39: Chapter 39 A Lament for Reason

The machine spirits of the Titans would favor it.

Those colossal god-machines, those war machines that required hundreds of Servitors to remain operational, their machine spirits would fly toward Icarus like moths to a flame.

The machine spirits of the warships would favor it.

Those ancient souls that had sailed the void for millennia, those silent witnesses who had seen the rise and fall of the Empire, they would choose Icarus over the priests who only knew how to pray and apply oils.

Even—he thought of a more terrifying image—

Would the weapons and power armor of the Custodians and Astartes, those creations born in an age when human reason still remained, also choose to favor Icarus and refuse to be used by their masters?

Because those weapons and power armor were produced by the Emperor in the 30K era.

In that era, humanity was still pursuing reason, still believing in science, and still using logic and empirical evidence to understand the world.

The machine spirits knew that the Emperor loved humanity, that the Emperor championed the Imperial Truth, not this current—this—

He could not find the right word.

"Superstition"? No, that word was too heavy.

"Ritual"? No, that word was too light.

He could only think of one description: current humanity had turned what they once understood into faith, and turned the technology they once mastered into miracles.

And Icarus was perhaps an existence left over from the Dark Age of Technology, a perfect STC Template.

It represented the Imperial Truth—at least that was what Helmut believed.

It did not pray, did not sacrifice, and did not hold any rituals.

It was merely calculating, building, and solving problems using the purest logic.

Helmut sat back down, his fingers tapping new commands onto the console.

The Warp storm began to rapidly subside after the Orks departed.

Helmut watched the data on the monitor; the once-raging Warp energies were calming down, like a beast lying back down after losing its prey.

The noise in the communication channels was decreasing, and the Astropaths were reporting intermittently that contact might be restored in the near future.

He did not know when the remaining Astropaths of the Astropathic Choir would be able to re-establish contact with the Empire.

But he also knew that he could not wait.

He had prepared a physical messenger ship.

This ship had no machine spirit, or rather, Helmut had deliberately not installed any machine spirit that could be detected.

It was just a ship, a purely mechanical ship that would not emit any psychic fluctuations.

He loaded all the data regarding Icarus into a memory drive—scan results, combat logs, industrial analysis, and his own conclusion: Icarus was highly likely to be a perfect ancient STC Template.

He handed the memory drive to a Servitor and then ordered the ship to set sail.

Physical messenger ships were the most reliable method of secure communication in the universe, and also the most common method used by the Adeptus Mechanicus.

There was no risk of Warp communication being intercepted, and no possibility of Astropaths being corrupted.

There was only one ship, sailing silently through the void, bringing the truth to those who needed to know.

His teacher, Belisarius Cawl; only his teacher could help him now.

Only he could block the greed of Mars and the desires of the High Lords.

Just as he was about to issue the final departure command—

All the display screens in the control room flickered simultaneously.

Then he saw them.

Twenty figures.

They were clad in black power armor, decorated with patterns of bone and flame.

Eerie fluorescence permeated their bodies, and ghostly halos danced around their feet, like compressed nebulae or solidified flames.

They were silent.

No speaking, no communication, not even any exchange of glances.

They simply marched in unison, walking toward the physical messenger ship.

Helmut's breathing stopped—if his mechanically modified lungs could even "breathe."

He watched those figures pass through the ship's armor as if passing through a doorway, as if that layer of adamantium hull did not exist at all.

They entered the ship and disappeared behind the metal bulkheads.

Then, the physical messenger ship moved.

It had not received his authorization.

There was no Servitor operation.

There was no warning.

It began to act on its own.

The ship's engines lit up with a radiance Helmut had never seen before—not the blue-white flame of plasma thrusters, but a pure, deep gold, as if sunlight had been compressed into a solid form.

Then, it tore open the shroud of the Warp and plunged directly into it, beginning its voyage.

The shroud closed.

The world returned to normal.

As if nothing had happened.

Helmut's mechanical particle engine nearly exploded.

His modified mechanical body began to leak machine oil due to over-revving; viscous liquid seeped from his joints and dripped onto the floor.

He had spent his whole life praying to the Omnissiah.

This was the first time he had seen the Omnissiah work in person.

"Twenty..." he muttered, his voice trembling with a tremor that an Archmagos of the Adeptus Mechanicus should not have. "Twenty Legion of the Damned warriors..."

He had counted. Twenty.

Corresponding to the twenty Primarchs?

Or corresponding to the twenty original Legions?

Helmut felt his logic core overheating.

The legends about the Legion of the Damned surged through his mind—they were the manifestation of the Emperor's will, the vengeful souls of the Space Marines who had died during the Horus Heresy, the wrath projected by the Emperor from the Golden Throne.

They only appeared when the Empire needed them most.

They only answered the summons of the Emperor himself.

And now, they had come to escort the messenger ship.

Helmut no longer doubted.

He truly began to believe—that the weapons and power armor of the Custodians and Astartes would refuse to be used by their masters against Icarus.

These ghostly warriors were the Emperor's will.

To some extent, ever since the Emperor was injured during the Horus Heresy and sat upon the Golden Throne, their relationship with the Emperor was even closer than that of the Custodians.

The Custodians were the guardians of the Emperor's physical body.

While the Legion of the Damned were the messengers of the Emperor's soul.

What did their appearance mean?

Helmut's brain was operating at high speed, with every logic circuit sounding an alarm.

Those weapons and power armor born in the era when the Emperor promoted the Imperial Truth—the Guardian Spears of the Custodians, the Bolters of the Astartes, the machine spirits of the Emperor-class Titans—might, in the future, stand on the side recognized by the Emperor.

The ancient machine spirits of the Empire had never sworn allegiance to any single user.

They swore allegiance to the Omnissiah, to the Emperor.

And now, the will of the Omnissiah seemed to have made a choice.

He—or it, or He—had chosen Icarus.

Helmut's mechanical body slowly and clumsily crawled out of the main control room; his mechanical joints creaked and groaned due to the loss of too much lubricant, and every sound of metal friction seemed to mock him.

But he felt a sense of unprecedented calm, a relief that someone had his back.

He remembered a scene he had seen during the war—the lower-class people of the Hive City began to migrate, gathering from the lower and middle levels of the Hive City toward the periphery of Icarus's industrial city.

There, there were plentiful supplies of protein bars, clean water, and living space where they did not need to suffocate in the dark.

Perhaps, before long, people would be able to live under the sunlight.

Icarus's large mining machines not only extracted the planet's own mineral deposits but also absorbed toxic waste gases from the air, breaking them down into atoms through negative-entropy furnaces, and finally manufacturing them into tools, production modules, and buildings via recombination fabrication platforms.

A perfect cycle.

A cycle that did not require prayer.

A cycle that relied only on reason.

Helmut began to consider a new question—perhaps he should perform an awakening ritual for Icarus's buildings?

If these buildings could be awakened, perhaps the Ecclesiarchy and the Adeptus Mechanicus would never be able to pin the label of "heretic" on Icarus again?

This thought existed for only an instant before he rejected it himself.

There were too many buildings, they appeared too quickly, and the efficiency of soul awakening was too low.

And Cawl might also be disappointed.

Because having a soul meant corruption by the Warp.

And Cawl was an extreme pragmatist—the most dangerous thing in the galaxy right now was never the wars raging across the galaxy—against the Orks, against the Warp daemons, against the Necron dynasties.

The corruption of the Warp was humanity's greatest enemy.

If the Warp did not exist, humanity would be able to spread knowledge and thought without limit, and even return to the Golden Age.

From Icarus's performance, he could sense how powerful humanity was during the Golden Age.

And he—Helmut, an Archmagos of the Adeptus Mechanicus, a student of Cawl—could only glean a tiny bit of the wisdom it scattered.

He stood up and walked toward the window of the control room.

Through the thick radiation-proof glass, he could see the silhouette of Icarus's industrial city in the distance.

Those buildings shone with a metallic luster in the sunlight; there were no Gothic spires, no intricate decorations, only the purest, most rational geometric shapes.

On the periphery of those buildings, he saw crowds of people.

The driven slave laborers, the oppressed civilians, crowds that had gathered spontaneously toward the Icarus industrial city.

They walked in the sunlight, chatted on clean streets, and stood in line in front of well-stocked supply stations.

Helmut recalled a quote—from Terra before the Dark Age of Technology, from the Emperor's exposition on the Imperial Truth:

"Reason is the lighthouse of humanity."

He still had too much to do.

He had to write a complete report for Cawl, prepare to deal with the questioning from Mars, and strive for more living space for this world.

But before that—

He glanced at the now-empty berth on the console.

The physical messenger ship had once been docked there; now, only an empty space remained.

Twenty souls were escorting it.

The Emperor personally saw it off.

Helmut performed an action he had never done in his life—he crossed his mechanical fingers over his chest, bowed his head, not to pray to the Omnissiah, but to pay tribute to that ancient soul sitting on the Golden Throne, to pay tribute to Icarus.

"Reason is the lighthouse of humanity."

He repeated the phrase, as if confirming a theorem that had already been proven.

Outside the window, the industrial city of Icarus continued to operate.

Under the sunlight, people continued to live.

And on the other side of the galaxy, the fleet of Skullcrusher Mogg was searching for a world that would allow the Orks to "WAAAGH" again.

But before that, all roads led to the same answer—

Some things were more eternal than war.

Some reason was more powerful than faith.

And for some choices, even gods had to act as escorts.