The slow-moving living daemon-steel cables failed to trigger the ship's shields. The instant they touched its metal hull, countless consciousnesses and torrents of data surged into motion.
Every Chaos Tech-Priest wanted to acquire a little information before the others, even if it was only the most trivial scrap of knowledge.
Yet when their consciousnesses actually entered the Pectaro, the digital world left every intruder silent.
"How could this happen?!"
They had speculated about all sorts of possibilities, imagining that once connected, they would encounter a raging machine spirit, an enormous tide of information, or perhaps the unique digital consciousness of the Men of Iron, with whom they could converse.
Instead, every Priest's consciousness and invasive data plunged into a completely empty space.
The sense of spiritual hollowness left even those who had fallen to Chaos feeling boundless emptiness.
Everything was like nothingness, utterly devoid of substance.
There were no data streams, no machine spirit, no consciousness belonging to the Men of Iron. Nothing at all.
Iax silently watched his auxiliary processing unit begin running at high speed while an independent firewall process rapidly iterated. He knew perfectly well that this was a little program he had written during his first battle against the Iron Warriors. A quick check of its version history showed that almost every time he encountered enemies of Chaos, it went through three or four updates in the background.
Now its version number was nearly into triple digits. Its operation grew ever more efficient, and its methods of handling the data became increasingly simple and effective. Instead of defensively deleting incoming data, as it had initially done, it now created an independent, empty data unit, isolated every incoming stream within it, and let them run separately there. Once the data stack filled up, it deleted the entire