Grim Dark Tech Support: A Dark Mechanicum Quest

Establishing any kind of noospheric link over any length of space inside the amalgam of ships around the Relay Station proves to be something of a hassle: the constant broad-spectrum vox messages act as a fairly effective jammer, swallowing up any signals that travel too far.

Talef solves this, ultimately, though it takes him most of a day, rushing frantically from ship to ship to manually rewire their Vox Arrays. What results is somewhat ramshackle, and you do not really appreciate the ten seconds of delay it gives you, but it is better than nothing.

It does also give Talef the opportunity to rewire the outer sensors of the Hulk, giving you a fairly clear view of the approaching Skinpiercer from your newly established command center.

The Coterie of the Blessed Lantern, it turns out, is not entirely without means of defending itself. While you were below, they mobilized these: more than a regiment worth of men in Cadian Battle Dress, what you surmise to be the mark of the Coterie impressed onto their breastplates and burned into their face.

"They are out latest order", Adriel tells you. They have donned a suit of carapace armor, gleaming in the light like Mother of Pearl, the mark of their strange coterie burned into the surface: the sweeping claw of the Mark of Slaanesh, the circle at its base transparent and burning with an inner fire. The Lantern, you presume, though a second circle at its care makes it look almost like an eye.

"intended for the Apostles of Blasphemy. Perfectly able soldiers, retaining all their training, but uncompromisingly loyal to their new masters."

You peer at one of them, who's purple eyes mark him out as a Cadian. They're not actually all from one Regiment, you note: they seem to have been drawn from a wide variety of worlds, before they were reshaped into what they are now. The Cadian looks back at you with blank, hollow eyes, and you find yourself doubting how much he can do on his own initiative.

Not, you suppose, what they are intended for, and they do seem to take orders well enough: when Adriel barks at the soldier to get into position, the Cadian moves, his back perfectly straight, his steps perfectly precise.

Not entirely useless, then. You leave the exact allocation of military resources entirely to the Coterie: they would not take your order and you are not a tactician besides. Instead, you focus on the noospheric transmission you are receiving from 8-Doxa, and on the data that is transmitted by the hodgepodge of sensors.

It is not, all told, of particularly high quality: none of the ships that brought the prey of the Beacon to its doorstep had much need for anything but the most rudimentary of sensors, and despite Talef's best effort, they keep overlapping and interfering with one another.

The result is that the Skinpiercer seems to flicker as Auspex Eddies play along her shields and skin. If you had not removed much of your capacity to feel nervous, surely now would be the time you would do so.

You ignore the way the spines that are even now painfully pushing out of the skin of your scalp are standing up. They mean nothing. You decide to focus on something else.

8-Doxa-Krainaima does not seem like a man prone to choosing a position in reserve, but obviously today he does not have much of a choice: though the semi-hulk of ships around the Relay Station is your biggest defensive asset, the biggest asset the Night Lords have right now is their ability to pick and choose their angle of attack. Your reserves can move through the ship quickly, of course, but they will still need time, and paradoxically staying farther away from the front means a quicker chance to get to the enemy.

The last thing you want is for Night Lords to breach your first line of defense and be set set loose inside the labyrinth that surrounds the beacon. You have seen them work before. That is the exact environment they tend to thrive in.

And so, 8-Doxa-Krainaima is cooped up inside a borrowed Drop Ship alongside the Murder Servitors and the complement of the Yulrasian Heavy Assault Infantry that you had honestly forgotten about until he requested them, ready to, in his own words, 'bring the fight to the enemy'.

The fact that he is willing enough to be in reserve does not, you gather, mean he enjoy it very much. You can see faint traces of the workings of his mind in the noosphere,alternately plotting and replotting routes of attack and screeching wordless 8-bit pleas for blood and skulls and glorious slaughter into the atmosphere.

It is grating, yes, but you do not ask him to stop. It is, for one, oddly reassuring, and for the other you do not want to be the focus of the Magos Mactators wrath, now or ever.

You keep his feed in the back of your awareness as you switch to the one monitoring the reptilian monstrosity, now encased in the specialized torpedo that will deliver it to its destination. You busy yourself fiddling with its hormone levels, for a moment, optimizing them to deliver the maximal degree of rage once the beast is delivered, then dialing them back down to avoid premature exhaustion, then picking a target trajectory that will deliver it where it should go.

You aim it right at the Frigate's bridge. With the shields up, that is of course a fool's errand, and you expect to retarget it at wherever a beach head ends up being established.

"The Skinpiercer has launched a spread of Macro Shells", Talef tells you, and that brings you, unfortunately, back to reality.

The ship is close now. It has, of course, been in effective attack range for days: if they had wanted to, the Night Lords could have launched an attack to destroy the station basically from the edge of the system.

It isn't like you can dodge.

That does indicate to you that they want to take the station intact, which is fortunate, because it means you are less likely to die in a superheated ball of expanding plasma. It is also unfortunate, because it increases your chances to be taken alive by Night Lords.

"Not the real attack", 8-Doxa cants, frantically enough to distort and double up in your vox, and you are inclined to agree. The Skinpiercer is too far out, for now: the shells are more likely than not intended to cause a rush forward of any reserves, ensuring them to be out of position when the real attack does occur.

You really wished there were guns pointed outwards, instead of just the turrets that make the labyrinth so lethal for the sort of small craft used to penetrate it.

The Hulk does not shake: it has too much mass to do this, of course, even as the shells impact the shields and they begin to fail. Still, it feels like it does through your interface: pinpricks of energy, massive enough to do serious damage to a city.

Void Warfare is mad, you consider. You have not, strictly speaking, been in any Void Battles yet: the desperate attempt to break through the encroaching vessels of the Ultramarines after Terra surely does not count. Still, as you watch the Skinpiercer maneuver and rush in a slow circle around the Relay Station, it is that precise experience that you are reminded of: plotting the vectors of shells you know are capable of destroying you if they hit in the wrong place, waiting always for the shot that will kill you.

The Skinpiercer, you realize, after long hours, is toying with you. A Gladius is a small ship, relatively speaking, but a maneuverable and fast one, and the Night Lords are putting it on full display.

It is getting close enough that the claws of their figure head seem to almost scrape the hull, arcs of lightning sparking off from it and dancing across the surface of your amalgam.

"Scrap Code", Talef cants out, suddenly, frantically, and then "contained. The daemonic entity again."

You do not have time to parse the implications. There is a spike of aggressiveness from 8-Doxa, and he is suddenly submitting a flight plan, plotting an intercept vector with the enemy frigate.

You begin to send an order to stand down. His current course of action is, on the face of it, insanity.

You also do not get around to finishing that order. A shrill warning rings across the noosphere.

Fusion Generators are things of incredible power: a miniature star, contained within the heart of a ship by powerful magnetic forces, their potential for destruction instead chained and carefully channeled into powering the ship.

It would, in theory, be possible to render one into a weapon, though at terrible cost to the ship that contains them. Your brethren in the blinkered Mechanicus are, of course, too hidebound and keen on tradition to ever do this. Your colleagues in the True Mechanicum usually have more potent weapons at their disposal. To tamper with the electromagnetic forces containing fusion reactions is an incredibly dangerous, foolhardy thing, especially if one has to rig it up to avoid damage to the rest of an entire amalgamation of other ships.

And yet, as the Skinpiercer skims past a ship called the 'Cornhauler', just this happens.

The entire process takes about eight seconds, which gives you just enough time to put into context that 8-Doxa spent several days traveling the outer ships to 'prepare defenses'.

Then a tongue of plasmic flame shoots out, engulfing the Skinpiercer like the fist of an angry deity.

[Roll: 8-Doxa-Krainaima: Weaponsmithing: 3d6: 3, 5, 3. Partial Success)
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

You are suffocating. You are a lump of meat, stuck in a shell of cold, inert metal. Your lungs are not expanding. Your heart is not beating. You taste metal in your mouth, and when you try to spit out whatever is within it, you realize it is your own jaw, and that you cannot move your tongue.


You try to scream, but have no mouth to do it with.

For a moment, you are back on Nuton's Folly, hurtling away from the expanding rubble of Nuton III in a dead shuttle.

This has all happened before. You know what it is. You are powerless to stop it.

In detonating the Plasma Reactor, 8-Doxa-Krainaima has set off a Haywire Field.


You do not know how much time has passed, when your implants start working again. Your internal chrono has gone with everything else, and you do not have any central time to synchronize it with.

It cannot, at least, have been very long. You woke up, after all.

A few seconds at most.

You are still standing: the improved arrangement of your legs has seen to that, where Talef has toppled over and is now heaving and breathing quite heavily.

"Sensors out", he cants to you. His cooling unit is trying and failing to start again, until you give it a whack and its fans spin into motion with a penetrating whine. "Trying to reestablish."

You nod. The monitors around you are still dead. For the moment, you are completely without information.

Then, the transmissions begin coming in. Every Vox Unit is out, right now, which means that any interference to noospheric transmission has gone as well. 8-Doxa is transmitting. There is, you consider, likely considerable lag in transmission. They are also utterly lacking in messaging discipline: a direct transmission of 8-Doxa's mind as he fights.

They are also the best you are likely to get, for the next moment.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

For a moment, you are utterly disoriented: the image seems to split half a hundred times.

The Murder Servitors, you realize, after a few seconds: your subordinate is splitting his attention across them, coordinating the input of several dozen pairs of sensors along his own senses.

That, you are forced to admit, is rather impressive: even receiving them is overwhelming. Beneath all of this, a constant chanting: rage and hatred, spun into code and flowing in a perfect cycle. You see the interior of the Drop Ship, and the Yulrasians in their gleaming armor. You see the course that is plotted. And you see…open void, the shape of a ship that has been battered, but is not broken, lightning arcing out into the void in broad arcs. A quick burst of the auspex confirms it: shields are still down. "Rebreathers", you wheeze out (8-Doxa wheezes out), and the Yulrasians recheck the masks they have donned five minutes ago. Their oxygen supply flashes on your internal display: they (and you) (and 8-Doxa) will be good, at least for the next hour or so. If you are still forced to fight, after the next hour, you are dead anyways.

The Drop Ship screams into a rent in the hull and sets down, and then you are off, clawed feet crashing into the surface of the deck. The Murder Servitors rush forward around you. You order one of them cut through a door, and brace as oxygen comes rushing out, carrying with it debris. Your Chord Claw cuts apart the corpse that was about to slam into you, and then you are inside the ship, and then you are amongst the enemy.

There is not a lot of light within the Skinpiercer. You can feel your eyes dilating, trying to catch as much light as they can. The human vermin that infests the lower reaches of the ship is used to these conditions, of course. Even now, they surge forward to meet your assault.

They are prepared for these conditions. They are not prepared for you.

The Murder Servitors do not need a specialized command to surge forward and begin the killing. That is your secret, to how you control so many of them at once. You are, by and large, not ordering them to kill. Rather, you are holding their leash, as you are holding your own.

And here, now, in the bowels of the enemy ship, you let go. You give up control, completely and utterly.

And in doing so, you find serenity.

The distinction between yourself and your constructs blends. You hack apart the Mutant that stands directly in front of you with a Chain Sword. Your Chord Claw obliterates a rating that is trying to rush you with a rusting cleaver. You step forward, on heavy clawed feet. You roll forward, on heavy treads. You stomp forward, on artificial limbs. You hurl yourself forward on organic legs that do not quite work like they are supposed to, anymore. You float forward, on devices inserted just below your neck.

And you kill. You kill with Chainsword and Claw. You kill with your inbuilt guns. You tear your enemies apart with servo arms and circular saws. Your Flamers roar and burn them.

You kill. You kill. You kill. You kill. None of the ones you kill are worthy of notice. None of these bodies will be useful for recovery. You grind their skulls under your clawed feet as you move forward. You notice, at the edge of your periphery, the pain as some of your servitors are torn down, killed in the inevitable attrition of lucky shots.

You are fine, for now. Within projections. You move forward, and you kill, and you leave the thinking up to your subordinates. Behind you, you vaguely notice the Yulrasians setting charges and generally doing their level best to keep the ship disabled.

They're doing well, you decide. Then you completely ignore them, again.

You cannot tell how much time has passed, when you finally hit your first real opposition. At some point, the crew of the Skinpiercer simply broke, and you began chasing them and killing them.

They are used to terror, but it is terror of a familiar shape, terror that comes to them in the dark and stalks them at night.

It is an entirely different kind of terror to be faced with a tide of walking corpses, fresh blood intermingling with the unguents on their claws and blades.

The Space Marine appears seemingly from nowhere. In one second, there is nothing, and then he is there, standing on the deck before you, Lightning Claw already rushing for your guts. He is fast, but you are in control. A Servitor reaches besides itself, head not even turning. You still almost die. The Claw sweep that cuts the Servo Arm now holding his wrist still almost kills you. It gets close enough you can feel the lightning claw sear the skin of your face. Then a Servo Skull impacts the Night Lord's head and detonates, and before the Space Marine can recover, a circular saw has been driven through his gorget.

You rip the half-severed head from its seat, and hold it over your head with a roar.

Then, the broken cultists come rushing back towards you, eyes wide with desperate fear, and you know what awaits you ahead.

You kill them. You kill every one of them that comes rushing at you. This time, they do not break. Right when they are gone, when you have expended every resource you could have possibly been made to expend on them, the true assault begins.

You are hit, and suddenly the tapestry of your vision begins unraveling, because you know it is not you. You are not on the ground, your chest obliterated by a Bolter Shell. You have not been torn apart by a Chain Sword. A Power Fist has not taken apart everything above your waist.

There are four of them. Just four. Still, they put up a resistance fiercer than anything their crew managed. For a few moments, nothing seems able to touch them. For a few moments, you see your casualty rates rise, see more and more of the sensory perceptions that make up the tapestry of your current existence disappear.

For a moment, your projections tell you that this is unsustainable, that with the current rate of exchange, you are going to lose.

Then the first of the Space Marines goes down, the blades that have replaced the arms of one Murder Servitor crashing through the lenses of his helmet, and it is as though a dam has broken.
The Night Lords are good at what they do. They are masters of fear, and of the shock assault, and that is what they have done now. For ten heartbeats, they have succeeded in this.

But they are not going up against beings that can be shocked, or broken.

They are going up against unfeeling, uncaring murder machines. For ten heartbeats, they outpace the response of the Murder Servitors through sheer speed, and then they get overwhelmed. A second goes down moments after the first, disappearing under skittering, spider-like constructs. A third has his arm ripped off by a servo claw and then continues fighting, attempting a withdrawal before a series of concentrated las shots bring it down in a stagger.

The Fourth….

You are lying on the ground, and your leg is gone. You are ripping apart a Space Marine, Bolter still smoking in his hand, still firing. You are bleeding. You are in pain.

You crawl forward, but then there are more heavy footsteps, and the Yulrasians are suddenly there, picking you up and carrying you away.

Then, everything goes dark.
[Roll:Combat: 8-Doxa-Krainaima: 4d6. 4, 2, 5, 1. Partial Success]

You shake your head, and remind yourself where you are, who you are. You are Eta Nu 9 35. You are in the control room of the station known as the Beacon of Perfection. All your limbs remain attached to your body.

"Sensors are back up", Talef tells you. "Turrets are back up. Unknown contact tracked within the Labyrinth…destroyed."

You check over the Sensors, letting Talef's reports watch over you. The Skinpiercer seems to be dead in space, you notice: smoke is pouring from several gashes in it's side, and something seems to have impacted it's bridge, just where you had intended the Reptilian Beast's drop pod to go.

Instinctively, you reach out for it, and notice that it is gone. Either losing connection to you caused a premature launch, or Madama Kapriosa interpreted her orders somewhat liberally. It doesn't matter either way. It seems to have been delivered. The lack of communications means you cannot check in, but you also would not want to be on that bridge right now.

"...reports of engagement in the sunward reaches", Talef cants to you, and you immediately snap back to attention.
The enemy, it seems, is not yet spent. "Seems to be contained, for now", Adriel tells you. You don't relax. You are fighting Space Marines. The situation can change at any moment.

Next to you, Talef lets loose a burst of angry binaric. "Scrap Code", he explains, and then he is rushing from cogitator to cogitator, frantically making adjustments.

You can see the issue. Talef too is transmitting to you. Something has snuck its way in, when the Haywire field was up and Talef was distracted, and now it is using the reactivating vox casters to move forward, jumping from device to device like a wildfire. It is, you note, making for the center of the station.

"Oh", Talef says, suddenly, and you see a smile spread over his face all of a sudden, "I know what they intend now."

He sends out bursts of scrap code of his own, and a ring of Vox Casters die, all at once, stopping the infection short of the crystal at the core of the station.

"It's a beacon", Talef says. "They intended to use the dread caused to home in on the beacon and bypass defenses via teleportation."

"You stopped this?", you ask, and Talef nods.

"Unless they can find another group of psykers that can emanate dread, they're done. And since they cannot, at this point of time, reach the core, they can't reach the astropaths."

"Would it be just Astropaths", Adriel asks, curious, "or Psykers in general."

You look to Talef, leaving the floor to him to respond, only when you look at him you realize he seems awfully, terribly afraid, and when you look at Adriel you realize the tone his voice had wasn't one of curiosity.

It was one of dread.

[Roll: Electronic Warfare: Myges Talef: 3d6: 4,3,5. Partial Success]

"They know where we are", Talef cants to you the moment after the realization hits.

For a moment, you know nothing but fear. For a moment, there is absolutely nothing you wish to do more than run.

You only make it halfway to the door.


Once upon a time, the things that burst from nothingness might have been called Assault Marines. Once they might have been known as Raptors, the name belying a certain amount of twistedness, but nothing of the things you are now seeing. Now, however, though there are many names they go by, one resonates the most.

Warp Talons.

The night blue of their armor has warped, turned to a swirl of hypnotic patterns, thorns of tarnished gold playing along the rims of their pauldrons and the twisted remnants of their jump packs. Their armor has twisted to be almost insect-like, their helmet resembling the shape of a praying mantis, their lightning claws the pincer of a crab…or a Daemonette. The lenses of their helmets are a deep, emerald green, and they scream as they fight, so loudly that within seconds you are forced to shut off your ears to avoid being rendered combat ineffective.

They come, and they kill. Adriel goes down within the first second, and the rest of the Coterie follows, sliced apart by the Lightning Claws before they can recover from the sudden appearance of the creatures.

Within less than a minute, everyone carrying a weapon within the Chamber is dead, with the exception of you..and Talef, who was already halfway out the door by the time they arrived.

[Roll: Combat: Myges Talef: 1d6: 5. Partial Success]

You barely escape the cloud of noxious chemicals that washes through the room, as Talef pushes his Chem Launcher back through the door and triggers it. The Warp Talons are not so lucky. The very worst chemical weapons a priest of the True Mechanicum specializing in dealing death could conceive wash over the room, and within seconds, everyone within it is dead, a fleshy soup leaking from the Warp Talon's twisted armor, the rest of the leadership of the Coterie of the Blessed Lantern reduced to blank skeletons upon the floor.

For a second, you allow yourself to breathe a sigh of relief. Then a power-armored hand grasps you from behind, and you feel the sting of Lightning Claws against your neck.

You freeze. Then, belatedly, you shut on your ears again, just in time to hear the end of a threat to your life, directed at your subordinate.

You give Talef some credit. He does not immediately obliterate you both.

That is probably more than you would've done

A quick auspex burst confirms a few things: a Space Marine in full Power Armor is standing behind you. Golden piercings are rammed into his skin, vicious hooks digging into nerves, and that just tells you everything you need to know about his religious conviction.

There is something odd about his Lightning Claws: a presence writhes within, and an eye seems to be staring, unblinking, from the back of his hand.

Daemon Weapon, you figure, and then you stop listening to him jabbering about being taken to the 'traitorous handmaiden'. You do not, you find, care particularly much, about the reason he is here.

You throw your head backwards, and your rapidly growing spines pierce both his eyes. He is blind and confused long enough to push away the Lightning Claws. You turn, and your arm blade jumps forward, piercing through

[Roll: Eta Nu 9-35. Uses Regicia's Cybernetics: 4d6. 2, 4, 6, 1. Full Success]


The Night Lord topples without a sound, too slow to react. Instead, it is your own hands that grasp his daemonic lightning claw and ram it into your stomach.

You note, with some faint amusement, seemed to be trying to pull away from your flesh.

Of course, the quite severe pain prevents you from considering what that might mean for very long.

Mercifully, you pass out quite quickly.

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You are, you notice, somewhat to your own chagrin, back in the garden, and you are not alone.

Next to you, skewered upon a broken tree like a butterfly in the collection of some mad god, is the Keeper of Secrets. She…it…seems smaller, somehow: diminished in presence as much as in size in a way you cannot quite explain.

There is a chuckle, from your left, and as you watch, the Daemonette is sauntering forward, closer and closer. Her robes have been replaced by a suit of gleaming, segmented armor, adhering impossibly closely to the contours of her body.

Within the armor, set just above the sternum, is an all too familiar eye, glaring at the world in desperate anger.

You recognize the eye, of course: it's twin is sitting in the face of the Keeper of Secret even know, glaring out into the world.

The Daemonette grins, revealing a mouth full of needle-sharp teeth. She steps past you, eyes fixed on the trapped Keeper, and for a moment you feel yourself filled with an incredible, profound yearning, intermixed with jealousy.

Unaccountably, irrationally, you wish to be the one her attentions is fixed on, even as she bends down and begins to devour her trapped sister.

She looks back to you, after what seems like an eternity, chin dripping with ichor. "I'll let you have what is left of her", she purrs.

"You did me a great service, Eta Nu 9 35. I think, in return, I shall let you leave this place."

She grins, and it is the quintessential grin of the predator before the prey. Already, she is changing, twisting, ascending.

Spines are pushing out from beneath her skin, close to those even know sprouting from your spine, though these do not stop at just the scalp: you see them growing from her neck and cascading down her back, until they might be confused, at a glance, with a long mane of hair. Poison drips from their tip, and you know that to taste it would be death, agonizing beyond measure.

She grins at you, and somehow her face grows more perfect and more beautiful, even as a second pair of eyes opens up beneath the first, all too familiar though their rage is gone.

She licks her lips, and suddenly the spell breaks, and the strange, enduring yearning is replaced by equally potent fear. You run, as fast as you can.

You are dreaming. You run, but you do not move. The Daemonette (is that what she is? Does that label even still apply?) laughs, and then she reaches out, and kills you.

There is, you realize, one difference to an ordinary nightmare.

You do not wake, upon dying, and the process is very slow, and very painful.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________


You wake screaming, and what you see does not make you feel like stopping. The walls of the command center are shifting and twisting: even as you watch, metal is peeling back to reveal all too organic eyes. Laughter rings through the corridors, and it seems awfully familiar.

"Time to go", Myges Talef cants at you, somewhat frantically.

He has waited, you realize, somewhat stunned. Then you realize that there is no hole in your stomach: instead, a Lightning Claw hangs from your belt as though it had always been there, the eye that once blinked from its back now gouged out. Pain emanates from it, and despair: the presence within it is much diminished, but it is still potent.

The entire situation is a mess, but perhaps you have at least gotten something out of it.

Now you just have to get out.

___________________________________________________________________________

Escape:

[] Rapid
You will move as quickly as possible, hoping that rapid speed will keep you ahead of the twisting corridors. Of course, you might get lost, but with the way the Station seems to be twisting, that might happen anyways

[] Careful
You will make your way forward carefully, seeking to understand the station as it is shifting around you and maneuver around any threats that might appear. Of course, you run the risk of not being able to deal with a threat, but at least you're not going to get lost.

[] Destructive
You are going to go in a straight line. If walls stand in the way, they will have to go. Risky for all the reasons blowing holes into the walls of a Space Station that is rapidly undergoing warp-based transformation might be risky

[] Loot
Well, a lot of things are probably up for grabs right now, and you might as well be the one to grab them. Of course, this means a higher risk, but also a higher reward

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A/N
The Yulrasian Heavy Assault Regiment was in the update as an option for the longest time. Then I seem to have accidentally deleted them, and not noticed until the plan was closed. As such, they've been put where I thought they made some sense, and not been subjected to any of the fates they might have been subjected to had you had any input.

Also, while I'm here: I'm aware that the vote is somewhat disproportionate to the length of the update. The next one is going to be a bit shorter, with a few more vote options. Mostly, I just wanted to get this one out.