The Ultramarines eyed the Castellans floating in a neat, docile stack inside the compartment with suspicion.
Iax offered no explanation. Vast streams of data surged between Iax and the three Castellans.
Creak.
The quiet Castellans suddenly turned toward the metal wall behind them, then raised their massive Mechanical Claws.
The Ultramarines raised their weapons almost reflexively.
But when the Mechanical Claws plunged into the wall and effortlessly tore the whole thing open, the Ultramarines split into two camps.
One group silently lowered their Boltguns and cautiously drew their Power Swords, while the other quietly reached for their Krak Grenades. Clearly, they no longer trusted Boltguns against these metal hulks.
The glow in Iax's electronic eyes brightened by two levels at the sight of the enormous cargo containers neatly arranged beyond the torn-open compartment.
The large metal containers were stacked nearly thirty meters high, almost filling the entire field of view, and arranged in two neat stacks inside the compartment. Iax, however, had already obtained information on their contents from the Castellans' data.
Only a third of the cargo hold before them actually remained. The other two-thirds had vanished, and the three Castellans had fallen out from behind the containers in front of them.
Although Iax had not discovered what had activated the three Castellans, their activity logs showed that they had been standing guard here for more than two hundred years.
As specialized engineering machines, they could not activate other machine intelligence units. Without any operational orders or a unit controlling them, the Castellans had simply stood here doing nothing.
Only when some fool had tried to attack them with something that resembled a weapon had their self-defense protocols been triggered.
The Castellans' preset instructions included unloading cargo after landing and activation, assembling an Apocalypse Titan, and assembling Enforcer heavy