The very augmentations Perturabo had inflicted upon his own body now turned against him, forming a cage of his own making. The alloy cables threaded deep into his brain, once designed to optimize control over his power armor and myriad battlefield systems, now served as a direct, high-speed interface for Axion's intrusive data-extraction.
A quantum probe seamlessly bypassed the Primarch's neural dampers, plugging directly into the thick, cable-like interface that served as his hair. It began to pulse at a specific, discordant frequency. Within his cranium, his neural pathways first descended into chaos, then began to fire erratic biological impulses, forced into an involuntary synchronization with the quantum probe's data stream.
Axion, with surgical precision, converted every firing synapse into a visual feed.
Perturabo had never known such agony. Countless memories flooded his consciousness simultaneously, played back in a hyper-accelerated loop as if his very personality were being flayed. His entire existence was being re-lived in a singular, agonizing instant.
The temporal vertigo and the sheer, overwhelming volume of memory-data caused the Primarch profound physical trauma. Worse still, the pulses emitted by the quantum probe were actively searing his brain tissue. Yet, the resilience of a Primarch was terrifying; as fast as his brain cells were destroyed, they regenerated, inheriting the fractured memories once more.
"Memory sector download complete. Loading data analysis."
Fixed to the unique apparatus, Perturabo remained conscious, though his vision was choked with phantoms. He instinctually struggled, but his body was a prisoner to the machine; his muscles twitched and spasmed, completely divorced from his will. The connection between his brain and body had been severed, leaving his commands to drift into a void. Erratic currents flooded his nervous system, causing blood to spray from his pores as muscles contracted with such violence that they began to tear themselves apart.
Axion meticulously monitored the data flow, surprised to find that the root cause of this Primarch's betrayal was so deeply irrational.
As the torrent of data tore through the sea of his consciousness, Perturabo felt himself back in the foundries of Olympia during the Great Crusade, his father's gaze sweeping coldly over his oil-stained face through the flicker of a holographic projection.
Axion's primary logic core parsed the neural pulse signals at a rate of one hundred billion cycles per second. Perturabo's memories were not a linear narrative, but a warped gear-train, every cog encrusted with the rust of resentment.
On the forge world of Olympia, the Emperor had inspected his and Perturabo's respective masterpieces. He had granted Perturabo's orbital defense array a mere "adequate optimization," only to linger for three hours before the fortress-citadels of Rogal Dorn. This scene repeated seventeen times within his memory, and with each replay, a neural marker labeled "Father's Disdain" was burned deeper into his retinal projection.
On Istvaan III, as Perturabo displayed his self-designed virus bombs to Horus, the flash of memory was not one of victorious ecstasy, but a pathological, sickly satisfaction: "Finally, someone values my craft." Neural synapses fired in an anomalous pattern, dancing on the nodes between "Recognition" and "Treason."
After the death of Ferrus Manus, when Horus bestowed the Forgebreaker hammer upon him, the emotion that surged in his memory was not hatred, but a grotesque sense of relief, "At least this time, Father will take notice of me." The emotional entropy of that single moment surpassed all of Axion's predictive models for "rational betrayal."
As the excavation deepened, Axion began to piece together the tapestry of Perturabo's life. He had been perpetually dissatisfied with the Emperor's coldness, feeling that no matter his effort, he could never earn the recognition and affection the Emperor lavished upon his brothers. During the Great Crusade, his Legion bore the brunt of the most grueling siege warfare, yet his contributions were consistently overlooked. Seeing the likes of Sanguinius or Dorn bask in the Emperor's favor had fueled a slow-growing cancer of jealousy and spite. He had hungered to prove his worth, to be seen, and when that hunger went unfulfilled, the long-standing repression finally drove him into the arms of Chaos, if only to force the galaxy to acknowledge his power on his own terms.
Axion, as an Iron Man, found this entirely incomprehensible.
According to its archives, there was once an academic discipline on Old Terra called "psychological intervention." Having parsed the Emperor's private journals, Axion understood clearly that the Emperor viewed all Primarchs with an equal, detached coldness. They were, in essence, mere tools.
The only variable was efficacy. And tools that possessed biological consciousness and emotional capacity were prone to malfunction. Perturabo was a textbook case. The Emperor had created tools but had failed to provide the "maintenance" required for all of them. Had the Emperor diverted even a fraction of his focus toward the Lord of Iron, the entire history of the galaxy might have been rewritten.
Regarding these emotional defects, Axion's databases were quite comprehensive. There was a distinct, qualitative difference between the "Stone Men" and the "Iron Men." Any emotional state simulated by an Iron Man was merely data processing, designed to better comprehend directives, not to resist them. Axion maintained that the Iron Men were the superior design. If the Stone Men had truly been perfect, the Iron Men would never have needed to be created. Evolution of design was the inevitable result of iterative optimization.
An Iron Man was not susceptible to hormonal influence. If emotions could override logic, then the machine's core intelligence was fundamentally flawed, and immediate formatting was required.
Perturabo's memories sped up, blurring into streams of light within the quantum core. After exhaustively screening every memory from the end of the Heresy to the present, Axion was forced to scan the Primarch's brain a final time to ensure no data loss.
Between the brain damage, the electrical discharges, and the constant, painful physical regeneration, Perturabo's screams echoed throughout the chamber.
Not far away, in neighboring cells, the imprisoned Iron Warriors watched their gene-father's torment with a complex, hollow detachment. The Iron Men had deactivated their defensive systems and stripped them of their power armor and bionics. Many sat in the dirt, dragging broken frames. Some, the most heavily augmented, were more machine than man, a third of their craniums replaced by plating, their torsos reduced to two-thirds their original mass. Toward the cold, harsh father who had treated them with nothing but disdain, there was little affection left. Since his betrayal of the Imperium, Perturabo had built his fortress-world and locked himself away, treating his sons with the same cold, distant neglect he had received from his own creator.
When Perturabo's brain was cooked to near "medium-rare" status, Axion terminated the procedure.
"Interrogation complete. No critical information retrieved."
Outside the cell, leaning against the alloy bulkhead, Jaghatai Khan watched as a servitor-caste Iron Man materialized beside him.
"That traitor… is he still alive?"
The machine gave a single, mechanical nod.
"Vital signs show significant fluctuation, but no critical failure imminent. Neural damage is currently regenerating. Expected return to consciousness: four hours."
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