The Canoptek Spyder is the great overseer of a necron tomb world's endless upkeep, a massive construct whose rounded, hooded carapace houses the machinery of its labours. Unlike the necron nobility it serves, a Spyder never sleeps. Through the long dark ages between wars it drifts on silent anti-grav engines through the buried halls, tending the stasis-crypts that cradle its slumbering masters, repairing the vast systems of the tomb, and standing eternal watch over the dead until the day they are called to rise.
Each Spyder is equipped with a fabricator claw array, a cluster of manipulators capable of the most delicate repairs and the most brutal violence in equal measure. With these tools it can knit ruined necrodermis back to wholeness, rendering the already resilient warriors around it all but impossible to destroy. Many Spyders also serve as living factories, crafting swarms of canoptek scarabs and clouds of nanoscarabs within their own abdomens and loosing them to mend damaged allies or to strip the flesh, weapons and armour from the enemy.
In battle the Spyder is a stubborn and formidable presence, programmed never to retreat and to fight to its own destruction in defence of its charges. Once a tomb world fully wakes, these constructs march out alongside the legions, lending their fabricator arrays and their scarab broods to the necrons' campaigns of reconquest, a mechanical heart that keeps the undying host whole no matter how grievous the harm inflicted upon it.