WARHAMMER 40,000: A Thousand Tiny Suns (40k/Exalted Crossover!)

You went to 11-01. 55 was muttering under his breath.

"The sun and the moon and the stars, he's gold and bronze and silver and-"

You put him out of your mind, kneeling down. You checked over 11-01 with a small stablight, swinging it up and down. Mercy of vents, he actually hadn't been too badly burned, the real damage was in the chest, where his flak vest had taken the brunt of the impact and blown apart. There was shrapnel dug in there, but not too badly. You attached a plasbag to him - taking it from 55, who was still doing as he needed to do despite his mutterings. You ran the line, adjusted the ungents, thinking as you did so.

"You're him, he's you, I'm nothing, no one, not anyone, nothing, nothing, not a thing," 55 said, then took out something small and dark. For a terrifying moment, in the dancing shadows of the night, you thought he had gotten the scalpel out. Instead, he offered it to you. It was the Krieger Honorable Infantryman's Portable Enscription and Cipherlabe Cylandricora Obvitiata! Your heart leaped, realizing exactly what you needed it for - you'd been just about to bandage up 11-01 and send him off. But you took the escriber, uncapping it and testing the black, soft felt tip that jutted from the pale white plastica that it was made of. It drew a thin line of dark on the back of 11-01's sleeve. Perfect.

"Thanks, 55," you whispered.

"Sun or son, or sun of son or..." he shook his head. "I can't shut them up. They're so loud!" He put his hands to either side of his head as you scribbled down what had happened on a small piece of parchment fetched from your kit. You tucked it into 11-01's vest, then gestured to 55. He helped him up and you got 11-01 onto his mount. Then, you turned to 55, your voice soft.

"Get them to the Commander. She has to know," you said.

55 was silent for a long time. Then he nodded. "Get them home. Get them home. Get them home." He was whispering it, a mantra. He swung up into his mount, still whispering. "Get them home, get them home, get them home."

He and the wounded vanished into the night.

Gitta bumped her head against your shoulder. You sighed. "Lets get ready."

You went to the bodies and found every lance that worked. You had been trained to not notice corpses early on in your childhood - there were enough backbirths and vents that had been dumped out and let to rot in prima schola corridors so children could get used to picking things off them. Some had even been shot up a little, for the effect. So, you weren't troubled as you got three more lances and the Sergeant's saber. YOu held the thrumming thing, feeling the chain engine rumble against your palm.

"They shall not pass," you whispered.

You swung up onto Gitta's back. YOur finger found the elastic of your glove and you tugged it back and snapped, once, twice, three times. The stinging pain focused you. Centered you.

You kneed Gitta after the blood and the footprints - and overhead, red contrails screamed by, backlit by threads of tracer fire shooting up from battlements.

A gray pallor began to slowly brush its way across the sky, banded in zebra stripes by smoke and pyres. The adnrealine dripped from your veins like a slow, deadly bleed that you couldn't stamp or staunch. Your head lolled and you held Gitta's reigns as she cantered forward, her haunches showing no sign of tiring. But you were tired. So tired. The blood had been easy to follow at first - but then there had been the sickening realization that the tracks had been subsumed by tank tracks, by the bodies of corpses, by thick rockcrete and even sheets of metal. You weren't sure where you were now. You had doubled back, to try and find your company, but without a micrbead, you were getting increasingly unsure of where you were.

You had tried the first test any Kreiger would before going for a scouting perch: You had found a dead Guardsman - a Scintillian grenadier - and stuck his helmet onto a loose spar. Sticking it up and above cover had gotten it shot off by a lasbolt. So, you let Gitta's instuncts and your own training guide you, keeping you in narrow valleys and winding, twisted wreckage. Her heavy, blunt claws scraped and dug into the chaotic terrain you were traveling over, and it felt like some...strange dream. Going on and on and on.

Endless.

Wags would have called it just like home. Idiots.

Krieg wasn't a warzone anymore. The old rubble and ruin had been cleared away, and gardens were beginning to bloom there - sickly and thin but flowering despite that. The radiation was dying by inches, and every year, Krieg was stronger and fitter and better. That's what your schola had told you, ever since you'd been old enough to wear a civilian mask. You thought back to that - all the people, covered and lettered and numbered, the factories, the chapels...the streets with their arcades and small markets, where you could get a fancy mask, if you wanted to be risqué or if you weren't old enough to know any better...

You knew some people who had fraternized in those arcades. There were the proper ways to do it. Trading a glove. Exchanging masks. There had been a rumor about...who was it?

07-91?

He was in squad five. Or he had been.

But the rumor was that he had actually...touched masks...

Your cheeks flared under your respirator. Had you been hit? Were you bleeding out and going insensible? You started to pat down your body.

How the hell would Kit do it, you wondered. Without a mask or glove to trade, there must have been no way for a Cadian to show affection. How sad. You shook your head, slapping the side of your head. "Merde," you whispered. Krigers were not meant to be alone this long, huh? You frowned and kept riding Gitta forward - and heard the sound of...of...your head cocked to the side. The distant rumbling of artiley and gunfire had shifted over the night - growing louder, then softer, then louder again. But now a new noise was coming to your ears. And it was...strange. It was like some kind of...marching tonality, but it had a rhythm that no one could ever march too. It was too irregular, riding and falling. And there was a strange pureness to the notes...you frowned and edged Gitta towards a thick spar of metal and peeked over it, standing in your stirrups to do so.

Your eyes bugged behind your goggles.

You were actually on the rear edge of a crashed orbital habitat - the shape blurred by mud and debris and ash, but unmistakable. The flat plane of it, still intact despite falling from orbit, made an ersatz marching field...and the Traitors had established a kind of command pavilion? But what command pavilion had instruments of bone and skin, with fibers drawn taut. Metal bars were drawn across them - and you saw they were hooked and had their own strands of string...string on string, drawing those strange pure tones into the air. Drummers played on other instruments, while a woman dressed in the closest thing to a proper mask you'd seen on a non-krieger stood in the center of the instrumentalists, and...began to put words to the marching tone. But not a cadence. It was something else - and it was not in a language you knew.

She was dressed in a red slip of fabric that left her shoulders bare and her back exposed - absurd, considering the situation - and she wore a half mask, covering one cheek in porcelain. her eyes were half closed and she lifted one arm up to caress the micro-stand she was singing into, which caught her words and broadcasted it out of laud-hailers set up at the edges of the pavilion. The strange not-marching cadence wormed into your ears as you tore your eyes from the band to the rest of the pavilion. There were several Traitor marines, each of them bedecked in fanciful colors. No uniformity, merely green and puke brown, bright pinks and searing teal, dark blue and somber gold, red and black and beaded with spikes and pins. They were all standing about, speaking to one another beside a hololithic map which showed the battlefield in shocking detail, with markers...that you recognized.

They used the same imperial cipher-code symbols that you had been taught since birth: Rectangular boxes with the broad X in the center, connecting each corner. Infantry. An X with a oval in the center and a C. Mechanized infantry, with Chimera support. And there, in false green of friendly (which meant hostile, to you), there were ovals without the X. Armor, cutting deep to the left and right of the flank, and there, there were the oval with the P and B rune.

Powered battle armor.

Space Marines.

They were piercing into the center of your line - which looked like it had been pushed back far.

Far.

If you were reading the map right-

"Lord Cartheniax," the man in the green and puke armor said, his voice gurgling and gargling. "You have performed quite a feat. The Imperials here are easy pickings. Heh. Heh. Heh."

"T'would not be possible were not for the hour of our ascension, Lord Rottgan," Lord Cartheniax said - he was the only one of the traitors who had his helmet off...and his features were not human. He had a kind of...bisected jaw, opening and revealing a long, snakelike tongue, an eyeball growing from the center of it. His forehead bore a symbol that sizzled and crackled and it made your head ache jut to see it. Despite his alien features, he still spoke like an arrogant nobleman from Elysium or Cadia, and you perked your ears. "Ere now, our Warmaster's fleets spill across the galaxy and there is not to stand in our way but a mewling infant."

"I wouldn't dismiss Guilliman so easily," one of the blue and gold men said. His armor was akin to the beast that had ripped your squad apart. "And I wouldn't say this conquest is complete yet. My companion-"

"Left in the midst of a battle. There is a lot of...chaos...out there," Lord Cartheniax said, his tongue flicking up to point his eyeball directly at the blue and gold clad one.

"My forces have just voxxed me," the red and black clad warrior said, and...their voice sounded almost female.

"Yes, my Lady in Blood?" Lord Cartheniax asked.

"They've taken their primary fallback position," the Lady in Blood said, her voice amused.

"Put it on the hololith!" Lord Cartheniax gestured with one hand and your throat worked in a quick gulp as you saw the hololith change to a grainy, green-toned image that...you recognized. It was the entrance to the medica facility, the bunker, that you had last ridden from this evening. You blinked hurriedly, trying to see, but the heavy soldiers were standing around it, blocking it off. A grainy, buzzing voice came from the hololith, barely audible.

"Send them on after their Anathema," Lord Cartheniax said, his voice richly amused. The Lady in Blood shifted aside - and you could see a space marine on the hololith, gesturing off the pickup. Your heart leaped into your throat. Serf-slaves wearing those armbands were pushing something towards the entrance. They were-

"He deserve a funeral pyre worthy of his name, doesn't he!?" Lord Cartheniax laughed, his voice pitching higher, cackling.

No! No!

The space marine on the hololith gestured and lasfire crackled. Then fire bloomed inside of the bunker. Smoke roiled out of it - and the hololith picked up the shrieks and the screams.

You closed your head, pressing your forehead against the lip of metal. Your shoulders hunched.

Barely uniformed men and women marched towards the traitor marines. They were platoons of the planetary population, and their commander - a man in a still grimy PDF uniform - came to attention. Lord Cartheniax turned to them. "We are to launch the final attack - the attack that will end this pathetic resistance! We-"

Enough.

You took a deep breath.

It was the first you've ever taken, you think...

---
Something is coming...

[ ] Clamber up, draw your chainsword, and call out this so called Lord Cartheniax
[ ] Clamber up, then call out to the masses of common men, turn them against these opportunistic butchers
[ ] Clamber up, and then use the habitat's artificial gravity generators creatively.
[ ] Clamber up, take aim, then quietly, oh so quietly, shoot Lord Cartheniax in his head.
[ ] Ride Gitta up and charge.

There are no write ins