Axion cared little for the departure of these "dead weights," even though he had just updated the equipment and vessels for these Imperial forces. The Wrath of Fenris had departed with one hundred thousand mortals and one thousand and three Astartes; this was a welcome outcome. After all, it reduced their standard consumption of provisions by a massive margin.
Just as the remaining mortals and Astartes began boarding their respective ships, the first challenge manifested.
Across the fleet, countless Tech-Priests scurried about, desperate and frantic. Yet, regardless of the rituals they performed or the interfaces they attempted to bridge, they could no longer perceive the Machine Spirits. The hulls, the weapon systems, the vehicles, it was all silent. The echoes of the Machine Spirit were nowhere to be found.
The Iron Men had always found the Tech-Priests' habit of interfacing their organic brains directly into data streams utterly baffling. The processing capacity of a human mind was nowhere near that of a quantum-chip computation array. Yet, these priests persisted in acting as pathetic, fragile processing units, risking the catastrophic collapse of their own cerebral functions just to access the ship's systems, as if the visual displays and data readouts were mere decorative relics.
Human minds were cluttered with emotional fragments and chaotic sensory data. When these priests bridged themselves into the ship's systems, they inevitably flooded the vessel with this biological detritus. Over time, this corrupted the system with massive amounts of data-junk, causing sluggish operations, retrieval errors, and equipment failure. Even more bizarrely, this emotional data provided a vector for Chaos corruption. The Iron Men simulated emotion through data; the Imperial Machine Spirit, by contrast, left raw, digitized emotion rotting within the hardware. They were two fundamentally different phenomena.
As the mortals returned to their ships, they were stunned. The hulls looked brand new; some naval veterans were certain they were in better condition than any vessel fresh off a Forge World's assembly line. The interiors were pristine, devoid of even a speck of rust. The once-shattered, chaotic lower decks had been completely overhauled. All conduits were unified and symmetrical, and every cable was neatly organized. The valves and switches that had once been scattered haphazardly were now concentrated in key control rooms, with every detail rendered with terrifying precision.
The labyrinthine pipe-wells were removed and redesigned for efficiency. The maintenance corridors and passage structures were hundreds of times more navigable than before. The squalid shanties, garbage dumps, and makeshift hovels that had once choked the lower-deck corridors were gone. The decks were clean enough to reflect a face.
It was despair-inducing.
Without the filth, the leaking steam, or the mildly toxic refuse to scavenge, even the strange, resilient moss that had grown in the dark corners would no longer survive. How many in the lower decks could now secure enough rations to fill their bellies? One percent? One in a thousand? No one could say. The pungent, gray mold-soup, a broth of recycled filter water, moss, and miscellaneous organic waste, had been the only thing keeping many of these wretches alive through their misery.
But worse was yet to come. The crestfallen Tech-Priests announced a reduction in the workforce. The Iron Men had fixed the structures that required constant, inefficient maintenance once and for all. The optimized design meant the fleet required far fewer hands to keep it running.
In the old days, no breakdown meant no work. Usually, a worker could earn a day's rations by fixing a single structural fault, a couple of foul-tasting starch bars or a tin of gelatinous, unrecognizable sludge. It was just enough to keep one from starving for two or three days. During these repairs, workers would often pilfer "scrap," which could be traded in the lower-deck markets for food or other oddities. Even a bottle of high-efficiency coolant spray for skin rashes commanded a high price in the black market.
Those opportunities were likely gone forever.
The new reactors provided an abundance of power; the lower decks and bilges were no longer the dim, flickering haunts they once were. Bright, clean, orderly, and ventilated, words that had never once applied to the lower decks, were now, to the inhabitants, deeply unsettling.
While the Tech-Priests were still busy analyzing what exactly the Iron Men had modified, and what brilliant structural innovations they could potentially "study," naval security patrols in the lower decks began rounding up workers who were attempting to inflict minor damage on the hulls.
Under Axion's optimization, every person in the lower decks now had their own room. Even if they were small, this was a luxury once deemed inconceivable. No one was forced to curl up in the warmth of a leaking pipe-well anymore. Yet, driven by the terror of a future without work, they began trying to sabotage hidden, non-critical conduits. The people of the lower decks needed tasks to earn their food rations.
Thanks to the Iron Men's practice of labeling every pipe type every few meters, no one was foolish enough to target the vital systems. Even so, several pipes suffered minor dents. Lacking work orders for laser-welders or other high-powered tools, the workers resorted to the most primitive methods: frantic, repeated bashing with wrenches and heavy tools.
But the quality of the ships refitted by the Iron Men defied all imagination. Though they managed to dent a few pipes, they couldn't even breach a single wastewater line. It was these very sounds of metallic percussion that caught the attention of the Tech-Priests, who were busy observing the ship's structural evolution. The naval security patrols that followed quickly apprehended the culprits.
After verifying that these workers were not corrupted by the Warp or tainted by xenos, they were summarily executed. The record of their crimes and the resulting sentences were broadcast on a loop over the lower-deck vox-casters.
Axion, for his part, remained entirely unconcerned.
Preparations were complete. Before departing, the Heart of the Forge had fully replenished the Void Sword. As the order was given, the massive fleet began to sail. The Tech-Priests gathered before the activated Arc Reactors, chanting and splashing holy oils; incense filled the mid and upper decks, creating a thick, choking haze throughout the ship.
Meanwhile, the Astartes paced restlessly through the weaponries and armouries. The Space Wolves and White Scars donned the brand-new power armor provided by the Iron Men. The new suits did not differ greatly in profile from the Mk X, but the shells were now integrated, single-piece castings with a double-layered, articulating structural design. Not only did they retain the modularity and weapon-compatibility of Imperial patterns, but the quantity of electronic muscle-fiber in the under-lining was triple that of the original. The traditional power backpack had been discarded, its functions fully integrated into the chassis itself. In truth, it was less a suit of power armor and more a mobile, personal Centurion-pattern suit.
The Astartes did not immediately swap out their traditional weapons for the terrifying new armaments filling the racks. They stuck to what they knew. Unless they were committed to an all-out boarding action, these horrific weapons would remain sealed in storage. Fighting inside a ship was a delicate affair; the weapons gifted to them were powerful enough to blow the ship apart long before they killed the enemy. Unless their ships possessed the sheer, massive displacement of the Phalanx, only a fraction of those formidable weapons could ever be safely deployed.