For a vessel that had haunted the stars since the ‘Great Crusade’ and subsequent ‘Horus Heresy’, the ‘Venomous Kiss’ had rejected the sleek trappings of its sister vessels from its first voyage into the void. The strike cruiser boasted no grand cathedrals and no burnished brass trim or Imperial flair had ever adorned its battlements. It was a brutal, indomitable thing that embraced callous utility above aesthetics, yet bore its scars with a macabre zeal; ancient plasma burns rippled across the hull in mycelial sprays, painting spiderwebs of ebony lightning bolts across a midnight blue canvas. Upon the Kiss’s bow, a crimson-winged skull leered into the emptiness.
***
Jagad's voice was a reverberating baritone against the tinny acoustics of the operating room as he began in robotic discourse, "Query: Why does Adeptus Mechanicum send a scout to the eastern sub-sector of Imperial space? Approaching Cicatrix Maledictum, edge of The Eye. Your vessel was ill equipped for warp travel," a pause, "Geller fields damaged by light voidcraft fire. Assumption: Aeldari Corsairs?"
The Warpsmith seemed to be analyzing the captured imperial craft’s schematics, deciphering systems diagnostics and putting together a post operation incident report all at once as he spoke; Jagad hated assumptions, and cursed the scrap of humanity he still retained for even making such a leap in logic without exact evidence. He only resumed when the research supported his initial claim, "Yes, damage sustained by Aeldari Corsairs. Final Query: Why you?”
There was no response, only the thunderous impact of ceramite boots against sterile decking as Jagad continued to circle the chain-suspended victim. The Warpsmith's panoply was bereft of grace — cumbrous artificer armor decorated with a cluster of clattering servo skulls which hung front his hip, each swinging limply upon brass chains — yet he moved with the agility of a stalking crag cougar.
“No matter, your prosthetics reek of Martian dogma, that is what matters." Jagad had excised himself of most petty emotions long ago — Much of the Night Lord's existence was a never ending quest to maximize efficiency and hedge probabilities; grudges were trivial — yet he'd managed to foster an opinion of the Martian Machine Cult that mirrored resentment as the centuries rolled into Millenia. They were a logical fallacy. Machine-men blinded by 'faith’ as if that had ever been enough.
"Conviction is fleeting. Flesh and steel are malleable…Role: Reclaimator, Iteration: GP-78V5, Low Gothic Designation: Galia Primus."
The captive, so recently inducted into the Adeptus Mechanicum that she could still be considered a woman, gritted her remaining teeth against the tungsten edge of a lower, augmented jaw; an impossible attempt at quelling the all-too-human quiver elicited by Jagad's unnervingly careful caress.
'Detestable biology', Galia cursed inwardly. The air reeked of sulfur, foul smelling lubricants and the iron-rich twang of blood. How she damned herself for not doing away with such crude olfactory organs. What remained of her ceremonial scarlet vestments did little to hide a trembling, fleshly bosom, emphasized by the rattling of adamantium shackles.
Despite this, the tech-priestess responded with surprising vigor, "The Omnissiah's light cannot be extinguished, blasphemer. It will find you, and his judgement shall turn your components to slag. I have been sanctified, made incorruptible.”
Galia could’ve been considered beautiful, perhaps she still was to the fanatics of the Iron Hands if such emotions dared stir in men of metal. Omnissiah only knew how long she’d been artificially lulled into a dreamless coma, pacified by some manner of heretical technomancy. Logic and protocol had dictated Galia purge both organic and implanted memory stores of sensitive data. It was a self-lobotomizing suicide, essentially, but even that simple function had been rendered impossible by the unknown machinations of her captor.
A dull, throbbing discomfort had spread through the entirety of her flesh to the twitching servo-joints of cybernetic limbs; ash blonde hair, wet with sweat and grease, fell in dirty mop upon her shoulders.
Jagad chuckled, an empty, metallic chortle amplified by his helmet's vox. “Humor: Typical zealot. You are worth more than the sum of your components.”
Cogitators whirred within Jagad’s cybernetic skull and the sensation resembled a pleasant itch. Galia’s unaltered physiology had begun to ripen with hormonal fear-stench — even a freshly inducted astartes could smell it — and for all his condemnations of Night Lord gene-brethren, Jagad could not deny his own refined terror-palate; he was a son of Nostramo, after all. "Noncompliance noted.”
As Jagad finished, an undulating tendril of necrodermis worked its way along the many interface nodes that dotted the priestess’ exposed spine, stopping to probe and ‘sniff’ at each clicking vertebrae with hound-like focus. It had the mouth of a mechanical lamprey greedily searching for a latch.
An array of both binary and high gothic error runes flashed across Galia’s cyan-lit eye lens at the sudden violation; the suckling mechatendril had found its access-point. With a slight ratcheting sound, the tendril buckled into the socket and slid itself home, craving both knowledge and suffering. The priestess wailed with electrical sparks, only to fall silent as the digital release of her voice-chords failed to overcome the ravaging intrusion of warp-infused taint.
For all his sterility, Jagad was host to numerous techoviruses refashioned from the forbidden artificial intelligences of ‘Long Night’; ‘borrowed’ from the heretics of the Dark Mechanicum, more or less.
Galia felt whole again in the worst possible sense. The once tepid air now seemed as sharp as glacial ice and twice as cold. There was no dampening the sheer sensation that inflamed every cybernetic inch, no pitiful moans of agony that would have allowed a brittle conscience to rest a little easier. No screaming, begging or pleading. No sequestering her consciousness to the strength of steel; for the first time in decades, Galia felt doubt.
He had not stripped her of mechadendrites — pathetic metal-manipulators compared to the Warpmsith's warp-infused vipers — which hung limply from their own shackles. Even deactivated, Galia's additional appendages howled in silent suffering as the technovirus ravaged her from toes to tendrils; another blast of processor-fraying sensation exploded from inside her skull before being relayed in a closed loop of torment.
Such a betrayal was impossible to a servant of the Omnissiah. Galia's enhancements had been oiled and thrice-blessed in holy balms, firewalls reinforced with binary proverbs, only to be stripped away in a few excruciating instants. Perspiration mingled with tarry grease on her pale skin, falling in a constant pitter patter onto the once sleek flooring; there was merely a mechanical panting and the slight squeaking of overstressed joints as conviction met corruption.
“I will…”
“Interruption: Do nothing,” The monotonous thud of armored footfall ceased, “Neither protest or screaming is discouraged, but the latter is preferred. Listen closely."
Galia's head drooped like a crestfallen bird, expecting the true torment to finally commence. What she didn’t anticipate was the subtle lift of her chin and to finally meet eyes with the lumbering Night Lord. His helm's faceplate was was a skeletal sneer, fashioned from what could only be imagined as the bleached skull of some xenos abomination; from its hollow sockets, ruby lens flickered with an intelligence that rivaled any magos of the Cult Mechanicum; vermillion, bat-like wings jutted from either side of the helmet and framed the warrior’s cruel visage with clannish pride. The sight was almost stirring.
"Intention: Galia Primus, serial: 78V5, it is fortuitous that my vessel intercepted you in the unfeeling darkness; my brothers would not have seen your value. Warning: No, they would have agonized every morsel of your pungent flesh and salvaged the rest for servitor components. You have application to me, Galia. Assertion: I have seen it. Every memory worth keeping since the day of your birth has been analyzed, every emotion catalogued, every dream dissected. Designation: Reclaimator. Scrap collector. Deluded prospector. False priestess. Rat. That is your current existence. Current Priority: Expendable.”
Galia rejected the Warpsmith’s barbed tongue. Even as a lowly priestess of the Cult Mechanicum, her will was iron. Weakness had been excised — body, spirit and mind — made strong with devotion and steel, yet…The pain had undergone a metamorphosis into something more…Delerium? Madness? That would’ve been a comforting lie of her own making. The heretic had picked the tech-priestess apart without twisting a single screw; he told no lies. Her heart beat with shame and the long forgotten pangs of heartache. No. No, no, no. Such things were impossible for the initiated. She had ascended…She had ascended to…More lies.
“The emotion within you festers like a diseased sore — intoxicating terror — but this is not weakness. It is merely untapped energy. Truth: Fear is a potent motivator. Fear of death. Of failure. I offer you a place aboard this vessel, as my apprentice, on the quest for humanity’s true ascension. Shedding the chains of dogma should not frighten you, Galia Primus.”
Jagad paused as if processing; the grating monotony of his tone taking on a cool collectedness uncharacteristic of his warp-maddened kith. Then he spoke, “I should.”