Every light in the Cathedral has gone dark.
Menials scrabble through the dark, hand over hand as they pick their way through metal and rust. They listen for the rumbling sounds of tracked servitors making their way blindly down the corridors, mechanical arms heavy with crates and boxes. Around the great central awning of Central Receiving Station boxes continue to be stacked on trains too overburdened to move even if the Motive Force had allowed them to do so. Amidst the twisting network of rail tracks runs another twisting network of pipes, groaning with the weight of unpumped prometheum and its ten thousand different refined products. Here and there amidst the grand dark come the weak flashes of personal flashlights - on and off quickly, then gone again, just enough time to get your bearings. Nobody knows when recharge will be available and so every drop of electricity is hoarded.
The Noosphere continues to buzz. Invisible, inaudible, but crackling against your skin like a living thing. It cannot be accessed - every terminal or transmitter which might receive or project it into the temporal world is offline - but even in the cold dark of a dead machine it hums close enough to touch. Now and then you can feel it run through your hair with electrical fingertips, feel it slither through your weaponry like a snake into a burrow, feel it ache against your eyes until the muscles spasm, impossible knowledge attempting to inflict itself on those unprepared to receive it.
Here in the grave you lie, Protomaga Secunda Toros. You have learned much already. First and foremost, you have learned that you did indeed die. You remember the theory, flash-sculpted into your mind, that your death and resurrection would be acknowledged by the Machine as a continuation of a single being and you would arise with full control of the Isohedron and its systems. The Machine [glory glory to it], unfortunately, has disagreed. You are a discrete entity, similar to but not the same as Magos Toros. This is not your rebirth but your birth, here amidst this vat of slime and glass.
It would have been sufficient to learn this. Sadly, that is not all that death has to teach you. Its second lesson is one of hubris: Your predecessor thought an independent power generator on an isolated circuit would be sufficient to ensure you were decanted from your cloning vat upon awakening. The Isohedron, again, disagreed. When it shut down it dragged down your laboratory despite your preparations, as though to rebuke you for your guesswork. Now you are trapped here in the slime, kept alive with a rebreather, organic fingers scrabbling against perfectly smooth glass. You have learned for next time to include a bolt pistol inside the vat so that you might have an easier egress.
A hell. You might well simply starve to death here. The nutrient slime that has sustained your generation will intoxicate as you wait for hours in the dark, in this hidden sanctum that nobody knows or can rescue you from. The Machine's cruelty when it comes to those who have underestimated it can be infinite, and now you writhe in the dark, paying the price for cheating death.
And then, a red light in the dark. A small thing. A dangerous thing. It traces its line gently across the room, scanning notebooks and tracing up and down cloning tanks. It stops over Toros Tertius, illuminating her desperate face in the dimmest of light.
Then it fires. Crack -SMASH-BLAM. A bolt round. It shatters the tank, plunges through the nutrient-gel, and blows out the brains of your sister-clone. Green slime, stained red, oozes from the broken vat.
You cannot see the shape of your twice-killer. The dim light of its laser sight does not reflect against its sleek, dark armour. The only clue you can discern is that, given the height of the gun from the ground, it is a giant. The stature of an Astartes, given how high it is as it raises its weapon and - BLAM BLAM. It guns down Toros Quadranis. Slime and blood washes thick across the floor, muffling the metallic tread of the assassin's footsteps. That was the last of your sisters. You are next. An hour ago you would have considered a quick death to be a mercy. Now, with your unaugmented human adrenal system screaming terror into your spine, it seems like anything but.
Sister Kota - you saw it in the dim light of its muzzle flash. The terrible mass of the Beast. It hunches in the dark like a nightmare. You see the dull gunmetal gleam of a bolter muzzle. You see smooth, black-painted ceramite panels that perversely echo your own powered armour. If you were to have seen a pict of this shape in daylight you might have thought it to be a crude image of one of the Emperor's Angels of Death. Here in the dark and wet, watching the way it moves, your heart tells you that this is nothing of His.
Your armour agrees. The Noosphere lashes through it, the powered systems whirring to full combat potential. You can feel the muscular microfibers twitch the sound of a hymn against your skin, you can feel the silenced weight of the cathedral drumming against your power pack, you hear a subtle hiss as your bolter readies itself to fire.
The Beast stops in front of the final tank. It is time to finish this hunt.
RPM
Fenn
Phoe
Tatterdemalion
Mustang1907
Balmas