While the various automata labored upon the planet's surface, the void above was a theater of chaotic violence.
Aboard the Vengeful Spirit, siren runes flickered in a frantic, rhythmic pulse. The bridge, locked in a state of high combat readiness, was bathed in the oppressive, blood-red glare of emergency lighting.
A jagged rift of sorcerous Warp-energy tore open in the center of the command deck, and Falkus Kibre stepped out, flanked by his two squads of Terminators.
As the empyrean energies dissipated and the identity of the arrivals became clear, Abaddon the Despoiler brought his fist down, crushing a nearby daemonic crew-serf into a pulp of gore and shattered chitin. By the original design, they were to have returned to the fleet aboard ancient, rediscovered vessels before transitioning into the Warp. Their appearance here, via emergency teleportation, heralded only one truth.
The mission had failed.
"Abaddon, we have been deceived!" Kibre growled. "The ruins are there, but they are guarded by a terrifying defensive force. We have sustained catastrophic casualties, information that the Magos withheld from us entirely."
Abaddon had already felt a premonition of disaster when Magos Pholios's Ark Mechanicus had abruptly broken formation and revealed the fleet's position. Kibre's report confirmed his darkest suspicions: he had been used as a blunt instrument by a greedy tech-priest.
"Take your men," Abaddon snarled, his voice a low, lethal rasp. "Hunt down that fool of a Magos. I want his mechanical head. Do not fail me again."
Cold and ruthless as he was, the Despoiler was no fool. Even as he spat out the command, he turned back to the tactical displays, beginning the complex coordination of a tactical withdrawal.
Equally incensed by Pholios's treachery, Kibre acknowledged the order with a curt, furious nod and strode from the bridge. The Chaos Sorcerers aboard the flagship would shunt them back to their own vessel to begin the hunt.
The Balefleet began a desperate, sweeping turn, but not before losing dozens of ships in a matter of minutes. The firepower of the Sapient Machine fleet was many times that of any Imperial equivalent; each salvo struck with world-ending force. Chained explosions rippled through the Chaos lines as reliable void shields were systematically overloaded by the sheer density of incoming fire. Once the shields fell, the heavy armor of the traitor vessels proved no match for the exotic weaponry, withering under two or three direct hits.
Though the Balefleet technically held numerical superiority, they possessed no real advantage in the number of capital ships. Conversely, the mechanical fleet lacked any small vessels, every hull was a titan of the void.
Axion's targeting logic was clinical: he prioritized the largest targets, systematically working down the chain of command. Had the Vengeful Spirit not been recently reinforced and refortified by the dark genius of Vashtorr the Arkifane, Abaddon would likely be drifting amidst the frozen wreckage of his flagship.
The Dark Angels fleet, maintaining their vigil at the system's edge, joined the fray with predatory zeal. Macro-cannon shells and lance beams rained down upon the retreating traitors alongside the mechanical fleet's plasma bolts and railgun slugs.
Intelligent torpedoes launched by the automata traced elegant, weaving arcs through space, effortlessly bypassing point-defense screens before burying themselves deep within the traitors' hulls, shearing through layers of Adamantium and ceramite.
These were not the crude, direct-fire munitions of the Imperium. Equipped with sophisticated logic modules, these torpedoes scanned their targets mid-flight, identifying energy signatures to strike critical vulnerabilities: reactor cores, fuel reserves, and lance battery capacitors.
A single well-placed torpedo could trigger a catastrophic chain reaction, gutting a heavy cruiser from within.
Caught in a vice between the Lion's sons and the Iron Men, Abaddon coordinated a fighting retreat while ordering an emergency transition into the Warp. The Balefleet plunged into the empyrean under a final, punishing "send-off" of concentrated beam fire, explosions continuing to blossom within the fleet as they vanished.
As the Chaos fleet fled, Lion El'Jonson stood before the bridge viewport of his flagship. He listened to the casualty reports with a grim expression, then looked toward the mechanical fleet holding its position nearby. Even in a pursuit against a retreating foe, the Dark Angels had seen three cruisers crippled and two destroyers lost.
The mechanical fleet, which had borne the brunt of the Chaos counter-fire, had not lost a single ship.
…
With the thieves purged from the system, Axion completed his deep-data analysis of the Augus base.
Millions of log entries detailed the base's daily operations over the millennia. The records transitioned from early reports of routine perfection to a mounting tide of error codes, most citing a lack of material resupply leading to the failure of foundational maintenance.
The decline had progressed from a lack of repair resources to a lack of the very machines tasked with performing those repairs.
Vast swathes of red-coded warnings eventually dominated the archives. Yet, amidst billions of failure reports, Axion discovered a single blue-tagged entry marked as "Execution Complete."
"SWPDP 1-13 Associated Data Archival: Complete. Current Status: Offline. Location Record: Purged."
It was clear that at some specific juncture, the base had served as a repository for something highly classified.
Leveraging the combined processing power of the orbiting fleet, Axion initiated a deep-stratum harvest of the databases within the base and the Regression-class Vessels. As he reconstructed fragmented sectors, more hidden details emerged.
The central intelligence of the Regression-class ships had been in hibernation, yet the internal sensors recorded a physical breach of the primary hull.
These events had gone unrecorded by the ship-minds because they were dormant at the time. The loss of the GST-33 logic modules was not the result of storage corruption over time, but a deliberate act.
By analyzing microscopic friction patterns on the manual hydraulic overrides of the hull gates, Axion deduced the truth.
After the base intelligence and the ship-minds had fallen silent, a single automaton had been activated. This unit operated entirely off-grid, utilizing purely mechanical means to execute its directives. It possessed sufficient hydraulic strength to force open multi-ton electronic blast doors without activating auxiliary power.
This mysterious entity had reached the primary control center of the Regression-class ships and, via a manual terminal, utilized low-level overrides to delete the Iron Man consciousness modules.
Then, it had manually triggered the docking clamps to release.
Despite the entity's extreme caution, the emergency status lights on the bulkheads had captured a final fragment of data. The ships of the Federation era featured manual-override designs specifically to counter electronic failure, a design philosophy that had outlived its creators.
Similarly, the emergency power reservoirs were hard-wired to remain active regardless of the ship-mind's status. These simple systems existed to provide directional lighting for escape protocols; once a door was forced open, the directional markers in adjacent corridors would automatically extinguish to conserve power.
——————
If you want to read ahead of everyone, go to my pat-reon: pat-re-on.c-om/magnor (remove the hyphen to access normally)