V2 Chapter 138: So You Too Can Feel Grief.
Duvette kept his hand pressed against the housing of the Men of Iron STC.
The white light continued spreading across the vast fabricator, that force driving deeper into the machine even as the resistance pushing back against it grew stronger.
Cawl and the rest of the guards were now fully engaged with the waking Men of Iron.
The good news was that the first Men of Iron to wake were bare chassis units. They carried no ranged weapon modules, no shields, no battlefield equipment. They could only charge the intruders with what their frames alone could do.
Their bodies held nothing but close-combat modules.
The bad news was that there were far too many of them.
In the storage alcoves behind the walls, more blue eyes kept kindling. The grilles in the floor were vibrating. The Men of Iron formations that had slept for an unknowable span of years were waking in successive waves.
The armour along their forearms split open. Folding blades extended from within. Finger-bones drew together into cutting claws. The servo-structures in their feet and legs produced brief bursts of power that allowed sudden acceleration over short distances, driving them toward Cawl and the others.
More critical information came from Cawl.
His binary receivers were picking up the exchanges between the Men of Iron. Those low, rapid, unbroken sounds were not simple noise. They were code, protocol, and judgement.
"They are exchanging assessments." Cawl's level voice came from the front of the line. "They are reconstructing a local command chain."
"These Men of Iron have autonomous awareness."
In truth, he did not need to say it.
Everyone could already see it. These Men of Iron had made tactical corrections in an extraordinarily short time, had assessed the fire intervals and attack angles of the people fighting them, and were now charging in alternating groups from multiple directions to draw fire and exploit the gaps.
Venus stood behind the Carpé household guard, her fingers locked around the grip of her bolt pistol.
She finally understood why the Adeptus Mechanicus treated the Men of Iron as the deepest prohibition. These were bare chassis units and they were already this dangerous. If they had carried full weapon modules, she could not begin to imagine how this would end.
Cawl was at full capacity now.
His vast frame held the forward position of the line, mechanical limbs locked to the floor. Laser weapons, plasma launchers, kinetic missiles, and the various weapon systems concealed in his mechadendrites all fired without pause.
One wave of Men of Iron was broken.
A second wave advanced over the wreckage of the first.
Using their assessment of fire intervals and their alternating charge tactics, with assault groups of three to five Men of Iron driving forward simultaneously, they succeeded in closing the distance to Cawl.
Cawl raised the Axe of Ominissiah.
The weapon swept out at a speed no mortal could follow and the disruption field passed through the two Men of Iron at the front of the charge. Their bodies were cut through at mid-section and fell heavily.
They were still moving.
The lower halves of the severed iron frames dragged themselves along the floor with trailing cables, continuing toward Cawl. They raised their cutting claws and attempted to drive them into the joints of the Archmagos's limbs.
Cawl recalibrated quickly.
Against these things, putting them down was insufficient. The core processing unit had to be destroyed.
He followed up with the axe blade a second time, then sent a burst of plasma from one mechadendrite to burn through several of the frames that were still pulling themselves across the floor.
The Skitarii and the 112th elites adjusted their approach as well.
Meltaguns targeted skulls and mid-chest first. Bolt weapons suppressed the joints. The Inquisitorial Storm Troopers focused on clearing any Men of Iron attempting to work around toward Duvette. The Carpé household guard held their position around Venus and kept firing at targets closing on the rear.
Cawl turned his head briefly to look at Duvette.
"How much longer?"
Duvette did not answer. The white light had now covered roughly two thirds of the immense machine. Only the core area and part of the side chambers still radiated that cold, resistant sensation.
His colour was not good, but Cawl read his eyes and understood the man still had more to give.
The white light stalled briefly at the outer edge of the core, then pushed forward another increment with considerable effort.
At this most critical moment, a hatch in the side of the STC that the white light had not yet reached swung open.
A burst of steam came through it.
Every Man of Iron in the hall stopped for a single instant.
Then the hall filled with their cry.
The sound carried emotion in a way that was entirely unlike the cold mechanical noise Venus had always associated with machines. It was a long, low, anguished keening: countless voices attempting to express a single feeling through binary data streams simultaneously.
Cawl's voice carried surprise for the first time.
"They are grieving."
His optical sensors locked on the open hatch.
"The collective awareness of these Men of Iron has recognised that the new individual emerging is wrong."
"They know it came from the same fabricator. But this new Man of Iron has been corrupted. It has been changed."
Something came through the steam.
It walked with an unsteady, lurching gait.
It was a Man of Iron, newly made.
But it was nothing like the chassis units standing in the storage alcoves behind it.
Its structure was distorted and malformed, like a human body that had undergone severe corruption. It stood a head taller than a normal Man of Iron, hunched, its frame a darkened, diseased metal colour.
One arm had grown too long and dragged along the floor.
The other arm had twisted into a branching structure of barbed metal, the tip forced into a shape that looked as though it had been squeezed from a manufacturing mould that had gone fundamentally wrong. Enormous corrupted horns had grown from its skull, their weight pulling its head to one side.
Its eyes flickered with a dim, sickly yellow light.
An unknown viscous liquid ran from the corners of its eye sockets and moved slowly down the metal face. Its skull trembled, an internal grinding sound audible from within.
It stared at Duvette.
Then it took its first step.
Each step was slow, but every one of them put a weight of pressure on everyone present. The chassis units that had been charging did not stop in the keening; if anything, the emergence of the corrupted new individual seemed to drive them forward with greater intensity.
Cawl raised a plasma weapon and prepared to fire.
Duvette lifted his head at this moment.
His eyes met the eyes of the corrupted Man of Iron.
In the depths of that dim yellow light, he saw chaos. He also saw pain. This was not a simple kill protocol. It was more like a consciousness that had been made wrong and was enduring something that could not be expressed any other way.
Duvette let out a long breath.
"I will set you free."
The next instant, the accumulated force inside him broke.
The white light erupted outward.
The STC's corrupted machine-spirit could no longer hold against this force of Order. The core area was consumed by white entirely. Every cold, resistant reaction still struggling in the depths of the machine was pressed back and out.
With Duvette at the centre, the white light expanded.
It moved across the fabricator, across the control consoles, across the Men of Iron locked in combat, and across the vast deployed frame of Cawl.
Everyone lost their sight in the same instant.
Sound went with it.
The Skitarii, the Storm Troopers, the Carpé household guard, the Mechanicus priests, Werner and Venus: all of them could see nothing but white. Cawl's sensors registered a continuous stream of blank data. His processors recorded nothing in any known category.
No one could have said how long it lasted.
Then the light began to withdraw.
The hall returned to them.
Duvette was braced weakly against the STC's control console, his palm still pressed to the fabricator. His breathing was hard. His shoulders still trembled slightly.
The Men of Iron had gone still.
They stood where they were, blue eyes fading gradually. The corrupted new Man of Iron had also stopped, not far from where Duvette stood. But now it was no longer corrupted.
The white light had cleared the corruption. It had not given anyone control.
The Men of Iron were still Men of Iron.
Cawl did not lower his weapons immediately. After confirming that all the Men of Iron had ceased movement, he began withdrawing from combat mode incrementally. The expanded mechanical structures retracted. The weapons platform folded back into the Archmagos's vast mechanical frame.
He looked at Duvette.
The Major General-Commissar's face was pale. But there was an unguarded, entirely unconstrained smile on it.
"I told you I would manage it, Cawl."
Duvette raised his head, his voice faint but carrying obvious satisfaction.
"Your turn now."
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