The alarms had created a painful choir; Only one of them was operating at max efficiency, with damage and neglect causing the rest of them to wheeze and sputter at varying, off key degrees that would grind against the human desire for harmony, even for something that was intentionally meant to be loud and annoying so that it couldn’t be ignored. 

Yet Rik was tuning it out all the same. The warp drive in front of him required his full attention after all and such minor distractions as the alarm system weren’t worth his time at the moment.

The plan was that the warp drive needed to be turned off so that it couldn’t trigger a warp jump in the larger space hulk. Ideally, all of the warp drives (or their equivalent) would be disabled before a random jump was triggered, but as long as a critical mass were offline then theoretically, the hulk wouldn’t be able to open the hole in reality of the scale required to move the hulk and thus it wouldn’t be going anywhere.

Not to say that having those warp drives try to do so anyway wouldn’t cause complications and technical issues, but that was a problem for the future.

The warp drive he was trying to beseech was his primary concern and it was proving to be the hardest challenge he had ever faced in his life. Much like how the warp had horrifically twisted the rest of the vessel to the point that its origins were impossible to tell, the warp drive was stripped bare of any signs of what its original template might have been. The degradation of reality that seemed to linger at the corner of the visual spectrum had taken its toil on the advanced piece of sacred technology, with the unnatural blood that rained from the walls and ceiling further getting into its inner workings and causing untold harm. 

The machine spirit itself was… was…

Rik was honestly at a loss for words about what the state the machine spirit was in. The closest he could get would be that it was like trying to interact with a machine spirit that had somehow endured the brutal tortures of the orks for [i]centuries[/i] and yet somehow was still able to mindlessly perform its original function, despite the countless defilements, broken pieces and unsanctioned modifications made to it but…

Truthfully, that didn’t truly capture the extent of the horror. Parts of its broken internals had been replaced by fleshy growths that [i]were actively drinking the blood dripping into it[/i] and by all accounts it was somehow still able to perform its function, despite all logic and reason saying that it was impossible. 

The machine spirit itself was… difficult to understand. It spoke with many different voices, all of them trying to speak over the others, each talking in a tongue that Rik didn’t know… but there was an [i]emotional[/i] undertone to each one that was always either manically overjoyed or so deep in the pit of despair that Rik was pretty sure if anyone else was trying what he was doing, they would have killed themselves by now.

There was a part of Rik that wanted to save this drive. To gleam the knowledge of how to heal such deep damage and twisted corruption that it’s time in the warp had caused. The quest for knowledge demanded as such but Rik isolated those feelings in their vaults. The mission required him to be objective and treat this as the triage situation that it was. 

With great difficulty, he managed to isolate and shut down some of its subsystems. Reactivate some of its long eroded safety features. With blood dripping from his eyes, he disconnected from the machine and looked towards those who had been prepping explosives to consign this poor, twisted echo of a sacred machine to wherever machine spirits went once they were truly destroyed. Rik honestly suspected that whatever the outcome, it had to be better than its current state. “The warp drive is as prepared for destruction as it can be. Once the charges are ready, get clear and perform the rite of detonation.”

Taking a moment to wipe away the blood on his face, Rik considered saying something: A sentimental urge to honour an ancient machine that, while it might not be sanctified anymore, deserved some respect all the same. When the pings of readiness appeared from the demolition team, he settled for “May this ancient wonder find the peace in destruction that existence denied it.”