Grim Dark Tech Support: A Dark Mechanicum Quest

Made an illustration of Ishmael, the Savant from the beginning of this quest. For whatever reason, the description "the sort of age that occurs despite rejuvenat treatment instead of without it" really stuck with me.

You only have a split second to make your decision, but that is more than enough. Monofilament Wire shoots out and wraps itself around the arm of the Space Marine descending towards the Colonel.

He arrests its momentum before they can even begin slicing through ceramite and bone, pivoting neatly around and freeing his trapped arm, even as his other hand slices through pseudo-flesh and the noose that is trapping it. The Daemonic Fragment tears itself loose with a triumphant screech, feathered wings bursting from its back as it scurries away, out of the wreckage of the command tank and into the depth of the ruins.

The Ogryn has recovered, now, and whirls around his pneumatic hammer. It impacts the center of the Space Marine's pauldron, and it actually staggers, crushing one of the cogitators under its weight. The Lightning Claws lash out in retribution, slicing through Moro's shield and the arm that is holding it below. Parlo fires, once, twice, las bolts impacting the armored gorget of the Power Armor to no apparent effect, but he is retreating as he does so, throwing himself out of the back of the Salamander and into the sight of the Space Marine. A smart choice, really: as the Lightning Claws sink into the Ogryn's stomach, you follow suit, skittering through the tear ripped into the roof and throwing yourself clear.

"Everyone clear?", Theama-Nul cants from somewhere to your right, and when he receives the affirmative from both you and Regicia, he sends out a detonation signal, and the Salamander goes up in a massive fireball: a detonation strong enough the blast wave lifts you up and tosses you a good ten meters.

You did not notice him plant the charge, and the fact this does not even make the list of the three most concerning things currently going on says unfortunate things about your situation.

The Space Marine has survived. It rides from the ruins of the tanks on a trail of fire, Jump Pack blazing behind it, the metal stripes affixed to it burning brightly and hotly. A barrage of Las Bolts follows after it. The Yulrasians have formed up, and their fire is disturbingly precise.

A single Las Gun is an adequate weapon, more than capable of overcoming most enemies it might come up against. It is far from the most destructive weapon conceived by humankind, far even from being the most destructive weapon at its side.

What it is, however, is cheap to make in great numbers, and destructive enough to still be useful in those numbers. One Las Gun would stand no hope at all of hurting a Space Marine in Power Armor.

Fifty of them firing at the same target, however, is an entirely different topic.

The Space Marine goes down in a trail of flames, craters blooming across the armor.

You see him limping away through the lines of the Insurgents, because of course he does. The Emperor built resilient, if nothing else.

You carefully regulate down the adrenaline levels in your body to stop your limbs from shaking and clear your head. The Insurgents break, as they see the Space Marine retreat. You cannot blame them for this. What hope do they have, if even the so-called Angels of the Emperor are being brought down.

You still meet resistance after that, on occasion, but it has largely collapsed: any lingering conviction that this was all a trap has now turned into a blazing fire, and the insurgents are largely just trying to flee. Occasionally, you find lines stiffened by Space Marine Scouts: youths in Carapace Armor in the same black and white patterns as the Marine that attacked you before, wielding Shotguns and Sniper Rifles.

They tend to disintegrate as soon as the Flamers set to work, but each of them represent a delay that the Hand of Transformation might use to flee. Still, Colonel Parlo seems to have taken the attempt on his life somewhat personally, and channeled that rage into conducting the battle.

You move through decayed storehouses and past half-active factory floors at the heels of the Assault Regiment, crushing all that stand in your way. Colonel Parlo has split his forces in two, the arms of the pincers spreading around the outskirts of the Manufactorum to cut off any possible routes of escape.

You sprint past the assembly lines as fast as your eight legs can carry you, Theama-Nul and Ko-Bea as close to your heels as they can manage. The theory that this place was used to produce spare parts has borne out to be true, you notice in passing, as you rush alongside an assembly line that has plainly been assembled mid-shift, half-finished parts piling up towards its end point. One of the Insurgents, a man barely old enough to be called and adult, tries to stand in your way, and you disembowel him before he can pull the trigger, already ten paces on before his body hits the ground.

You know where you are headed. The map of the Manufactorum Complex was woefully incomplete, but the quickest path out was still all too clear.

Six Rail Terminals are dotted around the complex, intended to ship raw resources to and the finished goods made from them away from the Three Saints Manufactorum. Of these, three have rails that lead deeper into the Hive, from the direction you are coming from, and two more are within reach of the Yulrasians, far too risky to approach for the Hand of Transformation. It is the last one you are now racing towards, with the fastest troops at Parlo's disposal at your heel.

A Space Marine Scout suddenly appears out of a dimly-lit hallway, Shotgun raised, and actually manages to fell one of the mutants before counterfire tears him apart. You barely notice the tripwire that spans across the hallway as your legs slice it apart, leaving the Grenade it was attached to harmless against the wall. These are the last, desperate rearguard actions of a force in retreat, you reason. By your reckoning, the Space Marine and most of the Scouts are going to get out, along with a good number of Insurgents: they have enough weight to push their way past any perimeter you can establish.

The Hand cannot simply follow along with them, however, for one simple reason: being at least somewhat daemonic is going to make it wholly unwelcome amongst these loyalist forces.
It will have to make its own way out.

There is a symbol on the Scout's shoulder pad that bears a striking resemblance to the mark used by the Raven Guard, which tells you the lineage of the Chapter if not it's precise identity. The Scout himself is tan, the marks of excessive exposure to the sun visible even on his very young face.

These are all the details you can take in, before your steps carry you further, past an attempt of an ambush that becomes abortive the second you burst through a thin wall instead of taking the path expected to you, slicing apart the carotid artery of a woman with your arm blades and killing two more insurgents by quick bursts of needler fire before they even have a chance to react, which goes a long way towards breaking the rest. You are close to the Train Station, now: if your speculations are correct, there will not be forces there once you have breached the final line of defense, the Hand having used whatever means it has to control these insurgents to clear its own escape route at their expense.

The next barricade you reach seems to confirm your suspicion: the three men manning it are facing the wrong direction. They turn far too slowly and far too late: you shoot one of them with the needler, slice through the neck of the next with your inbuilt blade, and crush the chest of the last with your leg, before clambering over the piled-up scrap they have assembled to create their strongpoint. Behind it lies another door, and beyond that Terminal Extremis Spireward.

Your team, you note, has begun lagging somewhat behind, though not so much you cannot hear Theama clear the barricade with an explosive charge and coming after you. You slow, slightly, as you take in the Terminal itself: a vaulted hall held in the gothic style of the Imperium, cranes rising above ten parallel rail lines. A train loaded with finished Chimeras stands ready to depart on one of them, apparently hastily abandoned during the conquest.

You are not too late, you note, with a sigh of relief.

Then the train starts moving, and you sprint forward, all thoughts of waiting for your team temporarily forgotten.

[Roll: Eta Nu 9 35: Mobility: 2d6: 1, 4: Partial Success]

You set off at full tilt, legs skittering across the ground as quickly as you can make them go. Somebody opens fire on you, though thankfully they are only using one of the heavy pintle mounted Stubber instead of a Bolter or any of the Turret-mounted guns, and their angle is bad. Only one of the bullets hits you, and it ricochets off your leg harmlessly in a shower of sparks. The train is picking up speed now, and you see your window of opportunity slipping away. You leap, desperately, stretching the components of your legs to a dangerous extent, and then you are aboard the train, clambering across a Chimera as it speeds out of the station.

"We'll try to catch up", Regicia cants after you, and then you are out of range, speeding away from the tunnel at absolutely unsafe speeds.

You clamber across the Chimera, and are almost decapitated for your troubles as the train rushes into a tunnel. For a second, you are at an impasse: stuck between two Chimeras with tunnel walls and ceilings too close to proceed. You stop, for a moment: the Hand, at least, is not going to be able to escape: not at these speeds, and not with tunnel walls all around you. Black smoke soon envelopes you: the exhaust of the train, confined to the tunnel and harmless to your augmented lungs, though it would be utterly lethal to any still beholden to their weak flesh. When it becomes clear that the tunnel is not going to let up for a long while, you carefully push yourself up, onto the roof of the Chimera, bowed down deep enough that your head never pushes across the crest of the turret.

The tunnel, you reason, has been deliberately created in order to transport Chimeras without damaging them. The Chimeras loaded had their turret mounted, and so it stands to reason that the tunnels fit the Chimeras along with their turrets. By moving carefully alongside them, you can slowly make your way forward, tough it's hell on your back and the roof of the tunnel remains uncomfortably close to your spine.

You make it almost halfway up the train when you hear and awful, terrifying sound: the sound of a switch being thrown, followed by the terrifying clamor of metal impacting metal.

Unless you are missing your mark, the train has just entered a tunnel very much not constructed to transport Chimeras with turrets attached.

Your ability to move forward at a slow, reasonable pace has been severly compromised. If you do not wish to impact the tunnel or be pushed off the train, you best move quickly.

[Roll: Eta Nu 9 35: Mobility: 2d6: 5, 6: Full Success]

You move as you have rarely moved before, weaving past turrets and leaping over the temporary gaps that spring up with all the Agility afforded to you by the eight limbs that have replaced your natural legs. At one point, what must have been the possessed man that fired the Stubber at you passes you by, mouth agape, eyes filled with fear.

You ram your blade through his skull as you pass him by, before clambering along the tunnel wall for a few steps to avoid the barrel of a Lascannon that has somehow turned sideways. Then, the last of the Chimeras drops down below you, and you throw yourself as flat as you are able, your head missing the top of the tunnel by mere centimeters.

The frantic rush of acrobatics has cost you a good bit of your process, and you are near to the end of the train again. It is now, however, clear of any obstacles. You rush forward, the walls of the tunnel passing you by, the smoke still obstructing your visibility to a mere few centimeters.

As such, you nearly run straight into the blade that comes for your neck. The only thing that saves you is the faint sound of a power field buzzing.

You stop dead, and the blade passes over your head, power field shimmering in the smoke like some Spectre from an old Terran scare tale.

Your unseen assailant strikes at you again: once, twice, and you find yourself each time. One of your mechadendrites is severed just below the tip, and you let loose a burst of absolutely filthy binaric as a surgical drill you have calibrated just right clatters onto the bed of the train.

You give ground, finding yourself rapidly driven backwards, unable to retaliate due to the lack of visibility.

Your eyes are modified to pick up radiation well outside the spectrum visible to the human eye, from the thermal to the electro-magnetic to the radioactive. All they see is the ghostly powerfield, and even that only barely, treacherously, seemingly flickering in and out of existence as they strike at you.

You feel one of your legs reach the edge of the train, and prepare to launch yourself forward in one last, desperate assault, ready to take grievous wounds in order to defeat your opponent.


Then the tunnel opens, and the smoke clears in a rapid gust of wind, and for the first time you see what can only be your target: the Hand of Transformation, in all its terrible, overwrought glory.

Magos Raskol has fashioned his creation from ceramite, which gives it an appearance disturbingly like that of a doll made for some high-born brat, though the features moulded into the mask that makes up the things main face seem likely to terrify more than delight: a daemonic grimace straight out of nightmares, exaggerated brows framing eyes of blazing, empyrean fire and blood-red lips drawn back from sharp, pointed teeth of steel in a fashion that is somehow both mocking and threatening.

Circles of rune criss-cross across the creature's body, trailing down from its neck and across the rest of its slender body, connecting the main face to eight more grimacing faces:two alongside the main one, two on either side of its neck and one on each clavicle. Of these faces, only two are alive with the same blazing fire that animates the creatures main face: the rest are asleep, as though whatever animating force might inhabit them is currently gone.

Six of the fragments still remain at large, then, you reason. Only the one you captured and the one inside the possessed man on the train have returned to the main body.

That, however, is a worry for a later time. Right now, it is the thing's arms and legs that are of more immediate concern.

The Hand of Transformation has six three-jointed arms, one of them holding the slender, strange power blade with which it has been attacking you, the rest of its hands bare of either weaponry or tool: maybe it has discarded them, or found it unwieldy to clamber along the train ladden with tools or weapons. It's legs are digitirade, bird-like claws sharp enough to bury themselves into the metal of the train's bed attached to them.

The sudden disappearance of the smoke seems to surprise it, if only for a moment: long enough, however, to allow you to skitter along the side of the train through the suddenly open air, putting distance between yourself and the gap at the end of the train.

It whirls around and strikes at you, but with its arms visible you can see the strike coming and dodge it far more comfortably then before. You come up with a rudimentary strategy, as you give ground. It's limbs, you reason, are not covered with the silvery symbols that mark its head and body: as such, they are probably surplus to requirement, and between yourself and Regicia you should be able to replace them regardless. It moves fluidly, forcing you back across the train, the three-jointed construction of it's arms allowing it to move them in unexpected ways. At one point, it drops the sword from it's top right hand into the bottom left in a motion so fluid and natural it almost manages to surprise you, tearing your robes as you are forced to throw yourself back once again. You cant a curse as you find your back hitting the back of the locomotive, avoiding the thrust of the sword only by the barest of milimeters and nearly doubling over as three fists hit you at once, though they fail to do any damage.

Then, you lean forward, looking straight into the eyes of the Hand of Transformation, and do something that you have not done in the longest of time: through conscious force of will, you pull at the atrophied muscles in the remnants of your face, pulling your lips back from the ruins of what once was your teeth.

[Roll: Eta Nu 9 35: Combat: 1d6: 6: Full Success]

You do not know if it recognises your triumphant grin for what it is: maybe the panic it shows as it tries to withdraw the blade from the Locomotive is just projection on your part.

It never manages to do so. Monofilament wires draws taut and severs its sword-hand at the wrist, and then you are on the attack, the blades of your arm striking out in rapid fashion, each strike shattering a joint or severing a limb. The Hand of Transformation looks at you, wide-eyed, and then it tries to launch itself off the train, into the abyss you had not noticed until know had sprung up around you.

You catch it with one of your mechadendrites, a claw closing around it's neck as delicately as you can manage, and then you strike out twice more with your blade, watching impassively as both of it's leg disappear into the burning Hive below.

And it is burning, you suddenly notice: not in its entirety, mind, but a good part of it appears to be on fire, while all around you on the raised streets you can see, fighting is going on: the masked figures of the Macabian Jannissaries and the ragged Conarian Rangers, wielding Flamers, Las Guns, and what you assume are farming implements remade into improvised chain glaives, against people armed, at best, with antique revolvers.

Fighting, you reflect, as you put the Hand of Transformation down very carefully onto the bed of the Train, is the wrong word for what is going on down there.

A massacre might be the more correct term: the sort of atrocity that might be committed by an occupying army stretched beyond its breaking point, or a Chaos Warband as a matter of course.

If you had to guess at the inciting incident for this, the armless and legless machine in front of you might provide the best of explanations.

Ah, well: all that does not really concern you. What does, however, is how you wish to proceed, once you have brought this train to a halt and allowed your subordinates to catch up to you.

Namely, you have to decide where and how you wish to fix the Hand of Transformation.

[Where?]

[] In Place
You will find a relatively safe location nearby, and go about enacting your repairs there. You will not have tools beyond what you have on your person, and you may find yourself exposed to sudden danger, but this will allow you to fix whatever problem you have quickly, before the Hand can destabilize the situation around you further and make everything much worse then it already has.
[] At Base
You will return to the Court of the Lady Czevene, where you will have access to more advanced tools and protection. Travel there, however, might be dangerous, and of course all the while the Hand of Transformation might continue to enact its terrible wiles.

[How?]

[] Material Focus
You will treat this thing as you would any other unruly servitor, focusing on whatever Tharc Raskol fucked up in its construction and programming and endeavoring to correct its behaviour that way.

[] Empyrean Focus
You will treat this thing as a daemon engine somebody has bound with insufficient stringency, combing through whatever bindings Raskol has put into place to to see what has allowed the daemon within the machine to go rogue in this way.