"Ha. So it's Brother Buna."
Regubor saw Buna, the Explorator Archmagos, and immediately flung a data packet at him.
It was compressed binary Imperial profanity, the kind that started cursing from the stage when the other man's genes were still paramecia. The wording was extremely vicious.
This counted as an old tradition of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Competitors showed one another not the slightest courtesy, and their foul-mouthed street-cursing had grown more and more extreme.
They would even use planet-scale transmitters to project binary obscenities at a competitor's Forge World. When they met face-to-face, outright brawling on the spot was not impossible either.
Of course, when Tech-priests brawled, they still kept it within reasonable limits. If the Department of Oversight judged it to be mutual assault, both sides might be fined research funding, or even punished with the temporary suspension of their research licenses.
That was a price they could scarcely bear. It meant falling behind in research progress, and very likely having their academic status and research projects replaced by other Tech-priests hungry for advancement.
Once they lost the position of project lead, they would be sitting at the children's table, not even daring to speak loudly.
After all, within the Adeptus Mechanicus, academic status and project permissions were everything. Without those, one could not even log into the high-level circles of the Mechanicus Forum, let alone qualify to be cursed at.
At that point, they really would be nothing more than a stray by the roadside.
"Brother Regubor, I trust you've been well. I hear you still haven't been rated as an Archmagos Honoris?"
Buna, the Explorator Archmagos born on Mars, returned an even larger packet of binary obscenities, then spoke with a smile that did not reach his eyes.
In passing, he revealed his specially made Machine Goddess