Leontus scanned the data-slate with meticulous care, the kill-tallies scrolling past in numbers so vast they induced a phantom ache in his skull. Amidst the mountain of data, one staggering entry arrested his attention:
"Unknown Biological Appendage Repelled: 1"
A biological appendage?
The Lord Solar immediately commanded the Tech-Priests to decrypt and analyze the sensor logs of the engagement. As the full chronometric record of the void war unfolded, the truth of the Hive Fleet's sudden withdrawal became clear.
It was a Leviathan tendril.
The entire swarm had arrived in the wake of this Leviathan. The tendril represented the primary vector of the Hive Mind's hunger. To repel the tendril was to force the swarm into an immediate, reactive retreat.
The Imperial Navy had long dreamed of striking directly at a Leviathan tendril to break an incursion, but it was an objective that bordered on the impossible. Such entities resided in the lightless depths of the occupied zones, shielded by dense, overlapping spheres of bio-ships. To even locate the tendril, one had to punch through the entirety of the Hive Fleet. Attempting a blind Warp-jump into the vicinity was a suicide mission; the Imperial fleet would likely emerge only to be devoured like canned rations by the surrounding xenos.
Imperial vessels lacked the unnatural fusion of high-velocity maneuverability and lethal accuracy possessed by the Iron Man fleet. Even if they could maintain such speeds, outrunning the swarm was meaningless if they could not strike. They certainly could not mimic the brutal tactics of those silver ships, which used their hulls as ploughs to carve bloody furrows through the sea of chitin.
It was a doctrine the Imperium could not replicate.
Accepting this reality, Leontus set the slate aside, categorizing the event as a fortuitous anomaly. He toggled the surveillance feeds, curious to see what these ancient machines intended to do upon their return. What he saw left him in a state of bewildered shock.
The starport in orbit of Vorchad III had been severed from its space elevator. The gargantuan station, dragging its drydocks and the two heavy carriers, had drifted out of geostationary orbit to a position in open space. The space elevator, now deprived of its tether, was collapsing in a catastrophic descent toward the planet's surface.
…
Legions of Sapient Machine Automata poured from the two carriers, transferring mountains of raw materials from the holds into the hollowed gut of the starport. On the surface of Vorchad III, hundreds of remaining automata were already dismantling the wreckage of the fallen elevator.
Two assault cruisers cycled in to dock with the starport, acting as stabilizing anchors in the void. Meanwhile, the carriers began jettisoning swarms of drones and empty cargo pods back down to the surface. The space elevator, including its multi-thousand-ton metallic foundation, was high-grade refined metal, material to be reclaimed and reforged.
As the terrestrial recovery began, the machines aboard the station commenced a frantic industry. The starport's internal architecture was gutted, creating a vast void that was immediately expanded with reclaimed plating. Its silhouette began to stretch, turning long and slender.
Within a week, a gargantuan metallic skeleton exceeding thirty kilometers in length began to protrude from the drydock, drifting like a skeletal finger in the dark. In the zero-gravity environment, hundreds of Eight-Legs tethered themselves to combat drones, flitting through the void to guide the growth of this massive spine.
As the remnants of the original starport and drydock were integrated into one flank of the skeleton, the carriers began retrieving cargo pods filled with processed metals, compressed air, and purified water.
The modified starport was now a colossal, sealed platform. Its interior was a hollowed manufacturing hive. Production machinery, formerly planet-bound, was installed within its guts. Compressed air was pumped in to pressurize the environment; purified water was introduced as a thermal medium. Above the structure, a massive, web-like lattice of hollow pipes unfurled, a giant net into which the water was pumped.
The vacuum of space is a poor conductor of heat, a significant hurdle for a high-output manufacturing platform. However, the void is never short of ice-meteorites. With simple gravitational tethering and engineering, a giant heat-exchange array was brought online.
As the Sapient Factory reactivated, massive structural segments began to emerge from the station. The ship's keel was gradually sheathed in plating; rare alloys, melted from the Hive Mind's flesh and mixed with standard metals, were cast into heavy components.
The assembly process was a blur of motion. This unshielded, raw construction of a titan in open space drew every eye in the system. Even the lowliest voidsman would steal glances through the portholes during their watch, marveling at the progress of the silver megastructure.
Since the loss of the nanite swarms, ship construction had become more "primitive." Components required mechanical smelting; the seams between metal plates showed signs of welding and fastening rather than being grown as a single, molecular whole. This did not diminish the hull's integrity, though it lent the vessel a more rugged, utilitarian aesthetic.
Once the complex central hull was finished, the original starport was completely dismantled. Its machinery was moved into the completed sections of the new ship to continue the work. The drydock itself was subsumed into a recessed bay at the ship's belly.
For the Imperium, this was a display of technological horror. After barely three weeks, the ship changed its profile daily. According to the estimates of the Magi, the vessel would be complete in twenty weeks. Most terrifying was the cross-sectional data: the ship wasn't being built as a hollow shell to be filled later; the internal systems, decks, and machinery were being installed simultaneously with the hull.
This was a vessel thirty kilometers long, sixteen kilometers wide, and eighteen and a half kilometers high. Such a volume could house hundreds of millions.
The Tech-Priests watched the Eight-Legs and automata weld and bolt with ceaseless, rhythmic precision, their internal logic-circuits screaming.
"Is this sacrilege? Or the favor of the Omnissiah? What manner of Machine Spirit will dwell within such a beast?"
For the Adeptus Mechanicus, the creation of anything followed a sacred, liturgical path. To install a single screw required prayers to the Machine God, anointment with sacred oils, a specific number of turns dictated by scripture, and a final blessing. This ritual was performed for every component of every machine, from a cruiser to a lasgun. This was the root of a Forge World's glacial pace; a cruiser could take decades, a battleship centuries.
When a Priest was asked why he had spent half a day in ritual only to leave without finishing a task, the answer was always: "The Omnissiah's mood is ill-favored for the turning of screws today," or "The Will of the Machine God tells me one turn is sufficient."
"Look at these machines," one Magos hissed. "They install ten thousand components in an hour. No litanies. No holy oils. No incense. Being machines themselves, can they truly not feel the Will of the Machine God?"
"This technology is Tech-Heresy of the highest order! I demand an immediate boarding for technical audit! This is a mockery of the Omnissiah!"
Such rhetoric raged among the Priests and Magi throughout the fleet. Yet, the fervor was abruptly silenced when Leontus broadcast the pict-feeds of the Pectaro obliterating the Dark Mechanicum, publicly praising the Iron Men's "loyalty" to the Imperial cause.