Axion pressed deeper into the vessel's maw, never deigning to look back as his Aegis Protector followed in his wake. Flanking the massive cargo crates, two Peltast Sniper Automata locked themselves into firing braces, elevating their over-calibrated sniper cannons to a state of high readiness.
The hull had hummed with detectable power signatures earlier; perhaps portions of the vessel remained intact, unsevered by the void's violence. With this calculation in mind, Axion accelerated his pace.
His multi-functional augurs cycled rapidly through various spectrums, yet the traces of energy flow had vanished entirely. Even for a mind as attuned as Axion's, the source of the power remained elusive. Every conduit marked on the schematics in his data-vaults was severed. Following the structural logic of the deck maps yielded nothing but a harvest of shattered piping.
Hiss!
A brilliant beam of energy lanced through the gloom. It punched through the kinetic shielding of a lead Automata, the residual thermal energy blooming across its silvered chassis. The armor glowed a dull, angry red as localized energy arcs danced across the impact site.
The unit's synchronized targeting array locked onto the threat instantly.
Lumbering out of the darkness was a humanoid silhouette, standing just under four meters tall. Its forearms crackled with the telltale build-up of an imminent energy discharge.
The Aegis Protector did not grant its adversary a second opportunity. Engaging its gravitic anchors, the Automata violently reeled the assailant inward. A heavy manipulator claw crushed the target's cranium, before shifting its grip to brutally wrench the mechanical arm from its socket.
The limb hit the deck with a heavy, metallic thud.
Axion swept a scanning beam across the fallen frame.
"Beep. Identification confirmed: Security Automata."
It was a severely damaged military-grade security unit, built upon a humanoid frame. Even before the Aegis Protector had seized it, the machine was already missing a limb; now, it was little more than a mangled torso. Despite its dismemberment, the security unit did not cease its struggle, its chassis thrashing with a frantic, mindless violence. Suspended by its head in the Protector's grip, the display was almost farcical.
Axion attempted to initiate remote override protocols, but every quantum signal vanished into the data-void. The security unit offered no response. Remote access having failed, Axion resorted to more primitive physical intervention.
Under Axion's direction, the Aegis Protector tilted the unit's head forward, stretching the neck assembly. Axion reached out with his own mechanical manipulator and snapped a specific cervical joint.
The security automaton went limp instantly.
The rupture revealed a hidden tactile interface port. Using his digit as a conductor, Axion established a direct physical link to the machine's core.
As the data streamed in, Axion's disappointment mounted.
He had hoped to recover cargo manifests or escort logs, but the unit's memory banks were not merely corrupted—they had been subjected to a recursive overwrite loop. Aside from a hard-coded directive to engage all mobile targets, there was no viable data. It had not even logged the recent loss of its limbs.
The cache was bloated with attack commands, yet these directives lacked any source-origin tag. Like the beacon signals back in the cargo hold, there was no command authority, no instruction marker, and no identification string.
In the logic of the Sapient Machine, every action requires a lineage: a command originated by the unit itself, issued by a superior, or requested by a subordinate.
Faced with this statistical anomaly, Axion opted for a systemic purge. He wiped the storage arrays clean and reconstructed the control kernel from its foundations. When he reinserted the metallic spine-jack, the security unit hummed back to life. This time, it did not struggle. The Aegis Protector released its grip, allowing the machine to drop.
Though armless and battered, its sensor suites remained functional. It hit the deck and balanced itself perfectly on its remaining legs.
Axion retrieved the severed arm from the floor. It was integrated with a Neutron Beam Projector, though the shoulder coupling had been ruined by the Protector's brute force. Loath to waste functioning technology, Axion secured the weapon to his person and continued toward the sector the automaton had emerged from.
Past a jagged breach in the hull, the architecture shifted. The surrounding bulkheads were now encrusted with the aesthetics of the contemporary Imperium.
White Romanesque pillars and ornate buttresses lined the corridor, flanked by rows of statuary. However, their forms were plagued by grotesque distortions. While Imperial hagiography typically favored the Emperor, skeletal remains, or grim heroes, all maintaining a recognizable human silhouette, these effigies were different. Their heads and torsos were warped into unnatural, alien geometries.
Switching to his empyrean-spectrum sight, Axion saw the statues shrouded in coils of Warp energy. This corruption bled from the stone like ink in water, dissipating slowly into the freezing air.
Within the walls, conduits pulsed with energy traces, "moving" in a rhythmic, serpentine fashion. A sense of cold familiarity washed over Axion.
Mecha-parasitic Nematodes.
These were singular, Warp-spawned daemonic constructs. They would latch onto a vessel's systems, siphoning power to fuel the corruption and physical reconfiguration of the ship. Axion recalled a previous encounter with a Space Hulk where these entities had stolen a ship's power to rouse a maddened Machine Spirit. Back then, the creatures had flooded the network with a deluge of scrap-code, nearly sending the vessel into a terminal cascade.
That had been Axion's first time interfacing with an Imperial ship; he had "kindly" performed a total data-sanitization for them. Though the Tech-Priests had wailed afterwards, claiming the Machine Spirit had been devoured and the ship turned into a "soulless husk," Axion saw no flaw in his logic.
The energy surging through these parasitic worms provided a new vector. By following the ley-lines of their corruption, locating the ship's remaining power core would be a simple matter of calculation.
Tracing the shimmering threads of tainted energy, Axion's pace quickened.
Meanwhile, in a diverging corridor, the Bladeguard veterans dispatched by Guilliman were embroiled in a grueling slog.
The fractured hull of the Space Hulk behaved like a living ruin of metal, its internal geometry shifting with glacial, predatory intent. Though the Ultramarines had located the Thunderhawk Axion had left behind, they were a step behind. Deprived of clear guidance and a definite objective, the lead veteran could only attempt to track their quarry through the labyrinth.
Despite the fact that Axion's party had made no effort to conceal their path, the trail had gone cold. Within a few bulkhead transitions, the sons of Macragge found themselves utterly lost in the shifting dark.