[Iron Gauntlet 2017] An Interstitial in Time...

[NovemberIX]

An Interstitial in Time...

 

 

The last thing Techmarine Espion had remembered was the all enveloping silence as the Adjutant-Captain reached for him inside the chamber. He awoke inside what seemed to be the ruins of a large room sunlight streaming through breaks in the wall. He had a brief response when he realized the Chronometric Chamber was nowhere to be found, but quickly smoothed his thoughts, pulled himself up and began to take stock of his situation. Espion's eyes moved to his suit status readout on the HUD. Minor damage to his right knee pad, a few harness servos needed to be realigned and his head was still ringing but otherwise functional. He quickly checked his environmental seals status. Every thing read nominal. Seeing no immediate threat, he checked himself over again, confirming his limbs and digits worked.

He was glad to find that his Auspex and bolt pistol had made it through the rough transition with him. Unfortunately he only had one extra clip. At least he had been equipped with his Engineering Pack, so he had a few tools to work with. Taking his Auspex from its maglocked position he started a passive scan of the local area. The air was full of trace compounds, but so far wasn't reading toxic, and radiation levels were at an acceptable level. The temperature was well within human comfort ranges. Gravity read just under 1G by .0001836%  

He activated the inspection light on his pack, and realized he was in a dolmen. It reached at least 13 meters above his head, the walls made of a strange stone, the ground packed dirt. He checked the auspex again, it's passive motion sensors remained clear. With nothing new to be found inside, he decided to make his way out through one of the larger gaps.

Espion wasn't prepared for what he saw. The land around him looked like nothing he'd ever known, thousands of shattered glass pillars stretched skyward. The air had a strange quality to it, it was thick, emollient,  almost viscous. He felt blinded by how short his viewing range was now. The nature of his surroundings didn't correspond with anything in the known Imperium. Deciding the risk was necessary, he racked his bolt pistol and began an active scan. There were caches of light and heavy metals abounds, strange crystalline radioactives, the air thick with gases the Auspex couldn't fully analyze.  Cycling through the settings he found a faint energy reading, but his scan radius was severely shortened by planetary interference.

With no immediate response to his active scans, Espion decided to investigate the point of interest. He hoped he would find some clue as to where he was and what happened. The auspex estimated it would be an hours distance at full run.


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Hotlab-1 on the Strike Cruiser Geofon was a mess. Equipment, chronostatic cables, and marines littered the deck. Klaxons has belatedly begun to ring out. As moments passed, marines began to get hold of themselves, some rising quickly, most a little slower than normal. Emergency teams were beginning to stream in to help the wounded and check for structural damage. Forge Lord Abielle had landed badly, but was one of the first to rise. He made a quick request to the Emperor that the chronoquantic signature was still in the memory buffers and shuffled his way back to the control daise. Pausing only for a moment to adjust for a broken servo arm and torn data patch cable, he began to query the memory banks. The Emperor had favored them today. Abielle called to the slowly rising Adjutant-Captain, “Jac, we have it, the data survived” leaving we can get them back unspoken.

A pair of recently arrived TaSC initiates hurried to brace Captain Bartlot, his right leg useless, as he began to issue orders. “Abielle, get me answers, I want to know where the chamber has been, where it’s going, and where it took Forgewright Espion. ” Despite his obvious injuries he began to assign damage control, operations, medical and science teams to their necessary duties. Injuries could be tended to later, time was, as always, of the essence.

Abielle tasked three newly arrived initiates to run data transfer cables toward his office, another to send a message to the Spite of Glatisant, he needed to confer with the engineers of the Comberth Stronghold League. He had a theory.

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Espion had been walking for 3 days according to his suit chronometer. The regular change of numbers his only reference to the passage of time because the whole of his journey had been under the same gloaming sky.

 The first signal he’d picked up led him to some sort of field communications device. With a small amount of effort he was able to interface with it to boost the range of his Auspex, and was then able to lock onto a stronger but distant signal. Way point centered in his HUD, he took the first steps. To pass the time he decided to contemplate various subjects he’d filed away over the years due to priority constraints. He had started with the inane idea that somehow the evolution of Humanity was directly correlated to the devolution of sound. It was one of those theories he’d heard on the Glatisant from a very drunken citizen composer one interesting evening while on watch. Dismissing as soon as it entered his head as too stupid to be true. He walked in silence for a few moments, but the steady rhythm of his footfalls, mixed with the regular jingling of his equipment sounded musical to Espion. Leaving the evolutionary thoughts to the researchers, he decided to focus on the music instead.

There was no single consensus among the Warriors as to what constituted the best battle song, but there were clear favorites, classics that endured not just through the millenia to one day be heard by the Novemberine, but through the whiles and mores of generations of Warriors to reach his current frame of reference. Like many of his fellow IX, he had spent a great deal of time studying in the archeo-media vault. Espion knew that he had a clear preference for some of the most ancient of music pieces. He often gravitated toward instrumental works, the ancient greats like Ephixa or 65 Days of Static made music that stirred his soul.  Some lyrics had a staying power though. Even if he didn’t fully understand them.

From the piece Stay True, he didn’t know what a dollarsign was, but he knew it would buy the biggest house in hell. More easily understood was Autumn Leaves Revisited, just as leaves fall, so would he eventually, that was the nature of duty. He realized he was getting mawkish, and that this wouldn’t be his field of death. He was going to regroup with the rest of the IX. With those thoughts he left the idleness of an unfocused mind, and recentered himself, he had a job to do.

He let himself recall the first battle song he learned as an initiate. He could still feel the roar of the instrumentation echo within him, his step picking up to match the unheard cadence. “Cause I want to fight, I want to fight, I want to prove I'm right, I want to fight, I want to fight, So turn and forfeit” The driving pulse of the percussion kept moving him faster, and soon enough he was loping across the strange land. The instructors had drilled the song into them, teaching them to be steady and sure in their actions, unrelenting. Inevitable.

That was the thought he needed, it was inevitable that he’d return.

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Abielle considered the conversation he had just had with the Comberth Stronghold Engineers. The triple-16 breach wasn’t supposed to happen, and it’s occurrence had created a new temporal loop. Records in the chronostasis vault were of no help, whatever was happening wasn’t part of their understood predestination axons. Details about reality were already starting to change.

This left the Forgelord worried.

The Novemberine had spent so much of their existence walking inside the steps of their forebears that to find out now they were cut loose with no roadmap left Abielle uneasy. He took on the Bluebird project because he knew the dangers of a type-1 TPDD, hell it’s danger was in the name, Temporal Plane Destruction Device. It operated by treating time as pages of a flip book and punching a hole through to insert itself. The IX’s interest was due to its low power cost relative to Gravity Induced Lightspeed Temporal Translation. Being able to precisely incurse into different time frames with some measure of success had been far too much of an incentive to ignore. It was their chance to recover the Primarch lost to time, to help put the Imperium on stronger footing.

Two positives emerged from the conversation was the Novemberine fleet was dispersed and created an ad-hoc sensor network that, with luck, would be able to react and interdict fast enough to recover the Chronometric Chamber the next time it returned to this time period. The other was that the CSL had come up with a plausible process for neutralizing the erratic incursion factor. The Chief Engineer of the Comberth Stronghold League figured that it was Chroniton Soak in the outer skin of the Chamber. Upon the first return during the testing of the Chronometric Chamber it had caused a massive energy release, demolishing a large portion of the research facility is was stored in. If they could separate the TPDD from the chamber, and then chronostatically ground both, it should prevent any more uncontrolled incursion.

Walking out of the entanglement communications suite, Abielle knew that it was time to start making preparations.

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73 hours later, Espion arrived at the signal source. He could scarcely believe his luck, as he approached, the energy signal had coalesced into a known pattern. Chronometric Radiation. The source was a large tower construct, the materials, again, did not conform to anything known to the IX or the Imperium. Circling the base of the tower, he risked doing an active scan with his Auspex. The return showed that the radiation source was above him. Finding a ladder built into the side of the tower he made his way to the top, noting that it’s width and gaps were perfectly suited to astartes physiology. The first ladder lead to a small landing and another ladder, ascending him to the height of the shattered glass towers that dotted the landscape. He wasn’t surprised to see they carried well on into the shortened horizon, but whatever significance that held meant nothing to him. The signal source is what he was interested in. Climbing one last ladder he climbed the edge of the circular top landing. It was almost non-descript except for the fact that it was on this mysterious planet. He looked across the landing to a console of some sort. As he walked his way towards it, he heard a slight buzzing. The buzzing began to intensify and arpeggiate in a familiar fashion. He looked at the console, and it looked like some sort of countdown nearing completion.

With a pop and minor flash there stood the Chronometric Chamber.

Espion hesitated for a moment, this level of luck never boded well. The moment passed and the lost techmarine stepped forward. As one foot moved in front of the other the Chronometric Chamber flashed out of existence. The strength of invectives that Espion loosed then could have burned a hole through plasteel. Exhausting his library of vituperations he turned to the console, just in time to see the Chamber flash back into existence. Not that he expected getting back to be easy, but this was plain absurd. It flashed back out almost immediately, leading Espion to decide to investigate the console.

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Adjutant-Captain Bartlot was being briefed by Forgelord Abielle about his most recent findings in the Geofon’s stellar cartography suite. “The Tanager has reported they are moving towards a Chronometric disturbance in their sector. They should arrive within a deca-cycle, the Lumen, the Aigaion and the Fort Grace are moving in to give support. Headmaster Falken informed me that long range sensors show the source of the disturbance to be near a non-aligned Imperial facility.”

For not the first time Bartlot cursed, “Of course it is, Abielle, why does this thing keep showing up in developed areas?”, the Adjutant-Captain was obviously frustrated, it was damn near impossible to keep operational security if their time machine kept being found by non-aligned forces, especially when it kept popping up at random in front of the citizenry. For 18 Hecta-cycles the IX’s fleets had been chasing Chronometric disturbances. Of the 15 they had been able to get a positive fix on, 12 had been in population centers, 2 at research facilities, and once at the very top of a Planetary Governor’s spire. His fear was that one of these incursions would end up with an NAI citizen boarding the chamber is making a bigger mess of the past.

The Forgelord knew it was a mostly rhetorical question, but the frequency with which the chamber showed up planet side, and in urban areas had piqued Abielle’s interest. In all reality it should be floating in space more often than not just based on simple statistics, but it always managed to incurse into Imperial holdings. “Captain, I’ve pondered the same question. I’m working on a hypothesis, but best I can guess right now is that it might be attracted to the energy output of developed population centers.”

Bartlot’s next words chilled Abielle, “Whatever it is, we need to actually get a hold of the damned thing this time, I’ve spoken to First-Captain Degas, all November IX operations are suspended until the recovery the chamber. He’s dispatched the Okchabursk to Zeroth day.”

The Okchabursk was a dreadnought ship that was designed, built and operated by the Comberth Stronghold League, and it hadn’t been launched in over 30 Kilo-Cycles. The CSL rarely ever left the Spite of Glatisant, and it was also the only other ship in the fleet that could perform a GILT-Translation. It was often considered just as, if not more, important than the Spite of Glatisant. Sitting at zeroth day mean that they now only had 3 mega-cycles of parallel time to solve the TPDD issue before a hard temporal reset.

Abielle didn’t want to consider what that would mean. Every action they had ever taken would be nullified, they would be starting over from day 1 with the hope they could avoid making the same mistakes in the next loop. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

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The top of the tower had a new addition, it couldn’t be called much more than a shack, a little over double the size of the Chronometric chamber it was obviously out of place. A door way swung open, and out came Espion chewing on an Imperial ration bar. He made his way to the console and began what had become routine checks over the last few weeks. There would be three translations “today” one of which he could hitch a ride with and get more supplies.

 Espion had learned a few things in the weeks he was stuck in the bend of time. Which was actually the first thing he learned. This wasn’t any ordinary planet, it was the area of least temporal resistance. The second was that in between all its various translations, the chamber always returned here, sometimes for just a moment, sometimes it sat for hours or days. At first he tried to return to normal space/time with the chamber, but every time it shifted out of that reference, he would shift along with it, and end up returning to the end of time, usually multiple hours distance from the tower. So he began to study it. Realizing he would need supplies, he was able to get the chamber to hone in on specific Imperial Energy Signatures and went along for the ride.

The console itself was a glorified timer, it counted down time to translations, and time between translations, it was from the console he was able to somewhat guide the Chronometric Chamber in its translations. Thus far, he hadn’t been able to make it back to his own time frame, any translations that would return there would end up either translating too fast for him to enter the chamber, or were so short that even if did enter it, he would return back to the tower almost immediately.

The techmarine had a plan though. For the last 16 Hectacycles he had been gathering the tools and technology he needed. He theorized that the random translations were the result of Chroniton Soak that was only getting worse, so the next time the Chamber sat for at least 12 hours, he was going to remove the TPDD and attempt to chronostatically anchor it. With hope, he would then be able to take control of the device and return to his specific reference time frame. Not that he knew for sure, be he felt like he’d be home soon, back with the IX, back with the Warriors.

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The disappointment that Abielle felt was palpable. He had received word days ago from the Tanager that they had recovered the Chronometric Chamber after fighting through an NAI cordon. The Chamber had been empty though, there was no sign of Forgewright Espion, or the TPDD. Headmaster Falken was transporting the empty chamber to a facility on Pyraxis for study, but Abielle could take no relief in that. Until the TPDD had been found, the Okchabursk was still sitting at Zeroth Day ready to hit the Grand Reset.

A technician broke his revere with a loud “SIR!” the human continued on “Chronometric reading incursion reading, 323 mark 159” the technician paused for a moment before continuing “That’s the Proscion system sir”

“Inform Commander Kope to make best speed at that heading” Abielle ordered, “I’ll be meeting with the Adjutant-Captain” as we walked out of the suite.

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The transition had been as rough as Espion had expected. And it took him a moment to reorient himself. After removing the TPDD, and discharging it’s chroniton soak, he was able to make a harness and seat for himself. He had returned to his previous time frame reference. Once he gained his bearings, he was started to look around. He found himself in the ruins of a building, the architecture was suitibly gothic that for a moment, he felt like he finally made it back. That moment was short lived, because in the distance was the last thing he wanted to see. A Tau armoured vehicle.

Espion let loose one last invective, and began to think very quickly.

 

Notes: So here it is, my final entry into the Iron Gauntlet, I've killed so many of my darling while writing this, the word count would balloon up, before I'd go and rip whole chunks out to try and make a more streamlined short story. Despite my best effort, I couldn't quite get it to 3000 words exactly, I went over by 123, but since this isn't being printed, I think I'm ok in this case ;) Links to the previous events that lead up to this story (and happen during) will be posted later, for now, Christmas is almost here, and I got some work to do :P
 

 

Edit: spelling

Edited January 14, 2018 by NovemberIX