Chapter 474: Securing the STC Template
The massive cart continued its descent, finally arriving at its destination, the Mechanicus shrine three kilometers underground.
The cart came to a stop in an unloading bay, packed with other rail carts, all thick with dust, clearly unused for a very long time.
The troops disembarked and held a defensive perimeter as Magos Robert approached a platform station. Set into the wall was a figure, a human form embedded directly into the wall, managing the local cogitator array, essentially a living, humanoid computer.
One of Robert's mechanical arms extended several data ports, plugging directly into the figure's mouth.
After roughly ten minutes, he withdrew the connection and told Kian:
"I've broken through this shrine's entire network defense and obtained full administrative access. Follow me."
He gestured, leading the group toward a massive steel door.
They passed through a series of heavy doors and industrial bays along the way.
Most of the doors had been blown open by what looked like heavy artillery. A smaller number remained sealed shut.
As Robert led the way, he explained:
"This particular shrine specializes in outfitting, its entire structure dedicated to Sentinel production.
Twenty years ago, the Orks arrived and seized control of this facility.
The Magos overseeing this site at the time triggered a self-destruct protocol in the final moments before falling. 95% of the shrine's manufacturing infrastructure and 75% of its finished stock were destroyed. The Orks came away with remarkably little."
Kian's eyes lit up at that.
"So that means there's still 25% of the finished stock out there for the taking? How many Sentinels would that be?"
Robert deflated his enthusiasm immediately.
"Statistically speaking, roughly 4,000-plus Sentinels should remain.
But as you've already seen, we've encountered several Ork-piloted Sentinels on the way in, and there's clear evidence of forced entry on many of these heavy doors. How many actually survived intact, we simply cannot say."
Kian's heart started sinking. A loot box, huh? Damn Orks better have left him something.
Robert led the group deeper into the shrine, and the further they went, the more Kian's spirits dropped.
Vast stretches of the facility showed clear signs of destruction, entire factory bays the size of multiple football fields reduced to melted, useless slag, the full force of the shrine's self-destruct protocol laid bare.
Whatever surviving structures remained had already been stripped bare by the Orks, down to the metal plating in the floors. Some of those parts were probably sitting in some Big Mek's war-forge right now.
The group walked for close to half an hour before finally reaching the chamber housing the STC template.
This was the shrine's deepest and most heavily secured room.
Inside sat an enormous spherical vault, its walls an absurd ten meters thick, wrapped in layer after layer of armour plating and anti-plasma, anti-laser coating.
For a full twenty years, the Orks had been consumed by burning curiosity over what this sphere might contain, and had subjected its outer surface to extensive, relentless assault.
The entire sphere was pockmarked with blast scars, along with scorch marks left by some unidentified laser weapon.
Even the deepest of these wounds had only penetrated about two meters into the surface, evidence of the Orks using laser drilling equipment against it over a prolonged period.
The sphere's interior anti-laser coating had a self-healing property: as it melted under sustained laser fire, it would liquefy and then re-solidify into a thick, hardened black gel wherever it had been burned. After penetrating about two meters, no amount of continued laser fire could push any deeper.
Robert approached the massive vault and searched its surface, eventually locating a small port.
He extended a data cable from one of his mechanical arms and plugged it in. After a moment, the sphere let out a deep rumble, and a one-meter square access hatch slid open.
From within the sphere came the grinding sound of gears turning, and a perfect golden cube, its surface polished mirror-smooth, was slowly conveyed out on a track.
Kian stepped forward, staring at the perfect cube, and asked: "This is the STC template?"
Robert nodded.
"This is a fairly common form of physical STC recording, manufactured on Mars. This particular unit is 8,351 years old, and remains as pristine as the day it was made."
He gestured, and the several dozen tech-priests who'd accompanied him immediately went to work, unrolling a red carpet across the floor and beginning the process of disassembling the cube.
Within moments, the cube had been broken down into over five hundred individual sheets of adamantium, each roughly a meter square.
Kian had assumed these sheets would be covered in dense text, detailed instructions for manufacturing a Sentinel.
But each sheet was completely blank, polished perfectly smooth.
Robert caught his confusion and explained:
"An STC template doesn't just record a single technology. It provides hundreds, sometimes nearly a thousand, alternate methods for implementing that same technology.
For instance, if a build calls for a specific metal you cannot produce, the template will include alternate material solutions elsewhere within it.
In short, as long as you can decrypt the template and possess even a baseline industrial capacity, there will always be at least one viable pathway within it to produce whatever the template describes.
Which is exactly why the recorded information is so densely packed. Every sheet requires microscopic scanning equipment just to read its content.
Once fully scanned and catalogued, we'll have completed a full copy of the STC template. From there, all that remains is decryption of the text itself, and you'll be able to begin manufacturing Sentinels."
He then walked to a corner of the chamber, where a long-dormant servo-skull sat lodged in the wall.
He pried the skull free, connecting a cable from his mechanical arm to charge it, and began loading operating instructions into it.
The little construct, built from a human skull, layered with mechanical components and an anti-gravity emitter, flickered back to life.
Robert let the servo-skull hover in front of Kian and said:
"Scanning the microscopic engravings on the STC template will take a considerable amount of time. Count Voss, I'd recommend leaving half your guard here, to protect our work from any surviving greenskins in the area.
You could take the remaining half and go inspect the Sentinel factories that may have survived intact.
I've already loaded this servo-skull with a navigation program. It will guide you to your destination."
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