ed them in his favour.
To extrapolate further, a second flicker-fail would potentially cost them the ship if the shields didn’t revive quickly enough. Worse, it could lead to a complete failure, which would not only cost them their ship, but also their souls.
Deltrian had no intention of dying, especially not after investing so much time and meticulous care into resculpting so much of his biological frame into this artifice of mechanical perfection. Nor did he wish his immortal soul to spill out into the transmogrifying ether, to be pulled apart at the amused mercies of daemons and their mad gods.
That, as he was so fond of saying, would not be optimal.
‘Analysing,’ he said again.
And there it was. The bruise of flawed code, mixed in with the generator’s scrambled cogitations, lost and found within a thousand thoughts per second. The damage was minimal, and focused around several of the external projector arrays on the starboard hull. They could be repaired, but not remotely. He’d need to send servitors, or go in person.
Deltrian didn’t sigh. He registered his irritation with a non-linguistic blurt of machine-code, as if belching in binary. With an exaggerated patience he didn’t possess, the tech-seer activated his epiglottal vox by simulating the act of swallowing.
‘This is Deltrian.’
The vox-network replied with an overwhelming miasma of shouting and gunfire. Ah yes, the defence effort. Deltrian had quite forgotten. He disengaged from the terminal and re-tuned into his surroundings.
He considered the scene for a moment. The Void Generatorum was one of the largest chambers on the ship, with its walls layered in clanking power facilitators forged from bronze and sacred steel. All of these secondary nodes fed the central column, which itself was a black iron tower of throbbing plasma, with the churning liquid energy visible from the outside through the eyes and open mouths of gargoyles sculpted onto the pillar’s sides.
Only now, as his focus returned to the external world, did he see the madness had ceased. The chamber around him, so recently alive with crashing gunfire and vox-altered screaming, was now beautifully silent.
The enemy boarders – or rather, the fleshy, broken things that had until so recently been the enemy boarders – lay in a ruptured carpet of blood-soaked ceramite across the chamber. Deltrian’s olfaction sensors registered a severe level of vascular and excretory scents in the air, enough to make mortal digestive tracts rebel in protest. The smell of the slain was nothing to Deltrian, but he recorded the charnel house stench for the sake of completion in the reference notes he planned to compile later that evening.
His attackers hadn’t come anywhere near him. That was because Deltrian, like many adepts of the Machine Cult, was first and foremost a believer in preparation to cover all contingencies, and secondly, a practitioner in the habit of overwhelming force. As soon as the void shields had failed for that split second, he knew the Night Lords would be scattered across the ship, defending every deck against the anomalous outbreak. So he took his safety into his own hands.
Admittedly, three-quarters of his servitors hadn’t survived. He paced the chamber, taking stock of the variances in slaughter. Those still standing were slack-faced automatons, lobotomised past personality, their left arms amputated in favour of bulky heavy weaponry. Bionics covered at least half of their skin and replaced a great deal more of their internal functioning. Each one was a labour of faith, if not quite love, and required unswerving attention to detail.
He didn’t thank them, nor offer congratulations on their victory. They’d never register it, either way. Still, to slay ten Imperial Space Marines was no mean feat, even at the cost of… (he counted in a heartbeat) …thirty-nine enhanced servitors and twelve gun-drones. A loss like that would inconvenience him for some
To extrapolate further, a second flicker-fail would potentially cost them the ship if the shields didn’t revive quickly enough. Worse, it could lead to a complete failure, which would not only cost them their ship, but also their souls.
Deltrian had no intention of dying, especially not after investing so much time and meticulous care into resculpting so much of his biological frame into this artifice of mechanical perfection. Nor did he wish his immortal soul to spill out into the transmogrifying ether, to be pulled apart at the amused mercies of daemons and their mad gods.
That, as he was so fond of saying, would not be optimal.
‘Analysing,’ he said again.
And there it was. The bruise of flawed code, mixed in with the generator’s scrambled cogitations, lost and found within a thousand thoughts per second. The damage was minimal, and focused around several of the external projector arrays on the starboard hull. They could be repaired, but not remotely. He’d need to send servitors, or go in person.
Deltrian didn’t sigh. He registered his irritation with a non-linguistic blurt of machine-code, as if belching in binary. With an exaggerated patience he didn’t possess, the tech-seer activated his epiglottal vox by simulating the act of swallowing.
‘This is Deltrian.’
The vox-network replied with an overwhelming miasma of shouting and gunfire. Ah yes, the defence effort. Deltrian had quite forgotten. He disengaged from the terminal and re-tuned into his surroundings.
He considered the scene for a moment. The Void Generatorum was one of the largest chambers on the ship, with its walls layered in clanking power facilitators forged from bronze and sacred steel. All of these secondary nodes fed the central column, which itself was a black iron tower of throbbing plasma, with the churning liquid energy visible from the outside through the eyes and open mouths of gargoyles sculpted onto the pillar’s sides.
Only now, as his focus returned to the external world, did he see the madness had ceased. The chamber around him, so recently alive with crashing gunfire and vox-altered screaming, was now beautifully silent.
The enemy boarders – or rather, the fleshy, broken things that had until so recently been the enemy boarders – lay in a ruptured carpet of blood-soaked ceramite across the chamber. Deltrian’s olfaction sensors registered a severe level of vascular and excretory scents in the air, enough to make mortal digestive tracts rebel in protest. The smell of the slain was nothing to Deltrian, but he recorded the charnel house stench for the sake of completion in the reference notes he planned to compile later that evening.
His attackers hadn’t come anywhere near him. That was because Deltrian, like many adepts of the Machine Cult, was first and foremost a believer in preparation to cover all contingencies, and secondly, a practitioner in the habit of overwhelming force. As soon as the void shields had failed for that split second, he knew the Night Lords would be scattered across the ship, defending every deck against the anomalous outbreak. So he took his safety into his own hands.
Admittedly, three-quarters of his servitors hadn’t survived. He paced the chamber, taking stock of the variances in slaughter. Those still standing were slack-faced automatons, lobotomised past personality, their left arms amputated in favour of bulky heavy weaponry. Bionics covered at least half of their skin and replaced a great deal more of their internal functioning. Each one was a labour of faith, if not quite love, and required unswerving attention to detail.
He didn’t thank them, nor offer congratulations on their victory. They’d never register it, either way. Still, to slay ten Imperial Space Marines was no mean feat, even at the cost of… (he counted in a heartbeat) …thirty-nine enhanced servitors and twelve gun-drones. A loss like that would inconvenience him for some
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