A House Divided
Part 1 - The Gates of the Abyss
Chapter 1 - The Gypsy
Cutting across the void of space the fleet of the Rogue Trader Roa Mahaka made steady progress towards the the northern edge of the Segmentum Solar, near the infamous world of Armaggedon, for a purpose unknown to all except the enigmatic woman and her personal staff. Three light cruisers escorted a transport hauler called the Khyber, the Mechanicum cruiser Machina Vult, and the goliath forge cruiser Hephaestus. Nine Cobra class destroyers, affectionately called The Swarm by their crews, ran complex sequence of scouting patrols around the vulnerable heart of the fleet. They had been enroute to their mysterious destination for some time, enduring arduous months of interstellar and Warp travel from Mahaka's usual operating zone in the Segmentum Ultima to the Segmentum Solar. More than one crewman had voiced reservation at the sudden change in deployment, but such was the trust Mahaka had engendered in her crew that they bore the disruption with scant murmurs of trepidation. If they knew what lay ahead, would their mutters have become murderous howls for mutiny?
Aboard the Khyber an odd collection of individuals was hastily assembling in a pre-fab module which had been erected as their quarters and briefing area in a spare hangar bay of the gargantuan transport. Mahaka regularly employed groups of field operatives in her missions, tasking them each to missions best suited to their strengths. A Rogue Trader often has need of discretion, and plausible deniability, in the pursuit of their goals. As such she kept each team strictly segregated from the others and the fleet crew. This group was her newest team, and had only known each other in passing for a matter of days before being awoken in the middle of their sleep cycle at the behest of Marius Oba, a former Colonel in the Astra Militarum and commander of Mahaka's field teams. The lights dimmed as a holo-projector cast the flickering form of an Imperial communications station before them. He wasted no time in explaining that events had come to pass that necessitated their deployment before the time he normally would have taken to acquaint them with each other and the expectations that would be placed upon them in the service of his mistress. While the team pressed him for details he bade that they wait with their questions, as someone more informed than he was present to provide them. From the back of the darkened room, Roa Mahaka strode forward. Though none of them had noticed her enter, the Rogue Trader herself had chosen to personally brief them!
With calm authority the former naval officer took her place beside Oba and spoke with a measured and precise tone. One of her senior teams had been tasked with boarding a listening station, Omeron 5, which orbited the gas giant Praxia Secundus. The Imperium listed the station as destroyed at the outset of the last ork incursion against the planet Armageddon, an early casualty in that bloody conflict given its remote location. Mahaka, who had earned her Warrant of Trade for the guerrilla operations she had undertaken as a naval commander in that same war, related that she had discovered through her sources that the post had survived the assault by the orks. She also knew that somewhere on the station there was a prize of high value to her future operations, a ship called The Saturnine Gypsy. This vessel, originally intended for Mahaka to command, had been undergoing the final stages of construction at Omeron 5 before being deployed. It was a heavily modified and experimental class of ship, not much larger than a Starhawk Bomber. It was fitted with bleeding edge stealth tech by the Mechanicum to facilitate its role in scouting and reconnaissance to support the fleets protecting Armageddon. Most startling of the revelations provided by Mahaka was that this ship was capable of short range Warp travel, a fact which elicited incredulity from the team's pilot Cassius. No ship that size should have that capability, yet Mahaka insisted that it did. And, as all her other teams had already been deployed, she was reluctantly tasking this team with recovering it.
Though they had a bevy of questions, Mahaka had no further time to spare. She bade them direct their questions to Marius Oba before leaving. Stepping back to the holo-display, he gave them what little intelligence he had available on the station's layout and defense grid. The first team had reported that the stations automated defense grid was active on their arrival, but navigable as they were in a poor state of repair. They had successfully infiltrated the station, finding the internal defense systems inactive, and made their way to the bridge. The last report through astropathic communication to Oba was that they were actively searching the station for the Gypsy. After that the team went dark, and the time-sensitive nature of the operation necessitated quick action. He answered the group's questions as best he could, but seemed reserved. More than one person on the team was particularly suspicious at the aversion shown by Oba when asked about why their operations were placed on such a constrained timetable. There simply wasn't anything else he felt they needed to know, and gave them less than an hour to prepare. The Khyber would make a brief Warp translation just beyond the range of the station's defenses, just long enough to launch the team aboard Cassius' lander The Queen of Diamonds, before exiting the system. Five hours later it would translate again and launch a separate lander with the support crew intended to man the systems of the Gypsy. If possible Oba desired that they discover the fate of the first team and recover their bodies, though he stressed that this was secondary goal only.
Suspicious at what Marius wasn't telling them, Merrick caught up to him in the hangar bay and pressed him for further details. Oba, however, was tight-lipped. He would only add that the reason for the urgency of the operation would reveal itself to them after they translated from Warp and began their approach to the station. As the crew readied their equipment and gathered aboard the Queen of Diamonds in an adjacent hangar to their base of operations the Skitarii, Wu-10, noted that the Cassius' Aquila lander had been heavily modified. Accessing a diagnostic port into the ship's cogitator he noted grimly that, while the vessel's machine spirit did not seem imbalanced by the modifications, he took a dim view of tampering with technical designs which were not intended by their designers. He made clear that he would tolerate such minor indiscretions, but that he would be compelled to act should any of his fellows desire to transgress more deviantly against the Mechanicum's edicts. Cassius smirked and shrugged off the cyborg's righteous proclamation, the necessity of such modifications would make itself clear in time. And when they did, the cyborg would be glad of them, and the pilot who insisted on their installation. The party strapped into the lander's jump seats, noting grimly that the psyker Manus Ashok had begun to sweat coldly as the dread of Warp translation came over him. Such experiences were not gentle on those with a mind to perceive the threats that lay behind the veil of Immaterium.
As the Khyber snapped out of Warp the pressurized bay containing the Queen of Diamonds was opened, the ravenous grip of space propelling it out as Cassius ignited her engines to full burn in an attempt to escape the ripples of material space which would soon follow as the cumbersome transport re-entered the Warp. For a few brief moments later, after the nauseating waves of discordant sensations which accompanied the tearing of the physical universe subsided, the reason for their urgent deployment was made clear. A sudden screech of static emitted from the lander's internal vox system, a blurt of binary which only the ship's cogitator and Wu-10 could decipher.
+++By decree of the Holy Inquisition of the God-Emperor the world of Praxia Secundus and its surrounding space is forbidden. Any vessel breaching the quarantine line of these signal buoys shall be deemed seditious and destroyed with no regard for mercy+++
Accompanying the transmission had been an override signal that had suddenly frozen the controls of the lander. Cassius and Wu-10, thinking quickly, rebooted the lander's systems and restored control. A brief review of the ship's auspex showed them what they had suddenly come to dread. They had exited the Warp for their insertion already inside the quarantine line. Marius and Roa Mahaka had knowingly sent them into forbidden space in violation of Imperial law. Quickly calculating the time for the buoys emergency signal to reach the closest listening post of the Imperial Navy from the time of the original team's insertion they came to realize that the stringent timeline they had been given was, in fact, the estimated time of arrival for warships which would be bent upon their annihilation. Ahead, they could see the gas giant Praxia Secundus, and the faintest speck of light from the station that was their destination. With few options left, Cassius pushed the Queen of Diamonds to her limits in an attempt to buy the team time, stressing the engines in the extreme. As the station grew larger through the lander's displays they noted the heavy damage, drifting wreckage of ork assault boats, and disintegrating state of repair the abandoned post was in. It had, indeed, been the site of significant assault. The assault had not, however, disabled the remaining automated defense systems. The space around the station became a blazing, and eerily quiet, maelstrom of lance and laser fire. Only the slightest shudder of uncomfortably close salvos whispered lethal threat to them as Cassius maneuvered the lander down the tight corridor of blind spots which Marius' intelligence had provided them.
Identifying the landing bay the original team had reported using, the pilot noted that its doors were still open. With a deft twist of the controls he decelerated rapidly and swung the craft into the bay, positioning it so that the turrets could engage any defenses still active in the bay itself. It became apparent shortly that no such defenses were active within the bay, and he powered the ship down. Through the low-light view screen of the cockpit he noted that the first team's lander was still in the bay, though heavily damaged and lying on the deck in ruin. The turrets which had guarded the bay were in a similar state, suggesting that whoever had been aboard the lander when it was destroyed had managed to cripple the them even as he met his doom. Donning void suits and readying their weapons the strike team exited the lander. Making their way to command pod overlooking the hangar they found gouges and tracks indicating that the original team had come through the pod on their way to the command center of the station, with Wu-10 and Aurora accessing the cogitator to close the hangar door, restore atmosphere, and acquire a base-line idea of the station's status. As they did this Cassius, Manus, and Vadik investigated the destroyed lander. Two bodies were inside. The first was strapped into a jump seat, the grievous wounds and hastily bandaged wounds preserved almost perfectly by exposure to the void after the ship's atmosphere had vented. The pilot had crawled into one of the lander's defense guns, which had a neatly fused hole punched through both the glass dome and his chest. He had managed to open the hangar and prepare for take-off after something had injured his comrade, but the hangar's turrets had crippled his ship and doomed them both before he could escape.
After stowing the bodies of within their own craft, they noted that a blood trail led from the an adjacent utility access door. The unfortunate pair had not come back to the hangar by the same route that the team had entered the station. With schematics in hand the team debated the merits of taking the first party's path to the bridge, or following the blood trail to find the rest of their missing compatriots. In the end they elected to follow the blood trail, believing that the first team must have made progress towards the Gyspy. As they progressed into the station they found that basic life support and power and had been restored. Condensation from melting frost coated the rusting walls while stale air sighed from vents. Aurora noted the presence of small spores floating through the halls and grimly identified them as evidence that orks had indeed assaulted Omeron 5, though there appeared to be no evidence of current ork activity aboard. The trail led them, in due time, to a tram intersection which allowed workers to traverse the station. While it was small in comparison to standard Imperial stations, it was still a monolithic facility in its own right. The tram led to two other junctions; one which accessed the station's grand hall, and another which led to elevator access to the command deck. With time running short, Vadik asserted that chasing the first team's trail through the halls may be a waste of time. The team reluctantly consented, realizing the mercenary had a point. The elevators themselves were not functioning, but with the aid of ascent cabling they made their way up the ten story elevator shaft and pried open the access doors. Ahead of them, down a long corridor with doors accessing various station sub-control rooms, was the entrance to the bridge.
Two las-turrets guarded the door, and Wu-10's infra-red optical filter showed a dense array of trip lasers scanning the last fifty meters before the door. Through careful, and surprisingly agile, maneuvering the cyborg weaved his way through the lasers and over-rode the bridge's access panel. The doors slid open, and a scene of carnage met them. Bodies were scattered everywhere, almost all of them servitors, with dense piles of the drones heaped around the top of the multi-tiered tower which ascended from the center of the domed command area where the commander's control throne would be located. As they cautiously entered the room several dormant servitors stirred and turned towards them, their visual auspex glaring red as they broke into a shambling rush. The firefight was short, but decisive. Simple task servitors were no match for their firepower, though numbers may have been a threat had so many not been destroyed atop the command tower. They found the bodies of the first team's commander and one of her subordinates. They had been torn apart by the servitors, the sheer number of the constructs overwhelming them when their ammunition was exhausted. Aurora focused on the task ahead, accessing the cogitator banks and rifling through security vids feeds in a search for the last team. As she did so, Wu-10 noted that many of the servitors present did not appear to be standard task servitor models constructed by the Mechanicus. Many had been hastily "assembled" from, he saw dispassionately, the bodies of the station's crew. Aurora gathered her comrades around her as she enlarged a video feed from the station's grand hall. She had found the rest of the initial strike team, their bodies lay still and cold in the center of a ring of servitor corpses piled head-high around them. Dozens more of the lobotomized creatures were standing idly around the bodies and in the hall, including several gun and close combat servitor models.
Why had the initial team gone to the grand hall? A cursory search of the cogitators had yielded no clue as the Gypsy's location, it wasn't until Aurora investigated the manifest logs for the last year of the station's arrivals that she noticed a strange pattern. Docking manifests kept mentioning supplies which were routed to a new cathedral being constructed, yet none of the individual transfer documents listed exactly what was in these supplies. Familiar with the obsessive nature of the Administratum for accurate record keeping (in principle, if not in action), she concluded that this was likely a cover for the construction of the Gypsy. Further examination of station records yielded little information concerning this "new cathedral", it wasn't even marked on the most comprehensive schematics of the station's layout. With time drawing shorter, they chose to push out from the command center towards the Grand Hall, in the hopes that the initial strike team had found something concerning the Gypsy's location which they had missed. If they could reach the team's remains, they might discern where their goal lay. Now they would just have to deal with the servitors.
Having reconnected and rerouted several systems from the control room, the party's progress through the station was greatly expedited by now-functional lifts and trams. Within minutes they were at the central access doors to the Grand Hall, a distance which would have taken over an hour on foot. The Hall itself, they had noted from the vid displays and schematics, ran for approximately a full kilometer, and was over two hundred and fifty meters high and wide. It had a wide and orderly central avenue carpeted in red which led unerringly through a collection of offices recreational buildings, statues, memorials, and elevated lecterns of the Ecclesiarchy. Everything was coated in a thin layer of condensation tinged green by the spores which were becoming more numerous in the air. Behind the towering doors they discussed their tactics in hushed tones. Their goal, they suspected, lay at the far end where the trail of carnage the first team had left behind seemed to originate. They had considered alternative access routes, but life support was absent or inconsistent in any section of the station adjacent to the hall apart from the foyer in which they currently were. Wu-10 re-evaluated the schematics, and noted that an air ventilation shaft ran across the room for its entire length. If they could manage to traverse the ducts, they could potentially avoid conflict altogether. While there were a few dissenting voices, they all agreed that a frontal confrontation against their odds would likely far no better for them than it had for the original team.
As the team each snapped into a long cable and began to ascent up the narrow ducts, the creaks and rattling around them set their minds alight with apprehension. After all this time, were the ducts still sound enough to support their weight? Would one errant move alert the servitors below to their presence? These thoughts and more raced through their heads as they slowly crawled towards their goal in the darkened recesses of the Grand Hall's vaulted ceiling. At the far end their descent began smoothly enough, having come so close to their goal undetected they felt confidence begin to surge even as the muscles in their arms quaked and burned. Such confidence can be dangerous, though. Only a scant ten meters from the ground a section of the ductwork finally gave way under Wu-10's weight and came down, with him in it, to the ground in a thunderous cacophony. The servitors activated and turned towards them as one, and Wu-10 tore himself free of the wreckage as the rest of his team fanned out into defensive positions. From the corner of his eye he caught a familiar sight: the red robes of a tech-priest, shredded by dozens of bullet holes. They clung to the still form of the acolyte of Mars assigned to the first party, he had collapsed under withering fire before a set of broad doors. His left hand was still clenched firmly around the cogitator leech he had jammed into the door's ornate locking mechanism but never had time to activate. Wu-10 shouted for his companions to buy him time as he ran over and pried the tech-priests hand off of the cogitator leech. A skitarii would almost never handle a tech-priests remains in this fashion, but there would be time for prayer and penance later. For now he needed to get these doors open.
The servitors advanced steadily even as a torrent of gunfire was unleashed upon them by the party. Yet, despite several well-placed shots, it was like throwing pebbles at a wave in the hopes of breaking it. Something would need to be done, something that could slow their advance even if it could not stop it. Manus Ashok, channeling the Warp, summoned a ball of azure fire which grew in his hands. Strain was written clearly across his face as he struggled to contain and focus the violent power before casting it overhand towards the servitor horde. When it landed in their midst it exploded in a radiant flare of psychic energy which almost blinded him, even as it incinerated what flesh remained on a dozen of the automatons and blew twice that number backwards. The effort of tapping the Warp, however, was not without risk. Manus had opened himself too much, and in that tiny gap the influence of things beyond human reckoning probed their minds. The air grew instantly chill as a thousand whispers surrounded them, faint voices which spoke to them each of secrets they had never told another living soul. Manus stumbled backwards, head in his hands, as his compatriots continued to fire. With a satisfying click the cogitator leech's indicator shone green even as the great doors unbarred with terrific clanging and began to slide back, inch by inch. Wu-10 voxed for his comrades to collapse towards the door, and within seconds they were each squeezing between the doors and into the darkened room beyond as gun servitor rounds began to smack a staccato beat against the metal. They knew not what lay within, but only that certain death awaited them should they stay in the hall. Tearing free the cogitator leech Wu-10 was the last to enter, without the override the doors began to close back shut, and soon enveloped them all in pitch back.
To be continued...
As the Khyber snapped out of Warp the pressurized bay containing the Queen of Diamonds was opened, the ravenous grip of space propelling it out as Cassius ignited her engines to full burn in an attempt to escape the ripples of material space which would soon follow as the cumbersome transport re-entered the Warp. For a few brief moments later, after the nauseating waves of discordant sensations which accompanied the tearing of the physical universe subsided, the reason for their urgent deployment was made clear. A sudden screech of static emitted from the lander's internal vox system, a blurt of binary which only the ship's cogitator and Wu-10 could decipher.
+++By decree of the Holy Inquisition of the God-Emperor the world of Praxia Secundus and its surrounding space is forbidden. Any vessel breaching the quarantine line of these signal buoys shall be deemed seditious and destroyed with no regard for mercy+++
Accompanying the transmission had been an override signal that had suddenly frozen the controls of the lander. Cassius and Wu-10, thinking quickly, rebooted the lander's systems and restored control. A brief review of the ship's auspex showed them what they had suddenly come to dread. They had exited the Warp for their insertion already inside the quarantine line. Marius and Roa Mahaka had knowingly sent them into forbidden space in violation of Imperial law. Quickly calculating the time for the buoys emergency signal to reach the closest listening post of the Imperial Navy from the time of the original team's insertion they came to realize that the stringent timeline they had been given was, in fact, the estimated time of arrival for warships which would be bent upon their annihilation. Ahead, they could see the gas giant Praxia Secundus, and the faintest speck of light from the station that was their destination. With few options left, Cassius pushed the Queen of Diamonds to her limits in an attempt to buy the team time, stressing the engines in the extreme. As the station grew larger through the lander's displays they noted the heavy damage, drifting wreckage of ork assault boats, and disintegrating state of repair the abandoned post was in. It had, indeed, been the site of significant assault. The assault had not, however, disabled the remaining automated defense systems. The space around the station became a blazing, and eerily quiet, maelstrom of lance and laser fire. Only the slightest shudder of uncomfortably close salvos whispered lethal threat to them as Cassius maneuvered the lander down the tight corridor of blind spots which Marius' intelligence had provided them.
Identifying the landing bay the original team had reported using, the pilot noted that its doors were still open. With a deft twist of the controls he decelerated rapidly and swung the craft into the bay, positioning it so that the turrets could engage any defenses still active in the bay itself. It became apparent shortly that no such defenses were active within the bay, and he powered the ship down. Through the low-light view screen of the cockpit he noted that the first team's lander was still in the bay, though heavily damaged and lying on the deck in ruin. The turrets which had guarded the bay were in a similar state, suggesting that whoever had been aboard the lander when it was destroyed had managed to cripple the them even as he met his doom. Donning void suits and readying their weapons the strike team exited the lander. Making their way to command pod overlooking the hangar they found gouges and tracks indicating that the original team had come through the pod on their way to the command center of the station, with Wu-10 and Aurora accessing the cogitator to close the hangar door, restore atmosphere, and acquire a base-line idea of the station's status. As they did this Cassius, Manus, and Vadik investigated the destroyed lander. Two bodies were inside. The first was strapped into a jump seat, the grievous wounds and hastily bandaged wounds preserved almost perfectly by exposure to the void after the ship's atmosphere had vented. The pilot had crawled into one of the lander's defense guns, which had a neatly fused hole punched through both the glass dome and his chest. He had managed to open the hangar and prepare for take-off after something had injured his comrade, but the hangar's turrets had crippled his ship and doomed them both before he could escape.
After stowing the bodies of within their own craft, they noted that a blood trail led from the an adjacent utility access door. The unfortunate pair had not come back to the hangar by the same route that the team had entered the station. With schematics in hand the team debated the merits of taking the first party's path to the bridge, or following the blood trail to find the rest of their missing compatriots. In the end they elected to follow the blood trail, believing that the first team must have made progress towards the Gyspy. As they progressed into the station they found that basic life support and power and had been restored. Condensation from melting frost coated the rusting walls while stale air sighed from vents. Aurora noted the presence of small spores floating through the halls and grimly identified them as evidence that orks had indeed assaulted Omeron 5, though there appeared to be no evidence of current ork activity aboard. The trail led them, in due time, to a tram intersection which allowed workers to traverse the station. While it was small in comparison to standard Imperial stations, it was still a monolithic facility in its own right. The tram led to two other junctions; one which accessed the station's grand hall, and another which led to elevator access to the command deck. With time running short, Vadik asserted that chasing the first team's trail through the halls may be a waste of time. The team reluctantly consented, realizing the mercenary had a point. The elevators themselves were not functioning, but with the aid of ascent cabling they made their way up the ten story elevator shaft and pried open the access doors. Ahead of them, down a long corridor with doors accessing various station sub-control rooms, was the entrance to the bridge.
Two las-turrets guarded the door, and Wu-10's infra-red optical filter showed a dense array of trip lasers scanning the last fifty meters before the door. Through careful, and surprisingly agile, maneuvering the cyborg weaved his way through the lasers and over-rode the bridge's access panel. The doors slid open, and a scene of carnage met them. Bodies were scattered everywhere, almost all of them servitors, with dense piles of the drones heaped around the top of the multi-tiered tower which ascended from the center of the domed command area where the commander's control throne would be located. As they cautiously entered the room several dormant servitors stirred and turned towards them, their visual auspex glaring red as they broke into a shambling rush. The firefight was short, but decisive. Simple task servitors were no match for their firepower, though numbers may have been a threat had so many not been destroyed atop the command tower. They found the bodies of the first team's commander and one of her subordinates. They had been torn apart by the servitors, the sheer number of the constructs overwhelming them when their ammunition was exhausted. Aurora focused on the task ahead, accessing the cogitator banks and rifling through security vids feeds in a search for the last team. As she did so, Wu-10 noted that many of the servitors present did not appear to be standard task servitor models constructed by the Mechanicus. Many had been hastily "assembled" from, he saw dispassionately, the bodies of the station's crew. Aurora gathered her comrades around her as she enlarged a video feed from the station's grand hall. She had found the rest of the initial strike team, their bodies lay still and cold in the center of a ring of servitor corpses piled head-high around them. Dozens more of the lobotomized creatures were standing idly around the bodies and in the hall, including several gun and close combat servitor models.
Why had the initial team gone to the grand hall? A cursory search of the cogitators had yielded no clue as the Gypsy's location, it wasn't until Aurora investigated the manifest logs for the last year of the station's arrivals that she noticed a strange pattern. Docking manifests kept mentioning supplies which were routed to a new cathedral being constructed, yet none of the individual transfer documents listed exactly what was in these supplies. Familiar with the obsessive nature of the Administratum for accurate record keeping (in principle, if not in action), she concluded that this was likely a cover for the construction of the Gypsy. Further examination of station records yielded little information concerning this "new cathedral", it wasn't even marked on the most comprehensive schematics of the station's layout. With time drawing shorter, they chose to push out from the command center towards the Grand Hall, in the hopes that the initial strike team had found something concerning the Gypsy's location which they had missed. If they could reach the team's remains, they might discern where their goal lay. Now they would just have to deal with the servitors.
Having reconnected and rerouted several systems from the control room, the party's progress through the station was greatly expedited by now-functional lifts and trams. Within minutes they were at the central access doors to the Grand Hall, a distance which would have taken over an hour on foot. The Hall itself, they had noted from the vid displays and schematics, ran for approximately a full kilometer, and was over two hundred and fifty meters high and wide. It had a wide and orderly central avenue carpeted in red which led unerringly through a collection of offices recreational buildings, statues, memorials, and elevated lecterns of the Ecclesiarchy. Everything was coated in a thin layer of condensation tinged green by the spores which were becoming more numerous in the air. Behind the towering doors they discussed their tactics in hushed tones. Their goal, they suspected, lay at the far end where the trail of carnage the first team had left behind seemed to originate. They had considered alternative access routes, but life support was absent or inconsistent in any section of the station adjacent to the hall apart from the foyer in which they currently were. Wu-10 re-evaluated the schematics, and noted that an air ventilation shaft ran across the room for its entire length. If they could manage to traverse the ducts, they could potentially avoid conflict altogether. While there were a few dissenting voices, they all agreed that a frontal confrontation against their odds would likely far no better for them than it had for the original team.
As the team each snapped into a long cable and began to ascent up the narrow ducts, the creaks and rattling around them set their minds alight with apprehension. After all this time, were the ducts still sound enough to support their weight? Would one errant move alert the servitors below to their presence? These thoughts and more raced through their heads as they slowly crawled towards their goal in the darkened recesses of the Grand Hall's vaulted ceiling. At the far end their descent began smoothly enough, having come so close to their goal undetected they felt confidence begin to surge even as the muscles in their arms quaked and burned. Such confidence can be dangerous, though. Only a scant ten meters from the ground a section of the ductwork finally gave way under Wu-10's weight and came down, with him in it, to the ground in a thunderous cacophony. The servitors activated and turned towards them as one, and Wu-10 tore himself free of the wreckage as the rest of his team fanned out into defensive positions. From the corner of his eye he caught a familiar sight: the red robes of a tech-priest, shredded by dozens of bullet holes. They clung to the still form of the acolyte of Mars assigned to the first party, he had collapsed under withering fire before a set of broad doors. His left hand was still clenched firmly around the cogitator leech he had jammed into the door's ornate locking mechanism but never had time to activate. Wu-10 shouted for his companions to buy him time as he ran over and pried the tech-priests hand off of the cogitator leech. A skitarii would almost never handle a tech-priests remains in this fashion, but there would be time for prayer and penance later. For now he needed to get these doors open.
The servitors advanced steadily even as a torrent of gunfire was unleashed upon them by the party. Yet, despite several well-placed shots, it was like throwing pebbles at a wave in the hopes of breaking it. Something would need to be done, something that could slow their advance even if it could not stop it. Manus Ashok, channeling the Warp, summoned a ball of azure fire which grew in his hands. Strain was written clearly across his face as he struggled to contain and focus the violent power before casting it overhand towards the servitor horde. When it landed in their midst it exploded in a radiant flare of psychic energy which almost blinded him, even as it incinerated what flesh remained on a dozen of the automatons and blew twice that number backwards. The effort of tapping the Warp, however, was not without risk. Manus had opened himself too much, and in that tiny gap the influence of things beyond human reckoning probed their minds. The air grew instantly chill as a thousand whispers surrounded them, faint voices which spoke to them each of secrets they had never told another living soul. Manus stumbled backwards, head in his hands, as his compatriots continued to fire. With a satisfying click the cogitator leech's indicator shone green even as the great doors unbarred with terrific clanging and began to slide back, inch by inch. Wu-10 voxed for his comrades to collapse towards the door, and within seconds they were each squeezing between the doors and into the darkened room beyond as gun servitor rounds began to smack a staccato beat against the metal. They knew not what lay within, but only that certain death awaited them should they stay in the hall. Tearing free the cogitator leech Wu-10 was the last to enter, without the override the doors began to close back shut, and soon enveloped them all in pitch back.
To be continued...