Unlike the vestibule chamber, this temple was empty of technicians, for only a select few had access to this portion of the facility. A quartet of battle servitors turned to face him, their terrible weapons of destruction whirring as they acquired him as a target. Quad-barrelled rotary cannons, conversion beamers and energy claws powered up with lethal speed.
'Identify!' demanded the nearest servitor, its voice human, yet devoid of emotion and life.
'Adept Third Class Pallas Ravachol,' he said as visual and aural recognition protocols scanned his voice, mass, features and bio-metric readings before deciding that he was an authorised presence and the weapons returned to their idle positions.
He knew he had no reason to be afraid of these battle servitors, since he himself had designed their autonomic defence routines, but he'd had to suppress a shudder as he stared into the barrels of their weapons.
Had even one protocol failed, he would now be a pile of shredded meat, bone and blood.
Ravachol made his way past the battle servitors, patting the gently spinning barrel of the rotary cannon as he made his way towards the Kaban machine, feeling the familiar mix of illicit excitement and trepidation as he drew near.
It sat immobile at the far end of the chamber, its tracked drive systems not yet fully integrated with it's armoured spherical body. The machine was six metres in width and ten high, though the high-sided pauldrons that protected its vulnerable arm joints added another metre. Its arms sat at rest, one ending in a plethora of projectile weapons, while the other bore a fearsome energy claw and saw-blade combination that could rip through the armoured bulkhead of a starship.
A network of scaffolding surrounded it and he could see that Adept Laanu's weapons teams had been busy over the last few days, installing a myriad of deadly looking plasma and laser weapons on flexible, metallic tentacles. The machine's sensory apparatus lay within a trio of convex blisters on its front, a dim orange glow indicating that the machine was in its dormant state.
It's sleeping, thought Ravachol, unsure if he was amused or disturbed by the notion.
Even as he guiltily quashed the thought, the dim glow on the sensory blisters grew brighter and the machine said, 'Hello, Pallas. It is pleasant to see you again.'
'And you, Kaban,' said Ravachol. 'How do you feel?'
HOW DO YOU feel?
Less than a month ago, he would have been ashamed to ask such a question. Such things were as alien on Mars as, well, aliens themselves, but his dealings with the Kaban machine over the last four weeks had been unusual to say the least and had turned his notion of what he thought he knew about the nature of machines on its head.
It had been a routine diurnal shift, and he had been updating the doctrinal wetware of the battle servitors who stood guard over the Kaban machine when it had first spoken to him.
At first he had been amused by the machine's locution, admiring the thoroughness of the adept who had configured its response mechanisms. But as time went on, Ravachol began realise that the Kaban machine was not simply choosing its words from a pre-selected list of set responses, but was replying specifically to his questions. He had devised ever more complex questions and topics of conversation to ensure that he was not simply triggering pre-existing phrases or responses, but as the days turned into weeks it soon became clear to Ravachol that he was in fact conversing with a sentient machine... an artificial intelligence.
The idea of a sentient artificial construct was both fascinating and terrifying, for part of the compact that had been sealed between the Mechanicum of Mars and the Emperor was that such researches were forbidden.
The more he conversed with the machine, the more convinced he became that he was seeing something unique in the history of the Mechanicum, but whether it was something that had come into being through human artifice or some unknown interaction of circuitry and electrons within the machine's artificial brain, he could not tell.
As much as he had enjoyed his conversations with the Kaban machine, he was not so naive to believe that he could keep such an important discovery to himself and had resolved to take his findings to his superior, Adept Lukas Chrom.
Ravachol had despatched his request for an audience and had settled back into his normal routine, expecting his petition to be processed within a few months, but within a week he was astounded to find that his request had been granted.
He remembered the sense of trepidation and fear as he had approached the inner temple sanctums of the Adept Chrom along one of the many hermetically sealed thoroughfares that criss-crossed the surface of Mars and linked the colossal forge cities with one another.
Such monolithic structures covered virtually the entirety of the blasted red surface of Mars, grim iron temples wreathed in smoke and fire and pounding with the relentless beat of industry. Adept Chrom's forge temple was no exception; its mighty bastions skinned in thick plates of burnished iron and surrounded by hundreds of cooling towers that belched clouds of noxious fumes through the skin of the domes and into the sulphurous skies.
A constant hammer of machines echoed from the hundreds of forges within, and as Ravachol walked along the mighty processional that led towards entrance atop the Thousand Steps of Excellence, steel statues of ancient adepts and their creations glared down upon him.
Adept Ulterimus stared out over the Hollow Mountains and his Sigma-Phi Desolator Engine met his gaze from the opposite side of the steel surfaced roadway. Thousands of pilgrims, adepts, servitors and functionaries thronged the roadway, each on some errand for their masters and Ravachol felt proud to be part of such a mighty organisation as the Mechanicum.
His sandaled feet carried him swiftly along the road, avoiding ponderous stilt walkers, rumbling Praetorians and long tankers carrying vat-grown protein pastes to be pumped into the innumerable nutrient dispensers that fed the populace of Mars.
After the exhausting climb of the Thousand Steps, he had been ushered quickly from one functionary to another, passing through dozens of skull-cog doors and along a bewildering array of hallways where all manner of bizarre and obscure machines pulsed with mechanical life. The interior of Chrom's temple was like nothing Ravachol had ever seen before, a mighty cathedral dedicated to the glorification of the holy Machine God, where the light of science and reason illuminated the ultimate ideal of mechanical perfection.
Ushered into the Master Adept's chambers, a mighty fane of steel and bronze that was dominated by the warlike form of a Reaver battle titan standing dormant at its far end, Ravachol found himself before the Martian lord who directed his fate.
Adept Lukas Chrom loomed above him, the tech-priest's wide-shouldered frame swathed in a deep crimson robe that did little to disguise the many augmentations he had been blessed with. Ribbed pipes and cables looped around his limbs and linked into a hissing power pack that rose like a set of wings at his back. A dozen servo skulls flew in an infinity pattern above his head, which, though pooled in shadow beneath a deep hood, Ravachol could see was fashioned in the form of a grinning iron skull. Wires trailed from the jaws and a pulsing red light filled both eye sockets.
'Adept Chrom,' began Ravachol, pulling out a data slate and reams of printouts. 'Firstly, may I say what an honour—'
'You have petitioned me in regards to the Kaban project,' interrupted the adept, dispensing with preamble altogether.
His voice was harsh and artificially generated, though the hissing of his power pack seemed as though it mimicked heavy, rasping breaths.
'Ah, yes,' said Ravachol, momentarily flustered.
'Then speak. There is much that occupies my time and I have little enough of it to spare.'