V2 Chapter 137: They Are Waking Up.
When Cawl actually stood before the vast construct that could change the fate of humanity, he found, to his own surprise, that he was calm.
He did not allow any extraneous emotion to occupy his processors. He did not rush toward the fabricator. He simply worked through the space in the most methodical way available to him, scanning everything within reach.
Every servo-skull moved under his direction. They spread through the upper reaches of the hall, along the edges of the walls, into the gaps in the floor, collecting data in passive mode.
Within a short time, Cawl found the concealed structures.
Deep within the hall's walls, beneath the floor, and in areas obscured by pipes and silver ornamentation: storage alcoves, everywhere. Vast and orderly, as though prepared long in advance as sleeping quarters for some kind of army.
The scan data from the servo-skulls came back to Cawl's processing core.
Inside those alcoves stood rank upon rank of iron figures.
Genuine Men of Iron.
Tens of thousands of them.
They were arranged in ordered formations in the darkness, each standing considerably taller than any normal human. Their faces were blind-eyed skulls of polished steel, the features clean-lined, carrying the particular sense of order that the Age of Darkness had produced.
Their musculature and vessels were rendered in semi-matte alloy plating, internal cabling, and fine steel wire. The structures imitated the human body, but nothing in them carried any softness of flesh.
The others registered their existence soon after.
When the gazes of Duvette's group moved from the fabricator at the hall's centre to the sleeping formations behind the shadows along the walls, the expressions on their faces grew considerably heavier.
These relics of the Age of Strife were sleeping.
Waiting for the order to wake.
Waiting for new instruction.
Waiting for whatever entity arrived here to restart the great machine, expand their numbers once more, and march out to claim the galaxy again.
"Duvette."
Venus finally asked the first question she had formed since entering the hall.
"You said they had been exposed to Chaos corruption? I can't quite—"
"I would strongly advise against testing that."
Duvette shook his head and cut her off.
"You don't want to see it."
He said this and walked forward toward the fabricator at the hall's centre.
Cawl's optical sensors turned toward him immediately. The servo-skulls adjusted position as well, opening a path between Duvette and the fabricator.
Duvette did not look back. He addressed Cawl as he walked.
"I am going to purify this device."
"There is only one thing I need you to do."
"Once the purification is complete, find a way to control them."
He stopped in front of the fabricator and looked up at the immense machine.
"Because if we cannot, it will not matter whether they were corrupted or not. The outcome will be the same either way."
Cawl was silent for a moment.
He was working through what form Duvette's so-called purification would take. Werner had called it a miracle. Duvette had consistently refused that word. Cawl found he was genuinely curious about what was about to happen.
So he gave a nod.
"Understood."
Duvette let out a slow breath.
He moved to stand directly before the immense machine. He did not touch it immediately. Instead, he raised one hand and gave the order to the squads behind him.
"All units, combat ready."
The 112th Combat Group's elite infantry spread out immediately.
They trained their weapons on the wall faces and the storage alcoves beneath the floor. Meltaguns, plasma weapons, bolt weapons, and hellguns all had their safeties released.
Werner raised his hand as well.
The Inquisitorial Storm Troopers silently adjusted their formation, bringing their muzzles around toward the nearest Men of Iron rank. The Carpé household guard moved to cover Venus, placing themselves between her and the alcoves.
Cawl issued a sequence of binary commands.
The Skitarii raised their weapons. Several Mechanicus priests cut all active interface protocols. Every mechanical device was allowed to observe only: no response to any signal from the fabricator or the storage areas would be permitted.
Duvette slowly closed his eyes.
He placed his hand flat against the cold housing of the fabricator.
The next instant, his eyes snapped open.
The palm pressed against the device erupted in white light.
That light was far more intense than the white illumination falling from the top of the hall. It spread from the centre of Duvette's palm and moved across the surface of the fabricator with speed.
Cawl's processors experienced a brief moment of lag.
He looked at the white.
This was not ordinary energy radiation. It was not any psychic phenomenon he had recorded. He could not locate in his memory banks any material, wavelength, or phenomenon that corresponded to what he was seeing.
The white light gave him only one reading.
Order.
Order so pure it approached something unreasonable.
The white light began to cover the entire immense machine. The ceramic housings, the metal pipes, the data chambers, and the deep interface ports were all being progressively wrapped by the radiance.
Then, as though forcibly roused from a long sleep, the ancient technology inside the fabricator began to respond.
Something white, whether steam or vapour, vented from the exhaust cowlings near the floor. A deep hum rose from within the fabricator. Ancient programs buried in its depths began self-initiating.
Duvette's brow contracted.
Cold sweat had broken across his face. His shoulders had begun to tremble slightly.
The white light was still pushing deeper into the fabricator, but its advance had slowed noticeably. Something cold and chaotic was rising from within the device, pushing back against the white, trying to drive it back into his palm.
"It's resisting!"
Duvette's voice came out with force.
"This machine has been exposed to Chaos corruption for nearly ten thousand years on this planet!"
"Its machine-spirit is rejecting me!"
Cawl did not respond immediately.
His dorsal mechadendrites had already begun to hum. A moment later, a thick plasma beam discharged from the tip of one of his arms and drove toward a storage alcove in the far wall.
One of the Men of Iron that had just begun to stir was hit by the beam.
Its chest cavity was punched through. The body was thrown backward into the figures behind it. The struck Man of Iron moved briefly on the floor, then went still entirely.
"Continue your work, Duvette."
Cawl said it with complete calm.
As he finished speaking, his frame began to change.
His limbs locked firmly to the alloy floor. The internal cogitators accelerated to high speed. The enormous frame expanded outward as mechanical structures pushed the red Martian robes aside.
Laser weapons, plasma weapons, energy shield generators, missile launchers: all of them rose from the armour and mechanical housing. Several mechadendrite arms turned simultaneously to different storage areas, targeting the Men of Iron formations that were showing signs of activation.
Across the hall, in the depths of the shadows, blue eyes began to appear, one set after another. They were waking. When the fabricator that had once controlled them stirred, the Men of Iron stirred with it.
The first to wake were not the full complement: only the formations in the alcoves closest to the central hall. Even so, their numbers were sufficient to put pressure on everyone present.
The Men of Iron moved forward in halting steps.
They appeared to be recovering from an extended period of dormancy. Their movement was not coordinated at first. But within a matter of seconds, their stride began to stabilise.
One Man of Iron drove hard into the metal grille across the front of its storage alcove.
The grille shook violently, producing a sharp, grinding sound.
A second, a third, more Men of Iron struck from behind.
The next moment, those metal grilles were torn apart entirely.
The first Men of Iron walked out of the storage areas directly into human fire.
Las-beams struck their metal housings. Bolt rounds detonated against their chests and shoulders. Some of them were knocked down. More stepped over the bodies of those that fell and kept coming.
They began to communicate.
The sound was low and rapid and continuous, like countless machines producing dense, fine tones simultaneously.
Code. Protocol. Binary data streams.
This was the low murmur of the Men of Iron waking.
No human present could understand what was being said.
But what they were doing told everyone in the hall everything.
They would execute.
Kill.