Chapter 1: The Offering of Flesh and Steel
On board of @Divine Symmetrica, in his private chambers sits tech-inquisitor.
Scaevola. The sanctum was a shrine to his obsession, a metal oasis of cold efficiency bathed in a flickering, red glow. The air hummed with the ceaseless whirr of servitors and the distant, soothing thrum of the ship's engines, a symphony of precision that resonated through his augmented form.
His body, a grotesque tapestry of flesh and machine, twitched in the rhythm of old wounds and new enhancements. Multiple manipules sprouted from his shoulders, ending in intricate tools and weapon mounts.
Additional metallic legs lent him an unsettling, spider-like gait, clicking against the cold metal floor as he paced. He was a walking arsenal, a symphony of metal and flesh, each limb a testament to the Adeptus Mechanicus' ceaseless pursuit of perfection.
At his side, A-73 "Binder" stood tall and immovable, a servitor of the highest caliber. Its pallid, expressionless features were etched with cog-runes, a silent testament to its devotion.
Its pallid, expressionless features were etched with cog-runes, a silent testament to its devotion. Hydraulic braces stabilized its arms, allowing for smooth, silent motions as it presented a data-slate. Scaevola’s own organic hand, pale and spider-veined, took it. The contrast was stark.
For a moment, he envied them. Binder, and the medicae servitor L-9 “Lumen” standing by with its array of folded, pristine tools. They were devoid of the mess. No desires clawed at their insides, no emotions clouded their logic. They didn’t feel the phantom ache of lost limbs or the searing memory of failure. They were perfect, empty vessels, their bodies refined to pure purpose. It was a state to be coveted. A shame, then, that the process that granted such peace also scoured away the brilliant, chaotic spark of a fully functioning mind. The very thing that made them useful also made them inferior. A necessary paradox.
“The bio-signs, Lumen,” Scaevola’s voice was a grating modulation of organic vocal cords and a brass vox-unit.
Lumen glided forward, its single green lens blinking. “Elevated cortisol. Neural spike in the hippocampus. The memory is causing physical stress, Magos.”
“The body remembers what the mind wishes to forget. A design flaw.” Scaevola’s gaze returned to the slate. “Skylark, begin playback. Expedition Log, Marker 7.4.”
The lightweight servo-skull, its purity seals fluttering, drifted closer. The feed from its pict-recorder lens translated directly into Scaevola’s mind, overlaying his vision. The sterile sanctum vanished, replaced by the choking dust and alien geometry of the tomb world.
He saw through Skylark’s eyes. His own team, ten tech-adepts and servitors, moving through a corridor of glowing green necron alloy. Their lumens carved weak pools of light in an oppressive darkness that felt alive.
“–scanning for residual energy signatures. The architecture is… reactive.” That was his own voice, filtered through the log. He watched his past self, a figure more flesh than he was now, place a metal hand on a wall. The wall had shimmered.
Then, the scream. Not through the audio log. A raw, psychic shriek that tore through the recorded memory and into his present skull. He flinched, a full-body spasm that rattled his manipulator arms.
In the recording, the world dissolved into emerald lightning. One of the adepts, Pryke, simply came apart, his body unspooling into motes of dust. Another, Livia, fired her radium carbine into the shifting darkness before a blade of pure energy severed her at the waist.
“Whisperline, focus on the ambient energy reading. Filter out the death screams,” Scaevola commanded, his voice tight.
The second servo-skull, streaked with virtual gore from the playback, adjusted its feed. The carnage dimmed, replaced by a cascade of data. A pattern emerged in the energy spike. It wasn’t random. It was a response.
“It was a security protocol,” Scaevola muttered, the pieces clicking into place with a cold, terrible logic. “Not an attack. A quarantine. Our presence… our biological signatures… we triggered it. We were the infection.”
Lumen’s calm voice intruded. “Heart rate is critically elevated. Suggest cognitive disengagement.”
“Disengagement is what killed them!” he snapped, the sound echoing in the metal room. He waved a manipulator arm, the gesture sharp, frustrated. “They died because of my ignorance. A variable I did not calculate.”
He shut off the feed. The sanctum’s red gloom returned, a blessing and a curse. The silence was deafening. He looked at Binder, at Lumen, at the silent, watching skulls. Perfect, unfeeling tools. He was trapped between their sterile perfection and the bloody, emotional mess of the flesh he still clung to. The flesh that had failed.
His enhanced hearing caught a new sound, a subtle shift in the ship’s harmonic thrum. They were moving. Changing course. The thought was a cold stone in his gut. Another mission. Another tomb. Another chance to fail.
He looked at the data-slate, at the names of the ten lost. Valuable resources. But in the quiet, all he could see were their faces in the moments before the green light took them.
“Lumen. Administer a cognitive suppressant. Standard dosage.” He needed the noise in his head to stop. Just for a while.
As the medicae servitor approached, needle unfolding from its forearm, Scaevola’s many eyes closed. The memory of the emerald lightning was burned onto the inside of his lids. It was waiting for him. He knew it was waiting for all of them.
The cold certainty of it settled in his gut, a leaden weight that no cognitive suppressant could fully erase. It was waiting. Not with malice, but with the patient, inexorable logic of a machine. A trap that reset itself, forever.
Scaevola’s eyes snapped open, the phantom green light seared onto his retinas fading into the sanctum’s steady crimson glow. Lumen’s needle retracted with a soft hiss, the cool flow of chemicals already beginning to dull the sharpest edges of the memory. But not the core of it. Never the core.
The loss was a statistical inevitability now, a data point in a flawed equation. His mistake. His to correct.
“Binder,” his voice was a low, grinding imperative that cut through the hum of the ship. The servitor turned its blank face toward him, hydraulic braces whirring softly. “Connect me to the commander of the Skitarii onboard. I need him to start training ten more troops from the flock immediately.”
Binder’s head tilted almost imperceptibly, a gesture of acknowledgment rather than understanding. One of its hydraulic arms rose, the manipulator digits retracting to reveal a comms-plug. It inserted the plug directly into a data-port on Scaevola’s spinal column.
The connection was instantaneous, a burst of static and encoded data washing through his consciousness. A grainy, helmeted face resolved in his mind’s eye, superimposed over his view of the sanctum.
“Magos.” The voice of Commander Kaelen was a blunt instrument, stripped of pleasantries by countless augmetic filters.
“The ten replacements,” Scaevola began, his thought-impulse transmitting directly. “I require them within the cycle.”
Kaelen’s feed flickered. “Impossible. The flesh is weak, and this month has proven it exceptionally so. We lost the Harkon squad to that genestealer cult on Sigma IV-9. The training vats are still flushing biomass. It will be three days, minimum.”
Scaevola felt a spike of irritation, a purely biological response that his suppressants couldn’t fully quell. Inefficiency. Delay. “Three days is an eternity in the bowels of a necron tomb.”
“It is the time it takes,” Kaelen replied, his tone devoid of apology. It was a simple statement of fact. “The flock is thin, Magos. We cannot rush the forging of new blades only for them to shatter on first impact.”
The logic was irrefutable. Flawed, frustrating, but irrefutable. Scaevola’s agreement was a pulse of binary. “Acknowledged. Three days. Make them sharp, Commander.”
The link severed with a final crackle of static. The sanctum’ silence rushed back in, thicker now, heavy with the weight of postponed action. Three days. Time, the one resource even the Omnissiah could not create more of, was being wasted.
His manipulator arms twitched, tools cycling through functions with a soft whirr of frustrated energy. The memory of the tomb was a splinter in his mind, festering. He had missed something. He was certain of it.
“Skylark. Whisperline. Re-initialize the log. Expedition Marker 7.3 to 7.5. Filter all non-essential audio. I want to see the walls.”
The servo-skulls obediently floated into position. The red gloom of the sanctum dissolved once more, replaced by the haunting, green-tinged darkness of the tomb. He saw his past self, a fool clad in metal and faith, leading his team to their dissolution.
This time, he ignored the screaming. He focused past the blinding emerald energy, past the disintegrating forms of his adepts. He commanded the pict-feeds to zoom in, enhance, analyze.
There. On the wall just behind Adept Livia, a fraction of a second before the energy surge. A pattern of glyphs, previously dismissed as decorative, glowed with a faint, internal light. It was a cascade, a sequence activating from the point of their entry, flowing through the necron alloy like a virus through a bloodstream.
It wasn’t a random security protocol. It was a diagnostic. The tomb was testing them, probing their biological and technological signatures, and finding them wanting. Contaminated. The extermination was not malice; it was a system purge. A housekeeping function.
He watched Livia die again, her body severed by a blade of light. But now he saw it not as an attack, but as the swift, efficient deletion of faulty code. The thought was more chilling than any daemonic wrath.
He let the recording play to its grim conclusion, watching each death with new, cold comprehension. He had not led them into a trap. He had led them into a sterile field, and their very existence was the contaminant.
The feed ended. The sanctum returned. Scaevola stood motionless, his multiple limbs hanging limp for a moment. The cognitive suppressant had smoothed the emotional edges, leaving only a hollow, terrifying clarity.
He had his variable. The mistake was not in his tactics, but in his fundamental premise. They were not explorers. They were germs.
Next time, they would have to be cleaner.