Grim Dark Tech Support: A Dark Mechanicum Quest

Engagement Roll: 6,5,5

You are left, reasonably quickly, with only two of your subordinates: Theama-Nul fails to turn up again, and Ko-Bea demurs after a while, citing issues with her new arm and choosing to return to the Wilful Eternity.

You are left, ultimately, with Myges Talef and 8-Doxa-Krainaima, the former having apparently not quite processed the trauma of their last joint endeavor, the latter seemingly about as unsuited for working with delicate circuits as it is possible for somebody to be.

At the very least, Talef's fear seems to be focusing his attention on the matter at hand rather admirably, which you appreciate.

There is, it transpires, apparently at least somewhat regular shuttle flights throughout the labyrinth of hulks, but getting your equipment from the Wilful Eternity still occupies a tremendous amount of time, especially as the regular pictcasts jam up every frequency of local vox, preventing wireless communication with annoying regularity. You pay some attention to them, waiting for the Diagnostic Haemonculus to reach you at the heart of the station: there is, after all, not much else to do. Watching them in sequence, you are beginning to appreciate their purpose. The Protagonist of the video continues to demonstrate her skills, growing them to standards that rise far beyond the practical, becoming more and more unattainable. As they do, she changes as well: the richness of her robes increase, and jewelry and makeup begin to be featured more and more prominently.

Some who watch these pictcasts, you suspect, will be lost within this transformation. Others, however, will be taken in and ushered along. Slowly, surely, the tone will become more openly heretical, more critical of the orthodoxy preached by the Imperium. Before long, there will be a call: not for rebellion, you suspect, but to flight: veiled allusions to a promised land, ones that will result in shattered bodies and corpses for most who try to follow, but seem to be successful enough to also result in the amalgamation of vessels outside the station.

What they find there, you suspect, is significantly different to what they were promised.

It is also, you consider, not your problem.

Your problem, rather, lies within the tangled remains of what once was the astropathic choir at the heart of the relay station's purpose.

Astropaths are of incredible value: they, together with the Navigators, are what enables the Imperium to exert the semblance of control it still holds over it's far-flung realms. Forget the gene-wrought might of the Astartes, or the infinite reserves of the Imperial Guard: without marching orders and the means to reach their destination, neither of them would amount to anything at all. Yet to the ritualistic warp-crafters of the True Mechanicum, Astropaths hold a value beyond the pricelessness they possess as means of communications.

Each Astropath, after all, possesses a direct connection to the Emperor. They have been touched by the anathema: their sight taken and their soul altered by the burning brightness of His light.
To sacrifice one of their kind, then, in the un-logic of the warp, is to inflict a minor wound upon the Corpse upon the throne: to twist one to chaotic purposes is to twist some of the Emperor's own essence against the order he created and cherished.

At the very base of the crystal, cradled in what you initially thought were hyper-complicated circuits, six Astropaths fulfill both roles. They have been sacrificed, you consider: killed as surely as if a knife of obsidian had been used to rip out their still beating hearts. And yet, they are still living, the moment of their death prolonged into torturous eternity by Magos Van Hex's monstrous skills, their very suffering a mockery of the corpse upon the throne as well as the fulfillment of her design.

You were not wrong, when you identified the mesh that connects the Astropaths to the crystal as circuitry, but you did not grasp the totality of what had been done to them.

There are ordinary circuits within the web that connects the Astropaths to the cogitator bank at the bottom of the crystal: metallic and crystalline wires, snaking through the air in thick bundles.

These do not make up the majority of the connections, however. That task is reserved for the astropath's nerves.

To other, lesser Tech Priests, this would create an insurmountable issue: humanities technology does, of course, commonly blend the organic with the technical, but this is a step above what most of your peers are capable of dealing with: a machine made up mostly of the organical, with all the strange quirks and interactions that stem from that. Van Hex apparently didn't see it as a necessity to even enable interfacing: something that speaks of supreme confidence if nothing goes wrong, which makes you classify it as unwarranted arrogance in this case.

Myges Talef sighs, and looks expectantly to you, when you discover how the machine is constructed.

This is fair enough. What you see before you is very much within your area of expertise.

It is, you have to admit, a little funny to have to remove some of the more technical components of the Diagnostic Homunculus to hook it up properly.

That is, admittedly, undercut a little when you have to shut it down so it doesn't perish from shock, something that should not be possible.

It takes you a little while to figure out what Van Hex has done, though when you do it becomes utterly obvious in hindsight. The Beacon operates on pain: impulses sent through the exposed nerves form the basic impulses that rule it, which should be utterly ineffective and pointless yet somehow, presumably through the vagaries of the warp, manages to work out.

[Roll: Eta Nu 9-35: Biological Engineering: 4d6. 5, 6, 2, 2. Success]

Still, the impulses follow the basic rules of biology, and so you spend the next few hours mapping them out, providing a system to translate them to Talef and to translate queries to more understandable language. The Infofector seems fascinated, though in the sort of way a rotting piece of carrion or an open fracture fascinates: he is gazing at a piece of work in his field of specialization built on principles utterly orthogonal to those he himself follows.
[Roll: Myges Talef: Cogitator Intrusion: 3d6. 3,2,3. Failure]
A design, it seems, that he cannot quite seem to wrap his head around.

Your subordinate works for most of a day, and you can see him getting frustrated as he does.

"This is impossible", he cants to you, eventually, shame clear in his voice. "It is not equivalent to any Cogitators I have ever seen. There's a pattern to it, but it's almost like…" He falls silent, canting concepts to you in binaric that are difficult to translate: order characterized by complete, entropic chaos, disorder so profound it qualifies as systematic, recurring patterns occurring in systems of complete randomness.

It is, by any reasonable standard, complete nonsense.

Unfortunately, you are dealing with an engine that is clearly more than a little entangled in the Empyrean.

"Six days", Talef says, grimacing, "at best, if I do nothing else and nothing goes wrong. I can do it, but it is by no means guaranteed."

You consider for a moment, then you sigh. "Well", you say, "we do have the time. Get on that, tell us if you need any aid, and we shall see what we can do otherwise."

Talef nods, clearly miserable, and you go to catch some rest.

Sometimes, the only thing that can be done is wait.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The woman is back, inside your dreams: her face still as utterly beautiful as it was before, keeping its serenity even in the face of your rejection.

She is not angry, you understand, on an instinctual level. She asked for something you were not willing to give up, and those very principles make you interesting, make you worth courting.

She smiles, then, revealing teeth just a smidge too sharp for the mouth they claim to rest in. She gestures to the vast collection of lore, behind herself. She reminds you that such a collection is a rare thing indeed, that to acquire the skill you are seeking would require centuries of study in a myriad of libraries, many demanding prices far in excess of those she is asking for. She grants you a glimpse, tantalizingly vague, of the knowledge she would grant you becoming useful in your very near future: images of a crystalline dome, a xeno of some form unknown to you held within it by silver chains.

Then, she spreads her claws, and offers you a choice: several prices that may be of different value to you while they are of the same value to her, all of which you are free to choose between.

[Price]
[] A small memory
-[] A Glimpse of the Emperor
Awe, Shame, and Disgust
[] Your First Kill
Terror, intermingled with triumph
[] Your Gene-Donor's Smile
Regret, Longing, and Hatred
[] Your Last Glimpse of Terra
Defeat, utterly and absolute
[] A Favor
Nothing, she hastens to add, too odious or demanding: nothing you have not done before, nothing against things you value. You may, she adds, even refuse to do it, though she of course reserves the right to withdraw the thing you bought if you do

[] A Garden
This one is…strange: a request to construct a self-sufficient eco-systemyou would consider as beautiful entirely in your mind, for her to then harvest for indeterminate purposes. This would largely take time and dedicated effort, but it is something you are well-qualified to do

[] Lesson for Lesson
In exchange for all of Xenobiology, she will take some of the knowledge you hold: nothing that cannot be remedied with a bit of brushing up on your it, and she will let you choose which skill you wish to exchange for it
-[]Write-in Skill

[] Refuse
This has all the hallmarks of one of the predatory pseudo-intelligences of the warp, and deals with those rarely work out well. Tempting as the offer is, as real as the visions of future need felt, you will not let yourself sink to that level.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The woman smiles, far less sharply, leaving you, you recognize, time to decide.

"Not too much time, though", she tells you, "for they are coming."

You do not have the time to ask who, but it turns out that that is not an issue. She shows you without you asking, and you rather wish she hadn't. You see…

Lightning crackling. Curling, flayed skin. Void-black eyes set within a pale face, golden piercings sunk deep into sallow skin. The blades of turned off lightning claw, turned off and scraping against each other. A promise, whispered in a voice used to speaking threats.

"We come for you", it says, and bloodless lips curl to reveal a smile of sharpened teeth.

Then fear rushes into your system, stronger and more potent then should be proportional.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

There is no higher biological form you have ever dissected that has not exhibited fear, in some form or another, even if that fear is not always congruent with the way baseline humans tend to conceptualize it. Fear, in its most basic form, is simply the drive to survive, and to take whatever means necessary to achieve that aim. Of course, biological processes are not evolved according to some sort of plan, and so the fear response of baseline humans is always constructive. Just as fear is one of the fundamental markers of successful lifes, modifying it to remove those inefficiencies is one of the first and fundamental needs of all those that wish to send such forms of life to combat.

The Astartes, for all the propagandistic claims of knowing no fear, absolutely do: it is merely the impulse to flee or freeze that has been removed from them, replaced by a heightened instinct to fight and the mental capacity and reflexes to do so quickly and effectively.

In your case, it means that if somebody hits you with an empathic psychic attack to induce a fear response, you can simply manually release the necessary counter-agents and shut down your body's physical response to the mental impulse.

Your heart rate still spikes to incredible heights before you manage to do so, of course, but such is life.

What you are left with, as your heart rate normalizes again, is a strange, almost alien realization: waiting six days for a mere potential result might be too long.

You need options.

It is, to your immense surprise, 8-Doxa who supplies one.

"Whatever's going on, it probably involves their brains", he says, gesturing at one of the Astropaths with a cybernetic implant of some sort. "We sink this thing into it, hook it up, and read out the brain directly. You look closely. He is holding a fairly simply Mind Interface Unit.

"If that goes wrong, you might disrupt the entire machine", you tell him, and he shrugs.

"You wanted options", he says, and you cannot really argue with that.

You have, of course, asked Ludmilla Kapriosa if flight would be feasible. The response was not encouraging. "The light we used to navigate blinked out", she tells you. "It's happened before. Takes the Navigator a good long time to reacquire the next of those things."

You are, you reflect, eternally cursed by circumstances to stick out commitments nobody should be forced to stick out.

You sigh, and then you make a decision.

[]Talef's Plan
Whoever these people are, it will take them more than six days to get here, even if they arrive at the edge of the system right now. Talef has time to decode the system, and he will manage: for all his flaws, he is really good at his job

[] 8-Doxa's Plan
It is risky, and if it goes wrong you are going to be left with the immediate fallout of a delicate warp engine blowing up in your face. If it does work, you will instead directly interface with an organic machine consisting of people that are being actively tortured to an unbelivable extent.

On the other hand, it will probably yield results

[] Another Plan
You will not wait for Talef, or commit to 8-Doxa's extremely risky proposition: instead, you will retrace your steps, and check if you have missed some other means of access. There is bound to be something, you figure, but of course if it was obvious you would have found it already, and finding it and exploiting might take more time then you are entirely comfortable with.