The sluggish cables of living daemon-steel failed to trigger the ship's defensive void shield response. The moment the mecha-tendrils made contact with the vessel's metallic hull, a torrential surge of consciousness and data began to churn with predatory hunger.
Every Heretek Magos of the Dark Mechanicum sought to be the first to harvest even a scrap of information, no matter how insignificant the data-mote. However, as their consciousnesses truly breached the Pectaro, the digital realm they encountered struck every invader into a stunned silence.
"How can this be?!"
They had conjectured countless scenarios. They had imagined encountering the fury of a wrathful Machine Spirit, drowning in a tidal wave of information, or perhaps making contact with the unique digital ego of an Iron Man to engage in binary discourse.
Instead, the consciousness and invasive data of every Tech-Priest plunged into a total, yawning void. The sensation of psychic emptiness brought a sense of infinite desolation even to those already fallen to the Ruinous Powers.
It was as if they had stepped into nonexistence. There was no tactile reality, no data streams, no Machine Spirit, and no Men of Iron, there was… nothing.
Axion watched impassively as his sub-processing units began to cycle at high velocity. An independent firewall process was iterating with rapid efficiency. Axion remembered this well; it was a minor sub-routine he had authored during his first engagement with the Iron Warriors. A cursory glance at the version logs showed that nearly every time Axion encountered the forces of Chaos, this program iterated three or four versions in the background.
By now, its sequence number was approaching triple digits. Its operational logic had grown increasingly sophisticated, handling data incursions with brutal simplicity. It had evolved from basic defensive deletion into the creation of an isolated, vacant data cell. This cell quarantined all incoming data streams, allowing them to run in a vacuum before deleting the entire data unit once the stack was saturated.
Faced with the tide of incoming data, Axion intercepted a random segment to analyze its contents. The warp-tainted data held no value for assimilation; it was riddled with entropy, disorder, and a cacophony of inexplicable desires.
Was this what they called the pursuit of knowledge?
The fragmented data packets were so corrupted they could not even be parsed into coherent meaning. Axion felt a flicker of frustration. Why are these creatures dumping cache-rubbish into my systems? This detritus was even more disordered than the cluttered cache-info found on Imperial vessels; at least the data on Imperial ships, however messy, was sequential and complete. Here, there was nothing but broken shards.
Perhaps the Dark Mechanicum intended to waste his processing power with this digital refuse?
Observing the mounting piles of information-garbage, Axion wasted no time.
"Execute data maintenance protocols. Initiate data purge. Streamline primary system architecture for sanctification."
This was the first time Axion had actively overclocked this program's operational efficiency. Massive computational power drove its iteration forward.
The Heretek Tech-Priests who had projected their consciousness into the hull of the Pectaro immediately suffered catastrophic short-circuits. Memories and knowledge began to evaporate, leaving their semi-mechanical brains a tabula rasa of absolute blankness. On the Chaos vessels, the daemon-spirits of the ships shrieked as they felt their sensory tendrils severed.
Axion, for his part, had grown weary of these entities pressing against his hull to dump their filth.
The figure-eight-shaped hull began a barrel roll. Concealed maneuvering thrusters on both flanks fired, carrying the ship through a high-G maneuver that effortlessly snapped the daemon-steel cables.
Every Relativistic Particle Emitter began to cycle. From the ship's flanks, dense clusters of starlight coalesced into ribbons of light—thin, seemingly harmless bands of radiance that surged outward. These blue-white lines lanced through the surrounding Chaos fleet with ease, drifting for thousands of kilometers before gradually dissipating into the void.
Guilliman, perceiving the Dark Mechanicum's intent, was already commanding the fleet to come about and support Axion. Suddenly, every Imperial ship erupted with high-priority klaxons.
"High-density, high-energy particle stream detected! Evasive maneuvers! Brace for impact!"
The high-energy particle streams unleashed by the Relativistic Particle Emitters were not conventional energy weapons. They functioned like intense cosmic radiation, projecting individual particles carrying immense kinetic energy at the speed of light.
The beautiful ribbons of light swept across the Chaos ships with deceptive grace.
Inside those vessels, every biological structure began to decay the instant the lines touched them. To any organic form, this weapon was an instrument of absolute horror. The sheer energy contained within the particles shredded cellular structures with ease. Sensitive electronic equipment within the ships similarly burned out under the bombardment.
Aboard the Chaos vessels, traitors, cultists, and Tech-Priests alike watched helplessly as their flesh dissolved. Their nerves died instantly; the biological husks ceased to react. There was no pain, for there was no longer any consciousness to perceive it. Even the warped, mutated flesh birthed by warp-energies withered and died within these slender, beautiful bands of light. Only the bodies of true daemonic entities were severed only to knit back together, staring blankly at the heaps of sloughed meat before they, too, were consumed.
Due to the encroachment of warp-energy, the material properties of the Chaos ships had become unstable, a problem Axion had noted during previous battlefield salvage operations. While their physical performance matched historical records, the hybrid metals forged under the guidance of warp-energy were temperamental; once the energy dissipated, the materials would undergo mutual rejection and turn to slag. Thus, he had no intention of salvaging these husks.
Following the sweep of the particle streams, only two Chaos ships showed any signs of movement. It was not a failure of the weapon, but rather that certain Tech-Priests aboard had used forbidden technologies to undergo a total mechanical overhaul, attaining a dark shadow of the "The Flesh is weak, Iron prevails" ideal once sought by the Cult Mechanicus.
However, restricted by the limits of their storage capacity, "poor mental faculty" was their defining trait. Having had their consciousnesses scrubbed by Axion, they were now essentially mindless husks. Perhaps, upon returning to the Warp, the omnipresent empyrean energies might allow them to slowly recover their lost memories, or perhaps their empty shells would be possessed by some bodiless neverborn.
To Axion, it was irrelevant.
Deprived of their handlers, the daemon-spirits of the ships lapsed into total insanity. The Chaos vessels began to fire wildly, attacking everything in their vicinity.
This turn of events actually caught Axion by surprise. Based on his understanding of Imperial vessels, he had expected that killing the crew via low-energy expenditure would neutralize the threat. Perhaps these ships possess auxiliary intelligence or autonomous combat capabilities?
To resolve the query, Axion initiated an active intrusion protocol.
The systems of the Chaos ships were flooded with warp-energy; there was no "system" in the conventional sense. The chaotic strings of garbled code and nonsensical commands made the ships appear, in Axion's eyes, to be suffering from a digital psychosis. After a single attempt at an intrusion protocol, he abandoned the notion of seizing control.
When the sky-filling clusters of blue-glowing plasma finally erupted, a pyrotechnic display rivaling the detonation of a Cyclonic Torpedo unfolded before the observers. Each plasma mass unerringly struck a Chaos vessel whose void shields had flickered out due to the crewless loss of control.
Immediately, the jagged, sinister hulls turned from black to a searing red. Ammunition stores cooked off under the intense heat, and the ships blossomed into crimson flowers of twisted steel. Brilliant light and sprays of molten metal bloomed against the lightless backdrop of the void.
Aboard the Wrath of Baal, the Blood Angels began to discuss whether the vista was worthy of being recorded in prose, to be preserved in honor of the Emperor's light.