Rotating emergency lights cast flickering, blood-red light through the thick smoke that had yet to settle. The air reeked of scorched material and Ozone from the energy overload.
Behind a shield wall formed by dozens of Word Bearers Terminator veterans, Primarch Lorgar Aurelian stood like a mountain, his gaze piercing the smoke and locking firmly onto the figure on the experimental platform.
After unleashing an energy surge powerful enough to cripple the entire laboratory, the humanoid machine showed no further aggression.
It simply stood silently on the platform, its inhuman eyes, filled with a deep blue radiance like a sea of stars, scanning everything around it at extraordinary speed.
Thick armoured bulkheads, complex control terminals, and the "unknown personnel" before it, clad in power armour and emitting powerful bioenergy signals.
A deathly silence lasted several seconds, broken only by the faint hum of power armour servos and the hiss of the environmental control system struggling to filter the air.
At last, Lorgar broke the silence. His voice emerged through his Helmet's speakers, steady and composed, carrying an unquestionable authority. "Answer me. What are you? Where did you come from?"
The machine on the platform slowly focused its gaze back on Lorgar. Its face remained utterly expressionless, as though its earlier scan had merely completed a basic data-entry process.
A clear, steady synthetic voice, devoid of any inflection, rang through the laboratory. It answered the questions directly, though it sounded more like a logical verification:
"Unknown warship architecture detected. No matching model in database. Unknown life forms detected. Abnormal biological signal strength. Degree of physiological modification exceeds known parameters."
"Standard-issue power armour detected. Exterior design displays certain features with low-confidence matches, but underlying technological approach is unknown."
"Overall assessment: not part of the armed forces of any recorded human nation or