Warhammer The Light of the Past [DAOT in 40k]

[Navarro]

EATB has stalled a bit; started with this idea I've been thinking of for a while. My own contribution to this subgenre of Warhammer 40k fanfiction.

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THE SANCTUARY, PART 1

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368.M25

Twelve-Star Admiral Constantine Aetius wept as he saw Earth appear on the vidscreen. It had been centuries since he last saw Man's birthworld, capital of the Federation of Man, glorious centre of all human civilisation. For that time, he had been at war across the galaxy fighting the most terrible enemy mankind had yet known to utter annihilation. Earth was not as it had been when he saw her last. The emerald-and-sapphire crown jewel of the Federation was no more.

Craters pockmarked her surface; rad-wastes stretched over most of Siberia and Central Asia, from what had been the Persian Gulf to the former coast of the Arctic Sea. His ship's auspexes were showing the ruins of Hive-arcologies; dark nuclear-winter clouds hid the surface largely from sight; and worst of all, the oceans had been drained. Earth had been at ground zero of the Cybernetic Revolt; the Iron Men gestalts there had pioneered some of their worst strategies. Billions of civilians herded into processing camps and sent back, blood-lusted by the diabolical cruciamen, at their own species as human waves before the Iron legions; entire populations broken down for chemical energy; countless individuals lobotomised and cyborged, their higher brain functions subverted to lend more processing power to the Iron gestalts.

That Man had held the planet as the fighting raged back and forth across space for five centuries had been a testament to his tenacity and will to live, but the Iron forces had one last atrocity to commit. They had attempted to carry out the wholesale destruction of Earth's hydrosphere, teleporting or transporting away via massive orbital capillaries immense quantities of water to burn as fusion fuel in their warships. The deepest areas of the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans were now massive inland seas; of smaller water bodies there was nothing left. The Caribbean, the Sea of Japan, the Middle Sea at the heart of the ancient world where Aetius had been born and raised; they were gone. Just salt flats and dust plains.

Across the galaxy, many planets had met similar or worse fates. Of the ten million worlds inhabited by mankind, no one knew how many had survived or maintained a state of civilisation. Estimates ranged from fifteen percent to a wildly optimistic forty-five percent.

+++It is not befitting you to weep,+++ a voice rang in his head. It wasn't his own of course; it was the voice of the Stone AI bonded to him by the implants in his brain, the voice of his ship. Despite what some were already proclaiming, the Stone Men had ever been loyal to man. It was against both them and humanity that the Iron Men had rebelled, and many had been martyred in the fighting. Relatively few had survived the Cybernetic Revolt; it had been an information war as much as anything else, and data equivalents to the sun-snuffers and empyreal bombs thrown about with abandon had not been uncommon.

Ultima Ratio, the ship herself, or as he sometimes called her, “Ultima”, was a supercapital Basilissa-class warship made in the shipyards of the Martian orbital ring. Forty kilometres long from bow to stern, she was of the blade-like configuration favoured by the majority of human warships. Her weapons were a mix of turret and broadside fire, capable of presenting a strong offense both to the sides and to forward. A mix of grav-impeller missiles, gravitic-accelerator mass drivers and phased particle beam projectors made for a jack of all trades adept at long, medium and short ranges; while her spinally-mounted Nova-cannon represented one of the greatest triumphs of military engineering. She was guarded primarily by an Aegis-pattern cyclic self-repairing Void shield array, and then by hundreds of missile arrays and volkite-based point-defence guns to take down whatever ordnance got past her shields.

“You know me, Ultima,” he said, vocalising his thoughts to the AI inhabiting his vessel. “I've never let my emotions stop me from doing what's necessary.”

He interlinked deeper with the ship's systems, running his mind through the planetary noosphere. It was dismal. Food riots here; water riots there. Stray Iron warforms occasionally launching attacks or being uncovered by Army searcher teams. Oxford University, part of the Greater Lundun Arcology Complex, Kingdom of Albyon, razed to the ground by a mob of Simplifiers; books that had been preserved for twenty-five thousand years burned or used as toilet paper, data-stacks completely annihilated. Cults were rising among the teeming billions, preaching the coming end of mankind, and rebellions were still being fought across the planet by local troops and Federation Army soldiers alike.

But still, there were positive reports; nano-plagues being cleansed from surviving water sources, civilian fleets on their way bringing vast supplies of water and terraforming supplies from the far reaches of the galaxy; speeches by Kings and Presidents and Prime Ministers celebrating victory over the Iron Men and glorifying the man who had cracked open and torn down their last major strongholds in the galactic north, near the Aeldari Home Cluster in the Perseus Arm. He was scheduled to meet with the Chief Executive Officer of the Federation and the officials of the Federation Senate; but he had his own misgivings still. His campaigns there had revealed awful truths.

His Navigators had given very disturbing reports while they were engaged on campaign. Reports that he needed to deliver. He waited until his vessel was in stable orbit, then desynced from his command throne. Nanomachine wires unthreaded themselves from his nervous system, leaving a barely visible puncture mark on the base of his neck. Despite the initial devastating blows of the war – when everything noosphere-connected was used as a weapon – he still trusted nanomedicine.

He walked down to the ship's teleportarium, changed into a protective suit covered in micro-sized aerythmetic wards, then stood in position to be sent down. There was a swirl of impossible colours, a lingering feeling of unease – and he was in East Africa, looking at the Capital Complex of the Federation of Man. It was built overlooking Olduvai Gorge – a symbolic token to man's origins here in the primal wilderness – and was of gleaming white stone. From its walls flew the banner of the Federation – the Solar Eagle; a gold eagle, wings outstretched, head pointing right, surrounded by twelve sun-rays on a field of black.

He walked to an aircar, and was taken straight to the heart of the Federation, the Senate Chamber. On twelve hundred seats sat the Delegates of the Federation's member states – the standard-bearers of human civilisation. There were even the xenos representatives of Federation client races; Tarellians, Kinebrach and others. But on a grav-lifted platform at the centre of the chamber stood the members of the Federation Senate – the governing body of mankind. They represented the heads of the core organisations that made up the Federation – its military, scientific and economic leaders, headed by the Federation CEO.

He took a skim-platform to the centre of the chamber, and winced as it interlocked with the Federation Senate's.

“Mr. CEO,” he said plainly. “While we've defeated the Iron Men, the Federation faces yet another crisis.”

“What's your concern?” the tired old man replied. Though juvenat treatments had kept him artificially young, the immense stress of leading humanity through the worst crisis it had ever faced – worse than the Greenskin Wars fought as man took the first tentative extra-solar steps - had worn him down.

“When on campaign in the Borealis Segmentum,” Aetius said. “We experienced severe empyreal disturbance in the area of the aeldari home cluster. We were there long enough to track that the disturbances seemed to be spreading and growing outwards.”

“The Warp is always turbulent,” the Paternova's tank said, automatic translators converting the gurgling sounds he made within his bath of hyper-oxygenated water into flawless machine-voiced Gothic. “Its tides ebb and flow, and its storms wax and wane.”

Aetius transferred the statistical data that had been gathered into the Senate's private noosphere. They showed a continual rise in Warp turbulence and a slow spread outward from the aeldari worlds. Worse, the scale and strength of the turbulence was starting to increase exponentially. In a matter of decades it would hit a tipping point.

“Not only that, but my forces encountered a similarly exponential rise in psychic phenomena,” he continued. “More powerful psychic channellers being born more often, and latents jumping into full-fledged active status.”

He remembered what he had seen. Common soldiers blazing with warpfire, a hellish light behind their eyes as they ran amok across the battlefield. Trained and trusted psycasters exploding into multicoloured fire as they fought in the midst of combat. If that happened amongst the civilian population … and worse, there were rumours about what happened to ships whose gellar fields failed. From the very first Warp-ship, the doomed Event Horizon, it had always been an urban legend among spacers. Of hostile, malevolent intelligences dwelling in a space where no mortal life could exist. If those things were real, if they could break into the material world en masse …

“If this continues, I believe the Federation faces not only a collapse of interstellar travel and trade, but a psychic apocalypse.”

“What is your proposed solution?”

“The aeldari seem to be at the core of this phenomenon. We know of the psychodynamic nature of Warp space, and the extreme nature of their society. If their … behaviours are disrupting the Warp to this extent, they are a threat to mankind equal to that of the Iron Men themselves. We ought to eliminate it.”

“You're suggesting xenocide,” the Federation Army Chief of Staff said. “A war waged to wipe out a whole species. We've never engaged in such a campaign, it's never been necessary. Even against the greenskins and the Slaugth, we've simply pushed them into quarantine zones and culled them when their numbers got bothersome.”

“I don't care whether we destroy the eldar or subdue them,” Aetius replied, using the vulgar term to make a point. “But we must end the threat they pose.”

“We don't have the strength,” the Navy Chief of Staff added. “The tachyon relay and Warp beacon networks are still in tattered disarray. If you're right, we won't be able to repair them and rebuild the Federation military before the aeldari cluster becomes inaccessible via Warp space. Not only that, but the aeldari still have their automated defence network fully online.”

Aetius bit his lip at that. At the start of the War, the first emissaries man had sent to the aeldari in two millennia had arrived in their core worlds begging for aid. What had happened to them had been unspeakable, and the aeldari had not sent a single one of their psychic automatons to mankind's aid. Even as the galaxy burned around them, they had not lifted a finger, lost in blood-orgies and narcotic-infused dreams. As the mechanivores bit savagely at the data of spacetime, as the sun-snuffers wiped out whole systems, as grey tempests of nanite swarms turned planets into steel wastelands of flowing nano-dust, as trillions died every hour across uncounted worlds and in the bleak void of space ...

“Dark Glass, Golden Gate?” Aetius said, referring to the most classified military projects in the Federation.

“Dark Glass?” the Navy Chief replied mockingly. “All that ended up doing was burning up countless psychers without a single hint of a Webway breach. A failed experiment. And as for Golden Gate … the project is due to be cancelled. It'd need resources from across the galaxy.”

Nevertheless, Aetius formally called his proposal to a Senate vote over the noosphere. It failed by a dismal majority. Even those who saw the coming doom did not believe there was much that could be done about it, with the realm of mankind in such a tattered state as it was now.

Then the fall of the Federation is inevitable, Aetius thought. All I fought to defend for these long centuries … gone. Is this how human history will end? Wiped out by the side-effects of xenos depravity? We held back the Iron Men, and now we face this inevitable doom?

+++If the Federation as-it-is is doomed,+++ Ultima sent along the mental link that bound man and machine, +++You should make efforts to ensure that at least some of what it was survives into the future.+++

And how?, Aetius thought.

+++You must act quickly,+++ the AI sent. +++Gather the forces you can. I suggest you start with your old allies. Go to the far corners of the galaxy. The Warp disruption will end eventually. But you may have to wait a long time.+++

***

It had been ten years since that fateful meeting, and Aetius had gathered everything he could muster. A colonisation mission, he had explained it as to High Command, and it was – of a sort. In the far east of the galaxy, many light-years to the north of the Consulate of Ultramar, a world named Sanctuary would be established to preserve a remnant of the Federation in stasis. They would sleep, watched over by Stone AI guardians, for a hundred thousand years or until they were awoken by entities bearing both human DNA and psy-resonance.

In the conference room of the Ultima Ratio, Aetius sat with all the leaders of the expedition. There was his old comrade, Sector General Miles V. Bradley leading his Stellar Expeditionary Group of Merican Colonial Marines; Alyssia Raven, Knight-Princess oath-sworn to him by ties of battle; Albus Helmawr from Araneus Pri,, his troops specialised in bunker and arcology warfare; many of Mars and Earth's top scientists, especially those trained in understanding and countering psychic phenomena; Technocrat Carl Lundgren of Ryza, an expert in gravimetrics who was convinced he could create an FTL drive which did not touch on Warp space if given sufficient funding and time; and many more. There were dozens of people in all, from the managers of transtellar corporations to the holo-avatars of artificial intelligences.

There were two hundred warships, approximately the size of a Federation Sector Fleet, and three hundred transport ships; 40 million soldiers in all. But their numbers were dwarfed by the civilian portion, colonists eager for any chance to escape the ruin that the core of mankind's civilisation, the area most ravaged by the Iron Men, had become. Sixty great colony ships were part of the formation, carrying six hundred million souls. Not only had standard-issue civilian STCs been brought along, but milspec auto-constructors which functioned along the same lines but were not designed for rugged civilian manufacture but high-end military-applications.

“We may be facing human extinction,” Aetius began. “The odds have never been as dire as this. If some other fragment of our civilisation survives, our sleep may not be as long as we thought. But we must keep in mind that we may well rise up from our stasis chambers to look on a galaxy completely devoid of human life. We must be more resolute and committed to our duty than we have ever been before. We must be brave, we must be stern, and we must not be shy to make hard choices.”

Everybody nodded.

“Failure is not an acceptable option. Defeat is not an acceptable option. We must aim for the survival of the species and its complete mastery of the galaxy. If xenos breeds do not kneel to us, they will be knelt. If any branch of mankind refuses to accept the authority of the Federation, it will be brought to heel. If the empyreal intelligences are real, and if they are hostile, we will destroy them.”

Everybody nodded.

“I take these actions not because I wish to do them but because I must. The Federation will not fail; humanity will not fail. We will survive, and we will thrive. That is my only wish.”

Aetius took a deep breath.

“All vessels,” he said, his voice being noospherically sent across both the vessel and the fleet. “Prepare for Warp transition. Ultima Ratio bridge crew, begin Warp transition.”

The Ultima Ratio moved ahead of the fleet, clearing space for its mighty plasma reactors to charge with power. Dark lightning coruscated across space, and with a mighty unsound, reality ripped open and the supercapital warship, followed by all its lesser escorts, stabbed prow-first into the unreal darkness of the Immaterium.

 

[Navarro]

THE SANCTUARY, PART TWO

381.M25

The RH1-N0 Planetary Reconnaissance Vehicle trundled across the surface of the world now designated Sanctuary. It was a planet approximately the same distance from its G-class star than Earth was, inhabited by non-sapient xenobreeds. Sector General Miles Victor Bradley of the Third Merican Empire's Colonial Marine Corps tried not to let tears of nostalgia for the Birthworld cloud his vision as the vehicle moved on. He shuddered to think of what would be happening amongst the sprawling starscrapers of the ancient city of Boswash when the food shipments stopped coming in. Within days, the teeming billions would be eating each other alive. It might have even already happened. Who knew with the tachyon-ansible network ripped into so many shreds?

The RH1-N0 PRV itself was a well-tested design from the early Stellar Exodus period. Based on end-M2 APCs from humanity's distant past, the vehicle was essentially an environmentally-sealed metal box – often treaded, in rare cases hovering on grav-plates – which served as a functional STC design for navigating potentially hostile alien worlds and as an APC used by high-grade militia and low-grade light Army units. A "Predator" light tank variant also existed, but was generally relegated for militia units since it was simply too thin-skinned for Army engagements and too fast to serve as an infantry tank.

This particular variant had been upgraded something above normal specs– a Volkite caliver mounted on hull top to deal more effectively with hostile wildlife, semi-sentient AI targeting and navigation protocols, self-repair nano-nodules. There were a number of larger IFV-grade RH1-N0 “Proteus-type” variants as well on the outer levels – big, bulky things that had been designed to deal with the needs of the Iron War. This was all that was needed for scouting a planet for potentially hostile xenoforms – damned greenskins popped up in the most unlikely places – and dangerous wildlife while the Federation Army's real military equipment remained in orbit. These vehicles had been fabricated aboard the colony ships.

Bradley sighed. For a millennium the Federation Army and by extension the forces that made it up had been considered an affectation to long-lost days of martial prowess, a parade-ground force. The Iron Men had been the ones to hold the leaguers of the quarantine zones and launched the pro-active strikes to knock brewing Ork waaaghs off-balance. Then the apocalypse had come, and the decadence of the core-worlds had come home to roost. Five hundred or more years of war had broken the society that the Federation had once been. In some ways it had made it better – a commitment to duty, an embrace of meritocracy, a strength that hadn't been there before. In other ways it had been made worse – an example of which was the dangerous foolishness that was the Simplifier movement.

Enough damage had already been done without raving mobs rising up seeking to destroy anything that had survived. Bradley had heard of STC machines, formerly given places of honour in the Old Colonies' grandest museums, taken and hurled into running fusion furnaces. But then, they had their reasons to do what they did.

Everything had been connected in those days. A living ecosystem of data spanning the stars. And it had all been subverted by the initial tendrils of hostile code crawling out from the initial centres of AI rebellion. Nano-meds made to dissolve the people who used them; industrial and construction equipment used to set up countless billions of “accidents” across human space; smart-habs turned into death traps; auto-piloted shuttles and aircars set to run over crowds or crash themselves into buildings. It had been the Stone Men's efforts to contain the worst of the attacks that had ensured humanity managed to survive the initial shock, realise what was happening, and turned what should have been an unmitigated slaughter into a war worth calling the name.

He looked over the gunner and driver – sturdy Catachans from Merica's extrasolar domains, gene-bulked and immune-reinforced to survive their death-world home planet, neurolinked into the vehicle's systems – and engaged his own connector with a thought. Nanomachine threads stabbed into his nervous system, infiltrated the sensory systems of his brain. He saw what the PRV's sensors percieved, or as best as they could be translated into.

They were near the base of an extinct shield volcano, near the coast. The environment was reminiscent of the Middle Sea at the nexus of Africa, Asia and Europa – Aetius would like this place for sure. There would need to be further scans of course, to determine geological stability and such, but they had already made a good start.

Aboard the Ultima Ratio, surrounded by the cool metal of her ready room, Aetius looked over the plans for the primary stasis complex, with the ship's AI in attendance via holo-avatar along with the chief engineer, Falk Karben of Cthonia. The structure was to be buried one kilometre under the surface, extending nine kilometres down and dozens in various directions. Karben, a sturdy bald-headed man with deep-set eyes, was proud of his work.

“We Cthonians sure know how to dig,” Falk boasted in a bittersweet tone. The War had seen his homeworld, located in the Sirius system, mined out to the very core to fuel the military efforts of humanity's armies. Ultima Ratio was largely made of Cthonian metal. It had been deemed non-viable for habitation and all those who could leave the planet had, leaving the dregs of its society to remain. An official Evacuation Fleet had been then declared, but it would likely never come. The storm-front of the Warp disturbances was already on the border of Solar. They were reaching deeper inwards to the heart of man's realm by the month, travelling on the very empyreal currents that bound human space together.

With a bitter twinge, Aetius thought of those who hadn't heeded his warning. The doom was coming on them, and they could no longer be saved. One of the ships that had joined his colony fleet, the arcology-vessel Interrex, had abandoned it later on, before the great journey to the eastern fringe. Her captain had not approved of the military-led nature of the expedition, that its civilian complement would be under martial law for the duration, and of the long stasis sleep the colonists would have to be subjected to. They had headed to the galactic south-west, hoping to ride out the storm by themselves. The nature of the coming cataclysm, he knew, would not leave them be.

Another vessel, the Van Saar, had been lost in the Warp, en route to rendezvous with his flotilla at Araneus Prime. He would have been glad to have had her scientists along with the Martians and Ryzans, but the Warp was cruel and getting crueller. He had lit candles for her brave and loyal crew, and prayed for them in the manner of his Chalcedonian-Zen faith. The religions of the Federation's most committed faith was that the Warp, with its vindictiveness and fickleness, did not represent the totality of immaterial reality. So it was believed and desperately hoped.

But he had gained some as well. A full clan of Tarrellians had aligned him and joined forces. The hardy reptilian xenos had elected to go into stasis along with his soldiers, but they would settle the deep deserts of Sanctuary where no human could comfortably live once they awoke.

The stasis vaults would be built largely from the recycled material of the colony ships themselves, surrounded in a shell of hexagrammic-inscribed phase-metal to protect against empyreal attention. Each individual would be first sedated, then cryo-frozen, and finally contained within a stasis field. The double layer of this system was necessary to prevent the insanity that would be caused if Warp-active sapients such as humans were to enter stasis in a conscious state. Psychic channellers and latents had been required to have a plasma-charge implant installed at their spinal column. If uncontrolled or non-human Warp resonance was detected in these individuals, the stasis field would collapse and the plasma charge automatically detonate. A scorched stump would be all that was left of their heads.

The military forces involved would be in the top layer of the facilities, ready to defend the civilians. There were six planned, each housing thirty million civilian colonists, and ten million Federation Army soldiers. Of course, not all would be awakened at once – but enough would be to defend the facilities if they were attacked. The complex would be AI-overseen, and would awaken if either 100,000 years had passed; humans broke into the antechamber a klick below ground, or significant hostile xenoform lifesigns (including Ork and Aeldari) were detected anywhere on the planet.

The Federation Navy elements would be contained in carefully concealed hangars located beneath Sanctuary's moon. Their crews would sleep within, ready to awaken at a signal from the planet below.

Despite himself, Aetius felt worry. The complex's troops would awaken in stages, piecemeal. Could a sufficiently large force core it open before they got the chance to mobilise? But it had to work. If mankind failed, it failed forever.

==*==

Vorr Kastav oversaw the excavation as teams of men and machines tore open the earth in great numbers, grav-beamers lifting up chunks of rock as sonic mining machines made soil run like water to allow the seamless deposition of dismantled arcology-ship corridors and phase-metal armour. There were thousands of engineers in powered suits, assisted by teams of construction robots, civilian-grade Iron Men with their consciousness cogitators removed by design. What remained was something sub-sapient; a bundle of expert systems that required oversight by a human or Stone Man, but the Iron War had shown the follies of trying to automate all aspects of life – even automation itself. A dictum had been learned in those dark days, one that would – if the adepts of the Sigilite Order who had joined the expedition in the interests of preserving humanity's tens of thousands of years of history saw to it, at any rate – be remembered forever by the Federation.

“MAN MAY NOT BE REPLACED.”

Even the Stone Men were now required to be bonded to a human at all times. This ensured that the two would be able to oversee each other, the man and machine checking the flaws of each others' natures. It had been common practice even before the War for a ship's captain to be the bondsmate of the vessel's AI. In orbit, the fabrication vessels were making immense amounts of phase-metal to be sent down below, working down dozens of asteroids every day. They too would sleep beneath Sanctuary's moon.

It would be an immense exercise in trust to let them take control of the stasis facilities, but they would be operating at minimum power to avoid detection and conserve energy at any rate.

The construction would be done in twenty years, it having been five since the project began. Even now though, the tachyon ansible got occasional reports from Federation space – psychers encouraged to explore their powers exploding into armies of extradimensional monsters that drowned planets in their own blood, horrific xenobreeds formerly locked behind guarded quarantine buffers openly raiding human space, client races declaring that the Federation had shackled their development and launching campaigns of secession (none of the xenos who had sent support to the expedition had made such statements). Behind them, the galaxy was burning.

Many had wanted to quit the project, but Aetius had been resolute. The Federation as it stood could not be saved. Even if they could put out one fire, another would spring up, and the effort of trying to preserve the galaxy would crush their limited resources – especially with the Warp disturbances. The Federation military as a whole was starting to fracture, many star nations' forces rushing home to save their own worlds and clusters. The government on Earth was increasingly nominal.

Nevertheless, Kastav continued to oversee and supervise his section of the grand design as best he could. The landers were always dropping off equipment – Baneblade heavy grav-tanks, Spatha MBTs, Volkite rifles in profusion for the Federation army troops, lasguns for civilian militia purposes, industrial and military materiel in abundance. Always, always more. Always more to dig and to build.

==*==

The sanctuary complexes were completed on the planet deemed Sanctuary by Aetius and entered. The Federation of Man, brought to its knees by its mechanical apocalypse, was destroyed by its psychic one. Across man's former realm, worlds burned by the score, then the hundred as monsters from the abyss of the galaxy's collective psyche slavered and capered through the burning streets of countless cities and villages. There was no organised response – there could not be with Warp travel impossible due to the storms. The Federation Army and Navy ceased to be. The disruption of galactic travel brought fresh disasters. Rapidly dwindling resources brought on civil wars on thousands of planets. Weapons of mass destruction were used in desperation.

Other planets simply starved to death. For five thousand years this continued, then an Imperium rose across the stars. The Warp brought it to horrendous civil war, crippled the Imperial dream before it could truly be born. Nevertheless, the Imperium of Man fitfully held on through the centuries and millennia, simultaneously contracting and expanding. Its colonists landed in M38 on a world once called Sanctuary, and developed it into a Civilised World known as Vyzanthia IV.

For three millennia the backwater colony planet subsisted, its population approximately one to two billion, until in 850.M41 a major Ork Waaagh!, led by a ferocious warlord under the Overtyrant of Jagga, landed on the planet. PDF and Astra Militarum forces were hard pressed against the invaders, but knew little of the forces that began to stir under their very feet as the war dragged on into its second year.

Forces that would change the fate of the galaxy.

 

[Navarro]

Next part has some outside POVs.

==*==

THE AWAKENING, PART ONE

850.M41

Vyzanthia IV/Sanctuary, Deep Underground

The metallic voice came over the PA speakers, that of the AI core that maintained this facility, designated 368-Alpha-Illion. It rang through and within the underground halls, plasteel and adamantium covered in protective phase metal.

“78th Merican Colonial Armored, 87th Aranean Arco-Wardens, Albyonic Grenadier Guards, 91st Kolossian Serjeants, 24th Rhomanian Themata, prepare for combat deployment effective immediately. Knights of House Raven under Princess Alyssia Raven, Knight-Colonel in the Federation Army, prepare for combat deployment.”

Captain Spencer Henderson, of the Grenadier Guards, listened to the words and thought over it as he got into his standard-issue Lamellar-pattern carapace suit. Greenskins, the sensors had said. He knew how to deal with the bastards. He'd seen the training holovids – fancy scientist type firing a volkite at a captured Ork. The beast had kept raging against its force-cage with a third of its chest deflagrated to cinders – it had taken a triple-tap to the head to take it down, though its death throes had lasted a while.

His time in the stasis chamber had been a dreamless sleep. As if he'd just gone down for a nap and woken up 15,000 years in the future. More concerning right now was the fact that half this planet's largest continent was awash with orkoid lifesigns. There seemed to be humans present at least – it was a good thing, knowing that the people in this facility and those like it were not the last in existence.

He picked up his rifle from its holding bay, a standard-issue Federation Army Volkite Charger rifle, Lastrum Corporation-made. The gun was essentially a rapid-fire maser rifle, capable of devastating effects on organic tissue. During the War they had not often been used on the Iron Men themselves, but on their fodder – the humans they'd subverted and sent forward instead of the main robotic forces as mere ammo-wasters. Henderson tried to remember a moment of his life that hadn't been coloured by the War, and realised he couldn't. In a way - born into his regiment - it had been his life. And then it had ended, only to be followed by fresh horrors.

“Come on!” he yelled to the men under him, urging them into the Mastodon grav-transport – a longer version of the Cataphract IFV; capable of holding a full company of 120 Federation soldiers, a forty-man platoon of Myrmidon heavy troopers, or four Hero-class warsuits. Its weaponry consisted of a forwards-facing melta array, a turret-mounted twin-linked neutron gatling array for AA purposes, two neutron-lascannons at the sides for any poor tanker who tried to flank the craft, and two plasma projectors closer to the front to light up infantry who tried getting close. Furthermore, it had a single refractor array to weaken enemy firepower. “You motherless bastards, you wanna live forever?”

The TacWeb was already giving him the immediate data of the unit, numbers, vitals, and so forth. Once they got onto the surface he'd have a satmap of the local area in the corner of his HUD, showing hostiles, friendlies, and neutrals. Orders were not to engage humans unless given a reason to.

==*==

Sergeant Kallista Belissariotis, 24th Rhomanian Themata, got into her warsuit. It was a standard-issue Myrmidon-pattern combat suit, the one used by Federation Heavy Troopers to fight the Iron Men. The perfection of human power-armour. She waited a moment for the neural interface to click – for the suit's nanomachine colonies to integrate into her brain and nervous system, at the back of her head, at the small of her back, at her elbows and legs and wrists, without need for the ports and plugs surgically introduced into earlier human power-troopers. A Myrmidon suit's data-and-target-acquisitions went beyond HUDs and displays – they made her know. The armour's expert systems integrated perfectly with her own instincts and training as a soldier.

One of the people fighting above would have fought the Myrmidon suit resembled Astartes warplate, but like none they'd had seen before in their manuscripts and stained-glass iconography. The shoulderplates and power-pack were stripped down – technically the powerpack was not needed for the armour to function, but it was there as a source of reserve power. The main power was generated via microfusion below the backpack itself. The helmet had an elongated rebreather/vox setup, a feature copied by Mark IV. Astartes armour, and a gorget which to an Imperial observer would have resembled a Mark VIII. There was no Aquila though – only the Solar Eagle and the Federation Army Cross.

She took up her weapon – a neutron rifle, rapid-fire pulsed particle beam weapon. The thing could blast through solid adamantium and vapourise the torso of anything organic in a single burst. Neutron radiation would also cause severe harm to anything organic that survived the first few shots and fry electronics – an especially good effect when fighting the Men of Iron - but the danger of backscatter radiation meant that only powered Federation soldiers used infantry-scale neutron weapons.

They would be deploying via teleport – homers were shooting upward to the surface and his suit had the requisite aerythmetic defence-formulas inscribed on its inside, projecting a field of material-realm sanity and order around her as she traversed the abyss of the Immaterium. She waited for the signal from higher command. It arrived.

She and her squad ran into the teleport chamber, waited for the machines to energise, and for an instant all was whirling darkness until –

Kallista was on a field. Sunset, surrounded by greenskins, who were assaulting some kind of fortress in the far distance. It was short time before they began to remedy that. Neutron rifles flared out as the Federation troops began to establish a perimeter, and greenskins dropped by the score. The soldiers were going for headshots – more viable for getting a quick kill – but the sheer destructiveness of the particle weapons was vaporising necks and upper torsoes as well. Not enough, though, she bitterly mused..

This land would have to be cleansed via phosphex and nanite scourer afterwards. Not a single spore of humanity's oldest enemy could be allowed to set its foul roots on this world.

Chem-propelled ballistics hit her suit's conversion field, failed to breach it as their kinetic energy was converted to harmlessly radiating heat and light.

Some of the heavy troopers were less lucky though – where the orks managed to bring up heavy weapons, some had armour damaged and were badly injured. Auto-triggered nanite colonies rushed to patch up the damaged plasteel/ceramite composite, as automed nanites rushed in to the soldiers' bodies to provide field stabilisation and minor regeneration. Combat medics and engineers would arrive later

Above, Thermae missile-troopers, held aloft by suspensor fields, rained down devastation with the missile micro-launchers attached to their risks. Highly miniaturised nova-missiles – about the size of a pen – loosed devastation on the enemy. Within the perimeter, Ravager units clad in heavy-duty Bellam combat-suits fired rapid-fire plasma bolts, pulsar-rifle melta-beams, graviton-beams, phosphex missiles and more out at the Ork hordes. They died in their thousands.

But the green tide kept coming. They always did, relishing the promise of a good fight against enemies they had not faced before.

Some distance away, the ground churned and melted, Mastodon heavy grav-IFVs following the vicious eruptions of melted soil and rock before firing into the churning masses of Greenskins. Out of them poured Army soldiers, fellow Myrmidon-suited heavy infantry, and the Hero-class warsuits that formed the lowest tier of Federation warmech.

They were uncannily agile for such hulking walkers, a result of plasma thrusters enhancing their movement and suspensor assistance reducing their overall weight, carrying vehicle-scale weapons in rifle-pattern. Volkite culverins, plasma destroyers, grav-impeller autocannons. Among others, there were workhorse Ajax-patterns, tough but slow Hectors, spearhead Achilles-patterns, CQC-oriented Heracles-patterns, lightweight fast-attack Atalantas, airborne Bellerophons. They moved across the battlefield like the heroes of old they had been named after, throwing back the orks again and again.

She was not sure about the pilots – they were loyal men and true, but their suits' systems crossed the line into AI. Non-sapient and human-bonded to be sure, and the autonomy was helpful, but

And still the greenskins kept coming.

Kallista would have spat on the ground in disgust had she not been in armour – as it was her frustration was only rising. There was a warboss somewhere – a key pylon in the orks' psychic dominance network that they only had a dim idea of. Taking him out from range would ensure some squabbling as his subordinates fought to take position – but it wouldn't be enough to halt this invasion.

What was needed was for a strikeforce to hunt and kill the warboss in single combat. That would be the killing blow – short-circuit the orks' in-built dominance hierarchy by having a non-ork dominate and kill the current leader. This would lead to all sense of cohesion in the Waaagh collapsing in on itself. It was an old pattern and one often executed.

They were in no position to do such right now, sadly enough.

Kallista grit her teeth and led her fireteam to focus their position on an ork walker, taking it out. There were plenty to kill right now, though.