Deprived of the pleasure of watching the Little Red-Robed Man's brain short-circuit, Iax decided to upgrade its Bodyguard and replace its shattered Monomolecular Sword.
Iax had not installed the new modules it had built at the orbital spaceport above Scintilla on its Bodyguard. Now, however, it could.
The Dawn of Fire had even more materials, and rarer ones, piled up in its holds.
Many of these materials were high-grade private stashes the Tech-Priests had brought aboard themselves. These costly materials were either special alloys produced on some industrial world or rare metal ingots sent to Mars as tribute, which the ship's priests had taken under the guise of resupply by quietly altering the supply manifests.
When Iax saw so many once-familiar raw materials, its urge to build things by hand stirred again. After all, in a universe teeming with monsters and horrors, operating alone as a vulnerable command core was rather dangerous. Given enough materials, building itself a guard unit might be a good choice.
Every time Iax wandered into a materials hold, servitors would report that some items had gone missing. Nothing was left at the scene except servo-skulls with their data wiped clean.
Well, at least Iax had shown some restraint this time. Otherwise, there would have been a list of damaged servo-skulls as well.
The Tech-Priests could only suffer in silence over the missing materials. After all, it was difficult to explain why such expensive materials, both rare and of little practical use, were in the ship's materials holds.
To solve this problem, the priests quietly relocated the materials they had acquired and brought aboard for themselves.
They moved them from the regular materials holds to a Spare Parts Warehouse that required higher-level access.
But this accomplished nothing.
The loss reports shifted from the materials holds to