Beneath the bizarre, suffocating atmosphere that hung over the chamber, the Senatorum Imperialis convened with uncharacteristic, cutthroat efficiency. Before long, a joint decree from the Inquisition and the Adeptus Custodes issued the formal response to the machine intelligence's petition.
The Ordo Sinister would grant audience to Axion. The designated staging ground for this visitation was set far from the high walls of the Imperial Palace, deep within the absolute bleakness of the Terran arctic.
There, buried beneath shifting sheets of permafrost, lay the northern redoubt of the Ordo Sinister.
Axion had raised no objections to the geographic coordinates. The machine intelligence sought only to lay its scanning arrays upon the legendary Psi-Titans, and specifically their esoteric weapon systems, records of which it had excavated from the stolen engrams of Magos Ingres.
With the accord formalized, two massive machine-vessels broke anchor from the void and drifted into Terra's low-orbital plane.
A heavy sub-orbital lifter detached from the belly of a sprawling industrial carrier, its reinforced holds securing a towering mechanical chassis. In both silhouette and functional configuration, this automaton shell was an exact replicate of the frame Axion had previously occupied during its operations upon the Forge World of Lucius.
As the atmospheric lifter began its steep descent, the scarred visage of the throneworld expanded across its viewfinders. It was a visual expanse of barren, ice-locked wastes, where screaming gales tore across the jagged permafrost.
Real-time environmental diagnostic arrays continuously swept the descent vector.
The thin air carried a lingering, negligible trace of radioactive fallout, while beneath the packed layers of ice and snow, the deep-penetration scans illuminated a labyrinth of monolithic craters. These were the ancient, unhealed wounds of the Unification Wars.
Though several restoration efforts had been orchestrated across the shattered face of Terra with the aid of the Adeptus Mechanicus, this brutally martyred soil could never truly return to what it once was.
Guided by the hard-coded telemetry voxed from below, the lifter touched down swiftly amidst a featureless desert of white ice.
To the naked eye, the horizon was completely barren.
The composite scanning arrays, however, peeled back a far more intricate layer of reality.
The moment the transport's landing gear dropped past twenty meters above the deck, the entire vessel seemed to punch through an invisible, shimmering membrane, vanishing abruptly from the visual spectrum.
"An optical projection cloaking array," Axion logged, instantly classifying the displacement.
With a dull, metallic groan, the heavy lifter settled onto the bedrock. As its magnetic clamps disengaged, the true nature of the staging ground was laid bare to the automaton's optical sensors.
They were standing within a massive, synthetically excavated subterranean shaft.
The cylindrical walls were a fused bulwark of reinforced black iron and structural ice, grooved with monumental gear-tracks. This was the throat of a colossal elevator shaft.
Clank. Clank.
With the harsh, deafening shriek of ungreased planetary cogs grinding together, the massive lift platform began its long descent into the deep.
The titanic slabs of alloyed blast-shielding at the surface slid shut, sealing out the sky and plunging the shaft into the cold, stark glare of automated lumens.
Only after descending nearly two hundred meters into the bedrock did the platform shudder to a halt.
The ambient world fell into a leaden silence, broken only by the hydraulic hiss of the transport's rear ramp lowering into a steep incline.
Axion assumed direct control of the chassis, stepping out from the hold with heavy, deliberate strides.
"Execute Safety Protocol PJ0229," a voice called out from the gloom.
A slender silhouette emerged into Axion's optical path, wrapped tightly within a heavy, fur-lined winter coat of pristine white.
Though the figure was buried beneath layers of insulation, Axion's multi-spectrum scanners easily penetrated the fabric. The individual's flesh was laced with a complex network of cybernetic ports and flickering diagnostic lumens. Yet, unlike the tech-zealots of the Adeptus Mechanicus, whose augmentations progressively stripped away every vestige of the human silhouette, this individual maintained a strictly standard human biology.
Axion noted with high-fidelity precision that these metal interfaces were overwhelmingly external mounting nodes, engineered for rapid modular hot-swapping. They bore a distinct structural divergence from the permanent, invasive implants of the Tech-Priests; their utility was far closer to the Black Carapace of the Adeptus Astartes.
"Security Protocol PJ0229 does not exist within current directories. It is highly probable you intend to reference Protocol BJ0228, the standard security protocol for civilian portable storage devices, which governs data verification and encrypted preservation. This unit is incompatible with civilian protocols, and there is zero risk of data leakage."
Hearing the machine's cold, literal response, the hooded figure let out a long, disappointed sigh.
"Ah. So that's how it is."
With a fluid motion, the youth pulled back his heavy hood, revealing a completely natural, unaugmented human face. He wore a high-precision auxiliary scanning visor across his brow, his features betraying a relatively young age.
This reception was a stark, almost irreconcilable departure from the rigid, chanting processions Axion had endured upon Lucius. But to the machine intelligence, such petty discrepancies were irrelevant.
"Welcome, ancient heritage of the Federation's tech-legacy. I am Mechanical Engineer Olot."
Axion's optical sensors pulsed once in acknowledgment.
"You may designate this entity as Axion."
"Mechanical Engineer... a remarkably familiar title. Tell me, why do you still employ a designation originally devised by the ancient Creators?"
Olot blinked, then offered a loose, indifferent shrug.
"We are not like those avaricious, techno-religious zealots on Mars."
"That is apparent. Your methods of cybernetic augmentation and implant architecture possess distinct technological divergences from those utilized by the Tech-Priests. In comparison to their crude, invasive modifications, your underlying methodology originates from the Sigrayal Commercial Coalition."
Olot's face blanked into utter incomprehension.
"The Sigrayal Commercial Coalition? We have lost an immense volume of records. The vast majority were destroyed during the great war ten millennia ago. Given the disparity in value between historical records and technical data, almost all of our history was abandoned. We retain only a highly finite amount of historical data, preserved through fragments of lore passed down by our predecessors."
"The Sigrayal Commercial Coalition," Axion stated, pulling the pristine records from its deep-storage sectors, "was the largest corporate provider of cybernetic prosthetics during the era of the human Federation. They were the primary commercial pioneers of neural-link architecture and bio-synthetic nerve integration technology, holding sovereign dominion over seven hundred and forty-three worlds. One hundred and seventy of those systems were dedicated commercial hubs, operating almost exclusively in mechanical components."
"Their manufactured prosthetics accounted for 39.55% of all artificial limbs and synthetic organs across the collective Federation, generating 4.1% of the coalition's gross aggregate revenue. Though their methodologies were highly sophisticated, the overwhelming majority of Federation citizens held a cultural aversion to permanent mechanical integration. The prevailing consensus dictated that installing heavy machinery onto one's own flesh was a primitive alternative to simply commanding specialized automata."
"Furthermore, in the event of catastrophic physical trauma, cellular limb-regeneration and organic organ-cloning technologies were sufficient to resolve any medical variance. The technology you utilize was fundamentally an esoteric service catering to a niche demographic of baseline citizens."
For the first time since its awakening, Axion utilized its pristine data vaults to peel back a fraction of the grandeur that had once been the Federation. Yet, compared to the psychic armaments it had come to inspect, it found the lineage of these human caretakers far more intriguing.
"Now," Axion's vocal emitter droned, its primary optic burning with a brilliant, unblinking cerulean light. "Explain to me why you introduce yourself using a professional title passed down from the ancient Creators?"
Staring up into the massive, glowing lenses of the iron colossus, Olot raised a hand and scratched at his bare head.
"Mechanical Engineer? That is simply how it was written in the teachings handed down to us. There is no deeper reason."
"How do you perceive the Tech-Priests tasked with maintaining the Titans within this facility?"
Olot turned, pointing a finger toward the sprawling darkness of the subterranean hangar behind him.
"There are none of those tech-mad lunatics here. Everything in this facility is maintained solely by us, including those massive Titan chassis. Their methods are far too primitive, and their cognitive patterns are entirely unstable."
Axion leveled a strange gaze at the man.
"'Us'?"
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