processing

Encased in his grand lifter-throne strategium, the Lord of Iron was haloed by the flickering glow of his pict slates. His grim features were sheened with the pallid glow of the screens, his scalp pierced with cabling and studded with implants. Hooded eyes, always in motion, took in the vast quantities of data, processing and coordinating with every blink. Not even the greatest adept of the Martian priesthood could match Perturabo’s speed of cognitive processing in matters of war.
Every screen flickered with brutal imagery, passing too swiftly for the unaugmented eye to follow: thousands of updates from ten thousand separate engagements across this war front and hundreds more across the globe. Only a handful of beings throughout the entire history of the species could coordinate battle over so many complex theatres of war.
Perturabo’s fingers – artist’s fingers, thought Magnus – danced across invisible haptic keyboards, and with every stroke he sent scores of orders, altered multiple avenues of advance, or adjusted a hundred or more creeping barrages in real time.
To watch him was to witness a master craftsman at work.
More than any of his artificer brothers, Perturabo had been an artist and a creator. Yes, Vulkan had his forge-craft, and Ferrus Manus his proficiency with technology, but Perturabo had been an architect of beauty, a dreamer of things unimaginable to others.
Magnus remembered Perturabo’s private repository, the walls of its many rooms hung with plans for grand theatres, awe-inspiring palaces wrought in steel and glass, and cities of such grandeur that they approached Tizca in their ambition.
That so very few had ever been realised was an affront to his genius.
That his mastery was now employed simply to destroy was a waste of potential that still sat ill with Magnus, even as it now served his purpose.

Fury of Magnus