40K - Session 3

A House Divided

Act 1 - The Gates of the Abyss

Chapter 1 - The Gypsy, continued...

As the doors of the Great Cathedral closed the sparse light that shone between them was snuffed out.  For agonizing seconds, that seemed to stretch for hours, the air was alive with the rapid smack of rounds on the opposite side, a thundering cacophony made worse for the absence of any other sensory input.  Even when the servitors outside stopped firing, and the drumbeat of bullet impacts faded, the void was quickly filled with the party's ragged breathing and a palpable sense of apprehension.  Shuffling in the dark the team checked themselves for wounds by hand and reloaded weapons before cautiously setting forward from the foyer into the cathedral itself.  Sodium lamps, their motion sensors finally stirred to life, began to flicker and bring the arched colonnade of the cathedral's main hall into view.  A fantastic example of Imperial architecture, it's imposing vaulted ceiling was still shrouded into gloom as the yellow light of the lamps glinted off of half-visible frescoes depicting the Emperor's triumph over the enemies of mankind.  Yet, for all its grandeur, it was obvious that the cathedral had been put to other uses than the gospel of the Imperial Cult.

The pews had been hastily broken and cast along the walls into massive piles.  The rich red carpet, embroidered in gold, was shredded in place and sodden with condensation from the reactivated life support systems.  Stacks of crates bearing the cog and skull symbol of the Mechanicum were neatly arranged to either side of the main approach to the tall lectern atop the elevated dais at the end of the cathedral hall.  And, near the end of the approach there was a row of surgical tables, some which still had bodies upon them in a partial state of servitor conversion, with a rotting pile of torn naval uniforms and discarded limbs behind them.  The stench had not yet bloomed fully, but the sickly sweet smell did nothing to abate the tension building in them all as the lights finally illuminated the scene at the end of the hall.  Four hulking forms were kneeling before the dais; combat servitors with heavy plasteel armoring and a horrifying array of loading clamps, chain-axes, or cutting torches in place of their arms.  An inhuman sight made doubly unsettling for the very human gesture they evoked, as their weapon arms were all lifted up in a position of supplication to the form seated atop the lectern.  There, in deep robes of red, a magos of the Mechanicum sat cross-legged with his staff of office in one hand and a scroll of paper held out in his other.  He was dead, that much was clear to Wu-10's thermal imaging, what little organic matter remained among his cybernetics was as rotten as the pile of discarded flesh they had seen seconds before.  The combat servitors, however, were a different matter, each had a small heat bloom where their power packs were still connected by massive battery cable to remote batteries stacked against the back wall.

Wu-10 halted the party fifty meters from the line of servitors, his enhanced optics picking up the sweeping lines of a proximity detection system hastily mounted into the columns at the end of the cathedral.  They swept lazy, irregular patterns across the space and, the skitarii guessed, were linked to the dormant servitors.  Would they immediately become hostile?  Or would the presence of an adherent of the Machine God be permitted?  The running gunfight in the great hall had tested them, and time was running short.  If there was a way to circumvent and deactivate the servitors, the party elected to try, if the servitors attacked then regardless they will have lost nothing.  As his comrades took up supported positions to cover him, Wu-10 strode towards the servitors with grim and determined steps.  As one the behemoths' arms descended and they stood, the groan of long-dormant pistons protesting their sudden return to life.  They turned in unison to face the cyborg, and one of their number broke ranks to lumber over to him.  Wu-10 tensed as it came within reach, but none of its weapons systems appeared to have activated.  It blurted a brief query in techna-linguis, a extended a dendrite port for interface.  Hesitating for a brief second, Wu-10 looked over his shoulder and was assured by the sight of his comrades taking careful aim.  He extended a dendrite concealed within his forearm and coupled it to the servitor.

A blaze of data streams and authentications passed between the two, the scant seconds it took to confirm his identity as a member of the Mechanicus passing with palpable tension.  Though the servitor had acknowledged him as a soldier of the Omnissiah, it began to blurt a series of cryptic questions concerning Mars and the tech-cults.  Wu-10 was a dutiful servant of the cult, but his role as a skitarii meant that much of Mars' history, and the ways of its guardians, was hidden from him.  Though he answered to the best of his knowledge, the questions became increasingly esoteric.  And with each wrong answer another servitor lumbered forward to stand before him.  Soon, it became apparent that the servitors had been re-programmed by the dead tech-priest to identify who he might consider "worthy" of obtaining his great prize.  And the skitarii had failed, as the combat protocols engaged and the servitor's weapons roared to life he tore his dendrite free and dove for a nearby stack of crates for cover as his comrades began to unleash withering fire towards the now hostile machine slaves.  Pinpoint cracks of rifle fire from Cassius and Aurora were drowned by the thunder of Vadik's shotgun.  Manus and Merrick slunk steadily from cover to cover in order to obtain a better vantage.

The battle was short, but a close fought affair.  Having been perilously close to the servitors on their activation Wu-10 struggled to break free, dodging the roaring blades of chain-axes.  Aurora, having astutely observed that the servitors were still coupled to the generators which had sustained their life support, took careful aim and within three shots blew the first one out in a shower of flame and sparks.  The two servitors attached to it convulsed as the power feeds overloaded, freezing them in their tracks and allowing her comrades to pick them apart while Wu-10 circled away from their deadly weapons.  Merrick, having seen the effect that disabling a generator had on the lumbering beasts, hustled through the darkened eaves of the cathedral and emptied his magazine into the second.  When it blew, and disabled the other two servitors, the engagement became a slow and inexorable affair of breaking down the servitors considerable armor.  Focused fire whittled the behemoths down one by one, their plodding speed playing against them as the party expertly re-positioned to stay a step ahead of them.  As the last servitor fell, the dwindling whine of its axe almost plaintive in the sudden stillness, they turned their reloaded their weapons and turned their eyes upon the magos.

The Magos Aurelian had been a powerful figure in the Mechanicum, known throughout the segmentum for his ingenuity and skill at deciphering the Omnissiah's designs from even the smallest fragment of archeo-tech.  It was this ability which had led to his appointment over the project to develop the Saturnine Gypsy, and it had become his obsession.  He had taken a cross-legged stance upon the lectern, facing towards his dutiful servitors with his cog and skull staff of office in his right hand, his left held a vellum scroll of human skin upon which neat rows of almost microscopic techna-linguis ran in precise lines.  Wu-10, alone among his companions in his ability to understand the strange dialect of Mars, reverently took the scroll with a whispered prayer and translated it for the group:

+++These are the final words and confession of Arch-Magos Aurelian 883, Master of the Forge of Praxia Secundus and blessed child of the Omnissiah.+++

+++Let it be known to you that find this record that, in my duty to the glorious Omnissiah, I have failed.+++

+++I should have destroyed it.  Logic, that most sacred tenant of our creed, demanded that it should be so.  The risk posed, should this vessel be captured by foes of the Imperium and Mars, cannot be understated.+++

+++She is my pride, the magnum opus of my works.  She is my child, and I could not bear the loss of her.+++

+++After the destruction of the blasphemous ork vessels which beset us, the station crew sought to call for aid and escape.  It could not be allowed, so I ensured that the communications array was inoperable. Should word be sent back that the station was left unattended with the prize still within I know it would have meant a fleet would be dispatched bent on her destruction.+++

+++She was not finished.  Final blessings and consecration were close, but I needed more time.  So many of my servitors had been damaged by the orks that it would have been impossible to complete the project without sourcing additional material.+++

+++The crew had gathered in one of the last hangars that still had power.  Several hundred men and women shivering in the dark as power began to fail.  Several hundred hands which could be put to better use. Their deaths were quick.  Rerouting the command subsystems to seal the room and vent the atmosphere into the void was beneath me, but their sacrifice deserved as much.+++

+++Radiation had been leaking from a reactor core cracked during the ork boarding.  I should have seen it sooner, but my work preoccupied me. It was poisoning what little flesh remained in me, my transcendence beyond the need for it was close.  I had to finish construction of the servitors sooner than anticipated, and many of the proper rites of consecration were bypassed in favor of expediency. They should be destroyed once construction is complete, lest their continued existence prove an affront to the Machine God.+++

+++She is finished, yet I have failed.  I shall consign myself to die here, upon the threshold of my child’s cradle, forever to stand a silent vigil in penance.+++

The ship had been finished, but only after the station had suffered catastrophic damage and the magos had been forced to cannibalize the remaining crew for servitors to attend him the final stages of completion.  It was a horrific realization, but unsurprising for men like Vadik, Merrick, and Manus.  They had born witness to the horrors wrought in the name of the God-Emperor before, sacrifices made to ensure that the Imperium of Man remained the predominant power in the galaxy.  Aurora and Cassius had heard of such things before, but never had cause to stare them in the face.  Wu-10, seeing the cold logic of the magos decision, said nothing.  However, beyond the cryptic words on the scroll, there was no evidence of where the Gypsy could be found in the cathedral.  It was Vadik, in a stroke of wild luck, that noticed that the lectern's floor had an input port carefully concealed in the mosaic tile which matched the pointed ferrule at the base of the magos' staff.  Slotting it carefully into position the eyes of the skull and cog lit up and shot a narrow beam of light onto a section of the floor covered in grating.  When the grating was removed an infrared sensor concealed in the tile, much like the lectern port, activated a hidden door mechanism with a loud groan of protestation.  The steps leading up the the dais dropped down into the floor, revealing a long passage running back into the heart of the station.  A small cargo tram sat at the near end, its tracks running out into the dark.

The tram ran for long minutes along a uniform tunnel whose monotony was broken occasionally by hanging pipes or discarded crates which had slid or been thrown off of the four flat beds behind the control car.  When it came to a rest at the far end another set of blast doors loomed before them.  An access panel blinked in the wall, and after several moments the cogitator leech they had recovered from the grand hall blinked greens.  The party stepped through into an expansive cavern, almost perfectly spherical, set into the heart of the station.  Flood lights, activated with the door, flared into life and illuminated the sleek form of a small ship,  It resembled a Starhawk bomber, but only in the most general of senses; the ship was almost three times the size of a standard model and had enormous engines.  The hard lines and angles had been smoothed, and where turrets or gun ports had once bristled outwards there were pods of auspex sensors.  Its most striking feature was a strange obsidian dome which sat atop it like a blister, and even from across the great gulf of space the strange symbols etched upon its surface made their skin crawl and stomachs turn.  Negotiating the maze of cranes and industrial cat walks they finally boarded the ship and took stock of its condition.  It was in pristine condition, but austere and spartan compared to the usual adornments which decorated even smaller war vessels like a Starhawk.  This was a vessel built for function above all things, and as Cassius surveyed the control scheme of the bridge its function became readily apparent.  The Gypsy had been built for speed, range, stealth and reconnaissance.  Just as Roa Mahaka had said.

Despite their boundless wonder at the Gyspy, the tight timeline of their operation weighed heavily on the group.  The follow-on team with the Gypsy's support crew was inbound to the station already, and they still had no idea how to get the ship out of the tight construction hangar in which it was nestled.  The Gypsy was still linked to the station, and hastily reviewing the station's schematics Aurora noted that the hangar they were in was located in the exact place where one of the station's auxiliary nuclear power plants was supposed to have been located.  And if the station followed standard Imperial specifications it had an emergency override to jettison the plant's core away from the station in the case of a catastrophic failure.  An override which could only be activated from the control throne of the station.  The party hastily split themselves.  Manus, Merrick, Wu-10, and Aurora began to pick their way through secondary access routes found via the Gypsy's cogitator link back towards the command center.  Vadik and Cassius, meanwhile, began the process of booting the Gypsy back to life.  They hailed the incoming crew's shuttle, warning them of the station's active defense grid and providing them with the best route to navigate to the hangar they had infiltrated the facility through.  They would link up there before exiting the system.

With the Gypsy thrumming and ready the command center group collected the bodies of the previous strike team and activated the power core override.  With titanic bangs that shook the station the bottom of the construction hangar blew away, the hungry void sucking the atmosphere out in a rush with the Gypsy riding the current.  It exited the bottom of the station behind the debris, Cassius at the helm and ready to negotiate the defense grid.  His caution proved unwarranted, for while the auspex of the station's defenses registered something it could not acquire target lock.  To his amazement he steered the ship slowly towards the hanger as the turrets and las batteries spun silently in search of a target they could never acquire.  On the command bridge, a brief discussion was held over the best way to ensure they covered their tracks.  If the incoming vessels dispatched by the Inquisition's beacons boarded the vessel there was a chance, however remote, that they would identify the team and track them back.  And access to the station's cogitator arrays could eventually give them evidence of the Gypsy's existence.  The only way to ensure the Navy, and the Inquisition, would not hunt them down was to destroy the station.  With a heavy heart, Wu-10 activated the station's self-destruct programs using the staff of Magos Aurelian to override the safety protocols.  They had less than an hour before the station's primary power core went critical.

Gathering back in the primary hangar they loaded Cassius lander, Queen of Diamonds, with the follow-on crew.  There was no time to provide them answer to their questions, and despite their protests they were all soon safely aboard with the four bodies of the previous strike team lying silently between them as the second lander's pilot, Hannibal Hasturian, piloted the Queen back out into the void beyond the station.  There they rendezvoused with the Gypsy, whose converted payload chamber was just large enough for the lander to dock safely inside.  As the support crew scrambled to their stations, Cassius and Hannibal prepped the ship for translation into the Warp as the Navigator Mahaka had sent climbed slowly into the chamber atop the ship.  Manus felt his skin begin to crawl as the mutant used the chamber to tap the Warp, and just as the Gyspy's auspex picked up the signal of multiple ships entering the system from the Immaterium the nauseating lurch of translation stunned them all.  Seconds later, though they would never see it, the Imperial surveillance station Omeron-5 exploded in a nuclear flare which, for only a second, matched the brilliant intensity of the star at the system 's heart.

Several days of Warp travel followed as the vessel tracked towards their intended link-up point with Mahaka's main fleet.  Hannibal, the Gypsy's secondary pilot, was a veteran pilot and conceited bastard.  He was a man more comfortable talking about himself than learning about anyone else aboard.  Enginseer Samala Kur-109 had brought 10 servitors to run the various systems of the Gypsy, and spared little time for her new compatriots as she devoted herself to communing with the ship's machine spirit.  Samala seemed hesitant to accept that the skitarii aboard was not immediately subordinate to her, but her orders from Arch-Magos Thul left little to doubt about their relationship.  The last member of their disparate support staff was the Navigator Kalu Mahaka, though he had not shown himself since boarding.  They were a strange breed, even for psykers, and Manus assured his fellows that isolation was in their nature.  The only thing they did learn, from Hannibal, was that the man was actually one of Roa Mahaka's many sons.  The Rogue Trader had sent her own child to shepherd the vessel!  And while Warp passage is always an unsettling experience, Manus spent much of the voyage in a sleepless state of near-panic.  Normal vessels were shielded by Geller fields from the predation of the formless horrors lurking in that nightmare dimension, but whatever form of Geller field protected the Gypsy seemed almost fatally weak.  Where the presence of the entities of the Immaterium could be distantly felt in standard Warp travel, in the Gypsy it seemed like they always hovered just out of sight.  Low and indistinct mutterings were replaced by baleful laughter and howling hunger in the psyker's mind, and when the ship finally exited the Warp he almost collapsed in relief.

Roa Mahaka's fleet drifted in a tight flotilla in the dark, the Cobra destroyers of the swarm flying complex intercept patterns around the heart of the congregated vessels in an attempt to find the ship they had registered as having left the Immaterium so close to them.  In an act on indignant defiance for having cast them almost carelessly into the jaws of death Cassius flew the Gypsy across the view ports of the Khyber's bridge, close enough to see the disapproving glare of Marius Oba beside the command throne where the ship's captain spat a mouthful of recaf across the front of his crisp uniform.  With a chuckle he glided the responsive ship down and into the main hangar bay after advising Marius to prepare a decontamination team to cleanse the ship and crew of any remaining orc spore which may have clung to them from the depths of Omeron-5.  The process, once undertaken, was an exhausting ordeal.  Hastily erected decon tents contained servitors which doused, scrubbed, and prodded the group relentlessly.  Hours later, smelling of stringent cleansers and sacred oils, the party gathered back in their briefing room.  As Marius entered he paused, for a second, beside Cassius to warn him against further outbursts.  For the sake of the Khyber's captain, if not his own.

Marius listened attentively as the party debriefed him on their operation.  He asked few questions, but was direct in both his praise and his criticism.  While he lamented that more bodies from the original strike team were not recovered, he understood why the group made the choices that they did.  The Gypsy had been recovered, all else was of secondary importance.  He informed them that the quartermaster tasked with supplying Mahaka's strike teams had been made available to them, and passed on the thanks of the Rogue Trader herself (who regretted that she could not have been present to hear their tale for herself).  In light of their success Mahaka had chosen to allow the team to remain as her principal agents aboard the Gypsy in the days to come.  Marius had cautioned her against tasking a junior team to this assignment, but she seemed to view their success as a sign from the God-Emperor that  they were intended for this role.  They would have need of it in the days to come, for Marius Oba finally revealed their true destination: the Koronus Expanse.  Aurora, stunned, quickly plied the commander for details.  She related to her teammates the tale of the Expanse, and how it remained one of the lest explored corners of the known galaxy.  It was a veritable wilderness, where the wonders of man's past lay scattered like gems in raw earth.  Waiting for someone brave enough to pull them back into the light of the Imperium of Man.

Marius informed them that the Gypsy had been vital to this endeavor as it would allow Mahaka to operate in the dangerous sector with greater freedom.  Rogue Traders were notoriously competitive, and guarded their star charts and paths between the system of the Koronus Expanse jealously.  It was not uncommon for them to turn on each other in the interest of eliminating competition.  Mahaka was new to the Expanse, and had need of more detailed information on what she might encounter within it.  To that end, she was sending the party to a little known trading post near the entrance to the Expanse, a place called "Freeport" to those that knew of its existence.  It was run by an enigmatic Rogue Trader called Kaenen Kel.  He had been a legend of the sector, a trailblazer who had delved as deeply into the mysteries there as any human alive.  For reasons unknown to any except himself and the High Lords of Terra his Warrant of Trade had been sanctioned, prohibiting him from entering the Expanse again.  Since that time he had pulled what remained of his fleet to the planet where he ran Freeport.  Reclusive by nature, his agents ran Freeport for him while he secluded himself in a secret facility somewhere on the planet.  He had the information that Mahaka needed, and she needed the group to get it for her.  They would translate the Warp near Freeport and find some way of getting to Kel.  A gene-coded dataslate was provided by Oba.  If they could get it into Kel's hands, Mahaka was sure that the Rogue Trader would negotiate with them.  If they could find him...