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Campaigns links are below.

1. Rifts

2. Veterans of the SIEGE: Birthright

3. Veterans of the SIEGE: 40K

4. Gaming Calendar

May the dice ever roll in your favor!

40K - Session 18

A House Divided







Act 3 - The Soul of the Abyss







Chapter 2 - The Mobius Forge







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





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





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





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





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


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


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





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





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





Atmosphere, where there should be nothing but vacuum.





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





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





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





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





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





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





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





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





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





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





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





In eternal service


I offer this oath





To see your light


To fight your enemies





I must walk back the path


Of those who came before





Against the deathless


Against the Necrontyr





In eternal service,


I must fulfill this oath





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





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





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





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





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

40K - Session 17

A House Divided





Act 3 - The Soul of the Abyss





Chapter 1 - The Synod





After receiving the urgent summons from Marius to return to Port Wander the party spent the four days of travel through the Warp back to the Maw recuperating from their nightmarish ordeal on Cyrix. Wu-10, suffering severe migraines from his affliction, was quarantined to the med bay by Grim. The Tech-Priest induced a coma and relegated all of his biological functions to the minimal levels, but the auspex scans of Wu-10’s brain were showing troubling progression of the radiation damage. Vadik prayed continuously in his quarters, what little was seen of the gloomy man was glimpses from the doorway of him on his knees with his copy of the Lectitio Divinatus in one hand and the other grasping his double-headed eagle medallion. Manus meditated in his chamber, trying to weld shut the cracks and seams in his soul that his exertions in the Adeptus Mechanicus facility had wrought. Despite his reconditioning he knew that it would take careful stewardship of his powers to keep from being consumed by it. Merrick and Cassius found an odd comradeship when they both tried to find a quiet place to drink in the shuttle bay, they swapped spirits and stories for long hours in an attempt to erase the fear and pain of their travails. On the last day of their passage through the Maw Aurora, who had been studiously poring over her notes, books, and datapads concerning the mysterious box, called them to the briefing chamber.


Her work had been exhaustive, but the results were limited as the main stock of her academic resources was not available to her aboard the Gypsy. The box itself was made of wraithbone, a psycho-reactive substance that could be willed into existence by sufficiently skilled Eldar, called wraithsingers, and then shaped to suit the maker’s need through mental visualization. Practically everything from furniture to ship hulls was made from wraithbone in Eldar society. And while Aurora had no idea what the symbol on the lid of the box was, it was similar in form to others she had seen used to denote a particular Craftworld (the behemoth ships that functioned as home to the transient species). And the elegant calligraphy around the sides, once translated, wove a complicated and poetic tale of loss and sorrow. It was something similar in prose and structure to Eldar funerary poems. As to the actual contents of the box, however, she could not say. Only opening it would yield them that answer. And while Marius had provided them a null rod in case an emergency arose where the had to dispose of the box but take the contents with them, he had also told them to avoid opening it if at all possible. They elected to wait, as their escort vessel was just clearing the Maw and they would be able to speak with Marius shortly.





As the Koba slid through the last of the turbulent space marred by the warp storms surrounding the Maw, the ship’s captain urgently called the party to his command deck. When they arrived, he had a worried expression and waved his hand to indicate the sensor panels. He and the other captains in Mahaka’s fleet had specifically chosen for their aptitude at covert operations. He had a healthy paranoia, and had entered the space near Port Wander well beyond their auspex scanning range, but close enough that he was able to tap into their systems by jumping the signal of the defense satellites and navigation buoys. Once he had accessed the station’s logs he had found no evidence that any other part of the fleet was currently docked. More troubling, he had attempted to contact the ground team Marius had stationed there, and received no answer to his coded messages after several hours. The party agreed that this was a disturbing turn of events, and decided to have the captain keep the Koba at the fringe of the system as they approached in the Gypsy. It was an older ship, but it’s very nature made it unlikely that it had yet been definitively attached to Mahaka’s fleet. It would get them aboard to investigate, but it was a risk.


As the Gypsy cut silently through space towards the glimmering lights of Port Wander they prepared for their deception. Cassius, naturally, would play the ship’s owner. His comrades would be his entourage, but once aboard they would have to head to the operations center that Marius established in the bowels on the station. Vadik and Merrick both knew that the dockmasters on these stations were well acquainted with bribery, they could use the remains of the cargo they had brought to the auction on the Hermitage to pay for their vessel to obtain a private berth. As Cassius dropped the stealth field and the Gypsy appeared on the docking scanners for the station a rushed and anxious voice cut across the comm line, a naval auspex technician demanding that the Gypsy identify itself. Cassius cut him off, snidely remarking that he had neither the time nor inclination to deconflict why the technicians had failed to properly log his vessel entering the station’s vicinity. He warned the technician to guide him to a docking berth befitting his station, lest he make note of the man’s incompetence to his superiors. Years of practice in such rhetoric served him well, and the chastened technician made no further protests and sent him the requisite coordinates.


The Gypsy slid into a massive, single-ship docking berth richly adorned with stained glass, carpeting, and statues lining its docking ramp. As they stepped off the ship a hunched little man with long brown robes bustled towards them, flanked by two rows of naval security specialist in crisp and formal uniforms. As he approached he adjusted a pair of glasses and unflooded a massive book from under his arm, nodding in recognition of Cassius and demanding to know why his vessel had not registered formally with any port in over a hundred years. Cassius laughed in contempt, and wove a complicated tale of his exploits as a racer on Terra. He had earned the right to a little privacy, and he paid well to have it maintained. With a gesture of his arm Muffin pushed forward a massive crate, and as the man looked into it his eyes grew wide in amazement. It contained fragments from an STC! The surprise was not his alone, either, as Grim stared in stunned disbelief that such a prize had been aboard their vessel all along and no one had told him. It was only with a supreme force of will, understanding the importance of their mission, that he was able to stand aside as the man keyed a navigation route into the hoverlift holding the crate and set it whirring on its way down the docking ramp. The dockmaster bowed deeply to Cassius, begging forgiveness for his impertinence and assuring him that his presence would be treated with the utmost discretion.


As the man turned and bustled away Grim, seething in frustration, noticed something. One of the junior members of the naval security detachment was staring in boredom out of the windows, and a service indicator light on the side of his rifle was clearly visible. The Tech-Priest, with an eerie grace for a man so heavily augmented, slid across the carpet to stand before him and snatched the rifle from his hands as he blinked in surprise. In a flurry of dendrites, hands, and whispered prayers he disassembled the rifle in less than three seconds. It was a serviceable weapon, but the unfortunate man had not bothered to clean its internal components for too long. Grim demanded to speak to the man’s superior, curtly informing him on his approach that such negligence was sure to offend the rifle’s machine spirit should he be called on to use it. The sergeant, darkly, assured Grim that he would see to the matter personally. Grim leaned forward, and insisted that a meaningful way to express his remorse would be informing the Tech-Priest directly should any inquisitive visitors come asking after their ship. The soldier nodded dutifully, and assigned his team to all points of access in and out of the docking bay. The dockmaster could be bought, but the pride of a soldier would buy them greater peace of mind as they went about the station.


Changing into more subdued clothing as Grim downloaded a schematic of the station they decided on their approach to the safe house. It was deep in the bowels of the station, where the cast-offs and lower class called home. Merrick would take lead, given his familiarity with such environs, with Merrick trailing them from behind to watch for any unwanted attention. As they departed the bay and began the slow process of navigating the elevators and halls that led them deeper into the station their suspicion began to deepen. The well maintained hallways full of light and decorum gave way to flickering sodium lamps that only partially illuminated the dirt and detritus that was strewn along the tunnels. Flesh dens and bars were the only signs of commerce, and people hurried from light to light in fear of what may be awaiting them in the shadows. Cassius and Aurora were particularly uncomfortable in the stifling recycled air, but Merrick found himself oddly at ease. There was a rhythm to these places which he understood, and he found himself gliding naturally back into it like an old familiar jacket. Finally, they approached the final elevator which would take them to the floor where the safe house had been established. Oddly, it was marked out of service with thick lines of sloppy spray paint. To one side a vagrant slept next to an empty bottle of booze, and under the light of a streetlamp a pair of men in matching colors played dice.


Merrick knew this game from his days in the Hive, waving his companions back he walked forward and nudged the sleeping vagrant with his boot. The man looked at him groggily, and he asked how much with a thumb pointing to the elevator. The man shrugged and looked sideways at the bottle of liquor beside him. Merrick nodded, walked back past his friends into the nearest liquor joint, and purchased the best bottle of stuff they had for a handful of bullets. When he dropped it in the man’s lap, enough to keep him and his two watchdogs sauced for the rest of the night, the vagrant chuckled and rapped his knuckles on the metal door of the elevator. A second later the doors slid slowly open, and the vagrant wished Merrick safe travels as he uncorked the bottle with his teeth. The party hustled inside, except for Vadik. He could not risk giving up his concealed position to join them, opting instead to keep a close watch on the gangers at the entrance until he saw a chance to take the access lift down himself. As it descended, however, the hair on the back of his neck rose. After the doors had closed the vagrant held a single hand and flashed a complex series of hand signs to one of the gangers playing dice, at which point the man dropped his dice and took off down the hall at a jog.


When the lift opened the party was stunned, for a second they almost thought they were back on war-torn Orion 9. The streets were deserted, with hasty barricades lying in piles along the halls. Bullet holes and scorch marks from flamers were everywhere, and you could count the numbers of windows and doors not broken or shattered on one hand. Graffiti covered everything, lurid and brightly colored gang signs painted on atop the other. Merrick knew it for what it was immediately. This was a “no man’s land,” the burned out husks of tenements and shops clearly marking the border between two different gang territories. There had been a fight here not long ago, and the victors had left their mark overlaying their vanquished foes as a reminder that they would pay in blood to keep what they considered theirs. The husk of a Rhino APC sat forlorn in a street junction ahead of them, a reminder that even station security paid a price to walk these halls. Was this why the ground team had gone silent? They were not far from the safe house, they would know soon. Though the gangers had scrubbed the numbers off the doors and turned all the signs backwards, an affectation meant to disorient security when they came calling, Merrick cautiously guided them forward out of the elevator.


While his friends pushed forward in the dark below, Vadik was stalking towards the vagrant. As he approached the man waved his hand in a dismissive gesture and told him that the elevator was not running today. Vadik lunged forward, grabbing the man’s collar in one hand and his neck in the other. The ganger playing dice pulled a knife and began to advance, but Vadik whispered to the man he held to warn his friend off. Oddly, he did as he was commanded. He saw something in Vadik’s eyes, and a strange unwilling compulsion had overcome him. Vadik demanded to know where he had sent the other dice player, and the man stammered that he had been sent to warn the “suits” that someone had come calling. When pressed further, the man could only say that they had been paid to watch the elevator and inform as certain person if anyone out of place came snooping around. When Vadik asked what they were supposed to do it about it, the man said that his gang had been paid handsomely by station security to hold them here until they arrived. Some sort of Imperial force had come to the gang, paid them handsomely to take out a group of men hiding in the area, and then left them with these instructions. Vadik chirped over the comm for his friends to get out, they were walking into an ambush. He told the man to bring the lift up, and though he struggled against his desire to do so he rapped the complex series of commands onto the metal grate once again.


No sooner had the Arbites finished warning them then Merrick saw them. Shadows flitting behind boarded windows, the scuff of a boot on a dirty floor, the crack of a stray glass shard brushed loose by a shoulder. They were less than fifteen meters from the elevator, and cautiously backed towards it. Whispers began to emerge from darkness as the gangers encircling them puzzled over this turn of events. Their boss had sent word that their quarry was here, but now he was saying that they were to be let back up. As the doors slid closed, a single shouted out in frustration to get back in position. When they lurched to halt back at their original floor they exited the elevator to find Vadik hunched over the vagrant, and the ganger from the light standing behind him with a knife drawn. Merrick did not need an explanation to know that something was wrong, and he casually fired two rounds through the ganger’s knees from the draw, walked over, and pushed the muzzle of his pistol towards the man’s head. Vadik slapped it away, a little blood and humiliation was something the gang could live with. If they started dropping bodies here they would have to fight their way out, and that would attract unwanted attention. Before releasing the vagrant Vadik swore that they would kill every last one of them if they followed, and Manus flared his eyes with azure psychic fire to drive the point home. The ganger nodded dumbly, and the party hastily wove their way back out towards the docking bay.


Safe again in the well lit and patrolled halls of the station’s upper reaches, they took stock of the situation. The safe house has compromised, and if the ganger was to be believed the ground team Marius had left here was dead. Was that why Marius had summoned them so urgently? Given that the ganger had described the events in the lower levels being the machinations of some sort of Imperial official, a dark suspicion began to take root. Cassius thought their best option lay with the House of Krin, he had maintained cordial ties with Lucretia since the incident aboard the Hermitage and felt he could depend on her for support. Grim figured he could search the databanks of cogitators in the Adeptus Mechanicus temple aboard the station. Grim and Wu-10 set off in that direction, while Cassius led the rest of his comrades towards the noble quarter of Port Wander.


As Grim and Wu-10 approached the massive doors to the sanctum of the Omnissiah aboard the station they were confronted by a pair of massive gun servitora. A quick blurt of binary set the servitors into standby, and they proceeded within. It did not take long for Grim to find an access point within the complex from which he could begin to filter and review the station logs which the Mechanicus kept for the Administratum. Disturbingly, he found that several records immediately preceding the time of the safe house’s compromise had been redacted or expunged from the system with an authorization code originating from an Arch-Magos. Such actions bordered on heresy for a cult that worshipped data itself as a divine construct, only to be undertaken in dire circumstances of need or threat. Confused and aggravated, he devoted multiple logic circuits from his subroutines and logi implants toward finding an alternative answer. And then, it struck him. The gun servitors!


Grim backtracked to the stoic guardians at the doors, knowing they had internal databases that stored all the data their video and audio filters perceived. Those files, however, were usually only downloaded at monthly intervals when the cogitators running the servitor was connected to the mainframe. This mysterious magos may have scrubbed the cogitator, but they did not remember to scrub the sentries! Downloading directly from the pair via dendrite as his guardian stood watch he reviewed weeks of data in seconds. What he saw troubled him. Three days before the safe house was destroyed a figure in a hooded black bodysuit, over which lay an ornate and engraved silver breastplate with a matching silver mask, had arrived with an entourage of tech-priests. With all identifying marks, save their Ordo symbols, concealed accessed the temple. They came back again four days later, the date when the station’s records had been altered. Whoever had seen to the data purge possessed impressive levels of authority.they had proceeded into the complex moments before the wipe had occurred. No sooner had he gleaned this vital information than a chirp in his comms line roused him from his binary meditation. The commander of the security team had just turned away a man who had been asking suspicious and pointed questions concerning the ship inside the docking bay. He had told the man nothing, but had promised Grim he would notify him immediately of any such occurrences. The Tech-Priest fired of a quick automated message to his comrades to rendezvous with him at the Gyspsy and departed the temple. Someone with immense power was looking for them, and they were getting closer.


Cass and the remainder of the party, in the meanwhile, had finally arrived at the opulent palace of the most powerful family on the station (arguably the the sub-sector as well). The house of Krin had made its fortune as one of the first Rogue Trader dynasties to venture into the Expanse. Unlike many others, though, they chose to redirect their profits towards building a commercial empire on the Imperial side of the Maw, controlling and throttling the legitimate trade that entered or left the Koronus Expanse. Their position of influence and power was on full display, as a clear plasteel dome of immense size encapsulated a manor with sprawling gardens and streams of clear water that ran on concealed water recyclers. Smartly, Cassius had guided them to the grounds via a service access route used primarily by servants and technicians. At the checkpoint into the ground two sharp-eyed guards in crisp uniforms demanded their identification. The group had dressed down and armed themselves for their foray into the station interior, and they looked sorely out of place. Cassius calmly removed his glove and presented his gene-coded signet ring. Politely he asked that word be sent, in as discreet a manner as possible, that he had business with the Lady Lucretia Krin. The guards exchanged a suspicious glance, but the senior of the two stepped back from the doors and spoke briefly on his comm line. A moment later, the doors slid apart and a familiar face greeted them.


The man was tall, imposing, muscular, and scarred. He wore an immaculate and tailored uniform, but still moved with the determined gait and purpose of a man who expects violence at any moment. Captain Sejanus, the head of the security detail that accompanied Lucretia aboard the auction on the Hermitage, guided the group inside. When Cassius began to speak the man politely, but pointedly, waved him silent. He guided them through a twisting series of passages beneath the man, and he asked that Cassius’ companions wait in a deserted security staging room, and that the nobleman accompany him to see Lucretia. He promised that the need for such discretion would be made apparent soon enough. Their suspicion deepening, they obliged the man and Cassius followed him onward as he wound deeper and deeper into the complex, pausing now and again and tilting his ear as he listened to his sub-vocal comm implant. In a hushed tone he commented that Cassius and his friends must enter and leave unseen, and that they were lucky that the guards at the gate they first approached were among those who had accompanied him to the Hermitage. They could be trusted to keep their mouths shut.


Finally, one last elevator opened wide and Cassius found himself on a wide balcony that overlooked the manicured gardens of the front of the manor. From an adjacent door the Lady Lucretia hurried in, bowing politely despite her haste as she approached. She had a troubled expression, and quite unexpectedly asked Cassius if he was safe. She pressed him, insistent on her need to know that he was not being coerced or forced along with his employer. She promised him the support and protection of her House if he asked for it, but he insisted that he had chosen to pledge his services to Mahaka. Confused, he asked her what was bothering her. She gestured for him to stand beside her at the balcony rail, but placed herself between him and the rail at the last moment. She whispered that there were two separate guests aboard the station, powerful ones, who had made a point of asking after him. Gesturing with her eyes he looked past her shoulder and down. Upon the wide manor lawn a massive table had been erected and lavished with the finest dishes and consumables available as a throng of richly dressed patrons milled about and clustered in small groups.


Representatives from every faction and authority of note were present, and Cassius recognized one of them. Tanis, the head of his father’s security forces and “fixer.” His family had tracked him all the way to the Expanse! Speaking with Tanis was an even stranger sight. A man in a hooded black bodysuit with a silver breastplate and mask. His hands were firmly clasped behind his back, and he partook of none of the fare presented. Cassius had been to countless such events, and the person for whom they were thrown would always attract a certain amount of discreet attention. A sideways glance here, or the way that groups would spontaneously form and enjoin mindless conversation within earshot of the guest. And the focus of this feast was the hooded man. Lucretia trusted that Cassius had his reasons, and that they were just, to associate himself with someone who had attracted the undesirable attention of her family’s guest. The service he had done her in warning of the coming violence on the Hermitage, and then committing himself to investigating the murder of her uncle, had indebted her to him. However, she could offer him no further assistance than this. Whatever Mahaka had embroiled him in, he needed to tread carefully. Port Wander was no longer safe, and they needed to rejoin the fleet in the Expanse as soon as possible. As Sejanus guided him back to his friends, and then to the service tunnel they entered the facility from, he was grim and silent. He wished Cassius and his friends luck, but warned him that coming back to the House of Krin again before concluding his affairs in the Expanse would be unwise.


As they began to make their way back to the Gypsy their comm line buzzed, and asn automated message from Grim warned them that someone was interested in their ship. Doubling their pace, they arrived back at the docking bay to find that Grim and Wu-10 had already worked with Hannibal to prepare the ship for departure. Cassius guided the Gypsy out into open space, hiding beneath the superstructure of the station itself as the stealth systems came on-line that would allow them to depart the complex defense network of satellites and picket ships and rejoin the Koba near the Maw. They all gathered in the briefing room while Hannibal guided the ship, and related the events of their separate investigations. While no name had been mentioned, they all agreed that the only possible explanation for the hooded figure was the Inquisition. Most likely it was Baylor, the Inquisitor of the Ordo Xenos that had investigated and prosecuted the Lord Aranea and kick in motion the chain of events that had brought them all here to the fringe of space and heresy. If the Inquisition was formally involved and looking for them, they were balancing on a line as fine a mono-filament wire. They decided they must look into the contents of the Eldar box, opting to wait until they were at the last Station of Passage through the Maw before doing so. For now, they reunited with the Koba and informed him of the compromise of their force of Port Wander. As the ship fired towards the swirling mouth of the Maw, a sense of inevitability and drewad began to take hold in the dark recesses of their hearts.


The time finally came, and they gathered in the locked cargo hold of the Gypsy. They held their breath as Muffin removed the null rod and lumbered out of range with hit, and Aurora slowly slide open the lid of the box, her breath stuck suddenly in her chest as she caught sight of what lay within. Small stones, over a hundred and each the size of a fingertip, lay in the box. They were perfectly identical in shape and size, oval and smooth to the touch. Aurora knew what they were. Eldar Soulstones! The psychic repository in which an Eldar’s soul would lie after death, safe from the devouring hunger of Slaanesh, until it could be incorporated into the crystalline matrix of their Craftworlds. Yet, these stones seemed different from those she had seen before. Usually they possessed an inherent color and warmth, but of all the stones in the box only three were anything except for dull and cold. And those stones were a riot of shifting colors, something she had only heard of in the rarest and most subjective texts on the arcane devices. Such Soulstones were usually worn only by Harlequins, those Eldar who had committed themselves to serving the Black Library. Why did Aranea have Soulstones? Was this why Baylor had pursued him? And what would he have done with them? Opening the box seemed to have opened as many doors as it had closed. Regardless, they did know one thing for certain now. They had become involved in the trafficking of xenos artifacts, a heresy punishable by death, or worse, under the heavy-handed laws of the Imperium. Mahaka and Aranera owed them answers.


The last place that they had known Mahaka’s fleet to be, when they departed for Cyrix, was hidden within the swirling wreckage of the Station called the Maelstrom. Sliding out of Warp and signalling in code they were relieved to find that the fleet was still safely hidden there, and they were guided to rendezvous with the ship Mahaka was aboard by a complex route through the slowly spinning debris of a thousand ships. Once aboard she met them in person, demanding to know where they had been, and why they had not immediately returned to her fleet after their mission on Cyrix. They explained the emergency message from MArius, and briefly summarized their discoveries aboard Port Wander. The woman’s eyes were dark and sad behind her bone mask she listened. Marius, she explained, had been sent back to Port Wander for supplies and to check on the ground team she had left behind there. Obviously, he had been compromised. Merrick, tired of the circular nature of their operations, pointedly demanded answers as to why they were flying around with Eldar technology. Mahaka shrugged, they had proven themselves trustworthy and she was willing to oblige their curiosity if Lady Aranea consented. She led them to a secure briefing room, where the elder noblewoman joined them several moments later.


The Lady Aranea sighed when the party finished relating the disturbing information they had obtained on Port Wander, not quite sure where to begin. Instead of more talk, she had decided it would be easier to show them what their endeavours in the Expanse concerned. She stepped forward into the center of the room and set the tip of her cane down. To the party’s amazement, when she let go it stood perfectly upright on its own. She ran her fingers in a quick and precise pattern over the smooth surface of the orb atop it. The rod of the cane telescoped down to knee height, and the orb began to glow a light blue. A projected hologram of a strangely dressed man appeared above the orb, clad in some sort of formal scientific uniform unrecognizable to the party. In an archaic dialect of High Gothic the apparition greeted them all and introduced itself as Azran Alkazem, the lead designer and first member of something called the “Synod.” Albina gestured to the orb, telling them that the Synod was the reason why her family had been pursued by Inquisitor Baylor. Grim, intrigued, demanded to know what the Synod was, and what its origin was.


Azran answered him, the blue hologram’s face twisting into a congenial smile as it explained that the Synod was the first prototype of a memory database developed to act as a repository of knowledge and skill as mankind spread among the stars. It was capable of scanning. Copying, and storing every neural connection, chemical process, and acquired memory in a person’s mind. Then, when the need arose, the Synod could replicate the brain function of anyone who had imprinted themselves upon it by artificially reconstructing their entire personality and memories. This way, though separated by millions of light years or hundreds of years, a scientist could access the most brilliant minds humanity had to offer directly. Grim’s mind, and those of everyone present, swam with the possibility. Aurora asked when it had been constructed the hologram answered that it’s first activation and imprinting, that of Alkazam himself, had occurred approximately 14,000 years ago inside of his laboratory in the Tycho crater on Earth’s moon, and that there were currently 1, 736 separate minds stored inside of it. This was an artifact from the Dark Age of Technology! Grim asked Mahaka pointedly if Arch-Magos Thul had been informed of this. A view screen on the wall activated, and Thul’s cold voice streamed across the speakers. He had been remotely observing the meeting from his vessel, and asserted that he had been aware of the Synod’s existence from the start. Access to studying it was his primary motivation for participating in Mahaka’s venture into the Expanse.


Albina spoke again, emphasizing that the Synod was the source of her family’s forutne and power. Rediscovered on the Luna colony by explorers sent after the fall of mankind’s first stellar empire, they had leveraged its knowledge to carve their own fiefdom of technological superiority on Terra. Later, when they learned how to imprint themselves upon it, they began to leverage a different power altogether. Information. Every dirty secret, alliance, trade negotiation, or rumor ever heard by any member of her House had been imprinted into one of the minds in the Synod. She had information that bring about the utter ruin of countless Houses (including Cassius’ own), they leveraged this knowledge from the shadows to safeguard their House and ensure their survival. Vadik, concerned and suspicious, asked what bringing everyone to the Expanse had to do with the Synod. Albina shrugged, and a sad look came across her face. The Synod was a miraculous device, but only a prototype that never entered full production for unknown reasons. It was never intended to host as many minds as it currently did. Those within it were beginning to degrade, memories of one life bleeding into the next. Azran spoke up again, stating that less than 38% of the minds housed within the Synod were still considered reliable due to the decaying state of the Synod’s storage. Internal safeguards had been emplaced to wall of and protect the data that was still known to be reliable, but every time the Synod was activated the decay was accelerating at an alarming rate.


This, Albina explained, was why they were in the Expanse. To pursue the means to repair the Synod. For generations her family had been aware of the problem. Fourteen times in the last seven hundred years they had attempted to repair it. Each time was a failure, more than one of which actually damaged the Synod further. Their last hope lay in finding an artifact the Eldar referred to as the Shantar Ar’Kanum,which translated to “Mobius Forge” in Low Gothic. An Eldar corsair in the Expanse claimed to have known its location, but had demanded that Hastur Aranea retrieve something for him in exchange. The contents of the box had been the promised payment, and thanks to the favor owed to her by the Serrated Query after the party rescued their agent aboard the Hermitage they knew where to find him. In the Serpentis system of Winterscale’s Domain. Grim protested, allowing the Eldar to tamper with the Synod was sacrilege. His protest was noted by Thul, but unwarranted. The Synod, in fact, had been built upon Eldar designs recovered by Alkazam. That revelation floored everyone in the room. Eldar and humans were known to have interacted during the Dark Age of Technology, but it was blasphemy to think that human technology was ever built or inspired by the manipulative xenos. In answer, Albina asked Azran to bring up the consciousness of the first Hastur Aranea. The man for whom her husband had been named.


The hologram shifted and an imposing man with menacing eyes and a defiant stance apparated before them. He scanned the room, his eyes catching on Albina’s signet ring. He asked her what she wished to know, and she told him that the assembled group needed assurance that the Synod’s mixed origin of Eldar and human technology was not a consequential matter. He laughed darkly, and related a tale of how the Emperor had found out his House’s secret during his war to dominate Terra. The house of Aranea had been able to avoid his attention for some time, largely through deft political maneuvering and a keen sense of which way the wind was blowing when his inevitable victory became apparent. However, in time the Emperor had come for them and forced his way into their fortress through the brute force of his Thunder Warriors. The Emperor had discovered rumors of technological databanks in Aranea’s possession that he required for his ultimate plans. To spare himself and his family he presented a deal to the Emperor. He would freely give the Emperor and his agents access to the technology he sought, if he would spare his house and leave the Synod with them. The Emperor, surprisingly, agreed. He forced Hastur to swear his allegiance in a complicated and grueling psychic ritual which bound the man in mind and body not to betray the Emperor’s vision for humanity. And the plans that the Emperor desired of Hastur? They were prototype schematics for a method of constructing stable, even habitable, wormholes through space-time. They were the collected notes of dozens of researchers from inside the Synod on the construction and operation of the Eldar webway. While the designs they detailed were of human origin, they were still predicated upon models developed by the hated Eldar. The Emperor himself had utilized Eldar technology for the good of mankind, how could they say it was now blasphemy?


Silence stretched for long moments in the room after the blue image of Hastur faded away. They were ground-shaking revelations for those born under Imperial doctrine, and they struggled to comprehend the ramifications of what they had learned. This was why Baylor hunted them, Albina insisted. He knew that the House of Aranea had a device they used to access information that could shake the Imperium to its core, though she did not know if he was sure what it was. Baylor wanted it for the Inquisition, or for himself. Her House, however, had upheld its oath to the Emperor. They had strived to keep the peace and maneuver the best possible candidates to ensure the Emperor’s vision was realized. Even after the Heresy, and the Emperor’s ascension to godhood, they had kept their word. Now, they had finally found a way to restore the Synod. The Imperium was fracturing, but with the knowledge inside of the Synod they could seal the cracks and unify mankind behind the right leaders. All that remained was the journey to the Serpentis system to find Il’Ishanti and the Mobius Forge.

40K - Session 16

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.

40K - Session 15

A House Divided




Act 2 - The Shadow of the Abyss




Chapter 3 - What Sleeps Below




Part 2 - Fire and Fangs


Aboard the Akan, which floated silently amongst the asteroids on the outskirts of the system, Manus Ashok was troubled.  He had been secluded from his comrades at the order of Roa Mahaka, forced to undergo an arduous process of psychic reconditioning to ensure his recent lapses of control would not continue to jeopardize the rogue trader's operational success.  To accomplish this he had been turned over to the astropathic corps, isolated in their meditation cells, and or weeks he had endured physical and emotional strains unimaginable to anyone who had not seen the inside of a Black Ship before.  He had passed their tests, though at times he felt it would be at the cost of his sanity (if not his soul).  Among the final phases of his reconditioning was a series of meditation drills meant to guide him through common practices among the other schools of psyker disciplines, and he sat in a circular meditation chamber with five astropaths as they guided him through methods of extra-corporeal projection used to train initiates in the ways of navigating the Warp by first imagining themselves adrift and plotting lines across nearby space.

As he set his mind in flight across the system he was drawn irrevocably towards a small planet.  It blazed with life and psychic light beneath a veneer of roiling storms, and upon its surface lay a singular point of gloom that fascinated him.  It was a blemish upon an otherwise vibrant orb of color, like a cancer that incubated in sullen silence beneath the skin.  He peered within, curiosity finally overcoming his hesitancy, and as wave of nauseating revulsion overcame him.  His mind was awash in a sudden desperate need, an overwhelming demand that threatened to undo his delicate control.  The need to feed.  The gloom resolved into a mass of writhing, unfocused animal hunger in which flashes of claw and fang tore at his mind.  And then, to his utter horror, a single eye opened inside his mind.  Lidless and white, it lacked any pupil or defined feature; and yet he knew that it had seen him, just as he now saw it.  The very nature of it was anathema to his finely tuned psychic senses, it's voracious will unbalancing the delicate weave of his mixed realities like an earthquake.  He fled, pulling his senses back from that awful place like a man recoils his hand from a flame.  In his reckless flight he caught, for only a heartbeat, the familiar glimmer of his friends' presence within that writhing presence's shadow.  Whatever was on this planet had been asleep, and now it had awoken to a terrible hunger.

His mind snapped back into his body with such psychic force that he toppled backwards off of his meditation platform, and as he shook his head to clear the residual tremors of his experience he saw that his experience had similarly effected the other astropaths in the chamber.  They sat clutching their heads, blood running freely from their noses and ears as they stared at him with mouths agape.  Remembering his friends, trapped for all he knew, within the grasp of the thing on Cyrix he called for an emergency meeting with the ship's captain and the astropathic corps' leader, hastening to pull himself together as he stumbled through the halls of the ship.  Once gathered he explained what he had felt, impressing upon them the dire nature of his vision.  The captain seemed dubious, but when the astropath confirmed that these visions were true portents, they agreed that immediate action was called for.  Moreover, the astropath had a deep suspicion of what may have been responsible for such visions.  Few things in the galaxy could so completely blind and overwhelm the senses of a trained a psyker in the manner Manus had experienced except for that awful threat from beyond the galactic rim.  The tyranids.

The Akan fired its engines and headed for the interior of the system as Manus worked quickly to formulate a relief mission.  The captain of the destroyer offered him what resources he had.  Manus could elect to bring a full company of his security personnel in drop pods, or take a select team of his best commandos to the surface aboard the Gypsy (which would rendezvous with them in orbit).  Manus mulled the choice briefly, and elected to take the smaller team.  The risk of collateral casualties from the insertion alone was high, and if there were tyranids upon the planet then the fewer people exposed to the threat the lower the risk that one of the insidious lifeforms would unwittingly escape.  Hannibal docked the Gypsy and brought Manus aboard with his strike team.  A grizzled and scarred sergeant named Hauk led the team supported by a heavy gunner named Diesel, a grenadier named Hix, and the twins Lupita and Diego.  As soon as they were securely aboard Hannibal conferred with Manus and they decided to take the Gypsy onto the planet.  It was small enough to descend safely through the hurricane's eye to the surface, and could shelter from the storms in the ravine adjacent to the cave system the party had used to access the cave system next to the Ad Mech facility.

As the storm's eye began to creep towards the cave system the Gypsy began its descent.  Soon it settled into the deep ravine, its wings coming within meters of the stone walls in a daring testament to Hannibal's skill in the cockpit.  With their bodysuits sealed against the corrosive atmosphere the assault team slid open one of the airlock doors and fired pneumatic grappling lines to the cave mouth, swinging over into the darkened mouth with clinical precision.  As they traversed the cave and lowered themselves to the Queen's landing site they took stock of the situation much as the party before them had.  The eerie thrumming, and sullen silence, and the bodies markedly increasing their anxiety.  Manus quickly headed to the Queen, hoping vainly that his friends may still be aboard.  Finding it empty he keyed the radio in the hopes that they were still in range of its broadcast.

Down below, in the darkened secondary reactor room, the party had been stoically taking stock of their situation in an attempt to formulate a plan which would allow them to fulfill Aurelian-913's last request to disable the sound generators that kept the planet's mega fauna at bay.    To their amazement, their vox system suddenly came alive with a familiar voice.  They rejoiced briefly, before quickly deciding that their best hope lay in uniting their two forces.  They gave Manus as detailed of a path to their location as possible, with Grim even hacking the lighting system to ensure that only halls and doors leading to them would be illuminated.  They also gave him a warning that whatever was here stood between the two groups.  Hauk whispered concise orders to his commandos, who fanned out in a silent formation and led the way down through the bore hole.  Once inside the main hangar Muffin slid aside the plasteel plating he had been order to hold over the hole cut through the doors and allowed the strike team into the facility.  After only a brief second of hesitation, they stepped into the jaws of the unknown.

They followed Grim's lighted path as quickly and quietly as they were able, sliding into the adjacent hallway access for the main reactor chamber.  The detritus and debris littering the floor made for slow going, but within moments they were standing outside of the housing unit.  The commandos checked their weapons as Manus began the mantras which would prepare his mind for tapping the Immaterium.  After confirming they were ready, Hauk order the door opened.  The stepped quickly onto the two meter wide catwalk and fanned out into a protective semi-circle with the psyker at the center.  Panning their weapons around they caught flashes of movement that scurried away from the light, and the entire chamber seemed to be alive with the ambient sound of slithering.  Hauk asked if Grim would be able to bring up the lighting inside of the chamber, and when it flickered on their hearts sank.  Dozens of alien creatures had turned to regard them with cold hunger and animal fury.  They were, indeed, tyranids.  A mixture of termagaunt and hormagaunt forms clung to everything in sight.  The floor, the reactors, even the ceiling teemed with the malignant feeding machines as they began to claw and slither their way slowly towards the the meal that had unexpectedly presented itself to them.

The commandos, holding their fire in check through an impressive display of discipline, waited until Hauk had finished barking a quick set of orders before unleashing a withering wall of coordinated fire on the forms around them.  With the battle begun, the tyranids launched forward.  The clawed termagaunts crawled swiftly across the ceiling and down the walls while the hormagaunts lept atop the reactor housing to employ the ranged bio-weapons that grew in place of arms.  Hix launched a spread of high explosive grenades between the reactors to impede their progress and Diego lit his heavy flamer off in controlled spreads of promethium that engulfed the horrid creatures atop one of the reactor housing.  Diesel's heavy stubber spit a stream of high speed death amongst the God-Emperor's foes while Lupita fired surgical bursts on the termagaunts descending the walls.  Manus called for an orderly withdrawal to the adjacent hallway to draw the tyrnaids into a funnel, hoping his comrades below would have the time to exit the secondary reactor chamber and join the fray while the beasts were distracted.

Down below Wu-10 and Grim began to work on the getting the doors open when Vadik had an idea.  If this was a reactor room, then it was likely to have a high power fire suppression system.  Grim, seeing where his comrade with his train of thought, quickly tapped into the system.  It did indeed have a sub-zero, concentrated halon fire suppression system.  Activating it would be lethal to anyone inside the reactor room, but with Manus' strike team pulling back (and wearing environmental bodysuits) the risk was minimal.  He triggered the system and a loud warning beacon began to blare inside of the reactor room, counting down from ten seconds.  Back in the hallway the hormogaunts not consumed by Diego's flamer began to fire volleys of horrific burrowers towards the retreating team, and while Manus focused his powers on slowing or deflecting the disgusting projectiles some few struck home.  Worst of all, with only seconds left before the halon system activated, Lupita fell victim to the tyranids that had begun to flood into the doorway.  A scything claw pierced her leg, drug her back into the reactor room, and flung her into the writhing mass of horror below.  Her death, though grisly, was mercifully quick.

As the halon system activated and highly pressurized Halon as a temperature near zero flood the room Diego howled in rage at his sister's death.  As soon as the flood slowed he stepped back into the reactor chambered and emptied an entire tank of promethium from his heavy flamer into the crystallized masses that were once termagaunts.  They shattered as much as they melted under the assault, and the team below took the opportunity to force the doors and begin climbing back up to assist the strike team.  Cassius gunned his jump pack up the elevator shaft, and once aloft over the reactor housing saw that the majority of the threat had succumbed to the fire suppression system.  Only a handful of hormagaunts remained, doggedly climbing atop the concrete housing units to gain a better vantage.  He fired bursts from his las rifle, but was unused to the coordination required to fly and fire and his shots fell wide.  They were enough, however, to coordinate the fire of the strike team as they took position back out on the catwalks.  Between them, Aurora, and Merrick they made short work of the remaining life forms.  As the two groups finally united on the catwalks they discussed their plans to move forward.

They knew the sound amplifiers generating the sub-sonic impulses that kept Cyrix's "worms" at bay were fed from a chamber directly beneath the main housing unit where the tyranids had been kept.  There was only one confirmed path directly to it, through the Grand Hall and a security processing station.  There were two other suspected paths, from the main reactor room they were in and from the labs.  The tyranids had found some way to tunnel into those areas when they overran the station, but whether they were direct paths back to the housing unit or not was still undetermined.  Grim had tapped again into the system, using access codes he had obtained from Aurelian-913's message, and flicked quickly through the grainy vid feeds still operating in the various parts of the station.  There was movement everywhere, now that the dormant creatures were waking.  The tunnels meant fewer numbers of the horrid xenos could overrun them at once, but it would take time to negotiate those tight confines.  The Grand Hall route was direct, but the open nature of the space meant that they could be swamped quickly if the tide (quite literally) turned against them.  In the end they opted to approach from the Grand Hall.  Time was a critical factor in their success, they wagered, and if they reached the emitter station before the full hive was roused they may be able to trigger it and escape.

They cautiously re-entered the Grand Hall, fully prepared to meet a wall of teeth when the access doors slid open.  What they found was almost as surprising: absolute silence.  Only moments before the vid feeds had shown flickers of motion everywhere, but as they began to fan out the hall was as deathly quiet as it had been when they first entered.  Grim and Wu-10, equipped with magnetic clamps on their frames, climbed the walls as Cassius fired his way up to the girders which supported the massive ceiling.  They settled into position on the wide supports to provide elevated over watch, dropping a line down to their friends should they need it.  They hesitated on how to move forward, with the strike team nervously advancing towards the nearest pile of debris.  Then, the tyranids struck.  The canny beasts had crawled among the strewn debris and long-dead corpses of their own to hide, springing forward and rushing in a wave of scything chitin.

The strike team began to lay down a coordinated field of fire to slow the horde's advance, but their numbers were staggering.  They would shoulder their own falling dead aside in their rabid desire to sink their teeth into soft flesh.  The strike team with Manus covered the southern half of the cavernous chamber as soon as the first wave was brought low, Vadik sprinted for the grapple line as Aurora and Merrick pressed up to hold the northern half.  More of the tyranids dug their way out of their hasty nests in the piles of bone around the Imperial Knights.  Most were brought low before they could get in range to set upon anyone, but when three managed to close dangerously close to Aurora the cyborg Wu-10 decided that he had waited long enough.  He lept from the support beam and descended upon them like the wrath of the Omnissiah.  His maul trailed electricity through the air he crushed one into a pulp of chitin and gore as it lept toward his beleaguered friend.  The others scampered back, hissing and gnashing their teeth, before launching themselves at him instead.  The tide seemed endless, but soon they had whittled down the second wave and began to hope that they would claim the Grand Hall quite easily.  That hope was dashed when a loud booming began to resonate from the opposite end of the hall.

Two massive security doors blocked the way from the Grand Hall to the security processing station that separated the hall from the tyranid housing units.  It began to crumple outwards under the force of titanic blows, and when enough space between the doors had been created two massive scything claws, each as long three men, snaked through and finally thrust the blast doors aside.  Stalking into the hall with thunderous steps a new bio-form emerged.  It was close to twenty feet tall, and looked like a hormogaunt blown up to ludicrous proportions.  A tyranid warrior, one of the synapse creatures that coordinated the hive mind's actions!  Its presence threatened to unnerve everyone present, and worse yet it had the opposite effect on the tyranids emerging from the rest of the room.  Their disjointed and animal behavior seemed to suddenly subside, and they swayed in an eerie form of unison when brought under the warrior's influence.  As one, close to fifty of them clawed free and began to proceed forward across the chamber around the behemoth's legs as it advanced.

Grim, desperate to slow its advance, rushed forward along the rafter and hurled his cry canister, engulfing the warrior and the termagaunts around it in a cloud of cryogenic gas.  It slew a great number of the smaller forms outright, but seemed to only incense the warrior.  Though slowed, it turned the muzzle of its massive bio-gun towards his position and launched a spore grenade that struck the ceiling near the tech priest.  Whip-like tendrils snaked outwards, trying to lash and grapple him, and he was forced to drop from the rafter onto the body piles around the Knights in order to escape.  Vadik, finally securing a stable firing platform for his sniper rifle atop the rafters at the near end of the hall, immediately recognized the threat that the warrior's spore launcher posed.  He called out to his friends to concentrate their fire on it as he took careful shots at the tubular mass it carried slung beneath its towering frame.  Manus, meanwhile, concentrated his will on a discharge of pyschic energy meant to stun and disorient the beast.  He hoped to break its control over the mass of termagaunts, or at the very least slow the monster's advance.  He succeeded in the latter, rippling the fabric of reality around the warrior's mind sufficiently enough to cause the beast to sway and stagger as it came forward across the frozen and unsure ground left behind by Grim's cryogenic canister.

Cassius, firing volley after volley of burst fire into the beast in conjunction with the strike team, narrowly avoided another tendril grenade.  A single lash had wound around his leg and found painful purchase, and he screamed in pain as he fired his engines to retreat and tore the tendril free from the writhing mass that tried to draw him in.  Wu-10, beset by termagaunts, was brought down to the floor by the coordinated attack of no less than three of the scything creatures.  It was only through the keen eye of Aurora and a volley of guided munitions from Grim that he was finally able to force his way back to his feet.  As the third wave was brought low, Vadik finally succeeded in placing a shot perfectly into the pulsating sack that fed the tendril grenades into the warrior's bio-gun, bursting it in a shower of viscous fluids and eliciting a pained roar of hatred.  Incensed to madness and finally clear of both the frozen ground and Manus' mental influence the warrior broke into a full charge, shouldering its way between the fallen Imperial Knights in its desperate bid to feast as the lesser bio-forms swarmed around and over it in like manner.  Manus, though, had been waiting for just such a moment.  With all of the bio-forms so tightly concentrated he summoned a blazing ball of azure fire between his fingers and flung it with snarl into their midst.  It erupted in an apocalyptic blaze that consumed all of the remaining termagaunts, but the warrior still charged forward through the inferno.

Finally passing the gap between the Knights it sets its eyes first upon Grim, fixated upon the pesky tech priest it dove headlong with slavering jaws bared.  Wu-10 however, was not about to let an ordained priest of his order fall prey to such a malignant xenos.  As his friends unloaded a storm of las and stubber fire into it he stoically stepped into its path, diverting its interest as it brought down both of its massive scythe claws.  He deftly avoid them both with almost disdainful ease, and as it lunged its head forward to devour him he thrust the head of his maul between its teeth and pulled the trigger for the single shot bolter built into the artifact weapon's haft.  Its discharge resonated in the chamber like a clap of thunder, snapping back the tyranid's head as black blood poured from its mouth.  It reared up on its hind legs and shook its maw from side to side, as if to cast off the pain, and Wu-10 saw another chance to strike.  He engaged his maul's charge with the flick of a thumb, stored electricity coursing into the weapon's adamantium head.  With an titanic two-handed swing he shattered the warrior's shin, stepping deftly aside as its massive bulk collapsed to the floor before swinging the maul up over his head.  The warrior was sluggishly trying to regain its feet when he blurted a prayer to the Machine God in binary before bringing the maul down with every ounce of power his formidable augmetic enhancements could muster directly between its six eyes.  He spilt the carapace over its head, and as it lay there, stunned senseless or dying, Hauk stepped forward.  He shoved the barrel of his las rifle into the cracked carapace and emptied his entire magazine into the creature's nerve center.  It shuddered once, and then moved no more.

Drawing deep, gasping breaths the party took quick stock.  Wounds were tended and ammunition counted.  They could hear more of the creature skittering behind the doors the warrior had thrust itself through, but none had yet chosen to enter the chamber.  They began to discuss their tactical options moving forward.  It would be safer if they stayed together, but if the Great Hall was their only avenue back towards the tunnel that led to the Queen.  Sergeant Hauk offered to keep his team behind to reinforce the Grand Hall and hold it in place as an escape route.  They would have fewer guns for whatever lay beyond, but they could retreat quickly this way.  As they finalized their plans, Grim suddenly stopped speaking mid-sentence.  He had noticed something gleaming amidst the ruined gore of the warrior's head.  Engaging his dendrites he cut away at the fractured skull plate and laid bare the nerve mass that passed for its brain.  The party gathered around in morbid curiosity as he tore free a mass of wires and electrodes.  Something had been surgically implanted inside the warrior's brain, something of human design.  At first glance it looked like pain stimulators, but at the nodes were something entirely different.  Gleaming black nodes connected the wires, nodes which each bore arcane symbols that Manus had seen carved upon other devices, the kind they kept aboard the black ships to muzzle psykers.

The Adeptus Mechanicus had done quite a bit more with these tyranids than the fragmented reports they had accessed indicated.  They had been performing experimentation that bordered on the heretical.  As the grim import of this discovery settled upon their minds, a strange sense of awareness washed over them all.  The feeling that they were not alone, that they were being watched by sightless eyes.  Whatever slept here was now fully awake, and it was aware of them.  The sounds behind the door to the processing station suddenly ceased, slowly to be replaced by a slow rhythmic clicking that echoed into the Grand Hall.  Manus grimly mused that it sounded as if a thousand jaws were opening and shutting in perfect time, salivating at the prospect of a meal so long denied them.