Just to be sure, can you specify if Maintain stealthy approach while gathering more information involves staying at the edge of the system (close to the Mandeville point) or if going closer to the planet 3? In that case, how close? (the closer the more info you can gather + the higher the probability of being discovered)
A 40k Rogue Trader in the Multiverse
- Thread starter LordNymphys
- Start date
- Crossover Art Quest Mature Sci-Fi
Just to be sure, can you specify if Maintain stealthy approach while gathering more information involves staying at the edge of the system (close to the Mandeville point) or if going closer to the planet 3? In that case, how close? (the closer the more info you can gather + the higher the probability of being discovered)
As a note (adding it just because our inventory is ponderous, not because I am suggesting any specific strategy),
I remind that we have as well
-2 Aquila Landers.;
-2 Arvus Landers;
-1 Necromundan Heavy Orbit Lifter.
You can go back in the threads and see the specifications of those, in case you want to suggest using them for combat or scouting, I can answer questions.
For practical effects the Aquila lander is the only vehicle we have that can travel from the edge of the system, the others are constrained to Earth-Moon like kind of distances (I mean, in theory they can travel from the edge of the system, but it would be a few years long travel).
I remind that we have as well
-2 Aquila Landers.;
-2 Arvus Landers;
-1 Necromundan Heavy Orbit Lifter.
You can go back in the threads and see the specifications of those, in case you want to suggest using them for combat or scouting, I can answer questions.
For practical effects the Aquila lander is the only vehicle we have that can travel from the edge of the system, the others are constrained to Earth-Moon like kind of distances (I mean, in theory they can travel from the edge of the system, but it would be a few years long travel).
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* For the resource count update I will update when something meaningful happens, for now I am just keeping track mentally of how much food and prometheus we are consuming
I'm sorry but I don't really know for certain what it entails as I was just trying to engage @thesarge7500 in discussion and build the plan. I did not really think about how a stealthy approach would be executed. Sorry I'm not very good with open plans. 🙇♂️
@BobTheNinja Would you like to help here?
BobTheNinja
Sword of Possibility
- Location
- Multiverse Sector Texas
Okay, after reviewing the star system information, here's my proposal:
[X] Maintain silent running as much as possible. Attempt to approach within at least 0.05 AU of the Oceanic planet while, if possible, maintaining an orbital trajectory that will allow us to hide our approach behind the Dead Moon.
-[X] Attempt to determine number and composition of pirate fleet as well as their position, status, and current likely activities.
-[X] Maintain elevated combat readiness in preparation for combat.
[X] Maintain silent running as much as possible. Attempt to approach within at least 0.05 AU of the Oceanic planet while, if possible, maintaining an orbital trajectory that will allow us to hide our approach behind the Dead Moon.
-[X] Attempt to determine number and composition of pirate fleet as well as their position, status, and current likely activities.
-[X] Maintain elevated combat readiness in preparation for combat.
This works for me.
[X] Maintain silent running as much as possible. Attempt to approach within at least 0.05 AU of the Oceanic planet while, if possible, maintaining an orbital trajectory that will allow us to hide our approach behind the Dead Moon.
-[X] Attempt to determine number and composition of pirate fleet as well as their position, status, and current likely activities.
-[X] Maintain elevated combat readiness in preparation for combat.
[X] Maintain silent running as much as possible. Attempt to approach within at least 0.05 AU of the Oceanic planet while, if possible, maintaining an orbital trajectory that will allow us to hide our approach behind the Dead Moon.
-[X] Attempt to determine number and composition of pirate fleet as well as their position, status, and current likely activities.
-[X] Maintain elevated combat readiness in preparation for combat.
ok, cool, we have a proposal then, will keep it open for today or if someone comes up with a different one by then I will prolong it, otherwise I will roll the dices and go ahead with the narrative
So, I think we can safely assume there are not going to be othr proposals for today
Rolling:
[X] Maintain silent running as much as possible. Attempt to approach within at least 0.05 AU of the Oceanic planet while, if possible, maintaining an orbital trajectory that will allow us to hide our approach behind the Dead Moon.
-[X] Attempt to determine number and composition of pirate fleet as well as their position, status, and current likely activities.
-[X] Maintain elevated combat readiness in preparation for combat.
-[X] Pirate craft, passive roll to detect the Vaduz (with disadvantage, because they don't know they are coming, where to look and because hiddend behind the Dead Moon in the last part of the journey)
-[X] Xenos Civlization, passive roll to detect the Vaduz (with disadvantage, because they don't know they are coming, where to look and because hiddend behind the Dead Moon in the last part of the journey)
As always, the lower the better, disadvantage applies worst roll, applying secret modifiers
Rolling:
[X] Maintain silent running as much as possible. Attempt to approach within at least 0.05 AU of the Oceanic planet while, if possible, maintaining an orbital trajectory that will allow us to hide our approach behind the Dead Moon.
-[X] Attempt to determine number and composition of pirate fleet as well as their position, status, and current likely activities.
-[X] Maintain elevated combat readiness in preparation for combat.
-[X] Pirate craft, passive roll to detect the Vaduz (with disadvantage, because they don't know they are coming, where to look and because hiddend behind the Dead Moon in the last part of the journey)
-[X] Xenos Civlization, passive roll to detect the Vaduz (with disadvantage, because they don't know they are coming, where to look and because hiddend behind the Dead Moon in the last part of the journey)
As always, the lower the better, disadvantage applies worst roll, applying secret modifiers
So, these are very interesting results...
We fail to stay hidden...from the Xenos, but we go undetected by the pirates.
We have a critical success in scouting the area and assessing enemy sources
And we have a critical failure into combat readiness, lol
Let the quill run this on the parchment.
We fail to stay hidden...from the Xenos, but we go undetected by the pirates.
We have a critical success in scouting the area and assessing enemy sources
And we have a critical failure into combat readiness, lol
Let the quill run this on the parchment.
Well it looks we'll be running the crew through some drills
BobTheNinja
Sword of Possibility
- Location
- Multiverse Sector Texas
I guess so. I know it's mostly because of a bad roll, but it's still disappointing, since we had done pretty well with our initial rescue interdiction against the Orkz to save that merchant vessel.
Bad Drills, good scouting
MACROCANNON BAY | PRIMARY BATTERY ALPHA-1 | SIX HOURS INTO COASTING TRAJECTORY
Bridge Master Catoz chewed on the edge of his glove, pink, greasy lips glistening under the glow of lumen-strips strung like entrails across the upper gantries. The drill klaxon had long since become background noise, a rhythmic blare between each calculated yell of Sergeant Lopez.
Lopez's voice cracked like a whip through the belly of the Vaduz.
"Loader teams, positions! Prep next shell! Manual harness rotation in ten seconds!"
The bay was a cathedral of iron and movement—four hundred meters long, two decks high, threaded with gantries, scaffold-rails, swinging chains, and liturgical machine-code stenciled in sacred rust. Two macro-shells sat at the base of the loader shaft, each the size of a railway carriage, burnished with oil and prayer-oaths scrawled by ink-soaked servo-limbs.
Menials—bare-chested, chain-collared, sweat-slicked—swarmed over the shell like ants dismembering prey. Twelve of them at a time maneuvered the thing into alignment with the crane harness, swearing and singing under their breath. Someone dropped a plasma torch, and a distant scream echoed from the access shaft—either pain or a hymn. It was hard to tell.
Catoz scratched beneath the folds of his collar, head lolling slightly. His mind drifted. The hammock in his quarters creaked in memory. He could still see the pages of that dog-eared pict-comic tucked into his stash—Mistress of the Flagellants, Part XII. Pale aristocratic girls bent over silk cushions, flogged in rhythm by golden rods. One even had a tiara. He imagined she sounded like that seneschal, Jalna, when she was annoyed—sharp but sexy.
He giggled.
That's when the crane groaned.
A chorus of screams followed—real, now. Bolts sheared with a sound like a broken prayer-bell. The support frame cracked, metal twisting like bones under pressure. Then the entire crane dropped six meters in a heartbeat. Two menials were underneath.
The sound was... pulp and crunch and silence.
Catoz stood dumbfounded as sparks rained down. Men scattered. One crewman vomited. Lopez shouted something about lockdown protocols and yelled for the emergency rites to be activated.
Catoz panicked.
His hand slipped forward—sweat-slick fingers closing around a silvered lever he wasn't even supposed to be near. He yanked it downward. It screamed in protest.
Somewhere above, the machine spirit of Alpha-1 awakened in confusion. A warning glyph flashed on a nearby cogitator. Then, too late, its binary voice wailed through the ducting.
+++ INCORRECT CYCLE INITIATED +++
The macro-barrel recoiled, half-spun, empty—but not quiet. The electromagnetic ring accelerated without the sacred timing alignment. A burst of raw force shook the bay. Magnetic fields twisted. The rear section of the barrel vented shrapnel and vaporized lubricant. Sparks cascaded. Steel screamed.
A bloom of force—sharp, localized, violent—ripped through the gun deck.
Metal teeth and coils flew. One struck Catoz in the face. He didn't feel it. One moment he was thinking about the tiara girl, the next he was falling into blackness, his body thrown backward into the iron pulpit he'd manned for thirty years.
CAPTAIN'S STRATEGIC LOG | COMMAND BRIDGE – TWELVE HOURS INTO COASTING
Hans read the damage report in silence.
The red font on the data-slate flickered slightly, as if the words themselves were reluctant to appear:
Callidus stood by, quiet and immobile, steam curling from his shoulder vents.
"The barrel fired empty," Hans said without looking up. "Recoiled against vacuum. How?"
"Ritual sequences were violated, Captain. A lever was pulled out of sacred order. The coil... became humoral."
Hans set the slate down. "And the lever?"
"Bridge Master Catoz pulled it," Jalna replied, arms crossed. Her tone was flat, professional. "Unclear why. Possible panic. No official command issued."
Hans pinched the bridge of his nose.
"We have one functional macrocannon left, reduced shell feed, and a Black Boa cruiser floating above a prison moon full of broken humans. Great."
Jalna's voice didn't waver. "Crew morale is shaken, but controllable. The servitor teams have already begun clean-up. Lopez is directing it personally."
Hans exhaled. The room smelled faintly of copper and engine oil, as always. He turned to Callidus.
"Sanctify what you must. Pray, anoint, flense the hull if it helps. Just get me that cannon back within a month."
The Magos clicked once. "So it is logged."
Hans returned to the command pulpit. DantArm17 glowed faintly in the far view. He stared at it through narrowed eyes, imagining what it must feel like to be in a slave pen on that rotting moon—watching the stars shift, knowing the Black Boa might come again.
He tapped the slate once more. The next line of decisions was waiting.
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Tactical Briefing Room | Officer's Spire, Deck 3 Forward, Vaduz
Solar Date: M41.995.146.6 | 13 Days into Silent Drift
The adamantium table thrummed softly under the weight of sanctified power lines and surveyor conduits. Light flickered across its engraved surface, throwing shadows across inlaid purity seals, rusted copper saints, and bolt-scored dedication plates. Above it, the hololithic array hovered—half a dozen data-spires feeding the display in flickering green-blue vectors.
Hans Zimmerman stood at the head of the table, arms folded, jaw clenched tight. The bridge had maintained full blackout for nearly a fortnight. Each whisper from the auspex decks carried weight. Each datapoint, a step closer to the rot.
Jalna sat on the right flank, sharp as ever, the stylus in her hand chewing between her teeth, eyes darting as she drew invisible lines from orbit patterns to energy return signatures. Her braid was unkempt today—probably hadn't left the deck in hours.
Caldan Fara stood opposite her, elbow resting on the edge of the table, her weight shifted onto one hip. Her boots were still dusted from the lower gunnery decks. Her jacket hung open at the collar, inked glyphs and personal kill-tallies scrawled across her forearms. Her voice came slow, drawled, almost songlike, just like before—Armageddon to the core.
"Cap'n, that thing—it's floatin' like a goddamned bishop on a soup bowl. Ain't moved. Not one inch. Like it knows it don't need to."
The Black Boa spun slowly in geosynchronous orbit above the oceanic planet, locked to one of the massive floating cities. She was small for a void predator, just 1.7 kilometers, old hull lines—Imperial class frigate, probably scuttled centuries ago and rearmed by scavenger kings. But her bow bristled with something alien. Long-barreled, finely veined, almost organic in curve. Wrong.
Rallax leaned forward, skeletal hands twitching at the projection controls.
"That... that's Eretekh work. I swear on the salt of my lungs. Didn't think I'd see it again."
Magos Callidus's vox-unit hissed.
"Structure and armature non-standard. Warp-burnished alloys. Barrel cores resist mapping. The machine-spirit of the Vaduz rejects communion. Contamination... likely."
Jalna's stylus slid back into her braid as she brought the projection into tighter resolution.
"Hasn't fired. Hasn't moved. But these—" she pointed at the dotted red arcs drifting in slow rhythm, "—those are supply paths. The orbital barges, two to three hundred meters each. Imperial build, stripped bare and repurposed."
The paths were precise. Floating city to the Boa. Boa to the moon. Always the same three cities. Always the same schedule.
"The three reactor-fed hubs," Jalna continued. "Only ones showing fusion output. The rest—nineteen of them—are surviving off biomass production. Algae tanks. That's where it gets ugly."
She turned, gesturing toward the planetary heatmap. "Based on absorption metrics and emission drift from the algae blooms, we're looking at two to three billion xenos down there. Spread across the oceans, supported by deepwater structure we can't even see. Eight hundred million in the floating cities alone."
Hans didn't answer immediately. He leaned in, eyes narrowing as he watched one of the barges begin its slow crawl toward the moon.
"And there," Jalna tapped again. "City seventeen. Human signatures. Tens of thousands. Working the foundries, I'd guess. No void traffic. No surface launches. They've clipped the wings of a spacefaring species."
Callidus adjusted the sensor feed. A series of high-resolution stills magnified across the center of the table—grainy at first, then stabilizing.
The creatures were aquatic, unmistakably alien, but strangely elegant. One image showed a sleek blue form, dolphin-sized, trailing thin tendrils from its snout, its skin iridescent in the sunlight breaking through shallow waters. Smaller groups of similar beings darted alongside it in synchronized motion. Another frame caught a larger variant, scaled and brilliant with a fan of glowing dorsal blades—a male-female, perhaps. Thorny spines jutted from its flank.
Then came the largest—a shadow beneath the waves, as wide as a cargo barge and moving with ponderous grace. Its mass displaced an entire section of a floating platform, lifting it slightly as it passed beneath. One eye caught the light—alien, ancient, enormous. Hans's mind reached for familiar shapes, but only "whale" surfaced. Even that felt lacking.
Some of the xenos rode subaquatic vehicles, bulbous constructs of coral and shell-like plating, stirring silt clouds as they moved between feeding beds. In the background, long rows of algae farms undulated—living machinery tended by bare-handed workers.
The image froze.
The display shifted to the moon.
Its surface unraveled—humid, tangled, fecund. Fifty percent shallow sea. Forty percent swamps and sweetwater lakes. The remaining ten, where the pirates had dug in, was forest and mud hills. The contrast was stark—wilderness everywhere, and then this gouge of industry, scabbed over with shanties and ferrocrete bastions.
"Xenos colonies cluster in the southern seas," Jalna murmured. "One to two million. No active signal traffic. Their links to the oceanic planet look severed. Probably deliberate."
At the heart of the cleared zone sat the pirate base. Half-labor camp, half fortress, with barracks, towers, and a voidshield cocoon over the core. Improvised shelters stretched out from its flanks like lesions—hundreds of tents, shacks, rust-stained prefab domes. Inside: four thousand pirates. Thirty thousand prisoners. Women made up the bulk. Children dotted the inner pens.
East of the base, the land turned strange.
"Pull magnification," Hans said.
The image twisted and redrew.
Trees had blackened into skeletons. The ground was split with shallow craters and matted flesh. Bones bloomed in piles where bodies had rotted into the clay. Fungus coated everything, sickly and spattered with grey nodules.
"Bioagent?"
Magos Erika, standing stiff in the corner, stepped forward. "Spores. Mio-chemical signature. Not clean. Probably improvised. Could be xenos retaliation. Could be pirates testing something they didn't understand."
"Either way," Caldan muttered, "some bastard cooked too hot."
Then came the villa.
At first glance, it looked like a nobleman's manor gone mad. Spiked palisades circled it like the teeth of a flayed god. One tower leaned half-collapsed into an albino tree, while a dome of cracked pearl glass shimmered weakly beneath the atmospheric haze. Statues lined the walk—bronze beasts, nude figures, the looted dead of a dozen failed worlds. The crest of Scarda gleamed from one of them—its bull, sunken in the mud.
And beside the front portico, unmistakable even now—a Drukhari skybike, sleek and silent, like a ghost caught mid-scream.
"No movement around it," Jalna said. "Could be loot. Could be worse."
Hans looked over the whole scene once more, jaw tense.
"Six hours to the moon's shadow?"
Jalna nodded.
He exhaled slowly. "All right. Let's vanish."
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Vote options:
[X] Keep hiding behind the Dead Moon, send scouts to the Swamp Moon and/or the Oceanic planet;
[X]Turn away;
[X] Direct engagement with the Black Boa;
[X] Hail the pirates, negotiate a deal with them;
[X] Hail the Xenos, negotiate with them;
[X] Bomb the pirate base;
[X] Bomb a xenos floating city;
[X] Open Proposal
*I didn't include the option invade the pirate base because it would be incredibly stupid to do that with the Black Boa still around and only one Heavy Lifter at our disposal.
[X] Keep hiding behind the Dead Moon, send scouts to the Swamp Moon and/or the Oceanic planet;
[X]Turn away;
[X] Direct engagement with the Black Boa;
[X] Hail the pirates, negotiate a deal with them;
[X] Hail the Xenos, negotiate with them;
[X] Bomb the pirate base;
[X] Bomb a xenos floating city;
[X] Open Proposal
*I didn't include the option invade the pirate base because it would be incredibly stupid to do that with the Black Boa still around and only one Heavy Lifter at our disposal.
[X] Keep hiding behind the Dead Moon, send scouts to the Swamp Moon and/or the Oceanic planet
Unless anyone has a better idea, I like checking out the moon and planet and waiting until our gun is repaired.
Unless anyone has a better idea, I like checking out the moon and planet and waiting until our gun is repaired.
[X] Keep hiding behind the Dead Moon, send scouts to the Swamp Moon and/or the Oceanic planet
Honestly I have nothing, although I guess this would give us more time to get things back in order on the ship.
BobTheNinja
Sword of Possibility
- Location
- Multiverse Sector Texas
[X] Keep hiding behind the Dead Moon, send scouts to the Swamp Moon and/or the Oceanic planet
I don't like our odds of trying to engage with one of our two macrocannons out of commission, that's a severe loss of offensive capacity. Especially since the Black Boa seems to be outfitted with unknown technology. We should continue gathering info while repairs are underway.
I don't like our odds of trying to engage with one of our two macrocannons out of commission, that's a severe loss of offensive capacity. Especially since the Black Boa seems to be outfitted with unknown technology. We should continue gathering info while repairs are underway.
As usual, the lower the better, so we have a critical success for our scouts (first roll) and a success for repairing the macrocannon
Away teems on the moon and the planet
New
Reconnaissance Part I: The Swamp Moon Descent
Sector: DantArm17-3a | Surface Infiltration Unit Gamma | Commanding Officer: Arch-Militant Caldan Fara
Solar Date: M41.995.146.7 – Outer DantArm17 System, Bridge of the Vaduz
| Fourteen Days into Lunar Shadow
The Aquila lander came in low and hard, its landing thrusters stirring up columns of greenish mist and fungal spores that glowed faintly in the night. Mud hissed beneath the stabilizers as the hull settled into a cleft between two long, knotted hills—half-solid masses of ancient stone overgrown with fleshy mosses and spike-rooted alien shrubs. The hills jutted like islands in a morass of swampwater and translucent aquatic vines, their tops barely visible through the fog.
Caldan Fara stepped down the ramp first, bolter slung over one shoulder, her boots squelching into the sucking, red-black mud. She looked up, taking in the landscape with the practiced silence of someone who'd grown up in Armageddon's ash wastes and fought greenskin raids in jungles where the trees bled and screamed.
"Smells like wet warcrime," she muttered. "Let's set perimeter an' go dark. Fast an' proper."
Behind her, ten troopers fanned out in double file—disciplined, but nervous. Their flak-armor was already dripping with muck, and the swamp insects buzzed like vox static. One of them, Corporal Vren, slapped his neck and cursed.
"Permission to incinerate the local fauna, ma'am?"
"No," Caldan said without looking. "But you find somethin' talkin' with more'n six legs? You light it up."
Magos Lhoris descended next, six legs folding from his thorax-like lower body, his mechanical spine glistening with injector lines and data-spikes. The green lenses of his ocular visor scanned the environment with rhythmic whirrs. He paused to observe a bulbous, floating insect the size of a fist latch onto a soldier's helmet before dissolving in a puff of acid.
"Fascinating," Lhoris said. "Atmosphere moist with reactive pheromones. Local fauna demonstrates biochemical mimicry and aggression. Possible territorial behavior. Also: aesthetically displeasing."
"Glad we brought you," Caldan muttered dryly. "Nice t'have someone to narrate the nightmares."
Magos Erika, compact and hunched in her synth-weave robes, raised a decontamination wand and began scanning the soil. "Biological densities high. Spore indexes approaching Class-VI saturation. This entire biosphere is a cocktail of engineered evolution. I would wager twenty of your soldiers this wasn't natural."
"Good thing we ain't bettin' with soldiers," Caldan said, waving the squad forward.
They crawled through the swamp for two days—silent, masked, and sweating beneath rebreathers. Mud came up to their waists in places. The terrain was alive. Trees glistened with slime. Something howled once in the dark and didn't stop until morning. One night, a soldier named Hess was nearly pulled into a sinkhole by something shaped like a tongue. It wasn't a tongue.
They fought once—an ambush by amphibian predators, slick-skinned and eyeless, bounding through the mist like muscle-clad cannons. Five of them leapt from a camouflaged pool. The first tore Trooper Bendik's leg off at the knee. Caldan shot it point-blank in the neck with her bolt pistol and kept moving. The rest were killed by lasrifle volleys and a plasma grenade.
The soldiers didn't complain much after that.
Only Vren grumbled, holding up an Administratum-branded canister of insecticide.
"Combat-rated," he read. "Tested against sixteen species of heretical invertebrates."
"It's perfume," Caldan muttered under her breath. "Might make the worms bite softer."
Nightfall, Day Two | Two Clicks from the Pirate Base Perimeter
The base emerged in spectral silence—spotlights cutting narrow arcs across the flattened treeline. Barbed fences gleamed in the distance, broken only by watchtowers and half-collapsed sensor rigs. The air stank of burnt fuel and ammonia.
They stopped in the underbrush.
Lhoris adjusted the lens focus on his cranial stalk, eyes narrowing.
"I can confirm it," he said. "The blighted zone east of the compound. Soil contamination aligns with plasmid signatures. Engineered microorganism. Waterborne vector. Spread pattern indicates targeted deployment... but inconsistent application."
"Sloppy," Erika added, kneeling beside him. "Not our work. And not Mechanicus-level biotactics."
"Xenos?" Caldan asked, voice low.
"I would estimate so," Lhoris said. "They were at war. This was an escalation. Unclear if it backfired."
"Well," Caldan muttered, "seems someone fired 'fore they aimed. Typical."
Third Night | Perimeter Breach | Pirate Base
She crawled beneath the outer perimeter during the changing of the shift. Slit one pirate's throat beneath the armpit, caught the body in silence. Stole the tunic, smeared her face with ash. Moved like she belonged.
The interior was a sprawl of smoke and shouting.
The outer camp was worse than she'd imagined—miles of shacks and tents. Mud channels for streets. Steel cages half-submerged in filth. The smell of sickness and broken things. People stared without hope—men and women from feudal worlds, their eyes dulled by weeks or years of exposure to technologies they didn't understand and violence they understood too well.
The tavern was a half-collapsed prefab dome, patched with sheets of scrapmetal and soot-darkened stained glass from some long-dead cathedral. Inside, a dozen pirates hunched over warped tables, drinking from tin cups and snorting pale powders off shattered dataslates. Fumes of spiced liquor, algae-vape, and old blood made the air dense and vile. A warped vox-caster on the wall played what might've once been music—now reduced to static, chords, and rhythmic screaming.
Many were mutants—mostly men, some only arguably human. One's spine jutted like a ladder through open sores in his back. Another had teeth growing from the side of his neck, chewing reflexively as he drank. A third had one eye so swollen and veined it pulsed with every heartbeat, like a fruit about to burst.
A girl passed between them, tray shaking in her hands. She wore what had once been a servant's gown—now torn and damp. Feudal garb, high-necked and ceremonial, now ruined. Her eye was swollen shut, lips split. She couldn't have been older than sixteen. One pirate, fat and red-faced, reached out and slid a filthy hand between her asscheeks as she passed. She flinched and didn't stop moving.
Caldan's hand drifted toward her bolter.
"One round. One breath. One less rot-bastard in the stars." She held the thought there. "But not now. Not yet. Mission's still breathin'."
She moved to the bar.
Three pirates leaned against it. Drunk. Swearing. All heavily armed. One was tattooed from neck to ankles with prison glyphs. One had black veins curling across his chest, likely a side effect of some tainted stimm.
"Shipment goes out next moon-cycle. To the Bone Market," the first one muttered, blowing smoke out of a rotten hole where his cheek should've been.
"Which Bone Market?" the second asked, blinking dumbly.
The first turned to stare at him. "What in the Emperor's syphilitic name d'you mean which Bone Market?"
"You know," the idiot slurred, "the cold one, or the other cold one?"
The third pirate leaned back and laughed, snorting into his tin mug. "Don't listen to Blit. He got his brains pickled on that grox piss from Alba."
"Yeh, but still, you know, the one with the pointy-eared freaks—"
"Drukhari," muttered the first, shaking his head. "Katta Bone-Eaters too. And them robed bastards with no faces. It's the one with the bazaar tunnels and the frost statues."
"Yeh," said the third. "That's the one. Sold a million captives there. Twice. Even the boss said it was a good cut."
"Didn't the boss say we were behind on quotas?" asked the idiot.
"He said we'd burn if we disappoint," the first said, suddenly sober. "Said he'd watch us through the ambers in his eyes."
They all fell quiet.
Caldan didn't wait to hear more. She moved.
In the shadow of the compound's center—beneath the cracked towers and faux-victorian domes—she saw the villa from the inside for the first time. The place was even worse up close.
Crimson banners stitched with flayed skin fluttered from broken balconies. One wing was shaped like a Calixian manse, all iron vines and stained glass—cracked and painted over. Another was a stone-brick ruin of feudal make, its chimney spewing pink smoke. At its heart stood a massive copper dome, etched with void-etched psalms in fifty languages. Everywhere: bronze statues, looted friezes, upturned fountains spilling grey water.
Guards stood at the gate. Two had combi-weapons slung at their hips. A third leaned against the pillar wearing a mask of gold filigree, one eyehole glittering with red light.
Inside the compound, the voidshield hummed—a pale shimmer hanging in the air like tension made manifest.
She felt it in her gut: this was the eye of the rot. The captain was inside.
"Could pop one. Could vanish. Could die tryin'," she thought.
She didn't push it.
She turned. She vanished.
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Sector: DantArm17-3 | Oceanic Surface Recon Unit Delta
Commanding Officer: Sergeant Lopez | Explorator Support: Magos Calyx | Field Descent: Magos Rallax
Solar Date: M41.995.146.9 – Floating Ruins of Destroyed City Twelve
The second Aquila lander descended in absolute silence, save for the dull groan of its heat-dispersal vanes flexing against upper-atmospheric drag. Its hull came to rest on a charred raft of organic ruins—an ancient shellwork deck twisted like a shattered vertebrae, buoyed still by patches of coralline bladder-structure that kept the ruins afloat decades after the pirate bombardment.
Sergeant Lopez stepped out, boots scraping against barnacled bone-surface. The air reeked of algae, acid, and something faintly floral—rotting protein, maybe, but processed through alien lungs. He wrinkled his nose beneath his rebreather.
"Disgusting," he said to no one in particular. "Heretical sponge-bastards built cities outta whale guts."
Behind him, Magos Calyx emerged in perfect stillness. Their sleek, black matte syn-skin shimmered with thin condensation under the humidity. The softly humming cranial dome bore no eyes—just a single lateral visor band that pulsed faintly across multiple spectra. Their movement was fluid, careful, and unnervingly silent as they scanned the ruins, mechadendrites unfurling with elegant precision.
"They built with muscle memory," Calyx said, voice low, modulated, fluid. "Not steel. This city grew... then died."
Calyx's spindly feet adjusted to the bone-slick surface, compensating for the oppressive gravity with micro-impulse correction. "Feels like walking in lead syrup. Even the breeze has weight."
Rallax followed next, his heavy exo-frame stepping from the ramp with methodical hisses. He and Calyx exchanged a curt nod—no need for words. Both had arrived with the team. Both knew what they were about to enter.
Ten troopers fanned out across the fractured platforms, auspex scanners sweeping the perimeter. The ruin's geometry was both ordered and chaotic: ribbed archways stood above rooms half-sunk in the tide, while transparent floors of calcified glass revealed submerged growth-labs or shrines shaped like inverted amphorae. Some walls had fused into veins of living shell—biomatter now long-dead, but unnervingly preserved.
Lopez passed a mural: a dome of concentric scales, colored with luminous ink. The scene showed figures swimming upward, tendrils entwined, toward what looked like a massive, sunlit eye. He snorted.
"Idolatry and mucus," he muttered. "Par for the xenos."
Submerged Module Alpha | Rallax Descent Channel 01
Solar Date: M41.995.146.9 – Four Hours After Landing
Rallax's armor sealed with a hiss. He adjusted the manifold prongs along his spine, blinking twice to sync his internal cogitators with Calyx's uplink.
"I will descend," he said. "Maintain surface relay. Uplink every twelve minutes."
Calyx tapped a control pad mounted to their forearm. "Confirmed. If you don't ping on time, I'm claiming salvage rights on your augmetic core. The voice modulator is mine."
Rallax did not reply.
With a precise leap, he vanished beneath the surface. Water swallowed him whole. Only the trail of bubbles remained, and then nothing.
Subsurface Layer 01 | Depth: 18m | Five Hours Later
The first chamber was a collapsed storage gallery, filled with egg-like cysts, long-dormant and calcified. Rallax advanced past dangling cables of hardened nerve-fiber and bony spines, until he reached the central chamber: a chemical reaction sphere, carved like a heart and pulsing no longer.
At its core sat an acid vat, the fluid inside thick and golden, slowly swirling with motion.
Rallax extended a sampling claw, scraped a vial's worth.
[LOG R-564.A]
"Chemical trace active. Acidic properties beyond Class-VI. Highly reactive. Erosive to organic matter. Shrimp specimens degraded in 0.7 seconds."
He catalogued the chamber for later inspection and moved on.
Subsurface Layer 03 | Depth: 38m | Seventeen Hours Later
The corridor was narrow, ribbed like a throat. A faint tremor passed through the structure.
Then, without warning, a mass broke through the ceiling membrane—a massive cephalopod, black-eyed and slick, with barbed suckers and a maw ringed with rotating teeth. Its arms coiled toward him.
Rallax fired from his right limb—a twin-beam plasma lance crackled and burst. Steam exploded through the water. The creature shrieked, thrashed, dissolved into a trail of white ink and meat.
[LOG R-567.D]
"Hostile neutralized. Non-sapient. Six-limbed predator. Defensive response successful."
His systems pinged. Time to surface.
He was navigating the maze of submerged ruins, backtracing his way to the surface when they came from the dark—sleek bodies sliding through algae-choked halls. Xenos. Sapient. Their forms darted like spears, flanking him.
Rallax's optics narrowed.
Ten of them. Blue-grey hide. The size of a fully grown grox. All bearing underslung biochemical weapons—some organic-fleshed like the ruins, others clearly hybrid-tech. They fanned out in a crescent formation, trying to box him in.
The leader approached—larger, vibrant with colored crests across the head-spines and pectoral fronds. A male-female caste, unmistakable. The black of command. Her gestures were sharp, practiced.
[WARNING: LOCK PATTERN DETECTED]
Rallax spun a full 180 and fired his rear thrusters. High-pressure jets propelled him backward through a crumbling hall of collapsed spires and spiral tunnels. Two of the xenos fired green-tinted bursts—chemical pulses that impacted the floor and exploded in clouds of sizzling foam.
"Engagement confirmed," Rallax growled into the vox burst to Calyx. "Sapient resistance. Hostile posture."
The lead male-female gave chase.
Rallax fired an arc of micro-mines behind him—jagged spheres spun from his left hip. They pinged on sonar and detonated as the pursuing xenos entered the radius. One xenos vanished in a pressure bloom. Another staggered, its exosckeleton twisted from the blast.
Still, the others followed.
He twisted into a vertical shaft, rising through the ruins like a harpoon. His internal servos hissed. A mounted claw extended from his back and swung forward to lash out at a pursuing male—clean contact. Blood clouded the water, black and thick.
He kept going.
The sonar quieted for one heartbeat. Then—
Something blocked the light above him.
A shadow the size of a ruin. Tentacles as thick as trees. Plates of chitin glimmering faintly with molten circuitry. A vast bulk shifted in the water, displacing so much current Rallax had to anchor himself to avoid tumbling.
He darted into the bones of a half-collapsed temple—a maze of halls, ascending and descending in impossible geometries, each corridor smaller than the last. The xenos followed, not in a frenzy but with perfect synchronization.
Rallax doubled back. Fired pulse-charges to confuse their sonar. Faked a right-turn and cut his reactor for three seconds to drift in silence.
The stalkers vanished behind him.
He turned into a massive vaulted chamber, high-ceilinged and open to the trench beyond.
He thought he was alone.
Until the wall blinked.
The creature rose behind the reef like the crest of a tidal god. A male-male—colossal. Whale-sized, its tendrils plated with psalm-etched gold, its eyes glowing with embedded tech—one green, one orange. Between its fronds pulsed a device—no longer crude. A lattice of living coral and metal, blinking with cognition.
Its presence pressed into Rallax's cortex like weight.
"You... are loud," it said. Not in Gothic—not quite. The voice came through the water and the translator at once. Deep. Resonant. Felt as much as heard.
"You burn. You fire. You watch from the hiding light."
Rallax tried to move—his arms primed.
The xenos didn't raise a weapon. It only loomed, filling the cathedral of stone.
"You run. You fight. That is good. We see you are... not theirs."
He extended a limb—slow, deliberate. Within it: the device. Compact, crystalline, glowing. It floated forward, held aloft by buoyant control tethers.
"Take this. Your master will come. The Council... will speak."
Rallax reached for the device, talons careful.
"Why?" he asked—his own vox modulation low.
The xenos answered with a single word, translated only as—
"Better."
Then it turned. The water shifted. And like a dream breaking, it vanished into the trench.
Surface Ruins | Dusk | Retrieval Zone
Rallax burst from the sea in a thunder of steam and brine, the alien device clutched in his hand.
Calyx turned from their auspex, matte-black syn-skin glinting in the fading light.
"You look like someone just proposed marriage."
Rallax's helm retracted with a hiss.
"Worse. They want to talk."
He handed over the device.
Calyx scanned it in silence, visor band flickering through spectrums. "Bio-cybernetic. Not grown—forged. Smart. The signal's been aimed at us for at least six days."
"They called us the hiding light," Rallax said. "They've been watching since the moment we entered orbit."
Calyx tilted their smooth cranial plate.
"Well," they said, brushing algae from the relay port, "I say we talk. Before they decide we're not better than the last devils."
Behind them, the ocean darkened.
And below—something watched.
Sector: DantArm17-3a | Surface Infiltration Unit Gamma | Commanding Officer: Arch-Militant Caldan Fara
Solar Date: M41.995.146.7 – Outer DantArm17 System, Bridge of the Vaduz
| Fourteen Days into Lunar Shadow
The Aquila lander came in low and hard, its landing thrusters stirring up columns of greenish mist and fungal spores that glowed faintly in the night. Mud hissed beneath the stabilizers as the hull settled into a cleft between two long, knotted hills—half-solid masses of ancient stone overgrown with fleshy mosses and spike-rooted alien shrubs. The hills jutted like islands in a morass of swampwater and translucent aquatic vines, their tops barely visible through the fog.
Caldan Fara stepped down the ramp first, bolter slung over one shoulder, her boots squelching into the sucking, red-black mud. She looked up, taking in the landscape with the practiced silence of someone who'd grown up in Armageddon's ash wastes and fought greenskin raids in jungles where the trees bled and screamed.
"Smells like wet warcrime," she muttered. "Let's set perimeter an' go dark. Fast an' proper."
Behind her, ten troopers fanned out in double file—disciplined, but nervous. Their flak-armor was already dripping with muck, and the swamp insects buzzed like vox static. One of them, Corporal Vren, slapped his neck and cursed.
"Permission to incinerate the local fauna, ma'am?"
"No," Caldan said without looking. "But you find somethin' talkin' with more'n six legs? You light it up."
Magos Lhoris descended next, six legs folding from his thorax-like lower body, his mechanical spine glistening with injector lines and data-spikes. The green lenses of his ocular visor scanned the environment with rhythmic whirrs. He paused to observe a bulbous, floating insect the size of a fist latch onto a soldier's helmet before dissolving in a puff of acid.
"Fascinating," Lhoris said. "Atmosphere moist with reactive pheromones. Local fauna demonstrates biochemical mimicry and aggression. Possible territorial behavior. Also: aesthetically displeasing."
"Glad we brought you," Caldan muttered dryly. "Nice t'have someone to narrate the nightmares."
Magos Erika, compact and hunched in her synth-weave robes, raised a decontamination wand and began scanning the soil. "Biological densities high. Spore indexes approaching Class-VI saturation. This entire biosphere is a cocktail of engineered evolution. I would wager twenty of your soldiers this wasn't natural."
"Good thing we ain't bettin' with soldiers," Caldan said, waving the squad forward.
They crawled through the swamp for two days—silent, masked, and sweating beneath rebreathers. Mud came up to their waists in places. The terrain was alive. Trees glistened with slime. Something howled once in the dark and didn't stop until morning. One night, a soldier named Hess was nearly pulled into a sinkhole by something shaped like a tongue. It wasn't a tongue.
They fought once—an ambush by amphibian predators, slick-skinned and eyeless, bounding through the mist like muscle-clad cannons. Five of them leapt from a camouflaged pool. The first tore Trooper Bendik's leg off at the knee. Caldan shot it point-blank in the neck with her bolt pistol and kept moving. The rest were killed by lasrifle volleys and a plasma grenade.
The soldiers didn't complain much after that.
Only Vren grumbled, holding up an Administratum-branded canister of insecticide.
"Combat-rated," he read. "Tested against sixteen species of heretical invertebrates."
"It's perfume," Caldan muttered under her breath. "Might make the worms bite softer."
Nightfall, Day Two | Two Clicks from the Pirate Base Perimeter
The base emerged in spectral silence—spotlights cutting narrow arcs across the flattened treeline. Barbed fences gleamed in the distance, broken only by watchtowers and half-collapsed sensor rigs. The air stank of burnt fuel and ammonia.
They stopped in the underbrush.
Lhoris adjusted the lens focus on his cranial stalk, eyes narrowing.
"I can confirm it," he said. "The blighted zone east of the compound. Soil contamination aligns with plasmid signatures. Engineered microorganism. Waterborne vector. Spread pattern indicates targeted deployment... but inconsistent application."
"Sloppy," Erika added, kneeling beside him. "Not our work. And not Mechanicus-level biotactics."
"Xenos?" Caldan asked, voice low.
"I would estimate so," Lhoris said. "They were at war. This was an escalation. Unclear if it backfired."
"Well," Caldan muttered, "seems someone fired 'fore they aimed. Typical."
Third Night | Perimeter Breach | Pirate Base
She crawled beneath the outer perimeter during the changing of the shift. Slit one pirate's throat beneath the armpit, caught the body in silence. Stole the tunic, smeared her face with ash. Moved like she belonged.
The interior was a sprawl of smoke and shouting.
The outer camp was worse than she'd imagined—miles of shacks and tents. Mud channels for streets. Steel cages half-submerged in filth. The smell of sickness and broken things. People stared without hope—men and women from feudal worlds, their eyes dulled by weeks or years of exposure to technologies they didn't understand and violence they understood too well.
The tavern was a half-collapsed prefab dome, patched with sheets of scrapmetal and soot-darkened stained glass from some long-dead cathedral. Inside, a dozen pirates hunched over warped tables, drinking from tin cups and snorting pale powders off shattered dataslates. Fumes of spiced liquor, algae-vape, and old blood made the air dense and vile. A warped vox-caster on the wall played what might've once been music—now reduced to static, chords, and rhythmic screaming.
Many were mutants—mostly men, some only arguably human. One's spine jutted like a ladder through open sores in his back. Another had teeth growing from the side of his neck, chewing reflexively as he drank. A third had one eye so swollen and veined it pulsed with every heartbeat, like a fruit about to burst.
A girl passed between them, tray shaking in her hands. She wore what had once been a servant's gown—now torn and damp. Feudal garb, high-necked and ceremonial, now ruined. Her eye was swollen shut, lips split. She couldn't have been older than sixteen. One pirate, fat and red-faced, reached out and slid a filthy hand between her asscheeks as she passed. She flinched and didn't stop moving.
Caldan's hand drifted toward her bolter.
"One round. One breath. One less rot-bastard in the stars." She held the thought there. "But not now. Not yet. Mission's still breathin'."
She moved to the bar.
Three pirates leaned against it. Drunk. Swearing. All heavily armed. One was tattooed from neck to ankles with prison glyphs. One had black veins curling across his chest, likely a side effect of some tainted stimm.
"Shipment goes out next moon-cycle. To the Bone Market," the first one muttered, blowing smoke out of a rotten hole where his cheek should've been.
"Which Bone Market?" the second asked, blinking dumbly.
The first turned to stare at him. "What in the Emperor's syphilitic name d'you mean which Bone Market?"
"You know," the idiot slurred, "the cold one, or the other cold one?"
The third pirate leaned back and laughed, snorting into his tin mug. "Don't listen to Blit. He got his brains pickled on that grox piss from Alba."
"Yeh, but still, you know, the one with the pointy-eared freaks—"
"Drukhari," muttered the first, shaking his head. "Katta Bone-Eaters too. And them robed bastards with no faces. It's the one with the bazaar tunnels and the frost statues."
"Yeh," said the third. "That's the one. Sold a million captives there. Twice. Even the boss said it was a good cut."
"Didn't the boss say we were behind on quotas?" asked the idiot.
"He said we'd burn if we disappoint," the first said, suddenly sober. "Said he'd watch us through the ambers in his eyes."
They all fell quiet.
Caldan didn't wait to hear more. She moved.
In the shadow of the compound's center—beneath the cracked towers and faux-victorian domes—she saw the villa from the inside for the first time. The place was even worse up close.
Crimson banners stitched with flayed skin fluttered from broken balconies. One wing was shaped like a Calixian manse, all iron vines and stained glass—cracked and painted over. Another was a stone-brick ruin of feudal make, its chimney spewing pink smoke. At its heart stood a massive copper dome, etched with void-etched psalms in fifty languages. Everywhere: bronze statues, looted friezes, upturned fountains spilling grey water.
Guards stood at the gate. Two had combi-weapons slung at their hips. A third leaned against the pillar wearing a mask of gold filigree, one eyehole glittering with red light.
Inside the compound, the voidshield hummed—a pale shimmer hanging in the air like tension made manifest.
She felt it in her gut: this was the eye of the rot. The captain was inside.
"Could pop one. Could vanish. Could die tryin'," she thought.
She didn't push it.
She turned. She vanished.
------------------------------------------------------
Sector: DantArm17-3 | Oceanic Surface Recon Unit Delta
Commanding Officer: Sergeant Lopez | Explorator Support: Magos Calyx | Field Descent: Magos Rallax
Solar Date: M41.995.146.9 – Floating Ruins of Destroyed City Twelve
The second Aquila lander descended in absolute silence, save for the dull groan of its heat-dispersal vanes flexing against upper-atmospheric drag. Its hull came to rest on a charred raft of organic ruins—an ancient shellwork deck twisted like a shattered vertebrae, buoyed still by patches of coralline bladder-structure that kept the ruins afloat decades after the pirate bombardment.
Sergeant Lopez stepped out, boots scraping against barnacled bone-surface. The air reeked of algae, acid, and something faintly floral—rotting protein, maybe, but processed through alien lungs. He wrinkled his nose beneath his rebreather.
"Disgusting," he said to no one in particular. "Heretical sponge-bastards built cities outta whale guts."
Behind him, Magos Calyx emerged in perfect stillness. Their sleek, black matte syn-skin shimmered with thin condensation under the humidity. The softly humming cranial dome bore no eyes—just a single lateral visor band that pulsed faintly across multiple spectra. Their movement was fluid, careful, and unnervingly silent as they scanned the ruins, mechadendrites unfurling with elegant precision.
"They built with muscle memory," Calyx said, voice low, modulated, fluid. "Not steel. This city grew... then died."
Calyx's spindly feet adjusted to the bone-slick surface, compensating for the oppressive gravity with micro-impulse correction. "Feels like walking in lead syrup. Even the breeze has weight."
Rallax followed next, his heavy exo-frame stepping from the ramp with methodical hisses. He and Calyx exchanged a curt nod—no need for words. Both had arrived with the team. Both knew what they were about to enter.
Ten troopers fanned out across the fractured platforms, auspex scanners sweeping the perimeter. The ruin's geometry was both ordered and chaotic: ribbed archways stood above rooms half-sunk in the tide, while transparent floors of calcified glass revealed submerged growth-labs or shrines shaped like inverted amphorae. Some walls had fused into veins of living shell—biomatter now long-dead, but unnervingly preserved.
Lopez passed a mural: a dome of concentric scales, colored with luminous ink. The scene showed figures swimming upward, tendrils entwined, toward what looked like a massive, sunlit eye. He snorted.
"Idolatry and mucus," he muttered. "Par for the xenos."
Submerged Module Alpha | Rallax Descent Channel 01
Solar Date: M41.995.146.9 – Four Hours After Landing
Rallax's armor sealed with a hiss. He adjusted the manifold prongs along his spine, blinking twice to sync his internal cogitators with Calyx's uplink.
"I will descend," he said. "Maintain surface relay. Uplink every twelve minutes."
Calyx tapped a control pad mounted to their forearm. "Confirmed. If you don't ping on time, I'm claiming salvage rights on your augmetic core. The voice modulator is mine."
Rallax did not reply.
With a precise leap, he vanished beneath the surface. Water swallowed him whole. Only the trail of bubbles remained, and then nothing.
Subsurface Layer 01 | Depth: 18m | Five Hours Later
The first chamber was a collapsed storage gallery, filled with egg-like cysts, long-dormant and calcified. Rallax advanced past dangling cables of hardened nerve-fiber and bony spines, until he reached the central chamber: a chemical reaction sphere, carved like a heart and pulsing no longer.
At its core sat an acid vat, the fluid inside thick and golden, slowly swirling with motion.
Rallax extended a sampling claw, scraped a vial's worth.
[LOG R-564.A]
"Chemical trace active. Acidic properties beyond Class-VI. Highly reactive. Erosive to organic matter. Shrimp specimens degraded in 0.7 seconds."
He catalogued the chamber for later inspection and moved on.
Subsurface Layer 03 | Depth: 38m | Seventeen Hours Later
The corridor was narrow, ribbed like a throat. A faint tremor passed through the structure.
Then, without warning, a mass broke through the ceiling membrane—a massive cephalopod, black-eyed and slick, with barbed suckers and a maw ringed with rotating teeth. Its arms coiled toward him.
Rallax fired from his right limb—a twin-beam plasma lance crackled and burst. Steam exploded through the water. The creature shrieked, thrashed, dissolved into a trail of white ink and meat.
[LOG R-567.D]
"Hostile neutralized. Non-sapient. Six-limbed predator. Defensive response successful."
His systems pinged. Time to surface.
He was navigating the maze of submerged ruins, backtracing his way to the surface when they came from the dark—sleek bodies sliding through algae-choked halls. Xenos. Sapient. Their forms darted like spears, flanking him.
Rallax's optics narrowed.
Ten of them. Blue-grey hide. The size of a fully grown grox. All bearing underslung biochemical weapons—some organic-fleshed like the ruins, others clearly hybrid-tech. They fanned out in a crescent formation, trying to box him in.
The leader approached—larger, vibrant with colored crests across the head-spines and pectoral fronds. A male-female caste, unmistakable. The black of command. Her gestures were sharp, practiced.
[WARNING: LOCK PATTERN DETECTED]
Rallax spun a full 180 and fired his rear thrusters. High-pressure jets propelled him backward through a crumbling hall of collapsed spires and spiral tunnels. Two of the xenos fired green-tinted bursts—chemical pulses that impacted the floor and exploded in clouds of sizzling foam.
"Engagement confirmed," Rallax growled into the vox burst to Calyx. "Sapient resistance. Hostile posture."
The lead male-female gave chase.
Rallax fired an arc of micro-mines behind him—jagged spheres spun from his left hip. They pinged on sonar and detonated as the pursuing xenos entered the radius. One xenos vanished in a pressure bloom. Another staggered, its exosckeleton twisted from the blast.
Still, the others followed.
He twisted into a vertical shaft, rising through the ruins like a harpoon. His internal servos hissed. A mounted claw extended from his back and swung forward to lash out at a pursuing male—clean contact. Blood clouded the water, black and thick.
He kept going.
The sonar quieted for one heartbeat. Then—
Something blocked the light above him.
A shadow the size of a ruin. Tentacles as thick as trees. Plates of chitin glimmering faintly with molten circuitry. A vast bulk shifted in the water, displacing so much current Rallax had to anchor himself to avoid tumbling.
He darted into the bones of a half-collapsed temple—a maze of halls, ascending and descending in impossible geometries, each corridor smaller than the last. The xenos followed, not in a frenzy but with perfect synchronization.
Rallax doubled back. Fired pulse-charges to confuse their sonar. Faked a right-turn and cut his reactor for three seconds to drift in silence.
The stalkers vanished behind him.
He turned into a massive vaulted chamber, high-ceilinged and open to the trench beyond.
He thought he was alone.
Until the wall blinked.
The creature rose behind the reef like the crest of a tidal god. A male-male—colossal. Whale-sized, its tendrils plated with psalm-etched gold, its eyes glowing with embedded tech—one green, one orange. Between its fronds pulsed a device—no longer crude. A lattice of living coral and metal, blinking with cognition.
Its presence pressed into Rallax's cortex like weight.
"You... are loud," it said. Not in Gothic—not quite. The voice came through the water and the translator at once. Deep. Resonant. Felt as much as heard.
"You burn. You fire. You watch from the hiding light."
Rallax tried to move—his arms primed.
The xenos didn't raise a weapon. It only loomed, filling the cathedral of stone.
"You run. You fight. That is good. We see you are... not theirs."
He extended a limb—slow, deliberate. Within it: the device. Compact, crystalline, glowing. It floated forward, held aloft by buoyant control tethers.
"Take this. Your master will come. The Council... will speak."
Rallax reached for the device, talons careful.
"Why?" he asked—his own vox modulation low.
The xenos answered with a single word, translated only as—
"Better."
Then it turned. The water shifted. And like a dream breaking, it vanished into the trench.
Surface Ruins | Dusk | Retrieval Zone
Rallax burst from the sea in a thunder of steam and brine, the alien device clutched in his hand.
Calyx turned from their auspex, matte-black syn-skin glinting in the fading light.
"You look like someone just proposed marriage."
Rallax's helm retracted with a hiss.
"Worse. They want to talk."
He handed over the device.
Calyx scanned it in silence, visor band flickering through spectrums. "Bio-cybernetic. Not grown—forged. Smart. The signal's been aimed at us for at least six days."
"They called us the hiding light," Rallax said. "They've been watching since the moment we entered orbit."
Calyx tilted their smooth cranial plate.
"Well," they said, brushing algae from the relay port, "I say we talk. Before they decide we're not better than the last devils."
Behind them, the ocean darkened.
And below—something watched.
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Vote options
[X] Parley with the xenos first
[X] Attack the pirate base
[X] Attack the Black Boa
[X] Flee
[X] Propose something
[X] Parley with the xenos first
[X] Attack the pirate base
[X] Attack the Black Boa
[X] Flee
[X] Propose something
[X] Parley with the xenos first
BobTheNinja
Sword of Possibility
- Location
- Multiverse Sector Texas
[X] Parley with the xenos first
So this bastard is working with the fucking Drukhari. Yeah, he absolutely needs to be put down.
So this bastard is working with the fucking Drukhari. Yeah, he absolutely needs to be put down.
Last edited:
[X] Parley with the xenos first
If we are going to attack we will need to attack both the Black Boa and the base simultaneously, or do so in a way that the other does not know of what is happening. If one is attacked and the other realizes what is happening we will have problems. If we attack the base and Black Boa finds out without being tied up we will have to deal with orbital support or even orbital bombardment. If we attack Black Boa and the base finds out they have time to organize better defense and possibly use the captives as hostages.
If we are going to attack we will need to attack both the Black Boa and the base simultaneously, or do so in a way that the other does not know of what is happening. If one is attacked and the other realizes what is happening we will have problems. If we attack the base and Black Boa finds out without being tied up we will have to deal with orbital support or even orbital bombardment. If we attack Black Boa and the base finds out they have time to organize better defense and possibly use the captives as hostages.