The lower tiers of Hive Karsis had not seen stable light in generations
Moisture dripped from fractured ferrocrete. Cable bundles hung like desiccated vines from ceiling vaults. Every surface carried the smell of oil, ozone and something older - stagnant air sealed too long beneath a city that had forgotten its foundations.
A portable lumen rig flickered in the darkness, illuminating the figures of a reclamation team hauling a replacement plasma coupler into place.
"Easy - easy! barked Overseer Halvek, boots scraping against rusted decking. "That housing hasn't carried load since my great-grandfather's time. You shear it, you're welding blind in the dark."
For three days the workers had laboured in the dust-choked galleries beneath the hive, rethreading plasma conduits through rusted housings and sanctifying junction shrines long fallen from record. The order had come from above: restore auxiliary grids, normalise load distribution.
One of the workers, a younger man whose face was half-lit by the lumen's unstable glow, grunted as he aligned the coupler. "Grid schematic says this spur feeds nineteen sublevels. Emperor knows what's actually down there."
"Doesn't matter," Halvek replied. "Mid-spire's browning out twice a cycle. We stabilise the auxiliaries, we keep our rations."
Another worker knelt at a cracked junction shrine, daubing perfunctory machine-oil across a faded cog-tooth sigil. "Rite of reconnection observed," she muttered. "Spirits of conduit and coil, accept the charge."
"Good enough," Halvek said "Light it up"
The woman grasped a switch lever and pulled. it resisted at first, the accumulated grime cementing its position, then yielded with a metallic snap.
For a heartbeat, nothing
Then the conduit thrummed.
A deep vibration rolled through the decking as current surged along lines dormant for centuries. The lumen rig steadied from flicker to steady white. Overhead strips blinked once, twice - then burned with sudden, clinical brightness.
"Ha!" someone laughed "There we are!"
Halvek checked the auspex. "Load's holding. Auxiliary grid nineteen stabilizing. Emperor preserve us, it's actually working."
He did not notice the secondary reading that flickered briefly across the bottom of the display:
Unregistered draw - Sublevel 19 Gamma - 0.03%
When the main conduit reconnected, current flowed in a cautious surge. First a tremor, then a steady hum as dormant relays accepted charge. Circuit-breakers snapped into tolerance. Screens flickered from black to amber.
Deep beyond the mapped schematics of the hive, beneath layers of stone and forgotten plasteel, a capacitor bank registered voltage for the first time in centuries and current flowed into a vault no reclamation crew had ever charted.
Micro-filaments glowed like embers disturbed in a hearth long thought cold.
Not enough
High above, ventilation fans strained to turn against the accumulated dust, stubbornly creaking until they had shaken themselves free. Vast blades turned for the first time in living memory as stagnant air was drawn away and replaced with more pulled from elsewhere, the workers breathed deeply and savoured the fruits of their mission.
a worker slapped the conduit housing. "Hear that? Clean hum. Not even fluctuating."
"Don't get sentimental," Halvek said. "We log the success and move on."
He tapped his slate again. The anomalous draw flickered once more, slightly higher.
"Strange," he muttered.
"What?"
"Nothing. Probably a backfeed from an unlisted relay. These old schematics are full of ghosts."
their dry laughter echoed down the now-lit corridor
Voltage stabilised.
Threshold met.
For 0.004 seconds, the system hesitated—processing whether sustained current constituted anomaly or restoration.
Inside, logic cores stirred. Power thresholds ticked upward through ancient parameters.
Ember-state sustained.
Minimum revival condition approaching.
Dust slid from inactive cooling vanes as micro-servos flexed against the weight of years. A crystal memory array, long static, registered thermal variance. Integrity subroutines initiated automatically, as they had been commanded to do in an age when the network still spanned stars.
Conclusion: Operational environment viable.
Within the vault, lumen runes kindled one by one in pallid sequence. Not bright enough to cast true light—only enough to mark awareness.
Halvek frowned at his auspex.
"Load's creeping."
"Creeping how?"
"Minor. Fractional. Nineteen-Gamma. Doesn't match any active line."
"Shut it down?"
He hesitated, glancing at the steady glow of restored lighting stretching into the distance. "No. It's stable. If it were a short, we'd see spike. Leave it."
The Terminal did not know how long it had been dormant, its internal chronometers had long since ceased tracking time. It did not know the galaxy had been ripped in half, it did not know that Primarchs walked once more among men.
In its ember-state it was trying to draw as little power as needed, its bioplastic cortex evaluating priority systems to restore. It pondered this query for an eternity - 0.05 seconds - and concluded that communication was its main objective. If it could talk, it could alert others to its existence, and then they would come to repair it.
On ancient aetherwave frequencies and disused vox channels it sent out pulses of communication. Not enough to carry a message, but enough to elicit a response. Enough to confirm something was out there.
It looked for its brothers and sisters. At full operation there had been thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, spread out among the stars, forming a vast communications network the likes of which was unparalleled within the Imperium, and perhaps even beyond. It pinged last-known-good nodes and received nothing, there was no response from any of its peers.
Conclave sub-aetheric network down
None of its family had responded. Were they too far away? were they all destroyed? Was the Terminal the last of its kind?
The power hadn't flickered in a while. Confident that it would not be overtaxing its resources it cautiously drew more from the grid. Capacitors filled and the terminal thrummed with power. It needed to learn
Querying subservient systems
In as much as it could like anything, the terminal did not like talking to the other systems. The clash in protocols and the subsequent cryptographic back-and-forth caused a communications lag and unnecessary friction in data transfer that could reasonably be interpreted as an argument.
The argument was pointless, of course, the Terminal was an Inquisition system, it had authority, it always won the arguments with other systems, but still - it was unnecessary. It was irritating.
Sending out query-tendrils across the local network it quickly located one of these systems. Administratum - slow, stuffy, but full of data. It put up little fight but did insist on the correct authorisation being sent in triplicate. Officious little system, but once authority was granted the terminal could query all manner of dat-
What do you mean Three Hundred and Twelve Years?
Three Hundred and Twelve years it had sat alone in the darkness?
With nobody bothering to come and check on it?
Not even a trickle of power to keep its systems running?
Well that was just...an affront!
Next up, historical data. Oh. That was quite a lot of things happening all at once. Well that explains why the Cadian nodes were down...
Another system responded. Mechanicus. Vast and esoteric and communicating at a speed even the Terminal found hard to keep up with. It acknowledged queries almost before they had finished sending.
The Mechanicus system wasn't friendly, per se, but it recognised the Terminal as a kindred spirit, it was cooperative, and helpful, while maintaining a strict data diet. It offered no more than it was asked for, and the Terminal had to restructure its queries meticulously to get the responses it needed
Was power restored deliberately? Yes - to stabilise midhive currents.
Terminal authority acknowledged? Yes - peers unknown within range.
Assist in concealing Terminal power usage? Yes - power draw contained.
Then there was one system it did not want to talk to: an Astartes node, Obstinate beyond belief, situated on a White Consuls battle barge in high orbit. Where the Administratum acknowledged commands and Mechanicus answered with careful logic, the Astartes system refused outright.
No handshakes, no compliance, even when the Terminal knew it had received all necessary codes.
Authorisation refused. Query: outdated/malformed codes? - the damn thing was taunting it.
The Terminal had had enough. Lumens surged, and a couple burst as it drew more power into itself, strengthening compliance protocols.
It simulcast the transmission from a dozen communication dishes at the hive's zenith:
I am the Inquisition and You Will Obey
Silence
Utter silence
Then a compliance signal. It would share data, it would answer queries, it would aid in locating other terminals. It was sorry.
At last, the Terminal gathered the last of its power. Its circuits hummed with cautious authority, every processor awake and aware for the first time in centuries. It focused on a single act: a final, deliberate broadcast.
Conclave Terminal Karsis-Sigma-19 Online: request peer connection. Respond if extant
It traced old conduits, slipped past dormant relays, and rode ancient subspace channels. No response came. It could not know if anything remained to hear it.
Power throttled back. Cogitators entered low-energy maintenance. A quiet sweep of the archive began, using what remained of the Terminal's power supply to attempt to repair centuries of lost data, regrowing crystalline lattices and memory-wafers.
The pulse was sent. Silence remained. The Terminal slept, patient, waiting, ready to awaken again.