The voice of Axion commanded the immediate attention of everyone on the bridge.
None could fathom how a metallic frame of such immense weight could traverse the alloyed decking without eliciting the faintest sound of a footfall.
"Axion, perhaps our audience with the Primarch must be deferred," Calanthus replied, turning his head with a look of helpless resignation.
Axion, standing over four meters tall, slowly raised a mechanical arm and pointed toward the massive viewport of the bridge.
"I suspect as much. This planet is... singular, is it not?"
The bridge crew followed the direction of the slender mechanical arm in bewilderment, staring at the planet visible through the glass, a world that, from this distance, appeared vibrantly teeming with life.
"My Lord? I do not follow," the Captain stammered, glancing between the planet and Axion's towering silhouette. Finally, he fixed his gaze on Calanthus. He clearly felt that seeking an explanation from Axion was futile; it was far more pragmatic to hope for an answer from the Ultramarine officer.
Calanthus felt the Captain's questioning gaze, but he was equally at a loss.
"Axion, we have lost our bearings. We have transitioned into a sector of space that defies localization, devoid of any Imperial facilities to repair the ship or guide us toward our destination. We were just debating our course of action."
While the exchange continued, the Captain's adjutant arrived on the bridge accompanied by a figure bearing a vertical pillar mark on their forehead, centered with the unmistakable sigil of the Eye.
Though the newcomer's eyes were clouded with a stark, milky pallor, indicative of total blindness, she nonetheless discerned the state of her surroundings with uncanny precision. She bowed deeply to Calanthus and the Captain.
Axion watched the "human" woman with clinical curiosity; she appeared nearly as frail as the Navigator, Sunard. After a moment of scrutiny, his glowing optical sensors shifted to the adjutant who had brought her.
Though he did not understand Axion's true nature, the adjutant felt a sudden, inexplicable pressure. He took a subtle step back before speaking.
"My Lords, upon translating from the Warp, I immediately ordered the Astropath to transmit a distress signal. Regrettably, we have received no response. Furthermore, the Astropath has discovered something even more unsettling."
The Astropath stepped forward, her sightless eyes turned toward Calanthus.
"My Lord, there are no psychic whispers within the currents of the Warp here. I cast my song toward the Great Rift, yet I found only silence. This entire sector is... muted."
"It is likely that no Imperial presence exists here," she continued. "Or perhaps, there is not even the background static of other psykers."
Calanthus looked silently at the Captain, then glanced at Sunard, who had returned to his navigation dais.
A cold tide of suspicion rose within him.
His Captain and Navigator claimed to have seen a flickering Astronomican, the Emperor's Light, just before it went dark. Yet the Astropath claimed the region was a psychic void, devoid of even the faintest shimmer of the Warp.
One of them was lying.
Axion, however, was entirely indifferent to their plight. Astropaths? Was this a new mode of communication? Some form of advanced technology surpassing quantum entanglement? Driven by a need for data, Axion performed a high-resolution scan of the Astropath.
"A peculiar mutation. Data suggests a 33.75% deviation from records found in the Old Days."
In the era of the Federation, the Navigator gene had already been identified; though unstable, its existence was documented. Back then, the Federation began the artificial cultivation of these mutants to observe Warp fluctuations. However, Astropaths were unheard of in that age. During the Federation's zenith, such individuals would have been classified as "espers", beings with mental powers, but their telepathic range would not have been sufficient for interstellar communication.
The scan hit the Astropath like a physical blow. She recoiled in sudden terror.
"What is this?! I feel as though an ancient presence is standing over me... dissecting my very soul!"
Her extreme reaction startled Calanthus. "Axion, what have you done?" he demanded, looking first at the machine and then back to the Astropath.
"Do you not perceive the Ancient One standing beside us?" Calanthus asked her.
The Astropath, lacking physical sight, relied on her psychic resonance to map her environment. In her mind's eye, however, the space Axion occupied was a terrifying void. Psychic power held no purchase over this ancient Iron Man.
"An ancient creation? Forgive me, My Lord... I cannot see him."
Axion performed a strangely human gesture, scratching his metal cranium. "Fascinating. The cerebral architecture is extraordinarily unique."
As he spoke, Axion's attention shifted to the Navigator on the high dais. The singular Warp-eye on Sunard's forehead caught his interest. A bio-scanning beam swept across the Navigator's skull, causing Axion to utter a soft observation.
"These xenos are truly marvelous."
The Captain's patience frayed at Axion's unrestrained behavior. "Axion... Excellency? I do not know what rituals you are performing, but I must ask you to cease this intrusive scrutiny. To peer into others so brazenly is a grave dishonor. Furthermore, I will not tolerate you referring to my crew as 'xenos'."
Axion suddenly bent down, his metallic face inches from the Captain's. The chill of cold steel and the piercing light of his ocular sensors sent a wave of primal dread through the officer's heart.
"Your 'crew'? If you define them as human, then let me be clear: in my eyes, even you are merely a gene-spliced humanoid."
"While you share a 60% genetic match with the humans in my database, I cannot yet determine if you, or any of these so-called 'mortals', are the result of natural human evolution."
"For now, do not call yourselves human in my presence. You do not yet qualify as subjects of my service. Should I find evidence to the contrary, I may reconsider my... options."
Silence fell over the bridge, heavy and suffocating. Calanthus eventually broke it, his voice laced with concern.
"Then what are we in your eyes?"
Axion gave Calanthus a peculiar look, searching his memory banks. The latter seemed not to have encountered Thien and his Black Templars yet. Coldly, he spat out a single classification:
"Fragile bio-engineered soldiers. A composite of human and various animal genetic markers."
"By the Emperor..."
The Astropath collapsed to the deck in a panic. She felt she should never have come to the bridge to report. What manner of blasphemous heresy was she being forced to hear? It was monstrous.
The Captain and his adjutant fared no better, their faces twisted in a mixture of pallid fear and simmering rage. This relic of the past had just denied the very humanity of the Imperium. It was the ultimate apostasy.
Axion patted Calanthus on the pauldron, as if attempting to offer some modicum of comfort.
"Do not distress yourself. At least your genetic state and that of your kind is relatively stable. It skews toward purposeful, directional enhancement."
Axion had completely misinterpreted the silence; he assumed Calanthus was experiencing an existential crisis upon learning the truth of his transhuman physiology.
But Calanthus was worried about something far more dangerous.
An Iron Man who viewed humans and Space Marines as alien species was an unpredictable variable in an already dying galaxy. He found himself paralyzed by the Primarch's commands.
Calanthus wondered: did Guilliman truly know the nature of the machine he had unleashed?