The route through the forge-palace was longer than the exterior had suggested.
The corridors were wide enough for the passage of heavy machinery and lined with equipment that had been installed in stages over what looked like multiple centuries, each generation of addition bolted or welded to the one before it. Overhead, the ceiling was threaded with conduit bundles as thick as support pillars, running in parallel from deep inside the complex toward some central destination that the corridor's geometry kept just out of view.
Nolan moved slowly, reading the space as he walked.
Reditus had abandoned the Armiger at the palace entrance. The war machine was too large for the interior corridors, and bringing it further would have required a level of rearrangement that neither party had time for. The servo-skull now drifted beside Nolan on its anti-grav field, its red eye-lenses cycling in the low light of the palace interior, cataloguing everything it passed.
The Terminator Guards remained outside. Nolan had given the order with a gesture before crossing the threshold, and they had settled into position without comment.
Their Magos guide led them deeper.
Along the way, Nolan noticed the automata. Servo-constructs of various configurations moved through the side passages, attending to mechanical systems that ran the length of the interior walls: cleaning contacts, testing junctions, adjusting calibration points on devices whose function was not immediately obvious from the outside. They worked without pause and without apparent instruction, responding to conditions rather than commands.
The Magos, without breaking stride, explained that these constructs were not entirely separate from the Fabricator General. The processing architecture that filled the palace was not simply adjacent to the Fabricator General's systems. In a functional sense, the entire structure was an extension of him. The automata were his hands in spaces his own body could no longer reach. The calculation networks were his working memory.
Nolan filed this away.
After roughly five minutes of walking, the corridor opened into a much larger space, and the heavy door appeared.
It was old, and built to impress without apologizing for the weight of what it protected. The frame was cast with the gear-and-skull iconography common to senior Mechanicus installations, but worn here into something that had moved past decoration into simple identity. Thick cables descended from the ceiling in clusters and disappeared through sealed penetrations in the door's edges, anchored to whatever lay on the far side.
The Magos raised one modified arm. A silent binary exchange passed through the air. The door's internal mechanisms engaged, and the whole thing opened inward with the kind of unhurried, massive movement that comes from machinery designed to last for centuries rather than to be fast.
The Magos turned, bowed in the direction of both Nolan and Reditus, and informed them that the Fabricator General of Triplex Phall was waiting.
Nolan looked through the open door.
His eyes moved across the visible segment of what lay beyond: servo-constructs at work on something very large, cable clusters anchored to the floor and ceiling at regular intervals, machinery that filled the space from wall to wall. He was quiet for a moment. Then, almost without intending to, he inhaled slowly through the helmet's filtration system.
Something in the air was not right.
He held the impression for a moment, examined it, and decided not to share it yet. He glanced sideways at Reditus and inclined his head briefly toward the door.
Then he walked in.
Reditus followed, his eye-lenses shifting to a wider aperture in the interior lighting.
The space beyond the door was very large. It had to be. The figure occupying its center stood more than thirty meters from floor to ceiling at its highest point, a mechanical body of such accumulated scale that it no longer resembled a person who had received augmentations. It resembled a building that happened to have a face. The chassis was dense with integrated systems: processing clusters, sensory arrays, support columns that had once been a spine, manifolds and exchange units layered over what had originally been a skeleton. At the very top, a head that retained more of its original proportions than the rest of the body turned slowly on its mounting, and a pair of mechanical eyes tracked back and forth across the room with the methodical sweep of auspex dishes.
They settled on the two arrivals.
"Hm." The voice was mechanical in the way that everything about the figure was mechanical: not constructed to imitate a human voice, but carrying the memory of one. It filled the room without effort, low and even, stripped of anything that might be called inflection. "The data calculation was failing to converge. Now I understand. Reditus."
The vast head continued its slow sweep, eyes pausing on each of them in turn.
"The probability of a successful convergence reaches ninety percent." A beat. "Lord Primarch. My apologies for receiving you in this manner. The years of necessary augmentation have made departure from this palace impractical."
Nolan looked up at the Fabricator General. His gaze moved across the full extent of that mechanical body with the unhurried attention of someone who was neither intimidated nor performing casualness. His mouth made a small sound, brief and involuntary, the kind that escapes when something genuinely exceeds expectation.
He had known, in an abstract sense, that the Fabricators General of the Imperium rarely retained much of their original form. Knowing it and standing in front of the result were different experiences.
Before Nolan could respond, the red glow of Reditus's eye-lenses intensified sharply.
The servo-skull drifted forward half a meter, its full attention directed upward at the massive face above them.
"Wesley?" The word came out slower than usual, carrying something that might, in a less mechanically reconstructed being, have been called disbelief. "You're Wesley? You actually became a Fabricator General?"
The vast mechanical head shifted again. Something in the eye-lenses changed, though cataloguing the change precisely would have required better access to the system's internal states.
"The probability of this particular reunion is thirty percent. I did not anticipate seeing you again, Reditus." A pause. "Particularly given that I was present for the ceremony in which your original body was committed to a servo-skull chassis."
The Fabricator General's head turned slightly, as though adjusting a focus point.
"I would also like to correct a minor imprecision in your phrasing. I did not become a Fabricator General. I was always the Fabricator General of Triplex Phall. You may recall my full name: Wesley Phall. I was born here."
Nolan glanced at Reditus.
Reditus had the particular stillness of someone processing several things simultaneously and choosing not to express any of them yet.
The Fabricator General continued, the head now orienting more squarely toward Nolan.
"Lord Primarch. It is possible your mechanical sage has not mentioned me. I studied for a period under Archmagos Fastinius. I am one of his students, and in that sense a successor to the principles he taught, and a fellow student of Reditus. We share a master."
Nolan absorbed this.
He looked at Reditus for a moment, then returned his gaze to the enormous mechanical figure before him.
"I'll admit," Nolan said, "that this was not a scenario I had anticipated when we landed."
He paused for exactly one beat.
"However. Before you and your fellow student have time to reminisce, there is something I need to do first."
The vibranium power armor activated.
The sound it made was brief and distinct, the hum of systems cycling to full readiness, and then Nolan was already moving. The charge crossed the distance between him and the Fabricator General in a fraction of a second, and the Ten Rings left his arm simultaneously, ten metal loops trailing purple energy as they spread out and drove into the Fabricator General's massive mechanical body at multiple points.
The room responded.
Weapon housings that had been flush with the Fabricator General's chassis rotated outward in the same instant, black muzzles swinging to track Nolan's position, targeting solutions resolving at machine speed. Wesley's defensive systems were not slow. For something of his scale, they were remarkably fast.
But neither the Ten Rings nor Wesley's defensive array was the most interesting thing that happened in the next second.
One of the thick cables running along the outer surface of the Fabricator General's chassis moved.
Not with the slow, passive shift of a heavy cable redistributing tension under stress. It moved with intent, jerking free from the surface it had been coiled against and whipping outward toward the far end of the room, accelerating as it went, and as it moved it was already beginning to change: thickening at certain points, articulating at others, the coil of it organizing itself into something that had joints, and then limbs, and then something approaching the rough outline of a standing figure.
Reditus made a sound that had no clear category.
Even Wesley went still for a fraction of a second, his targeting systems pausing mid-solution as his own sensor architecture tried to account for the behavior of something he had understood to be a standard cable run.
The Ten Rings reached it before it finished its transformation.
All ten struck in a tight cluster, and the cable-creature came apart in a cascade of sparks and thrashing motion. Where the rings hit, the material shredded and burned, and from the burning came thin threads of something that was not electricity and not fire, chaotic energy bleeding out through the ruptures and dispersing into the air with a smell that no filtration system could quite neutralize. Faint. Sour. Old.
The thing stopped moving.
The residual threads faded. The scorched cable remnants fell to the floor in several pieces and lay still.
The room was quiet.
"By the Omnissiah."
Wesley's voice, when it returned, had lost none of its mechanical flatness. But the content of what it carried had changed.
"I have recorded operational anomalies in this body's systems for years. Calculation errors with no identifiable source. Sensor readings that did not correlate with confirmed data. I attributed them to accumulated processing drift." Another pause, longer than the first. "Lord Primarch. What was that? A Chaos daemon?"
His mechanical eyes were fixed on the scorched remains on the floor.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Writing takes time, coffee, and a lot of love.If you'd like to support my work, join me at [email protected]/GoldenGaruda
You'll get early access to over 50 chapters, selection on new series, and the satisfaction of knowing your support directly fuels more stories.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~