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Hi all, I wrote this small scene as an experiment. It features a man guarding the nursery in Nowa Avestia, the headquarters of the Resistance. Now, I will confess, it is a little self-indulgent as the name Wójek is what my Polish little goddaughter and nieces call me - it means "uncle". My heart melts a little when they call me that. If I decide to include this in the story of Comes The Sandstorm, he'll only appear in this one scene, otherwise I think it'll become redundant. Sorry I am not publishing so much of late. Bit of an injury issue that impairs typing, painting, driving, etc. at the moment, but I am on the mend! Thoughts, commentary, and constructive criticism, as always, most welcome. ===== The nursery hallway was quiet, its padded walls dulling the sounds from within. Wójek sat just left of the entrance, boots planted square, hands resting on his thighs. Fatigues crisp. Plate carrier in place. His rifle was mounted above, secured high on the wall, well out of a child's reach. A woman arrived with a girl in tow. The child spotted him instantly. “Wójek!” She bolted forward and climbed clumsily onto his knee. He caught her with one hand, gently but firmly, steadying her as she wobbled, then rested his palm lightly on her shoulder. The other hand stayed relaxed on his thigh. He smiled. Just for her. A flicker of warmth behind a face built for silence. Her mother returned his nod, quiet and grateful. Another parent joined her, watching the scene. Her gaze lingered on him for a moment. “Have you ever seen him in civvies?” The woman shook her head. “Not once.” Footsteps approached. Another fighter passed down the corridor. Wójek’s expression dulled, the smile gone, replaced by the blank composure of a man back on duty. He gave a short nod to the soldier. The girl hummed something tuneless, kicking her boots against his leg in time. He didn’t move. He just kept watch.

I painted this model when I was about 14, so about <mumbles> years ago. I wanted to give it a refresh. I didn't have the heart to strip the paint off one of my favourite models. Instead, I painted over the thickly slapped on paint. So, the finished result is not perfect, but I have still preserved some of my childhood. Thoughts and suggestions most welcome, as always. EDIT: For a Windows admin, I am a total newb with regards pics. Fixed.

Hi all, Following a suggestion from @W.A.Rorie, I'm going to summarise the main characters in each of the two stories I have written. This came about because I've been posting passages out of chronological order and a mix of the two stories. I hope this helps clear things up. As my readers will know, I do enjoy my languages and will provide some context for their names. The meaning of the names isn't terribly important, but thought it might make a point of interest. I've lived in both Śląske (Silesia), Poland and on the island of Fyn, Denmark and, where possible, I've used local dialects from those places as opposed to the standard Polish or Danish. Polish is easy. Danish has a lot of glottal or rear throat sounds and I am really not sure how to describe them, so will do my best. Hopefully there's a Dane here who can help! Anyhow, enough language waffle - I'll bore you to sleep if you let me carry on! So, to begin, the first story: Comes The Sandstorm Characters: The Narrator - Age approximately 25. Worked in the mines to provide for his wife and home. He spent every waking hour there and she found affection in the arms of another man. However, he was a brute, and the new opening passage details our Narrator identifying his wife in the morgue after she was beaten to death. He didn't return to the mines and was punished through conscription. He is later noticed by Mona, who sees promise, and chosen to be the new squad sergeant of the 280th after the death of Sgt. Rakoczy. He is a reluctant leader, but grows into the role. Laska Nowak - [lass-KA noh-VAK] - Age approximately 24. Her name meaning 'grace' or 'mercy,' she's the squad's lance corporal, so second officer under the Narrator. She is passionate, but disciplined. She put on the tough front, but, in moments of silence, she reveals her loneliness. She is fiercely loyal but I have tried not to step too much into the 'tough gal' trope. She is the special weapons member, wielding a grenade launcher. She and the Narrator eventually get together, which firms up her loyalty even more. She's strong, mentally, and has a rather sardonic sense of humour. Krystan Jensen - [kri-STAN yen-SEN] - The 280th's Chimera driver. He is, like myself, on the spectrum, but quite a bit further along. Like me, he loves logic and things being 'just so.' When he is seated inside the cockpit of a machine, nothing else matters; only he and the machine. Develops a relationship with the unsolvable puzzle that is 329. Czajka Gorski - [chy-KA gor-SKI] - Age approximately 24. His first name meaning 'lapwing,' a type of bird. For those not familiar: https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/lapwing. His surname means, approximately, 'of the mountains.' Squad sniper. A man of few words. Not distant, but certainly observant. He does have some heart-to-hearts with the Narrator. He is a good advisor, doesn't give up much about himself, but, as he has been with the 280th since his late teens, he knows how the squad works. Zofia Malmgren - [zo-FEE-ah mal-GREN] - Age approximately 38. Polish first name, Danish last, so a mixture of cultures. No nonsense medic. She is somewhat of a pacifist and does not like weapons, but understands the importance of the cause and is always on-hand to do her medical duties. She does carry a pistol, but we never see her use it. There is a frisson of sexual tension between she and Róża, but nothing explicit. Róża Makówska - [roo-JA mah-KOOF-ska] (the 'J' is pronounced like the French 'je'] - Approximately 28 years old. First name meaning 'Rose.' Sergeant of squad 265 and career military. Initially eyes the Narrator with caution, maybe even looking down on him, but grows to respect him. Holds her own during the assault on Complex 27, scruffing a young soldier and snapping him out of his fear. Unspoken attraction to Zofia. I leave the idea they are intimate to the imagination. Marek Sobczak - [mah-REK sob-CHAK] - Approximately 35 years old. Lance corporal of 265. Not entirely won over by the Resistance. Betrays the Resistance to Lieutenant Kaśnyk, providing intel. Slain by the Fennec. Lieutenant Kaśnyk - [LEF-tenant cash-NIK] - Approximately 40 years old. I've tried to write him like a film noir gumshoe detective. As exemplified by his interview of the functionary, he is normally given mundane investigations and, while he completes the job at-hand, he yearns for a challenge. When the Resistance start to act, strange movements, stealing old, mothballed war engines, he gets fired up. He follows the rules to the letter. He is bureaucratic to a fault and sees everything in black and white, though he is aware of the value of a bribe. Possesses a monocle that projects information onto his left eye that provides information on whatever he looks at. His henchman, Barcza, is his last resort and he is reluctant to use him, but he knows the value of the use of a little force. Barcza - [bar-CHA] = Approximately 35 years old. Spec Ops commander (read: Kasrkin). Launches a stealth attack on Nowa Avestia (the Resistance's HQ) after Lieutenant Kaśnyk gave him his orders. Mission failed due to 329 and he itches to go back and fix the problem. Barcza is the soldier the Narrator's wife, Ida, fell into the arms of. But, he is not only a highly professional solider - he is also a brute. The Narrator gets his justice, but have not revealed that, yet. ;) His team, Raven, Lis, Gauge, and so on, infiltrate in a stealth modified Valkyrie named the Night Rovfugl [Night roh-FOOL] - meaning 'Night Bird of Prey.' I'm working on a model for this at this time incorporating LED lighting, engine modifications and a few other things inspired by stealth aircraft such as the F-117 and F-22. Mona - [MOH-NAH] - Effectively the GSC Magus. We never see her be violent nor use her psychic powers. She uses her powers of seduction, that soft scent of cinnamon and cloves, her guile, and, on occasion, womanly charms. She is extremely manipulative and has lived for an undetermined amount of time. She was there for the previous uprising, approximately 80 years ago, and has not changed since. One of three touched by the Genestealer's Kiss. Jagiello - [yag-GEE-EH-woh] - Age unknown, though likely 40-50 years old. Effectively, the GSC Primus. Cunning, tactical commander. Supremely confident. He listens to Mona when it is convenient and matches up with his plans. His confidence as a military commander inspires others and it was he who organised the current Resistance....but this begs the question: is he pulling the strings or Mona? One of three touched by the Genestealer's Kiss. The Fennec - [FEN-ECK] - Approximately 30 years old. Based on the Jackal Alphus, but she acts alone. She wields a rifle based on the Denel NTW-20 with the .50 cal barrel. She is not loyal to a particular leader, but 100% loyal to the cause. She is the final tool in Jagiello's armoury and she silences Marek Sobczak with a round through he and his vehicle. One of three touched by the Genestealer's Kiss. I am looking forward to making a conversion to represent her. The Patriarch - The Patriarch only appears twice in the first story and only in the shadows. I wanted to keep him out of the way, as I am far more interested in the stories of the people than him. He may show up more in the future. Vehicles: Brutus - Based on the HH Malcador with the battle cannon. Brutus is the epitome of reliability, determination, and standing ground. If something needs doing, Brutus will be there by their side, a steadfast ally, her crew confident in her abilities. The Iron Duke - The mighty Minotaur, its huge frontis shield makes it an impenetrable target, protecting those sheltering behind it, all the while its mighty twin Earthshakers launch shells, shattering enemy fortifications. While Brutus is the all-rounder, The Iron Duke is the shield. 329 - The unknown. This is where I break canon. It is autonomous in the sense it can function without a crew. No AI. just programming. The problem is, no-one quite knows what that programming is, so it is unpredictable. The closest person to finding out its secrets is Krystan. And even he is still scared of it. Detects the danger from Barcza's team when they try to lay demo charges on it and obliterates some of them, forcing a retreat. The Night Rovfugl - [nite roh-FOOL] - Barcza and his team's unique, customised Valkyrie, built with additional modifications to simulate stealth features found in F-117, F-22, F-35, including exhaust baffles, matte black radar-absorbent paint, intake baffles, modified tail plane, etc. The model is still the flying brick of a Valkyrie we all know and love, but it was a fun challenge to try to do something about it. ===== Thank you for coming to my TED talk. I will work on the characters from the second story next week. In the meantime, have you any questions, please feel free to reply.

So, firstly, may I take a moment to thank those who have followed my blog and the story of Prawa V. I am truly grateful for your feedback and support. It has spurred me on to continue writing. Now, for the hard part. I've not received any negative criticism. I would like to invite you to take my writing apart and really lay the hammer down on me. Where am I am going wrong? What doesn't make sense? Which character(s) just doesn't make sense? I ask this because, while positive praise is great, and it is appreciated, I want some criticism. I want to know how I can improve. Go ahead. Do your worst. And I will say thank you. I appreciate your time!

I've been going through and editing the first story of Prawa V, Comes The Sandstorm, and making changes to it, such as adding to the story with things such as physical descriptions, and so on. I've completely changed the beginning and given the Narrator a far better motivation. We've all lot someone precious and I hope I can convey the numbness one feels in such a circumstance. As always, constructive criticism and thoughts most welcome. Ida is a Danish name. Czajka is a Polish name meaning 'lapwing,' a type of bird, for those not familiar. I thought it was important to establish the two languages in the opening passage, even if the reader doesn't immediately understand the differentiation. I do try, when using other languages, to ensure I give context, as I don't wish to alienate anglophones. Regarding myself, I am a Brit, but speak several languages as I am a bit of a mongrel! I won't curse you guys with Welsh, haha! Anything in my writing that doesn't have sufficient context, please do tell me. I want my writing to be accessible. Thank you. ===== I gave a reluctant nod, jaw clenched, lips tight, and glanced at the orderly. He carefully replaced the sheet over her face. The chill of the morgue was nothing compared to the cold inside me. She lay there on the slab, bruised and swollen, eyes shut. She’d left me months ago. The mines took all my time. She was lonely. I don’t blame her for that. I just wish we could’ve talked before she found him. A soldier, one with time for her. My Ida. And now she was dead. Now she was gone. I stood there, unsure of the protocol. So, I just stood. “Subject 07-B, confirmed as the deceased by husband,” the orderly muttered into his terminal. He paused, then looked at me. I barely noticed. “We’re finished here. Please go to the office for the paperwork.” I nodded, slowly, then walked numbly to the door. The sand scratched at the windows, a soft, steady hiss that hadn’t stopped in two days. The light outside was the colour of rusted brass, sky and ground smeared together in the wind. I didn’t go back to the mine and no-one came looking. There were no calls nor knocks, just silence, and the low hum of the building’s backup generator when the grid dropped for an hour. I sat on the floor, back against the wall, Ida’s tags in my hand. On the third morning, a slip pushed under the door. No name was on it, just block lettering: FAILURE TO REPORT – WORK CONVERSION ENACTED - MANDATORY SERVICE REASSIGNMENT - BLOCK C-7 – 0900 HOURS I read it once and folded it. I didn’t pack. Just slipped the tags around my neck and left the flat as it was. The conscription hall was a prefabricated block off the railway line. Rows of benches, dust in the corners. A machine-voiced clerk read names from a slate while two enforcers handed out equipment bags. No-one spoke. They gave me a PDF uniform that didn’t fit, stained boots, and rifle with "Nowicki" scratched into the stock. No instructions, just a sector map, a bunk number, and a duty rotation I couldn’t read properly. My post was a wire-fenced pump station on the edge of the district. Nothing ever happened. No one even passed by. On the fourth night, Czajka sat down across from me in the mess. He didn’t introduce himself. I had already asked who he was. I’d seen him watching me. "Heard about your wife." I nodded, eyes on the table. "Can't have been easy." Another nod. "They... uh..." He paused. Searching. "She didn't get a burial. That's not right." My jaw tensed. I kept my stare fixed on the scratches in the metal surface between us. "It didn't have to be that way." He stood. He didn’t look at me when he spoke again. "There’s a unit. 280th. Rough posting. Not for everyone." He paused. "But they bury their own." He walked out without waiting for a reply.

Pour l'Empereur! Finished this project today. Very happy with the result. What do you think of the French Legion of the 42nd millennium?)

Original thread start from here. First posts are copy-pasted as regard 40k content, the rest will be running updates. Welcome! This is the log where I'll post anything which I've converted and/or painted for others. Most of my hobby work is not done for my own armies, but rather for my brother's and our friends' collections. It's a great way to experience modelling and painting all miniatures in Warhammer without buying them. Background might be added later on as my friends work that out. This update is however not about something as lethal as cats. It's about something pathetic in comparison, namely a Maulerfiend conversion I've been working on-and-off with for a Skaven-collecting friend of mine. It's based on a sketch he drew. My buddy magnetized a rectangular base so that it could be used as a K'daai Destroyer. He was so eager about the conversion that he managed to sneak it past other projects in my queue... Still, the sculpting was surprisingly quick work and was over before you knew it. Couldn't have done it so fast three years ago: And here's the painted version, alongside his brother. Not painted by me (though the Squats in the foreground are): The CSM-collecting friend, let's call him J.A.B, inspected the newer starter kit Chaos Space Marine lord and Khârn, as well as the new Primaris Marines and probably a few older Space Marine character sculpts. He concluded that hip armour looks good and solves the silly look achieved by the thin thighs of plastic Space Marine legs. Some weeks ago, he visited his parents, brought a gaggle of heretical Marines and asked me to make hip armour on them. Quicksculpted, without time-consuming rivets, difficult spikes or suchlike. He was content, and after returning home to his study town he sent down Berzerkers to receive like treatment, and a FW Necron centipede which needed replacement antennae. I've tinkered with them since they arrived yesterday. Below are the results. Note "KIL KIL KIL" on the knife Berzerker's segmented plates. Also see his painted Lord of Change. http://i.imgur.com/6BKPi38.jpg WIP for my brother's little power armoured collection. Grey Knight legs and helmets and Sanguinary Guard shoulder pads and torsos. Hip plates added to remedy thin thighs syndrome. Cloaks from Anvil Industry to be added later: A Dark Eldar turned into an Eldar Fire Dragon converted for my brother. He thoroughly checked the Dark Eldar sprues back when they were new, and meticulously came up with ways to turn all manner of DE weaponry into Eldar Aspect Warriors with a little converting. More to come: Converted Slaaneshi Daemonprince for a friend: My friend told me to axe the @$$ and instead go for a lean Daemon Prince of Arrogance look, not Lust. As per his instructions, there is now also shin armour plates with images of Elf torture: What else? I also added two lone flowing pteruges dangling from its belt. I'll show you the painted end result whenever he finish this creation: Kill Team A mate of ours has moved back home after years of studying abroad, while a friend of my brother have returned to the hobby after a long break. Combine this with the recently released Kill Team, and we've got a hobby frenzy cooking with making characters, goons and terrain for a mash-up campaign between Kill Team and RPGs. Here is the first harvest of quick-sculpting and conversions, soon back to commercial sculpts. Kastellan Ironstrider, a mate's cyborg: Badoom! Broadbeard, a loudmouth one-Dwarf illegal radio station sending live from his heists and battles. My character: Gnorke Radfizzle, a Gnome sharpshooter with rad weapons, for my brother's friend: The gang so far: Gnorke Radfizzle's car: The friend who has written all the rules and organizes the whole effort has had me convert a gaggle of goons. Here's psyker Spikeskull: And Badoom! Broadbeard's hateful rival, Adman: And finally Gnorke Radfizzle painted by said friend (I had nothing to do with painting). My brother's mate is in for a treat! I've painted nothing of the Kill Team stuff, only converted it. All painted by Johan von Elak, for your display here. Badoom! Broadbeard: During most of our Kill Team-RPG games we've actually had music playing to represent both the immediate sonic barrage emitted by Broadbeard's loudspekers, and the music he transmits across hacked radio channels (with comments of media moguls jumping from windows as their enterprises gets destroyed by Broadbeard's escapades). He obviously also report live from the field, and is the lousiest sneak, at skulking up on enemies, you've ever encountered. Clearly, the audio-disturbed mister Broadbeard has ruined many lives through his noisome adventures. Which leads us to...

So, this one follows on from the Death of 329 blog, but occurs before it, as regards timeline. As with that one, it's not set in stone, this is all first draft stuff. For some context, at the end of the previous story, the Resistance and bureaucracy ruling Prawa V made a kind of pact which benefitted both, but was ultimately not what either wanted. Reformed into the Concord. Read through previous blogs for more info. This story takes place about 50-odd years after the first story. Characters: The Narrator - name is Michał (Michael, pronounced in English like Mi-HOW). He is the Sergeant. His partner is Łaska (pronounced in English like Was-KAH - means 'grace' or 'mercy'). Age approx 76. Łaska - Tough as nails, but, although you don't see it in this sketch, deep of feeling. Before they retired, she was Michał's second in the 329 squad. Age approx 70. Freja - (pronounced fry-yah) - a mid-level analyst in the Concord who has uncovered certain secrets they'd rather not be discovered. Age approx 24. Krystan - neurodivergent, and I hope that comes across in the writing. Socially awkward; great with machines. I really hope I have avoided the 'gifted' tropes with him and would value any constructive criticism on him, or anything, to be honest. 329 - If you want to know about 329, I strongly recommend reading previous blog entries. It is not sentient, none of that anthropomorphising here. It has programming. But, no-one knows what that programming is, entirely. Background: The Concord has a data centre with records on all citizens and maintains a watchful, intrusive eye on them. I leave it a bit ambiguous. Interpret it as you will. Freja needs to get there to destroy it. Yes, basic, I know, but this is first draft, so am working on refining it! Anyhow, here goes. All constructive feedback welcome! EDIT: Please do excuse the formatting. The platform I write on and paste into this forums doesn't seem to want to play nice. Have tried to clear it up, but apologies in advance. Also, apologies to @W.A.Rorie, haha ===== “We need to wake it up," I said. “Hmm?” “You know what I’m referring to.” Krystan didn’t answer straight away. He looked down at his boots, then back up. “I know.” “Can you do it?” He drew a slow breath through his nose, then exhaled. “Yes.” “You know where it is?” Another pause. “Yes. But… does it have to be that?” “I wouldn’t ask, my friend, if it wasn’t our last resort.” Krystan’s jaw tightened. He stared past me, eyes fixed on nothing and everything. Already, his mind was clicking through the routines: fail safes, heat limits, fuel mix ratios, coolant tolerances. He blinked and nodded once. “OK.” We didn’t say anything else. There was nothing else to say. The descent into the vault was quiet. Dust clung to the walls, a shadow of how long it had been since anything had moved here. There were no lights but for the ones they brought. No sound but the echo of their steps. 329 was exactly where he’d left it, resting on the ferrocrete, half-shadowed, its armour pitted with time. The numerals still visible on the flank: 329. Faded, but not forgotten. He spoke to his crew without turning, "Stay here." A few nods. He continued, “Primary ignition sequence is triggered from the command cradle. I’ll do it myself.” He gestured at the sponsons without looking, his mind already seated in the cradle, mapping arcs from 329’s point of view. “Targeting gimbals will sweep. Don’t stand in their arc. Don’t wave. Don’t speak. And, please, do not draw attention to yourself. If it doesn’t like you, it won’t fire. If it really doesn’t like you, well, it might.” His voice was calm but inside, his heart was racing. A young tech shifted uneasily. Krystan didn’t look at him. “Cooling feeds are bypassed. It'll overheat within minutes unless I balance them. That’s expected. Please, do not attempt to intervene.” Krystan moved, stopped ten metres from it, then softly stepped forward. Climbing the hull was slower now. His knees weren’t what they had been, but the handholds were still there. Muscle memory guided him, a grip here, a twist there. The panel lift was stiff but intact. He dropped into the command cradle with a grunt and sat for a moment, feeling the worn metal beneath his palms. He ran a hand across the console. “Right,” he muttered. He flicked the manual override. Static. He reset the breakers, one by one. Then, finally, he slid the boot key into its old port, turned it ninety degrees, and waited. A low hum, barely audible, came from one of the secondary generators. Then the panel lit, faintly at first. One diode at a time. Red. Amber. Green. His eyes fixed on the console. The logic lattice unfolded. A systems handshake. Diagnostics spooled into view. Familiar, painfully so. He’d spent years trying to map the full chain, to coax it into transparency. He'd never had succeeded. But now, it welcomed him. He felt it under him, that vibration that wasn’t just sound, but a presence. Deep in the hull, turbines shifted while logic relays cascaded. Krystan swallowed. And despite himself, he grinned. Joy tinged with something sharper, fear and awe. The raw rightness of it. He knew power. He knew engines. But this, this was control. Brutal. Absolute. It sang under his spine. And still, he didn’t understand it all. It was the unsolvable question. The puzzle with pieces he would never fit. But it answered his call now, in this moment and that was enough. “Hello again,” he said softly. A line of text scrolled across the upper display: CRADLE OCCUPIED – IDENTIFICATION REQUIRED He placed his palm on the reader. KRYSTAN/R/1 – RECOGNISED SECURITY PROTOCOL OVERRIDE AUTHORISED WAKE SEQUENCE INITIALISED The hull trembled beneath him. A long, low vibration, rising through the floor, the walls, the air. From far off came the whine of priming hydraulics. He braced his elbows against the console, steadying himself. Then the sound, oh the sound that sent a shiver up him. A bass-deep roar, both mechanical and animal simultaneously. A howl of turbines long dormant, now stirring. The Vulcans twitched and pilot lights flared. Smoke hissed from the exhaust vents. 329 was stirring from its slumber. The systems stabilised and the console stopped flickering. Krystan exhaled, slowly and silently. He leaned in, one gloved hand resting against the warm metal rim of the cradle. “I need you to do something for me.” He entered the coordinates by hand. No macros this time; it had to be right. There would be no second chances. OBJECTIVE: CORE FACILITY DOORWAY PRIORITY: OVERRIDE – IMMEDIATE EXECUTION CONDITIONALS: DISREGARD RETREAT PATH He hesitated and let the final line sit there, the cursor blinking. RAID PROTOCOL: KRYSTAN/1/R – AUTHORISED EXECUTE? Y/N He hit Y. The machine responded. The primary generator kicked in, spooling up and adding to the raw noise. The Vulcans spun up, a mechanical howl that shook dust from the rafters. Krystan flinched. The sound wasn’t for him. It was an awakening and a warning. He stood, knees crackling under his weight, and hauled himself up through the hatch. He didn’t look back into the cradle, just climbed down the hull, one handhold at a time. He was slower now, but still steady. He dropped to the vault floor with a grunt and stepped back. 329’s drive motors spooled to full torque. The hull shifted and treads bit into decades of settled dust. The outer blast doors groaned open. Light poured in. Krystan stood to the side as the beast began to roll forward. Slowly at first, then with growing purpose. The was no hesitation. It had its task. And it would complete it or die trying. As 329 passed the threshold, Krystan murmured, “Last job. Make it count.” In the silence it left behind, the dust hung weightless in the air. For a fleeting moment, Krystan stood, distracted by the movement of the motes in the air. He stood beside the blast door, watching 329 roll into the half-light. The ground trembled under its treads. He didn’t speak. His eyes tracked the machine until it passed from view, swallowed by sun and dust. Then he turned, slightly. Freja was watching. Something passed across his face, a quiet sadness. The kind you carry when something precious slips beyond reach. He looked away from her, down at floor, and paused. He looked up again, meeting her gaze. He gave her single nod and then left without a word. I moved toward the blast doors and stepped up beside Freja. She hadn’t moved. Just stood there, eyes fixed on where the machine had gone. I unbuckled the sidearm from my belt and held it out to her, grip-first. “For you.” She stared at it with uncertainty. Then took it, with two hands, a little too tightly. “You ever fired one?” She shook her head. “Keep it pointed down unless you mean it. And if you mean it… mean it. Nothing in between. And keep your finger off that trigger unless you do.” She nodded. I didn’t know if she really understood. But that was all I had time for. Behind us, the squad gathered, six of them. Younger, keen, and alert, but with the kind of quiet I respected. Not showy. Just ready. Łaska joined last, her launcher low, eyes sweeping the soot-streaked vault. Even she paused, and if she paused, I knew something was shifting. She caught my eye, glanced at Freja still holding the pistol, and gave the smallest shake of the head as if to say "Really?" I just said, “Move.” I didn't shout. I didn’t need to. We passed through the vault mouth, into the access tunnel. No banners here nor signs. Just the wet-metal smell of old air and concrete that hadn’t breathed in decades. The slope took us deeper. Behind us, the door clanged shut and light vanished. Our headlamps clicked on one by one, narrow cones cutting into stale dark. We kept walking. Then came the sound, distant, through layers of earth and steel. A rumble, almost like thunder. Then a howl. Longer than before and sharper. Like something tearing loose inside the walls. One of the young fighters stiffened. “What the is that?” “Our side,” I said. “Keep moving.” Even Łaska turned at that one, briefly. Just enough for me to catch it. “It’s still fighting,” I murmured. Then lower, so only I could hear: “Gods help them.” We went on. The tunnel constricted the further we went. The air had changed. It was less stale now, more processed and recycled. That told me we were getting close to something still running. Something watching. The lights from our headlamps caught rust flakes clinging to overhead piping. Some markings on the walls, old Imperial codes, mostly faded. Others had been scorched off entirely. I kept count of the fighters behind me. Six when we entered, plus Łaska and Freja. Still six, for now. We pushed on, our steps muted by dust and grime. Every few metres, someone glanced upward, like they expected the walls themselves to shift.Ahead, the tunnel bent hard to the left. I slowed, held up a fist. The squad froze. Something felt wrong. I edged to the corner and peered around. A corridor beyond, straight and tight. No cover. A gantry overhead. Some kind of casing bolted into the ceiling. It was too clean to be old, too silent to be right. “Eyes up,” I said, quietly. Freja was breathing too loudly behind me. I tapped her arm once. She exhaled a little. She still held the sidearm too tight. I waved Czerny forward. Tall, lean, and sharp-eyed. He was our point man. He raised his rifle. He stepped past the bend... A bolt of blue light punched clean through his chest. He was dead before he hit the ground. We dropped instantly. Łaska swore through her teeth. A turret. Auto-linked. Something dormant that woke when it tasted movement. “Suppressive fire!” I barked. Two of the squad rolled grenades down the corridor, concussives. The blast slammed our ears and lit the walls in white. When it cleared, the gantry sagged, metal warped and blackened. I didn’t wait. We moved. Fast, tightly, disciplined. We passed Czerny’s body without a word. Gods love him, but we’d come back for him. Freja had dropped in the chaos. I reached back, grabbed her collar, yanked her to her feet. “Come on.” She stumbled after us. Eyes wide. Still shaking. A few hundred metres further, the tunnel split. A junction, one path descending, the other a maintenance passage running east. We paused. Only five now. Łaska leaned against the bulkhead, reloading her grenade launcher. Sweat on her brow. Even she looked rattled. Then the sound came again, that same long howl we’d heard before. But this time it changed, twisted mid-way into something worse, a scream. It was raw and mechanical. Full of fury. Echoing down through layers of concrete and steel. Łaska didn’t flinch. Just muttered, “Kurwa mać,” and slammed the bolt on her launcher closed. We didn’t speak. We kept moving. We reached the blast door to the Core. Freja crouched beside the console, muttering to herself, tapping in codes. Her fingers moved faster now, more certain. Whatever she'd found in the archives, it was working. I stood beside her, weapon raised, watching the corridor behind us and waiting. I could hear footsteps. Distant, but closing. Łaska came up beside me. One of the squad stood at her shoulder, the others farther back, rifle aimed down the tunnel. “They’re close,” she said. I nodded. “Time to move.” She didn’t flinch. She just looked at me. Really looked. “You want me to take them?” “No,” I said. “I do.” Silence. “You’ve got a squad,” I said. “You and them. That’s it. Take the east vent. Loop around. Make it look like we split. Draw them off. Give Freja the time she needs.” Her brow creased. “You’re not coming?” “I’ll be right behind you.” And there it was. That was the lie. And we both knew it. Still, I said it cleanly and evenly. Not a flicker in my voice. She stared at me a beat longer. Then her eyes shifted and her jaw clenched, but she didn’t argue. She knew me too well to believe it, and loved me too much to make me say it. Her hand came up and brushed my chest. Then dropped. That was all. She turned, gave the signal. The others moved. Quietly, professionally, fast. She hesitated one step longer. Then she was gone. Behind me, Freja’s voice was calm. “Almost through.” I turned back to the tunnel. Took position. Raised my weapon. The hallway stretched on, empty for now, but not for long. Let them come. ===== The blast door hissed. Freja flinched as it juddered, then began to part. “You got it?” I asked. She nodded, breath shallow. “We’re in.” The gap widened, revealing only dark beyond. No light. No sound. Just the dead air of the Core, sealed for decades. She hesitated. I didn’t. I caught her shoulder, firmly, and pulled her gently but decisively away from the console and pressed her back against the wall. Her breath caught. My face was close, my voice low and tight. “Do you hear that?” The scream of 329 carried faintly down through the layers above us. It wasn't just a howl now, it was something deeper. Fractured. Dying. A Banshee. Freja nodded. “You know what it is.” Tears rimmed her eyes. She didn’t speak, she didn’t need to. “It’s dying for you.” I stepped back. “Now go.” She went through the gap and into the dark. The door stayed open. Whether by design or decay, it didn’t matter now. I heard echoed bootsteps, dozens of them I dropped to one knee and raised my rifle. I went through the ritual: Breathe in. Hold. Exhale slowly. Squeeze. Black-armoured shapes rounded the corner — rifles up, visors gleaming. I let loose, full auto, the butt slamming into my shoulder. They stalled. That was all I needed. Grenade. Cap off. Rolled it into them. I paused a second as I saw Łaska rolling her eyes in my mind at my choice of words. “Eat this.” The blast lit the corridor in white. Screams. Scorched metal. I kept firing. They wanted Freja. They’d have to go through me. And I wasn’t moving. My rifle was empty. I dropped the mag, slammed in the last I had, and braced against the bulkhead. My side was slick with blood. One round had found me. Maybe more. I didn’t check. They were cautious now, the Concord bastards. I’d killed too many. A few rushed, and had died. The rest held back, thinking I might run out of ammo before they ran out of bodies. They might have been right. Another burst from their side. I ducked but shrapnel bit into my scalp. It didn’t matter. They weren’t getting through that door. Not while I was still breathing. I pushed forward on one knee, exposed for half a second, and took one in the throat. One of the younger ones. Maybe nineteen, twenty years old. His helmet popped off as he dropped. ":cuss:," I said to myself. The next came roaring around the corner, bayonet raised and desperation in his face. I side-stepped, caught his collar, and drove him headfirst into the wall. His skull cracked. He slid down, a deadweight. I backed up, near the door. I heard the whine of their comms. There were more coming. Then sudden pain, sharp and hot, in my shoulder. I dropped again, my rifle clattering beside me. My fingers were too numb to grab it. My breath was ragged. My vision greyed at the edges. Still, I smiled. Above me, 329 still screamed. Still fought and still held. “Good,” I whispered. “You hang on, boy. Just a little longer.” Footsteps. Five of them. Six. I couldn’t lift the rifle now. I reached to my belt. My pistol was gone. Ah, I realised. I'd given it to Freja. Well, at least it might give her a chance. Not that she'd got a clue what to do with it. The first Concord soldier rounded the corner. And then the world detonated. Not me. Not my grenade. Łaska came in like a sandstorm. Launcher up, eyes blazing. One round. Two. Shrapnel tore through their line; legs gone, helmets split, screams swallowed by her thunder. She didn’t shout and she did not and would not stop. She advanced, firing again, calmly, brutally, until the corridor was painted in smoke and ruin. Then stillness. I saw her boots first. Then her silhouette through the haze. She walked to me and knelt. I lay on the ground, eyes fixed on the ceiling. I couldn’t move my head and my arms barely moved. I couldn't feel my legs. Blood pooled in my mouth. I could taste iron, sharp and bitter. I smelled damp earth. The kind that came after watering. Our crops were blooming. Reaching for the sun. I saw her, moja Łaska, her face above mine, blurred, trembling, and so beautiful. She was talking to me but I couldn’t hear it. "I dream of rain," I whispered. Łaska sat on her knees beside him, holding his hand. "Kocham Cię, my love."

So, I am tinkering with a follow-up to the story I have written while I take a break before editing. I cannot recall who who said it (Oscar Wilde, maybe?), but someone said "kill your darlings." I've written this brief passage that follows on from the blog entry here: Essentially, Krystan has programmed 329 to get ahead and provide a distraction for Freja so she can do what she needs to. There's no sympathy here. It is a machine. And it won't stop. Its only programming is to advance and wipe out whatever is in front of it. And it's buying time for her. "You hear that? You know what it is. It's dying for you." This is Freja returning to the scene of the battle. This is also a bit of an experiment in that I've never written like this before. I know this breaks from WH40K lore, but it felt right and I am happy with it. This isn't written in stone, yet, but it is an idea I am toying with. Anyhow, thoughts most welcome. Did my Beast in the Basement die a good death? Bonus points for getting the Alien 3 ref, haha ===== She waited until the patrols moved on. The battlefield wasn’t cordoned, just forgotten. It was left to smoulder, and rot, and settle into silence. Wrecked Chimeras still dotted the ridgeline. Spent casings pooled in shallow craters. The stench of fuel clung low in the air. She moved carefully, her boots crunching over vitrified dirt, past what had once been a sentry post. The husk of 329 lay ahead, split open along its spine, blackened and half-submerged in rubble. One of the Vulcans had melted down the side of the hull. The other pointed skyward, cracked at the base. She climbed the flank, fingers brushing scorched plating, and dropped into the wreck. It was cooler than expected. Dust lay thickly over the control systems. Most of it was ruined, slagged by the brutal impacts that finally took it out. The forward compartment had collapsed completely, but the rear diagnostics bay remained intact, though barely. She found the recorder wedged beneath a fused junction box. The casing had warped, its paint seared off and serials unreadable. She pried it loose with both hands, teeth gritted, and held it up to the weak light filtering through the wreck. One orange diode blinked, slowly and steadily. Still alive. She fired up the recorder. It showed a static camera view from the turret: low angle, scorched lens edges, a skewed horizon. Ahead advanced the defensive line of the 135th PDF, twelve soldiers braced behind reinforced barriers, barely visible through the haze. The turret began to rotate. Overlay data appeared across the screen. - Rotate –34.5° to port - Elevation –4.0° The Vulcan cannons howled. - FIRE: 1.7s – 29 rounds expended The image blurred with recoil and muzzle flash bloomed white across the lens. A cloud of dust, and flame, and shredded bodies. Freja flinched. She hadn’t seen it from this angle before. She hadn’t understood what was happening above her, in the tunnels. She thought she had heard it, the howl, but this was different. This wasn’t a war. This was an extermination. More data scrolled across the feed: - Inbound airborne munitions detected - Inbound airborne munitions detected - WARNING: ECM failure - Impact to primary weapon - Primary weapon operating at 50% operational capacity The footage stuttered. One barrel exploded out of frame. Molten debris flashed across the periphery. - WARNING: Primary generator temperature +89.4°C over tolerance - Power reroute: PROTOCOL KRYSTAN/R/1 – Primary weapon overclock engaged The remaining Vulcan whined higher, a metallic shriek rising to a scream. - FIRE: 0.8s – 17 rounds expended - WARNING: Primary weapon operating at +205% of thermal capacity The cam shook. - Impact to primary generator - Impact to primary turret - Impact to primary turret - Sensor anomaly: unexpected error - secondary sensor suite - WARNING: Fire in cryogenic compartment - WARNING: Primary weapon operating at +137% operational capacity - FIRE: 1.2s – 21 rounds expended - Rotate +22.5° to starboard - Elevation +1.6° - FIRE: 2.2s – 43 rounds expended Freja’s mouth parted slightly. The image blurred for a moment. The final burst sprayed wide, uncontrolled. The last defiant scream of a dying machine. - WARNING: Primary generator: terminal damage - WARNING: Secondary generator: terminal damage - WARNING: Primary sensors offline - WARNING: Primary weapon offline - WARNING: Hull integrity failure imminent - WARNI- ===== DATA LOG ENDS She sat still, her hands clenched in her lap. She hadn’t wept in months. Not for what she’d seen. Not for what she’d done. But for this? For a machine? She didn’t know. But she sat with it. With the silence that came after its scream.

I am so looking forward to completing one of my pledges - the Night Rovfugl, Barcza, and his team of Kasrkin. I will get this done this weekend. It is, quite honestly, one of the most adventurous models I have taken on. You ain't seen no Valkyrie yet, guys. And, in keeping with my mixing of languages and giving my vehicles some character, 'rovfugl' is akin to 'bird of prey' in Danish. The Night Rovfugl flew blacked-out, its matte hull cutting low across the desert. No lights nor insignia. Just the shimmer of heat bleeding from shielded exhausts, briefly visible, then gone. Inside, the troop compartment was dim and red-lit, casting the squad in blood and shadow. Ten troopers sat in silence, visors down, weapons held loosely across their laps. Straps swayed faintly with the motion of the hull. Barcza sat near the rear ramp, his helmet resting between his boots. He scanned each figure once, methodically, then tapped his throat mic. “Roll call.” The replies came clipped, one after another. “Lis.” “Raven.” “Slate.” “Gauge.” …others followed, each punctuated by a nod, a pat on the side of their weapon. They were ready. Weapons were checked again. Magazines seated. Grenades counted. Las-sights flicked on, then off. Barcza slid his helmet on and locked it tightly. His visor polarised with a faint click. No one spoke. A red light above the side doors pulsed twice. The cabin shifted subtly as the Rovfugl dropped in to hover. The sound wasn’t a roar, more a pressure. A low, rhythmic throb, felt more than heard. Fast and tight as it neared the drop point. Each pulse landed in the chest like a second heartbeat. The red light turned amber. Then green. The doors slid open. Barcza stood first. One hand up, a closed fist: hold. Two fingers pointed forward: on me. A flat palm, sweeping left: form wedge. The squad moved. Ten black shapes dropped into the dark. No comms. No noise but the soft grind of boots on dry grit. The Night Rovfugl lifted behind them. There was no flare nor aftershock. Just a lingering pressure in the air, then nothing. Barcza gave a short circular signal: check arcs. Two peeled left. Two right. The rest swept forward, low and methodical. He tapped his mic once, low gain. “Follow me.” And they moved into the dust, into the dark.

The Resistance have finally captured the war machines they believe they require to make their stand. Brutus, the Malcador, reliable, dependable the spine of their battleline. She will not fail them. She will hold the line, her battlecannon roaring, her sponsons blazing as she paves the way for the Resistance's advance. The Iron Duke, his twin Earthshaker cannons blasting holes in the enemy's fortifications. He guards those retreating and the wounded behind his massive blast shield. Then there is 329, the Vulcan. ===== The Macharius Vulcan squatted low, its twin cannons draped in canvas shrouds that no one dared remove. Someone had tried hanging a tarp over the sponson flamers. It hadn’t stayed up. The air around it felt different. Heavy and watching. Krystan moved along the left track guard with slow, deliberate steps. One hand held a grease cloth. The other rested lightly against the hull. Sometimes the main power relay was warm when it shouldn’t be. Once, the hull had shifted an several metres overnight. No one admitted it. No one spoke of it. He’d stopped trying to explain. He was tightening a bolt near the forward access port when he heard boots behind him. Jagiełło. The Primus approached. His coat hung open, desert dust still clinging to the hem. He didn’t speak immediately. He just looked. "Is it secure?" he asked. Krystan kept his eyes on the bolt. "Operational, if that’s what you mean. I cleaned the filters. Primed the coolant. She’s fuelled and ready." "That’s not what I asked." Krystan hesitated, then looked up. "No. It’s not secure. It’s not anything. It’s just... watching." Jagiełło stepped closer. Krystan’s breath caught. "I wouldn’t go near it. Not without me." The Primus paused, just within the shadow of the Vulcan. The hull loomed like a waiting animal. Then, with a mechanical whisper, the main turret turned. The was no warning. No servo whine until it was already moving. The cannons angled downward with purpose. A red dot appeared on Jagiełło’s chest. Laser targetter, dead centre. Krystan didn’t move. "I didn’t tell it to do that." Jagiełło didn’t flinch. But his eyes narrowed. "Then who did?" The moment held. The red dot stayed there, unmoving. The turret didn’t twitch. It just waited. Then the light blinked off. The turret rotated back to neutral. The bay was silent again, save for the soft settling creaks of 329's cooling frame. Jagiełło stepped back, eyes still on the hull. "It responds to you," he said. "It tolerates me," Krystan replied. A long pause. "Do you fear it?" "Every time I climb in." Jagiełło gave a short nod. Then turned without another word and walked away. Krystan remained, alone in the silence, one hand resting near the hull but never quite touching. Behind him, 329 waited. Mona stood alone on the upper gantry of the repair bay, half-shrouded in shadow, her coat drawn close against the lingering cold of early morning. The lamps cast long, low arcs of yellow light across the floor below, catching on riveted hulls and coiled fuel lines, throwing everything else into gloom. Three silhouettes waited in that gloom. Brutus, the Malcador, rested broad and battered, its weight sunk into the cracked ferrocrete as though it had been there forever. The Iron Duke lay tarped still, its shape concealed, but unmistakable to those who knew. A relic swaddled in dust cloth and reverence. And then there was 329. The Vulcan crouched in the middle of the bay, a slumbering beast. Its plating still bore the soot of battle, scorched streaks trailing from vents and barrel shrouds. Someone had tried to clean it. No one had finished. Mona said nothing for a long time. Her gaze shifted from one war machine to the next, slow and measured. There was no warmth in her face, but no fear either, only thought. Beneath her coat, her fingers moved gently against one another, like feeling the edges of something invisible. A memory, perhaps, of something she held once. "We called them symbols," she said softly, to no one. "We needed strength. Something to anchor belief. And they answered." She let the words hang. From her vantage point, she could just make out Krystan, a lone figure by the Vulcan’s track. He hadn’t moved for some time. She didn’t need to see his face to know what it held. She had seen it in others. After the laying-on of hands. After the whispers. That quiet dread that follows faith too quickly given. Her eyes drifted again, past the tarp of the Iron Duke. It stirred faintly in the motionless air. "Perhaps too soon," she murmured. A tremor passed across her shoulders, a chill. The hairs along her scalp prickled before she heard him. She heard no footsteps. Just the sense of presence behind her, as though the shadows themselves had grown heavier. She did not turn. Her hands stilled. The air around her felt too still, too sharp. Even the Vulcan below seemed to hold its breath. "We can wait," rumbled the voice. It was not loud. It was not kind. It was not unkind. It was a voice Mona knew. A voice she had heard long before the desert, before the Resistance, before she had words for what moved beneath Prawa V. She closed her eyes. Her body remained still, but inside her chest, something shifted. "We have waited this long," the voice said. "We can wait longer." Silence followed. The air felt charged. Mona did not reply. When she finally moved, it was only to raise one hand to her collarbone, fingers brushing the skin there like she might steady herself. Below, 329 remained where it was. Waiting.

I realise I've not posted a lot of late. Apologies. This is the follow-up to the Resistance uncovering 329 and Kaśnyk and his squads attempting to prevent them. I'll be honest, not totally satisfied with this, but constructive criticism welcome. ===== LV-426. The white-red-white livery of 2nd Company. Not a rescue bird but a retrieval asset. The paint was scratched, worn by desert grit, but unmistakable. Even before it touched down, the survivors of Kasnyk's squad were already moving, dragging themselves upright, rifles slung, eyes sunken. No one spoke. The ramp hissed open. Kasnyk stood apart from the others, his greatcoat stiff with grit and dried blood. He waited until the rest had climbed aboard. The wind caught at the hem of his coat as he paused at the threshold, eyes scanning the desert once more at the gaping vault entrance behind them, the scorched earth where PDF troopers had fallen, and somewhere beneath it all, the thing they'd failed to recover. He stepped inside. The cabin was spartan. Bare racks. Jump-seats bolted to the sides. A single data-terminal flickered to life as the co-pilot keyed it. No greetings nor debrief. The turbofans never stopped. Kasnyk sat without a word, pulling the dataslate from his coat. He thumbed it active, fingers moving with practised precision. Engagement Zone: Vault 17A Hostiles: Irregular, structured. Command signals: present. Asset loss: 3 squads. Cause: Heavy armour. Designation: Unconfirmed pattern. Hull marking 329. Behaviour: Independent acquisition. Targeted PDF units. No allied coordination. He hesitated at the last entry. Believed allegiance: Insurgent. He added a line. Note: Asset exhibited selective targeting. No known Imperial response signature. He checked it twice. Cross-referenced what he could. He still didn’t like the gaps. When the slate was done, he stood, crossed the cabin to the co-pilot, and handed it over. The man took it, glanced once at the header, then looked back at Kasnyk. "Transmit this immediately," Kasnyk said. "Begin immediate relay to Sector Command. Classification of asset loss, Irregular engagement, Evidence of organised insurgency." The co-pilot gave a short nod and plugged the slate into the relay port. The screen blinked red, then amber, then steady green. Kasnyk didn’t return to his seat. He stood at the open hatch, one hand on the frame as the Valkyrie lifted, engines roaring. Below, the desert peeled away. Dunes, and stone, and smoke. The sun threw long shadows over the cratered landscape. He stared down at the vault until it was just a black smudge, swallowed by dust. The hatch closed with a mechanical hiss. Kasnyk didn’t blink. He replayed, in his mind, the moment the beast opened fire and how he had no control over its actions.

So, I've been enjoying writing my little vignettes for the follow-up story to my story of Prawa V. For those following, you already know 329. I hope you enjoy its redicsovery. I do have a weakness for 329. It, ultimately, dies, buying time for Freja. But, in the meantime, I am happy to let it terrorise people! Also, I do know this board censors naughty words, which is cool, but I have written Łaska to be, say....expressive! She's the only character who swears in my stories, but, if she swears, you know something is going on. In this instance, she is not exclaiming about a duck. ===== We’d walked deeper than I would have liked. The air had that dry, metallic weight to it. Maintained and monitored. The kind of place that hadn’t been abandoned so much as sealed. Freja led us through most of it. She didn’t speak much. Eyes fixed forward, dataslate tight in her grip. Łaska kept glancing at her, then back at me. She didn’t like how quiet Freja was. Neither did I. We reached the vault door. It was bulkhead-class, reinforced, built to outlast a war. The panel still blinked faintly. Standby power. I moved beside her. “This is it?” I asked. Freja nodded. Her hand hovered over the control, then pulled back. “Wait,” she said. “Why?” She hesitated. “If I’m right… this isn’t just a server room.” She didn’t explain. She keyed the override anyway. The door unlocked with a sound like pressure releasing from some cold storage. Metal groaned. Then silence. Inside, the dark was absolute. I found the manual switch. I hesitated for a moment. The lights snapped on in slow sequence, each one humming into life, pushing the dark back a metre at a time. Then it came into view. 329. Dead centre. Facing us. No effort to conceal it. The paint had blistered from heat at some point, I could still see the war scars along the front plating. Dust settled over it like ash. The cannons didn’t move. The treads didn’t twitch. It looked like a tombstone with a spine. Łaska exhaled. “Oh, :cuss:.” She held her breath. Her hand lingered over the trigger of her grenade launcher. My eyes tracked the chassis. No heat shimmer. No charge hum. Then it came A thin red beam touched my chest, high on the sternum, just left of centre. A laser targetter. Perfectly still and locked over my heart. I didn’t move. Neither did it. “Back out,” I said, my hand gesturing, “Now. Slowly” Freja looked at me. Then at the beam. She didn’t speak. Just stepped backward, one deliberate pace at a time. Łaska was already moving. Her hands weren’t on her weapon. She knew better than to appear armed around that thing. The dot held steady on me until I crossed the threshold. Then it clicked off. I killed the lights. The dark swallowed it whole again. We didn’t speak until we were two corridors clear. And even then, barely. We three knew what it was.

Hi all, I realise I have not written here for a bit nor have I started on my pledges for the Call To Arms (for shame!). Been a bit occupied travelling and with new job, etc. I've set aside Prawa V and my beloved Resistance for a little. I've finished the story and am going to go back in a month or so with a big, fat, red pen and edit, whilst mostly muttering "what the was I thinking?" In the meantime, I've started on a sequel set some 50 years later. Here's a small sample. I've leant into the Danish a little more for flavour this time. And, speaking of other languages, when I use Polish and Danish, they're not supposed to be literally those languages, more they are placeholders for other languages spoken by the people there, much as English is not likely the actual tongue people speak in either. Danish and Polish are such radically different languages. Polish is very structured and has clearly defined rules. The idioms tend to be a little bleak, haha, but they reflect centuries of being conquered, then freed, conquered, then freed. You get the idea. Danish, in contrast, appears to have no rules at all. You either know how to pronounce something or you don't. And their idioms are a lot more whimsical. I've also taken the liberty of using local dialects from the places I've lived. The Polish is of the Silesian/Śląske dialect while the Danish, which I am nowhere near as good at, is Fynske. Anyhow, enough of me prattling on about languages. Here's Freja, an up and coming mid-level functionary, born and raised into the system, now known as The Concord, some fifty years after the events of Prawa V. She has led a fairly sheltered and privileged life with a good education and her career path mapped out before her. The Concord arose as a result of a treaty between the Resistance and the Imperium, ostensibly giving more rights and freedoms to the ordinary people of Prawa V. However, Freja is noting little inconsistencies and investigating so she can fix the errors. She was not expecting to find this... ===== The vidcomm unit's screen went blank for a moment. Then green text appeared on its dark display, overlaying the video capture: Classified Footage | Designate: A-329 | Complex 73 Engagement Timestamp: [REDACTED] Audio: ENABLED Playback: Begin Freja leaned forward, her breath fogging slightly against the glass of the console monitor. The footage was grainy, pulled from a static-mounted vox-cam overlooking the southern approach to Complex 73. The weather was overcast. Figures moved across the dust-choked plain, Imperial troops advancing in loose formations, fanning out around ruined emplacements and moving toward the shattered gates of the outpost. She keyed the volume up a notch. At first, only wind. A dry hum across the microphone. Then, low and distant, the sound. A rising howl. She could not discern its source at first. It came from somewhere beneath the camera, rising like pressure forced through a tunnel. A mechanical scream like some chained and tortured banshee. It built until distortion clipped the audio. Freja instinctively winced. Then came the first burst. Two seconds of staccato hammering, each round a fist slamming against the the very fabric of the land. The Vulcans spoke with all the fury of a storm battering a shore. On-screen, an entire forward squad simply vanished. One moment they were crouched by a barricade. The next moment just mist, and parts, and ruin. The earth behind them erupted upward in blood, and mud, and flame. She held her breath. Another burst. This time it tore through an armoured personnel carrier. The vehicle buckled in place, armour peeling backward like fruit skin, then erupted from within. Screams lanced through the audio feed, brief, and wet, and silenced too fast to linger. Between each burst, she could hear the sound of shell casings hitting the floor. The camera shuddered as something passed it, a dark shape, fast, tracked only by its wake and the blur of hull. It pivoted mid-frame with unnerving speed for something of its bulk. There was a pause. Then three more staccato bursts. Bunkers detonated like oil drums. Earthworks collapsed inward. The footage blurred again as debris smashed against the lens. Freja flinched. Not from the violence, but from the sound the deliberate rhythm of it. The way each burst was spaced, measured, and executed. She watched a nightmare given form. She reached for the controls, and paused. Her hand was shaking. More footage followed. Distant shouts. Vox-commands from officers trying to rally their troops. Then came the flame. The side-mounted weapons ignited, torrents of liquid fire scouring trenches. Shapes ran and burned. The beast moved through it all, steady and purposeful. It did not halt. It did not hesitate. The howl rose again as the cannons spun, a keening shriek as it unleashed its rage. And Freja, who had grown up beneath silver and white banners, who had believed in census codes and public order, watched everything she understood burn beneath its barrage. On-screen, a final burst tore across the horizon, cutting down the retreating line like stalks at harvest. Then static. Freja sat back in her chair, pulse roaring in her ears. Her voice, when it came, was small. "Emperor's name..." But the file gave no answer. Only a final tag in the corner of the screen. Designate: A-329 [NO FURTHER RECORDS FOUND] ===== I did think about having Freja's final line be "Holy Emperor on a bicycle..." but I thought that might break immersion a little. I've just recently watched the Fallout series and love the naïvety of the main character (okey dokey, then!) As for 329, it's based on the Macharius Vulcan and I took the name Vulcan and ran with it. The Avro Vulcan, a jet bomber from the 50s and onward, is famous for its 'howl'. There's plenty of vids on YouTube out there demonstrating it and I remember seeing one at an airshow in my teens. If I knew I was going to be on the receiving end of its wrath, hearing that sound would make me reconsider my life choices. So, I built it into 329 as a psychological weapon. Just hearing those cannons spin up would have many doing an about-face and heading in the other direction. I do appreciate the game 'meta' with this particular model isn't great, but it is rather one of my favourites! I do rather imagine the sound of 329's cannons sounding like a deeper, bass rumble variant of the smart guns in Aliens, though I have struggled to put that sound into words. Suggestions gratefully received! Anyhow, thoughts, as always, most welcome.

As an advanced defensive position or as encampment security perimeter, this very quick to build basic terrain set will find lots of uses on your tabletop. Add security to your Communication Tower, Landing Platform or Tower Control. Or use them as forward defensife perimeter for your Fortification Wall or Silo Formation. There are lots of uses for this set and i think, like the Containers, it is basic accessory that should be available to choose from when creating an immersive battlefield. This PDF will give you a range of moduls for a Defense Line that can be set up very flexible. The Defense Line fits all 28mm tabletop games with a Modern or Future-Fantasy setting. Make sure to check out the fitting models of the fortification series available and coming soon. Get the set here: https://www.wargamevault.com/product/511363/Tabletop-Battlefield-Basics-Defense-Line C&C is highly appreciated, so feel free to coment or leave your wishes for future terrain sets.

Apologies for the lack of updates over the past few weeks. Had a few things going on I won't burden you with. Now, it is time to return to the sciroccos and the sands of Prawa V. For context, I've already finished this story and we're about 1/3 of the way through. This is the first draft, so any and all constructive criticism is most welcome. I've not yet returned to it to revise for the second draft, so am open to ideas. (Yes, @W.A.Rorie, that includes your mini-Napolean complex Cyclops.) On a slightly different topic, I am going to pick up some Kreig Death Riders soon and convert them to represent the Scandi nomads. Looking forward to it! But, I have so much else to paint. But, I want more models. But, I have so much left to paint....you know the story. Anyhow, here we go: The air in the office had gone stale. The only sound was the slow churn of the cogitator’s cooling fan — faltering, now. It let out a low whine and rattled as it drew air through its dust-clogged vents. A faint scent of ozone crept across the room, sharp and dry. The heat it gave off blended with the weight of lamp-glow and the dust stirred by old paper. Scrolls lay unfurled across the desk, overlapping in long arcs of yellowed parchment. The ink bled in places. Some of the seals had cracked when he broke the bindings. One was still faintly scented — sweet, brittle, like dried fungi left in a mine locker too long. The script was in multiple hands: faded stamps, half-legible annotations, marginalia in a style he hadn’t seen outside of recovery court reports. Kasnyk stood over it all, monocle flickering. “Overlay patrol routes with decommissioned facility grid. Apply compliance-era topography filter. Match for inconsistencies in power draw.” The cogitator’s hum deepened. The screen strobed slightly — it wasn’t meant to run this hot for this long. Across the display, lines shimmered and redrew. Patrol paths curved and nested in awkward patterns. A few coincided perfectly with power retention lines. Others bypassed old bunkers — ones officially listed as “cleared,” but still drawing heat and cooling resources. He tapped the side of the monocle. “Cross-check redacted facility codenames with sealed archives. Confirm any entries tagged 329.” Pause. Kasnyk’s breath left him slow and controlled. He turned away from the screen for a moment, rubbing the bridge of his nose. The room smelled of dust and hot copper, of old paper and machine breath. Behind him, the cogitator whirred again — slower this time, struggling. He reached toward the centre of the desk, clearing space, arranging the layers with precise hands. A single zone remained blank. Not blocked. Not encrypted. Just… absent. Patrols moved around it. Supply shifted past it. Everything curved. He stared. A long moment passed. He leaned forward, one hand flat on the desk. The lines converged. Patrols. Supply. Power. Marek. Rakoczy.All of them — circling nothing. And yet, he knew. He swallowed once. He didn’t smile. He didn’t sit. He just stood there — eyes fixed, alone in the heat, while the cogitator continued to hum itself toward collapse. The cogitator was still running hot. The cooling fan wheezed like a winded beast, struggling against a backlog of compiled overlays and archive decrypts. The room smelled of metal fatigue, old oil, and the dry bite of ozone. Scrolls lay peeled across the desk, anchored with dataslates and half-empty mugs. Parchment curled at the corners. Ink had begun to smear where Kasnyk’s fingers rested too long. He barely noticed. His monocle fed him blinking overlays: redacted vault codenames, sector patrol paths, topographic heat profiles. Somewhere between fatigue and obsession, the patterns had begun to blur. A knock. He didn’t answer. The door opened anyway. Aleksy Klimek stepped inside, clutching a slate under one arm. His boots thudded softly against the metal floor. “You asked to see me, sir?” Kasnyk blinked, then nodded toward the second chair. “Sit.” Klimek set the slate down beside a teetering stack of old requisition orders and eased himself into the seat, glancing once at the glowing cogitator. “You’ve been at this all night.” Kasnyk ignored the remark. “Take a look at this sector breakdown. Theta designations. Focus on venting cycles and active power routes. Something’s not… aligning.” Klimek leaned forward, brushing aside an empty recaf tin. His eyes scanned the overlapping schematics. His brow furrowed. “Sir—Vault Theta-6. See the vent cycle log?” Kasnyk made a dismissive gesture. “I’ve seen it. Slight deviation. Not enough for a flag.” “No, not just slight. It’s purging every nineteen hours. Look at the others in that zone — twenty-eight, thirty-two, some as long as thirty-six. That’s steady baseline.” Kasnyk stopped. Klimek pressed on, a little more confidently. “That frequency suggests internal heat build-up. Which means something’s running in there. A generator, maybe. Or thermal bleed from active systems.” Kasnyk turned fully toward the screen. “You’re certain?” Klimek nodded. “It’s not just Theta-6, either. I was running a comparative when I noticed another spike — Sector 12, southern reach. No vault codename. Just coordinates. No record of habitation.” Kasnyk’s voice dropped. “But it draws?” “Same vent rate. Power spike around the same hour every cycle.” Silence. Kasnyk tapped a stylus against the desk once. Then again. His thoughts were already leaping ahead. “No turret,” he murmured. “No marking. Not Imperial pattern.” Klimek tilted his head. “Sir?” Kasnyk straightened. “Nothing. Good work, Aleksy. That’ll be all. For now.” Klimek stood, glancing once more at the screen before collecting his slate. “Sir—if you don’t mind me asking. That Sector 12 anomaly. What do you think it is?” Kasnyk looked up at him, face blank. Then, with just the faintest narrowing of his eyes: “Something no one wants us to find.” Klimek left, the door clicking shut behind him. Kasnyk waited a beat, then moved to the comm terminal at the rear of the room. He keyed in a line request. Clearance denied. “Flight support for investigative flyover is non-essential. Declined.” He exhaled. A pause. Then reached under the desk and withdrew a flat tin — dust-covered, corners worn. He pried it open, selected a small item, and stared at it: a ration token. Not legal tender. But enough, in the right hands. “More than your job’s worth,” he murmured. He shut the tin, keyed in a private channel. “Kasnyk. I need a favour.” ----- The wind had settled. The dust hung in the air like a faded veil, stirred only by the slow shifting of langkløv hooves and the soft creak of saddle leather. In the distance, the Resistance patrol faded into the horizon — first as shapes, then heat-blurred smudges, and finally nothing at all. Ælka stood on a rise of packed sand, her weight leaning subtly against the shaft of her walking staff. She wore a linen tunic stained by years of sun, layered beneath a leather breastband reinforced with stitched bone and thread. Her forearms were wrapped in hardened bracers, the leather dulled and scarred. Tough breeches, desert-worn, were tucked into heavy, dust-filmed boots that reached mid-calf. Her face, as always, was mostly concealed — a cloth wrap over her mouth and nose, her head covered in gauze and woven cloth. Only her eyes were exposed: lined, dark, and steady. Strands of long grey hair spilled from beneath her head covering in an uneven curtain, soft and dry like wind-carved scrub. She spoke without turning. “They walk toward something they do not understand.” The words carried no malice. Just certainty. Stenrik stood beside her, hands at his belt, watching the same empty horizon. His frame was compact, wiry — not with the mass of a fighter, but the lean tension of a cliffside climber. Every tendon was taut, every motion efficient. He had already re-secured his mask after the meeting — an old, functional thing, scratched and patched, its lenses clouded at the edges. Now he lifted it back into place with a practised tug of the strap. His voice came muffled through the filter. “If that is what must happen to prevent a war, so be it.” He moved with precision, swinging up onto the langkløv beside him — the tall, long-legged desert beast shifting its weight as he settled. Its hooves pressed deep into the sand. Ælka’s mount stood nearby, snorting gently, saddle tassels clicking in the breeze. A younger nomad lingered behind them, eyes still fixed on the fading trail. “Why help them?” he asked quietly. Ælka turned to him just enough to be heard. “Because Kova walked with us. And because they walk toward something no one else will.” She looked back out across the desert. “Hun kender varmen fra støvet.” The young man nodded, uncertain but trusting her wisdom.. Far ahead, the Resistance convoy had already vanished into the dunes. Only the dust lingered, swirling like mist. Ælka said nothing more. She pulled her face wrap tighter and mounted her langkløv, moving with the slow precision of someone who had done this for decades. Behind her, the desert waited.

Firstly, my apologies for any errors in my Danish. I am far better at Polish! I hope these three passages help to bring to life the different waves of settlers who arrived on Prawa V over the centuries. I also hope it deepens the mystery of Mona a little. As always, comments, criticism, etc. most welcome. Thank you. If you're interested in pronunciation, it's Jagiełło (yah - gee - eh - woh - soft G), Stenrik (steen - rik), Kasnyk (cash - nik - yes, I am aware I've missed out the accent on the S but I am not going back to change them all now!), Sobczak (sob - chack), Czajka (chy - kah). We stopped ten paces short. No one spoke. The wind stirred between us — not strong, not loud, but constant. It carried the dry scent of old canvas, scrub brush, and sun-scoured stone. One of the nomads raised a hand, palm down. Not to stop us. Just to hold the stillness in place. Jagiełło didn’t flinch. He stood level, eyes forward. The weight of his presence didn’t shift. But when Mona stepped slightly ahead of him, no one missed it — least of all the nomads. She lowered her hood. The change wasn’t in her posture, but in the air around her. She moved as if this plain were familiar. Not recently — but in the way a road becomes part of you after enough miles. Then she spoke. Not loudly. Not with ceremony. Just a few words in a tongue none of us knew. A murmur rose among the nomads. One of them, younger, grunted something back — fast, uncertain. But another, an older woman wrapped in a dust-bleached shawl, stepped forward and narrowed her eyes. She made a sign I didn’t know — three fingers to the chest, then to the wind. Then she said it. Quiet. Like tasting it to be sure. “Kova.” Mona didn’t answer. Didn’t blink. Another voice, further back. A man this time. Hoarse. “Kirana?” Mona tilted her head slightly, not in confirmation. Not in denial. Just the silence of someone who’s been called many things, and knows which ones to answer to. The old woman nodded. Once. Then turned to the others and spoke in a low stream — the words flowed like sand over metal, rough and worn smooth by time. One by one, the nomads lowered their shoulders. One stepped aside, creating space. Another poured water into a small iron bowl and set it on a flat stone between us. Not a welcome. Not yet. An invitation. I glanced at Jagiełło. His jaw had tightened just a fraction. He was still. But I could feel the calculation shifting behind his eyes. Mona looked straight ahead. Calm. Steady. The wind pulled gently at the hem of her coat. ----- Kasnyk stood at the window for a moment longer than necessary. The desert outside was dipped in twilight, wind dragging sand across the concrete lip of the compound’s inner wall. Below, a generator stuttered and caught, coughing back to life with a wheeze of tired pistons. Behind him, the cogitator array continued its quiet work, charting terrain overlays and patrol logs onto a wide, pulsing grid. The screen showed sector loops that didn’t loop, supply routes that edged too close to sealed archives, and updated manifests that included items no longer in inventory. He tapped the side of his monocle. “Filter for supply redundancy. Cross-check energy draw against cooling systems allocated to decommissioned bunkers. Highlight anything rerouted.” The lens flickered. One by one, old bunkers lit up — most cold. One glowed faint amber. Vault Theta-6. Again. Kasnyk frowned. He reached for a dataslate on the side table and loaded the recent archive pull — old requisitions, handwritten manifests, post-war facility diagrams. That was when there was a knock on the door. “Enter,” he said, not looking up. The functionary stepped in, a junior aide barely out of academy stripes, arms burdened with scrolls wrapped in old twine and dataslates bound in copper crimps. He crossed the room quietly and deposited them on the bench beneath the auxiliary map display. Then waited. Kasnyk continued for a moment, narrowing the patrol sector overlay, eyes flicking across the junctions like a man reading an old scar. Only when he reached for a stylus that wasn’t there did he realise someone was still in the room. His eyes lifted. A brief frown creased his brow — no more than a second. “Dismissed,” he said, voice low but firm. The functionary left without a word. The door closed. Kasnyk returned to the display. He isolated the patrol paths of the 280th Sunward Watch across the last six weeks. They weren’t guarding terrain. They weren’t clearing routes.They were moving around something. Searching. “They’re not holding ground,” he murmured. “They’re searching for something.” The cogitator chimed. New transmission received – delayed sync. A small green icon blinked into life. Partial. Fragmented. Sergeant Marek Sobczak. Timestamped two nights prior. Low priority flag. Civilian channel. He opened it. There were no visuals — just Marek’s voice, crackling and warped: “...confirm visual on something… unmarked… not listed on any— vault appears active… power draw doesn’t match records… forwarding… can’t confirm full schematic, but the shape— it’s massive. Not local. They’ve… they’ve moved something, sir. They—” The file ended mid-transmission. Kasnyk sat still. Then called up the old topographical logs from the years immediately after the last compliance sweep — the last time anyone had mapped beneath Sector Twelve in detail. He fed in the newer, redacted layouts. The overlays pulsed. One showed an access tunnel decommissioned. The newer version showed… nothing. A flatness. But the patrols curved around it. “Compare,” he said softly. “List facility differences, changes to supply nodes, reassigned storage depots.” The system fed it in: cooling lines rerouted. Fuel allocations tagged as ‘emergency buffer stock’ never accounted for. Power cells drawn off-grid. Kasnyk leaned forward slowly. Hands flat on the desk. “There’s something there, isn’t there?” A pause. Then, more quietly: “They’re waking it up.” ----- The fire pit crackled low, sending up thin curls of smoke that vanished into the pale sky. The light was shifting now — no longer the flat white of day, but the burnished orange that came before true dusk. Shadows stretched long and slow across the dust. We were seated in a rough circle near the centre of the camp, a shallow depression lined with stones. The nomads didn’t crowd us. They kept distance, even now. Not out of fear. Just a different rhythm. Their clothing was layered, practical. Cloaks stitched from sun-bleached canvas and old industrial fabric, some dyed in earthen tones, others faded into pale greys. Boots and footwraps varied — a few wore repurposed treadplates strapped with cord, others had sand-hardened hides laced tight. Brass charms and wire-bound tools hung from belts, clinking softly as they moved. Nothing matched. Everything served a purpose. Their leader stood just off-centre, framed against a lean-to strung with scavenged cloth. He was tall, narrow-shouldered, and moved like someone used to measuring every step. When he finally stepped forward, he reached up slowly and removed his mask. It was old, military-issue from some forgotten war — rubber faded, filters patched with wire. He didn’t unclip it for comfort. He did it to look Jagiełło in the eye. “Jeg er Stenrik,” he said. His voice was dry but steady. Jagiełło gave a small nod. “You know why we’re here.” Stenrik studied him. “We heard the ground speak. Not with voice. With weight.” Mona remained silent, seated just behind Jagiełło. The old woman from before sat beside her, saying nothing, fingers loosely clasped over a bowl of ash and stone. Stenrik continued, switching to the shared tongue. “Something moves below the sands. Old. Not yours. Not ours.” Jagiełło's eyes narrowed. “You know where?” Stenrik shook his head once. “We know signs. Dust that falls without wind. Vibration in stone. Dry places turning damp overnight. It sleeps deep. But it turns in its sleep.” There was a pause. Jagiełło reached behind him and took something from Czajka’s pack — a bundled cloth sack. He opened it carefully, revealing a compact rig of pipes and mesh folded tight into a carrier frame. “Atmos capture. Ten litres at dusk, more if the wind is right,” he said. Stenrik didn’t reach for it. He looked at it, then at Jagiełło. “A gift?” Jagiełło nodded. “Not charity. Trade. Respect.” Stenrik considered this, then turned to one of the others and murmured something in their soft dialect. A few of the younger nomads whispered behind their scarves. “Det er gjort,” the elder woman finally said. It is done. A quiet fell. One of the nomads stood and stepped forward, pressing his thumb to his chest, then toward the horizon. Not a pledge. Just understanding. I watched them move, speak, shift. There was no theatre here. No performance. Just the slow machinery of trust turning, one click at a time. As we made ready to leave, the old woman leaned toward Mona. Her voice barely carried. "Du går stadig med en lang skygge, Kova.“ - You still walk with a long shadow, Kova. Mona offered a small, gracious smile and dipped her head in a tiny nod. The wind picked up again as we turned for the ridge. And behind us, the camp folded back into silence.

The vault walls were old steel, streaked with oxidation and reinforced with thick slabs of desert-cut stone. Lamplight traced long shadows across maps, dataslates, and supply manifests scattered over a folding table at the centre of the room. “They found him slumped in the runner,” she said, voice soft. “Or, at least, what remained. No one heard the shot.” “They weren’t meant to.” Jagiełło didn’t look up from the slate he was reviewing. He paused. "The round was designed for targets heavier than him.” “You authorised it.” “I did.” “And the slate?” He finally looked up. His face gave nothing. “He sent it. Too late to stop. Not enough to convict.” Mona didn’t blink. “You gambled.” “I assessed risk.” “You’re better than that,” she added, voice quieter now. “Or you were.” She didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t need to. The disappointment in her tone landed with more force than any volume. “The 280th sit in silence,” she continued. “Krystan won’t speak. Laska pretends to smile. Even Czajka is watching doorways like a prisoner.” Jagiełło’s eyes flicked away, just for a breath. “They’ll hold,” he said finally. Mona folded her arms. “For now.” “They’re still functional.” “They’re wounded.” Jagiełło returned the slate to the table with a click. “Good. Wounds are reminders. Pain sharpens loyalty better than ideology.” Mona tilted her head. “If you believe that, you’ve learned nothing from me.” A long pause. Then Jagiełło exhaled — not a sigh, but a release of calculation. “We need the nomads.” She straightened. “So soon?” “They’ve seen the convoys. They’ve heard the engines from below the sand. Better to offer our terms now than answer theirs later.” He stepped toward a long-range vox unit mounted on the wall. As he reached for it, a soft chime rang through the room — his personal channel. He tapped the receiver twice. The line opened. He didn’t speak immediately. Just listened. “Confirmed,” he said at last. “No survivors. Vehicle abandoned?” A pause. His jaw tightened. “Rifle retrieved?” Another pause. His eyes narrowed faintly. “Good. No spent casings, no tracks. Wind will cover the rest.” Mona watched him from the shadows, arms folded now. “Yes. I’ll prepare the contact team. Maintain distance. If they investigate further, let the desert answer them.” Silence. He cut the channel. Mona’s voice returned, dry as paper. “Our ghost?” “She’s dust again.” Jagiełło stepped back from the unit and folded his arms. “I want you with me for the nomad approach,” he said. “I assumed.” “We don’t offer them unity. We offer them necessity. Their strength, their routes, their silence.” “And if they ask for blood instead?” His voice was calm. “Then we show them we’ve already spilled our own.” ----- The Chimeras rumbled across the salt flats like beasts too tired to roar. Dust coiled around their tracks in slow, looping tendrils. The sun sagged low behind us, staining the desert red and bruised gold. I rode up top again, helmet off, wind clawing at my sweat-matted hair. Laska leaned beside the turret ring, arms folded, watching the horizon. Czajka stayed inside. He never liked the openness. We crested a low ridge — more suggestion than feature — and there they were. Jagiełło stepped down first. His coat shifted in the wind like a banner with no nation. Mona followed, her hood raised, hands bare. She moved like she’d been here before — not recently, maybe, but in a way the desert remembered. The nomads didn’t move to meet us. So we went to them. ----- The office was silent, save for the steady hum of the ventilation unit and the rhythmic tapping of a stylus against dataslate casing. Lieutenant Kasnyk sat rigid in his chair, monocle flickering softly in the artificial light. Behind him, the ancient globe of Verdanos spun lazily on its stand — forgotten for now. The cogitator projected a split-screen: faded vault schematics on the left, regional patrol logs on the right. Numbers flickered. Routes overlaid. Too clean in some places, too murky in others. He tapped a button on his monocle then spoke. “Compare current patrol logs of the 280th Sunward Watch to historical assignments across sectors eleven through fifteen. Filter by irregular route deviation exceeding twenty percent.” The lens blinked green, then populated data. “Terrain doesn’t collapse in that sector,” he muttered. He leaned forward. “Cross-reference Theta-6 with decommissioned asset manifests. List all power draws above thirty kilowatts per day in the last cycle. Exclude official requisitioned materials.” The lens pulsed. The cogitator on his desk to which it synchronised lagged, like it didn’t want to answer. Kasnyk’s brow furrowed. He stood and began pacing — short steps, hands clasped behind his back. “Compare Theta-6 schematics to post-war archival plans. Note differences in facility placement, supply lines, and reported inventories. Begin delta log.” The monocle obeyed and began to stream data in front of his left eye. Results crawled across the screen: storage realignments. Additional unlogged sublevels. An underground tramway noted in the original designs — now removed from all modern schematics. No mention of where it led. He stopped. Stared at the floor. Then, quietly: “Request speculative classification of site. Based on power draw, architectural capacity, and crew proximity.” Three probabilities returned: - Munitions cache. - Vehicle hangar. - Light manufactory. Kasnyk returned to his cogitator and tapped the screen once. Then again. The cursor didn’t move. “Not sealed,” he whispered. “Not idle.” He sat at his desk, summoned a new overlay — a rough triangle forming from the irregular patrols. Within it: nothing. Or so the maps claimed. The cogitator pinged softly. A message icon pulsed orange in the corner of the screen. Encrypted. Internal channel. Kasnyk didn’t even open it. He tapped the dismiss rune without breaking stride. But power was being drawn. Air filtered. Coolant spent. Something was there. Something they didn’t want him to see.

Lieutenant Kasnyk leaned forward, monocle interface flickering green as he parsed the packet’s structure. A transmission, incomplete. Encrypted but within protocol. Origin: Marek Sobczak, Sergeant. Timestamp: early hours, local time. Location: near the southern ridge. That alone should have been routine. But Marek was dead. The initial report had come through the PDF relay chain an hour earlier — Sergeant Sobczak found in his runner, chest perforated by unknown fire. No witnesses. No sign of the weapon. A freak accident, they said. Bandits. Mutineers. The usual desert ghosts. Kasnyk didn’t believe in ghosts. The packet loaded, fragment by fragment. Static-blurred voice logs. One partial image file. Marek’s voice — distorted, dry — emerged mid-sentence: “…possibly Crusade-era… no Imperial markings… entry point recently disturbed—” Skip. “…serial tags stripped… unknown vehicle type… blast shielding—” Skip. “…locals? Maybe the 280th. I can’t confirm. Will escalate—” And then silence. No data header. No routing confirmation. Just the raw, fractured remnants of something bigger. Something deliberate. He tapped his monocle. “Begin trace on Sobczak data trail. Full audit. Limit visibility — private channel only.” The cogitator chirped again in acknowledgment. He stood slowly, moved to the side cabinet, and opened a shallow drawer. Inside: a sealed data crystal — unmarked. He placed it beside the slate without comment, fingers tapping a slow rhythm on the desk as he stared at the half-lit screen. “Who did you see, Marek?” No answer came. Only the faint hum of the outpost’s ventilation. Still sterile. Still silent. But the weight had shifted. Something had cracked. ----- The mess hall smelled of overcooked grain, steam, and industrial soap. Not unpleasant — just lifeless. A kind of scentless familiarity that belonged to all PDF installations, no matter the sector. The 280th sat hunched around a metal table streaked with scratches and dried broth. Tin trays scraped softly under spoons. No voices rose to fill the space. Laska stirred her meal with the tip of her fork, not eating. She wore the same grin she always did, but it sat crooked this morning — not quite tethered to anything. Czajka sat beside her, quiet as ever, but his attention never left the door. Krystan slumped with his elbows on the table, nursing a lukewarm mug of recaf. He hadn't spoken since they'd filed in. I sat across from them, tray untouched. The ration stew steamed faintly in the stale air, but I couldn't summon the appetite. None of us could. Marek’s name hadn’t been mentioned. We didn’t need to say it. The air carried it. "Guess nobody's checked the heater coils again," Laska muttered, forcing levity into the space. "Tastes like someone's boot boiled in sump water." Czajka made a sound — might've been a laugh. Might've just been a breath. Krystan didn’t react. Silence returned like tidewater. Just the scrape of cutlery. The dull clatter of a tray dropped in the return chute. One by one, other squads filtered in. Most gave us a glance, then looked away. Maybe they’d heard. Maybe not. The desert wind tapped softly at the high windows. Outside, the sun was already high. Another day waiting to be filled with the wrong questions and the wrong orders. I looked down at my tray. The meal had cooled. I hadn’t touched it. Beside me, Laska suddenly stood. “I’m getting more recaf,” she said, though her cup was still half full. She walked off without waiting for anyone’s reply. Czajka finally spoke, voice low. “Do you think he saw it?” I didn’t ask who he meant. “I don’t know,” I said. He nodded, once, slow. “If he did, he’s not seeing anything now.” We sat in silence again, shoulder to shoulder. The 280th — whole, but not intact.

So, spoiler for this - this is not the end I plan for my band of Resistance fighters. I was just tinkering with ideas for them, but I thought you might like to see. It's a short passage, but you can see how they are all bonded, even 329 spins up for the fight. Thoughts most welcome. The sun didn’t rise that morning. Not properly. Just a bruised smear above the horizon, like the sky was ashamed to look us in the eye. We stood in the courtyard — the last open ground before the fallback position — where sand had drifted into the cracks between the stone like it meant to bury us ahead of schedule. Brutus rumbled behind me, her engine coughing low. One of her sponsons was gone — slagged in the last barrage — but the other still turned when I called for it. She’d die today, and she knew it. But not without giving back everything she had. The Iron Duke loomed just off to the side, its hull still scorched from the last charge. It had carried the wounded, shielded our retreat, held the line when the rest broke. A relic once — but now? A symbol. And behind it, half-lost in the bunker shadows, was 329. I could hear the fuel pumps hiss. The engines didn’t purr — they growled, low and resentful. Not like a tool, but like a thing that understood what was coming. Krystan hadn’t said a word since the night before. He sat inside 329’s belly like a monk in a temple. Still. Focused. If that monster had a soul, it had latched onto his. If Krystan was going to Hell, it would be there, busting down the gates. Laska stood at my right, eyes on the ridgeline. Her sleeves were rolled, dust crusted into her forearms. Blood too — not hers. She didn’t flinch. Didn’t blink. She’d made her peace. And I… I was proud of her in that moment, more than I could ever say. My love. Czajka had already gone prone near the southern wall. He didn’t look up as I passed — just adjusted the windage on his scope. He always knew the wind better than I did. Zofia leaned against the Duke, cigarette clamped between her teeth, arms folded tight. She looked like she was waiting for a punch — and daring the bastard to throw it. And Róźa... Róźa stood alone at the edge, near the ruined gate. No orders. Just instinct. That was all she ever needed. I turned to face them, boots grinding against the stone. My squad. My family, though I’d never said the word. They were filthy. Scarred. Exhausted. They were perfect. “We don’t hold this ground,” I said, low, calm. “We become it.” No speeches. No shouting. Just the truth. Laska nodded, her shoulder brushing mine. “We’re already ghosts,” she said. I smiled. Real, for once. “Then let’s :cuss:ing haunt them.” And when the first shells came down — distant at first, then closer, hungry — I didn’t flinch. I watched the horizon crack open. I heard the howl of 329 winding up like some ancient god dragging itself into the fight one last time. And I felt no fear. Only pride. Pride in the machines behind me. Pride in the people beside me. Pride that this — this bloodied, broken corner of the desert — was ours. If the Imperium wanted it back, they’d have to dig us out with their bare hands..

The wind tore at them as the Valkyrie dropped into the canyon, its engines shrieking against the tight walls. Dust and gravel whipped into the air, reducing the world to a swirling maelstrom outside the armoured glass of the troop compartment. Kasnyk stood, swaying with the turbulence, one gloved hand gripping a restraint overhead as he stared through the side viewport. The canyon was exactly as it had been described in the geological surveys — a deep scar in the desert, sheer cliffs of wind-scoured stone, peppered with outcroppings and the occasional stubborn succulent clinging to life. At its base, mostly swallowed by the rock, sat the bunker, hunched against the cliff face like some ancient fossil. The hatch clanged open the moment the skids touched down. Kasnyk descended first, boots crunching on the gravel-strewn floor. The air was dry, still, and carried the faint smell of scorched metal and explosive residue. The valley’s towering walls threw long shadows despite the midday sun. Behind him, Aleksy Klimek and four other members of the investigation team followed. The two Valkyrie crewmen remained aboard, engines hot and ready. Kasnyk liked the pilots well enough — competent, quiet — but he had no intention of taking their opinions on what he was about to find. Kasnyk advanced towards the battered bunker entrance. The blast had left a wide, irregular gap, jagged metal edges curling outward. As he crossed the threshold, his monocle flickered to life without prompting, overlaying faint data across his vision. STATUS: Breach Confirmed Explosive Residue: Detected Material Composition: Standard Siege Charge Timestamp Estimate: <48 hours> Kasnyk nodded to himself. His boots kicked up a layer of dust as he entered. Within, the bunker felt cavernous and oppressive, its empty corridors swallowing sound. The only noises were those of his team spreading out, the creak of gear, and the rasp of their breathing. Rows of vehicles flanked their path — tarpaulin-covered shapes, lined like silent sentinels in the gloom. The faint beams of the team’s shoulder-mounted lamps revealed what the dust and silence had hidden. Chimera-pattern hulls, Leman Russ frames, skeletal artillery pieces, and stubby transporters sat dormant beneath layers of grime and canvas. Each machine was perfectly aligned, unmoved for decades, perhaps even centuries. “There's so many,” muttered one of the investigators. The sheer number of them was staggering. Kasnyk didn’t respond. He was busy drinking it all in — not with wonder, but with analysis. His monocle scanned and catalogued automatically, lines of data crawling along the edges of his vision. As they continued, the air felt thick, almost expectant. Their lights flickered against the oppressive stillness. The deeper they ventured, the more obvious it became — no vermin, no signs of recent life. Just untouched silence. Klimek edged too close to a barely visible pressure plate near a service hatch. Kasnyk’s hand shot out, grabbing him by the collar. “Hold.” Everyone froze. Kasnyk knelt and brushed away the dust. A recessed mechanism lay exposed — rudimentary, but deadly. A fragmentation charge. “Traps,” Kasnyk said, standing. “Old. But still willing to work.” Klimek nodded, slightly pale, but grateful. “Thank you, sir.” Kasnyk gave a small grunt of acknowledgment. His heart beat faster, but not from the near-miss. He could feel it. He wasn’t wading through another dull supply theft. Something meaningful was waiting at the end of this trail. A light sensation built in his stomach — a familiar, welcome thrill. The same he’d felt long ago, when cases still mattered, when he was still certain he could make a difference. His eyes slid sideways to Klimek as they resumed their march. The young officer recovered quickly, carefully marking the trap for later removal. Kasnyk allowed himself a flicker of quiet satisfaction. Klimek was shaping up well — sharp, cautious, and just naïve enough to still care about the work. They pressed onward, weaving through the graveyard of machines until the hall finally widened into a more open chamber. Kasnyk’s monocle flickered. ERR[042] : Object classification failed. Possible: LV / Chimera Variant / Unknown – processing… He stepped forward, boots crunching into the fresh scuff marks left behind by heavy treads. Dust patterns and disturbance told the story plain enough: something massive had been here — and recently. And unlike the other machines, this one was no longer resting. They swept their lights across the chamber, and there it was — the Iron Duke's vault. The great sealed door stood ajar, its mechanisms scarred by the breach. Inside, the floor bore the unmistakable pattern of heavy tread marks leading out, and a large, dustless imprint where something colossal had once sat beneath a discarded tarpaulin. The blast shield's silhouette was faintly outlined in dust residue on the floor. Kasnyk entered the vault slowly. His team followed, fanning out, quietly cataloguing the scene — markings, disturbed dust, maintenance terminals, and the damage to the door. Every detail mattered now. Kasnyk’s attention turned to the side of the vault. Scorch marks spidered out from an old control terminal. He crouched, monocle feeding him flickering data. “Explosion?” suggested one of the investigators. “Possible,” Kasnyk mused, running a finger along the floor. “Or power feedback.” Klimek moved closer, examining the pattern. “Sir. Not radial — linear. As if they caught a discharge, not a detonation.” Kasnyk raised a brow. The young officer wasn’t wrong. “Well observed.” He stood, dusting off his gloves. “Someone knew the risks and still went through with it.” In the silence, broken only by the occasional clatter of boots and equipment, Kasnyk felt the old thrill rising again — the sense of standing on the precipice of something deeper than a petty theft. There was a thread here. And he fully intended to pull it. ----- The wind outside the outpost’s main hall blew softly against the old hab-blocks and ferrocrete structures, but Marek hardly noticed. Leaning against a weathered pillar, he took a slow drag from his lho-stick, watching the station’s central yard through narrowed eyes. The sun was fading behind the ridgeline, painting the canyon’s jagged edges with long, creeping shadows. Below, the returning 280th were unloading. Their movements weren’t hurried, but they were… tight. Controlled. Soldiers always carried tension after a patrol, but Marek knew the patterns well enough. This was different. They weren't just tired — they were guarded. Even from each other. Krystan, the Chimera driver, cursed as he tried to coax the vehicle into one of the motor pool bays, its tracks screeching in protest. Laska laughed, making some quip Marek couldn’t catch from this distance, and the others gave her a weary chuckle. The usual theatre. But something was off. He took another pull on the lho-stick and exhaled slowly. No orders. No patrol logs posted. Just their quiet return. He flicked the spent stick into the dust and turned, heading toward the mess hall. The mess was crowded but muted. Soldiers ate mechanically, trading only the occasional word. The usual clatter of cutlery and quiet murmurs filled the room. Marek slipped into the corner, grabbed a tin cup of recaf, and settled against the wall, watching. The 280th were gathered at their usual table. No boasting, no exaggerated tales of minor glories — not like after a normal patrol. Instead, low voices and darting glances. He spotted the sergeant — their newly appointed leader, after Rakoczy’s demise — holding it together well enough. But it was in the little things. How the squad avoided meeting each other's eyes. The way Czajka picked at his food instead of eating. How Laska's usual brashness seemed slightly forced. The table froze for half a breath. Just long enough. Marek saw it. A glance from the sergeant. A suppressed smirk from Krystan. A tight flicker of tension across Czajka’s brow. Then they moved on, laughing it off, Laska throwing in an exaggerated wink to defuse it. But Marek wasn’t laughing. His mind already worked through the implications. He quietly sipped the bitter recaf, lowering his gaze just enough to seem disinterested. Across the room, unnoticed by Marek, The Fennec sat alone at a battered table, idly stirring the slop on her tray. She watched with the detachment of a ghost, catching every glance, every nervous shuffle. To anyone else, she was just another tired soldier nursing a bland meal. To her, this was the job. ----- In the armoury, Laska moved alone. The low hum of the power systems and the occasional groan of settling metal were the only company left to her. She removed her flak jacket with a soft grunt, the weight sliding from her shoulders and leaving behind the familiar ache of another long day. Shoulder plates followed, then webbing, gloves, and gear. Each piece was placed carefully into her assigned locker, not from fear of punishment, but habit. Order calmed her. Loose straps were tightened, buckles checked, latches secured. Her eyes lingered on her grenade launcher resting across the workbench. It wasn’t a brutal thing to her. It was solid, dependable. She had called it a few names in frustration before, sure, but it never failed when it mattered. She traced a finger along the barrel, noting where the paint had scuffed and worn. If she needed it to sing again, it would. She’d make sure of it. Satisfied, she exhaled softly and headed for the barracks. Inside, a handful of soldiers were already asleep, sprawled or curled beneath rough-issue blankets. Gentle, uneven snores filled the dimly lit space. The room smelled of worn leather, faint sweat, and the faint metallic tang of the station’s recycled air. Laska moved between the bunks quietly, stepping over scattered boots and stray bits of kit. At her bunk, she shrugged out of her fatigues, down to just a tank top and shorts. The metal-framed bed creaked softly as she sat and pulled the thin blanket over herself. Above, the cracked window admitted a shaft of silver moonlight that stretched across the room and caught her face. She lay still, eyes open, watching the dust motes drift lazily in the pale glow. Her thoughts wandered, unbidden. Home. Not the one spoken of in stories, but the real one — cramped, bureaucratic, stale. Yet, even so, the faces there mattered. Parents, a younger sibling or two, each trapped just as surely as the miners and the outcasts. Different cages, same bars. She was here for them. For all of them. The tension in her limbs eased, bit by bit, as the day’s weight gave way to quiet. The muffled sounds of the outpost settling into night — the groan of a shifting bulkhead, the faint ticking of a cooling vent, the soft snores of comrades — became a kind of lullaby. And then, barely audible, the desert wind outside sighed against the walls. The old scirocco. Laska smiled faintly, eyes half-lidded. Its voice carried a strange comfort. Distant, patient, eternal. As sleep crept in, she caught herself thinking — not of battle, nor of duty — but simply that it might have been nice to have someone beside her. Just for warmth. Just for company. The thought softened her expression, and soon, sleep took her. ----- The mess hall had long since emptied. The overhead lumens buzzed quietly, casting a dull, institutional glow over half-eaten trays and upturned ration tins. The silence was broken only by the rhythmic tap of Marek’s boot heel against the bench leg, his dataslate balanced on one knee. He sat alone now, the last of the 280th having turned in. Somewhere, the low whine of a generator pulsed in the distance. He tapped a few last notes into the slate. Supply discrepancies, personnel manifests, unassigned engineering units. His thumb hesitated over the transmit rune. A report, yes. But it lacked certainty. Something was missing. That was when he noticed it. A narrow door in the corner of the hall — flush with the wall and featureless. He had eaten in this room a dozen times and never seen it before. A storeroom, maybe. But something about it tugged at him. He stood, slinging the dataslate under one arm, and tried the handle. Unlocked. The hinges groaned faintly as he pulled it open, revealing a narrow passage descending into gloom. He hesitated — then stepped inside. The corridor descended deeper than expected, walls pressed close, lit intermittently by flickering strips of lumen tape. It smelled of dust, dry rust, and something older. Faint ventilation hummed overhead. A forgotten tunnel. Marek pressed on, bootfalls muffled by layers of grime. “Entry Point Theta... unmarked. Passage appears pre-Compliance era,” he murmured into the slate, recording everything. “Possibly related to recent recovery operations.” At last, the corridor widened into a chamber. His breath caught. Vehicles. Dozens. Rows of ancient machines slumbered beneath tarpaulins. Chimera transports. A few half-track variants. An old Malcador, matte desert yellow paint peeled and blistered from decades of disuse. And at the centre — a shape that dominated the room. No markings. No designation. No turret. Just bulk. A blast shield hunched over the prow like a crouched animal, the whole thing draped in tarp and shadow. The scale of it made Marek falter. “I don’t know what I’m looking at,” he whispered into the slate. “Command might. Serial tags missing. No visible identifier. This...this wasn’t logged.” He moved around it slowly, panning his slate’s lens across the frame. “Design unknown. Not Imperial standard issue. Mechanicus, perhaps? Power lines routed oddly. Could be a relic from the Crusade era? Will request cross-check. Bunker appears to have been accessed recently. Tracks in the dust. At least one body removed... no signs of blood.” His voice grew quieter. “Locals — the 280th? Did they do this?” He turned, biting his lip. The battery icon flashed red. Less than five percent. “Damn.” He broke into a jog, heading back through the tunnel, slate clutched tight. Outside, the desert night had cooled the air. A warm desert breeze washed over him, gentle now, but gathering. Marek dashed across the sand to a waiting runner — a squat, four-wheeled desert vehicle painted light grey, with thick, knobbled tyres and a number stencil in black along its side. The roof was little more than a sheet of polymer fixed over a flimsy frame. A cart meant for supplies, not escapes. He slid behind the wheel, tossed the dataslate onto the passenger bench, and fumbled with the ignition. The engine coughed, sputtered, then caught. He plugged the slate into the vehicle’s charging port and watched as the charge icon blinked orange. He wiped a sleeve across his brow. “Come on, come on...” A low curse escaped his lips. He checked the signal strength. Weak. But maybe enough. The slate came to life. He loaded the report, jammed his thumb against the transmit rune— From half a kilometre away, The Fennec watched him through the scope. She lay prone on the ridgeline, rifle cradled in her hands, her body perfectly still. The long-barrelled weapon rested on its bi-pod, its optic hooded against the moonlight. The wind was cool against her cheek. Her breath slow. Even. Measured. The runner’s headlights cast long shadows across the sand as Marek wrestled with the slate. Through her scope, she could see the sweat on his temple, the way his lips moved as he muttered curses. Her thumb adjusted the zoom. The crosshairs hovered over his chest. She exhaled. A moment’s pause. Then she tapped her vox-bead. “Visual confirmed,” she whispered. “He’s sending it.” A beat. “...Understood.” She realigned the shot. Marek’s finger was just lifting from the rune. The slate’s light glowed green — transmission active. She squeezed. The report was sent. So was the round. His body spasmed sideways, head lolling. The slate dropped to the floor of the runner. Blood and viscera dripped through the hole blown through his torso and the back of his seat by the high-calibre round. The Fennec watched for five full seconds. Then she moved. Quick. Precise. The rifle disassembled in practised motions, piece by piece into her carry harness. She slid back into the darkness, feet finding each step in silence. The desert swallowed her. The sound of the scirocco rose. And the night was whole again

This series of three four passages is a lot longer than I have posted in the past and I hope you have the patience to read it. I feel it is quite revealing about our three main character, our Narrator, Mona, and Jagiełło. Constructive criticism always welcome, of course. ----- The engineers worked with steady purpose. The charges were placed meticulously, each bundle of explosives hugging the seams and structural weak points where ancient metal met equally ancient stone. The bunker was as much a part of the canyon wall as it was a man-made structure, the centuries having eroded and fused its exterior into a hardened shell. Even so, age had done little to blunt its Imperial craftsmanship. We crouched behind 312, shielding ourselves from the impending blast. At the lead engineer’s nod, the charges detonated. The canyon swallowed the dull roar, sending dust and pebbles cascading from the high ridges above. When the grit cleared, a jagged breach had replaced the sealed entrance. Heat rose from the rocks as we stepped forward. I caught the first breath of air from within. Dry, stale, and heavy with dust—it smelled of time itself. No blood, no rot, no sign of recent death. Just stagnant air, the kind you’d find when unsealing an old storage locker, except magnified a thousandfold. Inside, the air was thick with settled dust. A pale film coated the floor, unbroken even by vermin. No footprints. No scuff marks. Whatever this place was, it had been undisturbed for generations. Czajka stood at my side, rifle up, eyes sharp. “No movement.” “That’s worse,” Laska muttered, swinging her grenade launcher casually as she scanned the gloom. Her voice carried enough false bravado to mask her nerves, but not enough to fool anyone. One of the engineers, a lean woman with streaks of grey in her dark hair, Ella, knelt and examined the floor. “Sarge, these old bunkers? They’re usually rigged. Motion sensors. Traps. The standard for places they didn’t want rediscovered.” She stood and dusted off her palms. “We’ll sweep. Slow and proper.” I nodded, trying to project the steadiness I didn’t fully feel. “Do it.” The squad pushed deeper. As we moved down the main corridor, I found myself breathing shallower. The silence pressed in like a physical thing. The passage was lined with immense doors, each marked with corroded plaques and faded sigils. I couldn’t read most of them beneath the dust and rust. The engineer squad set to work, marking detected traps and bypassing them with practised efficiency. A few muttered prayers to the Emperor went unheard by anyone who still cared. “Partial power bleed,” Ella reported. “Most of the grid’s dead, but there’s still juice in some lines. We’ve looped the worst of it, but…” “But there could be more,” I finished for her. She nodded grimly. Further in, we found it — a small, dust-caked dataslate wedged behind a rusted terminal. Its cracked display flickered faintly to life as Czajka gingerly passed it to me. The words were simple. A bay number. Nothing more. Following its direction, we wound through an adjoining passage until we came to a sealed vault door. Unlike the others, this one was marked by the faint outline of a faded symbol, barely visible beneath grime. No name. Just a half-obscured emblem of a stylized iron crown. The engineers crowded around the access terminal. Sparks sputtered as they interfaced with it, bypassing dead code and corrupted subroutines. Then it happened. One of them—Martja, I think—jerked backward with a startled gasp. She collapsed, twitching as a sharp electrical feedback arced from the terminal. “Martja’s down!” someone yelled. I swore and rushed forward, but it was too late. She was gone. The door, however, had accepted the sacrifice. With a groan, ancient hydraulics strained and hissed. Dust cascaded from the seams as it cracked open, revealing the chamber beyond. And there it was. Even draped in layers of tarp and shadow, the Iron Duke dominated the vault. The chamber was cavernous, yet it barely contained the bulk of the vehicle inside. Its massive frame loomed, partially shrouded by dust-cloaked tarpaulins. The shape was unmistakable—armoured flanks, wide track guards, and the towering blast shield at its prow. No turret. No number. No name. Just sheer, brute presence. Laska whispered under her breath, “Big bastard.” We stood there in silence for a long moment. I realised I was holding my breath. The thing radiated a sense of history — not reverence, exactly, but weight. Purpose. I forced myself to exhale. “Back to work.” I pointed to two of my squad. “You and you. Prepare her for transport back to the station.” They hesitated for a heartbeat before nodding and moving to follow orders. Engineers and soldiers alike set to work, still glancing nervously at the Iron Duke between tasks. Martja was dead. But the Duke was awake. And there was no turning back. ----- Bright white lumens beat down from the ceiling, casting hard shadows across Kasnyk’s austere office. The room was a cube of sterile grey walls and sharp angles, furnished with only the essentials: a bolted metal desk, two straight-backed chairs, a cogitator recessed into the desktop, and not much else. A potted plant sagged on the corner of the desk, brown at the edges, and beside it a small brass globe of Kasnyk’s homeworld spun lazily from a recent absent-minded flick. The air was filtered and scentless, like the air of all Imperial offices, leaving nothing behind but emptiness. Kasnyk sat behind the desk with the practised stillness of a man well-versed in the routine. His stylus tapped against the parchment pad before him in a slow, deliberate rhythm — no impatience, just a means to keep time as the drone across from him talked. The stylus was always there. Even with the cogitator active and capable of doing all of this automatically, he preferred the scratch of pen on parchment. It gave the appearance of attentiveness, and more importantly, it grounded him. Across from him sat a minor logistics clerk, Sub-Officer L-8427, pale as parchment and clearly unused to the desert sun outside. His charcoal grey uniform, faded and wrinkled, had seen better days, and the badge pinned to his chest was slightly tarnished. A rank insignia and serial code were affixed beneath it, worn smooth from anxious fingers. The clerk perched nervously on the edge of the chair, clutching a dataslate that trembled ever so slightly in his grip. “… and that’s the third time, sir, this cycle. Missing components from Container 41.” The clerk's voice quavered slightly. “If it were just once, I’d let it go, but three times? That’s no clerical error.” His eyes darted across Kasnyk’s impassive face, searching for some sign of sympathy. Kasnyk gave none. The stylus continued to tap softly. “You suspect theft?” Kasnyk asked without looking up, voice a monotone. “I— yes, sir. Or diversion, maybe. Components don’t walk away on their own.” The clerk shifted in his seat, adjusting his fraying collar. “My supervisor told me to drop it, but I know something’s not right.” Kasnyk almost smiled — almost. The truth was, petty theft, squabbles, and bureaucratic grudge matches made up half his caseload. The other half was divided between fuel shortages and low-ranking scribes who drank too much amasec and reported ghost cults behind every malfunctioning lumen. But duty was duty. “You did the right thing,” he said flatly, making a show of jotting something down. “These things have a way of surfacing.” The clerk’s shoulders sagged with relief. At that exact moment, the cogitator gave a soft chime and a faint amber glow lit the edge of Kasnyk’s vision. His monocle flickered to life of its own accord, quietly feeding information to him as the clerk babbled on. Kasnyk did not flinch. His stylus, however, stopped tapping. Amber Alert — Security Breach: Storage Bunker 9C — Prawa V, Sector 12. Kasnyk blinked once to scroll the monocle's display. Flagged Item: 77-IC/DU. The stylus resumed tapping. The clerk, oblivious, was still venting about warehouse irregularities. Kasnyk returned his full attention to him, masking the sudden jolt of interest rising behind his cool exterior. “Thank you, Sub-Officer. I’ll see this logged appropriately.” He stood, motioning toward the door. “I trust you will remain vigilant.” The clerk stumbled to his feet, almost saluting before thinking better of it. “Yes, sir! Of course, sir.” He scurried out, leaving Kasnyk alone with the amber glow. The moment the door sealed, Kasnyk’s mask cracked. His lips twitched into the faintest smirk. He leaned forward, hands folding together as the cogitator projected a map and data readout. There it was. The old storage site. The bunker hadn’t triggered an alert in decades. Amber flag — mid-tier, important but not urgent. Inventory marked for Special Oversight, designation “IC/DU”. IC — Internal Compliance. DU… He’d seen that suffix before. His monocle obligingly supplied the associated entry from old files, redacted but familiar. DU = “Iron Duke.” Not a person. Not a smuggler. Not some legendary insurgent whispered about in frontier bars. A vehicle. A tank. Specifically, an ageing but formidable siege engine — codename only. Its existence, long buried beneath layers of bureaucratic dust, explained why the locals spoke of it like a ghost. Kasnyk’s expression hardened, eyes narrowing behind the data scrolling across his monocle. Who had breached a sealed bunker to get at it? Why now? He tapped the screen, pulling up active units in the area. A few registered. Routine patrols. One newly reassigned squad, the 280th Sunward Watch. He’d seen them during his last visit to the sector — odd, but nothing concrete. Yet. Kasnyk exhaled sharply through his nose and glanced to the side. The plant drooped pitifully. Without hesitation, he crossed the room, retrieved the long-neglected watering can, and gave the dry soil a careful pour. “You and me both,” he muttered. The leaves barely moved. Neither did Kasnyk as he stood motionless, eyes distant. There was something here. Not proof. Not yet. But there was something. ----- The heavy air in the hidden vault beneath Nowa Avestia, the place we called home, pressed around us as we stepped deeper into the chamber. Dust lay thick over the floor, deadening every step. The flicker of our shoulder-mounted lamps painted uneven, narrow bands of light across towering shapes swathed in tarps and shrouded in shadow. Jagiełło stood in front of it, a great looming mass mostly hidden beneath faded tarpaulin, but unmistakable in scale and presence. His hand with the claw-like glove rested against its flanks, fingers gently brushing against the dust-caked surface as if reacquainting himself with an old acquaintance. His other arm hung loose at his side, the long boneblade he wielded idle, unthreatening. The orange folds of his cloak caught the uneven lamplight, glowing like smouldering embers amidst the gloom. The worn edges of his armour were dulled by dust, yet still retained the distinct patterns of Resistance craftsmanship – subdued purples, greys, and the occasional streak of rust where the desert’s breath had left its mark. I stood a few paces away, trying to make sense of the shape beneath the tarps. The hull loomed, riveted and scarred by age. What could only be a vast blast shield – not a turret, I noted – jutted from its forward section. Two muzzles, dark as abyssal wells, protruded slightly beneath the folds. Whatever this machine had been built for, it was clear it was no ordinary vehicle. “You did well,” Jagiełło said without turning. His voice was low, calm, but there was weight to the words that made me catch my breath for but a second. “Many would have failed to bring it here intact.” I tried not to swell with pride. The praise was measured, but coming from him, it was more than I’d ever expected. “It wasn’t easy,” I replied carefully. “We lost one of the engineers, Martja. The vault… resisted.” Jagiełło’s fingers traced the blast shield’s edge. “It often does. Those vaults were meant to keep things out—or in.” He finally turned to look at me. His eyes, a jaundiced yellow and sharp beneath the hood, fixed me in place. “Yet you overcame it.” I nodded, unsure what else to say. In truth, I wasn’t sure if we had overcome it or merely gotten lucky. His gaze lingered for a moment before he stepped back from the machine. The faint metallic scrape of his boots against the floor broke the silence. “This will change much,” Jagiełło murmured, mostly to himself. “For all of us.” He didn’t elaborate. He never did. We stood there a while longer, me staring at the machine, him lost in quiet calculation. Then, without further ceremony, he turned and began walking toward the vault’s exit. I followed a step behind, my heart pounding with a mixture of quiet exhilaration and rising apprehension. I couldn’t help but wonder—not just about the machine, but about what this discovery meant for us, for the Resistance, and for my family back in the mines. My fingers absently brushed against the lasrifle slung over my shoulder as if reassuring myself that I was still just a soldier, still grounded, even as the scale of what we’d uncovered threatened to sweep me away. Jagiełło said nothing more, his footfalls steady, echoing against the vault’s walls. Only when we left the chamber did I risk a glance back. The Iron Duke—whatever it truly was—waited silently in the dark, its purpose and power still cloaked in shadow. ----- The echoes of bootsteps lingered faintly, diminishing with each step down the winding corridor until only silence remained. Mona stood alone at the threshold, eyes cast over the slumbering colossus cloaked in tarpaulin and shadows. Lamplight pooled in uneven circles across the chamber, casting long, soft-edged silhouettes that barely touched the corners of the vault. Dust hung suspended in the air like old memories. The Iron Duke loomed still, its towering blast shield and flanks swaddled in thick layers of age-stained canvas. Yet, even beneath the coverings, its outline radiated a dormant menace, softened only by time. Mona advanced with slow, deliberate steps, her boots making no sound against the dust-smothered floor. She exhaled slowly, as if speaking a wordless greeting. Her fingers reached out, trailing across the tarpaulin as if it were the hide of some great beast. She did not know the finer purpose of its structures — the guns, the tracks, the layers of steel — but she felt its weight, its presence. And that was enough. She approached the blast shield, placing her palm flat against it. The cold of the metal seeped into her skin, the dust clinging faintly to her touch. With deliberate patience, she traced a three-quarter circle upon its surface, leaving a crescent-shaped mark in the dust — incomplete, waiting. A subtle breeze stirred within the vault, pulling at the motes of dust in languid spirals. No source could be seen, but Mona’s lips shifted into a soft, knowing smile. To others it would be nothing. To her, it was the Duke whispering back. She closed her eyes for a moment, savouring the moment. The tension she so often masked behind poised words and gentle touches gave way to quiet satisfaction. She could feel the Iron Duke’s potential — not in mechanics, but in meaning. This was no simple relic; it was a totem. A promise. A manifestation of what she and her kin would one day unleash. Mona opened her eyes again, stepping back slowly, leaving the mark untouched. “You’ll wake when you’re ready,” she whispered, voice low and reverent. And with that, she turned, vanishing into the half-light, leaving the Iron Duke to slumber a little longer.

Nowa Avestia loomed ahead, washed in the pale glow of the setting sun. Marek sat atop the Chimera’s hull, arms folded, eyes scanning the familiar silhouette of the outer walls. The station was as he’d left it — quiet, unassuming. Yet, as the squad dismounted and rolled through the gates, something gnawed at the back of his thoughts. The yard should have been busy. The 280th, ever a fixture at the outpost, were nowhere to be seen. No idle banter, no groups lingering near the vehicle bays. Marek’s brow furrowed. “Where’s Rakoczy’s lot?” one of his troopers muttered. Marek waved him off. “Probably dug into some menial sweep. Nothing to worry about.” But the unease lingered. He hopped down from the Chimera, boots clanging against the cracked concrete. The garrison’s bustle was there — PDF guards on duty, traders arguing over cargo — but the absence of the 280th pressed at him. He made his way to the barracks, eyes subtly scanning the faces of passing soldiers. No familiar insignias from Rakoczy’s squad. Only the station’s regulars. Later, seated at his bunk, Marek flipped open his battered dataslate. His thumb hovered over the encoded message he’d prepared before setting out. It was ready to send — coordinates, maps, supply routes, the lot. He stared at it for a long time. His instincts, dulled by years of routine, were now fully awake. Something wasn’t right. Still, orders were orders. He clenched his jaw, weighing it in his mind. Nearby, laughter and the scrape of boots on metal floorboards echoed from the adjoining hall. Normal sounds, nothing more. But Marek knew better. He tapped the dataslate off and set it aside. “Maybe in the morning,” he muttered to himself, trying — and failing — to shake the sense that the desert had shifted while he’d been away. ----- Kasnyk’s office hummed faintly with the mechanical churn of the outpost’s life-support systems. Bright, artificial lighting left no shadows to hide in — a deliberate choice. The walls were bare save for a single shelf stacked with dataslates, parchment rolls, and battered binders. His desk was equally sparse, occupied only by a flickering cogitator terminal, a potted plant sagging from neglect, and a small globe — worn and faded — of his homeworld, Verdanos. It spun lazily under the ventilation draft. He sat stiffly in his chair, stylus tapping rhythmically against a half-finished report. A stack of investigations awaited, each more tedious than the last. “Case 39-14,” he muttered. “Water ration disputes again.” The file detailed a theft from the eastern cistern — a group of off-duty PDF accused by a local informant. No violence, just a missing shipment and too many conflicting testimonies. He sighed. “Nothing but thirsty opportunists.” The report, as always, was thorough — and suspect. “Smugglers disguised as wandering preachers,” Kasnyk read aloud, lips thinning. “Found near the southern ridge. Again.” He leaned back and rubbed the bridge of his nose, letting his eyes wander briefly to the potted plant. He should have watered it yesterday. Next came routine shipping manifests. Supplies inbound from Prawa V Prime. He cross-checked them with requisition logs, frowning slightly. Minor discrepancies, nothing to lose sleep over. Yet. Finally, the next slate slid beneath his hand. Kasnyk’s monocle flickered to life without prompting, scrolling data across its lens. Material composition: standard dataslate alloy. Typeface: Imperial Gothic, Sub-Type 7-B. Handwriting: Sergeant Sobczak. Cross-referenced and confirmed. He skimmed the contents — coordinates, route reports, asset listings. On the surface, routine. But a knot settled in his stomach. He tapped the monocle. “Correlate.” The system displayed movements matching Sobczak’s unit. The 280th Sunward Watch had passed through the same region shortly before. His memory flashed back — Rakoczy and his squad standing stiffly during their debrief. He rose from his chair, pacing slowly. Why had the 280th shifted their patrol pattern? Why hadn’t he pressed harder at the time? He circled the desk once, fingers tracing the globe absentmindedly. “No,” he muttered. “Not enough yet.” Still, the discrepancy was filed, noted carefully in the margins of his investigation ledger. Kasnyk returned to his chair, but the silence of the office felt heavier than before. ----- The canyon appeared suddenly, like a scar split open across the earth. From the rise where we first saw it, it stretched beyond the horizon, a jagged wound deep enough that the morning haze concealed its depth. The desert sands broke off in sheer cliffs, and nestled against the cliff's edge was the narrow, winding trace of the old service road. We paused, engines idling, watching the worn track snake down into the depths. I could feel the unease ripple through the men, unspoken but clear. I gave the order to advance, and the column crept forward, single-file, our lead Chimera — 312 — taking point, with 376 following close behind. The first stretch was manageable. The canyon walls sheltered us from the worst of the desert wind, but as we descended, the temperature began to climb. The deeper we went, the less air moved. It became a trapped heat, like the blast of a furnace, dry and oppressive. Then came the grinding sound. "Stop," Krystan called from the driver's seat, voice edged with frustration. "Something's off." A brief check revealed the truth — 376's transmission had seized. The backup vehicle was crippled halfway down the descent. I climbed out, squinting up at the canyon rim as fine dust sifted down lazily from above. "What are we looking at, Laska?" I asked, wiping sweat from my brow. Laska, who had hopped over to peer into 376’s exposed engine compartment, wiped her hands on her fatigues. "Transmission's :cuss:ed, Sarge," she said, deadpan. "Properly. She's not getting home under her own power." Her tone was so casual it might’ve been a joke, but there was no grin this time. Krystan cursed under his breath. I could feel the squad shift, eyes darting nervously to the cliffs above. Exposed like this, strung along a brittle road, every ridge and rock seemed to be watching. "Abandon it. Everyone on 312," I said. The order tasted bitter. It wasn’t just the heat making us sweat. We packed ourselves tight, soldiers and engineers perched awkwardly atop the hull, gripping onto straps and welded handholds. With the extra weight, 312 groaned in protest, her suspension creaking with every shift of momentum. We threw open the hatches, letting the oven-hot air sweep through. A poor trade — cooler, but now exposed. Every eye scanned the jagged canyon walls, watching for the flash of a scope or the glint of movement. There was nothing, only the rovfugl wheeling high on thermals, circling lazily. A scavenger by nature, it rode the rising heat without urgency, as if patiently waiting for something to die below. Krystan worked the controls like a man nursing an injured beast. The brakes squealed occasionally, a high, sharp note that echoed too well. Czajka sat beside me, silent as always, but his gaze never left the ridges. His marksman’s eye picked out every likely firing position, but he gave no voice to what we all knew — if someone waited up there, we’d never make it to the bottom. The descent grew harsher. Sparse desert scrub gave way to cracked stone, the last defiant plants replaced by small clusters of squat, purple succulents clinging to life. The heat was unbearable, the air unmoving and thick. Sweat pooled inside armour, and tempers flared. A sharp comment from one of the engineers drew a snap from Laska. Another soldier barked back, and I could see the tension boiling just beneath the surface. “Enough,” I said firmly, voice steady. “Keep it together. We're almost there.” They quieted, but the mood remained tight. As we wound lower, I found myself staring at the track ahead, then to the walls hemming us in, and back again. My stomach tightened in ways the heat couldn’t explain. This was the first time I was truly leading them — my squad, my responsibility. No sergeant to defer to. No Rakoczy to give the word. Just me. I tried to push the thought down, but it clawed its way back up like the dust coating our boots. Was I leading them into some forgotten treasure trove... or a grave? Finally, the trail widened as we emerged onto the canyon floor. The world pressed in around us — towering walls hemming us in on every side. Before us, half-hidden by a natural overhang, was the entrance: a vast cavernous maw where rock and machinery fused together. The outline of the bunker was unmistakable, its doors sealed and ancient. We dismounted. The heat down here felt heavier still, dead and oppressive. The squad gathered, looking to me for direction. Inside, the bunker waited. And none of us liked the feel of it.

The resistance outpost bustled with quiet activity. Low voices traded logistical updates, ration tallies, vehicle status reports. Jagiełło stood at the centre of it, near a long table littered with half-folded maps and dataslates. But when the coded chime of his personal vox-bead crackled in his ear, he stepped away without a word, moving toward a corner where the shadows gathered near the storage crates. He pressed a finger to the side of his jaw. "Fennec. Report." Silence for a heartbeat. Then the faintest murmur buzzed in his ear. Jagiełło listened, unmoving, his face unreadable. "Continue tracking," he said quietly. "No interference unless the conditions we discussed are met." More soft static. His eyes narrowed, though his tone remained level. "I understand. Do not lose him." He tapped the channel closed, then remained still for a few seconds longer, considering. Behind him, the soft hum of the outpost resumed — muted conversations, the clatter of ration tins, the grinding whine of an engine being coaxed back to life. Jagiełło returned to the table, eyes flicking once to the maps, then further — westward, where the desert stretched toward the coordinates that still glimmered in his thoughts. He said nothing to the others, but the wheels had begun to turn. ----- The mess hall was its usual haze of low voices and worn familiarity — the scent of the last meal still lingering, mingling with the faint aroma of old leather and the sharp tang of cheap detergent. My squad clustered around a battered metal table, sharing plates of ration stew and whatever passed for bread in this corner of the desert. I poked at mine, appetite hollow. The vox operator’s headset crackled, pulling me from my thoughts. He leaned toward me. “Sir—it's Jagiełło.” The words stiffened my spine. I took the handset without hesitation. “This is the 280th.” The line buzzed faintly, but Jagiełło’s voice came through, low and controlled. I kept my replies clipped. “Understood. This evening. Two Chimeras, 312 and 376.” I flicked a glance at the squad, catching Laska’s smirk as she toyed with her meal. “Yes, sir,” I continued. “Engineers and demo specialists attached. Proceeding to the coordinates.” More static. I nodded out of habit. “We’ll be ready.” The line went dead. I set the handset down, standing to address the squad. “Change of plans. We’re moving out tonight.” A few groans, but no surprise. They’d seen worse. “Armoury. Now. We’re kitting up for a long haul.” Laska leaned back, grinning. “Guess I won’t get to spend the evening with my first love after all.” A few chuckles circled the table, and a groan from Krystan. “Laska, no one wants to hear about you and that spanner.” I allowed a tight smile. I wasn’t about to ruin what little levity we could muster. In the armoury, the squad moved with purpose. They might have joked, but every one of them checked weapons, recharged power packs, and inspected their armour. Flamethrowers, grenade launchers, and extra charge packs were distributed. The engineers huddled near the far wall, fussing over tool kits and breaching charges. I double-checked the requisition sheets, making sure everything matched up. It wasn’t perfect — but it was done right. As we stepped out into the chill of the evening, the desert sky beginning to turn the colour of bruised steel, the Chimeras idled at the loading ramp. Their hulls were dulled and pitted, but ready. “Mount up!” I barked, louder than I needed to. The squad shuffled toward the vehicles. I muttered under my breath, “I’ve always wanted to say that.”

So, I've started posting more full scenes on the story. I originally starting to create small vignettes from my originally-written passages but felt they were not conveying everything I was trying to get across. Currently, I'm about six months ahead, in terms of writing progress, of what you see here and I hope you are enjoying it. I never really intended to share my writing, but it is heartening that people enjoy it. I've made quite a few breaks from the GW Genestealer Cult lore: - The Genestealer's Kiss is kept to a minimum. As I mentioned in a previous post, I feel like it's too much of a McGuffin, so keep it reserved for a few, select characters. I prefer the Cult (or Resistance, as it is termed in the writing) to evolve naturally with the force of will of the Primus and Mona's seductive, whispered words drawing people in. - I don't use the term Primus or Magus, except once. This makes it feel more like an everyman story. - The Fennec is, for anyone familiar with the army, a Jackal Alphus. I've changed her a little, also. She's very much a lone wolf. I've changed her weapon, too, so she functions more like a cross between an Alphus and a Sanctus. For the gun nerds out there, her weapon is based on the Denel NTW-20 with the .50 cal barrel. I do want to make a conversion of her model with her prone beside her bike with the tripod and muzzle brake, as there's no way she's firing that from the saddle. In terms of language, the names of things may seem a little unusual to some, but there is method in the madness. Most people are given Polish or pseudo-Slavic names. These represent the newer wave of settlers who have overtaken the original settlers of the planet. Names like Jagiełło, Marek, and the sergeant Róźa Makówska, who you will get to meet soon. Older names, such as those for flora and fauna and certain places, reflect the previous wave of settlers, hundreds of years ago, who were of Scandinavian descent, Danish in particular. The rovfugl, a desert bird, for example. We'll meet some of the desert nomads in a coming scene who speak in Danish amongst themselves. I do this, not to be fancy or anything, but because I have family in both countries and have lived in both for some years. I think it adds to the 'otherness' of the place in the sense that we all what the GSC and Imperial Guard is, but, I hope on reading, it yanks you just out of the comfort zone just long enough. Thoughts are most welcome and thank you for following my story.