Boom, boom, boom, boom!!!!
The ceaseless, heavy thunder echoed endlessly through the depths of the Iron Hands flagship's belly, amid its exposed, enormous keel and hydraulic pipes, like the beating heart of an ancient furnace.
This was no longer an ordinary warship's storage hold. Driven directly by the cold will of the Primarch Ferrus Manus, it had been utterly transformed, reshaped into an immense weapons factory of terrifying scale.
Hundreds of fully automated production lines, like the digestive tracts of steel behemoths, ravenously devoured the ore, alloys, and energy cells delivered in an unbroken stream by conveyor belts.
Enormous stamping presses hammered several times a second. Every impact shook the deck, forging incandescent metal into basic frames.
Countless articulated servo-arms welded, riveted, and assembled at speed under programs precise to the micron. Welding sparks splashed through the dim space in an unending rain of steel, while laser etchers hissed as they inscribed cog emblems and cold serial numbers onto armor plates.
The air was thick with the pungent industrial reek of hot metal, coolant, and ozone, and the temperature remained high enough to make skin burn all year round.
To Ferrus Manus's gray eyes, as exacting as precision probes, the most satisfying of the many steel killing machines born from these hundreds of production lines was not the most numerous model, but a towering creation that stood upon its own dedicated platform.
It was a heavy combat robot nearly ten meters tall, like a small mobile fortress.
Its main body was covered in multiple layers of matte dark-gray composite armor, its contours rugged and powerful. Each arm ended in an enormous rotary impact drill with a diameter comparable to a Power Fist. Even on standby, the sharp teeth forged from dark alloy radiated a chill that sank into the marrow.