set off, exploring our new home and trying to find my new shift location. I could already tell it would take hours to reach it. But then I should have a room far deeper and smaller, which would be closer to where my shift was. I was willing to travel a bit further to have a nicer room.
I was working deep in the forge and manafactorams maintaining the servitors. Much like I had been before, if anything, it was a step back from what I had been doing before. But I was thankful for it as it would give me time to acclimatise to my new home.
The structure of the forge world was a mess. If you didn't have the detailed maps from the noosphere and, more importantly, the access codes, it was nigh impossible to travel far within the forge temples.
Doors shut and locked with no apparent warning, lights flickered out, and entire corridors could be flooded with super-heated gases. If you could link to the noosphere, then the machinery warned you, and you could open doors, so I was fine. But I couldn't imagine living here without that access.
Thankfully, Snuffles could access it. His interface needed a bit of tweaking so he could understand the messages, but soon he was moving around with more confidence than I. Snuffles trotted on ahead, nose to the floor sniffing, every now and then pausing to look back at me to make sure I was still following.
We reached a viewing point within a huge cathedral to the Omnissiah. I couldn't see anything because the storm was still raging. According to the reports, this particular storm had been raging for thirteen years. The longest one had been forty-one years.
A hiss from one of the surrounding machines, venting some gas, pulled me from watching the almost hypnotic storm. The cathedral itself was of course home to a great machine, with dozens of tech priests hovering around it or praying to it.
Using my higher access, I found out that the purpose of the machine had long been forgotten, but it still trundled on with whatever task it had been given. The priests helping it as much as they could. Looking at it, I would guess it was an environmental scrubber.
Continuing, we joined a massively busy corridor. Vehicles of all kinds moving up and down it, helped by servitors.
But not always.
Even as I watched, a servitor wasn't fast enough and was caught by one of the mighty machines and crushed. No one cared. The most it got was a grunt from the tech adept managing them as he scavenged the parts, leaving the organics to be cleared up by others.
Following the stream of traffic, we reached a huge cylindrical pit. It rose right up to the surface and was large enough for huge freighters to set down and unload their cargo. When it was ready to leave, rather than lift off, burning fuel, it was tugged to another section of the transport hub and then fired back out into space.
How it didn't just turn the ships into shrapnel, I didn't know. But when I got the chance, you could be sure I would investigate.
The traffic looked almost disorderly, with teams just missing each other, a fraction of a second delay, and it would all come to a crashing halt. But I couldn't fault the results. In minutes, huge trucks and trams carrying goods of all sorts, from minerals and metals to food, vanished into the tunnels around us.
The organised chaos stopped for no one.
You were liable to be trampled if you got in the way. It was only through the noosphere that we could easily traverse through it all. At the far side, we entered a series of lifts that descended deep into the planet. Some were huge, to carry the massive amount of supplies needed to fuel the planet.
Others were smaller, mostly for personnel.
Each controlled by a servitor fused to the mechanisms.
The air only got hotter the further down we went.
---
I was standing on a raised walkway overlooking a factory, Snuffles leaning against my leg, when I heard a wet, unhealthy cough from behind me.
Turning, I saw a procession of people, several hundred strong, shuffling forwards. They were all incredibly worn, with deep bags under their eyes and covered in filth and burns. Both chemical and heat from their work in the forges. They all wore heavy-duty protective clothing, with some even wearing gas masks, mostly the younger ones I noted.
Their clothes, while sturdy, were as worn and filthy as they were.
Absent mindedly wiping some sweat from my forehead, I followed the people from a distance.
They shuffled forward, like zombies, barely aware of their surroundings; some looked like they were unsteady on their feet. Almost as if drunk, even if I knew they weren't. They were all huddled together heading towards a distant corridor. On the way, one of their number collapsed, with several of the people around him rushed to help him up. But many of the others looked on with glassy-eyed indifference.
They reached the corridor and entered another smaller one. Here they entered the place of residence for many of the workers in the surrounding forges. The air was slightly less hot and noticeably less toxic, although I still wouldn't want to spend any length of time there.
It was worse than the Glow Gate or the slumps for fuck sake. Not many lived in the slump, or at least survived the slump, the lowest levels of the hive for that reason.
They joined a line, inching forward to get their bowl of slop, wolf it down and then move off to their bunks. They didn't have homes or even rooms. It was bunking house after bunk house, with thousands to a room. Family units were clumped together, with children sometimes sleeping in the same bunks.
Even the parents needed to share sometimes. I saw a couple exchange a brief hug, and then the man collapsed into bed while the woman went off for her shift.
All around me, there was an air of depression. Even the children looked tired and worn out, looking worriedly at their parents.
A commotion in the far corner grabbed my attention.
Someone else had collapsed, but this time they couldn't get up. Several people, family members I would guess, were gathered around her. She looked ancient and frail, but checking her records she was less than forty.
I was confused what they were doing for a moment before I realised they were saying tearful goodbyes. I saw why soon enough. Pushing through the crowd was the overseer to the room, with several servitors in tow. When they reached them, they grabbed the women, ignoring the people around them and marched off, ignoring the sad cries around them.
I didn't need to check where they were going. She was off to be converted.
Shaking my head in distaste, I looked away and left the depressing room, unable to look at it any longer.
After that, I didn't feel like exploring much longer, so I found my shift location and headed home to cuddle Snuffles.
---
Far too soon, I was off again. I gave the option for Snuffles to stay at home, but he decided to come with.
Following a similar path from yesterday, we descended deep into the forge city and found my workstation. I was working in a manafactorum that produced components for the Rhino. My assembly line worked on the engine and drive chain for it.
A single cog in the machine. Only a small part and one of hundreds of lines producing the same thing.
Rather than going to the assembly line, I moved to where the servitors I needed for my shift were stored. The servitors worked far longer shifts, sometimes days at a time, but their organic parts still needed rest.
We rounded onto the corridor where my group of servitors were stored. A dark, dank corridor, scorching hot but a wet oppressive heat rather than the dry heat of much of the rest of the forge city. It looked as though it had been forgotten or was incomplete, with wire, pipes, incomplete wall panels and an uneven floor. Lining the corridor were dozens of blast doors, all sealed. It was the same for any of the many other corridors around me.
Walking down to my one, I muttered the rite of activation with my unique code and credentials.
The door chirped, then shuddered and twitched to life and with a tortured scream started to open. As the door opened, a wave of hot fetid air blew into my face. I almost gagged at the smell and took a few paces back so the smell could dissipate into the corridor.
It was a mixture of rot and decay, sweat, grease and a mixture of burning plastic and electronics.
Looking inside, I could see hundreds, thousands even, of servitors. It was less of a storage facility and closer to a tomb, with them all piled on top of each other in a tangled mess. Like in a mass grave. The only light in the room came from an exposed electrical wire sparking on the ceiling.
The servitors snapped awake, my rite having activated them, going from a slumber to instantly alert as only machines can. Slowly at first, but gaining speed, they detached themselves and made their way into the corridor to line up.
I couldn't help but frown at the uneven lines that were forming. They should have lined up perfectly; that was the advantage of them basically being biological machines. I would need to test that; it was either the biological parts failing or the chip itself.
That accuracy down here wasn't important, but up in the manafactorum, when they were moving between heavy machinery, a few inches could spell all the difference. It took ten minutes for them to finish lining up. I was ticking them off as they went past, doing a mental count.
As the last one stepped out, I noticed a dozen still in the room. A few were twitching and writhing on the floor, their biological functions having failed, but the mechanical parts still desperate to obey orders. The others were fully dead. Several looked like they had been crushed under the weight of the rest of the servitors.
One was still pinned to the wall where a panel had rusted through, revealing a sharp metal strut which had been pierced through its chest.
I made a note in my logs that I was down a few and moved on; others would deal with them. Servitors died by the millions on the planet, if not billions, and they were constantly replenished, mostly by vat-grown bodies. An adept would be down to collect the remains, mostly the bionics which could be used again, but even the bodies would still have a use, getting thrown into the furnaces to provide some more fuel.
The body's final service to the Adeptus Mechanicus.
With my servitors now in tow, we marched as a procession towards my assembly line. Snuffles was in the lead, so I knew we were going the right way, so I turned my attention from the surroundings to focus more on the servitors.
They were a ropy lot.
I already needed to check their chips, the software they were running on and any commands. Both for the accuracy issue I noticed earlier, but if they were anything like the ones I'd worked with in the hive city, there would be a huge amount of optimisations I could do.
But past that, the physical hardware was bad enough; the metal rusted in places and poorly maintained. It would take a long time to go through them all. And that wasn't even mentioning the biological parts. Much of their skin was blistering and pulling away from the metal bionics.
Causing infection and disease to set in. There wasn't much I could do about that now, but I would need to look into it. Not for any humane reason, the procedures were very effective at killing off whoever they were, leaving only lights and clockwork, effectively just meat puppets.
But if I could eke out a little longer on them and they could last years longer, that would help my targets. Everything was tracked and evaluated and most definitely held against you, forever as part of your digital identity. One of the adepts I'd worked with hadn't received a promotion because of something he did several decades ago, and it was doubtful he would ever get past it.
A soft woof came through my vox, pulling me from my thoughts.
We were at the manafactorum.
With a different chant, again the command buried within it, I set them to work. We stepped into the room and were instantly hit by a wave of noise. It was all around me and stifling. I felt it deep within my chest. The floor too vibrated almost violently from the constant heavy machinery in use all around me.
When I arrived at my line, I greeted the tech priest I would be taking over from. Like many of the priests I had seen, he had left humanity far behind him, having installed bionics with no attention to aesthetics or the human form.
With three left arms and only a mechandendrite for the right. A servo skull hovered over his shoulder, spewing incense and holy chants; his robe was in tatters, just barely red in colouration.
'Observation: 47 seconds early, excellent timing brother.' he sent over vox as that was the only communication possible here.
I nodded in thanks. 'Inquisitive: Anything of note during shift?' I asked, copying his mannerisms.
'Negative: All systems optimal.'
I seriously doubted that, but I thanked him nonetheless and watched him lead the servitors to their tomb for the next eight hours.
Walking up to a gantry overlooking the factory floor, with a good view of my servitors at work, I checked everything was moving as it should. I was glad to see the shift change hadn't affected anything. Glancing around me, the manafactorum went on as far as the eye could see.
Which, to be fair, wasn't that far because of the heavy pollution in the air, obscuring everything further than a few hundred metres away.
But the point stood.
There was assembly line after assembly line, with dozens of adepts and hundreds of acolytes working on the floor, maintaining tens if not hundreds of thousands of servitors, not to mention the thousands of organic crews called menials, on just this factory alone. There would be so many more, all working around the clock to pump out goods. I couldn't actually find the number; my access was not high enough to see that information.
Looking back at my line, I carried on with my checks, looking through the logs and the statuses of my machines, both now but also historical, to get a clearer picture. I also compared it to my quotas and targets. They were achievable, but even a few hours delay and I would start to slip behind.
There was almost no slack in any of the timelines. I was expected to produce 2107 units by the time I was finished with my shift. A very specific number, and that was just my line. There would be hundreds producing similar numbers. It showed the staggering scale at which the Imperium functioned at.
When I was sure everything was running as smoothly as could be expected and that my predecessor hadn't left any nasty surprises, I started to move amongst the machinery. I was careful not to get knocked over or too close to the giant machines.
The servitors or machines made no deviations or concessions to people in the wrong place at the wrong time.
First, I headed to the end products, all stacked to one side by a mono rail, ready to be transported to the next step in the chain.
I picked three at random, one from halfway through the previous shift, one finished just before I took over and one that was finished with me in command. I compared them to the expected outcomes and then to each other. They were all within the margin of error allowed, although a bit closer to it than I would have liked.
The margin for error was already generous.
I wouldn't use them for my projects; let's leave it at that.
With them looked over, I started to walk the floor once more. Snuffles was curled up on the gantry, keeping an eye on things for me and I tapped into his sensors several times just to check in.
Both watching the servitors as well as the machinery, a couple of times I moved closer to inspect some of the CNC machinery like the lathes, grinders and milling machines. All the while creating a list of things to double-check or investigate that I might be able to improve over time.
I wouldn't touch anything for several weeks, as boring as that would be, but once I was more settled and I had a better handle on things, that would start to change.