The Fabricator General looked at the orbital picture of Mars. Great stacks of smoke were visible from orbit. Which in fact, was incredibly good news. It meant that the planet was no longer glowing in space from all the fires and weapon signatures that the de-escalating conflict once made. Emotion as the barbarians on earth merely a few million kilometres away understood it, was not something that the Mechanicum went through. Fear was nonexistent to them. But self-preservation instinct - which in practical terms was more or less the same thing - ensured that sufficient threat to the life or at least prosperity of every Magos that kept the conflict going meant they would instantly back out of partisanship.

Years had passed now since the first shots were fired, and yet deaths were in the thousands on a daily basis. Of course, most of them were of more or less irrelevant populations. Combat servitors, a few lesser members of the tech-guard, some menials and industrial servitors in edge cases. But this didn’t denigrate a simple fact. Even this level conflict that could eventually be ignored once repairs were done was absolutely intolerable. The fact was that for Salkor, relative peace and order had been the main selling point of his reign. If said peace and order was unable to return then that would mean that he couldn’t deliver on a key part of why his occupancy of his office was accepted and slowly, encrypted lines on the noosphere would carry messages inquiring about who might replace him, and once some likely candidates were established they would begin to discuss [i]how[/i] they might replace him.

But though his efforts had gone far, they weren’t enough. Even without abundant weapons and munitions still the schismatic halves of the Electro-Priest orders were fighting on with what individuals they could influence, and their own ranks. It was like a gang-war in old terra at this point, and yet still disruptive. Worst of all, even if these fighters could also be made to stand down the hatred intensified by this war would be no less present and inflamed. If he didn’t manage to do something to put these disparate parties into some meaningful reconciliation or at the very least a truce they were genuine in an effort to honour then he would see a resumption of this conflict in a few hundred years. Worse yet, they will have gotten wise to his method of abridging this conflict and will have decentralized or better obscured their suppliers of armaments. 

A great difficulty to Salkor in ending this was that he didn’t actually care about the theological variance between the fulgurites and corpuscarii. As far as he was concerned it was meaningless, semantic, their positions tautologically equivalent. While it meant he was personally not dragged into their conflict it also meant he struggled to propose anything to end their conflict.

What could he really do though? Both sides simply demanded unconditional surrender to the other on the basis of acknowledging their own wrongness in the matter of truth of the Omnissiah’s will. What negotiations could be had when neither side was willing to consider even a microscopic bit of compromise? 

This was also hardly the first crisis he had to attend to either. For one, members of the Martian Parliament had to be replaced after it was revealed to the public they had partaken of the war, or in a few tragic cases they had died be it because they had partaken, or inversely they had refused to do so. Unsurprisingly, all of their assemblies were now done through vox links with not a single one attending in person. While functionally no difference was had apart from a few lost nanoseconds due to transmission mediums, it had shown staggering disunity on Mars if its leaders were willing to abandon such hallowed tradition.

Depending on how one looked at it, there was also a more pressing issue. Thousands of augurs had relayed quite worrisome data from Terra. Thousands of probes and listening posts throughout the solar system gave a relatively accurate representation of the geopolitical situation on Earth. It was now well known that the disparate polities of mankind’s homeworld were one by one being absorbed under one banner. This alone wouldn’t raise any mechanical eyebrows. After all, any past attempts to re-unite terra inevitably failed once more as industrial, infrastructural, and resource bottlenecks were hit that made the maintenance of their Empire impossible, and as they inevitably died there would be nothing holding their realm together. But this new regime was different. Their warriors were far more technically advanced than the rabble of the rest of Earth, but even more importantly this advancement was consistent and standardized rather than being some fluke of briefly unearthed archaeotech. 

They were also lead competently, their master clearly not in some raving lunacy or constant hedonistic and debauched consumption of mind altering substances. Shrouded in mystery, and at the same time known by all his subjects this self proclaimed Emperor could if left unchecked and given free reign to continue his progress make a serious threat to Mars.

The issue was that nobody could truly agree on what to do. Many Forges insisted that Earth simply be struck by the most potent weapons of the Martian arsenal. But the response to this was twofold. One, many believed this to be sacrilege given the amount of yet unfound archaeotech on Terra. Two, an almost defeatist position was held by some where it was believed that these Terrans had already managed to constitute a sufficiently advanced state that they would have erected means to defend from an attempt at extermination from the stars.

In some sense, the brief civil war was thus a test by the Omnissiah, a trial before the greater one that the Earthlings might pose. This very same trial bore reward now it was passed, for thousands of manufactorums across the red planet were already on a war footing, and great forces were already mobilized. While this state of affairs couldn’t continue forever and was thus partially wound down, it still ensured that Martian weapon stocks were full and forces beyond count. 

This was all of course a redundancy. The terrans didn’t have the fleet to properly invade Mars, any ships they managed to erect would be destroyed before they could even disgorge the invaders within. But, this militarization of the Machine Cult would serve as a deterrent against the people of this nascent Empire even attempting to so much as mildly inconvenience the Martian people.

Still, there was something of a premonition. Navigators and Astropaths alike spoke of a changing of eras, and the little part of flesh and blood that remained within him knew this too as an undeniable fact. The Fabricator General liked to quiet this inferior part of himself by saying it was due to merely a reaction to the war of the electro priests. Yet, the rational, the logical part knew that this was self-deception. The much younger Salkor would have appreciated the irony in the meat being more objective, more sensible than the machine. Now, he could only sense concern. 

He couldn’t tell why, but he knew this would not end well.