Upon receiving the definitive response from the Iron Men, the fleet of the Lucius Adeptus Mechanicus watched the cybernetic armada depart before sending an astropathic message through the void to their distant Forge World, announcing the impending arrival of the ancient machines. Only then did they slowly fire up their engines to resume their journey toward the technological exchange with Archmagos Belisarius Cawl.
However, to the networked consciousness of the Iron Men, the unreliable nature of astropathic communication was painfully obsolete and agonizingly slow.
The machine fleets operating across the galaxy reacted far faster than the Magi and Tech-Priests of the Lucius Mechanicus could ever anticipate.
Several standard fleets, which had previously responded to Roboute Guilliman's orders to purge the pirate incursions in the Dark Imperium only to be led on a frustrating chase, immediately detached a strike group and set a direct course for the Forge World of Lucius.
When this standard fleet arrived on the outer fringes of Lucius, the resident Tech-Priests and Magi left behind to guard the world had no inkling that a deluge of profound fortune was about to descend upon them.
Carved deep into the planetary crust was a massive variant of the letter L, seared across the surface like a brand that stretched nearly thirty kilometers from top to bottom. Its outline was starkly defined and rich with intricate, micro-etched detail.
Compared to other Forge Worlds, where plasma run-off overflowed in radioactive torrents and ecosystems suffered apocalyptic degradation, Lucius was in a significantly better state.
Granted, the surface was crowded with a staggering density of forge-complexes, factories, smelting furnaces, and colossal machineries. These industrial monoliths churned ceaselessly, shrouding the world in a perpetual haze of smog, steam, and the harsh glare of industrial glare. A labyrinth of conduits, cabling, and pipelines crisscrossed the landscape, connecting every manufactorum into a monolithic, planetary network.
The radioactive industrial runoff in the upper atmosphere only occasionally yielded bursts of rad-fall or localized acid rain.
Furthermore, as a vital nexus of military production, Lucius boasted impenetrable defensive works. It was one of the few worlds to have withstood a Tyranid Hive Fleet invasion, and even before the return of the Iron Men, it was a target that the Great Devourer had actively chosen to bypass. Its formidable garrison and the sheer volume of war materiel churned out by its massive industrial capacity made the Tyranids calculate that the bio-mass harvest would be a net loss.
Unlike most Imperial Forge Worlds, the architecture here did not lean heavily into the typical, soaring Gothic style. Instead, the buildings were brutal, dense, and encased in thick armor plating. Most structures loomed as angular, hard-edged geometric shapes, adorned with the heraldry, cogs, and binary runes of the Adeptus Mechanicus.
The skeletal icon of the Omnissiah's cog was omnipresent. Skitarii clad in dark, blackened armor patrolled the broad thoroughfares outside the factories that choked the planet's surface. Serfs and citizens were segregated into distinct sectors, laboring in tasks that differed only in their degrees of brutal intensity.
The deliberate and unswerving approach of the Iron Men mechanical fleet immediately triggered alarms across the Forge World and nearby Imperial installations.
The Inquisition, Astra Militarum, and Imperial Navy units stationed in the sector instantly began auditing their logs for distress signals. Under normal parameters, an Iron Men fleet never approached an Imperial world unless a distress call had been logged. If a world as critical as Lucius had broadcasted a plea for aid without their knowledge, it would be deemed a catastrophic failure, an act of dereliction punishable by immediate execution or being sent to seek the Emperor's forgiveness in death.
Yet, after an exhaustive sweep of all communication arrays, no such distress signal could be found originating from Lucius.
Then, the mechanical fleet began a series of maneuvers that baffled every Imperial observer.
A massive array of transport ship hulls was decoupled in high orbit, hurtling through the atmosphere toward the barren, scorched wastes of Lucius's surface.
Unsure of the incoming vessels' intent, the Planetary Defense Forces and local Skitarii cohorts panicked, sounding the sirens of war.
An investigative task force, led by the Inquisition, immediately hailed the descending fleet demanding an explanation.
The reply they received left them completely dumbfounded.
"We have received an invitation for a technological visit to the Forge World of Lucius by a Magos of the Lucius Mechanicus."
"In accordance with safety and technical specifications, compulsory emergency maintenance is now in progress. Do not engage in hostile maneuvers. Do not interfere with the execution of emergency repairs by mechanical units. Risk level: Critical."
Shortly thereafter, the Lucius Adeptus Mechanicus received a deeply unsettling and frantic inquiry from the Inquisition.
When told that the Iron Men were arriving for a "technological visit," the Magi and Tech-Priests left on the planet fell into absolute confusion. The Inquisitors stared through the viewscreen at the tech-savants with expressions that clearly conveyed: You had better not be lying to us.
But when the Inquisitors relayed the Iron Men's warnings, the Lucius tech-adepts grew even more bewildered.
What were the Iron Men repairing?
What had gone wrong?
In an instant, the entire Forge World boiled into chaos.
The Tech-Priests scrambled to run diagnostics across every sector of Lucius, desperately trying to identify whatever terrifying safety flaw the Iron Men had flagged as a "critical risk."
Out in the wastes, the transport hulls fired their retro-thrusters, touching down along the rims of the world's colossal tectonic fissures.
Swarms of mechanical units surged from the open holds, plunging directly into the deep, yawning chasms that led down to the planet's artificial core.
Eight-Legs gripped sapient machine automatons with their mechanical appendages, using anti-gravity nodes to descend into the subterranean depths choked with archaic infrastructure. They systematically dropped these automatons onto various catwalks, gantries, and conduit arrays across multiple sectors.
The entire tech-priesthood of the world was in an uproar.
Countless Tech-Priests and Enginseers, acting under the strict admonitions of their Magi, watched from a terrified distance as these machines, deemed by many to be the living avatars of the Omnissiah, wrought their inscrutable will upon the planet.
The severity of the situation was transmitted back to the split-fleet, quickly dominating several data-processing threads within Axion's consciousness.
The structural degradation of Lucius's core had breached the Iron Men's baseline safety thresholds.
Aided by hordes of machine automatons, Eight-Legs, and controlled bursts of nanite swarms, a bizarre mechanical structure began to take shape. It resembled a colossal conduit or chimney, its massive opening rising directly from the core's containment mechanisms all the way up to the surface.
In orbit, an industrial vessel shifted its vector and began altering its own chassis. The hull unfurled, sacrificing its internal structure and onboard systems to transform into a massive, multi-layered cooling fin array shaped like a towering ridge.
The transformed vessel descended through the atmosphere, interlocking seamlessly with the newly constructed surface terminal.
Suddenly, the power grids of factories across half the planet flickered violently before plunging into total darkness.
Horrified Magi desperately routed checks through their remaining logic-log and Cogitator arrays.
The diagnostic results left them speechless.
For the first time in its history, the entire Forge World of Lucius was experiencing a severe power deficit.
The vast majority of the energy generated by the artificial core was being systematically drained by the structure the Iron Men had just erected. The once blindingly incandescent core grew visibly dim.
Meanwhile, the towering, kilometer-high structure on the surface glowed with terrifying brilliance, venting titanic columns of excess thermal energy into the cold void of space.
Deep below, the activity around the core containment mechanisms grew even more frantic.
Massive mechanical units were ruthlessly tearing away the centuries of ad-hoc patches, welds, and jury-rigged infrastructure that the Adeptus Mechanicus had piled onto the machine over millennia.
In their place, the Iron Men installed flawless, entirely new structural frames and pristine mechanisms.
The ancient machines went so far as to rip out the archaic Cogitator arrays lining the perimeter of the core, replacing them with a massive, advanced platform and an entirely re-engineered control matrix.
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