Axion peered through a reinforced viewport at the rust-red orb hanging in the void, a planet that bore a haunting resemblance to Mars. He felt a flicker of doubt as to exactly where their heading had taken them.
However, observing the jagged clarity of the surface features, he concluded this was likely not the Red Planet itself. Even in the Old Age, the development of Mars had been staggeringly dense; finding a stretch of barren, unoccupied wasteland there would have been an impossibility. Furthermore, this world bore the scars of a catastrophic conflict. The tangled masses piled across the plains were clearly not natural rock formations, but the calcified wreckage of war.
His long periods of wandering the corridors had dulled the crew's initial terror. The Tech-Priests, having found new ways to approach him, gradually realized that this relic of the ancient past was not entirely inscrutable. He was communicative, and occasionally, he would even provide answers to their convoluted technical inquiries.
If a priest had something of genuine value to offer, they might present it for his inspection. Sometimes he would provide enlightenment; other times, he would take an interest in the object and offer a "small hand-crafted gift" in exchange. Because of this, the priests of the Dawn of Fire had bestowed a new title upon Axion:
The Omnissiah's Mystery Reliquary.
As Axion watched the planet, a Magos approached, cradling a small metallic box with an air of profound anticipation. Axion tilted his sensory array, scanned the offering, and, with a clinical lack of ceremony, reached into his chassis to toss a peculiar sliver of processed iron to the priest.
This dynamic had begun when Axion first used scrap materials to forge several compact, man-portable weapons in exchange for the high-precision tools held by the Mechanicus. Since then, the Tech-Priests seemed to have experienced a sudden awakening of logic. They now frequently appeared with eccentric curios, hoping to catch Axion's eye and secure a trade.
Initially, their offerings were useless to him. That changed when one Magos produced his most prized possession: a component for a quantum deconstructor.
The priest had recovered the tool during his early studies on a distant world, never truly grasping its function. It wasn't until a later pilgrimage to the vaults of Mars that he recognized the design as a fragment of an ancient STC production line. Even then, its specific purpose remained a mystery. He had kept it, hoping to one day integrate it into a greater machine, but abandoned the idea upon realizing its energy requirements were catastrophic.
Thinking he had little to lose, he presented the "useless" relic to Axion.
In a rare display of delight, Axion handed the priest a custom-built plasma pistol. It was the first weapon he had gifted, a bulky piece of hardware by Imperial standards, but one utilizing Dark Age principles. Its output was stable, its yield immense, and though its power consumption was high, Axion had fitted it with articulated thermal vanes that rendered the risk of "Gets Hot" almost non-existent.
The Mechanicus personnel were driven into a near-religious frenzy when Axion demonstrated the weapon by burning a clean hole through a slab of adamantium-reinforced Dreadnought plating. In the heat of the moment, no one bothered to ask where the mangled armor plate had come from.
Following that, Axion became something of a glorified salvage yard. Tech-Priests brought him "mysterious" collections—useless pre-Imperial civilian trinkets, shards of Dark Age debris, or strange mechanical organs from forgotten eras. None of this deterred Axion. He appraised each piece, trading his "hand-crafted" boredom-killers for the scrap.
The priests even gave these gifts a liturgical name: The Omnissiah's Commendation.
Once acquired, most of these weapons were spirited away for dissection. The priests were baffled by the alien energy-flow structures and amplifiers that defied their dogmatic understanding of physics; the only element they could feasibly replicate were the articulated cooling fins.
After extracting what knowledge they could, the priests, unusually generous for their kind, discreetly struck the Imperial Mint Mark onto the weapons, sent them to the Ministorum for "purification blessings," and, after the requisite Rites of Awakening, gifted them to the Ultramarines with whom they shared ties. Their hope was that these Astartes would, in turn, recover more unidentifiable or ancient curiosities during their campaigns to be traded back to Axion.
The Ultramarines, after field-testing the weapons, were more than happy to oblige. In a galaxy of nightmares, no warrior could refuse a sidearm that was reliable, stable, portable, and possessed the stopping power of a heavy weapon.
In this manner, Axion recovered four or five functional production-line components, a mountain of recyclable exotic materials, and several chassis parts from Old Age military automata. As for his raw materials? The armory was vast. If one dismantled enough things, one always found what they needed.
The efficiency of his salvage operation skyrocketed once the priests realized Axion had a specific appetite for "ancient trash." They began targeted "feedings." Axion accepted almost anything that wasn't of Necron or Aeldari design, even scorched fragments of T'au battlesuits were welcomed.
Axion had no idea where these priests were unearthing such a quantity of junk, but he didn't care. These items were vital. Without a battlefield to scavenge, he had to be resourceful. Many of these relics contained synthetic alloys no longer produced in the modern Imperium, materials that were irreplaceable without his own mining operations.
Occasionally, a piece of military gear would yield a specialized component he couldn't forge by hand, like the box the Magos had just delivered.
It was a focal-buffer for a heavy laser array. Axion had previously hand-assembled a heavy lascannon for his Wardens; with this component, the weapon's output would increase by 30%. In overcharge mode, it could even hold a capacitor-burst with a destructive yield comparable to an atomic pulse cannon. Though the sustained fire duration would drop, a few modifications to the heat sinks would rectify the flaw.
Such precision components required an automated production line to manufacture; manual assembly simply couldn't reach the necessary tolerances. Axion's obsession with securing a standard production line wasn't just about speed, it was about restoring his designs to their original, terrifying potential. Manual crafting varied in precision; the atomic-level sequencing of a quantum-print array represented the absolute zenith of human manufacturing.
…
While the Tech-Priests were busy in their technological revelry with Axion, Roboute Guilliman finally received fresh intelligence.
The Lion and Dante had departed Baal a significant time ago.
The news caused Guilliman to slam his fist onto the strategium table in a rare display of fury. He was once again reminded of the agonizingly slow gears of Imperial bureaucracy. From the moment the message was dispatched to the moment it reached his ears, the information had drifted through various Sector Departmento Munitorum offices for over five Terran months.
By the time he had arrived at the Baal system, more than three-quarters of a Terran year had passed since the initial dispatch.
When Guilliman censured the high command of the Munitorum for their inefficiency, the Master of the Departmento could only shake his head with a weary sigh.
"My Lord," the official replied, "be thankful this was handled by the Munitorum and sent via high-priority vox-tether. Had this passed through the Administratum, even for the Lord Regent of the Imperium, you would not have heard of it for at least two Terran years."