Люди Железа в плену у Тёмных Ангелов:

>Боевой автомат типа «Эксциндио» Железного Крыла

>Мало кто кроме старших кузнечных мастеров-ремесленников Железного Крыла знает что-либо об автоматах типа «Эксциндио» – возвышающихся металлических левиафанах, отлитых в нечеловеческую форму и высвобождаемых лишь против самых непреклонных врагов. Они – вихрь закручивающихся когтей, сгустков загадочного пламени и потоков радиации. Мало какой боевой порядок способен выстоять против одного из этих монстров, ибо выпущенный на поле боя «Эксциндио» не ведает жалости или сдержанности и, в отличие от автоматов Механикум, обладающих холодной логикой, он испытывает злобный восторг от устраиваемой в рядах противника резни.

>Лишь Темным Ангелам и Самому Императору известно, что эти боевые единицы совсем другая порода, нежели топорные автоматы Марса, а в их основе лежит сдерживаемая технологическая база с Терры. Каждый уцелевший «Эксциндио» – это измученные и оскопленные остатки искусственного интеллекта Темной Эпохи, последние из внушающих страх Силика Анимус, скованных для службы Человечеству. Легенды об этих кошмарных ужасах до сих пор встречаются в рассказах о Старой Ночи и страшнейшем зле войн Объединения. Даже в нынешнем состоянии они являются устрашающими противниками. Темные Ангелы держат эти злобные машинные разумы в глубинах скрытых хранилищ Калибана и выпускают их лишь против мерзейших угроз на самых опасных полях битвы.

>Реликтовое вооружение

Множество видов оружия, носимого в бой «Эксциндио», являются древними реликвиями, ныне известными лишь Первому Легиону. Зачастую они столь опасны для органических владельцев, что воевать ими дозволяется лишь расходуемым средствам вроде автоматов.

>Руки-манипуляторы

Хоть они и меньше, нежели боевые когти, которые служат основными руками этих боевых машин, второстепенные конечности не менее смертоносны.

>Внутреннее отражающее поле

Комплекс отражающего поля, заключенный внутри тяжелобронированной груди каждого «Эксциндио», соединен с цепью разрывных зарядов. Как только боевая единица получает критические повреждения или принимает закодированный сигнал от операторов Темных Ангелов, заряд поля инвертируется и провоцирует взрывы, которые разрывают «Эксциндио» на части.

>Скованный ИИ

«Эксциндио» не являются нескладными автоматам, они – обладающий самосознанием искусственный интеллект сродни Силика Анимус, коих так боятся Механикум. Каждый «Эксциндио» – единственный в своем роде дьявол из древних легенд и заляпанных кровью мифов; это убийцы и тираны Древней Ночи, взятые в плен воинами Императора, закованные для службы Ему и отданные под охрану Первому Легиону. «Эксциндио» удерживаются под контролем благодаря грубому удалению их логик-стеков. Подобная жестокая процедура, сравнимая с ослеплением или лишением слуха смертных ученых, оставляет им ограниченное сознание, делающее из них однопроцессную боевую единицу. Тем не менее, каждый «Эксциндио» сохраняет феноменальный, если не сказать настораживающе нечеловеческий, интеллект, поэтому за автоматами идет постоянное наблюдение в целях слежения за малейшими признаками непослушания.

>Аварийный выключатель ИИ

Темные Ангелы всегда принимают во внимание коварную натуру и жуткую мощь своих подчиненны с ИИ, а потому, когда «Эксциндио» выпускают на поле боя, у них есть средства обуздать склонности автоматов к совершению убийств прежде, чем они поставят под угрозу победу в битве или нанесут вред дружественным подразделениям.

>«Древний и гнусный, «Эксциндио» – это порожденное нечистой логикой и еще более отвратительными умыслами сознание. По сравнению с еретехническими конструктами Ордос Катастрофика, родней которым он вряд-ли является, «Эксциндио» не поддается приручению, свирепая ярость делает автомата буйным, а отрадой его ложной жизни является простая резня.»

— Из редактированной Истории терраваттских авгуров

>>46001
"Though millennia had passed since its creation, the machines within responded with alacrity, and each of the six caskets on the raised biers began humming with power. Glowing gem lights winked into life along their sides and streams of condensing vapours bled from louvred vents at each flanged apex.
Telok began intoning the names of the individual creatures suspended within. The degraded records of the hulk named them hellhounds, but their creators had originally chosen a class of mythical hunting beasts as their title.
<Tindalosi!> cried Telok as the hinged lids split apart and the caskets slowly rose into the upright position. <Wraiths of Steel and Spirit, come forth!>
Sinuous, hunched-over creatures emerged from each of the caskets in an exhalation of ghostly vapours. Dormant and without animation, all were locked into adamantium harnesses that kept every portion of their bodies immobile.
Their upper bodies were wide and ridged with armour plating like overlapping scapulae, with three pairs of arms corded with gurgling tubes and which glittered with fractal-edged claws.
Below the waist, their forms divided into powerful, hook-jointed legs. Their skulls were elongated, lupine horrors of serrated teeth and bulbous sensor pods. Power coursed through the feral machines, yet they were still without animation, without a vital spark to set them on the hunt.
Telok reached deep into the heart of Exnihlio and drew forth the Tindalosi’s spirits, six of the most vicious, lunatic essences he’d ever known. Their consciousnesses had been driven insane with isolation and a vicious regime of deletions and restorations. All six were haunted, viral things that hungered only to destroy. Keeping them divorced from their bodies was the only way to avoid unrestrained slaughter.
Their spirits rose from his deepest data sepulchres, along pathways long forsaken by spirits of nobler mien. They feasted as they went, absorbing the essences of slower machines that now fell silent as their internal sparks were devoured. With each morsel the lunatic spirits’ hunger to consume grew stronger until each was little more than a ravening data-vampire.
They manifested as scraps of light atop the altar, six glittering orreries of glitching, sparking static. Like dense atomic structure diagrams that would have plunged any who studied them into madness, they struggled against the bindings in which Telok held them.
One by one, Telok fed them into their dormant bodies. Each metallic death-mask lifted with a screaming howl, the furious static illuminating their distended ocular sensors with scribbled light and monstrous appetite. They fought the adamantium bindings locking them into their harnesses, but Telok wasn’t yet ready to unleash them.
First they needed the scent.
Like any evocation, an offering was required.
Telok detached from the altar and removed two broken lengths of golden metal from beneath his robes. The severed arms of Archmagos Kotov trailed lengths of snapped wiring and droplets of viscous floodstream chemicals.
<Drink deep of your geas, my wraithhounds,> said Telok, moving between the struggling creatures with the golden arms upraised. <Relish your prey’s machine-scent, know his binaric presence. Let it fill you, let it consume you. Its structure is all you crave. It fills your every thought with hunger. You will taste no other light, drink no other code, crave no other spirit. All else shall be poison to you. Only this will salve the agony within your metal flesh!>
Whipping blade-arms cut the air like razors, crackling with arcs of angry energy. The static-filled eyes of the Tindalosi blazed with aching desire, a soul-deep need to hunt the prey whose binaric scent enslaved their every sense.
With a pulse of thought, Telok unlocked the bindings holding the Tindalosi to their caskets. They surged free; enraged, famished and blaring with hostile binary. Phase-shifting claws flickered with unlight and Telok felt a thrill of fear as they encircled him like pack-wolves in the final moments of a hunt.
The geas he had bound them to would render him lethally toxic to their devouring hearts, but would their hatred of him overcome the prospect of extinction?
They howled as they caught the scent of Kotov, bounding towards the Barisan. They fell upon it with the thoroughness of the most rapacious ferrophage. Claws tore through armoured plates and ripped them from the gunship’s fuselage as they sought the source of their prey’s binary scent. The keel of the Barisan split as supporting structural members were torn asunder and the gunship was comprehensively dismantled in a furious unmaking.
Telok grinned as the gunship’s binaric screams filled the chamber, a drawn-out death howl of machine agony. Its once-proud spirit was dying piece by piece. Not devoured, not absorbed, but shredded into ever smaller fragments before being cast to oblivion.
Within minutes the Thunderhawk was a wreck, its warlike form broken down into a ruin of buckled iron, ripped plating and shattered, soulless components.
<Nowhere to hide,> said Telok as the Tindalosi raced into the wilds of Exnihlio with the unquenchable thirst for Kotov’s scent burning within them.
...
In theory, each of the Tindalosi were equal, but theory and reality were quite different. The first hunter Telok had awoken had always been the leader of this pack, even before there was a pack. Its inception date was centuries earlier than the others, when the mystery of its creation was still a jealously guarded secret.
Its bulk was greater, its armour accreted with patchwork repairs from the time when it had needed such attention. Its neural network was a hybridised collection of heuristic kill-memes and automated pattern recognition arrays. It had not been conceived with the capacity for autonomic reasoning, but the frequency-fractal processes of its supramolecular system architecture swiftly became capable of self-aware thought.
Its name was the result of a rogue decimal point within its ultra-rapid cognitive evolution, like a grain of sand caught in an oyster. Around that arithmetical error, a name grafted onto its awareness of self.
It called itself Vodanus.
Once it had hunted alone. It had slain the great orbital AI of Winterblind and torn the heart from the Arc-Nexus Emperor of a world that would go on to be known as Fortis Binary. But like most things in war, especially new and efficient forms of mass murder, what had once been unique, became almost commonplace. The enemies of its aeons-dead masters developed their own form of hellhounds, and the proliferation of such lethal assassins ended the forgotten conflict for which they had been created. What war could be fought when any commander would be hunted down and slaughtered within hours of their appointment?
But even with the war’s end, the lightning was out of the bottle and resisted being put back. Some hungers, once awoken, can never entirely be satiated. The hellhounds compiled kill lists of their own, and waged individual campaigns of annihilation.
The hellhounds’ newly united creators finally trapped their creations into automated void-hulks, devoid of life or viable prey. They hurled them into the hearts of stars and did their best to forget the monsters they had birthed ever existed.
A faulty drive saved the vessel bearing Vodanus from its appointed death. Drifting beyond the frontier of its former empire, its creators bid Vodanus good riddance. And so it had been for uncounted millennia, sealed in a cold tomb that slowly decayed and eroded the hellhounds’ existence one by one until only six remained.
Only the most astronomical odds saw the void-hulk drift into the celestial arena of Telok’s testing grounds. To detect a cold slab of virtually inert metal in the vastness of space was next to impossible, but the stellar surveys in preparation for the Breath of the Gods’ activation were necessarily precise.
And so the drifting void-hulk had been salvaged by Telok’s inter-system fleets and the Tindalosi were once again yoked into service as hunter-killers.
The six of them swept into the distribution hub like glittering, earthbound comets, claws extended and every augur sweeping for the code-trace they had torn from the Thunderhawk. That scent was already fading, and with every second of its diminishment, their pain grew in direct response.
The impossibly complex planetary schematics of Exnihlio named this place as Distribution Hub Rho A113/235, but Vodanus and its Tindalosi cared nothing for names.
All that drove them was hunger.
Every screed of their being ached to drink the prey’s code. Their bones were broken glass that could only be restored by the prey’s light. Their minds were ablaze with a fire that could only be quenched in the prey’s death.
A pulse of linked thought from Vodanus sent the Tindalosi racing through the distribution hub, slaloming between grumbling ore-haulers, climbing the scurfed tower-silos and circling the ore hoppers. The hundreds of servitors ignored them, glassy-eyed stares fixated on their labours in unending loops of servitude.
The Tindalosi quartered the area into search grids.
The prey’s scent was here, they could all taste it.
Fleeting hints of it drifted from droplets of floodstream. Where his mechadendrites had brushed the walls, they could sense Locardian fragments of transferred code-bleed.
Vodanus drew in the millions of microscopic traces, building a mental map of the prey and its movements. It looked for patterns, movements and things out of place. What was missing could tell it as much as what it found.
It rose up on its hooked legs, letting the data flood its hunter’s heart. The mind-screams of its brethren echoed in its skull, pleading to be allowed to feed. As if they knew anything of real hunger. Vodanus had slain kings and emperors. All they knew was the bland tasteless kills of lesser beings.
They begged and howled, desperate for their hunger to end.
Vodanus ignored them, loping over to where a yoked gang of servitors shovelled at an ore pit. A last trace of prey lingered here, strong where he had touched one of the master’s machines.
Vodanus reared over the cyborgised humans, its curved spine flaring with micro-cilia sensors. The ore pit was empty, but the servitors dug anyway, their mono-tasked routines clearly expecting it to be full.
An instantaneous inventory of the hub’s roster showed one of its ore-hauler vehicles to be missing. The noosphere showed no record of a reported fault, nor any exloaded docket of maintenance or transfer.
The vehicle’s absence was unauthorised. It had been taken.
Vodanus craned its elongated skull as two of its hellhound companions appeared behind the servitors. Relative to Vodanus, they were barely cubs. New machine souls.
Though their outward form had remained unchanged for millennia, they were lean and athirst. They circled the servitors, butting against them and slicing their leathery skin with quick flicks of finger blades.
The prey had brushed past these cyborg things. Transference had occurred. The hellhounds hungered to kill them, to sup those scraps of scent.
Vodanus snapped and hissed in a mathematical language from a time before the Mechanicus, from the machines of an alien culture.
No Kill. Bad Meat.
They hissed back, hostile and resentful, but obedient. The servitors continued their meaningless work at the empty ore silo, oblivious to the hideous appetite of the hunters circling them.
The prey-scent moved through the hub, and Vodanus had no trouble in following the trail now it knew what to look for. The prey had taken a vehicle, a crude and noisy thing that almost obscured the scent. Had that been the intention?
Could the prey be aware of the hellhounds’ pursuit?
No. The vehicle was simply a means of transport.
Vodanus dropped onto his many limbs and ghosted through the hub in a figure of eight pattern, sifting the competing scents of Exnihlio and triangulating the prey’s likely vector. A ragged red line lifted from the ground beyond the hub, like drifts of smoke in a volcanic cavern.
Its head snapped around as it heard the screech of tearing metal and the meat thud of claws through bone. The two Tindalosi it had warned away loomed over the ruined remains of two servitors. The first hellhound dissected the cyborgs like a gleeful butcher.
Flesh was waste matter, but metallic augments were snapped open. A rust-red extrusion from the hellhound’s skull sucked out the code like a scavenger hollowing marrow from bone.
Vodanus sprinted back to the disobedient Tindalosi. Threat signifiers blazed from it, and the remaining servitors stepped back from its screeching anger. Even they understood the terrible threat of this creature.
It slammed into the observing hellhound.
The impact was ferocious. Metal buckled as it was hurled back.
Overlapping rib plates caved inwards and two of its limbs snapped. It bellowed, but its spine bent in submission as coruscating emerald arcs of light flickered beneath its damaged sections. Its rib plates began unfolding, fresh limbs already extruding from within its archaic frame.
Satisfied this cub had not broken its geas, Vodanus spun around, ready to tear the feasting hellhound from its violation.
It was already too late.
The Tindalosi spasmed, scarlet lines bleeding through its convulsing body like a searing infection. It howled as the force of Telok’s geas prohibitions ripped through it in an indiscriminate storm of destruction. Ancient technologies melted to black slag within its body, trillions of bio-synthetic nerves and cortical synapses burned like fulminate.
Fine black ash poured from its body, inert blood of the machine.
The hellhound literally came apart at the seams, its silver-steel body parts falling into the ore pit in a clatter of components. The gleaming metal blackened as self-immolation protocols released ultra-rapid ferrophage organisms within its atomic structure that necrotised the body utterly.
The Tindalosi gathered around Vodanus. It showed them the prey’s red spoor. Their bodies snapped and grated in anticipation, eager to follow the trail to its source, but it held them fast, forcing them to watch the ashes of their brother scatter in the wind.
Bad. Meat.

>>46018
...
Pavelka shook her head, seeing the approaching machines in a way Tanna never could. ‘Their spirits are degenerate, ancient things. Mass-killers from a war millions of years ended. They scream their name in my head… Tindalosi! Tindalosi!’
...
Silver creatures with wide, ursine shoulders. Narrow spines and the powerful legs of lean hunting hounds. Too-wide jaws, filled with tearing metal saw-fangs. Glittering, compound eye structures like scratches of light in a cave.
Their howls were shrieks of thirsting need. Blades snapped erect on their every limb.
Bolter fire and hails of whickering, razor-edged discs flensed them. Explosions blasted fragments of molten metal, and ribbons of steel pared back from every slicing impact of an eldar projectile.
One volley was all they got.
Uldanaish Ghostwalker took the first impact as two of the Tindalosi leapt at him. The wraith-warrior’s blade moved too fast for something so huge. A Tindalosi howled, impaled, its gut ripped open and spilling shredded metal. Ghostwalker hurled it aside. Hellgun fire battered the fallen beast’s gleaming flanks.
The second bit down on his arm, and sickly green fire bled into the wound. The creature’s rear limbs curled to claw at the wraith-construct’s chest. Tanna stepped in and hammered his blade into its haunches, tearing through to its spine.
It fell away, rolling clear of his follow-up.
Ghostwalker’s gauntlet-mounted weapon swung to bear. Buzzing projectiles tore into the Tindalosi with a breaking-glass sound that was curiously musical. Three hounds snapped and clawed the ramp, poised to launch themselves at the Space Marines.
...
A slash of talons came at Tanna’s head and he parried with the body of his pistol. The weapon went off and he chopped his blade into a leg as hard as adamantium.
The creature staggered and Tanna worked the roaring blade hard into its chest. He hauled it free and kicked the beast back. He blinked and shook his head.
The monsters Ghostwalker had downed were up again. Shimmering green lightning played across their bodies. Opened guts were closed and buckled limbs straightened. Only once had Tanna fought creatures so difficult to kill, so unwilling to die.
The Tindalosi charged, but just before the instant of contact, two leapt to the side. Their powerful legs easily carried them over the railings of the gantry. Not his concern. Something for the Cadians and eldar to deal with. Behind him, Yael and Bracha opened fire with their bolters.
...
Energy beams stabbed it. Minor irritations. Its armour was proof against such primitive low-emission weapons. Crackling arcs of strange storm-lights struck it, psychic body blows of doom-seeking power. Ancient null-circuitry worked into its body dissipated these attacks harmlessly.
...
Green-armoured warriors danced around it, darting in to bite it with crackling mouth-parts and slash with buzzing blades. It fired electromagnetic micro-pulses that exploded their internal organs.
It heard screams from these ones, terrified screams that didn’t come from any vocal organs. It filed the information away for later perusal. No species it had thus far slain evinced such behaviour upon its death.
Its jaws snapped on a mortal’s head, wrenching the body from side to side and letting the serrations of its teeth do the rest. The fast meat-things kept coming at it, unaware yet that they could not kill Vodanus. Their weapons sparked against its armour, vespid stings against a leviathan.
Two of the black-armoured warriors rounded upon Vodanus – Space Marines, Telok’s data had called them – together with a slender warrior armed with a screaming-toothed sword. The weapon was clearly too large for her to wield, but Vodanus recognised that she too was a lethal huntress.
These Space Marines were tougher and more deadly than anything its long-forgotten masters had wished dead. Each was encased in toxic armour of machine-spirits that could kill a hellhound with one wrong-placed bite or the temptation to feast. Vodanus did not fear these killers, but knew to be wary of them.
Its prey was within sight, escaping along an outflung bridge of mesh steel and wire. Still within its grasp, but the first rule of any hunt was to leave none alive who might hunt the hunter.
A pair of thundering impacts slowed its charge as the Space Marine warriors fired their heavy guns. Vodanus twisted into the air, killing another of the soul-screaming meat-sacks with a flick of its hooked back leg. Explosive ammunition followed it down, caroming from the curved plates of its shoulder as it landed in front of the three warriors that mattered.
It howled in fury, but they didn’t run, which made them unique.
Everyone ran from Vodanus.
But, Vodanus reminded itself, these things did not know it.
Another blast of explosive rounds hammered its armour.
One detonated within its chest, and the momentary pain staggered it. Vodanus had not known pain of this kind in millennia. The pain of isolation and madness, yes. The knowledge that its existence was fragmenting moment by moment, certainly.
But the pain of being wounded?
That stirred old memories, old hurts and old joys.
The power Telok had imbued it with from the ancient machine began its hateful work, cannibalising mineral reservoirs within its body to re-knit the damage, undo its hurt.
...
It sprang forwards, faster than they could avoid. One clawed arm rammed into the chest of a Space Marine with all the force Vodanus could muster. Black and white became saturated with red. So bright, so vivid. So much.
Vodanus clawed the body into the air and bit it in half.
It spat the crumpled debris of meat and metal from its mouth.
...
Instead, it turned towards a last handful of soft, meaty bodies that awaited murder. Most were code-free, bare flesh and fear, but one stood at the control hub, violently enmeshed with the ancient spirit at its heart.
This one bled code, bad code. Her machine arms snapped clear of the hub, drawing into her body. She cried a warning to the others.
Vodanus howled and relished the terror it tasted.
It bunched its hooked legs beneath it.
And the world exploded in screaming white fire.
...
The Tindalosi faced him; he a wounded giant, they mechanised assassins that renewed themselves with each passing second."
- Gods of Mars

Собсна.

>>47144
>>47142
Авреем наблюдал, как падал лысый человек, переворачиваясь и кувыркаясь в воздухе. Беднягу звали Вехлас, и он кричал, пока не ударился головой о выступающую перекладину поворотных лесов. Дальше он падал молча. К тому времени, как его тело растянулось на палубном настиле в пятистах метрах внизу, большинство остальных рабочих вернули внимание к огромному плазменному цилиндру, который возвышался перед ними. Подмостки были узкими и раскачивались от шагов рабочей бригады внизу. Авреем видел, как они отцепили плазменный цилиндр от поддерживающих смазанных цепей, и направили в зияющее отверстие приводной камеры.
— Он уже упал? – спросил Койн.
Авреем кивнул, он был слишком ошеломлён и опустошён, чтобы ответить.
— Почему ты всегда смотришь? – поинтересовался Хоук.
— Я продолжаю надеяться, что кто-нибудь сделает хоть что-нибудь, чтобы помочь.
— Размечтался, – проворчал Хоук. – Механикус плевать на нас – мы просто рабы. Даже не люди. Они считают, что оказывают нам честь, убивая здесь. Ничего себе честь, а?
— Я видел, как четыре человека погибли, заправляя всего один двигатель, – сказал Авреем, вытирая пот со лба грязным рукавом спецовки. Когда-то она была ярко-красной, но с тех пор промокла и покрылась грязно-чёрными пятнами масла.
— Четыре, – задумчиво произнёс Койн. –
— Нет, последний не упал на палубу, – пояснил Хоук, бросив злой взгляд на Вреша, облачённого в мантию надсмотрщика, управляющего работой с парящего репульсионного диска. – Бедолага упал на один из нижних подмостков. Он не умер, но, похоже, переломал все кости.
Безразличие, которое демонстрировали Механикус, ужасало Авреема.
— Люди гибнут, а для надсмотрщиков это всего лишь неудобство.
— Мы – завербованные, – сказал Хоук. – Чего ты ожидал?
Авреем кивнул и опустился на корточки, положив голову на руки. Они воняли потом, лопнувшими волдырями и машинным маслом. Вместе с Хоуком, Койном и Крушилой он работал с сотней других мужчин на узких подмостках, оказавшихся частью огромных поворотных лесов, которые перемещались подобно гигантскому колесу вокруг внешнего корпуса необозримого термоядерного реактора. Бурлящий плазменный реактор
размещался в подфюзеляжной части приводной камеры. Диаметр приводной камеры составлял три четверти километра, всего их было пятьдесят. Каждой из них требовалось две дюжины плазменных цилиндров величиной с цистерну руды, которые вставляли словно пули в барабан револьвера, чтобы “Сперанца” накопила достаточно энергии и покинула орбиту.

>>48351
Как думаешь, что происходило с эльфопетухами?

"Perhaps this connection began even before humanity first encountered Askellian worlds, for the Lay of Askellios relates how the original settlers braved many Warp storms and other perils after departing Terra so many millennia ago. Unseen hands seemed to raise up eldritch barricades at every turn along their journey, and many were lost to horrors for which they had no comprehension or defences. Finally, after what seemed like ages of travel, the fleets found a serene area free of storms. It was far from their projected colonisation zone, but after so long in space, its peace projected a sense of welcome that few could refuse. Those who voiced any concerns that there might have been unknown influences guiding their journey were quickly silenced— through violence where necessary.
Over the following millennia, the humans of Askellon discovered that this serenity was not common for their stars. During the many Wars of Purgation against the xenos species who dared exist where Mankind was present, almost every alien civilisation encountered had records of the Warp and the entities that crept from that unholy realm."
- Enemies Beyond

"One of the first, terrible truths humans discovered when they ventured beyond Terra and into the stars is that they were not alone. Wherever Mankind went, it encountered the alien. Some civilisations were long dead, having fallen to selfdestructive hubris, natural disasters, internecine wars, or external predations. Others, though, were very much alive, and myths from the Dark Age of Technology speak of the terrifying first encounters with alien races."
- Enemies Without

"The Magos Dominus of the Legio Cybernetica are privy to many ancient secrets from the Dark Age of Technology, a time when the un-living phalanxes of Mankind’s creations shattered forgotten alien empires to carve humanity’s first empire from the stars."
- Retribution

"The Magos Dominus of the Legio Cybernetica are privy to many ancient secrets from the Dark Age ot Technology, a time when the un-living phalanxes of Mankind’s artificial creations shattered forgotten alien empires to carve humanity’s first empire from the stars, the most secret of these lores is Cybertheurgy."
- Extermination

"The Magos Dominus of the Legio Cybernetica are privy to many ancient secrets from the Dark Age of Technology, a time when the un-living phalanxes of Mankind’s creations shattered forgotten alien empires to carve humanity’s first empire from the stars. "
- Massacre

"During the Dark Age of Technology, the human race was almost
annihilated by its own hubris. Though Mankind’s first steps away
from its home world were faltering, natural adaptability and
belligerence of spirit soon saw it flourish in the void. Science and
technology advanced at a breathtaking pace, enabling the conquest
of increasingly far-flung planets. The vast reaches of the galaxy
shrank as Mankind’s capabilities grew, and alien races were driven
back into the shadows by the fierce light of human progress."
- Adeptus Custodes Codex 8ed

"He cut the vox-link to the Knights of Santales to perform one last check on the arcane instrumentations and crude wiring he had strung between the two god-machines and a cluster of distinctly Dark Age esoterica he had drawn from the Dreadwing arsenal for this purpose. The Warhounds could not fight, but they could still serve. If he listened, tuned out the stuttering bangs and the screams of a bastion put to the sword, and concentrated, he could almost hear the voice of Arsia Praedator in his mind. Its deep silica dreams came to him in a fitful Martian cant, a pronounced Phaetonii accent. The technology to which its weapons and power transfer systems had been so cruelly hardwired, however, was blackest Terran and its murmurings spoke of its distress.
Radiological dating placed the technology's origin at between twenty-five and thirty millennia ago, an era when humanity had only begun exploring the arts of species-scale annihilation. Its power had waned over the intervening epoch, but it remained effective, requiring only that which Canis Incaedium and Arsia Praedator slumbering reactors were able to provide.
An acolyte of Mars would have deemed this gambit sacrilegious, and would not have hesitated in laying down his or her life to prevent Duriel from proceeding.
But Duriel was not a Techmarine. He was a forge-wright, and a master of the Ironwing. He was learned where those of his brethren trained on Mats were not. The Theologiteks of Narodnya had guided his learning, encouraging the accumulation of wisdom rather than lore and of reason rather than dogma. He had studied heretechnika that would be burned on sight on Mars, infernal war machines that consumed the flesh of the slain as fuel, and worse, diabolical engines whose Silica Animus harked back to the blood-soaked legends of prehistory, machines capable of offering divine providence and fortune in battle in exchange for the blood of a willing sacrifice.
This was why the forge-wrights of the Ironwing existed. This was why the Dark Angels existed: to wield the sanction that other warriors dared not."
- Lion El'Jonson: Lord of the First

"The Codicier raised his hand to hover over the imprisoned weaponry. Not since the darkest hours of Old Night had mankind's mastery of the killing sciences been explored in such intimate minutiae There was no consistency of design or uniformity of function. Nothing in this vault had ever been, or would ever be, immortalised in the sequences of a Standard Template Construct. Every grip, sleeve and neural shunt that his fingers brushed belonged to an artefact that was unique in this galaxy. Each was a singular terror, born from the infinite creativity of humanity's apogee and never to be repeated since. Neural whips, lonophoric eradicators. Personality phages. Gemynd blasters. Glass-walled grenades that carried torpid, warp-borne mindworms inside. These were weapons that attacked the mind and, whether one believed in such notions or not, the soul. Built at the pinnacle of mankind's supremacy over the laws of physics, many had been constructed to eradicate not only their victim's physical body but its reflection in the empyrean as well, weapons of such unholy potency that not even the memory of the slain could remain intact.
The relic Aravain finally settled upon was a monstrous ancestor of the bolter family, massive-barrelled, fed by a multitude of plastek hoses that Redloss silently proceeded to clamp into Aravain's armour's power plant. Superficially it resembled a heavy bolter, albeit heavier, built to be wielded by Men of Iron or some other breed of upgraded soldier in the millennia before mankind had raised its transhuman Legions. The stamp it bore was recognisably Terran, though of no lore that still existed today. It was only as Redloss clamped an ammunition hopper to Aravain's girdle plate and started manually feeding the belt to the magazine that its more fundamental differences became apparent. The high-calibre shells emitted a glow that burned Aravain's psychic sight, even as he closed his eyes and turned his face away.
'Yes,' Aravain said, feeding his gauntlet reverently through the grip loop on the cannon's upper barrel and feeling its weight. His harness suspensors whirred as they spread the immense load across his power-armoured frame. 'This will put the fear of the First into them.'"
- Lion El'Jonson: Lord of the First

"'Every warrior here knows his duty,' Trigaine barked as twenty knights of the inner circle of Santales levelled their forbidden arsenal and took aim.
They opened fire.
Nerve induction shredders dropped men like marionettes, purging the brains of their electrical activity with vehemence enough to shatter an empyreal reflection. Gemynd blasters and lucidiron arc rifles attacked the cerebral cortex with the ferocity of a waking nightmare, sheer terror leading the soul to loosen its connection to the mortal spiral. Missiles bearing payloads of asphyx and sinistrum compounds alongside conventional explosives spread desolation and insanity even as they tore bodies asunder.
Every blast punched deeper into the world of the unreal and Aravain felt something scream from beyond its barriers, many voiced but singular in its ability to know pain. Aravain winced, his mental barriers dimming the mortis shriek but unable to mute it entirely.
The weapons of the Santales interfered with the normal patterns of the mind. No mental shield or exercise of Aravain's could block their effects. These were weapons built by the greatest warlord-scientists of humanity's darkest age to the express purpose of overcoming such wards. They obliterated the psychic utterly, further saturating the materium with a null-effect that would take years to dissipate. As a psyker himself, Aravain fell the effects more pronouncedly than his brothers.
Dark Steed lifted off with a howl of thrust before pivoting one hundred and eighty degrees and opening fire with its own upgraded armament. Its twin-linked heavy bolters had been replaced with psionic beam weaponry - the product of an unremembered people built to resist the irresistible. By such artifice had they endured Old Night. Centuries later they had sought then to resist the Dark Angels. The weapons survived."
- Lion El'Jonson: Lord of the First
Достаточно.