Draykon sighed wearily. Without Techpriest Rileigh’s mentorship he was reaching the limits of his ability. More than that, he was missing her immensely. While they had met with a few other techpriests while in orbit of Zyrantiel, and spoken to a few over Mechanicus vox-channels, he had not seen a single other techpriest in their time at Outpost-Bastion Eta-181, and was unlikely to for the rest of his stay.

It was all so much easier having the matronly Metalican in charge. While Rileigh was often reserved to the point of being anti-social, even for a Mechanicum, Draykon followed her lead and applied himself with quiet diligence to assisting in her labours. Without her, however, it was very difficult for Draykon to know what exactly to do when faced with a problem.

He’d managed well enough in the aftermath of the battle in the clearing, recovering Rileigh’s unconscious body, performing the Rite of Aid upon her, and arranging for the remaining servitors to finish the construction work that remained to erect the augur relay. After returning to the Outpost-Bastion and ensuring that Rileigh would be looked after by the chapel’s medical servitor he’d headed out at first light to finish the necessary ministrations upon the relay that he could perform himself.

After setting the last pieces of the structure in place and giving it what benedictions he could, Draykon had then returned to Omnissiac chapel to help repair Rileigh’s broken form. The techpriest was still alive, but the medical servitor had insisted that she would stay sedated for some time, at least until her broken cybernetics were restored to a proper level of function. The damage that had impaired Rileigh was significant enough that Draykon agreed with the servitor.

Rileigh lay on the table that the Mechanicum had used for repairing servitors and performing other repair rituals on smaller machines. She lay on her side, with the medical servitor occasionally prodding her to make intermittent observations. Much more of the female Mechanicum’s form was obvious with the stark white robes having been removed to better tend to her. While her body definitely had a motherly plumpness to it, the facade of her relative lack of cybernetics was quite broken when Rileigh was observed in her less clothed state, as if the appearance of a less-augmented, maternal techpriest was a carefully cultivated image kept up for the sake of uninitiated Imperials. While it would appear that most of Rileigh’s soft face was unaugmented, with only the upper, left-hand quarter of her face being taken up by bionic eyes and plating, her head was in truth far more augmented than that. Beneath the hood she bore numerous cables and cords sprouting from the back of her head, a bionic ear, and a goodly amount of fleshbonded metal along the length of her spine, constituting her divine techno-communion device, ran along her neck until the extensive data cores and potentia coil upon her back came to meet it. A good number of the present cables that came from the back of her head also merged together into a third mechadendrite (apart from her back-mounted optical and grasping mechadendrites) that ended in a conical dataspike, which, for the most part, sat inactive upon her shoulder, looking like a decoration upon the end of a hair braid.

The titanium cybernetic arm on the techpriest’s left side had had a number of its servos blown out by the power of the luminen charge, and the most Draykon could do was remove the damaged portions, leaving the useless limb as it was, sitting limply at her side. Aside from the broken limb, Rileigh had a short litany of other injuries; parts of the cabling from her head to her datacores had been fried, her main cybernetic eye had burned out, and she had sustained numerous burns caused by her potentia coil overheating and burning the fleshbonded skin, leaving all of the flesh around her augmetics red and scalded.

It could have been a lot worse, Draykon thought. At least those horrible aliens were all dead. The scene of the desperate battle had haunted what few hours of sleep Draykon had stolen away in between the ritual repairs he was making to restore his mentor over the past few days. The red eyes and snarling maws of the xenos, along with the brutal dispatch of men and servitors alike had woken the young Mechanicum with a start more times than he would ever admit. At least when his senses returned to him he was in the solid embrace of the command-basilica, with the quiet prayers to the Omnissiah being intoned by servitors, alongside the calming, rhythmic clang of the temple’s noise generator.

When his visual sensors awakened he would sometimes sit rigidly still, listening to the temple’s sounds and staring directly upwards. The chapel was fairly tall, about ten meters in height, with the eves of the ceiling being covered in power cables and data-wires. Sometimes he would magnify in on the individual bundles of wires, letting his cybernetic sight idly trace the conduit’s path. The responsibilities of a techpriest had always seemed so enormous to the young tech-adept. Even before he had joined the Cult Mechanicus his parents had spoken to him of techpriests with reverence always on their lips. Having assumed a fraction of Techpriest Rileigh’s responsibilities and feeling subsequently overwhelmed with the work on the augur relay and repairing his mentor’s wounds he felt he had been sufficiently humbled.

At the very least he hoped that his ministrations upon his fellow Mechanicum were sufficient. Draykon knew now, more than ever, that there really was only so much he could do. A low, insistent chime ended up pulling the tech-adept’s sight away from the dim buzz of an overhanging lumen lamp. Dragging himself out of bed, Draykon slowly shuffled over to the central chamber of the chapel, ready to do what he could to aid the beleaguered machine awaiting him. He hoped that the machine had not been waiting too long.

The medical servitor was displaying an “empty” warning-glyph on the display built into its back-mounted interface. The reservoir of the machine’s anaesthetics were depleted, and Draykon was not sure where he would exactly find more. Requisitions for the base were far and few between, unless they were for proprietary equipment. Draykon quickly searched about the laboratorium, hoping to find a previously ignored bottle of anaesthetic. The medical servitor’s ability was moderate, but certainly more skilled than he was, and for the most part Draykon was referring to its programmed advice. He had applied ointments and performed replacement rites for what he could, but the young adept’s pace of repairing the techpriest’s body was slow, and his every application of his ability felt unsure.

Rileigh stirred very slightly. Draykon, having given up on his ultimately fruitless search, looked over the medical servitor’s display, seeing what it recommended. The green text on the slate black screen recommended that he “sedate the patient”. This was not an option. The servitor’s cortex shuddered as it interpreted the response and calculated a second opinion; “console patient with a benediction, praying for them to overcome the weakness of their flesh”. Draykon looked at the cybernetic-laden form of his mentor and thought better of it.

The tech-adept had tried to make sure that the artisan was comfortable in her repose, and for now he would simply sit at her side, allowing consciousness to return to her form as the anaesthesia wore off. While he had been fairly confident in his replacement of Rileigh’s burned data-conduits going from her head to her data vaults, Draykon was not so sure of his ability to replace and properly calibrate her cybernetic eye. He knew how fiddly such work could be, and even he had to calibrate and re-calibrate his visual sensors at least once a day to get them to display in a manner that he found optimal.

Draykon leaned against the table that Techpriest Rileigh lay upon, hoping to assuage any disorientation that she would suffer, and to hear any of her orders upon waking. After a half hour he was greeted by a familiar click-hum, as the techpriest’s cybernetic eyes came to life with their familiar green glow. She twisted a bit and moved her limbs slightly, waking ever so slightly over the course of the next hour. Occasionally she grunted in pain or let a low hiss out from between her teeth as the all too human parts of her body made the pain they were in apparent. Slowly, Rileigh tilted her head over to look at Draykon, with her one, bleary organic eye and her main and secondary cybernetic eyes.

“You have calibrated my eye lenses incorrectly.”

***

A few days after awakening from her drug-induced slumber, Rileigh was still in pain. She cursed her weak flesh every waking moment that the tissue around her blessed bionics ached and stung from their burns, and the headaches from her cybernetic eyes’ unwillingness to focus properly at times was just the absolute last rivet on the hull for her frustration.

All the same, her bionics were one of the few things keeping her moving. That and her motivation to serve the Omnissiah’s great works. The form that such great works were taking this day was the installation of cybernetics upon guardsmen of the 5th Company of the Catachan 54th, her main allies in arms on this horrible green hell of a planet. Indeed there were other techpriests on Zyrantiel, but as ever the techpriesthood was spread thin, as much for the sake of practicality as it was for the sake of preventing unnecessary internecine conflicts.

And so in the name of Omnissiah Techpriest Artisan Rileigh found herself in the midst of the bloody work of delivering His beneficence unto those who were found deserving among the Catachan’s masses.The dispassion for the flesh that came with her religion was enough to see her through the operations needed to install bionic limbs and cybernetic senses, but Draykon’s devoutness to see through the gore and necessities of surgery was not so developed. Rileigh mentally noted that she would yet rectify such weakness. Many of the cybernetics she installed on the Catachans were “servitor-grade” bionics, as she had little in the way of higher quality stock, and would hold onto such finery to look after herself and Draykon, in the event of further harm coming to them.

While taking a break to meditate between surgeries Rileigh watched the Catachans that she had aided on the prior days. She winced while sitting down on the steps of the Mechanicum chapel, cursing the weakness of her flesh with a mental subroutine. The burned flesh around the potentia coil mounted to her back was healing, slowly. As she took a deep breath to concentrate and embrace the clarity of thought gifted to her by the Cult Mechanicus, Rileigh took notice of two of the Catachans making use of their bionics. One, she believed to be identified as Corporal Vengur, had received a replacement for his destroyed right arm, while the other, some private she had not bothered to learn the name of, had the lower part of his leg, below the knee, replaced with a suitable bionic. The private with the bionic leg seemed none too happy about the affair, while the corporal seemed to be embracing the strength provided by the new arm.

The techpriest pulled her hood over her face with her manipulator mechadendrite to hide the annoyed sneer on her face. The ungrateful wretch should have been ecstatic to continue his service with the durability afforded to him by his bionic leg, and all the more grateful that he could at least partially overcome his body’s biological nature. Rileigh thought that she had done a particularly decent job of replacing the guardsman’s leg stump with something functional.

The techpriest sat fuming for some time, doing little meditating during her break between surgeries. The illogical nature of the guardsmen, combined with her own pain was putting her into a bad mood. This bad mood, of course, was itself illogical and only betrayed the Mechanicum’s own nature as an imperfect cyborg, rather than one possessing the clarity of thought exhibited by Arch-Magi and others so far beyond the mere flesh of Humanity.

The corporal and the private took off, and a little later Sergeant Stag came out of the barracks to drill his fresh replacements he had been allotted to replace those that had been lost to the augur relay fiasco. Rileigh was again fascinated by the sergeant’s form. The scars on his body were still impressive, and the fact that he of all people did not require any cybernetic replacements, from this conflict or any of the previous ones he had obviously been involved in seemed a nearly impossible feat to Rileigh. Doubly so, given how he tended to put himself at the forefront of danger. She had learned her lesson the other day and avoided staring, instead only stealing glances here and there when circumstance allowed her to do so.

The sergeant was like some sort of well-wrought machine, sure in his movements and precise in his actions. He was maybe a bit loud, but the disposition of the soldiery to be particularly loud about their affairs was something the techpriest was getting used to. This was not something she was particularly fond of, but rather a fact that she had divined from her time in proximity to both the Legiones Skitarii and the Imperial Guard. In Techna Lingua or Low Gothic, they had a certain propensity for volume, and she would always be sure to observe that from afar. In the midst of battle, with unaugmented voices, it made perfect sense to yell, as gunfire and explosions did tend to be quite loud. However, somewhere steeped in relative peace, like the barracks complex, it simply seemed disruptive.

Soon enough the yelling-engagement with the new guardsmen was finished, and they began to disperse to various duties. Some returned to the barracks, others to the motornarium, and a few stood together to have a leisurely discourse. Sergeant Stag spoke with the malingerers for a few moments, seemingly having an easy rapport with the men. Rileigh tugged her robe’s hood forth once more. Even when she was much younger she had never been one to socialize. Perhaps it was natural that such a recluse child would be found by the Adeptus Mechanicus. Even when she was in lower stations within the priesthood she had always shied away from roles where she would be directing others, excepting tech-thralls and servitors. Her true place had always been in the heart of a forge, surrounded by the clamorous industry therein, embraced by the dense layers of the noosphere, and at work, creating works according to the laws of the Omnissiah.

“Hey. Hope I’m not interrupting a machine ritual or whatever.”

The techpriest snapped back to the present moment, returning from her reminiscing with a start. Rileigh looked up to find Sergeant Stag before her, tentatively getting her attention. In truth “tentative” was a poor descriptor, as tenderness was a quality largely unheard of among Catachans. All the same, as she surveyed the guardsman with her mechadendrite’s lense he was standing a polite distance away, with what she had to assume he thought of as a non-threatening posture.

“Nothing of the sort. I simply needed a few moments to collect myself after the consecutive surgeries necessary to return your men to a satisfactory level of function.” She cut herself short of making a rude remark about their lack of gratitude. While the techpriest had little care for social graces the sergeant had ensured the survival of herself and her adept, and aside from that there was an unidentifiable quality to how she regarded the man. Respect was not quite the right word, but she seemed to have strong deference for him, regardless of how short their working relationship had been up to this point.

The sergeant scratched his neck idly, meeting the gaze of her mechadendrite hesitantly. “So I know yer busy and all, but could you come with me to the armourium vault? I wanted to make sure everything’s in order, especially after the skirmish. If you could sanctify it yerself I’d really appreciate it.”

Rileigh was all too glad to perform familiar priestly duties, and to postpone further surgeries, if only for a short while.

“Very well, I shall attend to the needs of the machine-spirits.”

She began to stand, and the soreness of her burned flesh suddenly kicked in again. She hissed, a bassy static burst crackled from her neck’s vocal implant. Rileigh pulled herself up with her cybernetic arm, anchoring it with her weighty power axe and forcing her cybernetic legs to do most of the heavy lifting. As she stood she found a warmth in her right hand. It was unfamiliar and strange but it helped her up. Once she had stood Rileigh found that the sergeant had helped her up, and she found herself staring at the Catachan’s rough, warm hand holding her much more slender, and pale one. Almost reflexively she reached out with her grasping mechadendrite and lightly grabbed Sergeant Stag’s wrist, tugging it away from her hand.

“Er, sorry… It just seemed like you needed help standin’?,” Stag said quizzically.

Rileigh looked up suddenly, most of her features obscured by the shadow’s of her robe’s hood, but for her primary and secondary visual sensors. She was glad for it too, as the moment had caused a thoroughly embarrassing blush to come to her round features, but the depths of the stark white cloth hid her red face well enough.

“The assistance was… understandable.” she said coolly. “Let us attend to the matters of which you spoke.”

The techpriest started off in the incorrect direction, only realizing that she was doing so after a few moments. She stopped, looked back to see the guardsman, now more confused than before, watching her from the foot of the chapel. Rileigh took a moment to clear her obviously flustered mental subroutines and then turned about and began walking in the correct direction, gathering a still perplexed Sergeant Stag in her wake.

***

The armourium was quite different from the constant activity that the outpost’s barracks and parade grounds saw. The quiet hum of charging lasgun charge packs, the smell of gunpowder, and the very occasional buzz of a servo-skull or slow footsteps of a servitor had a wonderfully calming effect upon Techpriest Rileigh. As her head cleared from the aberrant warmth she had felt from the embarrassing scene that she’d partaken in at the foot of the Omnissiac chapel, Rileigh was realizing that it was likely the guardsman had brought her here as a pretext, rather than being overtly direct.

Stag is nothing if not a competent hunter, she remarked internally, he does seem to favour a certain combination of misdirection and ambush. It must be a tactic that had served him well upon Catachan, and wherever else he has fought.

Sergeant Stag was going through a dataslate he had taken from the front of the armourium, leaning back on a large row of shelving that held ammunition boxes for autocannons. He didn’t seem to have any particular goal in his analysis of the information upon the dataslate, he was most likely flipping idly through the consecutive reports of ammo counts. At least that was Rileigh’s best guess that she could divine from her somewhat damaged ability to sense the noosphere. It was no discredit to Draykon’s repair rites that Rileigh’s sensitivity to the realm of machine data was so disabled, rather it was likely that the damage she had sustained while channeling the monumental amounts of energy had permanently dulled some of her senses. She was, ultimately, no electropriest.

At the very least the air filtering and the roofed nature of the armourium made it quite pleasant to tarry in. The techpriest was by all means a patient person, but when it came to people she was also an expectant one. Ever expectant of people to finish their business with her and then soon leave her alone, that is. And so, standing in the aisle of the armourium, waiting for the sergeant to more fully state their purpose for being here, she could feel her reserves of patience ticking down, bit by bit.

“Well…?,” she started, hoping to goad the guardsman into speaking.

Stag set down the dataslate gently, and began, “So… thanks for coming with me here. I needed to talk to you, and I felt it would be best if this was said away from pryin’ ears and eyes.”

The techpriest turned to look upon Sergeant Stag more directly. What was he trying to say? Rileigh accessed her supplementary data-vaults, and mulled over the contents pertaining to Imperial Guard conduct. The main, salient points that came to her immediately were regarding the emphasis on obeisance towards superior officers, avoiding fraternization between those of differing ranks, and how to properly approach and enlist the aid of a regiment’s techpriests. She surmised that this was her liason’s attempt at doing just that.

“What further would you have me do?” she asked, presuming Stag’s intentions. Rileigh did not relish the idea of further distractions, or being entangled in matters primarily concerning the Munitorum.

He was a bit taken aback, “Huh? Nah, it ain’t like that. I wanted to speak with you privately because as your liaison, I wanted to give my thanks to you for savin’ our hides back there when you were settin’ up the augur. Not to mention how many of the men you’ve been outfitting with bionics. It’s good to see ‘em on their feet and able to fight again.”

It was the techpriest’s turn to be taken aback. The sergeant’s kind words were invoking a strong, but muddled emotion in her, which made her direly uncomfortable. She had done little to help the guardsmen in truth, and had only really fought against the Orks to protect the augur relay and the lives of herself and her adept. Rileigh was, however, a bit pleased to hear praise for her actions that day and her process of augmenting the wounded. She fondled the various charms wrapped around the wrist of her right, unaugmented arm, feeling the distinct ridges of the hexagonal nut before slipping her fingers around the familiar brass of the stub casing charm. She was glad the nervous habit was hidden by the voluminousness of her robe’s sleeves.

“I…see…,” she muttered eventually. The techpriest did not really know how to address such direct praise, it was not something she had a large amount of experience in. Compared to this, the lofty praise given to her by a magos for her perfectly constructed works felt glacial.

“I just wanted to make sure that you were thanked properly for it. Since you picked me to be your liaison it just felt right to foster some communication between us,” Stag continued. “Most don’t take too kindly to Machine Cult types, but you’ve done us a fair turn, and I respect that.”

The praise was too overt. Aside from the bothersome return of the unidentifiable internal warmth that she’d felt when the guardsman had held her hand before, her mind was also racing, trying to interpret the meaning of this heaping on of thanks. She had made the unconscious decision to not have much interest in the Imperial Guard’s internal politics, but if they were anything like those of the Mechanicus then Sergeant Stag was no doubt hoping to enlist her in his further attempts to increase his rank. The techpriest hoped that this assumption was in error, and that the Imperial Guard were indeed more like the Legiones Skitarii, where, generally, simple veterancy and valour were the deciding factor for promotion. I do not need further involvement in politicking, she thought harassedly, it’s how I ended up on this Omnissiah forsaken rock to begin with.

Techpriest Rileigh nodded, before realizing that the gesture was probably lost in the depths of her hood. She wanted to ensure that she was being clear, so before she continued she pulled back the robe’s hood with one of her mechadendrites as she took a few steps forwards. This seemed to grab the sergeant’s attention to an appropriate degree. Rileigh watched him trace the details of her face with his eyes, as they now stood barely two meters apart. The techpriest was far from an expert in reading the expressions of the unaugmented, but the intensity of his gaze hinted at his wonder and apprehension of her face and her cybernetics.

Given the opportunity by the pause in the conversation she observed the Catachan in turn. He had a noticeable tan line where his neck met his body, and where his arms met his shoulders, as the sun of a few worlds had likely left him with his current, darker shade of skin, while his flak vest and other garments had kept the rest of his body largely untouched. Up close Stag’s musculature was even more impressive, and so were his scars. Similarly obvious was his body heat and the well worn-in smell of himself upon his gear.

Finally, she looked back upon the guardsman’s face. His normally severe expression had softened somewhat, but his strong jaw and high cheekbones still kept their harsh angularity. His short, bristly, and thick black hair matched that of his eyebrows and the burgeoning stubble upon his chin. His deep brown eyes came to meet her own mix of visual sensors and eye. Everything, from the buzz of a nearby servo-skull and the armourium’s lumens, to the yells of drilling squads outside, to their own breathing seemed to become silent. Rileigh was usually so reticent to meet the eyes of another Human, Mechanicum or otherwise, that she avoided it entirely, but now, she couldn’t break the lock the two of them had established. Despite her internal chrono noting this interaction as only taking a few seconds it felt like they beheld each other’s eyes for the better part of an hour.

Rileigh blinked and quickly looked away, turning her head away and looking at Stag with her optical mechadendrite instead. With her grasping mechadendrite she pulled up the hood of her robes once more. While she still wanted to make her point about not wishing to be pulled into politicking between guardsmen, finding the words had now become annoyingly difficult.

Eventually she found her voice, clearing her throat with a rumble of vox-static before saying, “Yes. Well. I comprehend your gratitude, and while I think that it is important for the servants of the Omnissiah to work together, I do not think any closer of a relationship between us is appropriate.”

“Right,” Stag breathed in and sighed heavily. “You’re right.”

Rileigh’s heart was beating outside of its standard parameters, and that feeling of warmth within her had turned to an anxious, burning feeling. In her numerous years of service as priest of Forge World Metalica she had not felt whatever this noisome emotion was and she resolved to squash it, or at the very least learn to throttle it before it overcame her ability to think logically.

“At any rate,” Rileigh said in a much more techpriestly tone, “I shall begin a cursory sanctification of the stored munitions here. While the servitors likely do a suitable job, I believe they are Mark VII Josian-pattern ammunition handlers. The pattern is decent enough at basic sorting of weapons and loading of magazines, but I know for a fact that they do little to ease restless machine-spirits. I would not have further conflicts falter due to such a preventable factor while these machines are under my stewardship.”

For the next two hours Rileigh spoke more to a non-Mechanicum than she had over the duration of the rest of her life. With the sergeant’s assistance the techpriest sanctified most of the arms and munitions present in the armourium, and told the sergeant useful information about each of the weapons and ammunition before beginning the rites. The sergeant seemed receptive to the lore she proffered, though it seemed that his comprehension was ultimately lacking.

Before the last batch of munitions for the Hydra autocannon, nearer to the front of the armourium, could be sanctified the process was interrupted. Adept Draykon had tracked down his mentor, after some running around the outpost, and was quite glad to finally tell her that the shipment containing the equipment and components needed for the next augur relay’s construction had arrived. Rileigh sighed and excused herself, as she had to attend to the delivery. On her way to the hauler she reviewed the visual data of her close encounter with sergeant. She found her reaction to that situation disconcerting, and she quietly swore that she would prevent such a misstep from reoccurring.