40K - Session 13

A House Divided




Act 2 - The Shadow of the Abyss




Chapter 2 - The Battle for Ft. Dorn




Part 3 - Dire Wounds, Dire Words, Dire Choices




As dawn broke over the horizon it's rays played across the broken form of the Skitarii as his friends desperately worked to stabilize him. Aurora had applied sanguine stabilizer, and dressed what injuries were visible, but the warning runes on her narthecium gauntlet continued to ping ominously. It wasn't until Grim came to lend her a hand after retrieving his quantam entanglement dart that they realized what was happening. The analytical processes run by his medical dendrite immediately warned him that there were acute levels of radiation seeping from the cyborg's injuries. When the warboss' round had punched into him it had shattered several of the radium rounds the warrior of Mars kept in a bandoleer across his chest, and fragments of the highly radioactive metal had become embedded in Wu-10's injuries. Immediately pushing his friends away to a safe distance the Tech-Priest ordered his servitor to carry his brethren's limp form as they made their way to the waiting Taurox. He would work to secure Wu-10 to the vehicle's exterior, carrying him inside the Taurox would expose his friends to high levels of radiation, as the others finished destroying the artillery pieces.

As Grim and Muffin set off for the Taurox, with Cassius following shortly behind at a safe distance to get the Taurox running, the rest treated what wounds they could and quickly devised a plan to destroy the ork's firepower. They took the melta bombs they had procured at Ft. Dorn and worked them into the chambers of each of the guns, rigging the last two charges directly to the barrels of two of the guns as a redundant measure, and set the timers for five minutes each. Once rigged, the remained of the party set off back towards the Taurox. When Vadik's wrist timer ticked down to zero a thunderous roar erupted behind them, and they looked back to see massive chunks of shrapnel and torn metal flying through the air, propelled by a wave of over-pressure strong enough to drive a flurry of dirt and dust before it for over a five hundred meters. The job was done, but the threat was not yet over. The spotters in the abandoned manufactorum had been watching their movements since they left the artillery site, and with the destruction of the pieces they mounted a counter-offense. Merrick was the first to see a dozen exhaust trails of the missiles rising up from the manufactorum and arcing inbound to their position. He called out to his friends over the vox and Grim, experienced in the ways of ork warfare, advised them that the warheads on those missiles were likely not explosive. That didn't mean they were benign, however. These were ork Stormboyz.

Each with a missile strapped to their back, these orks were specialized in rapid aerial insertion techniques. At least, as specialized as orks got. They thundered down in a scattered group around one of the shell craters that the party had hastily retreated to in preparation for the ork assault. Only three of the orks landed inside of the massive crater with them. The rest landed with audible thumps that shook the loose earth randomly around outside the lip of jagged earth. They were brutish, like all of their green-skinned brothers, but less heavily armored to allow for greater mobility and lift with the improved jet packs they cobbled together from downed aircraft. As suddenly as the assault began, however, it ended. The orks landed with little grace, and the party took full advantage of the precious seconds afforded to them as the orks picked themselves up and wheeled to strike them down.

The Stormboyz inside the crater were gunned down before they could get their feet beneath them, and a handful of lobbed grenades kept the many of the rest distracted as Cassius brought the Taurox close enough for Grim to employ its mounted machinegun to cut down what few remained. Two orks made it from outside of the crater into close range, the first was distracted by an illusion Manus wove from the Immaterium's power. It flailed to find its true target between the sudden appearance of THREE of the psyker. Unfortunately, such a hasty tapping of the Warp sent the psyker to his knees, as the power flooding him slipped ever so slightly out of his control. The ork managed to get one good swing, luckily, against the psyker before Merrick felled it with a well-placed shot to the head. The only casualty of the brief skirmish was Vadik's cyber-hound. It had closed to grapple one of the Stormboyz, and in the frantic melee a round from Vadik's rifle had struck the hound in the flank instead of its intended target. As the dog fell away, the ork turned upon it in blind fury and buried its Choppa deep into the neck before being felled from a hail of lasfire by the surviving party.

Before more orks could jet in to join the fray, the party piled into the Taurox and Cassius gunned his way through the maze of rubble and craters back towards sanctuary at Ft. Dorn. As they pulled through the train gates they collectively breathed a sigh of relief. They were bloodied, critically injured, and low on ammunition; but they had finally silenced the guns that thundered against the plasteel walls of the Imperial facility. Grim had radioed ahead, and warned the fort's engineers that he would need a place to safely store their vehicle, contaminated as it was with radiation from the wounded Skitarii. They exhausted IG troops had no shortage of scalped vehicles that had been stripped for parts, and offered the shell of one of their Taurox (as it had sufficient environmental shielding) as an improvised treatment room. Grim knew that only the ministration of a higher Tech-Priest, like Thul, would see his fellow devotee through this trial that had been laid upon him by the Omnissiah. With Wu-10 secured and stabilized, though still unconscious, they made their way to the command building and asked to see the Colonel.

Siduran and Kane were waiting for them, and the commander seemed in a jubilant mood since he received word over the vox that the guns were silenced (and a warboss dead to boot). He smiled broadly and clapped Cassius on the back as he proferred drinks from his canteen cup. Kane, terse and cold as he had ever been, simply stared at them in casual disdain. When pressed the Colonel and Commissar both consented that the party should be granted access to the next prisoner, Saran Voor, but the Commissar was adamant that without fulfilling the terms of their agreement they would not have access to the last prisoner (a man named Singh). The Commissar tried to insist that until the last objective had been completed that the party would not be allowed to leave with ANY of the four soldiers. Things began to get heated, and it took careful persuasion from Cassius (drawing on all of his guile and charisma as a veteran of the Imperial courts) to convince the Commissar to allow them to leave with those soldiers to whom they had already been granted access. As they were turning to leave the room, a haggard Guardsman burst in and reported that the orks were massing forces at the old artillery site. Given the size of the troops, the Colonel collapsed into his chair and shook his head. The battle at the artillery site had drawn the orks like moths to a flame, and they were sure to begin their final assault on Ft. Dorn within 24 hours. The Commissar called for the fort's engineer, and advised him to prepare their "contingency plan."

In the detention cells beneath the command center the party crowded into the cell of the third penal trooper. His name was Saran Voor, and he stared at the wall blankly without appearing to notice their entry. It took forceful direction to snap the man's attention to them, and he did seemed utterly uninterested in the knowledge that he had been granted a reprieve from his sentence in exchange for revealing the details of his testimony at the trial of Lord Aranea. He reported that he had been a communications officer aboard the Sibelius, and reiterated the details the party already knew about the sudden change in the captain's demeanor, the unscheduled Warp jump, and the torpedo launch onto the death world's surface. He seemed hesitant to disclose more, and when Cassius asked the man what he needed he looked straight into the noble's eyes begged for him to promise to grant the Emperor's Peace. Death, he insisted, was the only reprieve from the nightmarish cycle of mental trauma he had become locked into since his time in the penal legions. Sleep was plagued by nightmares, waking brought only death and pain. Grant him release, and he would tell them anything they wanted to know. Cassius consented, and the man revealed that the only detail he had kept to himself was that he had received a coded distress signal in techna-linguis from the death world's surface which was dated 30 years before the time they entered the system.

Cassius assured the man that the Emperor's Peace would come to him soon, but this only exacerbated the man further. He snapped into a frenzy of action, producing a shiv he had concealed and lunging towards the towering form of Vadik. His flailing efforts were easily subdued, and it was apparent to them all that he was trying to draw the party into killing him. Cassius again spoke in a voice of calm authority, convincing the man that the death he sought would be his soon enough. With Saran pacified, at least for the moment, they regrouped at the Taurox to discuss their next steps. An ork attack was inbound in less than 24 hours, and they were too wounded and exhausted from their recent trials to risk the last objective. However, without Singh they would be returning without all of the information they might need. Their only options were to find a way to steal Singh out from under the commissar's nose. They agreed that rest and tending to safe transport for Wu-10 need to be prioritized. While others caught what sleep they could for a few hours, Grim would assemble a hasty life support coffin that was rad shielded from armor components of the IG Taurox.

After a fitful rest that was too short, Grim woke his friends and they devised a plan. The primary concern was getting Singh without triggering an alert in the base, as this would undoubtedly lead the Commissar to turn on them violently. They had seen the general layout of the detention center, and knew there was no access to the prisoner that wasn't closely monitored. Their second concern was getting off of the planet with Singh, as it was certain that the Commissar would vox out about their actions as soon as he realized what they had done. They could not risk having the entire war front turn on them. They were convinced that the Commissar's "contingency plan" was to set the fort's reactor into overload if the orks appeared like they would take the facility, so they struck upon a bold but dangerous plan. Grim would enter the communications center of the command building and find a way to disable the fort's communications, and once the radio was silenced they would take Singh out from the detention center while they were picking up the other three. If they could not convince or bribe the guards, they would subdue them.

Grim entered the communications center under the pretense of checking their cogitators and performing rites of function. The bewildered guardsmen on shift, drilled in deference to adherents of the Machine God where matters of advanced technology were concerned, sat in bewildered silence as the Tech-Priest accessed their systems. He begged the machine spirits, begging their forgiveness in techna-linguis for what he was about to do and insisting that his actions served the greater purpose of furthering the Omnissiah's will in the completion of the mission his Arch-Magos had assigned him. Soon, the spirits relented and revealed to him that their maintenance sub-routines ran on a strict schedule linked to their internal clocks, and their internal clocks ran periodic time corrections based on planetary orbit data programmed when the system was installed. With a few simple tweaks the one hour maintenance program would now coincide with a automated reset of internal clocks every single hour. The comms systems would be forever locked in a loop of maintenance, essentially blocking all communications to and from the base until a Tech-Priest could find and correct the alterations Grim had made to the system. Tampering with the machine in such a manner was hard for the Tech-Priest to stomach, but he had convinced himself that this was the only way to ensure a safe extraction of the prisoner. The Omnissiah had put him on his path, under the guidance of Thul. And Thul had seen fit to assign him to this mission. The guardsman hesitantly intruded on Grim's thoughts when their system had suddenly shut off, and after an angry chirp of binary had silenced them he provided half-hearted assurances the system would resume normal function "...soon..." His terse response was only partly in annoyance at them.

Downstairs, after a brief vox signal from the tech-priest, the party headed into the detention cells. Two guards were present, a pair of the commissar's lackey's who were present on the loading dock and gunned down the frantic penal legionnaires who had tried to tear their way into the combat drug stocks. They advised the party that they had been granted permission to release Daria, Saran, and Hix to their custody, but were surprised when the party insisted that Singh had also been granted release by the commissar. The sergeant on shift insisted on contacting Kane, but swift thinking (and swifter talking) from Cassius convinced the man to let the issue slide. After all, what would happen to him if he bothered him when he was so obviously preoccupied with the impending ork assault? Why, the poor man might find himself sent to the front trenches just for inconveniencing the Commissar at such a crucial time! Begrudgingly, the man consented and opened the door to Singh's cell for them. There was a problem, however. While the full body restraint chair that Singh was secured to had wheels, his penal collar was still firmly in place. The others had their collars removed, but Singh had not. The guard asked if he could call the commissar to come and unlock it, but Aurora insisted that they shouldn't bother, lying and implying that they intended to see the commissar again before they departed. Rolling out of the detention rooms they were anxiously on guard for the appearance of the commissar, and didn't dare to breath until they were safely in the Taurox and outside of the gates of Ft. Dorn. They pulled off of the road just under a kilometer from the Imperial facility, allowing the tech-priest a few minutes to override the lock on the explosive collar around Singh's neck while they were still within range of the broadcast signal that perpetually delayed it's internal trigger.

With the prisoners safely aboard, though Singh remained muzzled in the restraint chair and glared ominously at his fellow liberated soldiers, they called ahead for Hannibal to arrange their departure from Gloriana. As their engine-seer attended to the Gypsy's pre-flight activation, Hannibal flew the Queen out and sling-loaded the Taurox back to the spaceport. When they arrived back at their vessel, exhaustion weighing heavily on their bodies and minds, more than one of them was disconcerted at the lack of relief they felt for finally slipping the fetters of this cursed planet. Only a hollow, empty sense of accomplishment could be drawn from their exploits on the Orion 9, and Aurora wondered if they had done any good for the war effort on the planet at all. Somewhere behind them on the surface scarred green and brown, as the Gypsy roared into orbit, a single point of brilliant light ignited for a heartbeat with the burning fury of a star.

It was three days travel through the Warp back to their rendezvous point with Mahaka's fleet at the Stations of Passage, and they intended to try and get some answers out of Singh before they arrived. They had secluded the others in one of the crew bunking rooms aboard the Gypsy, with strict orders to keep an eye on Saran lest they be turned over to Singh. To ensure the safety of the other prisoners, as they knew the man wanted them dead, they had left him restrained and locked inside the Taurox under the unsleeping eye of Grim's combat servitor. The beast of a machine physically escorted the man to and from the lavatory, and when not engaged in matters of biological necessity (under close scrutiny) he was shackled. Muffin wheeled the bodyguard of the Sibelius' captain down into the Gypsy's bay and they removed his gag. They asked him what he knew of the affairs that led to his incarceration in the penal legion, but he simply stared at them. It wasn't until they asked him what he wanted to loosen his tongue that the man told them tersely that the only way that he would speak to them of what happened on the Sibelius was if they gave him the other three prisoners. He blamed them for the death of his captain, the only man who had ever treated him with respect and kindness.

Singh also, tantalizingly, informed the party that he had certain information about his lord's activities which no other person aboard that ship had been privy to. When Manus, seeing little other choice than to pry the information out of the man's mind through use of the Warp, stepped forward he was caught completely off guard. As he reached out in his mind's eye to seek the soul of the man before them, he recoiled in horror at the sudden absence of the psychic ripples which usually pervaded the world around him. Singh was a blank! A human with a rare genetic mutation that rendered him without any trace in the Warp, the carriers of the Pariah gene were exceedingly rare. And it made him essentially invulnerable to any manipulation of the Immaterium in his presence. Singh, seeing that he had so disconcerted the psyker, sneered that the only way they would get answers from him was slow torture, and he had been trained to resist such ministrations by a lifetime of base treatment due to his unique condition. In exasperation they bound him and ordered Muffin to keep him restrained for the remainder of their flight. Marius would have to find some way to loosen the man's tongue, they had neither the time nor the will to break the man in their current state.

The remaining time in transit to the fleet was spent in fitful episodes of sleep, plagued by nightmares and slow healing wounds. They often checked on Wu-10, but he remained in a comatose state, his internal systems running at the bare minimum to keep his neurological functions intact. As they exited the Warp, they signalled for a shuttle from Thul's Forge ship to meet them at the Khyber in order to take the injured Skitarii to his master for definitive treatment. Disembarking, they were met by Marius and questioned thoroughly on their mission as tech-priests from the Hephaestus took charge of their friend's jury-rigged life support pod and hustled him aboard a waiting shuttle. The soldiers they had liberated, including Singh in his restraint chair, were turned over to the naval security forces for questioning by Mahaka's agents. Merrick and Vadik both emphasized the danger of Singh to Marius, indicating that the only way he seemed likely to cooperate was to be given what he wanted. Marius insisted that Mahaka's interrogators were skilled, but would bear in mind their advice. Medical staff attended the party, and they were given leave to rest in their quarters until summoned again when Singh's and the soldier's interrogations were complete.

The wait, it turned out, was only three days. They were not, however, summoned by Marius. Instead, they were gathered back in the shuttle bay of the Khyber and informed that they had been called to attend the Arch-Magos Thul upon his Forge ship concerning their incapacitated friend. They gathered aboard and sat in silence as their tiny vessel entered the shadow of the Mechanicum behemoth. The Hephaestus was the largest ship in Mahaka's fleet by far, and her Cobra destroyers seemed like sharks swimming alongside a whale by comparison. Thul had been an enigmatic figure in their travails so far, with only Wu-10 and Grim having interfaced with the powerful figure. He and Mahaka had struck upon a bargain years ago, he would repair and maintain her fleet so long as he was given first access to any archeotech or other oddities that she came upon in her travels. Grim related to them that Thul had been a Magos of notable repute on Mars itself for several hundred years, and would likely be a powerful figure with a Forge complex upon the holy red planet itself had he not set himself upon the path of the an Explorator and sworn to reclaim the gifts of the Omnissiah which lay strewn across the stars from the bygone age of the stellar empire humanity established, and lost, long before the coming of the God Emperor.

Aboard the titanic industrial vessel they were led silently through dim and winding tunnels by a simple task servitor. They saw only once the red-robed forms of Mechanicum tech-priests, the rest of the ship seemed to be crewed exclusively by a numberless host of servitors mindlessly fulfilling their compulsion of their programming. Their escort guided them to a waiting pod, one of dozens where the Magos performed his experiments, and filed into a large surgical chamber lit so dimly they stripped over cables upon the floor and bumped into surgical trays. Thul had no need for the artifice of standard lighting, but wordlessly raised the sodium globes brightness. More than one of the party retched and drew back in revulsion at what was suddenly revealed. In the center of a circular suspensor field, hanging limp in the air, was Wu-10. A mass of tubes had been shoved down his mouth, which hung open beneath sightless eyes in a wordless scream. His limbs had been removed, leaving only a torso split down the center and spread apart like some grotesque sideshow. Each of his remaining organic components had been extracted and hung glistening in the suspension field beside him, still connected by viscous tubing, ligaments, and vasculature. His lungs pumped feebly, his heart beat in erratic timing, and oil-tinged blood flowed sluggishly along veins and arteries which seemed to glow under the orange light of the sodium globes.

The Arch-Magos strode forward from a shadowed recess with a clatter across the steel grating, his form barely even recognizable as human beneath the folds of his crimson robe given the extensive augmentations he had made to his flesh over the hundreds of years he had served the Adeptus Mechanicus. He spoke in blurts of binary, which were eerily translated into Low Gothic by speakers around the room. This had the unsettling effect of seeming that he was speaking from everywhere, even though he stood directly before them. He explained that Wu-10's life hung by the barest thread, though through long hours he had managed to excise the radioactive shrapnel which had so wounded him. However, the damage to his nervous system had been to extensive, particularly in limbic system of his brain. Certain fragments of radium remained embedded there, and this left Thul with an unexpected problem. Thul had two options to proceed, and since the Omnissiah had seen fit to make the party factors in the equation which led to this conundrum the Magos believed it was they how should decide.

The first would be to excise the contaminated sections completely, sparing the Skitarii his life at the cost of his ability to form new and lasting memories. By replacing the excised sections with with augmetic components he could replicate SOME of the brain's functions, but not perfectly. Wu-10 would forever be locked in time in his mind, relying on an internal database each day to refresh his understanding of events that had transpired since their battle with the warboss on Orion 9. The other option was to leave the fragments in place, which would continue to contaminate his nervous tissue and kill him. Thul could not say if this process would take months or years, but the Skitarii's fate was certain if they chose to leave the fragments in place. Through implanted neural conditioners he could still form new memories, but in time even they would not be capable of compensating for the radium's corrosive effects. Long moments passed in silence as the party contemplated, but in the end all but the psyker Manus voted to leave the fragments in place. Thul chirped in techna-linguis to attend him in the final stages of reassembling Wu-10 and dismissed the remainder of his servant's comrades. While the party was escorted back to the shuttle they walked in heavy silence, wondering what their friend would make of their choice when he finally awoke again.