A House Divided
Act 2 - The Shadow of the Abyss
Chapter 3 - What Sleeps Below
Part 3 - Things That Should Not Be...
As Hauk's commandos took up firing positions atop the ruined Imperial Knights from which they could dominate and hold the Grand Hall, the party crept towards the shattered door separating them from the security processing station. Between the gaps in the rent steel shadows flickered in the dim sodium lamps, but nothing came into the hall. Cassius, relying on the speed and maneuverability of his jetpack, flew into the room and quickly scanned for targets. The shadows appeared to be the products of the ceiling lamps flickering in and out of function, for he saw none of the monstrosities waiting for them within the station itself. He signaled to his comrades that it was safe to enter, hovering aloft in the cavernous space to maintain an advantageous view by which he could cover their movement. With a moment to spare, he took stock of the station's layout.
The hexagonal space was made of of charred concrete and thick plasteel, and dominated by three features. A massive grate of interlaced steel formed the floor, with a gigantic fan above it. According to Grim's schematic analysis this was actually the tail end of a rocket booster the Adeptus Mechanicus had mounted INTO the floor so that it's engine output fired vertically upwards. As specimens were brought from containment by rail line into the substation they would be screened, and the booster existed as a failsafe for containment whereby specimens flagged for disposal or at escape risk would be incinerated almost instantly. Overlooking this grate was the room's second feature, a sealed and heat-resistant command bunker for the room which protruded from the wall like a blister. It was accessed primarily from a hallway connecting to the laboratories, but since that route was not available to them they would be forced to use the narrow steel staircase thayt wound up the sides of the room and accessed a sealed door set into the bunker's side. Finally, the massive opening which led to the Tyranid housing unit and stood adjacent to the entrance to the Grand Hall. Luckily, it was closed for the moment.
With no threats immediately presenting in the substation itself the party quickly entered the room. Wu-10, and Aurora headed up the stairs to try and reach the command center as the others took up positions near the Grand Hall entrance to beat a hasty retreat if necessary. Utilizing the codes he had obtained from the corpse of Aurelian-913, Grim engaged the access door's override and allowed his cyborg companion to make first entry. As the sodium lights flickered into life a pang of sorrow flickered through what little remianed of the human inside of Wu-10. The command center was full of bodies, long dead. Some clung to each other, others curled into balls against the walls with the remains on ration containers still grasped in skeletal fingers. They had sealed the door to the laboratories and then slowly starved or succumbed to dehydration. The body of a single Tech-Priest still stood, remarkably, over the engine controls, his augmetics providing just enough support after his life functions had ceased to keep him upright. As Wu-10 laid a hand on the deceased priests should to mutter a binary prayer it crumbled into a pile of steel and dust at his feet. Aurora, focused on the task at hand, tapped into the cogitator and linked it to Grim in the hope that he could use the command center's systems to engage the purge systems they knew existed in the housing structure.
Grim, who had been anxiously awaiting access to the remote cogitator access the command center's systems would allow him, patched into the system. The prmoethium charges set into the main housing hall, and all of the individual housing unit adjacent to it, appeared to be functional. However, as he attempted to trigger them, he was met with something quite unexpected. A sudden wave of white noise fed back so suddenly into his systems that he was forced to manually sever the connection. He had wondered why the promethium had never been activated in the housing units, and know he knew why. Somehow, by some contrivance of the animalistic xenos that was unconscionable to the devotee of Mars, there was a presence inside of the remote system that had blocked his access to the charges. Reconnecting hesitantly, and devoting additional subroutines to insulating his own systems from possible intrusion, he probed the system again. Each time he came close to the command nodes for the charges, or life support systems, the presence again blocked out his access through the generation of hateful waves of scrap code. He had some limited control over the door function that accessed the housing unit, however, but when he tried to shift the door sequence he found his commands reversed. Bringing up an intenral display of the main door's function he was astounded at the levels of redundancy his deceased brethren had put into the facility's security.
The door itself was actually a solid ring of steel over half a mile in diameter, three stories high, and over ten meters thick. It only had one opening in it, cut to line up in size with the entrance into the security subtation and each of the housing units. Once activated it would glide under magentic propulsion on a series oftitanium bearings the size of a human torso until the opening aligned and allowed access. This way, only a single housing unit OR the security station could be accessible to the main housing dome at any one time. And now, inexplicably, the door was somehow moving back towards the security station. Grim, sensing that whatever had blocked his access was also controlling the door, hurried to the command center and ordered his friends to retreat back to the safety of the Grand Hall. As he took his place beside Wu-10 in the command center the door slide open and a wave of chitinous teeth and rage began to flood in. With his friends pulled back to safety, and the command center sealed against the intense heat, Grim activated the purge system. Less than a second later, as the horde crossed the center of the room, a whie-hot pillar of fire erupted upwards through the grate in the floor. After three seconds he shut it off, and the only evidence that the Tyranids had been there were small specks of ash drifting aimlessly in the waves of heat roiling off of the glowing steel of the grate. He noted, darkly, that the door was already sealed again as the massive ring spun at the behest of the...thing...inside the system to another of the housing units. As soon as the metal had cooled sufficiently to allow them to enter, the party regrouped at the base of the stairs to the command center.
They knew time would be of critical importance. Once they were inside of the housing unit they would be at the mercy of the door's rotation sequence to escape. Grim noted that the only hard-wired command node for the cogitator system which controlled the housing unit was mounted into the ceiling of the main housing dome, ten stories in the air. Cassius and Grim would attempt to access it and set off the charges. After the housing units were purged they would access the utility service shaft at the center of the dome which could reach the generator powering the sonic impulse units that kept the planet's worms at bay. The rest of the group prepared to engage the Tyranids as they came out of the housing units, loading weapons and ensuring their armor was fitted tightly. The thought that only a few dozen of the ravenous monstrosities could be unleashed on them at any one time due to the door's unique construction was scant comfort to them as the ring slid back into place by the security station and the inner blast doors parted.
Immediately a rush of Temragaunts attempted to force their way through the widening gap, clawing over, and even through, each other in their desperate bid to be the first to sate their unending hunger. A withering torrent of focused weapon's fire made short work of them, but for all the bodies it seemed there were fewer than the lasdt wave which had rushed into the station. Cassius fired his thrusters, arcing into the housing dome and twisting quickly to survey the space beside the doors. To either side of the door Termagaunts hunched, hissing at the noble. Warned of the ambush, the party quickly broke down the corners and cut down the beasts. Only one even made it close to them, but fell beneath a rapid succession of precision shots from the dual pistols of Merrick. The ground shook as the ring began to turn again towards one of the housing units, and the party scanned the massive dome. Their jaws dropped with their hopes as they finally saw it. Hung from the ceiling like some twisted marionette of alien flesh and steel was a massive and horrid amalgamation of wiring , bone, teeth, and flesh. It twisted in its bondage to roar at them, and Aurora finally realized what it was. A Swarmlord. The Adeptus Mechanicus had captured and experimented on one of the most diabolical and ingenious threats the Tyranid had brought to the Milky Waty from the dark corners of some other doomed galaxy.
It's limbs had been amputated, save for the twenty meter long scythes it swung about in the air around it. Cables and cogitator nodes had been forcibly drilled into each of its vertebrae, connecting the beast to the housing units main cogitator, and tubing ran into its neck and eye sockets. This was the source of the malicious signal inside of the remote cogitator access that had denied Grim, the progenitor of Manus' dark visions, the hateful master which had drvien the Tyrnaids forward in an organized fashion, and the architect of the station's undoing so long ago. And they were trapped with it, over two miles below the planet's surface. With a supreme effort they willed themsleves forward and began to revise their plan while firing upwards at the dangling behemoth. Grim knew that he reaching the cogitator was suicide since the Swarmlord was physically wired into it, and he shouted for Manus to follow him as he cut a line for the generator access his schematics promised was in the center of the chamber. Vadik, swearing at his luck, fired round after round to little effect into the Swarlord's chitin. Then, to add insult to injury, the gate locked into place in front of one of the housing units and a fresh wave of Termagaunts flooded into the chamber.
Aurora screamed over the comm line that the beast functioned as a nerve center for the Tyranids, someone had to find a way to distract it before it could lend its significant mental prowess to empower the more animalistic sub-species it had unleashed. Manus focused himself and, with only a second of hesitation, reached out into the Immaterium to lash at the Swarmlord with a powerful wave of energy meant to disrupt its autonomic functions. He willed blood vessels to rupture, nerves to set alight in pain, and muscles to contort spastically. To his surprise, it worked. A Swarmlord usually had such a significant presence in the Warp that it was immune the powers of human psykers. This one, however, had been subjected to batteries of conversion, torture, and experimentation that had left it weakened. It writhed in agony, and its contortions were mirrored suddenly by the Termagaunts below who slowed their coordinated advance to a stumble. That gap was enough for Manus to stop, focus his mind further, and call into being a wall of azure fire that erupted between the forward advance of the Tyranids and the access hatch Grim was sprinting for. The blazing conflagration consumed almost half of the beasts as they staggered in a drunken stupor, too dazed from the psychic howling of their master to know better.
Grim set to work prying open the access hatch to the sonic generator room beneath the housing unit, leveraging his utility dendrite to hoist the 100 kilogram lid up, as his comrades picked off what few Tyranids had managed to shake off the psychic reverberations of the Swarmlord's agony. Manus, however, was stumbling like he was drunk. Tapping the Warp in such quick succession had taxed him, and it was only with a supreme effort of will that he was capable of summoning the focus to stagger towards the open hatch the Tech-Priest was clambering through. The Swarmlord, however, had regained sufficient control of itself to lash out at the prey that had dared to harm it so. A blazing conflagration, this one of the Tyranid's design, erupted in a pillar of focused psychic rage that engulfed the center of the room, directly on top of the psyker as he reached for the ladder. It was only by throwing himself bodily down the access hole that Manus had even survived, his smoking armor and blistered skin testament to how narrowly he had averted a grisly fate.
Grim could not spare the time to check on the psyker, he knew that he had a holy duty to deactivate the sonic emitters. Even if they all perished to the slavering jaws of their enemy, he would ensure that they would be the abomination's final meal. He flew into the generator control room and set about the complicated series of commands at the console to silence the system forever. Above, his compatriots began to edge backwards towards the security control room doorway, despairing for the fate of their comrades. It wasn't until Manus managed a wheezing update over the vox that they dared to breath a sigh of relief, and he told them to be ready to withdraw into the security room when the door opened. He had an alternative plan for extracting himself and Grim, but had no time to explain. Then, as the door slid into place and the Tyranids began again to unite under the control of their centemptuous master, the emitters went dead. A stark silence settled over the room, as the sub-sonic nosie polluting the entire complex died away. The odd sensation laste donly a moment however, for the Swarmlord began to buck and thrash in a frenzy against its restraints as a horrific shaking replaced the ominous sound.
Bursting through almost impossibly thick walls of steel and ceramite a horrific worm, composed seemingly from rings of bones and sinew, burst into the chamber. Its maw was wide enough to devour an armored transport whole, and as it spread it's mouth a superheated spray of lava vomited across the floor and incinerated a dozen of the Termagaunts. The rumbling intensified, and a second worm burst in beside the first as its partner reared back and opened its gullet towards the Swarmlord. The Tyranid synapse creature raged against the behemoth threat, bathing it in psychic fire and lashing it with pincers that could have torn a Baneblade open. The worm seemed barely fazed. Cassius, defiant in the face of the risk and enraged at the possible death of his friends, flew within range of the beasts talons and declared that the creatures final judgment had come for all its sins against the Imperium of Man. He fired all of the thrusters of his jump pack in unison, and they formed a visage akin to the flaming wings of seraphim as he propelled himself backwards. The Tyranid, for the first time in its long existence, knew despair as the titanic worm lunged forward. It clamped its mouth upon the Swarmlord's upper torso, and then began to wrap itself in massive coils around its prey. The supports which had affixed the Swarmlord in place ruptured under their combined weight and the pair came crashing down to the floor. The second worm, eager itself for the feast so long denied it, reared above the pair and vomited another stream of lava across the writhing mass. As a third worm burst into the chamber the party took flight into the security control room, if Manus and Grim were to escape they certainly would not be getting out through the hatch anymore.
As the worms devoured the Tyranid lord above them, Manuis and Grim caught their breath beneath the flickering lights of the generator room. The structural supports were buckling under the clash above them, and very soon the room would likely collapse. Manus placed a hand on Grim's shoulder, breaking the Tech Priest from the reverie of binaric chanting he had begun in preparation for his ultimate union with the Omnissiah. He asked the devotee of Mars to close his eyes, and hold on to him no matter what he saw or heard. Grim was not sure what the psyker intended, but the tortured soul had seen them this far. As he deactived the visual feeds from his optical array and pulled his hood low across his face the temperature in the room suddenly plummeted so rapidly that crimson environmental hazard icons blazed across his internal displays. He felt an odd sense of vertigo, as if his physical body was being pulled in all directions at once as Manus burrowed a hole between their reality and the Warp, forging a tunnel of will alone through which he could guide the blinded priest. Though the journey lasted only a fraction of a second they both felt invisble fingers of bone-chilling cold clawing and dragging at them, desperate to pull them into the space between dimensions where their souls could feed the insatiable thirst of gibbering entities whose very existence was anathema to the sane.
And, as suddenly as the transition began, it ended with an nauseating lurch. They stood in the center of the grate of the security control room, shaking from a cold which had had seeped far deeper than their bones. The others, stunned at their sudden appearance, were still running in throught the doorway to the housing unit. Wu-10 and Aurora were beset by what few Termagaunts surviving, but they made short work of the beasts now that the unifying force that compelled them was rotting in the stomach of this planet's true apex predator. They stumbled, rushed, and pushed their way across the rocking ground and back through the broken door into the Grand Hall. Atop the Knights Hauk's strike team was rapidly engaging waves of Termagaunts as they poured in from the main generator complex and the laboratories. As the party began to cross the Grand Hall to link up with them another of the horrific worms burst in, its head weaving from side to side as it searched through some arcane biologic means to find prey. One by one the party sprinted, rolled, and leaped across the hall across piles of bones and sizzling puddles of the incendiary vomit that the worm spweded across the floor.
The Tyranids wave into the Grand Hall lessened as more and more of the worms fell upon the besieged research outpost, drawn from miles around as they were with the collapse of the sonic field that had kept them at bay. Wtih Hauk's team linked up to them they pressed to the exit as Grim voxed Muffin to unblock the doorway. Cassius, knowing he would need time to fire up the ship's engines, launched through the narrow passage and took off at the maximum speed he felt he could safely maneuver ahead of the party. Only at the end of their single file procession through the narrow hole in the outer blast doors did they come under serious threat. A worm burrowed up into the Grand Hall from the main generator room immediately adjacent to their exit. The party made it through, but Diesel, the heavy gunner of Hauk's strike team, sacrificed himself to draw the worm's attention in order to give the others time to escape. Exhausted, bloody, and stumbling from the tectonic aftershocks of the worm's passage into, and through, the Ad Mech facility. Thankfully, nothing pursued them beyond the heavy blast doors and they made their way back to the cavern they had stowed their ship in.
Cassius had the ramp down and the engines ready by the time the party piled back out of the access drill hole. They fell limply into the seats, or held themselves to the rigging on the walls as best they could, as he quickly brought his faithful racer out of the cavern and docked with the Gypsy, which still waited for them in the canyon adjacent to the cave's opening. Hannibal had a dozen questions, not the least of which was why his geo-auspex was going insane, but Cassius was too focused to answer any of them. With only moments to spare he took the helm, fired the engines into a hard ascent, and made his way up the narrow eye of Cyrix's storm and into the cold, welcoming embrace of low orbit. He collapsed behind the controls, caught somewhere between sleep and paralysis as his body finally dumped the last of the adrenaline which had kept him moving, and alive, over the chaotic last few hours. The rest of the party patched their wounds before gathering in the ship's cabin to stare at each other in stunned, silent amazement that they were all still living. And then they realized that, for all they had undergone in that damned research station, they STILL had not retrieved the box they had been sent to Cyrix to retrieve in the first place.
With the interference from the Ad Mech facility's broadcast finally silenced, Grim had a much easier time locating a final position of the torpedo containing the myserious box. It had punched through the porous surface of the planet and come to rest in a large cavern less than two hundred meters beneath the planet's surface, less than ten miles from the Ad Mech facility they had just escaped. The storm's eye would soon be passing over it, but they debated waiting longer to allow themsevles time to recuperate befor eonce again daring the hazards of Cyrix. In the end, they chose to proceed immediately. Hopefully the voracious worms would still be occupied with the research station, and they could retrieve their prize while the giant beasts were distracted. Slapping his face to ward off fatigue, Cassius again took the helm of the Queen as his comrades climbed aboard, dropped the nose of his ship towards the narrow window through the chlorine storm, and gunned the engines. The descent was swift, but uneventful. With their environmental suits sealed tightly against the atmosphere, they stepped out onto the scoured surface of Cyrix next to a jagged hole through the yellow stone. It burrowed for over a hundred meters before breaking into the roof of the cavern that Grim's scans had shown the torpedo to be resting in.
Time was of the essence, to rappel the entire party onto the planet's surface would risk wasting their brief window in the storm. Cassius, being the only member of the team equipped with a jet pack, glided across the cavern in advance and found the torpedo, crumpled and heavily damaged, lying at the far end of the cavern. Following Aurora and Grim's instructions over the vox he careuflly detached the plate which shielded the trigger housing for the torpedo's main charge. They had been warned by Hix Carera that there had not been time to remove the explosive charges themselves, so the utmost care had to be taken to remove the content of the comparment, even though the trigger itself was absent. The surface impact of the torpedo would render the explosives highly sensitive to any disturbance. Nestled in a mess of wires and circuits was the strange box, roughly the size of a briefcase and seemingly made of some sort of bone. Its surface was etched with odd xenos symbols which flowed together like water. Wiping sweat from his eyes, Cassius followed his friend's careful instructions and sequentially cut a number of wires which prevented him from withdrawing the box. Whispering a prayer to the God-Emperor he stoically snipped the final wire, retrieved the box, and flew back to his waiting comrades.
Though it caused Manus intense discomfort, Grim quickly placed the null rod they had been issue atop the case and sealed inside of a carrier crate held by Muffin. He gave his faithful servitor explicit instructions not to allow anyone except himself access to the crate, and they all reboarded the Queen as the chlorine storm crept dangerously close. Their ascent back to orbit was more harrowing, Cassius had not planned on the time he would have had to take to detach the mass of wiring in the torpedo and now he was forced to deal with far more turbulent conditions. Though they were badly shaken by the experience, in body AND mind, they all breathed a sigh of relief as they finally left Cyrix behind them, docked with the Gypsy, and then coordinated a link-up with the Cobra destroyer still patrolling the system's exterior. Via astropathic communication the captain of Mahaka's prized ship informed them that they had been ordered back to Port Wander. Something had happened, and Marius demanded their presence there as soon as possible. As the ship slipped between realities and began the long trip back to the Imperial port, the dazed team wondered what fresh horrors this dark corner of the galaxy possibly had waiting for them next.