Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

At that moment, in low orbit, the Adeptus Mechanicus fleet continued its slow circuits around the planet.

The Magi aboard the transport ships were, precisely as Lin had predicted, already planning their withdrawal — and in truth, they cared little what chaos would swallow Cath Maximus once it was abandoned.

They had no objection to fanning the flames a little, so long as it cost them nothing. But the moment their own interests entered the equation, the calculus changed entirely.

The Deputy Forge Director's catastrophic defeat had caught the vast majority of the Magi off guard. Their earlier banter had all been premised on his inevitable victory; the only real debate had been how many Frateris Templar and private troops he would have to spend before reclaiming the Warlord-class Titan that mattered so much to him.

But none of them had imagined the Deputy Forge Director could lose so utterly — or that he would pay with his own existence in the bargain.

A senior Magos Dominus of the Iron Guard, a master of the doctrine of control — defeated at the hands of a mere biologis magos from Forge World Huangquan VIII?

They had no idea how he had lost. What was obvious was that nobody wanted anything more to do with Cath Maximus and its cursed luck.

Having already transferred the bulk of their assets, they simply wanted to leave. As for the production lines that had yet to be demolished?

That had always been the final step before abandoning Cath Maximus to the Greentide anyway. If that magos had seized Cath Maximus just to feast on ork mushrooms, then let him have it.

Most of the Magi had arrived at this conclusion. They were desperate to depart — yet the command authority over the fleet rested with the Forge Director. Director Augustus had still not issued the order to make way, and that absence was beginning to stir a restless unease among the Magi.

One of them sought an audience with the Forge Director, only to be informed that Director Augustus was currently in his personal laboratory and would receive no visitors.

None of them could fathom what the Forge Director was doing — none, that is, except the Master Forger Senior Magos.

He was with Director Augustus at that very moment, inside the laboratory that belonged to the Forge Director alone.

"This engagement has cost us considerable strength," said the Master Forger.

He spread open a data-slate, and the wetware eyes of the cogitator-mind projected his compiled figures forward: "The Deputy Forge Director brought nine Macro-Cohorts to the surface — a total of one hundred and twenty thousand Frateris Templar. In the end, only the strength of six Macro-Cohorts returned to the fleet through the spaceport."

A Macro-Cohort was the largest formation in the Frateris Templar order of battle, typically numbering ten thousand warriors or more. The Deputy Forge Director had committed nine such formations to the ground war — and three had been annihilated entirely.

That kind of butcher's bill would demand serious accountability even in victory. That the Deputy Forge Director had lost made it all the more damning. Yet the Forge Director appeared entirely unmoved by the scale of the losses. He brushed the data-slate aside and turned his gaze to the amniotic tank before him.

Suspended in the translucent amber of the culture fluid floated a human body, already fitted with basic mechadendrite implants. But its eyes were sealed shut, its fingers drifting only with the slow currents of the fluid, utterly devoid of awareness.

Homunculi and knowledge-infusion were among the Machine Cult's most prized arts. Setting aside the rare few among natural-born humanity who possessed exceptional gifts, the majority of tech-priests were self-manufactured by the Mechanicus. Those homunculi, upon stepping out of their growth-vats, would be subjected to rigorous examination by the Mechanicus — to determine whether they had absorbed the teachings and blessings of the Omnissiah.

Those who passed became Mechanicus acolytes, earning the right to serve the Machine God upon the endless celestial ladder of advancement within the Adeptus Mechanicus. Those who failed became raw material for Servitor fabrication.

Even the material destined to become Servitors was required to retain some fragment of human consciousness before the process of conversion. Yet the figure suspended in the amniotic tank showed no trace of awareness whatsoever.

This was no fabrication failure. The body had been grown for precisely this purpose — to serve as nothing more than an empty vessel.

"Cost. Cost is always the price of growth," the Forge Director summarised, his voice measured. "To serve the true Machine God, one must first purge from the very depths of the soul the false scripture planted there by the false god."

The Master Forger understood without being told. He unsealed the amniotic tank's hatch, then stepped respectfully to one side.

Director Augustus reached out and lifted a pale violet crystal — shaped unmistakably like an Aeldari wraithstone.

The crystal was saturated with something — a sensation of shock and bitter indignation, a residue of resentment and fury pressed into its lattice. The Forge Director paid it no mind.

He simply set the stone into the centre of the power conduit circuits on the vessel's body. Whatever the psionic crystal contained surged outward at once through the power conduits, a pale violet radiance spreading across every limb, every surface — and then fading just as quickly. But as the light receded, the body that had held no intellect at all slowly opened its eyes.

Witnessing the 'miracle' before him, the Master Forger's chest swelled with exultation.

"This is the true power the Machine God should possess!" he breathed in admiration. "No tedious, useless rituals of the false god — only the simplest act, and the soul of the dead is returned to the living world!"

His reverence seemed to rouse the consciousness now inhabiting the vessel. It opened its eyes in confusion, and from its throat came a broken, incoherent groan:

"The Omnissiah… the Ashes of the Spiritseer… Lin… Lin!"

The last memory to surface snapped its consciousness back into sharp clarity. It looked around — and did not find Lin, the one who had shot through its skull.

What stood before it were Director Augustus and the Master Forger Senior Magos.

The Deputy Forge Director lay in the amniotic tank, as though everything he had endured had been nothing but a dream.

And yet his own mind refused the comfort of that lie. The agony of having his skull blown open was still vivid, immediate. The system failures triggered by the psionic interference had robbed him of any chance to upload his own consciousness-code.

By any reckoning, he should be thoroughly, completely dead.

"Why am I here?" the Deputy Forge Director asked, on instinct.

"A gift."

He saw Director Augustus spread his arms wide.

"The Machine God's radiance bathes you, Deputy Forge Director. He chose you — and returned your soul to the living world. In return, you must consecrate your body and mind entirely to His service."

"The Machine God…"

The Deputy Forge Director gave a low, hollow laugh. "If His radiance truly bathes me, why did He abandon me in the battle before? What more must I do before it counts as wholehearted service to the Omnissiah? Why did He not send the Machine God's guidance into my logic, and let me defeat that soulless abomination?"

"Not the Omnissiah."

The Forge Director corrected him flatly. The Deputy Forge Director looked up in surprise and found something burning in Augustus's eyes — a fervour he could not quite decode.

"You have not yet come to know the true Machine God."

"The true… Machine God?" The Deputy Forge Director stared at Director Augustus. His throat had gone strangely dry.

"Precisely. The true Machine God."

Silence fell over the laboratory, broken only by the measured tread of the Forge Director's footsteps. Augustus shrugged off his red Mechanicus robes and turned them aside to reveal the embroidery beneath.

It was a crest: a half-mechanical, half-skull visage at its centre, encircled by an eight-pointed star. Save for that star, it was indistinguishable from the standard symbol of the Omnissiah. But that eight-pointed star was enough to make the Deputy Forge Director go rigid.

"Chaos," he whispered.

The word drew an irritated rebuke from Director Augustus.

"Ignorant! Does the eight-pointed star belong to Chaos and Chaos alone?"

"The power of souls and machine-spirits alike converges in the warp. Our faith in the Machine God also manifests there. Does that make the Machine God a symbol of Chaos?"

The Deputy Forge Director knew little of the warp, and so could not easily refute the argument. Yet the dim, half-formed awareness of the warp that Mechanicus members possessed — fractionally more than that of ordinary people — left him with a nagging feeling that what the Director was saying contained a grain of logic. He pressed on:

"I don't understand. If the true Machine God truly exists within the warp, why does He never answer our prayers?"

"Theft. The vile false-Emperor stole the Machine God's authority. The Omnissiah doctrine instilled in us from birth twisted the faith we should have directed toward the true Machine God, ensuring our prayers would never reach Him. I was fortunate — I was guided by the Machine God Himself — and that is how I pierced the lie."

The Forge Director crossed the room and tapped the wraithstone crystal set into the centre of the Deputy Director's power conduit circuits.

"Proof. The process by which your soul was retrieved from the warp, held within this stone, and restored to the living world — that is the proof of the true Machine God's existence."

The Deputy Forge Director looked down at himself. He could not deny that only something divine could explain why he still existed.

"A god grows mighty through faith, and grows weak through its absence. The Omnissiah has redirected our faith down a false path, leaving the true Machine God pitifully weak. And yet — even so — He drew upon the faint warp-resonance generated during your battle with the magos from Huangquan VIII, and brought you back to the world of the living."

"You did die — truly and completely. But death was a necessary process."

The amniotic fluid drained from the tank, expelling the Deputy Forge Director from within. Still unaccustomed to his new body, he stumbled and dropped to his knees. He had no choice but to look up, head tilted back, at the Forge Director who spoke with such unhurried conviction.

"This is a trial, Deputy Forge Director."

"A trial…?"

"Precisely. Only by defeating the past branded upon you by the false god Omnissiah can you shed that skin and be reborn as a true devotee of the real Machine God."

"A true devotee of the real Machine God…"

The Deputy Forge Director's entire sense of direction was being steered entirely by Director Augustus.

"Your body. Look at the body crafted for you by the sacred arts of the true Machine God. Cast off the shackles the false god once placed upon you — no longer constrained by synthetic synapses and logic-thought conduits. Think! Think how powerful you are now!"

The Deputy Forge Director did as he was bidden. He discovered with astonishment that this body carried far fewer mechadendrite implants than his former one — yet his cognition was sharper by several degrees.

He felt as though some fundamental constraint had been broken, so that now, at every moment, countless ideas and innovations were coalescing and being born within his mind.

If he were to face Lin again in this body, he would never fall into a logic trap again — not ever.

Watching the undisguised astonishment spreading across the Deputy Forge Director's face, Director Augustus allowed himself a look of deep satisfaction.

"Powerful — is it not? It seems you have already sensed the secret of this body. Unlike the Omnissiah's constraints upon us, the true Machine God grants us keener minds and broader imaginations. More than that — this body even carries a measure of psionic potential."

"Do not disappoint the Machine God's expectations of you, Deputy Forge Director. He has bestowed upon you a second life, and with it a commensurate mission — and you must answer His call."

The facts had broken down his resistance entirely. The Deputy Forge Director gave a compliant nod — but even as he did, he found his thoughts drifting back unbidden to his earlier battle with Lin.

'You can leave that question for your Machine God — assuming He doesn't decide to eat your soul as a snack.' He remembered that Lin had said something to that effect.

The heretic from Huangquan VIII had never once used the name 'Omnissiah' for the Machine God… Could it be that he had known something all along?

There was no time to dwell on it. The Deputy Forge Director, having accepted his own resurrection, was instructed by Director Augustus to kneel before him. Under the Director's guidance, he was led through the first prayer ever offered to the true Machine God.

The Master Forger Senior Magos was likewise guided to kneel on the Deputy Forge Director's other side. The Deputy Forge Director glanced at him sidelong — and only then realised his old rival had preceded him by some margin in embracing the true Machine God.

"O Machine God, watch over our journey, and shelter us with metal and light."

"For this universe is an indifferent void, and the warp hungers to devour us."

The Forge Director led the prayer to the Machine God, and its opening passages were indistinguishable from the orthodox liturgy. But as it swelled toward the familiar crescendo, Director Augustus suddenly shifted into an entirely different register.

"Ring the great bell once! Move the levers, activate the pistons and the pumps!"

"Ring the great bell twice! Press the buttons, ignite the engines, kindle the daemon, infuse the soul!"

A strange tremor crept into the Director's voice — he was screaming at the full capacity of whatever remained of his biological lungs. It was the first time the Deputy Forge Director had ever seen a man so thoroughly transformed by augmetics still capable of expressing such raw, overwhelming emotion.

"Ring the great bell thrice! Sing together — and praise Vashtorr! Praise the true Machine God!"

The instant the name 'Vashtorr' was spoken aloud, a wave of dizziness crashed over the Deputy Forge Director. Unbidden, a vision surfaced before his eyes: a daemon's face, crowned with inverted, curling horns. But when he raised his head again, what met his gaze was Director Augustus's face — the face of a man almost entirely consumed by mechanical augmentation.

Somehow, in some inexplicable way, the daemon's visage seemed to flicker and overlap with the Director's own.

"The prayer to the true Machine God is complete. The great Machine God has turned His gaze upon this place. Deputy Forge Director — speak your true name. Complete the covenant with the Machine God."

The Deputy Forge Director trembled. He had the overwhelming sense that the moment he spoke, he would lose something precious and irretrievable. But there was nothing left for him to refuse.

"Viktor," the Deputy Forge Director whispered, his voice shaking as he spoke his name.

A soft, half-heard snicker reached his auditory receptors — yet the sound-wave sensors registered nothing at all. As though the laughter was nothing but a trick of his own mind.

But watching Director Augustus nod with evident satisfaction, Viktor felt that whispered snicker in his ear become, once more, unmistakably real.

"Well done, Magos Viktor. Your covenant with my Lord is now sealed. From this day forward, you shall be honoured with the privilege of serving the true Machine God. As your obligation, you shall wield my Lord's blade and carry His radiant truth into the world."

Viktor had no words. All he could do was press his forehead deep into the ground and answer in a low voice:

"By His command, it shall be done."

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