Naturally, Lox had no way of knowing about the secret conversation between the Emperor and Malcador. It was a secret that had to remain buried. In a sense, the Dragon of Mars and the God of All Machines were really one and the same concept.
When he announced the founding of the Advanced Technology Community from the rooftop of Ganymede's planetary control center, an organization born from the Adeptus Mechanicus had already come into being.
In the past, the Adeptus Mechanicus and the Imperium had stood as twin heads of the same eagle. The signing of the Treaty of Olympia had made them close allies.
Yet after the Martian Civil War, the severely weakened loyalist Adeptus Mechanicus had been forced by circumstance to reorganize into the Mechanicus Order, a subordinate organization under the Council of Terra.
From standing shoulder to shoulder to serving beneath another, the gap was hard for most grease monkeys to accept. But they truly were in decline now, and had no choice but to accept reality.
Objectively speaking, the Imperium really did act rather disgracefully, Lox thought.
No wonder Mars drifted away from it.
When Mars called for aid, the Imperium, after weighing all sorts of considerations, ultimately sent only a small force. They directly hauled away twenty to thirty thousand suits of Terminator armor, along with other scattered production equipment. In the end, Sigismund simply appointed Kane as the next Fabricator-General, brushing off the matter of supporting Mars.
The grease monkeys had remembered all of it. The moment they returned to Terra, the Emperor summoned them off to fight the Webway War again. Resentment had already begun to grow in their hearts. After all, they had held to the bottom line and never betrayed the Emperor, only to end up like this.
The Advanced Technology