“By your leave,” said Alaric, rising from his seat and leaving the chamber.
Nyxos continued writing. He would have to recite it all before the conclave of lord inquisitors and suffer their interrogations until they knew everything he did. He did not begrudge it, but this would be difficult to explain. A daemon in information form, the return of the Dark Mechanicus and a corrupt Standard Template Construct. Yes, their questions would be many.
And then there was Alaric himself. He was intelligent, curious and imaginative. They were qualities normally buried by the training of a Grey Knight, but when confronted with the foulest of enemies, they shone through in Alaric. That was why Alaric had convinced the Castigator to take on daemon’s flesh when any other Grey Knight would just have died screaming prayers. Probably the Grand Masters of the Grey Knights saw it as something unstable and unwanted and would keep Alaric from ever attaining the rank of brother-captain that he deserved. But Nyxos had seen enough of Alaric’s qualities to know that perhaps there was some other role he could serve within the Inquisition, where a sharp mind and a Space Marine’s body could be put to best use.
But those were matters for another time. For the moment, Nyxos would have to make sure he had answers for the lord inquisitors.
Deep on Holy Mars, the world sacred to the Omnissiah and spiritual heart of the tech-priesthood, a mighty labyrinth lay below the rust-red surface. It was forgotten, deliberately so, by all but the highest echelons of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Those to whom the archmagi ultima bowed, those who had the ear of the Fabricator General, knew of its existence and they jealously guarded that knowledge well. All but a handful of men and women in the Imperium were incapable of even imagining the weight of secrets it contained.
The Standard Template Constructs were sacred rumours among the tech-priests, any scrap of information concerning them a holy revelation. And all those scraps were gathered, filtered through the most ancient and powerful logic engines, dissected and assembled and placed in the gene-locked data vaults that lined the walls of the labyrinth. Reaching deep into the crust of Mars, the archive contained information concerning the Standard Template Constructs, some of it older than the Imperium itself. And every few centuries, after decades of debate among the very highest circles of the tech-priesthood, something new would be added.
A new vault was assigned and coded and the information was typed into it in pure binary by one of those ancient, hooded figures who were closer to the Omnissiah than anyone who lived. That information concerned a world named Chaeroneia and the Standard Template Construct that had been found and lost there. It was the STC for the most awesome of technologies—the Titan, the god-machine—and it had been, according to all the data gathered, pure and complete as no STC had ever been before. But it had been used for the ends of the Enemy, twisted into a weapon of Chaos by a monstrous daemon of the warp. And so was the lesson illustrated – none but the Adeptus Mechanicus could comprehend the majesty of the Standard Template Constructs and the purity of the knowledge they contained, none but a tech-priest, stripped of his humanity by his devotion to the Omnissiah, could be trusted with the enormity of such information.
The vault was sealed and consecrated and the picture became a little clearer. One day the Adeptus Mechanicus would attain complete understanding of the galaxy and the grand design of the Omnissiah, using the Standard Template Constructs as a guide to His divine methods. One day the STCs would all be completely reassembled, as pure as the Titan STC should have been had the Enemy not abused it and so threatened everything the Mechanicus existed to protect. It was the quest that had consumed the Priesthood of Mars ever since the Dark Age of Technology had given way to the Age of Strife, long before the Emperor arose and united mankind in the Imperium. It was a quest that consumed every tech-priest and menial every moment of their lives and drove them closer to their Omnissiah in their zeal to understand.
It took many normal lifetimes to become close enough to the Omnissiah to accept the truth that lay at the heart of their teachings. Only the highest, those who knew of the archive and its contents, could do so. And so they all knew, as somehow they had always known, that their quest would never end.
Scanning and basic
proofing by Red Dwarf,
formatting and additional
proofing by Undead.
[Grey Knights 02] - Dark Adeptus Page 31
