Servitors were a special creation of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Through memory erasure, frontal lobe removal, and extensive mechanical modification, humans who once possessed the ability to think were reduced to puppets capable of carrying out only simple tasks.
In truth, it was more accurate to call them machine-driven flesh than modified humans.
To ensure the obedience and efficiency of these flesh-machines, the Tech-Priests performed cruel alterations on their brains, replacing useless biological wetware with sacred mechanical circuitry.
In other words, a normal servitor was not supposed to have any awareness at all, much less the ability to act outside the bounds of its orders.
And yet now, more than a hundred servitors had suddenly abandoned their original workstations and fixed their clouded, unfocused eyes, already whitened by repeated chemical washings, on Gaia and Solomon.
This behavior, so far beyond reason, immediately sent a wave of panic through the workers operating the transport machinery nearby.
Not far away, several Tech-Priests responsible for ritual appeasement and work supervision immediately noticed something was wrong. At once, they began trying to forcibly shut the servitors down using mechanical gauntlets linked to the implants inside the servitors' brains.
But to their shock, even commands with such a high priority had no effect on them.
By the Omnissiah, this was no ordinary malfunction.
One of the Tech-Priests immediately left the area and headed toward a nearby forge, preparing to call in reinforcements.
Feeling those empty stares on her, Gaia tensed to the limit, one hand already reaching for the hilt of the longsword on her back.
If these heavily augmented servitors truly went berserk and attacked as a group, they would be far more terrifying than any ordinary enemy.
Solomon, standing behind Gaia, was completely dumbfounded.
What was this?
He had done plenty of business on forge worlds before while moving cargo from place to place, but this was the first time he had ever seen something like this.
Was this some kind of special local custom on Igor III?
Yet just as Gaia braced for battle, the Tech-Priests scrambled in confusion, and Solomon gave up trying to think, the servitors showed no further signs of aggression.
Instead, every one of them made the same strange gesture.
They extended their right hands and pointed at the ground.
Even the cargo servitors whose arms had been removed lowered their heads and pointed downward with their skulls.
Then, those whose vocal cords had not been removed all spoke the same sentence at the same speed. Even those that had lost the ability to speak joined in with rough, broken cries.
"Be... low..."
After delivering that message, the servitors trembled once, then silently returned to their original posts as if nothing had happened.
Everything looked perfectly normal again.
If not for the fact that the terrified workers had fled and left the area far emptier than before, it would have looked almost no different from just moments earlier.
But compared to a direct attack, this situation made Gaia even more uneasy. The relief she had almost felt vanished on the spot.
If the servitors had at least glitched out and attacked them wildly, then regardless of whether the Mechanicus would compensate them, at the very least it would not have pinned the blame on them.
But now, this whole group of servitors had suddenly gathered in front of the two of them in an unbelievably eerie display, then delivered a message.
What would happen next did not need to be said.
Right at that moment, the Tech-Priest who had gone for help soon returned with a large group of red-robed oil-stinkers.
The leader had an extremely unusual build. After undergoing an extraordinary degree of mechanical modification, his body was already almost inhuman. If not for the two human arms still hanging at the front of his torso, which itself was driven by four hydraulic mechanical legs, Gaia would have thought he was some kind of large machine.
As he moved, his heavy metal body produced booming tremors like distant quakes, instinctively filling people with fear.
Using his audio receptors to quickly gather the reports from the various Tech-Priests, he soon understood what needed to be done.
"Who are you?"
With thunderous footsteps, the massive mechanical giant stopped in front of Gaia and Solomon and asked in a cold synthetic voice.
Seeing that the inevitable had finally arrived, Gaia felt the last bit of hope in her heart die peacefully.
"Uh, I'm an independent captain. I'm here to do business. The one beside me is my bodyguard."
"Just to be clear, what happened just now has nothing to do with us. Not half a throne's worth."
Solomon carefully raised both hands and answered the enormous machine-man in front of him.
But the other party ignored him completely and instead activated the three servo-skulls floating behind him, beginning a detailed scan of the two of them.
Solomon's scan was completed almost instantly.
Just an ordinary man with a combat rating of five.
But when the divination beams of the servo-skulls swept over Gaia, he immediately spotted the traces of modification on her body.
An unarmored Space Marine. That was nothing unusual. The man claiming to be a free captain might well come from some Rogue Trader dynasty.
But the physiological data that came next nearly made him choke on glands he no longer possessed.
By the Omnissiah, what was he looking at?
And those modification patterns... why did they seem so familiar?
With the help of a heavy dose of calming agents, he quickly recovered his composure. Ignoring the anger rising in Gaia's eyes, he carefully scanned her body again.
The next moment, no amount of sedatives could suppress the emotion that exploded out of him.
Two mechanical arms seized Gaia by the shoulders, and an almost roaring synthetic voice burst from the mouth of the mechanical giant, whose bionic eyes were now glowing red.
"You know Ulizar?"
"Where is that traitor now?!"
...
In the busy void-port, a battered small ship was currently crawling with repair machines, metal arms constantly patching its damaged outer hull.
But those savage-looking wounds were really only superficial damage.
What had truly injured her core were the detonated power chamber and the crippled main engine.
Priestess Lena was currently leading repair servitors, painstakingly trying to reconnect the energy conduits, but every attempt ended in failure.
She shook her head, recorded the data from each attempt, and returned to the laboratory that had been converted from half of the ship's medical bay.
Although every Tech-Priest was well trained in basic machine construction and repair, when it came to huge and delicate equipment like a ship engine, a specialized forge-master was still the better choice.
It was like university students on Old Terra. Science and engineering students might all study the same foundational courses in high school, but if you dragged a biology major over and forced them to draft engineering schematics, it would obviously be extremely difficult.
Priestess Lena entered the collected data into the cogitator, hoping to build a model that might reveal a workable solution.
But the facts proved that for an ordinary priestess like her, someone without outstanding talent, trying to cross into another specialization was a difficult thing indeed.
(End of Chapter)
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