4 months later

Hephaestos stared at the blank walls of his cell. They weren't that much different from his own quarters. They lacked a cogitator station and without the proper tools he hadn't been able to improve the vent through which stale, recycled air was blown, like he had done in his own quarters. And there was a constant humming noise. Something which bothered him to no end as he had calculated that it was a distraction that continually decreased his efficiency with 0.9%. He had considered disabling his auditory sensors, but since they were still biological, he didn't see how he would reinitiate them later, so he had dismissed that option.

Once more, his mind wandered off to that night that had robbed him of so much. The loss of his master he had seen coming at least, and although he hadn't thought of it when he had electrocuted him with his own power, he had been pretty confident that he'd be reassigned to another Librarium official. What he hadn't expected was the harsh treatment he had received from the Res Interni skitarii.

He'd regained conscious rather quick, perhaps minutes after he had crashed to the floor in the emergency stairwell. In hindsight his awakening had been rather surprising, considering the fact that one of the strongly reinforced skitari had been dragging him down to Tremendus' quarters, making sure that his head had bounced off every single step of the stairs, causing quite a few gashes in the skin of his bald head. When they had arrived, blood had been trickling down his skull and spine, but that had seemed to be the least of his trouble. Before him had stood another adept Mechanicus, his robes as red as his own, but the edges had been made from black velvet with gold filligrene symbols woven into it. Even when Hephaestos had regained his footing, after being unceremonicly tossed before the other adept's feet by the skitari, the adept from Res Interni had towered above him and judging by barrel sized chest of the man, which was clad in finely wrought armour, inlaid with silver symbols of power, Hephaestos had had a 0.00001% chance of repeating the stunt he had pulled on his master.

"Adept Hephaestos. How good of you to join us." a deep rumbling voice had said not much unlike the sound of an ore refinery grinding rocks. "You seem to find yourself in a precarious situation. Just like your master. Or, correction, late master." Hephaestos had focused two of his lenses on the body of Tremendus. For a split second he had thought he had killed the mech-deacon himself, but an instant later his brain had registred the lack of a head. Another of his lenses had turned towards another skitari, standing behind Tremendus' desk, holding up a power axe. It hadn't taken long to connect the dots. But there was no time to calculate the odds of losing his own head, as the adept before him had spoken up again. "I am Karsh, departemento Res Interni. I take it you heard about us?" Hephaestos had nodded vigorously, still trying to gather his thougths. "I am here because your master... let us say... overstepped his authority... and explored lore that was restricted to him..." At that point Hephaestos had mustered the courage to look up at adept Karsh's face, only to find that the man's entire skull had been replaced by a bionic one. Three yellow, assymetricly placed visual sensors had looked back from under the red and black hood. "And neither his proposed penance, nor his proposition for rehabilitation were particularly satisfying." Hephaestos hadn't been able to resist and had inspected the headless corpse of mech-deacon Tremendus 8878, which he had immediately regretted afterwards.

The giant before him had taken a single step towards him and used a mechadendrite shaped as an industrial pincer to lift him up from the floor. Hephaestos had dangled for exactly 8 seconds above the ground before Karsh brought another mechadendrite to bear, this one shaped more like the narcethicum of an Adeptus Astartes Apothecary. "I have reasons to believe that you shared this lust for data exploration." And before Hephaestos had been able to oppose the statement, Karsh had continued with a shussing burst of binary. "You need not waste your, nor my time with denial. I can see it in every aspect of your being, scholar. And your file, Hephaestos MP5568-05... I correctly identified you, didn't I?" Hephaestos had nodded once. "As I was saying, your file, Hephaestos, your file doesn't leave room for doubt. So how about you grant me your confession. In standard techno-lingua please." But Hephaestos had been frozen by terror. His mind had given up reason and logic once more. He hadn't been able to comply, even if he had wanted to reveal his role in Tremendus' research. His vox box only produced static. The lense at the far left side of his visor had registred how one of the skitarii had approached him, but still, the added threat hadn't provoked a reaction. A single feeling had dominated Hephaestos' mind, leaving no room for structured thought: fear. Mind-gripping fear.

"Pity..." Karsh had rumbled, "I hate to waste good neurotoxins on servitor fodder." And whether the adept had realized that Hephaestos' cores had frozen or not, a thick steel needle had approached the tech-priest's chest. Hephaestos had struggled, but the heavy pincer had kept him firmly in place and Karsh hadn't seemed to mind just where he would inject his serum. The sting of the needle was bad, but what came after was almost unbearable. Hephaestos couldn't even register the time that went past the penetration of the needle and the hot, burning sensation in his veins. It only took microseconds for his entire body to be drenched in pain. At first, only his biological parts were affected, but seconds later his visor had shut down, sending a scourching pain via the primary optic datacables straight to his brain. The next second his cores were infected, sending stimuli to all his extremities, making his body spasm uncontrollably, putting the servo's of his bionic legs into overdrive, making them flail wildly. Finally, the toxin had reached his memory cores and Hephaestos had wished he had never had them installed. Every single connection seemed to come apart, billions of dataconnections were ruptured violently, each and every one adding to the pain. Hephaestos had started screaming immediately after the injection, but at that time his vox box had nearly burned out due to the enormous stress he had been putting it under.

The pain had receded, just enough for Hephaestos to regain control of his limbs and voice, but his trouble hadn't come to an end. Still blinded, Hephaestos had cried out again when something had been jammed against the pale flesh of his neck. He had heard a soft, metal clicking sound and then had felt how dozens of little teeth bit into his biomatter. "Adept Hephaestos. Your pain limitations have been properly recalibrated. And they are now under my complete control." Karsh had said. "Please experience this for yourself." The pain had returned immediately, but localized in the frontal lobe of his brain. Hephaestos had trashed, slamming his own fists against his head, almost busting one of his visor's lenses. "So now you know, adept. Now you realize that you're completely powerless. Now, it is time for your confession." The pain had receded again and after a green flash, his vision was restored. Partialy. Only the closest objects had been finely outlined and the colours had been all wrong. With all the concentration he had been able to muster, Hephaestos had tried to ignore these irregularities. "Whattt... do you wisssshh... me to confessss?" he had replied weakly. A sound of rocks being split had rung through Tremendus' quarters and Hephaestos' visuals had started shaking. Somehow his brain had concluded that adept Karsh was laughing. "I understand your question... But you should understand that I am not here for easy confessions. I am not here to wantonly torture your body, be it biological or machine. No, adept... I am here because your master thread on dangerous territory. Territory that would be his demise, if he would have continued his research. And together with his downfall, he would have damaged the Mechanicus, perhaps even the core elements of our believe in the Omnissiah. I don't want to badger you into a false confession. I need to know the truth."

The pain had come back, now focused on his spine. Hephaestos had tried to bend his colon until it would have snapped, but his attempts had proven futile. He had performed a dance macabre, unable to end his pain, unable to escape. "We will continue this exercise following protocol, unless you give me your truthful confession. In proper techno-lingua, mind you." Karsh had said as if he was just asking for a simple datatransfer, instead of tearing Hephaestos apart. The adept waited for another 5.4 seconds. "No?" Hephaestos had registered surprise in Karsh' voice. But once more his sensors had become useless when a new wave of pain drowned everything out. It had been worse than anything he had experienced before, but somehow his mind had managed to keep itself together. Minimally. It had only produced a single thought: Karsh hadn't been lying about his pain limitations. And the adept had used that power to the fullest. For the next hour, wave after wave of excruciating pain had hit Hephaestos' body, each and every time focused on another part. His fingers had felt like they had been replaced by white hot steel pins, his bionic legs had weighed two tons, feeling like they were about to tear the lower half of his chest away. Each time his mind had, even unconsciously, reached for the connections with his memory cores, he had gotten stung, like getting a knife planted in your eye. But still, his mind had found a way to protect itself. It had pulled back from his body, letting it endure the pain induced by the neurotoxins, detaching itself from reality. And that had been his salvation, even if it was just chance.

Adept Karsh had dropped him to the ground. Hephaestos had remained still, a miserable collection of now reddish flesh, bones, some of them broken under the stress Hephaestos had put them under, and some, now completely uncalibrated, bionics and augmentations. "Adept Hephaestos. Your body is destroyed. Yet you withhold a confession. I have registred this before... You are protecting someone... to the detriment of yourself. You are a tech-priest of the Mechanicus. You know loyalty to a dead master is useless. I conclude that there is still someone else." Karsh had pauzed for a second, giving Hephaestos a few precious seconds to consider his situation and Karsh' behaviour. "I am now inclined to think that you were innocent..." Perhaps Hephaestos had only wanted to believe it, but he had heard truthfulness in Karsh' voice. No pity, but doubt. "But you need to tell me who I should be looking for. In these matters, all bonds of loyalty are forfait. The research of your master was harmful for the Mechanicus. Anything that hurts the Mechanicus should be cut away like a cancer. And like any decent magos biologis, I only wish to cut away the bad and spare the healthy tissue around it." Hephaestos had heard him mumble something else, but his auditory receptors hadn't been able to isolate it properly, but to this day he would swear that he had heard Karsh say "If not, we would have nothing left to scrutinize, and what's life without a purpose..."

Hephaestos had only needed a split second to decide. Even without being tortured, he would have taken the same decision. Later he had had his logicalculus drive calculate the odds of another outcome in other circumstances, but after a week or so, he had had to conclude that there weren't any scenarios however unlikely where he wouldn't have made the same choice. Apart from being sure that he had made the right decision, it had also given him something new to research: guilt.

"Adept Garant. He's the one you're looking for." His logicalculus drive had given him some minimal parametres to give this message - to make sure he wouldn't sound to eager to give up his friend after his presumed loyalty - but his strained vox box hadn't delivered the message the way he had wanted to. The words had been spit out too fast. His true mind too visible within them. Adept Kaersh hadn't noticed however. A few short bursts of binary had send the skitarii on their way. Hephaestos hadn't even noticed how adept Karsh left him lying on the floor, detaching the toxin regulator from his neck on his way out of Tremendus' quarters. Hephaestos had been left with feelings of relief, still mixed with fear. At that point guilt hadn't even made the top 10 of his preoccupations.

Hephaestos got up from his cod and opened the door of his cell, locking it behind him by putting in a four digit code into the little security keybox next to the door. The protection it provided was laughable - even an uninitiated would have no trouble finding the code eventually - but it still meant it were his own, personal quarters. Which was better than he had expected. Logic would have dictated he would have shared a bed in one of the massive dormitories. Which would have been far worse than aircycle noises for his efficiency. He started walking, his bionic feet clanking on the iron deck. Trusting his bionic legs and their gyro's, Hephaestos produced a dataslate from his robes, reopening the file he had been reading. His first attempt at selecting it, failed and once more Hephaestos cursed his weak human flesh. His bionics had recovered soon enough from Karsh' neurotoxins, but his muscles still suffered from tremors and weakness. He ached for bionic replacements, but in his current situation, he had less than a 0.01 % chance of getting such a treatment. Not the ideal circumstances for cutting off one's fingers.

Soon he arrived at the elevator hub and the servitors responsible for the lifting mechanism started pulling at a thick metal chain, attached to a pulley a few dozen metres higher. While the mindless machinemen slaved, Hephaestos thoughts wandered again, his visor unfocused on the text on his dataslate, his other sensors seemingly offline.

After his ordeal, Hephaestos had been found by another adept of the, at that point, late Tremendus 8788. His recollections of his journey and stay at the medrepair were hazy at best, but his internal chrono system had put him there for at least 180 terran hours, just over a week. Which had been enough to completely change his world. When his systems had somewhat stabilized he had found a single datacard with a short briefing and instructions. Although Hephaestos couldn't argue with the efficiency of the communication, he had still felt annoyed, which only annoyed him even further as it had been a sure sign that his logicalculus hadn't been properly recompiled. At the end of the message, Venom's name had appeared. Only her title had been changed to mech-deacon, which had been far worse than annoying.

In the briefing, Hephaestos had read that the Librarium had elected Venatoria as Tremendus' successor. Adept Garant had been apprehended by Karsh and had joined the ranks of the Librarium's servitors. In clear techno-lingua, Venom had commanded him to come before her in her newly acquired quarters. Afterwards, Hephaestos had mused that Venom's tone in the message had been far more friendly than the oral data transfer later. Apparently, Venatoria's logicalculus drive had also somehow suffered damage as smugness and glee had been clearly visible and audible during their communications. She had utterly enjoyed the fact that she was in control and she had relished at the prospect of putting Hephaestos on Cell as a glorified engineseer. Mockingly she had wished him good luck with his new task... trice. Hephaestos could still feel a choler coming up when he thought about that interaction.

"O Five! Get in you coghead. You're late!" The voice of the bloated overseer, a man with fuzzy ginger hair and a matching beard, which Hephaestos knew as commandeur second class W. McGinn, echoed from the top of the elevator shaft, making short work of any plans for retaliation on Venom. His logicalculus, now properly reconfigured, suppressed his urge to sigh or groan at the horrible abbreviation of his callsign. He stepped in the roughly timbered, wooden cage that served as the elevator car, gave the correct audio command for the servitors to start hauling up the car and prepared himself for yet another frustrating debate about the efficiency of the harvester machines with McGinn. When the servitors stopped pulling at their chains, he stepped out onto the command bridge of the colossal harvester machine, which, far above the massive iron tracks of the crawler, provided him with a commanding view of the green-and-yellow, rolling plains of Cell. Immediately McGinn started blathering, and simultaneously splattering him with thick drops of grey saliva. Once more, he understood why Venom had been so smug about all this.

When McGinn was done though, he abandoned the standard protocol. Instead of sending him to the enginarium of the harvester, he retrieved a dirty piece of paper from his back pocket. "Here O'Five. Before you head down to the engine, someone wants to see you." Hephaestos logicalculus started producing various hypotheses, each one a bit more wild than the previous. Until he shorted out the processes for the sake of efficiency and decided to go see for himself. After a long walk and the necessary, but uncomfortable climbing and clambering on various service ladders - the harvester wasn't really build for casual strolls - Hephaestos arrived at the front of the Harvester. The noise here was eardeafening as this was the place where the harverster's tracks crushed the vegetation underneat. There was a small observation post hanging on the side of the tracked behemoth that was connected to the main body of the harvester by a narrow walkway. Hephaestos knew it was a secundary system as numerous pictcorders and a few auspex wands at the front were used to steer and navigate the machine. Therefore it should be unmanned. Instead, he saw someone standing in the small cabin, the person's face covered by a hat and scarf which would help him to breath as the air around here was saturated with small biological particles of the vegetation being steam-rolled. The rest of his outfit, a baggy coverall made him unreckognizable. Although even if Hephaestos' visor would be able to get an unobstructed view on the person's identifying features, he probably wouldn't recognize him or her as he had taken no interest at all in his fellow crew members. He only spoke to the tech adepts at the enginarium and then again, only if it was absolutely necessary.

Somehow the other person had noticed him and beckoned him closer. Hephaestos proceeded, keeping both his hands on the thin and probably not so trustworthy handrails. The floor of the walkway shook and trembled and it didn't get better inside the observation post. Hephaestos noticed that over 42 percent of the screws keeping the metal plates of the cabin together, had been shaken out of their screw holes, which didn't help in restoring his confidence in the structural integrity of the cabin. He anticipated on a very difficult social interaction as he had to supress continuously certain biological reflexes that he had learned to identify as fear. but contrary to his expectations, the interaction smoother than he could possibly have predicted. The other man didn't take of his hat, nor removed his scarf. Whoever he was, didn't even speak up. Instead, he just handed over a data crystal. Hephaestos scrutinized the little thing and then retrieved the ramshackle dataslate he'd received on arrival. Luckily the thing accepted the datacrystal and soon three quarters of the screen - the machine spirit had been damaged quite badly by a nonchalant worker who had quite carelessly used the slate as a service tray to carry recaf - showed him an authorization code for an Inquisitorial document. One of his lenses screened the face of the other person again, but didn't harvest any new intel. The message on the dataslate wasn't too enlightening either, but it did make Hephaestos feel funny. Another case of intuition presented itself. Within the document there were orders to leave Cell and leave the sector to join the ranks of the Inquisition and although Hephaestos desired nothing more than to leave his current location, he wasn't entirely sure that an induction in the most secretive force of the Imperium was his preferred destination.

He didn't seem to get a lot of time to consider the situation. The other person pulled out the datacrystal from the dataslate and handed him another one. Next, he pushed past Hephaestos and moved over the service walkway towards the harvester in a brisk pace, clearly indicating that the meeting was over. Hephaestos used one of his six lenses to follow him and at the same time plugged in the second crystal. On it, he found a detailed interary and the necessary release papers to end his service on the harvester. Despite his stomach ache, Hephaestos couldn't help but smile.

Author's note:

This short story is at an end, but I'm planning on having O'Five return some day. Thank you for reading. I hope you found it entertaining. I especially hoped to write in a style that would reflect the 'Mechanicus' way of seeing things. As always, reviews are most welcome, both positive as critical.

I would also like to thank Claw, who has GM'd an awesome game for me and for which I created the character of O'Five.

For those of you who would like more, I can say that there's another story here on about an Arbite with a bit more spine than O'Five. Expect other stories in the Warhammer 40.000 universe soon. I hope you will enjoy those as well.