The stunned survivors were just starting to pick themselves up out of the ruins when Katiya's bolt pistol and Zeb's shotgun hewed them down. Katiya was expeditious with her shots, each round bursting the head of an enemy like a pulped fruit until there were no more targets. Blood mingled with ferocrete dust and the superstructure creaked somewhat alarmingly.

"We need to get moving," Katiya said, clambering up the rubble to reach the main control room beyond. The core of the station was a cylindrical shaft containing the broadcast equipment. The mechanisims themselves were arcane, tied with seals of the Mechanicus and incensed by swinging burners. Three levels of catwalk ringed the central transmission spire, one sunk into the ground and one above them. The commissar and her aide stood on the central catwalk.

"Emperors teeth," Katiya growled as she beheld the formerly sanctified chamber. The transmission spire had been daubed with strange runes that made her eyes ache. Small pieces of polished metal and pieces of animal bone and feathers were tied in some kind of fetishes which hung from seemingly random pieces of equipment. On the bottom level an astropath was plugged into the array, the flesh around his input plugs black with infection that should have long since killed him. Whatever was going on here, it was clearly more than a simple broadcast station.

"Approach the conduit only by nines," a mechanical voice declared. Katiya's head whipped around to see a servo skull floating towards her. Well a servo skull of a sort. Rather than the sanctified units she had seen countless times in the past this one still had meat on it. THe flesh was rotting but had been articulated somehow by mechanisms beneath the ruined black skin. As it spoke the mechanisms worked in an eerie counterfeit of human musculature. The effect was like watching a spider wearing a deathmask attempting to pretend to be a human.

"Intruders to be destroyed, blood to be shed, only by nines," the thing continued in its synthesized voice, droplets of oil dripping from a mouth that was held open by a metal grate.

"The Emperor Protects," Katiya hissed, and then whipped her power sword out in a glittering arc that bisected the head. It fell away in a shower of sparks, giving a brief and grizzly view of intermingled machinery and human brain matter. The spire exploded into action, pistons pumping and steam jetting in all directions. Metal screamed on metal and the whole structure seemed to shake. Dozens of the psuedo-servoskulls burst from recesses and passages in the wall, gibbering insanely. The only common and understandable phrase seeming to be 'only by nines.' They rushed the intruders, some spitting las bolts from their eye sockets, others wielding short cutting torches or blades, other still chomping mechanically with decayed teeth of old bone or rusted metal.