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A House Divided

Act 3 - The Soul of the Abyss

Chapter 2 - The Mobius Forge

The journey from the Maelstrom to the Serpent’s Cradle was far from the longest voyage anyone aboard had ever endured, but the shadow of recent events stretched each second into an eternity. Troubled dreams plagued them, and the sense of surety they once had was badly shaken. What would they find in that system, drifting on the fringe of a pocket of space already devoid of the God-Emperor’s light? They tried to busy themselves with preparations to distract them from the crushing weight of their questions. Aurora pulled, reviewed, and annotated every single reference to the system she could find within the navigational and expedition records they had available. Cassius ran pre-flight check after pre-flight check, tuning each wire and bolt of the Gypsy and the Queen of Diamonds as tight as he dared. Vadik prayed, one hand upon his double eagle and the other clutching his Lectitio Divinatus, appearing to anyone passing him to be consumed with seeking relief from his doubt through faith. Manus meditated, trying to focus and organize the maelstrom of his heart, lest its influence tip the delicate balance of his control when he tapped the Warp. Wu-10’s condition continued to worsen, despite the constant ministrations of Grim. His time was drawing shorter, and it seemed that the closer they got to some facet of the truth the more desperate his struggle became. The only member of the team not seemingly affected by the gravity of recent events was Merrick, who drank and cleaned his pistols in sullen silence on the flight deck. He mused darkly to those that asked after him that he had already outlived every other ganger that had cut their teeth with him on Necromunda, he harbored no illusions about his ultimate fate.

As they entered the system the fleet utilized a staged plan for approach to the twin stars. The Koba would enter as close to their target planet as the captain dared, while the rest of the fleet would exit the Warp a week from the system and make a more careful approach. Aboard the command deck of the Koba, the party caught their first glimpse of the bizarre system that early Imperial explorators had dubbed The Serpent’s Cradle. Several planets, primarily gas giants, clung to a steady orbit far from the center of the system. There were traces of structures and habitation upon a few of them, but their prize lay at the heat of the Cradle. There, two white dwarf stars spun in perfect unison. Aurora and Grim began to discuss the auspex readings the Koba’s initial scans returned, comparing them to notes from previous recorded forays into the system. The more they discussed these findings the more bizarre the situation became. Both stars, Serpentis Major and Serpentis Minor, were identical in mass, volume, rotation, axis, gravity, and speed. Binary star systems were exceedingly rare, but neither of them had ever heard of two stars that were, for all practical purposes, identical; much less identical and locked in orbit of each other. Binary stars obeyed the laws of mass and gravity the same as any other stellar body. The star with less mass would inevitably assume a degrading orbit around it’s more massive partner, inexorably drawn over eons into a cataclysmic impact which would merge the two. However, the orbit between these stars was unchanged, even by a micron, across every reported Imperial survey of the system spanning hundreds of years.

The most startling discovery though, was Serpentis 4. At an equal distance from each star there lay a single planet, roughly approximate to Terra’s moon in size. It was centered perfectly at the point of axis around which both stars spun. To a casual observer not versed in astrophysics it would readily appear that the stars were actually orbiting the planet, and not the other way around. Due to the planet’s close proximity to the stars, and the fact that the magnetospheres of the collapsed stellar giants intersected and overlapped across it, the auspex could not give them reliable data. Even visual imaging was scrambled by the powerful distortions, and the Koba’s cogitator struggled to give them anything more than postulated hypotheticals. It had a possible surface gravity of 0.98 compared to Terra, surface temperatures likely over 150 degrees celsius, no atmosphere feasibly present due to the radiation of the stars to which it was tidally locked, and only the barest traces of some sort of structures of xenos origin somewhere on the surface. Aurora stepped forward, pulling out a pile of datapads on the recorded expeditions to Serpentis 4 in the hopes of formulating a safe plan for descent onto the planet’s surface.

Only three expeditions to this isolated fringe of the Expanse had ever attempted to land personnel and materials on the surface of Serpentis 4. The first had utilized a standard shuttle drop directly towards the planet, but lost all vessels after their systems went haywire in the magnetosphere. They had underestimated the power of the combined fields, and their systems had become overwhelmed from prolonged exposure to such intense energy. The second attempt had seen a flight of shuttles enter the far side of one star’s magnetosphere, and then follow the surface of the star around towards Serpentis 4. The approach initially seemed to have been the perfect answer, but as soon as the flight broke away on a landing vector to the planet one of the unpredictable solar flares the star emitted had consumed them all. The final attempt was made with boarding torpedos. This one was an apparent success, as all the torpedos had passed through and registered impact on the planet itself. However, despite weeks of waiting for the dropped personnel to establish a basecamp with communications, only a single 37 second transmission was ever recorded to have been sent up from the planet. It was composed almost completely of static white noise, and screams. Using all of this information they were able to extrapolate three viable options for landing on Serpentis 4.

A head-on approach in either the Gypsy or the Queen, at high speed, with all electronic equipment save direct flight controls disabled. It would require practically inhuman reflexes to respond to in-flight emergencies, but if they could breach the barrier of the magnetosphere before it scrambled their systems they could reach the surface intact.

Enter the magnetosphere of one star opposite Serpentis 4, and then fly between the surface of the planet and the inner edge of the magnetosphere before landing. If they kept a high enough distance from the surface they theoretically would have time to respond to the star’s solar activity, as long as they did not veer too high into the magnetosphere and scramble their cogitators.

Land on Serpentis 4 via boarding torpedo, and hope for better success at establishing a livable basecamp and communications array than the last expedition had. They would have limited means to get back off of the planet, but the torpedos themselves could reach the surface.

In the end the matter was not decided by consensus or logic, but by bravado. Cassius, ever the humble man, insisted that he could handle the head-on approach. He refused to entertain the other options more than briefly. He had piloted ships under manual control in settings where a fraction of a second of hesitation or delay would have seen him dead. This was the type of flying he loved, the type of flying he lived for, the type of flying he had come halfway across the galaxy itself for. He would take the Gypsy down to the planet, because no one else in the sector except him could do it. Despite any misgivings they may silently have harbored, the team consented. He had proven his skill more than once before, he had earned their trust when it came to these matters. As the Koba closed the distance towards the Gypsy’s disembarkation point, they strapped themselves in and checked their gear. The descent to Serpentis 4 was at hand.

As the Gypsy floated silently out of the Koba’s docking bay the team assumed crash positions. Hannibal ran system checks with Cassius, ensuring all of the redundant systems or functions not tied directly to ship navigation were disabled. The engines rhythmically pulsed, vibrating the deck plates as Cassius spun the energy output higher and higher. Hannibal, watching the reactor’s shielding displays, nervously cast sidelong glances at his pilot as the safety threshold dwindled. Cassius, however, noticed nothing. Through his MIU he had merged so seamlessly into his control of the vessel that the engine’s rhythmic power surges had synchronized with the slow beating of his heart. Then, guided by some inner voice, he diverted the reactor’s power to the engines. The ship shot forward so suddenly that it thrust its occupants back under inertial gravity so intense they couldn’t even turn their heads away from the cockpit view of the stellar maelstrom they were descending into. Answering to the whims of his gut feeling alone he swung the Gypsy through ever more complex and acrobatic maneuvers, riding unseen waves of gravity and radiation with an instinct bordering on prescience. While their travel time through the magnetosphere would be logged at a mere 23 seconds, it passed like an eternity in the veteran racer’s mind. Pass it they did though, but just as he began to ease on the throttle a single red warning light blared in his periphery.

Atmosphere, where there should be nothing but vacuum.

In the time it took Hannibal to open his mouth and scream across the cockpit, Cassius had already input seventeen different navigational commands through mental uplink and manual input. The Gypsy’s dormant systems began to come online slowly, too slowly. Assuming total command through direct input he fought to bring the ship’s nose up as the hull temperature readings flickered to life, skyrocketed beyond redline, and then blinked out of existence as the sensor modules on the ship’s surface melted away. He felt the ship burning through his MIU, his nerves screaming from the overload as sweat trickled down his face. They impacted each of the planets three atmospheric layers like a bullet punching through a wall, thunderous shaking and the agonized scream of torn metal overriding the wailing klaxons accompanying each transition. The final transition severed all input to the primary engines, and as the ship descended to the surface Cassius could rely only on the pitch and roll thrusters still attached to the hull to guide the Gypsy into a suicidal glide, fighting to maintain position while decreasing their velocity as a broad carpet of green trees came into view beneath a sea of clouds. Angling for a clearing of emerald grass which lay beyond the treeline he winced as the trunks of the tallest trees snapped across the bow of his ship, shattering into splinters and jerking the controls wildly in his hands. At the last second he closed his eyes, sighed, and leaned back in his seat.

Impact, apocalyptic and final, knocked them all unconscious. And yet, in a daze of smoke and ringing ears, each person on the bridge awoke. By some miracle of piloting and luck, they had survived! Cassius disengaged his MIU, he didn’t need it to know how badly the ship was damaged. He hailed their Engineseer, Samala Kur, but got no answer. He messaged Kalu Mahaka in the astropathic chamber, but was met with silence. He shared a knowing glance with Grim, who wordlessly set off through the smoky halls of the vessel towards engineering to ensure the safety of the reactor, clambering through halls twisted by the impact and tilted at odd angles. When he opened the final door to the engineering bay he felt a twinge of sorrow in what remained of his heart, all he saw was a jagged hole that looked out over ruined trail their crash had gouged into the grassy plain. The entire engineering compartment had torn away somewhere in the descent. Samala Kur, the reactor, and the Warp drive were gone. He stumbled over to the housing chamber for the ship’s cogitator, but though it had survived the impact the grand vessel’s machine spirit lay in agony. Whispering furtive prayers as a parent would soothe a sick child with a rhyme he entered the final coded commands which released the ancient machine spirit back to the aether to rejoin the Omnissiah.

While Grim tended to the machine spirit of the doomed ship, Aurora and Manus rushed to the astropathic chamber. There they found Kalu, Mahaka’s son, lying crippled and bloody. The crash restraints, if he had even worn them, had failed, and he had been tossed about the cramped dome like a ragdoll as the ship came to a rest. He was living, but in a deep coma and appearing to struggle with each breath. The next few hours were a flurry of activity as they took stock of what had survived the crash, and established a small base camp. The Queen was thankfully both intact and capable of hovering out from the docking bay of the Gypsy. Portable generators allowed them to heat their makeshift shelters, and powered a baseline life support system they had cobbled together for Kalu. They had hoped to radio out for assistance, but with the Gypsy’s communication arrays burned away in entry the Queen’s relatively meager array had no hope of breaching the planet’s bizarre shielding to reach the fleet. There was always the hope that the Koba had been able to track their descent, but whether or not they were aware of the cataclysmic outcome was a guessing game. They decided, over a meal of sealed rations and recycled water, to try and press forward to find Il’Ishanti. He was somewhere on the surface of this world, and they had an operational vessel to begin the search. In the morning they would begin aerial reconnaissance flights to try and locate something, anything, that would give them a hint of where they could find the elusive Eldar.

The first few days passed relatively quickly as they took 12 hours shifts setting aloft in the Queen, Cassius and Hannibal alternating turns at the helm, and scanning the planet’s surface for signs of life or habitation. The planet was oddly lush and green, almost perfectly so. Though it’s skyline shimmered and undulated in strange geographic patterns, it was for all purposes a world designed for habitation where nothing should live. Even stranger still, apart from a small variety of insect species it was utterly devoid of life. No mammalian, reptilian, avian, or other native fauna were found no matter how precisely the equipment was tuned. This lent an odd sense of stillness and quiet to the base camp, where only the wind through the grass and leaves moaned about them unsettlingly. They had catalogued a number of esoteric and bizarre readings during these flights. Geothermal pings that seemed to run in precise lines beneath the planet’s surface, and occasionally a bizarre sort of ventilation shaft composed of unidentifiable material which straight down into the crust beyond the maximal range of the scanners. Then, at the tail end of an exhausting flight where he had opened himself to to the Immaterium to scan for Warp signatures, Manus found something. A pocket of pulsing Warp energy, fifty miles in diameter, in the middle of a dense old growth forest in the southwest hemisphere.

The next day the team set forth, with Hannibal at the helm to pilot the ship, and reached a point they believed to be near the epicenter of the odd pulsation. For miles in every direction was a thick carpet of titanic trees, so they descended by grapple line to the forest floor. Hannibal would return ever 12 hours and fly a closed loop over the canopy to establish communications, leaving Muffin to guard the base camp and unconscious Kalu. As he flew the Queen out of sight, the party set forth through the underbrush in search of the source of the strange sensation Manus was registering. After less than an hour they came across something unexpected. Little by little, step by step, and note by note, they began to hear an odd sound carried on the wind. Music, haunting and beautiful. It took some time to get their bearings on the source, but as they drew closer to it Aurora realized something. This was an Eldar song, a funeral dirge whose tempo and melody matched the ornate tonal speed of the rhyme inscribed upon the wraithbone box they carried. Cresting a hill they saw beneath them a massive tree which had fallen across a draw between two ridgelines extending from the hill’s crown. Upon its wide trunk a figurte sat, playing an odd stringed instrument none of them had seen before. They had found Il’Ishanti.

If the Eldar noticed them he made no sign of it was they clambered across the massive exposed roots and onto the fallen arboreal giant’s trunk. They halted twenty meters for him, waiting for him to initiate some sort of contact to break the tension. They had been razed to abhor and hate his kind, taught that such creatures were abominable evils who twisted men’s minds against the will of the God-Emperor. The thought of openly consorting, even peacefully trading, with one of the dubious Eldar roiled their spirits. Aurora, however, had been fascinated with the species since her earliest days in the Schola Progenium. This close, she felt the rhythm and flow of his music much easier, in a timid voice began to sing the funeral dirge of the wraithbone box in time with his playing. A slow smile crept across his immutable face, and as the song came to an end he was satisfied that these humans had what he sought. He thanked Aurora in halting Low Gothic, forcing out the words from such a base tongue the way a man would spit sour pith from his mouth. Aurora, in perfect Eldar, asked him if he would be more comfortable conversing in his native tongue.

With a broad grin he stood, and the stark differences between his species and theirs was abundantly on display. He was rail thin, but what musculature could be seen was corded and tight. He towered above them, but his low mass made him appear almost skeletal in profile. His complexion, as white as alabaster, seemed oddly smooth as an absence of pores or other imperfections gave his skin the appearance of carved stone or plasteel. He was clothed in a simple white robe, parted at the chest, and white trousers of some silken fabric. Aurora noted to herself that such colors were usually reserved for mourning or penance in broader Eldar culture. Then she stammered, her words catching in her mouth as she saw that he wore no soulstone. She tensed, as the only Eldar she knew that did not wear them were vile and sadistic Dark Eldar, hated even more by the race of man than their more disciplined cousins. He smiled, then laughed, and complemented Aurora on her singing voice and attention to detail. He was no Drukhari, but could not fault a Monkeigh for failing to note the subtle differences which would have told her as much. Besides, even if he were it wouldn’t matter. As long as he knew where they could find the Forge, why should they care?

Aurora, though still suspicious, motioned for Wu-10 to bring forward the wraithbone box. When it was presented to him a strange expression came across the Eldar’s perfect features. A mixture of elation that morphed to sorrow, pain that transformed to relief, and disgust which turned to joy. All these expressions passed across his face in the blink of an eye, and he visibly exerted himself with a gesture of his hand to re-center his thoughts. He slid the box into his pack before fixing Aurora with a steady and pointed stare. Why, me wondered, did they seek the Mobius Forge. What did they hope to accomplish? Aurora surprised even herself when she told him the truth. That they sought the means to repair an artifact from man’s past, a thing forged in the eons of man’s first stellar empire when relations with the Eldar were less hostile. They hoped the Mobius Forge could do this. The Eldar kept staring for long seconds, and then burst into laughter. They might find the means to do this with the Forge, he explained, but the Forge itself would not fix the Synod. He cypticaly urged them to consider instead that the Forge was not meant to repair a “thing,” but it could give them the means to find the right time and place to do so.

Aurora begged him to extrapolate, but his mirth faded into a sad smile. The human mind could not comprehend the nuances of his language sufficiently for any explanation he could give her to make sense. They would have to discern his meaning for themselves, and he pointed off north through the woods, telling them that what they sought was only a few miles distant. As he strapped his strange instrument to his pack he took from within it a strange mask. Sliding it onto his face, and the pack onto his shoulders, he turned to face them. Aurora’s heart pounded in her chest, for she recognized the mask this strange Eldar had donned. He was a Solitaire, a troupe leader of the Harlequins that guarded the Black Library. This was why he wore no soulstone, he danced without one in brazen defiance of She Who Thirsts. Her leaned close, almost whispering into her ear that he hoped for her sake their paths never crossed again. In silence he turned, walked across the fallen tree, and disappeared effortlessly into the green expanse of the forest.

Climbing down themselves, they set off along the indicated direction. It took very little time for them to find what the Eldar had suggested, a black pyramid jutting out from the earth in the midst of the forest. It was utterly smooth, with no evidence of weathering or damage despite its apparent age. Grim quickly ran terrain modeling scenarios that indicated to him that due to the age of the forest around him, and the way that the earth had moved across it, that the pyramid had been here for at least a hundred thousand years. It had not been built in the midst of the forest, so much as the forest had grown up around the pyramid. And the mysteries only deepened. Beneath the glassy surface small flecks of lights reflected back at them from seemingly random and impossible angles that did not correlate to the position of the planet’s suns, and each time he scanned for crystalline substructures within the stone he found nothing. Wu-10 struck the stone, fracturing off only a tiny sliver with a titanic blow of his hammer. The stone melted and reformed into itself within seconds, leaving behind a perfect and unmarred surface devoid of any evidence that he had struck it. Scanning around its periphery they noted that a rudimentary trench had been dug down to access a door three stories below the soil of the surface. The path to the door was lined with rough slate stones overgrown with moss, evidence that it had been decades since anyone had tried to access the bizarre structure. And then there was the door itself.

The entrance to the pyramid was a rectangle of stone with an almost imperceptible outline. The only two things that truly made it stand out from the rest of the wall at all were the rough hewn ditch accessing it and the strange groupings of symbols on its surface. Five of them in all, in a flowing, serpentine script which seemed utterly alien to everyone there. Everyone, that is, except for Aurora. There were tell-tale formations within the arcane language which hinted at something familiar to her, something Eldar. This was an ancient form that their language, one she had never actually seen before firsthand. She obsessively began deciphering the words, struggling as the hours passed to work out the words. She was perhaps one of only a dozen humans alive in the galaxy that could have done it, but she did. With her translation firmly hand she recited it aloud as she stood before the door.

In eternal service

I offer this oath

To see your light

To fight your enemies

I must walk back the path

Of those who came before

Against the deathless

Against the Necrontyr

In eternal service,

I must fulfill this oath

As she finished the strange litany, which filled her comrades with shivers of distaste to hear their friend intoning in the Xeno’s tongue. The door did not so much open as disappear. The odd stone that formed it seemed to melt and flow into the walls, leaving a broad corridor stretching down before them. As they passed along it the sheer perfection of the structure, especially given its age, was disconcerting. Every line and angle was perfectly straight and uniform, and the walls themselves seemed to emanate a strange light from an unseen source. So lost in the experience were they that the door closing behind them went completely unnoticed. The hall passed at a steady downward angle for the better part of a mile before ending in a domed chamber notable only for the small cylindrical pedestal that stood at waist height in the center of the room. On its surface was a strange impression of a hand, with four slots for fingers which seemed revoltingly long. Aurora, almost reckless, rushed forward to examine it. After she could see no other means of operating it she placed her hand in the impression. Her mind filled with a static roaring that seemed nonsensical, before she flung herself away in pain she could make out the barest hint of intent from the midst of it. Manus, sensing tremors within his perception of the Warp, stepped forward in her place. The Eldar were a psychically active species, perhaps Aurora had not been successful because she did not possess the means to translate what was being transmitted to her.

As his skin grazed the cool stone his mind was flooded, much as Aurora’s had. It was almost overwhelming at first, but he organized his thoughts and steeled his will. As blood began to drip from his nose he noted that there seemed to be a sense of inquisitiveness underlying the insistent waves of static that washed over him. He struggled to comprehend what he was being asked, in the end settling to focus his entire will upon a single idea. The Mobius Forge. And as soon as he did so, the strange device activated. The platform they had stood upon began to descend at an impossibly rapid rate, leaving the domed chamber behind in the blink of an eye. WU-10 and Grim’s internal altimeters showed them travelling at speed beyond freefall velocity, but they felt no sensation of momentum or falling. They could perceive the walls around them sliding past rapidly, but felt nothing. And just as abruptly as it began, the descent ended with an imperceptible halt. They stood next to another long hallway. According to Grim’s calculations they had travelled to a point almost on the other side of the planet in less than seven seconds.

Committed now as they were to exploration of the strange complex, they pushed forward into the next hall. It was constructed identically to the one on the surface, eventually terminating in another chamber. This one, however, was no domed chamber. It was a perfect sphere, with a one meter wide walkway extending from the hallway entrance and across the five hundred meter diameter of the cavernous space to a wide circular platform. And upon the platform, a strange throne sat. It was obviously of xenos origin. Too wide for a single human to sit, with a back seemingly far too tall. At either side long armrests extended, upon the end of each were the same hand impressions as had been upon the pedestal. Manus did his best to communicate to them that the device needed them to visualize what they wanted, but what did they want? If the Forge itself was not capable of fixing the Synod, why seek it? Aurora recalled the Eldar’s words from earlier, and urged them to consider that the Forge would allow them to find the right time and place to have the Synod repaired. They settled on trying to find the Synod’s designer, Azren Alkazem, who had a laboratory upon the surface of Luna sometime during the Dark Age of Technology. Human anatomy was not compatible with the throne’s design, so it would take two of them to sit upon the Throne at once. One would focus on the time, one would focus on the place.

For a species so different from that which had made the Forge, even the act of trying to activate it caused intense psychic damage. Vadik and Merrick tried, but the ganger could not withstand the excruciating pain that simply inputting a command left him in. Grim took his place, and as he and Vadik endured wave after wave of mental anguish a strange pattern of lights began to emerge on the surface of the sphere around them. Point flickered into life, first a few, and then more. Brilliant lines of white began to connect from dot to dot, before exploding outward into ever more convoluted fractal patterns which engulfed the entirety of the chambers as they expanded at an exponential rate. Soon, the light became so bright that their eyes were blinded from it. A strange lurching sensation overcame them, as if the ground itself had heaved under their feet. The light faded, and they stumbled as they rubbed their eyes to reorient themselves. With a start, they saw that were no longer in the Forge.

Above them, through the distorting glass of an atmospheric dome, they saw Terra itself shining green and blue in the black expanse of space. And then they saw the war. Ships, thousands upon thousands of ships of unfamiliar, were engaged in an apocalyptic battle above humanity’s homeworld. Screams and explosions brought their eyes back down. Inside the habitation dome they had found themselves in they stood upon a rocky plain of grey that stretched towards a complex of buildings. The designs were obviously human, but seemed to follow none of the standard lines they accustomed to. Panicked men and women in strange garb fled from building to building as a uniform mass of mechanical humanoids marched in unison across the plain towards them, discharging weapons that atomized those unlucky persons impacted by them. They had found Alkazem’s lab, upon the surface of Luna, in the midst of the rebellion by the Men of Iron!

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