Vox Vitae: Warhammer AI quest

The wind howled beyond the bunker, rattling at its metal door rippling its crude camouflage nets. It was not, to put is lightly a high-tech solution to dealing with aerial surveillance but the resistance cell had long since learned that their enemy's lack of discipline extended far beyond the realms of direct confrontation. The more pious among them would claim that this was a sign of the weakness of the Arch-Enemy as was said in the scriptures of distant Tera, while the more secularly inclined would put it down to these being pirates with a space ship, though that perspective was harder and harder to sustain in the wake of the increasing use of warp-craft on Denva. Not for nothing did suicide pills come to be as common lasguns in their ranks. As several of their sister organizations in the mountains of Nyvaros were destroyed by infiltration and and what the invaders euphemistically called inspiration the group had come to depend more and more on the ancient and somewhat eccentric engineer who ran the matter printers and portable laser lathes which kept their equipment in working order.

Omega-15 was a tech priest and not just any tech priest, those with a love of cybernetics and the odd prayer sent the Omnissiah's way from force of habit, one of the old guard who had been around more than a century before Unification, prefering to speak binaric over Gothic whenever he could get away with it, insisting upon Rites of Forgiveness whenever he was part of a sabotage effort on enemy infrastructure and generally about as easy to get to know as a steel porcupine. That he was a steel porcupine with a built in plasma gun had earned him a place at the start, but they had come to rely on his (equally artificial) gut when it came to what could and could not be salvaged and when someone was too far gone to save, to trust.

He too had stopped calling what needed to be done 'the Emperor's Peace' once one of the younger recruits had confronted him on it. Omega-15 was not a zealot, but he did believe and indeed on any world of the Imperium of Man he too would have been called a heretic. Perhaps the last expert on the theology of the Machine Cult in the Denva system and a member in good standing of the Cogitare Exploratorum he had once had ambitions of joining the Spark of the Ancients on her journey to the stars, but he had not scored high enough on the test for entry. Where others might have taken that as a sign to turn away from his quiet reverence of 'Ancient Vita', as he called her on the rare occasions the subject came up, he had simply redoubled his efforts to live according to the principles she had laid out.

For Omega 15 had a secret: he had encountered the Ancient One in her tech priest persona shortly before the death of Magos Dominus Thalya, he had been one of those to recieve weapons from her hands. And in that brief encounter he had felt the diamond-hard noospheric presence of her regard, so unlike any other tech priest's, and it had marked him so much that he had never stopped wondering at at how and why, worrying at it like a dog with a bone. The accepted answer, the simple answer, the one Ancient Vita herself had given was that she was piloting a robotic puppet. After all did she not provide the machines to achieve unity with the holy machine unlike anything seen in the annals of imperial history, beyond even the vaults of holy Mars? Such was the wisdom of the ancients.

Nonsense, actual zero-value sense, childish nonsense. It was basic history that the path to union with the Machine began on Mars during the Age of Strife, the Ancients did not make use of large scale cybernetics, they did not yet decry the weakness of the flesh and yet here it was, the cornerstone of Denvan technology, hidden in plain sight: Organic-Machine-Control. Why would an Explorer of that ancient age have it?

Suspicion had grown, though if it had not been for his years in research and development perhaps it would never have borne fruit. The old tech priest knew from personal experience how hard it was to innovate, even to iterate on a design given all the wealth of knowledge now in Denvan databanks and yet she did it so effortlessly.

How?

"Attention all Resistance Personnel," the message blared across priority channels. "At 15:00 DST a warp wake was detected at the edge of the system, communications using secure signals and astronomic observations have confirmed it is the Spark of the Ancients. An attack upon the invader flagship is imminent. If you can do anything to distract the bastards now's the time." The voice shifted to a slightly less formal manner. "Don't do anything too crazy though, Denva is going to need living soldiers after today, not dead heroes."

In a whir of servo-motors Omega-15 rose from his seat and began his pre-battle diagnostics. The Angel of the Omnissiah had returned, he could do no other than to aid her to his maximum potential.

OOC: I left it intentionally vague if this guy guessed AI or just Awakened Machine Spirit.