Ten minutes after leaving the station, we arrive at the centre of the vessel. Once again, we are confronted with the bane of all adventurers, a locked door. This magnificent specimen is a single slab of adamantium alloy six metres wide and four metres high. An embossed and painted Cog Mechanicum dominates the door and holds multiple sensors that ping us once as we approach then fall silent. Painted beneath the Cog Mechanicum in high gothic is the sixth Warning of the Cult Mechanicus:

The Machine Spirit Guards the Knowledge of the Ancients.

We’ve either found an adaptive STC, which I highly doubt, or the prime cogitator for The Barbers Blades.

On either side of the door is a casemate, bristling with heavy bolters and multi-lasers. The corridor is filled with hidden doors that no doubt hold a whole maniple of battle servitors.

There are no obvious noosphere nodes for me to tap into and try to hack my way through and while I would almost certainly survive assaulting the position, I am reluctant to make the attempt. This is actually a rather good spot to set up the bomb as it should be defended by current defences, so long as I don’t destroy them. Should isn’t good enough though, I have to be certain the primary Machine-Spirit isn’t going to mess with the bomb and for that, I need to get through the door.

First, I try the obvious and use my stolen credentials to request entry. I am denied and told to back off or be terminated. The penitents and I quickly retreat into the closest side room, a storage room filled with broken cogitators, servitors, and other parts that some enterprising fellows have turned into a quiet spot to slack off.

There’s three plastic tables, junk welded into eighteen, uncomfortable stools, and an open crate filled with empty bottles of Tranq: a crude, cheap booze made from chem-distillates that numbs the body and depresses the drinker. It’s a popular drink in the Calixis sector and is often brewed from stolen dregs by Hive dwellers and Imperial guards.

The penitents huddle around the tables in prayer as I pace around the room, attempting to puzzle out our next move. Brian scans everything with mechanical glee, then hovers right in front of my face, then screeches and hisses at me.

Brian has changed a lot since I found him on Distant Sun. At first he was a cracked white skull with no jaw, a red mechanical eye, and a dangling, half severed mechadendrite for a spine. These days he has a new, dark grey plasteel jaw that’s actually a power pack. His skull has been lined with the same alloy I use to make the Black Skeleton implant and its surface has been engraved with warding runes. His broken mechadendrite has been replaced with a new one, each segment alternating between bronze and black.

My sigil, a hammer inside a cog, is embossed in brass upon his forehead. Several, insect-like manipulator arms dangle from his jaw like the tendrils of a jellyfish. His mechanical eye remains, but his other holds a custom vortex micro-missile. It’s the only one I’ve ever dared to make and I did so while remote piloting servitors stuffed into a D-POT a hundred thousand kilometres from my fleet.

After hissing his report at me, Brian bobs up and down in front of me like an eager child, almost too excited to sit still long enough to receive permission to embark for the crazy idea they’ve just spouted.

I look up.

Right in the centre of the room is an armoured vent. I’m far too big to fit inside the vent. However, what’s the chance that during the last thirteen thousand years, a barely qualified apprentice has been stuffed into that vent to perform repairs or additions, because their superior has too many implants to fit, and has opened a tiny hole in the security that I can exploit?

I order the penitents to move out of the way.

With the trauma of my early years as a plumber inspiring me, I unscrew the vent and poke two mechadendrites into the corners and fake the current running through the sensors so that the vent does not report it has been opened. Brian curls his mechadendrite on top of his head like a turban, then moves into the vent.

I access his pict feed.

Brian passes through an unpowered laser grid and arrives above one of the hidden rooms. He pokes a sensor through the vent. Within are sixty Velox Pattern security Servitors with coil whips integrated into their arms and wrist mounted las pistols.

The Servitors lie curled up in their cradles, their once mighty, vat grown muscles withered with age and their skin is drawn tight across their sensor filled skulls. Large vats of soylent viridans hang above their cradles, dry and empty. No power is detectable within the room and whatever motive force that once kept these war machines in hibernation failed decades ago.

Brian withdraws his sensor and moves on to the next room, carefully scanning the wires hidden behind the panelling, looking for anything that might still be powered or contain a data feed that could be spliced into.

The next room is more concerning as it contains a squad of five Space Marine Servitors in their power armour. These have survived the years far better and remain in hibernation. So long as the revival drugs in their pharmacopoeia haven’t degraded, they’ll be ready for combat within minutes of triggering security.

They’re carrying bolters, but I’d be willing to bet that, as one of the last lines of defence for one of the most vital rooms in The Barbers Blades, it won’t just be standard bolter rounds, or armour piercing Kraken rounds within their guns. Tempest rounds, Vengeance rounds, Inertial fusion bolts, really there are a lot of different types of bolter ammunition that could give me some trouble.

My conversion field will protect me from most threats, but I don’t fancy its chances against a squad of Space Marines, possibly more, plus four heavy bolters from the casemates, all firing exotic ammunition at me in a narrow corridor with no cover. That’s enough to shred an Armiger.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Brian continues his search and discovers a poorly installed optic cable that has been slipped through a tiny hole drilled through a thick screw holding an armoured wall panel in place. The cable runs along the inside of the vent for half a metre before disappearing into a tangle of cables behind another panel that are too messy to scan properly.

The screw is still in place, and made from plasteel, rather than adamantium alloy. I can understand why someone would put a hole through the softer screw, rather than try and drill through the armoured panel, but it still makes me laugh.

This innovative, yet careless installation of what might be an important data feed is exactly the sort of thing I’d expect to see from an apprentice.

Brian wraps his tiny sensors around the exposed wire and runs through several calibrations until he can detect the photons passing through the cable. A moment later my MIU presents a pict-feed to me.

In my head, I cackle as I realise we’ve hacked into a security data-feed and I can now see the inside of the primary cogitator room of The Barber’s Blades from a single position. The entire room is packed full of shambling corpses. Not just any old zombies though, no these ones are Servitors, stuffed full of barely functioning cybernetics and armed with heavy bolters and flamers. They’re almost certainly Charron Pattern Servitors and are notoriously unreliable, known for shooting both allies and enemies once they’re set to task, even more so when they’re made out of recycled crew.

The Servitors are mixed in age, though most of them are less than two decades old. I suspect that the primary machine-spirit has been killing looters and converting them into Servitors. This isn’t quite rogue AI territory, but I do need to find out why and how it's doing this lest this behaviour spread throughout the Breaking Yards.

If the Machine-Spirit was behaving normally, it should be using all of these Servitors to continue patrolling the vessel for intruders, not packing them like sardines into a single room. The defences at the door are plenty. It doesn’t need some four thousand rotting, rusting corpses in a room that’s best kept as clean as possible.

I have Brian slice into the optic cable. This resets the connection and when the pict-recorder sends a connection request to the hub, it is intercepted. My E-War system is rather gimped without E-SIM there to boost it. However, I am able to pick apart the connection request and rewrite it. Brian also intercepts the connection request coming from the other direction and informs me I have thirty seconds to complete my hack.

I manage to write and test the tiny program in four seconds, replacing the ping with my own, one that contains a small packet of malicious code and is exactly the same size as the original ping down to the byte. Brian sends the new code down the spliced cable with his little tools and it is accepted by the controlling hub.

My code executes and paralyses the Machine-Spirit just long enough for me to follow up with another program that cuts off all its external links other than the one I am using and stops it from closing my connection. After that, it’s just a matter of time. The Machine-Spirit is nothing special and two minutes later, its loyalty belongs to me.

I open up each connection one at a time giving me a much better view of the primary cogitator room. It’s a lot smaller than the one on Dying Light, but it’s still full of massive racks of cogitators. There’s a door to the stern, port, and starboard of the room. Rather than a central access, the main cogitator stations line the bow facing wall. They lie on a high dias with a rather grand looking throne mechanicum and several smaller seats with vicious looking data spikes and bulky helmets looming above them.

I examine the protocols within the Machine-Spirit I have subsumed, then open the connection to the next device in the chain. Once I am confident I have not been detected and have a good understanding of what I’m about to attack, I disguise another attack program within the pict data and upload it over several minutes.

My extra caution pays off and within the hour I have complete control of the security station, giving me command of the local defences and doors without triggering any alarms. I also get access to a wealth of other data like available power, environmental and damage control data. The security station only holds the last decade in its logs, the rest having been packaged and sent off the primary Machine-Spirit.

I run through the data and try to find out what is happening only to end up more confused. The vessel has been sending out patrols to capture and convert looters into Servitors for at least a decade. This has been an effective strategy to maintain and protect itself. It recently captured some zombies and converted them, which spread the plague through the vessel.

This is unusual as an Imperial Machine-Spirit should have recognised the corruption and destroyed the Zombies with fire, then quarantined and sterilised the area. It’s also odd that the primary Machine-Spirit is active at all, as it should have been shut down when the vessel was decommissioned.

Something obviously turned it back on again. It isn’t showing on the pict-feeds I have access to. However, as all the Zombies are in the cogitator room and entered it while we were traversing the vessel, I am willing to bet that whatever intelligence that has taken over the void ship is hiding in that room.

I register myself and the penitents with the security station, giving us access to the room. The security station has a powered noosphere node and I use it to subsume control of the Zombie Servitors, changing their friend and foe data so that every Servitor thinks all combatants are acceptable targets and adding a countdown for the command to execute.

“Mr Pyrestain, get everyone moving. Expect a lot of noise.”

“Yes, Lord.”

The penitents accompany me to the door, huddling around me as the casemate guns track us as we approach.

Feeling rather smug, I watch the Servitors power up and the carnage unfold as the massive army of dead, mechanised flesh rips itself apart and sets everything on fire, purging the plague.

A maelstrom of ragged, worn souls rushes towards me and I consume them. The penitents shoulder their guns and point their weapons at the door. Their hands shake and one of them faints, which only causes more panic.

“Stand firm!” I shout.

The penitents freeze.

I continue, “The enemy has been destroyed. I’ve already taken care of it.”

The fire suppression system kicks in and coats the cogitator room with foam, putting out the growing conflagration. Once the fire is out and the Environmental Sustainer has cleared all of the smoke. I open the door and lock it open, then order Brian to return, cutting my control off.

The room is absolutely trashed. The cogitator racks are riddled with holes. Twitching burnt flesh is strewn across the floor, sticking up from the snow like foam in a morbid tapestry.

Clovis helps the fainting penitent back to their feet.

“Guns up,” I say, “and hold steady. I’m going to send the Servo-Skull in first.”

Brian wizzes past me and runs up and down each row of cogitators, scanning everything. Nothing tries to shoot him.

I turn to Clovis, “Sweep the room and put a round in the head of every Servitor. I’m going to see what I can get out of the Throne Mechanicum.”

“Yes, Holy Father. Your will be done.”