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Inspirational Friday 2017: The Black Legion (until 1/5)

Kierdale

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Azekai Veteran

Azekai

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The Scion Dolorous

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Honda Venerable Brother

Honda

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In Search of Knowledge -
 

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EDITED because English is important :P

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Colonel Schaeffer Novitiate

Colonel Schaeffer

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Designation: 309213909032-Gamma 
 
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Edited after proof reading it again.
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Warsmith Aznable Venerable Brother

Warsmith Aznable

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Something Hateful

 

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Lorelei hurried into the ship’s Forge room, her excitement straining her abhuman physical limits. At close to 2.25 meters tall Lorelei could speak with space marines eye to eye. But being from an abhuman population adapted for zero gravity, a strain of homo sapiens longinus, she was exceedingly thin. Her long, graceful bones were delicate, and her muscle density was too light to bear standard gravity for more than a few minutes without her exoskeleton.

 

Her exoskeleton, a gift from her master, was a gold chased work of art. The work of a master craftsman, it originally had been designed to be light, slim, and unobstrusive. Once it had allowed her to wear fashionably tailored clothes without revealing the titanium support structure. Now, just a few short years later, it was covered with tool holders, diagnostic computers, various adapters, and a machine she had designed herself to oxygenate and filter her blood and inject and monitor several different kinds of chemical stimulants. Her somewhat crude augmentations let her live and work for weeks without having to return to the station’s null-grav decks where her people were quartered.

 

“Vol!” Lorelei called out as she scanned the cavernous room. Among the work tables littered with half finished projects, experiments, and junk, she spotted her destination, and she slowed to a cautious, respectful pace when she saw he was not alone. “Master Volundr!”

 

The two Iron Warriors turned to look at her. Forgemaster Volundr was, as always, unreadable behind his skull-faced helm. Lorelei was one of the few who could interpret the subtle movements of his servo-arms and mechadentrites to read his mood, but today she was too excited to remember. Standing next to him was one of the lesser Tech Marines who piloted an attack craft in one of the Grand Company’s flyer squadrons. He wore a large handlebar moustache in imitation of the leader of Skull Squadron, but she did not know his name. He did not, the sudden thought popped into Lorelei’s head, pull the look off nearly as well.

 

“I am aware of the situation.” Volundr waved away the space marine pilot who hurried off with the manner of someone just given a mission, leaving Lorelei alone with the Forgemaster. “Pull it up on the holotank. Give me your recommendation and I will tell you why you are wrong.”

 

Lorelei activated the Forge holotank with a neuro-implant pulsed thought, then manually called up data feeds and files. A live satellite image of the ground war on the planet below dominated the dataflow, and Lorelei highlighted a battlezone near the planet’s capital city.

 

“The Martians have landed a coffin ship.” She excitedly narrowed and zoomed in the feed, adding a stream of her own notes to the picture. “The Storm Sired squadron managed to force it into an inefficient atmospheric entry. It came down far into No Man’s Land, and the erection system is damaged. They are standing an Imperator-class walker, but at around forty-percent speed. The coffin ship is only partially under their air defense umbrella, and no significant units from either side are immediately available. There is a four hour window that the Imperator is vulnerable. If we do some creative realignment of the squadrons in orbit we can get enough of the smaller ships past their defense platform and destroy the Imperator with a saturation bombardment before it walks.”

 

“You are too eager.” Volundr came to stand beside Lorelei. “The idea of destroying a high prestige target and the perception of urgency has caused you to ignore the death of thousands of our voidsmen.”

 

“Replaceable.” Lorelei said quickly, then immediately felt a pang of shame.

 

“Needlessly wasteful.” Volundr said. There was no reproach in his voice; he stated everything matter of factly. “Give me your secondary.”

 

“It’s a standard feint.” She ran the scenario file without enthusiasm. “We rush a couple of air assault regiments to isolate the coffin ship, send a fast column of light infantry and auxiliaries in trucks toward the target kicking up a lot of dust, then when the defenders shift to support the titan hit the wall in Zone 5 here with breachers and a Predator spearhead in a bid for their back-up void shield generators.”

 

“The Novuroskan campaign.” Volundr identified the exact historical notes Lorelei had hastily copy-and-pasted on her way to the Forge to satisfy the requirement of a secondary to any offered plan. “I am disappointed in your lack of imagination.”

 

Lorelei clenched her fists, wanting to argue again for her initial plan. Instead she sighed and brushed some loose strands of her bangs back behind her ears. Her hair should have been long and woven into elaborate braids to signify her eligibility as a bride, but she told anyone who asked she was married to science.

 

“Then how?” Lorelei demanded. “We can’t let that Imperator stand. Even if it doesn’t link up with the active maniples the Martians have in Zone 3 it can threaten our entire left flank by itself if it makes it just twenty klicks deeper under their air defense. They have superior numbers, superior position, and will gain unstoppable momentum once that bastard is walking. We won’t lose just the city, we’ll be pushed off the continent. What are we going to do?”

 

“Something hateful.” Volundr replied, and Lorelei imagined she could hear his cold smile through his helmet’s modulated vox.

 

*************

 

BX-2 had been sleeping. Perception returned. There was the dreaded moment when sleep turned to waking, when the chemical inputs of which BX-2 was completely ignorant took a second to cycle, leaving the vat grown human brain to reel in terror of withdrawal, followed finally by the euphoric wash of drugs that maintained the pleasant state of existence that was all the formless personality within that brain knew as normal.

 

BX-2 had no eyes, and did not see as normal humans did. Probes and electrified clips attached to the truncated nervous system, feeding randomized, rhythmic stimuli to the brain. From its artificial birth through its years of maturation, the malformed person that was BX-2 experienced its life with a severely limited perception. An empathic psyker attempting to read BX-2’s mind would have no frame of reference for anything BX-2 experienced, thought about, or wanted. Only the most primitive, basic emotions would be understandable. BX-2 perceived a melange of sensory stimuli, and the patterns and structures formed by the brain for BX-2’s consciousness to experience could only be guessed at. BX-2 lived in an isolated world all of its own.

 

But there was purpose and design to the rhythm that the stimuli was initiated by the machines that kept BX-2 alive and thinking. BX-2b was a multi-purpose interpreter of sorts. For years the BX-2b computer passively measured the electrical patterns created by the sympathetic firing of the individual bundles of nerves, matching those patterns with brain-wave models and referencing micro-second snapshots against the external stimulus timecodes. These were continually fed to a very powerful processor that turned each snapshot into a mathematical forumula and filed it in an immense database, tagged and annotated in a variety of ways.

 

There were dozens of brains such as BX-2, each with its own server. A dedicated artificial intelligence sifted through the network of databases and continually updated a master language, of sorts, that each beta unit, when activated, could use to instigate desired neural activity from the pitiful slave consciousness in any given brain.

 

BX-2’s day started as any other day. Mornings were exciting, yet refreshing. Midday was satisfying and rewarding. Sometimes BX-2 would take an afternoon nap if there was nothing else interesting, but this day there was something interesting. BX-2 was excited. There was an anticipatory feeling. BX-2 was experiencing things not just out of sequence, but in novel combinations. BX-2 was distracted by memories of younger days for a while, when many things were novel, but then some of the new experiences began to be worrisome.

 

BX-2 began to perceive an emptiness, spiked with angry intensity. BX-2 panicked and willed experience to be pleasant again. BX-2 desperately needed the complacency of an afternoon. BX-2 would have settled for boredom. BX-2 wanted a pre-sleep excitement like the kind BX-2 enjoyed during adolescence, but lately had looked less forward to. BX-2 recoiled from the strange intensity, pleading for happiness. Eventually BX-2 became angry that life would suddenly become so strange and unpredictable and unpleasant and for the first time BX-2 could remember BX-2 was uncertain about what would happen next.

 

Then, in BX-2’s mind’s eye, as uniquely strange and incomprehensible to others as it was, BX-2 pictured a goal. The mind within struggled and grasped, reaching in an abstract, impossible to describe way. BX-2 would reach that goal. BX-2 would be certain about life and satisfied with existence again.

 

BX-2 would be happy.

 

*************

 

The supersonic rocket craft streaked through the flakk choked sky. It was sleek and silver, marred here and there with burns from atmospheric entry, with aggressively swept wings and compact control surfaces. Of a dozen that had been launched, only this one remained.

 

It arced low, hugging the terrain. The sonic boom and disturbed air flattened trees, knocked weary, trudging soldiers from their feet, and shattered the glass windshields of transport trucks. It danced away from smart missiles, and threaded the needle of interlacing las-fire. The adamantium hull barely registered the comparatively soft steel clouds of flakk that were thrown in its path. It maneuvered as if it had an insane need, and nothing could stop it.

 

The Imperator was clear of the coffin ship, but had only taken forty-two steps. The crew of the massive titan were only then being alerted to a possible airborne threat, but it was too late. The princeps in her neural tank only had time to yell her rage into a turbulence of amniotic fluid for a short moment before the impact.

 

The sleek projectile impacted the upper left thigh of the god-machine. In a flash of blue arcing static discharge the hull disintegrated, not by the force of impact but by design, and millions of needle-like probes propelled at incredible velocity penetrated into the interior of the titan. Trailing behind each needle-probe was a liquid-metal filament that cooled into a highly conductive wire at more or less the moment the probe it was attached to expended its kinetic energy. The core of the projectile liquefied into a semi-plastic gel which splattered and then wrapped around the exterior of the titan. The remaining kinetic energy realized through microscopic networks of converters and flowed into a push battery, powering the post-impact processes of the weapon.

 

Of the millions of probes that penetrated the titan, mere dozens connected with the god-machine’s internal networks. The millions of probes that were unconnected withered in seconds as energy was diverted into the established connections. In less than a minute hundreds of more lines had wormed their way into the network, guided by those already functioning.

 

The princeps of the Imperator began perceiving incomprehensible models of impossible experience. There was no recognizable form, no words for the concepts overpowering her mindscape. Her own brain began to suffer cascading neural failures, and as her moderatii screamed in sympathetic terror she suffered a massive, fatal aneurysm. Her last coherent thought was paradoxically an overwhelming joy and sense of accomplishment.

 

Without the princep’s firm guidance, the machine spirit of the Imperator raged, then panicked as the same assault of alien sensations battered its wounded artificial psyche. The princeps had been weak flesh, retreating into the oblivion of death. The ancient, hardened network of the Imperator had no such relief. The machine spirit mentally disassociated, and rose to full locomotive power.

 

The war for the capital city briefly stopped as millions of people watched in terror as an Imperator titan thundered across No Man’s Land in a fugue state.

 

*************

 

Lorelei and Volundr watched the scramble of the aftermath take shape via live satellite feeds on the holotank. The Imperator’s mad flight led it many kilometers from the battlefield before it collapsed in mechanical catatonia. The Adeptus Mechanicus forces that had anchored the defense of the city abandoned the walls, regrouped, and made a reckless drive to recover the god-machine. Warsmith Barnabas was quick to exploit the sudden confusion among the enemy, and was over-running Zone 1 and Zone 4. Lorelei calculated that the city could not be permanently captured, but the mayhem the Iron Warriors would cause would end its active involvement in the war even after the defenders rallied.

 

“How did you know it would do that?” Lorelei asked, impressed at the extent of the chaos below. When Volundr did not answer she saw micro-twitches of his secondary servo-arm and grinned at him. “You didn’t!”

 

“My simulations suggested it would attack the city.” Volundr admitted. “The real surprise is the lack of warp emergence. I expected at least a Class II manifestation. Most curious.”

 

“Why don’t we do that all the time?” Lorelei asked. “How many of those do we have?”

 

“Too many.” Volundr said. The turned to face her. “The Warsmith would not be pleased to learn the details of this weapons program. That is why it is housed on board this ship, and never on the Child of Calamity.”

 

Lorelei was stunned.

 

“Since when do we keep secrets from the Warsmith?” She asked, nervously looking behind her, searching the shadowed recesses of the workshop. The warm exhilaration of a victoriously executed plan and discovery of something new instantly gave way to a cold, clammy feeling of dread.

 

“Since we scraped the orange and black paint from our armour and returned to the fold of the Legion.” Volundr said. Lorelei touched the back of his arm, underneath where his shoulder pad hung, and felt the familiar contoured remains of the imperfectly removed orange paint. “Since she was given a senior seat in the Isarnhauld.”

 

“Vol,” Lorelei whispered fearfully. “What are we doing?”

 

************

 

Warsmith Barnabas tramped heavily down the Stormbird’s ramp. The old warrior was covered in soot, dried blood, and mud. His armour was pitted, torn, and cratered. His weapons were battered and worn. And yet he removed his helmet with an uncharacteristic jollity, tucking it under his arm in antiquated formality and not bothering to hide his good mood.

 

Barnabas, his lieutenants and champions hurrying to keep up, approached the reception group and saluted jauntily by banging the back of his power axe against his plastron.

 

“It is good to know that some of the old guard still respect the old ways!” Barnabas all but roared. He seldom took his helmet off, and in a legion as famously paranoid as the IVth this was considered unremarkable. Few knew of the vanity that caused him to hide his face, which he considered to be profoundly ugly. His eyes were small and too close together, his nose was large and bumpy, and his forehead was ridged reminiscent of an ogryn, accented by his very large eyebrows.

 

His host aboard ship was none other than Queen Yseult, the Warsmith Bolverk’s fourth wife, from a Drukhari cabal that controlled the webway nexus deep in the bowels of Warsmith Bolverk’s spacehulk. Once she had been the head of her own Wych-cult, and was a highly skilled assassin, gladiatrix, and huntress. The centuries she had lived aboard the Child of Calamity as the wife of a mad Asartes warlord had changed her.

 

She was no less beautiful, and certainly no less deadly. But her eyes made even the jolly Barnabas stop in his tracks. Her face showed a strain that no one, not even her brother Archon Ythwnn could guess at the origin of. But her eyes. On the odd occasion when other Drukhari were called into company, even they balked in her presence.

 

“Great gods.” Barnabas exclaimed quietly.

 

Where Yseult’s eyes had gone was a mystery. In their place, shining with a writhing inner light, were lavender soulstones.

 

“They were not anyone you know, Barnabas.” Yseult informed him distantly.

 

“Undoubtedly.” Warsmith Barnabas agreed awkwardly, then pressed the subject to practical concerns. “I have been told the Child of Calamity is en route, and that Bolverk will be leading the bulk of the 49th Grand Company personally. The recent sack of the enemy capital city gives us time, but without Bolverk’s commitment to reinforce me not even that could be considered a turning point.”

 

“He is coming, as promised.” Yseult said airily. She turned to leave the flight deck, and Barnabas fell in pace beside her while their attendants Legionnaires merged into an honor guard escort.

 

“I am told Princess Maya has grown into a superb commander.” Barnabas said conversationally. “Bolverk speaks with great pride of your daughter.”

 

Yseult stopped, and the hackles on Barnabas’ neck rose in warning as the air around her chilled suddenly, a hint of frost forming on the should pad of his nearest to her.

 

“That thing is not my daughter.” Yseult said calmly, almost wistfully, and Barnabas wished he could tell where her grotesquely macabre eyes were looking. She turned her face toward his. “I don’t know what it is.”

 

For an awkward moment the legionnaires waited, unable to read the sudden mood shift and too cautious to act. After a moment Yseult simply continued, prompting them to follow along.

 

“Come, Barnabas.” Yseult motioned toward a lift. “I expect you’ll want to clean up and rest a bit before we move on to new business.”

 

The 49th Grand Company post-Cadia - Part One

gunnyogrady Veteran

gunnyogrady

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Thank you all for your stories! I am excited to see so many pieces come in, I was getting a little worried!

 

I don't know when Kierdale will officially close the competition, but in the mean time I'll settle in to read all of your work, and have a judgement soon.

Kierdale Venerable Brother

Kierdale

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Thank you for your entries in Inspirational Friday: The Primordial Annihilator versus the Adeptus Mechanicus.

Half way through I was worried that we didn’t have many entries, but Thursday night we got three more!

Heliomanes gave us Apameia, a tale of a young adept racing to spirit his master, an archmagos, to safety. But all is not as it seems...

I gave you a couple of entries (and an idea), in Machinations I fleshed out what I started in Damnatio Ad Bestias, showing the growing corruption on Alceforge, the coming of the Psychopomps and the death of magos Chi-Eta...and survival of his closest ally(?).

And I was inspired by the Lexicanum entry on the Adeptus Mechanicus to write There will be no more.... The entry mentioned about members of the Priesthood of Mars not accepting the Emperor as the Ominissiah. I thought I’d take one of these groups and twist it’s beliefs.

Carrack, as I did, built on his entry for the `Mutants` theme with Backwards. I really liked both the description of Calebra Hive at its peak, and particularly the observations on the Mechanicus and the Imperium.

But what was in that bunker?? I’m sure we’ll find out.

Shinespider gave us a clash between an inquisitor and a member of the Mechanicus, puppets dancing to another’s tune...

Azekai’s work gave us an excellent description of a knight pilot, their engine and the relationship between them. I haven’t read such a great and detailed description. Too short!

In Search of Knowledge was Honda’s piece for this theme. A great an intriguing intro. I liked the character of Dr. Hermes and Magos Dexlan’s growing irritation. A great twist and that much was left unexplained was good.

Colonel Shaeffer gave us Designation: 309213909032-Gamma, describing so much in so little words: simple status updates from a forge world. The reduction in efficiency (far more important than lives lost. How very Mechanicus, nay, Imperial!), the changes in leadership (with rank dropping). And that final entry :thumbsup:

…and I was very pleased to see a homo sapiens longinus in Warsmith Aznable’s Something Hateful. I had hoped to see some of the less-common human strains in people’s entries for the last theme, so it was nice to see one now. I loved the premise: an enemy titan undergoing a problematic deployment in no-man’s land. A tantalizing target or prize! I also really enjoy your occasional comments that help to flesh out the culture of your characters (about Lorelei’s hair, etc.). The references to past campaigns, making it more than a stand-alone, self-contained story but rather clearly part of an on-going narration. These small things really add to the background. And, for those who have been following the 49th Grand Company, there were some interesting developments there...

Thank you so much for your great and varied pieces!

I hereby close that topic but if anyone has more stories on that theme, at any time, please post them here with a suitable title.

And here begins our nineteenth challenge of Inspirational Friday 2017:

The Primordial Annihilator versus the Astra Mi- Imperial Guard

Though they are but mortals in a galaxy of gods and monsters, the Imperial Guard combine vast numbers, mighty armoured vehicles and good honest human courage to win bloody victories in the Emperor’s countless wars.

-Imperial Guard codex

With regiments raised on countless worlds, the Imperial Guard are the Emperor’s most numerous forces. From the orphaned Cadian regiments whose very planet broke before they did, crying out “Remember Cadia!” as they march into battle; to the massed cavalry charges of the Attilan roughriders; the hardened jungle fighters of Catachan; the innumerable conscripts of the Valhallans; the proud Mordian regiments from their twilight world, the battle-hardened Armageddon Steel Legion; the Vostroyan firstborn with their fur hats and fine arms; the Tallarn raiders, striking and fading like desert wind; the grim Death Korps of Krieg to the Elysians dropping onto the battlefield from upon high...the regiments of the Guard are varied and not limited to infantry as armoured companies grind the battlefield and the enemy beneath the treads of their chimeras, Leman Russes and superheavy tanks such as the Baneblade and Shadowsword.

Tell us this time a tale of the forces of the Primordial Annihilator against the Imperial Guard.

The Primordial Annihilator versus the Imperial Guard runs until the 27th of October.

Let us be inspired.

And who shall judge this new challenge? That decision lies with our current judge: gunnyogrady.

The champion chosen by gunnyogrady, shall claim the Octed amulet:

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Or, for the cannon fodder loyal troops of the Emperor’s Hammer:

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Honda Venerable Brother

Honda

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This was one of the coolest things I've ever seen. I shall be obligated to borrow it at some point...for a friend.

MyD4rkPassenger Veteran

MyD4rkPassenger

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It's been quite some time since I've written here, forgive some errors I am on lunch and will fix them when I get off work, I just had to get this one down while it was fresh!

 

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Kierdale Venerable Brother

Kierdale

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I’m extending the deadline for Chaos vs. IG by a week to 10/27.

A. Gunnyogrady hasn’t judged the last challenge yet (and hasn’t checked in since 10/12. If no judgement come this weekend then I’ll do the honours).

B. We’ve only had one entry so far.

C. This weekend I’ll be rather busy!

Kierdale Venerable Brother

Kierdale

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Well, there has been no sign of gunnyogrady since 10/12 so it falls to me to pass judgement.

There’s a reason why I don’t judge IF every week anymore...I hate having to choose a winner!

 

However, after reviewing the entries again I’ve chosen one which, thought it didn’t feature the Chaos-side of the theme much, I do feel it exemplified the Adeptus Mechanicus.

 

The winner of The Primordial Annihilator versus the Adeptus Mechanicus is Colonel Schaeffer.

Congratulations!

Carrack Veteran

Carrack

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Duty

Port LeCroix, Level 45, Calebra Hive Ruins

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Warsmith Aznable Venerable Brother

Warsmith Aznable

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Here is my entry. It is very long, and I apologise for that. I have broken it into different parts to make reading it seem maybe less overwhelming.

 

The Mercy Song

 

Part One

Hidden Content
Yannis closed his eyes and concentrated on the familiar noise of the ancient monorail system, willing the pressing mass of humanity to fade away. The commute to the burbs was time-consuming and uncomfortable, but it beat living in the high arcologies. Their safety from the changing planetary environment and the threat of invasion was entirely theoretical, as far as Yannis was concerned. Everyone knew that life anywhere inside but the highest spires was nasty, brutish, and short.

 

The packed-in manufactorum workers and mid-grade servants, Yannis included, swayed in time to the clatter and hum of the mega-city’s crumbling mass transit. The smell of oil, grease, sweat, desperation, and indifference was usually in the background of their lives, unnoticed but ever present. Pressed together like crackers in a ration tin the lives of workers and their varied jobs concentrated into a noxious miasma. Yannis breathed into his high collar and counted the number of times the monorail stopped and opened its doors. The announcement system crackled unintelligibly at every stop; it was an oft repeated joke that all of the transit speakers had been blow out centuries ago, but the proper repair request paperwork should be reaching the appropriate authorities imminently.

 

At the forty-second stop since leaving the industrial district Yannis became aware of the extra room in the monorail car. With every stop the passengers had shuffled about, rearranging to create the most comfort, but it took many stops before one could actually stand without rubbing shoulders with someone.

 

With a hiss of shutting doors and the garbled crackling of the PA system, the monorail lurched back into motion. Just seven more stops, Yannis thought to himself. As the hum of the electro-magnetic propulsion system rose to travel intensity, Yannis heard another another, more musical hum. He opened his eyes and looked about, still hanging from the strap, and spotted an old woman sitting at the back of the car, dark but for the sickly yellow glow of the emergency exit sign.

 

The woman was frighteningly thin, clad in ragged, old clothes. Her dirty grey hair was long and stringy, and her leathery skin was creased and wrinkled. Her bony hands clutched a beat up canvas satchel, at second glance an frayed and faded military map case. Despite her advanced age and wretched condition, the old woman rocked gently back and forth, not in time with the transit system but with the song she hummed to herself. Her face was a mask of serenity, the skin of her eyelids stretched tightly over the eyeballs protruding from their sunken sockets. She rocked and hummed her half remembered hymn, whispering very few of the words every now and again as they rose from her memory.

 

“Mercy… oh, have mercy…”

 

The words caused a chill to corkscrew down Yannis’ spine. The only mercy he knew was the Emperor’s Mercy. Nervously he looked around and saw his neighbor Petros leaning into the center pole by the door, and moved to stand near him. The two exchanged concerned looks, then resumed silently counting the number of stops until the monorail stopped at their platform.

 

Later, Yannis and Petros turned at the bottom of the concrete steps from their neighborhood platform to the street and watched the monorail lurch and glide away into the dusk. Not able to say exactly why, the two men both laughed, then clapped one another on the shoulder and made their way to the small hab block they shared.

 

***********

 

“Melika!” Yannis called out to his wife as he opened the door of their small apartment. He closed the flimsy plasteel door and wearily hung his heavy canvas work jacket onto its wall hook next to hers.

 

“Just in time,” Melika answered him from their kitchenette. Their apartment was small. They had no children so they counted themselves lucky that they even had a separate bedroom. Most couples with no children made do with only one room, but this far from the city center the housing authority was less rigid.

 

Yannis sat upon the floor and kicked off his thick rubberized canvas boots, heaving them toward the corner by the door before laying down and stretching painfully. Their front room was spartan, as were those of most couples they knew. Melika ferried two bowls of steaming protein stew and sat them upon the two shoved together footlockers that served as their only table. A brightly coloured but flimsy plastic pitcher came next, and Melika poured simple, clean water into their PDF issue canteen cups.

 

“Anything on the video?” Yannis sat up, hungrily spooning the stew into his mouth.

 

“It’s thirdday.” Melika poked her stew with her metal PDF issue mess spoon, fishing for steamed vegetables. “Nothing good comes on until Fifthday.”

 

“Hmmm.” Yannis agreed disinterestedly. He looked up at Melika then, suddenly remembering how attractive he found her, overcome by a sudden nostalgia for something he couldn’t put his finger on. He watched her eat, her dark brown eyes fixed onto her shallow spoon lest her prized vegetables tumble back into the stew. The way her natural brown curls framed her face beguiled him, and even her somewhat large nose, slightly crooked from a work mishap, was charming to him.

 

“Why don’t we go to Seventhday Service?” Yannis suddenly asked.

 

“We go every Seventhday.” Melika looked up at him, confused. Attendance at the neighborhood mission was mandatory on service days.

 

“No,” Yannis said, “I mean at the Cathedral.”

 

“It’s a difficult and long trip for our only day off.” Melika, not impious, but extremely practical, frowned at the thought of spending hours on the monorail to stand in line for hours again to get even close to the Cathedral. “It would be better to wait for a Feast so we’d have three days off in a row. Better chance of getting inside if we did that, if we chose the right one.”

 

“It was just a thought.” Yannis said glumly. “I don’t know why I said it.”

 

Suddenly the telescreen on the wall activated, startling the two mid-meal. Yannis and Melika dropped their spoons and jumped to their feet, facing the telescreen as the seal of the Astra Militarum faded into view and triumphal marching music blared from the vox.

 

+++Attention Citizen-soldiers… Attention Citizen-soldiers… Stand ready to receive local activation instructions… Failure to watch the following broadcast is equivalent to desertion in the face of the enemy and is a capital offense… Stand ready to receive local activation instructions… Insert localised video here in 5… 4… 3...+++

 

Yannis and Melika spared one another a quick, nervous glance, then came to attention and saluted as the double-heade eagle of the Astra Militarum was replaced by a live feed of their local Mobilisation Officer. His dress uniform was wrinkled and ill-fitting, obviously thrown on only moments before he was called to read his announcement live on-air. He fumbled nervously with several papers on a clipboard, staring at the words for a moment before taking a deep breath and looking directly into the camera.

 

“247th Infantry Battalion…248th Infantry Battalion… 173rd Motorised Rifle Company... 72nd Field Artillery Battery… 101st Armoured Auxiliary Detachment… 4077th Mobile Medicae Unit… 6-6 Light Recon Company… the entire Northern Zone Transportation Division… and the 1st through 7th Support Companies of District H1Z1… uh… and any retiree officers and Reserve Listed specialists… report to duty stations immediately. All secondary and tertiary PDF members report to your neighborhood Ready Reserve Officer for headcount by 2230. Full alert kit for all members.

 

… Was that good? OK, set it to repeat for recall on-demand and-”

 

“Well, that’s me.” Yannis reached out and muted the playback by confirming his acceptance of the orders with a touch of a button.

 

“Lucky you.” Melika hurriedly removed their half-eaten dinner from their PDF footlockers. Yannis pulled his trunk slightly out and threw open the top, quickly removing items, many he hadn’t looked at since his orientation training and initial issue. Melika quickly sanitized their dishes (even soldiers weren’t exempt from bio-waste law without a direct order) then opened her own trunk.

 

“Lucky me?” Yannis grinned at her as he adjusted the straps on his webgear, letting it out to accommodate for the softer physique he had gained since basic.

 

“Sure.” Melika said. Yannis saw through her forced smile, however bravely she put it on. “I have to stay here counting and recounting my issued wargear and lining up for head count three times a day until whatever this is is over. You get to ride on a Chimaera and eat fresh rations.”

 

“This is just a drill...” Yannis, gripping his las-carbine still in its canvas dust cover, locked eyes with her. “I’ll be home tomorrow, probably with a medal for not having sold any of this junk for stimms.”

 

“Or maybe a commendation for having gained the least weight since indoctrination.” Melika adjusted Yannis’ collar so that one side was not awkwardly trapped under his webgear. “Now you hurry. I have another hour, you move, don’t be late!”

 

Yannis hesitated, kissed Melika on the cheek and hurried outside and merged with the mass of humanity again. Instead of the unorganized pressing of flesh he routinely experienced during his commute, Yannis fell in with route-stepping citizen-soldiers. Their training had been brief, but intense. Yannis felt a surge of eerie time displacement in his mind, brought back by the sound of tramping boots and the smell of fresh issue uniforms and the canteens and other gear bouncing against his sides with each step.

 

“Yannis!” Petros fell in beside him as they descended the hab block stairs. “I didn’t even finish dinner!”

 

Part Two

Hidden Content

“Alright lads, over here. Over here.”

 

Yannis lined up with the rest of his platoon where Sergeant Drakey indicated. Usually he was Mr. Drakey, or “Opa” Drakey, gaffer of the local corner shop where everyone bought tobacco, pastries, and ABC liquor. But today, and for the foreseeable future, he was Sergeant Drakey.

 

“I think Opa should stay with the neighborhood reserve.” Petros said from close behind Yannis. “These gangers won’t care he’s a nice old man.”

 

“I wish they let him make our rations.” Yannis said, not for the first time. “Our field desserts are like sawdust.”

 

“What is sawdust?” Pertos asked.

 

“Forget it.” Yannis waved him off as they shuffled forward, one step at a time, to receive new gear. Yannis’ grandfather had been from the northland, where actual trees still grew row upon row in farms to be harvested for luxury items, but Petros’ people had come from the coast. Of course Yannis had never seen a tree or even wood, and Petros had never seen the ocean or even a fish. Yannis had seen sawdust, though. His grandfather’s work utilities had always been covered with the stuff.

 

Finally it was Yannis’ turn at the front of the line. He stepped forward to a stack of crates, in front of which stood a pair of specialists from a supply detachment. On the concrete expanse of the assembly area were dozens of supply trucks lined up, each with open cargo compartments and stacks of crates, and line upon line of soldiers receiving gear.

 

“One flak vest. One helmet-”

 

“I already have a helmet.” Yannis interjected.

 

“Now you have two. Don’t interrupt me again.” The bored supply specialist continued heaping wargear from the crates into Yannis’ arms while another ticked off marks on a dataslate. “Seven lasgun ammo packs. Only take one out of the plastic packaging, leave the others in. One new issue bayonet. Two field covers...”

 

Later Yannis and Petros sat arranging their new gear.

 

“What are we supposed to do with two helmets?” Petros grumbled.

 

“You’ve been issued two helmets.” Yannis replied, repacking his at the bottom of his rucksack. “Remember: having less than two helmets is now heresy.”

 

“Hey now.” Sergeant Drakey stood over them and waved an admonishing finger. “Do not say such things when the Lieutenant comes. Heresy is nothing to laugh about.”

 

“Sorry, Opa.” Yannis and Petros both made the sign of the Aquila.

 

“You are good boys, I don’t want to have to tell your wives I had you shot.” Sergeant Drakey shook his finger at them. “The Lieutenant will be here soon, though. We are going out then. So you keep your damn mouths shut, yes? Yes!”

 

“Yes, Opa.”

 

***********

 

Yannis did not like the sinking feeling of the industrial lift. He sat with his squad, all of them sitting on benches in the troop compartment of their open topped Goliath armoured truck, backs against the armoured hull, knees touching the soldier opposite, lascarbine clutched between their thighs. The red light of the industrial lift began blinking, then shut off as the lift thunked to a stop. Yellow lights on the wall began spinning and an air horn blatted out crush warnings as the heavy metal doors of the lift slowly ground open. Yannis, and everyone else in his squad save the Lieutenant, hunkered down, trying to get their head and shoulders below the top of the armoured sides of their truck.

 

“We had Chimaeras at my indoctrination exercises.” Petros grumbled quietly, so that only Yannis could hear him. “I hated it then, but I’d give anything for an armoured roof right now.”

 

“We had one too,” Yannis told him. “But we only had one, and they wouldn’t let us go inside. We had to sit in a plasteel mock-up and pretend to fire the las-array.”

 

The armoured truck’s promethium engine roared, and the soldiers in the back were all rocked toward the rear, leaning heavily into one another as the Goliath moved off the lift and into the cavernous darkness of the underhive. All of the quiet conversation of friends and neighbors ceased, each of the soldiers suddenly gripped with anxiety. Two weeks of roll-calls, gear checks, field rations, and guard duty hadn’t really seemed like an actual military activation. Even their convoy to the hive had seemed like a drill. Yannis and most of his comrades had been enjoying the break from the routine of their work schedules and sometimes brutal realities of the work itself. But as their platoon separated and took different lifts down for patrol, the novelty had worn away more with each meter they dropped.

 

“How are we supposed to see anything?” Yannis complained.

 

“You want to see something?” Petros asked.

 

“I want to see something before it sees me.” Yannis answered.

 

The Goliath drove through the vaults and halls of the underhive. Sometimes Yannis heard the roar of the engines echo off the ceiling as it dropped close. When this happened the oily smoke from the exhaust stacks swirled through the troop compartment, and the soldiers stuck their faces down into their uniform tops and tried to breathe through their undershirts. Other times the Goliath’s engine whined and the truck rumbled side to side, the soldiers grimacing as their helmets cracked together or banged off the armoured walls of the troop compartment. When this happened they sometimes heard things crunching or cracking beneath the Goliath’s great wheels, and they reckoned they were driving over debris.

 

It was dark. Yannis did not know how the drivers knew where they were going. Sometimes the Lieutenant, standing next to the heavy stubber gunner behind the drivers compartment, activated the large spotlight and shined it into the darkness. When this happened the soldiers all quickly shut their dominant eye, just as their Imperial Infantryman’s Uplifting Primer instructed, so that they could maintain nightvision with their aiming eye if they had to. It was too dark without the spotlight to see anything, there was no nightvision to speak of, but they did this anyway because that is what they were supposed to do.

 

The anxiety and terror of the patrol had long since faded into a tense boredom when the buzzing noises came.

 

“What is that?” Petros asked, looking up and seeing only darkness, then hunkering down again as a loud buzzing noise sounded overhead again.

 

“Insects?” Yannis said, remembering his grandfather describing the large flying beetles that sometimes descended from the hills to threaten the tree farms. “Flying insects?”

 

“Quiet in the back.” Yannis had spoken loud enough to draw the ire of the Lieutenant, who switched on his spotlight and swept the bright beam to the sides.

 

Suddenly Yannis heard another buzzing noise, louder than before, followed abruptly by a metallic clinking. Something rolled on the deck next to his boot, and he reached down to pick it up.

 

“What is that?” Petros asked, not certain of what Yannis was doing.

 

“It’s a chunk of metal.” Yannis held the soft lead slug in his hand, gently rolling it around in his palm to keep its warmth from burning his flesh. “It’s hot.”

 

“Do what now?” The Lieutenant turned, still hanging onto the spotlight with both hands, peering back into the gloom toward Yannis, who held up the slug.

 

The side of the Lieutenant’s face exploded in blood and bone, with a large flap of skin peeling back to reveal a ruined mass of teeth and muscle. The soldiers in the squad let out a collective gasp of horror, not understanding at all what had just occurred. A tumbling solid slug buzzed into the Lieutenant’s upper chest, missing the top of his flak vest and burrowing into his throat with a wet smacking sound. The Lieutenant dropped down to the deck, clawing at his throat while wet, gurgles of blood poured forth in the place of his astonished words. Yannis stared in horror as the Lieutenant lay thrashed, then lay still, eerily lit by the wash of the spotlight reflecting off the top of the driver’s compartment.

 

“It’s shooting!” Someone shouted. “They’re shooting at us!”

 

A steady stream of incoming fire began to plink and pop against the side of the Goliath. The heavy stubber gunner, who had not seen the Lieutenant go down, suddenly swore and swiveled his weapon to port. The heavy gun began chugging away in crashing bursts of fire. Each round spat a jet of fire out of the end of the barrel almost as long as a man was tall, illuminating the stygian darkness in periodic moments of eerie hellfire.

 

Yannis did not know what was out there, but infantry drill took over. He and the rest of his squad turned around in their seats, placed their lascarbines over the edge of the truck’s side armour, and began snapping rounds out into the darkness. They stopped temporarily and held on tightly as the Goliath swung around in a long, high speed turn.

 

“Bloody plastic packaging!” Petros tore at the packaging of a fresh ammo pack for his lascarbine. Yannis joined him in cursing the supply specialists who had insisted their ammunition be returnable to stores should they not use it. The long term, water proof packaging was difficult to tear, stretching great length before finally ripping, then requiring great effort to expand upon said openings enough to extract the battery pack within.

 

“Cease fire!” Someone commanded, and after a couple of more commands Yannis withdrew his lascarbine and ducked his head below the rim, looking for whoever was taking charge. Someone he could not see was giving directions from near the front. “The driver says we’re through a different vault, now. No heat signatures anymore, whatever that means. Save your ammo.”

 

Yannis was breathing hard, and his heart was hammering in his chest. His hands were shaking, still fumbling to insert the fresh battery pack. He felt momentarily as if here were not in his own body, or as if he were floating several centimeters above himself. He looked around at his squadmates, wide-eyed. He saw the same expressions on everyone else that he felt himself.

 

“Gangers?” Someone asked.

 

“Had to be.” The heavy stubber gunner called back to them.

 

“Did you see any of them?” Petros raised his voice to be heard.

 

“I saw muzzle flashes,” The gunner said, then indicated the large, barrel shaped device on top of his heavy stubber. “Then heat signatures through the optic.”

 

“Did you get any of them?” Another voice asked. “Did we?”

 

“I think so.” The gunner replied, shrugging in his carapace armour.

 

The ride back to the next lift was tense. Yannis and the others remained quiet, listening for the sound of incoming slugs. Every rock that kicked up and pinged off the undercarriage made them jump. Every time the Goliath turned they were afraid they were for some reason going back. Nobody noticed that Andris and Marcus were also dead, slumped down in their seats as if they were simply ducking for cover, until the red light of the lift raised visibility.

 

***********

 

The Goliath slowly cruised though the low-hive neighborhood. The ceilings were a couple dozen meters high in this section. There were freestanding structures much like the illegal settlements on the fringes of the burbs. The lights mostly worked here, too, though the ever present barrel fires on every corner made their contributions to visibility as well.

 

The local hivers seemed unable to resist coming out of their hovels, stimm flops, and off-license establishments to gape at the PDF patrols. Settlements that appeared largely empty on approach were teeming with throngs of locals by the time the column of Goliaths were driving through them. The locals reacted with a myriad of emotional responses, none of which seemed of any logic to the soldiers who had to dismount and walk alongside the trucks in populated areas. It slowed the column down, but it also kept ganger juves from sneaking bombs onto the bottoms of their trucks.

 

“Yannis.” Petros called, then pointed toward an alley opening the column was coming to.

 

“I see it.” Yannis in turn indicated the potential ambush point to the soldier walking behind him.

 

It had been little more than a month since Yannis’ squad had lost the Lieutenant and the others, but it felt like a lifetime ago to Yannis. More and more they patrolled areas that were theoretically under control, but the rioting of hive citizens was usually far more deadly and disruptive than the active hostility of the underhive gangers. The death of Sergeant Drakey was still fresh in everyone’s minds. He was burned to death by a petrol bomb thrown during a food riot, and the thought of kindly old Opa being murdered, who sometimes let him pay for his morning caff and pasties later if he did not have enough chits on him, made his blood boil.

 

“What is that?” Petros pointed again, this tie with his lascarbine.

 

“Where?” Yannis raised his own lascarbine, trying to see what Petros saw. “Where?”

 

Before Petros could answer the gunner of their Goliath shouted. “Bomber!”

 

Yannis, his lascarbine pointing in the general direction his comrade had called his attention to, immediately pulled his trigger upon hearing the warning. The other PDF soldiers on his side of the Goliath fired in the same general direction, and Yannis saw several people in the crowd drop.

 

“Where, Petros! Where!” Yannis demanded, pausing to acquire a target.

 

“There!” Petros cracked off a shot and Yannis searched the surging, screaming crowd to see where it went. “In the red! In the red!”

 

Yannis could not see exactly who Petros was shooting at. He picked out any member of the local hiver crowd wearing any article of red clothing or carrying anything coloured red, and put a crack of las into them, sometimes two. For a few mad minutes the squad fired at the fleeing locals, and were rewarded for their efforts when a satchel one of the slain had been carrying detonated.

 

“Mount up!” Came the command, and Yannis was pulled into the Goliath’s troop compartment, then turned around to pull Petros up after him. The column sped through the now clear streets, taking advantage of the momentary panic of the locals. They knew from experience that the civilians would return soon, angry and violent over what they would definitely view as an atrocity, and against all logic would hurl chunks of masonry and bits of steel at the heavily armed troopers.

 

“What is even happening?” Petros asked Yannis, who shrugged like he always did when Petros asked.

 

“They have not told us why we are doing any of this.” Yannis said, repeating the old joke without any humour, “This means that knowing what is happening is heresy.”

 

Part Three

Hidden Content

Yannis and Petros walked together down the concrete steps of the neighborhood monorail platform. The monorail was military use only now, and had been filled with supply personnel and crates of materiel. Yannis and Petros were in transit to new units, and had been authorized to resupply their consumables at their own neighborhood armoury.

 

“This is a grim sight.” Petros said to Yannis. From many of the streetlamps and traffic signals hung the bodies of heretics. Slates of hard plastic were hung around the necks of the corpses, each detailing a capital crime.

 

“Looters.” Yannis read each heresy as the two made their way toward their hab block. They stopped and stared at Opa Drakey’s corner store for a moment, then silently continued into the open square that their hab block faced. People, mostly military people, were moving down every street they had seen, doing whatever their duties required them to be out and about for. But in the square was gathered a crowd of civilians, those too old, too young, too infirm, or too necessary to local functions to have been activated by the local PDF. A fair few of PDF secondary and tertiaries were also mixed into the crowd.

 

At the center of the crowd, on a platform made of discarded artillery containers, a ragged band of street preachers were haranguing the crowd, whipping them into a raucous frenzy. The object of their sermon was a pathetic scarecrow of a man with a sign around his neck that read “food hoarder.”

 

“I will meet you here in fifteen minutes.” Petros told Yannis. “If you are not here I will meet you at the platform. It is not good to linger.”

 

Yannis merely nodded and hurried up the stairs to his own level of the hab block. On his way to his and Melika’s apartment he passed several doors that had the Imperial I spray-painted on their exterior. One had its front window broken out, and soot from flames trailed up the concrete exterior and stained the ceiling black. Yannis was relieved when he reached his own door and found it closed and locked, just as it should be. He spared a glance down to the square, and grimaced as the heretic was whipped toward a lamp post, apparently to be hung, pleading for mercy.

 

Mercy.

 

That word lingered in Yannis’ brain as he unlocked his door and stepped inside. He was not sure why.

 

Inside he was disappointed that Melika was not waiting for him. Disappointed but not surprised. She was merely tertiary PDF, but Yannis was certain that her medicae detachment would have been called into active duty by now. The riots in the arcologies were getting to be a daily occurrence, each seeming larger and more destructive than the last. The official word was that outside agitators were responsible for arranging and instigating the violence, but once a crowd was panicked things took on a life of their own. The military often found itself in strange turnarounds, either shooting at the very people they had come to protect, or providing aid and evacuation to rioters they themselves had forcibly surpressed.

 

Yannis had stopped trying to make sense of any of it after Opa had been murdered.

 

“Hello Melika.” Yannis called to the empty apartment. “I am home, my love.”

 

He gathered a few personal items and stuffed them hastily into his rucksack. In the bedroom he retrieved a fresh supply of socks and underwear. He felt guilty dumping his old, filthy socks and underwear in a pile at the foot of their bed, but he needed to make room in his pack. He paused to smell the pillow that Melika laid her head upon, drinking in her scent and truly missing her for the first time in weeks. As he choked down the urge to drop everything and go look for her, he noticed writing on the mirror hanging on the door to their necessary room. Printed in her neat, tidy hand in black marker upon the mirror:

 

Activated, being deployed to Manufactorum District, finally will get to see where you work I guess, stay safe, love Melika.

 

Yannis cast around, then pulled a grease pencil from his flak vest he kept for marking maps, and wrote under her message:

 

Sorry I missed you. Petros and I going to new unit. Sorry about the dirty laundry. Stay safe. Love you.

 

The zealous crowd outside in the square roared in a crescendo of hysteria, then began singing a triumphant hymn. It shattered the tempting illusion of normalcy that being back in his own home caused. Yannis took one last look around, then hurried to meet Petros after locking the front door again.

 

***********

 

Yannis sat upon a duffel bag. Petros too, and so did everyone in his new company. The duffel bags were arranged in long lines, the air technicians had called them chalks. The new “special troops” brigade (neither Yannis nor Petros could say what that meant) waited patiently on the tarmac, lined up to the side of the runway at the military spaceport to the east of the megacity. The last five days had consisted of little else but sitting in these boarding chalks, perched atop their duffel bags, wondering what they might be waiting on.

 

Valkyries and Arvus lighters came and went, though apparently nothing to do with them. Rumours and speculation ran wild. The two most popular theories held they were either going to be ferried directly to the spire district of one of the hive arcologies, or to one of the orbital platforms. The officers that prowled through their ranks every so often only scowled at them and barked commands at their senior NCOs. None were forthcoming with any rhyme or reason for their wait.

 

“Hey, Yannis.” Petros said, patting his duffle bag. “I think mine is ready to hatch.”

 

Yannis laughed, in spite of how bitterly frustrated he was with the situation.

 

“I missed Melika by maybe a day.” Yannis complained, not for the first time. “Because we had to wait so long at the Gate Zone.”

 

“Yeah. Yeah.” Petros said, bored of this line of thought. “I haven’t heard from my Marietta since the alert. Not even writing on a mirror.”

 

Two days later, without explanation, the brigade was ordered to leave the duffle bags where they were, board a group of buses, and travel to a different district entirely.

 

***********

 

“What a kak thing to make us do.” Petros complained. He and Yannis carried each a pail of whitewash and a long handled rolling brush. “This will get paint on our uniforms. Having paint on our uniforms is heresy, they will say.”

 

“At least there are no gangers out here.” Yannis said. The two walked through a warehouse district. They were far from any of the population. There were no riots in that vicinity of the city. Everyone moved with a purpose when in public, behaved themselves, worked quickly and efficiently, or otherwise made themselves invisible.

 

“Then what is this, eh?” Petros pointed at the cinderblock wall as they reached their destination. “Kak heresy, you know, that kak gangers come out here to do.”

 

“Yeah.” Yannis put his pail of whitewash down and readied his roller brush. “We are like confessors. They confess their heresies on these walls, and we absolve them with paint.”

 

“Do not talk like that.” Petros said sullenly, getting to work covering up graffiti that had hastily been sprayed on the wall of a warehouse. “To talk like that is heresy they will say.”

 

“Wait.” Yannis said, reaching out and putting a hand on Petros’ shoulder.

 

“No.” Petros said. “Reading heresy is heresy they will say.”

 

I will find him, and I will show him mercy!

 

“Who?” Yannis read the graffiti anyway. “Who will this person find?”

 

“It does not mean anything.” Petros quickly covered up the words in front of Yannis with a long sideways stroke, then went back to whitewashing his own area of the wall. “If it did mean anything, understanding what it meant would definitely be heresy. They don’t have to tell me that, and I shouldn’t have to tell you that, adelfe.”

 

“Do you remember that old lady on the monorail?” Yannis asked as he began to methodically cover over the graffiti.

 

“No.” Petros said vehemently, eyes piercing Yannis with his glare. “And neither do you. You think we saw a heretic before this started? You know what they will call it if you tell them now after waiting all this time?”

 

“Yeah.” Yannis finished covering up the graffiti, pushing the strange words out of his mind with thoughts of Melika.

 

Part Four

Hidden Content
Yannis dropped the battery pack from his lascarbine and slammed a fresh one home before the spent one had even hit the deck. His squad sheltered behind a concrete planter, something he had never seen before their air assault of the spire. Beta squad was maneuvering to the cover of a bank of personnel lifts, and Yannis’ Alpha squad was providing cover fire.

 

“Yannis, these do not look like gangers.” Petros observed in between volleys of fire.

 

Yannis had not bothered to think about it. They had air assaulted the top level of a spire; anything shooting at them from a lower level was a heretic.

 

“Maybe they looted an armoury?” Yannis found the fastest, most convenient explanation.

 

“Alpha squad, ready to move!” Corporal Georgios commanded, and Yannis tensed up, ready to sprint. “Go! Go! Go!”

 

Yannis and the rest of Alpha squad leapt over the concerete planter and sprinted forward. Yannis was not certain what their destination ultimately was; cover seemed to thin out toward the Grand Stair where the heretics in PDF wargear were shooting at them from. Another concrete planter offered itself, though lower and shorter than the previous one. An overturned stone bench provided further cover for the trailing members of Alpha squad.

 

Yannis cracked off a couple of las shoots before throwing himself down to slide across the polished marble floor and into the cover of the stone bench. Automatically he looked for Petros. Petros was still sprinting to Yannis’ position, and Yannis watched with dismay as a las beam cracked into Petros’ shoulder. Petros spun to one side and dropped down on one knee, stunned by the pain. Yannis and Petros locked eyes momentarily, and then a second and third las round cracked into Petros’ head and neck.

 

“Grenades out!” Corporal Georgios called out. “Cover fire and assault!”

 

Yannis reached and tore a grenade from his webgear, pulled the pin to prime it, and lobbed it alongside the rest of Alpha squad. There was a mixture of krumping frags and popping smokes, and Yannis became aware of Beta squad charging past his position, firing as they moved.

 

“Follow me!” Sergeant Kritikos urged Alpha squad, waving his chainsword at them as he sprinted past.

 

Yannis leapt over the toppled stone bench, his bloodcurdling battlecry joining the howling madness of the rest of his platoon. He drowned his anguish and despair with anger and righteous fury, outpacing his fellows of Alpha squad, hitting the line of heretic defenders at the top of the Grand Stair bayonet first with Beta squad.

 

***********

 

“I have never seen such a place.” Corporal Georgios wondered at the remains of the shopping mall. “I had no idea that people lived like this.”

 

Yannis picked his way through toppled display stands covered in the tattered remains of once fashionable clothes. Broken glass crunched underfoot.

 

“People maybe should not live like this.” Yannis said. “Maybe this decadence led them to their rebellion.”

 

“Is that what this is?” Private Mikael asked, stopping to look at a human shape made of plastic, wearing bright coloured clothes of fine material. “A rebellion?”

 

“What else could it be?” Yannis said, angrily. “Or do you think gangers came all the way up from the sump to put on the uniforms of the 1st Infantry Battalion?”

 

“Shut up.” Sergeant Kritikos called from ahead, irritated. “No idle speculation.”

 

“Idle speculation is heresy.” Yannis said softly to himself. Petros had been dead for four days.

 

***********

 

It was definitely a rebellion. The vox casters blared the call to overthrow the rule of Terra for a full fortnight as Yannis and his platoon made their way down the spire toward the hive shaft. In every stairwell and down ramp they encountered an ambush. At every landing they stormed a defense barricade. Dozens of other platoons moved in parallel, and the special troops brigade advanced more or less on line. They took hatchets to every vox cast they found, silencing the threats and curses their enemy heaped upon them between the pleas for their defection.

 

They did not take prisoners, but any heretic soldier with communications gear was kept alive long enough to be thrown from the spire from the nearest outside access. Yannis fought with hot blood, but did not relish the idea of execution. He avoided the details sent to defenestrate the captured officers and other suspected leaders of the rebellion, but could not do so indefinitely. Yannis found himself marching a hive noble to an outside access at bayonet point, seventeen days after Petros had been killed.

 

“Right. Through here.” Sergeant Georgios (Kritikos has been killed) waved the laspistol at a large door, and the execution detail filed out onto an observation balconey. The ground-dwellers were stunned by the view. Yannis fought the urge to drop to the deck and hold on for dear life. Others in the detail were not so self-controlled, and one man vomited.

 

The prisoner, a haughty fellow with a perpetual sneer, laughed cruelly.

 

“Worms.” The prisoner sneered. “Fit only to crawl about the ground, never thinking to look upward and aspire to more, only ascending to these heights in the slavish devotion to following orders.”

 

“Pull yourself together lads.” Sergeant Georgios barked at the detail. “Don’t give this kak the satisfaction.”

 

Yannis thought of Petros, and regretted that his friend from the neighborhood could not be here to see such a thing. He forced himself to look at it, to remember it for the both of them. He felt the emptiness of his loss, and filled it with resentment for the selfish ones who engineered the rebellion in which his friend had died.

 

“I will do it myself.” Yannis said.

 

The prisoner turned to regard him, but the thought that this wretch might dare respect his righteous determination fueled his contempt even more. He moved quickly, not wanting to give the prisoner time to face his imminent death, time enough to come to terms in the face of it.

 

“There is no mercy for you.” Yannis said vehemently, grabbing the prisoner’s hands, which were bound behind his back, and yanking them upward. “No mercy here and now, and no mercy to come.”

 

The prisoner twisted to look at Yannis with intense scrutiny, his expression and demeanor betraying no terror of death, even as Yannis heaved him over the waist high railing. Yannis looked over and watched him tumbling slowly in the free air. Before his features became indistinguishable the prisoner, even plummeting to his doom, pierced Yannis with his stare.

 

“What was that?” Sergeant Georgios asked.

 

“Petros died for this.” Yannis felt light headed, outside himself, his heart hammering in his chest. Very much, he thought, like the first time he had been shot at. “We don’t even know why.”

 

***********

 

Yannis and the survivors of the special troops brigade were formed into loose boarding chalks. No duffle bags to sit on, each stood disinterestedly in only his wargear, lascarbines slung over their shoulders. Many had lost their helmets and wore only their soft field covers, bandannas, or even nothing at all upon their heads. Yannis had lost his helmet during a mad climb over enemy makeshift barricades. This was shortly before the final battle to seize control of the hive, where the companies fighting their way down had finally met the companies fighting their way up. The 2nd and 3rd Infantry battalions, hive battalions who had rebelled on the orders of the hive nobility, lay heaped in a smoking pile in the center of the Connective Level’s Grand Concourse.

 

The junior commanders and NCOs of those battalions had proclaimed their innocence and attempted to surrender. Yannis felt very angry when listening to their broadcast pleas of ignorance of their commanders motives, their livid statements of loyalty to the Emperor, and, above all else which raised his hackles, their desperate pleas for mercy.

 

Yannis had lost his helmet shortly before that fight, but he had not lost his rucksack until after that fight. The last of his clean socks were with him, as was the second helmet he had been issued during his initial muster.

 

“Alright lads, we’re next.” Sergeant Georgios informed his platoon as a trio of Valkyries roared into the large hangar bay. Yannis put one hand on top of his helmet and carried his lascarbine with the other, and jogged into the wash of the Valkyrie’s thrusters, then tramped up the rear ramp. One of the first ones on board he took one of the jump seats normally reserved for the door gunners, who were absent on this flight.

 

As the engines of the Valkyries gunned and the trio of craft nosed out into the open air, Yannis saw the mouths of Georgios and some of the others moving but could not hear them. Instead he looked outward, letting his feet dangle over the side of the aircraft through the open side doors. Yannis didn’t know where the brigade, now hardly more than a company in strength, was being relocated to. He found he did not care. The rumour that had excitedly spread through the ranks prior to his departure was that not only were the bulk of the rebels defeated in the battle for the capitol arcology, but that the Subsector Fleet had arrived in-system with reinforcements.

 

Yannis took off his helmet, held it in his hands for a moment, then released it. He thought he might watch it drop into the ruins of the rail yards at the base of the hive, but just then the Valkyrie banked. Yannis watched his the ground sweep downward and saw the clouds beneath his feet. As the Valkyrie leveled off, the secondary arcologies came into view. Yannis felt peaceful for a moment, but only a moment.

 

Bright streaks of fire shot down from the heavens and lanced through the hive structures. Even more played across manufactorum, shipping, and military districts of the megacity. Explosions and fire erupted everywhere across the ground. The Valkyrie Yannis was riding in made a gut wrenching turn and dive. A series of disorienting turns followed, and Yannis’ view alternated between the megacity and clouds. He noted, with a strange clarity, that the bombardment seemed to be over, yet even more ominous signs filled the sky.

 

He was witnessing an aerial invasion.

 

Part Five

Hidden Content

The remains of the monorail line lay mostly twisted and scattered about the streets. The uprights from which the magnetic track had hung were white metal bones standing at odd angles here and there, or bent and broken, scorched as black as their fire ravaged surroundings. The platforms were generally the same, however, being for the most part simply great lumps of concrete and steel.

 

Yannis was startled when he recognized the number on the platform his unit came across.

 

“49-H-IV-Q.” Yannis read off the designation stamped into the plates bolted to its sides and stenciled onto the rain shelter. “This is my platform.”

 

“You live around here?” Georgios asked.

 

“Just down that way.” Yannis said, pointing down the street that he and Petros would walk home along everyday after work. “With my wife, Melika.”

 

“Right.” Sergeant Georgios motioned the squad to halt. The squad halted in place, squatting down with the lascarbines held ready. “We’ll stop here for a bit, cover in that enforcers station over there.”

 

Yannis continued to look down the street, his mind drifting from the present.

 

“Corporal Yannis.” Georgios snapped his fingers to get Yannis’ attention. “Off you go.”

 

“What?” Yannis asked.

 

“Go and see.” Georgios said. “Go and see if Melika is there.”

 

A few minutes later Yannis found himself standing in Opa’s corner store. The doors were gone, the windows were gone, and even the roof was gone. There had been a fire, maybe more than one. Nothing remained of the shelves of goods, everything long since looted. Opa’s sales counter was turned over, its thin metal sides stove in. Yannis was transfixed by the runny black spray-painted words on the wall behind where Opa used to stand doling out the small comforts of their lives daily:

 

I will sing to him a new song.

 

Yannis thought for a moment he could hear singing. He shook his head, knowing he needed sleep. But the singing did not stop, and he raised his lascarbine to the ready, and crouched next to one of the broken out windows to peer out into the square. Perhaps two dozen ragged civilians stood, joined hand in hand, raising their voices in hymn to the Emperor. The zealous fury long since burned from them, they sang a mournful sounding song, reciting lines of High Gothic by memory, their provincial mouths mangling the unfamiliar sounds of unknown words sung by rote.

 

Yannis had seen enough to know that any situation could change in the span of a breath, and absolutely anyone could be a danger to him. He watched them for a little bit longer, then crept out one of the broken windows, one on the far side of the little shopette. He moved from cover to cover among the broken masonry and burned out ground vehicles until he came to the stairs of his hab block. Using their concrete walls as cover he crept up to his apartment’s level, then moved cautiously toward his home.

 

His apartment door was off of its hinges, laid out on the terrace. He followed the muzzle of his lascarbine inside.

 

“Melika.” Yannis whispered. “I am home, my love.”

 

The footlockers that had made their humble dinner table were missing. The telescreen had been pulled off the wall, and small shards of black, broken glass told Yannis it had most likely been destroyed. The pots and pans of their kitchenette had been taken, but the flimsy, brightly coloured plastic bowls and cups were scattered about the living room. The cooler door hung open, but the light was off inside, and the food that had been inside was long ago looted, along with the wire shelves. The Adeptus Ministorum approved wall hangings Melika’s mother had given them on their wedding day were also torn off the walls, nowhere to be seen.

 

Yannis heard a sound from the bedroom, and quickly swung his lascarbine to cover the door. His initial fear of ambush passed, he allowed himself the wild hope that his wife was actually in there, waiting for him. Yannis pushed up the bedroom door, sagging on one set of hinges, and followed his lascarbine into the room.

 

A woman yelped, but Yannis did not see her at first. What he mistook for a pile of laundry turned out to be a rag covered woman, painfully young, starving, and frail. It was not Melika.

 

“Please.” The woman croaked with cracked, discoloured lips. “Mercy.”

 

But Yannis was not looking at her. His eyes were drawn to the mirror. Their previous messages to one another smeared away, a scrawling, shaky hand unsettling similar to Melika’s had written:

 

I will find you, and I will show you mercy.

 

“Please.” The diseased, starving woman pleaded. “Please...”

 

From the square Yannis could hear the ragged zealots singing a new hymn. The melody was hauntingly familiar, though he could not quite make out the words. The memory of it crept up Yannis’ spine like a cold, dead hand. He walked out of the bedroom, through the living room, and out onto the terrace with stiff legs. His lascarbine dangled in his numb, unfeeling hands. The hairs on his arms and the back of his neck stood on end, and he shivered though it was not cold.

 

Down below in the square there were a dozen or so ragged penitents. From his vantage point on the fourth floor Yannis could see then what he had not seen when squatting in the ruins of Opa’s corner store. What he had mistaken for colourful debris before was corpses. Dozens and dozens of corpses, all of them laid out in an inward seeking spiral. Hundreds. Maybe more than a thousand. All laid shoulder to shoulder, face down, heads pointed toward the remains of the preacher’s makeshift platform. They were shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, with their arms around one another, draped comfortingly over shoulders, across the small of the back, hand in hand. Here and there the corpses of mothers held lovingly close the bodies of dead infants. Here and there a large family, children arranged from tallest to shortest.

 

The bodies at the furthest end of the spiral were putrid, bloated, and black. Fat, white maggots wriggled over a few. Over all of the lost souls shiny-bodied green flies strutted possessively. Boils, lesions, and running ichor stained the clothing of the middle recent. But most horrifyingly, Yannis saw that the newest addition to the gruesome display still heaved and gasped for air, their dying bodies struggling to live against whatever plague they were stricken with. At the very center of it all, the singing penitents, led by a ragged confessor, continued the macabre service. One by one they knelt before the confessor. One by one they imbibed something unspeakable from his defiled chalice. And one by one, singing that dreadful hymn as they did so, laying themselves shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, next to their predecessor and wrapping their arms comfortingly around one another.

 

Yannis watched on in dumbstruck horror as a young mother held the chalice to her infant’s lips, discouraging the babe from recoiling at the taste. The infant was limp before the mother had finished her own taste of the draught, weeping black bile from its tiny eyes, nose, and mouth. Still singing, the woman lay down among the others, all the while the confessor exhorted those remaining to continue.

 

“Please...” Came a rasping voice behind Yannis. He turned and saw the skeletal woman slowly, excruciatingly dragging herself from his bedroom, reaching a yellowed hand toward him in supplication. “Please… have mercy...”

 

Yannis stumbled backward, nearly fell, then fled down the terrace toward the hab block stairs. Down in the square the chant droned on, seeming to grow stronger even as one by one the voices choked and died.

 

Mercy… Oh, mercy… Give me mercy, sweet lord… Oh, my sweet lord… Mercy, my lord… I have to know you, my lord… Sweet mercy, my lord… I really want to see you… Mercy… Oh, mercy… I really want to know you… Oh, do not forget me… Mercy… Oh, mercy… See me reaching, my lord… Mercy… Oh, mercy… Do not leave me, have mercy… Take me there, oh, take me to you...

 

Yannis ran when he reached the bottom of the stairs, and he did not look back.

 

***********

 

When the hives began to drop, all Yannis could think about was water. There was precious little, and they were rationing their stores. The world shook with unceasing thunder as the hives dropped, and the only thought Yannis gave to it was to comment that the dirty brown clouds their ruination caused to fill the sky looked like they were terribly dry.

 

Every now and then the group had the good fortune to find a broken water pipe amongst the twisted debris that used to be the burbs. Hab water tanks, situated on rooftops to provide pressure, could be got to and had water in them, but they learned the hard way that any easily accessible water carried the weeping plague hidden inside. It was a grace that the disease killed so quickly, otherwise none of them would still be alive. The unfortunate soldiers sent to collect water greedily drank their fill before returning with their report, and collapsed in a bloody, ichor covered mess shortly thereafter.

 

Yannis had not had good, clean water in days.

 

One by one the arcologies of the megacity collapsed, shaking the planet, killing untold numbers beneath their massive bodies, and sending great plumes of noxious miasma into the sky. Yannis, many kilometers out in the burbs, lived through that terrific catastrophe, and only thought of water.

 

Eventually Yannis, and everyone else still alive in the megacity, took note that the capitol hive did not fall. Its lights shone through the choking clouds of dirt and toxic metals, like will-o-wisps beckoning the shambling citizens deeper into the destruction of war.

 

The special troops brigade, like every unit of the PDF, was no longer an extant organization. Groups of survivors came together, bound by the goal of reaching whatever might be left of civilization. But the Enemy was out there in the suffocating darkness too. Coming upon new people became a wild-eyed dance of suspicion and sudden violence. The chatter of stubbers and the crack of lasguns was a constant. It was white noise to Yannis and the others. Someone, somewhere was always killing someone else.

 

Yannis gradually became aware of a low rumble. He stopped and looked to the others he traveled with. Their faces were covered with makeshift scarfs, and most had scavenged goggles and safety glasses from local small manufactorums. The group stood stock still, looking to one another for threat cues. This was new to Yannis’ experience, but something about it tickled his memory.


The rumble became louder, and the ground began to vibrate, then shake.

 

“Track.” Someone nearby said, almost to himself. Then, looking about to raise the alarm. “Track! Armoured Vehicle!”

 

Yannis scrambled, not quite in a panic, but far from calm. The PDF had very few armoured assets, and Yannis had never served anywhere near any of them. The Goliath trucks his Motorized Rifle Brigade had used were repurposed civilian vehicles. The few Chimaeras the PDF possessed all carried specialized infantry raised from another part of the megacity, and they exclusively worked alongside the even more rare Leman Russ tanks. The planet produced generally only as much armour as the tithe demanded, and the PDF didn’t rate the extra effort beyond the token force.

 

All of that, Yannis instinctively knew, meant that an incoming tracked vehicle was probably not good. He sprinted away for as long as he thought he could, everyone else doing the same. When the rumble became too loud, too immediate, Yannis located a broken slab of concrete to hide behind. Evidently the remains of a set of stairs, Yannis seized the opportunity to go beneath street level. He found the rubble filled remains of a basement, wedged himself near a convenient hole in the masonry to watch the streetch from shoe level, and waited.

 

A large, boxing tank with a low profile turret with a long barrel roared down the street. Its armour prow pushed aside burned out hulks, concrete and rebar debris, and hapless soldiers alike. It never slowed down, but bullied its way forward without regard for anything else around it. The strange tank design was followed by a similarly armed variant, and then by obvious troop carrying versions.

 

 

Coaxial and side-sponson heavy weapons chattered, and the armoured unit moving through gunned down whatever people they saw. Yannis saw groups he considered friendlies and enemy alike rendered into irregular masses of blood, meat, and bone.

 

“They’re savages, Petros.” Yannis said to himself. “If they could see this, they would call it some kind of heresy.”

 

And just as soon as they had arrived, they were gone. Yannis could hear the distant rumble and firing from these unknown foes for a long while after, but they faded into the bad dreams of the remaining special troops brigade.

 

Part Six

Hidden Content

Yannis moved on-line with a large group of Loyalists, lascarbine at the ready. They picked their way through the brown haze, wound their way around oily black fires, and crawled over broken chunks of concrete, careful to avoid the rust flaked rebar jutting and bending at crazy angles. They found others.

 

There used to be loud challenges, desperate code phrases, angry yelling, pleas of innocence. But not any more. Yannis spotted a group of survivors squatting on their heels around a small fire. They were roasting small pieces of meat on a spit of rebar. Yannis fired as soon as he saw that they were cooking, and the other Loyalists around him immediately followed his cue. There was no time for conferring or confirming, killing was simply a reflex.

 

Loyalists did not eat fresh meat, for there was none to be had.

 

They scattered the fire, and placed the burnt human remains under a small pile of rocks. The Traitors they would have left to rot in the open air, but the death rot attracted Things. Already the shiny green flies were gathering.

 

Yannis rifled through their webgear and makeshift satchels for any kind of sealed food packaging, batteries, or hard ammunition. There was precious little, but any small amount increased Yannis’ personal store greatly. They found a promethium canister with water in it and shared it out until it was empty. The flavor was bitter, drinking it caused mild dizziness, and Yannis’ throat felt raw for hours, but they had long ago discovered that Promethium added to water killed the Weeping Plague. Not even the collected rainwater was safe since the murder of the hives had poisoned the sky.

 

But it was good to have water to drink.

 

***********

 

Yannis did not know what had caused the panic. Other Loyalists had hurried past him at a jog, looking back over their shoulders. He looked and saw others hurrying out of the dirty brown mist. There was a scream, a lone terrified voice. It was soon followed by more, and soldiers and civilians were sprinting, tumbling, crawling as fast they could. Yannis did not know what was happening, but he joined the panicked flight.

 

***********

 

The lights of the capitol hive were no longer active. They followed the broad streets of the manufactorum district. The layout was familiar enough to Yannis that he felt confident of their direction. What he no longer knew was why this was their goal, but moving mattered. Groups who stopped did not survive. Fear and desperation tore them apart, or the Enemy did. Moving on, forcing their way toward whatever happened next was the only thing keeping them alive.

 

The dust still hung in the air, choking and suffocating, but it was no longer as impenetrably thick as it once was. The heavier elements had fallen out to poison the ground instead. When the hot wind picked up they could sometimes enjoy pockets of relatively clear air. Other times it drove harder, limiting visibility to zero and forcing them to shelter among the broken foundations and dead machines.

 

Yannis, enjoying an opportunity to shake the dust from his face cover, breathed in warm fresh air. In the he saw flapping sheets of white plastic and dirty sheets strung on nylon lines. A handful of green canvas Militarum tents with the white and red Aquila design of the Medicae Corps were within. The sight excited Yannis, but not because of the promise of food and medicine to requisition. Melika was assigned to serve as a nurse. Yannis hadn’t seen her in months, since before the war started. Every time he saw the Aquila Medicae symbol he remembered her face, remembered her smell, and his heart beat faster in the hope he might see her.

 

“Yanni.” Someone whispered to him as he hurried incautiously forward toward the Medicae camp. “Hey! Wait!”

 

Even before he pushed past the white plastic he knew. He could smell the overwhelming fresh death. He could smell the hint of old rot. There were bodies lined up, row upon row. Mostly dessicated, paper thin flesh raggedly draped around shocking white bones. The greasy black stain of plague surrounded others. Few of the plague flies lingered, and the visible maggots were split open, empty husks.

 

Yannis gingerly stepped through the bodies, and pushed his way through the next set of sheeting. Fresh bodies lay torn before the entrance of one of the Medicae tents, clad in the filthy rags of civilian survivors. Looters then, not the nurses who one worked here. Their water parched blood still oozed from the long, vicious slashes. From inside the Medicae tent Yannis heard a metal cabinet crash to the ground, followed by the breaking of glass. Curses in a growling, gutteral language that Yannis did not understand punctuated the continued breaking of glass.

 

“Yannis.” Whispered one of the soldiers. His group (he could not call them a unit) crept quietly up to him. Yannis did not know why they followed him. He did not command discipline or issue orders. He dimly remembered being assigned the rank of corporal, but no symbols of authority or legal paperwork had accompanied this. It had merely been battlefield necessity. Yannis merely lived to survive, to keep moving forward, to perhaps find Melika one day. The others followed in his wake.

 

Yannis made a decision, and moved. Maybe another time he would have crept away, but this day he felt a hollow anger for the Traitor and the Heretic. Melika had once worked at a place, just like this, in the early days of the war at least.

 

One soldier pulled back the tent flap and stepped aside, Yannis plunged in followed quickly by the others, all leading with lasguns. They spread out, intent to kill, but stopped short.

 

The warrior within was enormous, and clad in thick, encompassing armour. The warrior was easily the size of an Ogryn, but the hatred on his face was intelligent and direct. It hissed an imperious word and raised a large bolt pistol in their direction, but did not fire. In its other hand it held a bundle of looted medicines. An enormous combat knife, more like a short sword to Yannis and the PDF, was stabbed into the ground between them. They hesitated, and so too did the armour clad warrior.

 

“Kill it!” Yannis shouted, pulling the trigger of his lascarbine and cracking home a bolt of light, straight into the warriors oversized forehead. To his surprise its head did not blow open, but the flesh seared away and the beam of energy charred the skull underneath. The warrior screamed and launched his bolt pistol into the chest of the soldier next to Yannis. The unlucky soldier collapsed backward with the wet crack of bones snapping. The armoured warrior attempted to carry through the motion and grab the combat knife between them, but Yannis and the soldiers in his group fell upon him. They screamed in terror and rage, jamming their bayonets into the warriors head and neck repeatedly. It died hard, breaking the legs of two of the soldiers and finally jamming his combat knife into the gut of a third, but the PDF soldiers were relentless, bringing the raging beast of a man down.

 

They did not stop stabbing their bayonets until the head rolled away.

 

***********

 

The spires of the capitol hive were on fire. The black silhouettes of leathery winged monsters circled the heights, illuminated darkly like shadow puppets. Unearthly cries skirled through the night.

 

Nobody slept.

 

In the morning one of their pickets was found decapitated. The head was nowhere to be found. Another soldier was simply missing. No one questioned either occurrence. The remaining wargear and supplies were shared out, and the group kept moving.

 

***********

 

Amidst all the ruin of the City Center, the old city near the footings of the capitol hive, the Cathedral still stood tall. Yannis stared at it four nearly an hour. The others believed him deep in thought, perhaps planning an approach. Finally, when Yannis was convinced he was not hallucinated or dreaming, he picked up his lascarbine and hurried toward the Cathedral to join its beleaguered defenders.

 

Barricades protected its bases, sandbags and scraps of metal and chunks of concrete from surrounding ruins. The burned out hulk of a boxy APC served as advance cover in the square, its metal tracks scattered and littering the ground, reminding Yannis of a victim of ganger violence he once saw, laying in the street with his own broken teeth on the pavement around him.

 

A motley collection of PDF, Ministorum acolytes, zealot civilians, and a small handful of red robed nuns manned the firing pits protecting the Cathedral. They exchanged desultory fire with an unorganized scattering of human refuse. The Heretics had few real weapons, little concept of cover, and no discipline. They hurled makeshift promethium bombs that fell far short of their targets, and wasted their precious battery packs burning scorch marks into the barricades of the defenders.

 

Yannis led his men to charge into the largest group, screaming incoherent, inarticulate rage as he did. The Heretics broke and ran, but paused to jeer and taunt them from a distance.

 

They promised an army was coming. They promised mercy to the defenders.

 

***********

 

“You are Corporal Yannis?” The red robed nun demanded Yannis’ attention. He had lived in the same fighting position for three days since they had arrived at the Cathedral. She held out a canteen of fresh water in one hand, and cradled a boltgun in the other. Yannis was angry that such holy women must sully their hands with weapons, but the woman carried her weapons with serene confidence.

 

“I am Yannis.” Yannis eagerly accepted the water. It took all of his self control not to guzzle the whole thing. Others he had seen greedily drink, only to vomit, or suffer cramps and diarrhea. They were no longer used to abundance, though they had never thought of themselves as blessed with abundance before the war. Their lives and seemed meager and oftentimes desperate, but now he dreamt of their simple lives as he had previously fantasized of riches and power.

 

“You were with the special troops brigade?” The nun asked him. Not idle chatter, or a guess, but a demand for confirmation of data already known.

 

“I was.” Yannis said. “Motorized Rifle Company before that, a truck trooper.”

 

“You are required.” The nun informed him, and left without waiting to see if he obeyed.

 

He levered himself out of the fighting position. More like extracted himself, really. He had soaked into the foxhole, and standing to leave with like pulling a scab from the flesh of the planet. Everything about him felt crusty and stiff. The bottoms of his pants were ragged, having torn away from the tops of his boots where had had kept them bloused. His feet felt like rocks inside those boots, and he barely registered the steps he took. He knew he had problems with them, but he no longer believed he would live to ever remove his boots again anyway.

 

Inside the Cathedral he met an unremarkable man. This man asked him a few questions that seemed random and nonsensical to Yannis, but he answered them obediently. After that, Yannis was stationed behind the metal Aegis works at the foot of the stairs leading up to the Cathedral front entrance. He had water, fresh batteries for his lascarbine, and most importantly he was relieved in shifts and allowed to sleep in the Cathedrals narthex.

 

He did not know what had happened to the soldiers he had led to the Cathedral. In honesty he would not have been able to tell the apart from any of the other PDF rabble that surrounded the outer defenses if he had bothered to try.

 

***********

 

The promised army did come. They were hundreds strong. They came in the night, bearing torches. But the singing… Yannis heard the singing long before their fire shadowed forms appeared at the edge of their perimeter.

 

They came as pilgrims would come. Joined hand in hand, or bearing torches or makeshift religious icons, singing as they marched in to surround the Cathedral. Many of the picket positions and observation posts were disoriented, confused, uncertain of the situation. These were overrun, disappearing behind the mob, never to be seen again. Others abandoned their posts and ran to take cover in the main defensive positions.

 

Yannis knew the song. He could sing it himself by now. He would never confess to anyone, but when he heard it now he had to fight the compulsion to raise his voice and join the chant.

 

Mercy… Oh, mercy… Give me mercy, sweet lord… Oh, my sweet lord… Mercy, my lord… I have to know you, my lord… Sweet mercy, my lord… I really want to see you… Mercy… Oh, mercy… I really want to know you… Oh, do not forget me… Mercy… Oh, mercy… See me reaching, my lord… Mercy… Oh, mercy… Do not leave me, have mercy… Take me there, oh, take me to you…

 

Yannis bit his lip, drawing a thick glob of blood. He focused on the pain, focused to make that his reality. The mob filled the Cathedral square, torches casting their dark world in flickering blood red. They packed in like penitents on a Feast Day, and they sang, eyes ablaze, rapturous smiles one and all.

 

The defenders were mesmerised. No one moved a muscle, except those who struggled to plug up their ears or cover behind the barricades. Most merely watched, transfixed.

 

Another song rose in challenge, flowing forth from the Cathedral doors like a golden flood:

 

A spiritu dominatus, Domine, libra nos…

 

The small group of nuns marched forth, bolters at the ready. Lips curled disdainfully, these women spat the lyrics of their hymn like accusations. They sang like judges directing the building of a gallows. Their eyes blazed with hatred, and Yannis felt himself wither momentarily under their gaze.

 

From the lightning and the tempst, Our Emperor, deliver us…

 

Yannis remembered the Emperor, and he had done in His name. He knew, for all his faults as a man, for all his petty wickedness, these women sang not to condemn him, but to rally his faith. His hatred for the Traitor, the Heretic, the Mutant, the Alien, the Witch, everything he had been taught to despise and revile since before he could even understand what those words meant, began to boil within his numb soul.

 

Yannis did not know the words, but he felt them, and he joined his voice to the other defenders in a sudden, violent battlecry. The square was filled with light and smoke, thunder and screaming, blood and pain, as the defenders broke the malicious glamour of the Traitor horde and let loose with their weapons.

 

The Heretics surge forward in a mad rush, despite their horrific rate of loss. They trampled their dead even as they received fatal wounds and began their own descent to be trampled in turn. They were as a tide of vile hatred washing over the outer defenses. The mass of wretched humanity crashed into the metal Aegis line, which buckled and rocked under their weight. Yannis fumbled and dropped his battery reload, but instead of stooping to retrieve it began plunging his bayonet into the wall of Traitors. Those at the front could not move, and their eyes bulged and the lungs rasped as the life was pressed out of them by the inexorable advance of those behind. Yannis stabbed frantically, but the Aegis was slowly giving way.

 

From the blasphemy of the Fallen, Our Emperor, deliver us,

 

Yannis pulled another battery pack from his webgear and slammed it home, firing precise, close range bursts of energy into the faces of the heretical zealots before him. He fired as he backed slowly up the steps, wary of being caught under the avalanche of human filth that rolled over the barricades and spilled toward him.

 

A morte perpetua, Domine, Libras nos.

 

But Yannis could not move fast enough, and the horde of Traitors washed over him. He fell back and bruised his back on the hard edges of the stone steps. The Enemy did not seem interested in killing him, but crawled, fought, and pulled their way past him, slithering up the steps in their eagerness to defile the sanctuary of the Cathedral.

 

Yannis was startled by a face he recognized.

 

“Melika.” Yannis breathed, reaching out to touch her face. She screamed, wild eyed, and clawed back at his. One word, over and over, as blood and spit foamed and gobbed from her twisted, cracked lips, in a frenzied mania.

 

“MERCY! MERCY! MERCY!”

 

That thou wouldst bring them only death, that thou shouldst spare none, that thou shouldst pardon none, we beseech the, destroy them.

 

Yannis sobbed, anguish gripping his heart. He pushed her chin back and away from him as she screamed and snapped at his fingers. With his other hand he changed his grip on his lascarbine to hold the barrel just behind the bayonet. Yannis then released Melika’s chin with his other hand. In her mindless drive to bite and gnash at his face, Melika impaled her throat on Yannis’ repositioned bayonet.

 

“Mercy...” Melika gurgled, blood pourined from her throat and mouth.

 

The crashing roar of boltgun fire brought Yannis back to his immediate situation. Sprays of blood and chunks of meat fell around him, and hot bits of shrapnel peppered his exposed skin. The nuns advanced down the steps, blunting the assault of the mob. They emptied bolt after bolt, changing magazines in turns to maintain a steady stream of devastating fire. Their stand rallied the defenders who had not been killed, and Yannis found himself kneeling on the steps beside the nuns, adding his precise, disciplined fire to theirs.

 

At the edge of their perimeter, the retreating Heretics streaming around her, Yannis saw an old woman. She was wraith thin, dressed in rags, with long, stringy hair. Her face was rapturous, and she held herself while she rocked back and forth, humming the now familiar song. Yannis cracked off a coupe of shots at her, but then she was gone. Yannis was left wondering if she had really been there at all.

 

For weeks after there was howling in the night, promethium bomb attacks, and constant sniping, but the Heretic horde never appeared in strength again.

 

***********

 

“Acolyte Yannis.” The unremarkable man called out. It did not sound like an order, though Yannis knew it was.

 

“Sir.” Yannis began a salute, but then remembered he had been ordered not to. “My lord.”

 

He stood before a gibbet, and the Inquisitor approached him, some concern upon his face. One of the Sororitas accompanied the Inquisitor bearing, as they always did, the menacing promise of swift retribution.

 

“We are leaving soon.” The Inquisitor informed him, but made no move to leave the scene. Yannis shifted uncomfortably under the intense scrutiny. Finally the Inquisitor indicated the corpse in the gibbet. “Who was this?”

 

“A Heretic, my lord.” Yannis answered, earning a grudging nod of approval from the Sororitas at the Inquisitor’s side.

 

“Indeed.” The Inquisitor agreed. He took on a sympathetic aspect, one wholly convincing, though Yannis believed he knew better. “As a favour to you, for your steadfast loyalty, I can order another corpse be fastened into that gibbet. We can bury your wife in a real grave.”

 

“No.” Yannis answered vehemently. “No mercy.”

 

The Inquisitor looked at Yannis long and hard, then shared an inscrutable glance with the Sororitas at his side.

 

“Come one then, Acolyte Yannis.” The Inquisitor said. “We have a lighter waiting.”

 

The small group that Yannis was now a part of left the killing fields of the Cathedral square. They left behind row upon row of crucified and gibbeted heretics. They left the smoldering, greasy piles of corpses. They walked through the arriving throngs of Astra Militarum relief troops, the penal labour gangs, and the thousands upon thousands of desperate new colonists hoping to reclaim this dead world and restore its tithe status for the Imperium.

 

The rows of Valkyries and Arvus ships coming and going and waiting to be loaded and unloaded along the broad main avenue of the Old City was their destination. Yannis trudged alongside his new master, eager to shake the dust of this world off and forget himself in a new life of constant service, paused only to look at fresh graffiti that had hastily been scrawled on a nearby wall.

 

I will find him.

Edited by Warsmith Aznable
Kierdale Venerable Brother

Kierdale

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I’m submitting mine now, unfinished, as time is against me but more so I’ve lost enthusiasm for this piece. It continues the battle on Alceforge from my last two entries. Perhaps I’ll rework it sometime in the future.

Boots on blasted ground

Hidden Content

He watched at waves crashed against the cliff face far below the Crags. The seas of Alceforge were water only in name, in memory of what they once were, for they were now heavy with silt and the dross from manufactorums. His enhanced eyes automatically identified abnormalities, normally to aid him in finding weaknesses in targets but whoever had programmed his matrices hadn’t thought to log the planet’s befouled oceans as ‘Standard For Alceforge’. Hydrocarbons chains, heavy metals, biological waste, it all scanned across his visual field as he watched the waves slap at the rock face two hundred meters below. Over millennia they would eat it away -perhaps faster due to the pollutants they carried- for water was stronger than rock.

He looked back toward the column of black smoke rising from the west - the ruin of the late magos’ citadel - and thought of that which had proven stronger than water or rock.

Sound.

The enemy assault has begun with a crazed charge of mutants, the Imperium’s own conscripts seemingly turned against them too, masses of horned and hunched monstrosities throwing themselves in a mad rush. The Skitarii has opened fire, tearing into the masses with their rifles and their deafening barrage had then been eclipsed by the unleashing of the Ordinatus Ulator. Magos Chi-Eta’s most prized war machine, a relic of the Heresy: all sound had seemed to cease in the second before it had fired.

Even outside of the blast itself, Ranger Alpha-Zeus-4’s optics shook with the infrasonic waves, his targeting systems going haywire and forcing a reboot. The blast caused the air between the enemy to bulge as waves of sound met in constructive interference. Ears ruptured before the blast hit, lungs exploded as the air pressure rocketed and bodies were crushed and tossed about, the air detonating as if struck by a god. ‘The War Drum of the Omnissiah’ was a well-earned nickname.

The skitarii’s visuals had rebooted to reveal a field of carnage. Bodies torn asunder and those at the center of the blast rendered liquid. The near half of the forest was no more, trees uprooted and shattered. Those that still stood were adorned with the skewered bodies of those beastmen who had been lucky enough to be at the edge of the Ulator’s blast.

But then had come the renegade Astartes. In his ignorance of the ways of Slaanesh and the Dark Prince’s worshippers, the ranger Alpha had assumed the fallen Angels of the Emperor had driven their mutant stock before then as slaves, as fodder. But such was not true for the existence of Ulator had been known to the Psychopomps, indeed it had been the war machine that had drawn them to the forgeworld, and to die in an aural apocalypse, to have their arrival at their lord’s debauched palace heralded by such a call, was a great honour to the horned Children of Slaanesh.

While the cybernetic enhancements of the skitarii had been synchronised to shut off when the Ulator had fired, protecting them, such measures did not protect them from the sonic weapons of the enemy.

While most advanced beside their tanks and transports, some noise marines stood atop their vehicles, strumming hellish cords on their blastmasters. These perverted weapons tore into the skitarii ranks, the Aegis lines behind which they sheltered providing no protection whatsoever. The destructive sound passed through ceramite plate, and indeed what fleshy morsels remained within the liquid-filled tanks of the Mechanicus’ cataphract robots was pulverised as the waves of sound reverberated within the armoured bodies. The Shroudpsalm did nothing and the canticle quickly changed to the Incantation of the Iron Soul.

The rebel Astartes bored onward into the valley, crushing the lush vegetation beneath their boots and treads. As more of their weapons came into range the crescendo mounted.

But all was not lose as the air began to hum with the recharging of the Ordinatus Ulator.

Ranger Alpha-Zeus-4 shook himself from his reverie. The ground had collapsed beneath them before the Ulator had been able to fire again. Old, disused mining tunnels from ages past. Overlooked in Chi-Eta’s hubris. They had been undermined by whatever passed for sappers in the enemy army. The very earth had erupted in a sonic blast before swallowing hundreds of skitarii, robots, walkers, a vast swathe of the magos’ once-prized paradisiacal gardens...and the Ulator.

Acting-magos Aleptaw had explained during the retreat that the enemy had not only managed to collapse much of the north field, but infiltrators had also managed to sneak into the citadel via those forgotten subterranean passages, and assassinate Chi-Eta.

But the war was not yet over. He turned his gaze from the cliffs to the plains at the foot of the Crags. Salvation had come in the form of Man. A task force from the Shrineworld of Kierdale’s World. The piety of these Guardsmen was as strong as those of Zeus-4 and his ilk, but while the ranger worshipped the Omnissiah, Kierdale’s World was a bastion of the Imperial Creed. He only hoped that they were stronger of spirit than the penitents whom had arrived only days earlier.

Within hours of the Guard making planetfall defences had been erected as the Mechanicus command updated the newly arrived brigadier on the situation. Networks of trenches had been dug, zig-zagging their way across the fields and about the camp. Zeus-4 watched the Guardsmen at work and at rest. He observed from his lofty perch in the Crags as they talked -his enhancements enabling him to read their lips and take into account their dialect-, jested and gambled. Activities alien to him. He saw no advantage in them. Another group knelt, heads bowed, before a hairless individual clad in robes of black with a vest of flak armour over it. A priest. This was something ranger Alpha Zeus-4 understood. Upon the survivors’ arrival at the Crags, the electropriests had given a sermon even as servitors began the process of constructing their own. The clerics of the Omnissiah had blessed those who had made it out of the debacle at the citadel and steeled their hearts for the continued defence of their world.

“RIGHT YOU ‘ORRIBLE LOT! The tin-can toy soldiers of Alceforge have failed in the defence of their world,” spittle flew from the lips of father ‘Invulnerable’ Bede. His cheeks were ruddy with shouting, almost the same colour as his lips. He towered over the kneeling Guardsmen and would have even if they had stood. He was a big man and rumour was he had been a Guard before he had taken his oaths. “So it has fallen to you, the chosen men of Kierdale’s World, to return your arms and armour to the world of their forging and use them in its defence! The Emperor,” he made an Aquila across his chest with his gauntleted hands, “knows that His Guardsmen will not fail him. That the muscle and soul of Man is resolute where technology has faltered.”

Lieutenant Bamburgh at his side took a hurried step forward, cheeks flushed, noting that the priest’s voice had carried as far as some of the Mechanicus personnel constructing defences nearby. He cleared his throat before speaking. “So be sure to say your prayers over your weapons and beseech their machine spirits to aid us in repelling the enemy from their birthplace.”

“The Emperor wills it,” Bed finished and the assembled humans echoed his words.

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“The forges.”

The table cracked under brigadier Warkworth’s fist and he nailed the acting Magos with a stare. “You told us the forges were locked down by Chi-Eta before the enemy assault began, and that they could not be reopened or restarted until you were fully invested as magos.” It was not a question.

The hooded tech-priest nodded, his meat eye downcast, his others dimmed.

“I need answers, acting magos Aleptaw. How did the enemy manage to make orbit over Alceforge? How did they manage to land so many forces? How did they manage to destroy your predecessor and his citadel? And how the hell have they managed to restart the forges?”

It was now that Aleptaw resented his flesh, understandings the blessings of the Omnissiah on yet another level: the baseline human could not detect lies emitted from a voxbox as they could those from meatlips.

“Heretics have been discovered on Alceforge.”

“You don’t bloody say.” This from the big priest at the officer’s side. His eyes were bloodshot and Aleptaw wondered if it was just zeal pumping through his veins or some other concoction tainted his blood. Now was not the time for a scan.

Brigadier Warkworth had refused to lend the Mechanicus his forces until questions had been answered. And they had been given, to the best of the acting-magos’ ability. It was now clear that the hereteks on Alceforge has managed to infiltrate or convert the crews of a good number of the planet’s defensive bunkers, and once a map was plotted of those facilities known to be loyal, those known to be traitor and those suspected of treason yet unconfirmed, it was clear that the retaking of the planet would be severely hampered if assaults of each defensive laser emplacement and missile silo were necessary - and no orbital cover could be provided until these traitor sites were taken out.

So an ultimatum was given: acting-Magos Aleptaw would have the loyal sites turn their weapons -designed for shooting spacecraft out of orbit- upon their nearest traitor or suspect sites...or the forces of Kierdale’s World would proclaim Alceforge forsaken and leave, making a recommendation that the planet be scoured from orbit and the Mechanicus deal with Mechanicus heresy.

Thus towering lasers had risen to the extremes of their mountings so that they might be targeted out across the ash plains toward their fallen peers. The ground turned to sheets of glass as the cannons fired, the blistering heat of their discharges so close to the ground liquifying and melting the surface. Great missiles launched, their trajectories not taking them beyond the atmosphere, warheads falling back to earth upon the heretek positions. But word speak quickly, as the blasphemers utilised their own corrupted noosphere, and soon the rebel installations began returning the favour before they themselves were obliterated. Some even turned their arms upon the forges they had tried to seize.

In a matter of minutes the vast majority of Alceforge’s ASAT installations had destroyed each other. Columns of fire rose into the sky where fuel lines and ammunition dumps had been hit. Plumes of toxic smoke curled upward in places, and in others they crept ominously across the landscape, driven by the terrible winds whipped up by the explosions rocking the planet’s surface.

Noosphere and other more primitive communication nodes shut down under the EM conflagration and Aleptaw looked on in anguish as section after section of the holomap went dark. How much of a planet would remain for him to rule?

“Now I’ll send out my men,” smiled the brigadier.

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Stealth was out of the question as the armoured fist kicked up such a cloud of dirt and ash in its wake that its approach could be detected from dozens of kilometres away. The Leman Russes and assorted Chimera-chassis drove at top speed and while a few guardsmen opened the top hatch of their APCs to survey the terrain - all were glad to have their boots back on the ground after the trip through the Warp - they did not do so for long as while the air on Alceforge had been rated as ‘breathable’ in their shipboard briefing, the torn, angry skies flashed and the silt storms grew heavier. Coughing, they battened down the hatches. More than a few smirked at the sighted the lasgun arrays on the squads of lancers advancing before the vehicles, watching the nobles on their horses getting steadily dustier and dustier.

As the hours wore on and the sun, barely visible through the cloud cover and smog, rose higher, the land began to gently drop, mountain ranges grew on the horizon, and their objective came into sight.

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With a shaking hand he cut the vox feed but the screaming did not cease. It was deafening in his ears. It was coming from within his own tank. He blinked and shook his head, knowing it was the worst thing to do with a concussion, but it was a natural reaction. Equally naturally he sought out the source of the screaming, as the events of the last few minutes began to reform in his shaken mind.

Lasfire has landed out from the Mechanicus installation they had been tasked with securing. The shots had puncture the lead Russ and it had went up in a ball of fire, the broken body of commander Alnwick thrown from the cupola. The tank had rolled to a halt a couple of meters onto the bridge and Belsay had cursed, ordering his driver to keep on at top speed. They had to cross that bridge. Had to keep up the momentum. He’d say a prayer for Alnwick, his crew and his tank when all was done, but they needed to be pushed out of the way for the advance to continue. That had meant bulldozering them off the side of the bridge.

Belsay had just watched the wreck, flames still licking its armour, tumble over the edge when his own tank had been hit.

The enemy fire impacting the armour was like continuous thunder and he reached for his helmet, cursing the cheap construction: the chinstrap must have broken when they’d been hit. His hand fumbled in the darkness. The power was out and his mind was still so foggy. He reached for the outline of his helmet once again. His fingers slipped but then got round the front rim and he pulled it toward him. This brought him face to face with the source of the screaming with the tank.

Davies, the driver, continued screaming as Alnwick pulled at his helmet, his face burned away, the sockets of his eyes empty, the orbs boiled away.

A great ravine wound its way about the installation from 6 o’clock round to 1, and the fastest approach was across the bridge, spanning a hundred meters, at the 10 o’clock point. Capture the forge and it would be the first step in retaking the planet, they’d been told. The details, some bollocks about backup noospheric scrubbers and relay stations, had washed over the NCOs and junior officers. They knew all they needed to know. Rush across that bridge, take the compound. A Skitarii feint toward the refineries a few klicks south would draw away the bulk of any renegade forces...they’d been told.

As the artillery broke heavily and sought cover from which to fire from behind - which in most cases meant the Chimeras that had escorted them, the realisation sank in that the Skitarii feint had evidently failed. The enemy were dug in and well armed.

Metal slammed into the dirt as the rear hatches of Chimeras opened and guardsmen rushed out to set up heavy weapons. Within a couple of minutes of the lead Russ having been taken out, there were mortar rounds being launched from behind their APCs and this was soon joined by the fire from Wyverns and a Basilisk. Guardsmen rushed about, seeking cover from which to take shots with their rifles out across the chasm.

Figures could be seen in the watch towers at the corners of the compound, hardwired servitors in armourglas tanks linked to cannons. Others moved about the walls: the razormesh had been reinforced by stacking cargo containers along the compound’s perimeter and figures lay prone atop these. Most wore the colours of Alceforge - turncoat Skitarii and tech-adepts. The Skitarii sighted their arquebuses across the valley and skilfully picked off any guardsmen they could, though a cheer went up from those who saw a hail of stormshard shells come down on target, tearing three sniper teams to bloody ribbons before a Basilisk shell blew up the very container they had been atop, tearing down the mesh before it. Opening an entrance.

“Great! If only the Guard had jump packs!” Spat a corporal.

“Leave such lofty desires to the Astartes and Sororitas!” His sergeant retorted to a chorus of groans. “Form up behind the Chimeras and be ready to move out!”

There was nothing complicated to it, they had to push their way across the bridge, literally pushing wrecks out of the way, dozens of infantry hugging the back of the vehicle before them -but gingerly, not too closely- and advancing as fast as they could.

The three remaining Russes lead the way, cannons booming out across the chasm, blowing craters in the compound’s buildings -all but the central tower! Do not target the central tower!- and heavy bolters raking what enemy infantry showed their faces.

When lascannons took out one of the Russes the other two barged it over the edge. The same with the next.

Then the renegade fire took out a Chimera in the middle of the Guard line, penetrating its flank and throwing the bodies of nearby guardsmen, burning and screaming as they plummeted.

“Onward! On! On!” Shouted one of the surviving tank commanders.

NOTES: Attack on a forge. Armoured fist, air-cover. Cavalry flanking.

Daemon engines and heldrakes.

Kierdale Venerable Brother

Kierdale

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What do you know? I give up on the entry I’ve struggled with the last (nearly) three weeks, and then -the pressure off- an image comes to me I can work with.

Consider this a continuation of the Battle of Alceforge:

 

Inconceivable

Hidden Content

It was inconceivable.

Unconscionable.

Blasphemous.

Unheard of.

Mortals might turn from His light - base, bastards with no heart or faith. Madmen who sold their souls to the devils of the Warp.

But not Astartes.

Not the Emperor’s own Angels of Death.

So he had been taught. So he had been raised.

The Space Marines were Mankind’s aegis against the tyranny of aliens and the insanity of heretics and mutants.

Such had been hammered into him, day in and day out, by the preachers of his school back on Kierdale’s World.

Yet before him, clad in lurid hues, their weapons wailing like the banshees of legend, strode the towering figures of fallen Angels. They turned their horned helms to face third squad, stealing their way through the foundry ruins off to his own right in an attempt to flank these abominations, and then turned their fell weapons upon them. The ferrocrete walls of the Mechanicus installation offered no protection against the sonic blasts from the gargoyle-muzzled firearms - if such a term could be applied to their weapons - and men crumpled against the walls they had sought cover behind, blood pouring from the ears, eyes and mouths of those lucky enough to survive. Others fell and never rose, their innards ruptured by crescendos of sound. Only as the howl of the weapons died down were the cries of the survivors audible over the crack of his own squad’s lasrifles. The volley faltered.

“Steel your hearts and steady your aim!” Shouted Yohnovich, the bastard commissar from Valhalla. Their last deployment to that desert world hadn’t thawed him in the slightest.

“Have faith, men! Your weapons have come home to the world of their forging! Guide them in the defence of their birthplace as you yourself would defend Holy Kierdale’s World!” Invulnerable Bede punctuated his words with a booming blast from his shotgun.

It did not stop the relentless advance of the traitor Astartes, but did cause the nearest to falter.

That, the first, slightest halt in what had been an inexorable swathe of madness and destruction, was what they had needed.

The young lieutentant’s voice cracked as he rose from their hurriedly-dug trench, pointing his cavalry saver at the enemy.

“First rank, FIRE! Second tank, FIRE!”

 

And with the faith and arms of mortal men, the tide of battle was turned.

Kierdale Venerable Brother

Kierdale

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Thanks to MyD4rkPassenger (and welcome back!) and the ever dependable Carrack and Warsmith Aznable for their entries in Inspirational Friday: The Primordial Annihilator versus the Imperial Guard.

I was sad to see no entries from IG-forum members (except an ex-Mod of the barracks: yours truly :wink: ). Too busy coming to terms with the new near-Khornate bloodshedding of their commissars, perhaps......

I must admit I haven’t yet had chance to read the entries, having struggled with my own in the last days (and I don’t read anyone else’s until I’ve finished writing mine). I’ll do so as soon as possible.

I hereby close that topic but if anyone has more stories on that theme, at any time, please post them here with a suitable title.

Though the last couple of challenges have been tied to Codexes released at the same time, and Codex: Craftworld Eldar is next, I’m not setting that as the next theme as I fear players might be too caught up in digesting their new army book in the first weeks, so I’m going to try doing new codexes a month or so afterwards instead.

And here begins our twentieth challenge of Inspirational Friday 2017:

Images of Chaos

Every fortnight for Inspirational Friday I ask members to write prose on various subjects related to Chaos, to tell us a tale and conjure up images of the servants and pawns of the Chaos Gods, but this time I want actual images.

Images of war. Images of Chaos.

Submissions may be accompanied by prose, but the aim of this challenge is to give us one or more images depicting the forces of Chaos. I’d like to keep sketches and 2D paintings for another time, so this time I ask for photographs of your models, with suitable backgrounds/settings. For those with digital abilities, by all means go to town with filters and special effects. Get creative.

The quality of the miniature painting is not being judged, it is the overall image. In fact you might be able to get away with unpainted miniatures in a black and white image :wink:

IF2017: Images of Chaos runs until the 10th of November

Let us be inspired.

And who shall judge this new challenge? That decision lies with our current judge: ColonelSchaeffer.

The winner of IF2017: Images of Chaos shall claim the Octed amulet:

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  • 2 weeks later...
Kierdale Venerable Brother

Kierdale

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No word from Colonel Shaeffer and they haven’t read my PMs so I’ll judge IF: vs. IG.

Just give me some time to finish Warsmith Aznable’s entry :D

 

I hope to have chance to take some photos for the current theme tonight too. And hope there will be other entrants...

Kierdale Venerable Brother

Kierdale

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MyD4rkPassenger, I liked the build up in your piece, the narrators comments on the planet and situation and the steadily worsening situation. The pacing was excellent and it’s sadly rare for us to see Night Lords entries in IF. Yours was extremely well done!

 

Carrack, yours too was excellent. I liked that the tank commander no longer bothered to learn the names of three of his four crew. The descriptions of the battle were good and very easy to visualise. The mention of other units too helped to flesh out the battle and make it more believable.

 

And Warsmith Aznable’s The Mercy Song...

That a win.

Need I say more?

The chronicling of the fall (and recapture) of an Imperial world through Yannis’ eyes was excellent. The steady fall, the lack of information provided to the guardsmen, Yannis’ rise as he survived, his longing for his lost wife, the gradual darkening and that it took a good long time before Chaos really presented itself in the story was extremely well done.

I liked the inquisitor’s question to Yannis at the end and can’t help thinking that was a final test.

A pleasure to read. And perfectly grim dark.

 

At the moment we have no entries for the current topic. I hope to post my own tonight, though if there are no others then I’d like to ask you to judge the next IF instead.

Warsmith Aznable Venerable Brother

Warsmith Aznable

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Thanks for the kind words. I am glad that the length of this one didn't put y'all off from reading it.  The Mercy Song has a two or three things that I've been trying to get into words for a long time, so I'm happy that it was well received.

 

And yeah, Yannis absolutely would have ended up in that gibbet if he had taken the Inquisitor up on that offer to get his wife's corpse out of it. :yes:

 

The Mercy Song is also a callback to some other of my stories without being too explicit. That is, I don't expect people to remember where "the Mercy Song" that Yannis hears in the story was referenced in my writing before. I left it out because the focus is on Yannis, who has no idea what the song, or the graffiti, or the creepy old woman might mean because the destruction of everything he knows and loves is just collateral damage of powerful actors who would never even notice it. It was just a Wednesday in the Imperium when Yannis' turn to suffer came around.

 

Spoilers below:

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EDIT: I just did a word count: 12,827. Far beyond short story and well into novelette. :blink.: I will work harder on keeping length down.

Edited by Warsmith Aznable
Carrack Veteran

Carrack

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@ Warsmith. Mercy Song makes my top five list for all 40K fiction, pro and am.

 

I went and wrote two prologues to Duty, my entry for last week. The World Marches

Level 45

  Reveal hidden contents

 

Set The World on Fire

Level 45, The World and Port LeCroix

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Note.

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Edited by Carrack
Kierdale Venerable Brother

Kierdale

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Thanks for the additional posts/explanations. :)

And Carrack’s 40k-take on Halloween made me realise I missed doing the annual IF Horror-theme we always do around that time of year. Next year, then.

Kierdale Venerable Brother

Kierdale

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Phantom Herald

Hidden Content

FerroDeep Complex

Alceforge

One month prior to the Psychopomps arrival.

Smit rubbed his eyes as he punched in, aware of the servo-skulls hovering about the workshop, monitoring him and the other technicians in the small, dimly-lit chamber. The smell of dust and hot electrics permeated the still air, the one fan at the far end of the room providing little ventilation. One of the disembodied craniums orbited overhead, its glowing sensor eyes focused upon him accusingly. His card still held between his thumb and forefinger, he pointed to the chronometer upon the wall with his middle finger then raised that same digit toward the servo-skull.

“I ain’t late.”

He then trudged over to his cubicle, blinking his eyes hard, trying to get the dream from his mind. Smit yawned and rubbed the skin about his temple jack. He and the others down here all still had names: they were too skilled to be lobotomised, chipped and labelled, but not important enough to be clad in the red robes of the priesthood or to receive an Omnissiah-given name. Thus he was ‘Smit’, as he had been born, way over in the eastern habs. Throne, how long had it been since he had commed his folks, let alone made a pilgrimage back? He just hadn’t had time. Work, prayer, work, prayer. What free time he had he slept, and not well.

He sat down to find a servo-skull on the bench before him and was about to swat it away and tell it to bug one of his peers when he noticed the damage to it.

One of its lenses was hanging out, the eye socket and indeed the metal casing around it smashed.

He had sympathy for whoever had done it.

He blinked again and didn’t realise he had forgotten to open his eyes until a blart of binaric in his ear jolted him awake and he spun his head toward the source.

It was the mask. That jade mask. That visage as alluring as it was frightening.

He reeled backward, his hands flying up before his face for a moment but as soon as he lowered them to peek again, the mask was gone. It was Komez.

The shorter man tilted his head and looked at Smit with concern before speaking once more, his voice emitted from the brass vox grill implanted in the middle of his forehead. Where his mouth had presumably once been was a forest of jacks, some of them trailing cables ending in plugs, probes and monitors.

“You look tired again, Smit.”

“I am tired, Komez. Can’t sleep.”

“Same story yesterday, Komez.”

That got on his nerves. “‘s the truth, Komez! I ain’t going to the dens. I ain’t!”

Komez nodded slowly but Smit really didn’t care if his colleague believed him or not. Throne damn him. There were too many missing work these days - seduced by the simtech dens people said. But not him.

“I believe you.” Liar. And Komez tapped the bone and metal artifice upon Smit’s desk.

“This was found in sector 665, and th-“

“What was it doing there?” Smits blurted our the question as it coalesced in his mind.

Komez’s look answered it. They didn’t tell me. And I didn’t ask, so neither should you.

He continued, “And they want you to repair it. Not to perform a dump, just mend it so a dump can be done.”

Smit blinked his eyes several times and nodded absently.

* * * * * *

“There.” Hours later he set the servo-skull upon his bench and admired his handiwork. Whatever had hit it had cleaved through the frontale, cracking the left orbit and dislodging the optics there. It had also partially sliced through the feed cables and initial data buffer for both the left and right camera that were coiled up in the nasal cavity. He wasn’t sure how much it would have recorded, but at least he has fixed it.

As he sat there with the skull in his hands he allowed himself a thought he knew she should not think. A thought he had resisted on several occasions before, whenever he had had to work on these constructs or had been reprimanded by a functional one. He wondered if any of the original occupant - of that skull - existed, lingered, in the servo-skull. Komez had admonished him when he had once voiced the thought after too much synthahol. There was no meat. No grey matter, he had said. But surely full Abominable Intelligence was forbidden! That the servo-skull was a captious bastard was more an artifact of whatever captious bastard engineer had programmed it, Komez had said. He had eventually accepted his friend’s words. He had never opened the central chamber of a skull to satisfy his curiosity on the meat-issue. That was more than his life was worth. Someone would be holding his cranium.

But who had this been?

What words had they spoken at the end? Who had they kissed when those mandibles had had lips?

What had they seen in life?

What had they seen in death?

‘They’ wanted the skull repaired for a data dump. He had repaired it, but would a dump work? He didn’t know. He had reconnected what needed reconnecting, replaced what needed replacing. But he didn’t know.

It would be a trivial thing to check. No challenge to his skill. Equally no challenge to cover up that he had checked.

Gingerly, not taking his eyes from those of the servo-skull, he inserted a cable into his temple jack and slid the bronze plug into the atlas-port at the back of the skull before him. Footage of the skull’s patrol flooded his mind and froze on a final image.

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He unleashed a blood-curdling scream and fell back off his chair, his hands flailing before his eyes, dropping the skull only for the cable joining them to pull it with him as he fell to the floor, the image from his dreams burned into his retinas.

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* * * * * *

FROM: 3rd Battalion command, Kierdale’s World 32nd.

TO: [REDACTED BY =][= ]

Alceforge has been liberated, my lord, thanks to He upon Terra. Within this report I have attached images of the terrible Enemy the Guard of my regiment and loyalist Mechanicus forces overcame (at great cost in lives and particularly materiel, I must add).

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Recordings show the assault upon magos Chi-Etas citadel was commanded by this individual:

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Of additional note are the following images:

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Note the self-inflicted injuries in the shape of the the mark of [REDACTED BY =][= ]. We present this as evidence of the impurity of Homo Sapiens Variatus and submit a plea for a pogrom of such strains found in the sector.

Additionally, the following was witnessed fighting alongside the mutants and warpspawn...

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Your ever loyal servant, [REDACTED BY =][= ]

Inquisitor’s personal log.

Forward above communique to the 666th chapter for immediate action.

Order the immediate deployment of the liberators of Alceforge to warzone [REDACTED] for frontline service <projected casualty rate: 98.95%>

Thrown together on the train, using some photos I already had in my gallery (and Camera+ effects).

Kierdale Venerable Brother

Kierdale

Posted
  • Author
Posted

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Well, I guess Inspirational Friday: Images of Chaos wasn't so inspiring :biggrin.: I like to experiment a little with themes and I guess that one didn't grab people. Perhaps if I'd been able to post my own earlier as an example (not that I expected entries like mine, anything would have been welcome)?

Either way, we'll call that a no contest and move on. :smile.:

I hereby close that topic but if anyone has more stories on that theme, at any time, please post them here with a suitable title.

And here begins our twenty-first challenge of Inspirational Friday 2017: If Horus had won...

In Legion, before the outbreak of the Horus Heresy the xenos Cabal presented the primarchs Alpharius and Omegon with a vision - the Acuity - of the fate of the galaxy. Two paths:

Excerpt from Legion, by Dan Abnett

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+ Regard, then, the future. Horus wins and Chaos triumphs, a terrible prospect, but likely. The Cabal sees a scintilla of honour remaining in bright Lupercal. He will secretly hate himself for the atrocities committed in his name. If he wins his fury will accelerate along with his self-loathing. He will immolate the human species inside two or three generations. The self-destructive, redemptive urge in Horus will deive him to exterminate mankind in shame. Even his closest allies will war against him in a final armageddon. Chaos will burn brighter than ever before and will then be extinguished. It’s great victory will flare and then gutter as the dying Imperium takes it to the grave. Races of the Galaxy will be spared, through the sacrifice of the human race.

Consider the alternative, Oregon Primarch. This is what we have foreseen. The Emperor will give his life to achieve victory. He will fall, at Terra, striking Horus down. This will be his destiny, see.

If the Emperor wins, stagnation will seize the Imperium. It will seek to perpetuate itself, over and again, across thousands of years, but it will decay, slowly and surely. It will decay, and gradually allow Chaos to seep back in and consume it.

If the Emperor wins, Alpharius, Chaos will ultimately triumph. Ten, twenty thousand years of misery and rot will follow, until the Primordial Annihilator at last achieves ascendancy.

The slow, inexorable conquest of Chaos, or a brief period of terror and frenzy. Creeping damnation, or a bloody century or two as the human race rips itself apart, and expunges Chaos from the galaxy. This is the choice we present to you. The human race is a weapon. It can save the galaxy or destroy it.

And as we all know, at the siege of Terra the (false :wink:) Emperor was victorious, at a terrible price.

But what would have been the fate of the galaxy, in your opinion, had Horus slain his father and survived?

I ask you to tell us what you believe would have happened had fate taken a different path. Whether or not you follow what the (foul, never to be trusted) xenos Cabal predicted or not is entirely up to you.

IF2017: If Horus had won... runs until the 24th of November.

Let us be inspired.

And who shall judge this new challenge? That decision lies with our current judge: Warsmith Aznable (as mine was the only entry for Images of Chaos I’m calling that a No Contest).

The winner of IF2017: If Horus had won... shall claim the Octed amulet:gallery_63428_7083_6894.png

To prize as their gift from their patron god, or to hide it away from the forces of Chaos...

...and the honour of judging the next topic.

Urriak Urruk Veteran

Urriak Urruk

Posted
Posted (edited)

From Ice and Iron

 

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This is my first attempt at something like this, don't give me too much flak! I got to expand on the murky fluff of Dorn's homeworld and try and weave a redemption in there if all the Primarchs are supposed to eventually turn on Horus.

 

EDIT: Fixed a typo.

Edited by Urriak Urruk

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