V2 Chapter 136: So This Is the Men of Iron STC.
By the following morning, the last organised Chaos forces in the canyon area had been cleared entirely.
The Eisenmark Armoured Regiment still held every road leading to the ruins entrance. The 112th Combat Group had established heavy fire positions on both sides of the canyon. The Tanith light infantry regiments maintained their observation posts across the high ground and the low valleys.
The military threat in the area had been eliminated. At minimum, nothing of any scale appeared on Duvette's tactical display in the surrounding region.
Cawl's vast frame, draped in the red robes of Mars, stood before the heavy ruins gate. Several Mechanicus priests of absolute personal loyalty accompanied him, along with an elite Skitarii detachment.
Adeptus Mechanicus instruments had been set up across the entrance area. A large formation of servo-skulls floated in the air above the approach, like a quiet mechanical swarm, waiting for Cawl's instruction.
On the other side, Duvette had brought several hand-picked elite infantry squads. Venus was also present, with a small number of Carpé family household guard; the larger body of family troops had been kept at the outer perimeter. Lord Inquisitor Werner stood slightly behind the main group, his standard mild expression in place. His Inquisitorial Storm Troopers followed behind him in silence.
Duvette checked his tactical display.
The ruins entrance showed as a dark void on the map. The outer perimeter was secure. The interior was unknown.
He gave a nod and made a gesture to the side.
Several heavy Adeptus Mechanicus machines advanced. Mechadendrites locked against the edge of the ruins gate. Hydraulic structures produced a low sound. The heavy gate, sealed for an indeterminate number of years, began to move.
A body of air that had been contained for a very long time pushed out from behind the gate as it opened.
The smell was complex: the dust of accumulated decades and the cold scent of bare metal. Cawl did not enter immediately. He raised one of his mechadendrite arms and issued a stream of binary commands.
The servo-skull formation went through the gate at once, spreading out in the darkness and beginning to collect interior information in passive scan mode.
A moment later, the servo-skulls returned, the red light in their eye sockets pulsing steadily.
Cawl looked at Duvette.
Duvette looked at Cawl.
Both gave a nod and stepped through the gate at almost the same moment.
The rest followed behind them. 112th elite infantry held the forward and rear positions. The Skitarii maintained the middle section. The Inquisitorial Storm Troopers covered Werner. The Carpé household guard stayed close to Venus.
This location appeared in Imperial tactical records as the Menazoid Catacombs. Nobody knew where the name had originally come from. Perhaps it was a mistranslation from early crusade documents, or perhaps it was a name left behind by the local cultists.
They descended along the only available passage, cut into the cliff face.
On both sides: silent ancient metal and bare rock. The floor was too even to be natural stone. The servo-skull swarm spread ahead, scanning the walls, the floor, and every fine crack in the surface.
Duvette looked down at his tactical display.
No enemies. No obvious mechanisms. Neither Cawl's servo-skulls nor Duvette's own tactical panel showed any danger reading.
There was nothing here but silence and darkness.
Cawl's enormous body nearly filled the passage.
This made it effectively impossible for anyone behind him to see ahead. Every time he moved, his mechanical limbs occupied most of the available width, and several Skitarii were forced to press themselves against the rock walls to pass.
Duvette followed behind Cawl, watching his tactical display as he walked.
Cawl stopped without warning.
Duvette almost walked into the alloy limbs, but managed to stop in time.
"Could you give some warning before you do that?" Duvette said, looking up.
Cawl paid no attention. He was scanning the adjacent rock wall with his optical sensors. A moment later, he moved forward again.
Duvette shook his head and followed.
Some time later, Cawl stopped again, this time just as suddenly.
Duvette also stopped, because his tactical display had told him the same thing.
They had arrived.
At the end of the passage, a rock face waited.
It was tall and heavy, almost entirely indistinguishable from the surrounding mountain body. Everyone except Cawl and Duvette looked at it for a first moment and took it for a natural rock wall.
Only the near-invisible gap in the stone, barely perceptible, suggested this was a door. A door fifteen metres tall.
Cawl stood before it in silence for a long time.
The servo-skulls circled the rock face, red scan lines passing over the seams and the texture again and again. Cawl's mechadendrites rose slowly, then pointed toward a specific location to the right.
He shifted his enormous frame to the side, making room for Duvette.
"Here." Cawl said.
Duvette stepped forward and looked where the indication directed, to the right side of the wall.
There was nothing visible there. No obvious mechanism, not even a clear protrusion. But since Cawl had indicated it, Duvette raised his hand and pressed his palm against the area that was almost entirely continuous with the surrounding rock.
He pressed down lightly.
Both sections of the gate, cast from an unknown material, turned inward without a sound.
No dust fell. There was not the faintest trace of friction. The two sections of gate, fifteen metres of height apiece, opened smoothly and silently, as though they had never aged at all.
Blinding white light came from behind them.
Everyone instinctively narrowed their eyes.
When they actually walked through into the space beyond, the breath of almost everyone in the group stopped at the same moment.
It was a cylindrical hall, one thousand metres tall and five hundred metres in diameter.
The hall extended deep into the mountain body. The top of the space was too high to see clearly. Bright white light came straight down from somewhere far above, illuminating the entire space in something clean and cold.
The walls were covered in pipes.
Wind instruments, flutes, silver tubes, chrome tubes, all of them dense and interlocking, crossing and wrapping and extending up the walls from the floor to the heights. They looked like the component parts of some enormous instrument, or like the exposed interior of an ancient machine.
The floor was covered in silver inlay.
Every section of the inlay was engraved with extraordinarily complex algorithmic paradoxes. Fine lines and symbols covered every surface, thousands of equations within every square metre.
Venus also looked down at the floor beneath her, then quickly raised her eyes. She could not interpret what was written there, but she could tell it was not decorative.
Cawl took one sweeping scan and had resolved all of the complex formulas in an instant.
Then he provided the explanation. "This was an arsenal. These equations number one and a half million. They record the process and underlying principles behind the manufacture of every ultimate weapon that was ever produced here."
Nobody responded, because by that point everyone's attention had already been entirely taken by the immense structure standing at the centre of the cylindrical hall.
It stood there.
Part machine, part ceramic. A vast array of pipes, chambers, housings, and support structures interlocked to form a single enormous device.
It waited in silence, as though it had always been waiting for whoever came next.
"Is this... the fabricator that creates the Men of Iron?"
Lord Inquisitor Werner's voice came slowly.
It carried the faintest tremor.
The last time he had lost his composure to this degree was when he had witnessed what he believed to be a miracle in Duvette. Now the ultimate secret of an ancient age stood quietly in front of him.
Cawl said nothing.
Duvette said nothing.
Every person there understood what they were looking at.
Since the Age of Darkness, the Imperium had only been able to relearn its lost science by recovering and restoring ancient STC fragments, wreckage, and partial records. The Adeptus Mechanicus had searched across thousands of worlds for those traces, treating every shard of material, every fragment of schematic, every physical data copy as a sacred relic in its own right.
In the Imperial history that everyone present was aware of, nothing so complete as this had ever been placed in front of them.
And this represented the most central, and the most dangerous, knowledge the Age of Darkness had produced.
The Men of Iron, this name from the most ancient age, had once stood for the era when humanity was the master of an automated technological empire, the age when humanity had stood at the apex of its glory.
And the device that represented that age now stood in silence at the centre of the hall.
It waited for all of them.