How about this configuration?" Tyr asked, pointing at the blocky machine sitting in front of us.
"Hmm, that could work." I said. "But have you considered the risk to crystals moving out of alignment or the crystal matrices shifting? That might cause conflicts, right?"
"I had not. Let me change them." He said brightly, diving back under the machine to change out the crystals. Muttering the chants as he did.
We had been at it for several hours. I had been able to get some of the new crystal growth machines, which were still a rare commodity in the forge world. We had been experimenting with them ever since.
Trying to find other uses, without changing them in any way of course, as that would be heretical. I had gone through Xaldris rather than Viel. Mostly because he was so busy.
I still wasn't entirely sure how I'd ended up here. I'd kept in contact with Tyr over the weeks since I'd given him the rite. First, it was to make sure the rite was working as intended. Then it was just casual conversation, exploring and learning other rituals together.
The talks were what really kept me coming back, partly the human interaction, which I was missing slightly, but also as a sounding board. Tyr had been grown and raised in the forge world and groomed from a very young age to be a tech priest, so he was perfect to understand the Adeptus Mechanicus ethos better.
However, like mine, it hadn't been a peaceful childhood. If there was even such a thing in the Imperium. He was a vat-grown clone of Archmagos Telok, who was running a decade-long experiment. He was the 89th success, having passed the test to become a tech acolyte.
According to Tyr, there had been thousands of other clones, all raised in different ways or environments, all to see how it affected the child and their life.
The expectations of the children in these schools were brutal and falling short, even the slightest, was it. No second chances. They were dropped down to the menials or worse, converted into a servitor. Maybe a more specialised one, honouring their background rather than just the most basic ones.
The situation within his forge had taken two steps forward and one point nine back.
The ritual had served its purpose, allowing him to meet and exceed his targets. But this only made his superior more overt in her attempts. I was just waiting for the inevitable to happen. Either she succeeded and screwed Tyr, forcing him to make an unrecoverable mistake.
She'd come close several times. At one time, he actually called me through the noosphere in a panic, asking for help. We managed to right it, but it was closer than I cared to admit. The other option was that she took it a step too far and caused a disaster that came back to her and got put in her place.
Either by another priest, likely the Forge Master, or by wearing through his master's or mentor's patience. Archmagos Telok's because she was interfering with his experiment, which, from everything I learned about him, was unlikely. It was all just new data, so either way, he was happy.
What was more likely was that Solvexa would have had enough and pushed back… hard.
I was contemplating offering to have him on one of my assembly lines. I had dozens under my remit. It wouldn't be a promotion, but it would escape the sabotage, and then when we were better positioned, I could help him strike back.
And even if he didn't want to, I would anyway. Both to remove the threat and to help any future priests that might be assigned to her.
Particularly as it was looking likely that I would receive another promotion pretty soon. Just a comment from the Forge Master. He was very pleased that my production increases followed me to all the assembly lines I worked on. Which was a massive increase in productivity for the entire forge temple.
Which looked good on everyone's records. From the junior priests working the lines right up to the Forge Master himself.
So he was keen to put even more lines under my aegis to boost their productivity even more. Which had started to make one thing clear. I needed trusted subordinates. How I was going to get that here, I wasn't sure. I had a look at a few junior priests, and quite frankly, I was better off without.
One thing I found almost refreshing, if slightly unnerving, was that I didn't think it was greed that was driving the Forge Master. Using the better production to get things, be that power or a promotion.
No, he was a true believer and anything that made things more effective must be a sign from the Machine God and therefore, I must have received a heavy blessing from him, what with the machine spirits' love. Which was still the excuse I was going with.
It was working out rather well, and to be honest, I was no longer sure how much of a lie it actually was.
Sliding back out from under the machine, Tyr wiped the grease and oil from his hands before reverently chanting the activation rite. The machine hummed to life, and the crystals we had calibrated started to form.
As we watched the solution in the chemical bath, Tyr shifted from side to side. "Why did you start spraying the servitors in your shift? The menials as well. You treat them with more respect."
That question came out of nowhere.
How to say it in a way he could understand when it mostly came down to 'because I could'. It was no extra work from me and it didn't risk me in any way, so there was no real downside in not being nice to the menials.
"How would you feel if you saw an adept with poorly maintained equipment?"
"I would be liturgically incensed by such inefficiency. Adepts can't shirk their holy duty. It is a privilege to work alongside the Motive Force."
"Exactly."
"Exactly?"
"Yes, why is that any different to servitors or menials?"
Seemingly stunned, he stared off and muttered. "I'm not… sure. But they are biological—disposable? Flesh is a weakness. Sacrificed for the greater good."
Hoping I hadn't just shattered the man's worldview, which it very much looked like. "Sure they are tools and as you argued, disposable ones. But we are all a cog in the great works of the Omnissiah. Anyone working for his holy goal in discovering knowledge should be given our all. And that's not even mentioning the logistical side of it."
"Logistical?"
"Say, my work has made my process 1% more efficient or 1% increase in output. Now, on my assembly line, that might only be a few items, but expand that to the entire forge temple? Now we are looking at 100s if not 1000s of items. Expand that out again to the Forge World and now we are looking at millions of items.
"Can you imagine a 1% increase in the entire output of the Mechanicus would be?"
---
Archmagos Viel Nox disengaged from the sacred engram with a hiss of cooling vapour.
Even through the Rite of Clear Thought, agitation bled through his normally immaculate emotional partitions. The fragmentary STC remained obstinate. He had probed it from every sanctioned angle, invoked all proper binharic queries, cross-referenced it with the Forge's archives—meagre compared to Mars, but still extensive and still the missing schema refused to reveal itself.
It was a trial.
A gift, veiled as hardship.
A test of worthiness.
He accepted it as such.
The partially restored STC sat within its cradle, glowing faintly. Even damaged, its presence warmed the ancient circuits woven through Viel's chest. All knowledge from the Machine God was sacred. All fragments, all whispers. Even the incomplete were to be cherished with reverence.
He cast a glance across the sanctum. The copies of the recovered STCs rested upon a raised shrine. The true originals lay entombed far below, deep within Vault Omicron-Prime, guarded by kill-locks and machine spirits too ancient and irritable to ever be brought to the surface.
His name was now part of the Forge World's recorded liturgy. Inscribed. Immutable. Eternal.
For exactly three seconds, pride flickered through him.
Then he crushed it.
Emotion was weakness.
Pride was inefficiency.
He was above such fleeting tremors of flesh and ego.
He was a prophet of the Machine God.
Thanks to his blessed foresight, he had gained everything he required. As Fabricator Locum, his word carried the weight of law, unless countermanded by the Fabricator General himself. And he was an ancient Magos, his earliest sealed records dated to at least a millennium past.
The calm of the forge world had aided him. The Moirae Schism, though not eradicated, had been driven deep into the shadows—its remnants muttering in hidden sanctums or buried threads within the noosphere, concealed beneath encrypted cowls.
Far more peace than the tension he had left behind.
A faint frown crossed his metal features. He reread the report on the ganger—no, Adept. The man had cast off his past to embrace the holy luminance of the Motive Force.
Once again, Viel permitted himself a moment of praise for his own vision. As he had predicted, coming to the holy world of Stratix had been advantageous. Aleric's 'gift' had only intensified under his careful tutoring. Now, the adept's mere presence was often enough to sway hostile machine spirits into uneasy alliance.
Yes, Aleric's affinity for machine spirits was being noticed. Far more than Viel's predictive-concordance algorithms had projected. He had seen several queries into the adept's data-stacks. Most were irrelevant acolytes. But others… they had been notable, like the Fabricator Lords, which was a different matter entirely.
His progress within the manufactorum had drawn attention as well, especially from his Forge Master, who had pushed the adept upward at every opportunity. And now the former ganger, with only a handful of years' service, held one of the most critical positions within the temple.
And he thrived within it.
But more than that, he had caught the eyes of the Fabricator Lords on the day he helped subdue Magnovitrium-Prime.
The ancient machine-spirit's incandescent fury had stilled the moment he entered. Several adepts had entered with him—any could have been the catalyst. But the noospheric pict-captures showed the same truth.
Magnovitrium-Prime calmed only as Aleric-007 stepped into the chamber.
With the great engine soothed, it became manageable—still uncooperative, but no longer actively harmful. And under the rites Aleric oversaw, that shifted as well. The spirit became… helpful. Responsive. Collaborative.
The thought crossed Viel's mind again. Convert him. Sanctify him. Preserve him in a blessed state where he could remain close, remain useful and free from irrelevant distractions.
But no. Conversion risked diminishing his spark, the strange resonance he held with machine-spirits.
It was the primary reason Viel had delayed. That, and the gift Aleric had given them, clearly the Omnissiah had chosen another path for him.
Now his aptitude shone bright. He devoured the lessons Viel set before him with a single-minded drive that impressed the old Magos, reminding him of a young Viel, centuries ago, first stepping onto the sacred path of the Machine God.
So much so that he was nearing the point where he could finally be useful, not only with machine spirits, but within the noosphere itself. Viel had hoped his rapport with spirits would persist even when interfacing with higher data-realms.
It would be centuries yet before Viel risked one of his truly sacred engines in Aleric's care, but he had several lesser relics suitable for testing. The same applied to the noosphere. There were vaults, ancient, sealed, tantalising, into which Viel longed to send a proxy.
He was certain they held fragments of knowledge left behind by the Machine God.
He would begin small. But if outcomes followed his algorithms, he would gain access to what he sought, returning more pieces of divine knowledge to the Mechanicus, ready to be archived.
So Viel left the adept alone… for now. He could always convert him later, if required.
During his contemplations of Aleric, his sub-cogitators continued reviewing secondary reports, sifting mountains of data in seconds thanks to the potency of his augmentations. Then something was flagged.
He redirected full attention to it, consuming the 1273-page file in the span of a few servo-clicks. Clearly, the scribe responsible was of competent lineage; the report was efficient, free of indulgence. Viel noted several formatting methods for future use.
A disturbing find had been uncovered deep within the forgotten catacombs of the old city, far beneath the surface. The tunnels predated even the earliest Mechanicus presence, ruins of the Age of Strife, brought to heel only by the Omnissiah's warriors.
Several Magi had uncovered artefacts and a hidden workshop steeped in heretekal ideation. Some fragments muttered of the Moirae Doctrine, citing events faintly resembling the prophecies' fevered ramblings.
Blind fanaticism. Tradition blinded adepts clinging to scraps of misinterpreted data. It saddened Viel to see Mechanicus brethren led astray, but he found solace knowing he walked the ordained path.
As if the galaxy itself could one day be split in half.
But it was not the doctrine that concerned him—it was the other relics.
Twisted machine spirits.
Fragments of corrupted scrap code that killed several explorers upon discovery.
All signs pointed toward accursed hereteks, or worse, the Dark Mechanicum. Brothers who had veered so catastrophically from the Omnissiah's light.
Deceived by that wretched traitor Kelbor-Hal, may his name be listed among the machine damned. Thinking of him stirred a cold, calculated rage in Viel, until his servo-skull anointed him with purifying oils.
In response to the discovery, they had authorised silent probes into the old tunnels and sanctioned further expeditions into the most sacred depths.
Turning his attention back to the lingering reports, his gaze caught on a greyed out segment. The data-slate flickered, iconography resolving into casualty projections and asset lists. The Collegia Titanica, once proud on Stratix, had been annihilated in the chaos of the Dark Mechanicum uprising. Entire Legios lost. Knowledge cores corrupted or shattered. Holy engines, some dating back to the Great Crusade, reduced to half remembered schematics or ritual fragments.
A tremor of sadness, quickly drowned beneath a spike of rage that pulsed through his augmetics.
So much lost. So much stolen.
At least their Knight Households endured.
A quick noospheric query revealed that a new Knight chassis had just stepped off the assembly line, still steaming from the sacristan bays, receiving its consecration oils. Its future Principle-Pilot would arrive in days for the Rite of Becoming. He allowed himself a moment to appreciate the machine's glory, titanic lineage distilled into a smaller, but no less sacred, form.
Then duty intruded again.
He dismissed more mundane disputes, paranoid Magi imagining hereteks in every shadow. They'd been investigated early on, but after many wasted hours, the petitions were now automatically catalogued into low-priority bins.
He cast a longing glance toward the restricted vaults, both physical and noospheric. So much forbidden knowledge now lay open to him after his elevation… but other matters demanded attendance.
He had a meeting to go to.
Unfortunately, the meeting was too important to leave to one of the other magi, so it had to be a fabricator lord who greeted them. Due to his position and having direct connections to them, it was decided that it was his task.
Lord Hal Orpheus was far too influential to dismiss. The head of a massive rogue trading family that was based in the segment, with stakes or even direct control over many worlds. Not to mention their exploration of the veiled region to their galactic south, past the control of the Imperium.
They brought back thousands of artefacts, many of which ended up with the Mechanicus as was right.
The Orpheus family had been growing their influence for centuries, and it looked like this would be the time it would pay off. The Mechanicus looked down on the political manoeuvring of the other factions. Dismissing it as it wasn't part of their duties.
But during his time on Gravis Prime, he had regular contact with the family. One of their major trading hubs passed through Noxium.
Standing, he moved at a deliberate pace, his servo guards falling into formation around him, and started walking to the meeting room. For such an important event they were using Convocare Lux Ferrata, the grand meeting room.
As he walked, he tracked the delegate through the halls, making sure his calculated pace was accurate, which it was. They had come from the docks, where a shuttle had dropped them off. Not one he recognised. Looking at its credentials, it was a heavy transport ship, heavily armed and armoured. With more than enough room for the hundreds if not thousands of personnel guards.
The delegates' grand cruiser on the other hand, was well known to him. It was docked on the drydocks on the moon orbiting Stratix, awaiting refits, where it would be for several months. It was getting the upgraded focusing crystals as well as some of the first enhanced Gellar fields off the construction lines.
A subcogitator pinged him; he would arrive 17.45 seconds after the delegation arrived at Convocare Lux Ferrata.
Perfectly timed.
The doors opened to the chamber. It was perfectly designed to bring feelings of warmth, comfort and power, with its roaring fire, gold upholstery and padded seats. Viel didn't understand the need himself, but the Fabricator General liked them, so it stayed. It did make for an easier meeting Viel begrudgingly admitted.
Seated at one side of the table was the Lord. Viels blessed eyes scanned him critically, ignoring the pomp and ceremony of his outfit. It was a lace collar and cuffs with a flamboyantly bright red waistcoat and a white overcoat.
Instead he focused on what mattered.
As expected, his bionics were impeccable, a golden right arm and left side of the face. He knew if he looked under the table, he would see two bionic legs as well. All top of the line, some of the best the Mechanicus could make.
The man himself was old, nearly as old as Viel himself, but looking at him, it would be hard to tell, thanks to the copious amount of regeneration treatments he had undergone. But if you looked carefully around the eyes, you could see some of the wrinkles that refused to fade during the process.
But the main giveaway was the single human eye. Old and piecing, the other was cybernetics, still plated in gold. Giving him one last scan, he noted the artefacts hidden amongst his many jewellery. If it was to hide it, Viel didn't know, nor care.
He had a personal shield hanging around his neck as a pendant on a fine golden chain. As well as the two digital rings on his hand. Viel quickly scanned them and searched through the blessed libraries to find a match. He assessed them to be plasma-based.
Nodding at the lord, he sped up his perception to assess the rest of the party.
He scowled distastefully at the first member, and possibly the most important and powerful in the room. At first glance, she wasn't important, with a humble faded cloak around her, which hid her exquisite armour and the same pendant as a shield.
But these weren't what made her a threat. On her forehead, hidden by her long fringe was a metal cap covering the third eye. She was Novate Nobility of the Vanthegor Dynasty and she was Navis Scion.
It was a prestigious position.
It was for those young enough and therefore uncorrupted enough to be seen in public. Thyssala was coming to the end of her time in the role. Viel was unsure how long she could hold the mutations at bay, but he doubted she had a century left before she was forced to step down.
The House of Vanthegor had been linked to the Orpheus from the very beginning. Starting like them as a small family, but through their shared relationship had grown to dominate most of the southern sectors.
The next few he glossed over as irrelevant. Several well-made servitors, as well as two guards, far below their blessed sketarii. The only thing of note was their armour. At first, it appeared like any basic carapace, but Viel knew the truth. Under the disguise was powerful xeno armour.
From his very hive, in fact.
But he allowed the lie to stand. It wasn't worth the cost to confiscate the artefacts. As much as it burned his righteous heart. The final few were human. One was dressed in an impeccable Naval uniform, his badges revealed him as Admiral, although his secondary badges of High Admiral hinted at what the meeting would be about.
The others were all heavily augmented, but coated in silver rather than the gold like their lord. As the lord's inner circle, they were decked out in pompous outfits but had artefacts protecting their body. The last two of note were similar to the others, but they had gold-plated bionics like the head of their family.
They, too, had the old young look, but the eyes were nowhere near as old. They were the son and daughter of Lord Hal and the heirs apparent of the house of Orpheus.
Finally, Viel turned his attention to the elephant in the room. The mighty Astarte stood still like a statue in the corner. He didn't recognise the chapter at first; once more he scanned the databases until he found it.
The Stormwalkers. A recent founding chapter, but in close keeping with their precursor chapter of the White Scars.
He allowed his perception to slow back to real time. He nodded to those relevant before turning to greet the Lord.
"Greetings."
Lord Hal stood and bowed. "Fabricator Locum Viel Nox. Thank you for seeing us. Congratulations on your most holy ascent."
Viel nodded, pleased. But allowed none of it to show on his face. He settled into his seat opposite the Lord. Several of his magi mirroring him with Lord Hal and his retinue doing the same.
Wanting to get the meeting started and abhorring inefficiency, Viel leaned forwards. "How can Forge World Stratix assist?"
"I'm sure you were rather surprised, not expecting me to come with my flagship. But when I heard the new STCs offered, I had to come and see them in person. You have the thanks of House Orpheus for briefing us ahead of time. But knowing the Mechanicus approve efficiency I will be to the point."
With a flourish and a warm smile, Lord Hal drew himself up and continued. "I have had the go-ahead from several bishops and cardinals that are high up within the church and have the ears of Ecclesiarch Paulis III. With their support I have all I need to form a crusade into the southern regions. Our target is the Dark Marches. With recent stability and growth, now is the perfect time to expand the Imperium once more."
And gain more planets under house Orpheus, further strengthening them, went unsaid.
"I have already received the approval of several minor forge worlds, Dixazine and Ablakion. As well as the support of the Lord High Admiralty." He said, pointing at the Admiral. "So we have come to the most sacred Stratix, one of the most powerful forge worlds in the segmentum, to gain support for our endeavour."
While they had been talking, Viel had kept half a mind on them; the other was furiously scanning data vaults and data packs, cross-referencing data for any information that might be helpful.
As the Lord fell silent, Viel sped his mind to its maximum, furiously calculating.
He concluded they could support the effort.
But did they want to?
"The most holy Stratix has the capacity to help you in your endeavours. But we have other items that have priority right now." Viel said, not committing to anything, to see what the Lord was willing to offer.
"I understand of course." Lord Hal said smoothly. His charming smile was still plastered on his face. Even inspecting him intently, Viel couldn't see through the lie. If he didn't know better, he would think he was a young, cheerful man.
Lord Hal was as ruthless as any nobility. Maybe more so. He had to step over a mountain of corpses to claim the family head.
"During the crusade, we are sure to find artefacts that require Mechanicus oversight. As well as a say in any worlds that might support or be of interest to the Mechanicus."
Viel hated the process, but played along, negotiating back and forth until a deal was struck. The forge world would support the efforts. Supplying it with weapons and armour to outfit the conscription efforts. As well as a navy to support them, when it came to light that the navy could not move away from the segmentum.
The Dark Eldar were becoming more active and had raided many of the outlying worlds.
Another reason for the Navy to be on board and gain more ships, allowing them to patrol more sectors.