The Quest for Knowledge - A Warhammer 40k Fanfiction

Any hangars or loading bays the hulk might have once had had collapsed under the ravages of times, or been crushed by impact forces beyond comprehension. The collision and fusion of spacefaring vessels was by no means a peaceful process. In any case, a point of entry would have to be created.

Spitting a steady stream of high-powered lasers, repurposed mining rigs from the fleet's support corps were boring a neat rectangular hole through the hull. Void-hardened Skitarii assisted them, fearlessly dodging between beams to plant Melta charges on structural weak points. With every muted explosion, a particularly troublesome portion dissolved into debris.

A few score kilometres away, a fleet of landers, haulers, and transports waited: the landing party, equipped with everything to set up, operate, and defend a forward base. Aboard one of these vessels, Skitarii Alpha Zeta-21 let his mind wander through the Noospheric links joining him to his troops, prodding them with unspoken orders and corrections whenever their performance dropped below designated tolerances. His neural pathways still thrummed with the command doctrina the Archmagos had handed down to him. Commanding officer for the entire landing operation. His neurotransmitter dispensers were working in overdrive to articulate the ecstasy he felt. Distantly, he perceived the data-tether that linked him to the Omnissiah's Wrath; they were watching him. Silently, he narrowed the acceptable performance range.

"Towards perfection. Towards the Omnissiah."

His troops silently echoed his chant with Noospheric tags. The rectangular section of the hull had finally come free. The mining vessels retreated, only to be replaced by commandeered construction machinery. Their piloting servitors guided the clamps onto the metal, arranging themselves into an optimized pattern to maximize the work done. Zeta-21 felt a surge of approval from the Ark Mechanicus; his calculations had been judged adequate. His augmetics rewarded him with another dose of endorphins. The Skitarii engineers jumped away, firing jets to manoeuvre to their waiting ships.

The construction haulers began to reverse, effortlessly pulling the detached section away to reveal the ship's interior. It was completely dark and, judging from sensor readings, below freezing. Life support systems were not active. An alert squawked, drawing his attention to the leaking atmosphere pouring steadily from the breach. Readings indicated it was breathable, but incredibly stale. No matter. In any case, the artificial respirocytes in their bloodstreams would let them live without air for three weeks. Servitors were released from small ventral bays on the construction rigs, affixing small orbs around the perimeter of the breach. They flashed purple, interlinked by glowing lines which then expanded into a shimmering barrier. The air stopped leaking. They had a secure bay.

With a single jolt of thought, Zeta-21 ordered his small flock forward, the ships automatically arranging into a fractal pattern optimized for quick landing and unloading. His cogitators raced as he calculated the minimal time in which he could complete his operation. If he was quick enough, maybe he could be accepted to the Archmagos' personal guard. His servos whirred and clicked at the mere thought, but he forced calm and order back into his mind. The priests could glance into his thoughts at any time. Fantasizing like a child was definitely not going to earn him any commendations. A 'flesh-vice', they would call it. The purity of steel entailed the purity of logic. Proper caused led to proper effects. There was no need to dream when any outcome could be perfectly predicted. Yes. An optimal landing would eventually lead to the desired result. It was a certainty.

His auspex arrays felt the light scraping of energy field against metal as the ships crossed the threshold of the atmospheric barrier. Immediately, sensors pinged, scouring the surrounding area for any unrecognized activity. The battle-spirits of the ships' weaponry strained against their handlers, eager for combat, but the scans came up empty. They had not been detected yet. Zeta-21 had been in enough campaigns, however, to know this stroke of fortune was temporary at best.

"Touch down. Begin FOB setup. Priority to defence systems. Inload work orders and timeframes from the command Manifold. Secure this zone for the Omnissiah."

As their landing gear made contact with the cold floor, vox-casters were already barking orders as adepts roused the servitors and automata under their command. Flying servo-drones popped out of hatches in the hull, effortlessly pulling material caches many times their size from the cargo holds to predetermined construction points. Logistical servitors lugged components to waiting Enginseers, who muttered rites of blessing under their breath as their mechadendrites snapped and whirred, deftly assembling gun turrets and command equipment. Swarms of servo-skulls rushed off into the darkness, feeding information back through Noospheric tethers and nodes erected by Skitarii under his command. With a thought, he shunted the data to waiting Lexomats for parsing and analysis.

Simultaneously, adepts were dragging out and activating more specialized equipment around him: targeting cogitators for the defence network, auto-fabricators for battlefield repairs and logistics, Machine-shrines for sanctifying equipment and blessing repairs. His hands involuntarily contracted into a cog across his chest at this last sight. His chronometric sensors told him the construction was proceeding on schedule. Five minutes. That was all he needed. That was all he had to need.

One of the servo-skulls went dark, the abrupt disconnection sending alarm bells ringing throughout the network. A few more peeled off from reserves to check its status, leaving digi-trails for their handlers to follow if necessary. A few of his men lifted their galvanic rifles to their shoulders, noiselessly moving to cover behind support pillars and makeshift barricades. The pitch-black doorway remained quiet, heightening the uneasy feeling deep in Zeta-21's chest. He linked up with one of the skulls, routing its optics through his own cogitators. The powerful glow-orb mounted on the surveying drone could only dispel the inky darkness for a few feet in all directions, but it still flew on, relying on its sonic sensors to deftly sidestep obstacles. He spooled its auditory equipment through his sensory parsers, but it was deathly quiet. Not a single sound could be heard. Not even the omnipresent groaning and creaking that normally accompanied every movement of an ancient, war-weary vessel.

"Has it entered a region with no atmo?"

That could not be possible. It had not seen or opened any sealed bulkheads. Then why the silence?

A scattered pile of debris caught the servo-skull's attention. It dipped into a seamless dive, auspex scanners painting the target of its curiosity. In an instant, its suspicions were confirmed. It was its lost comrade, now in pieces from some unknown blow. Immediately, the drone was on high alert, squawking warning signals and combat tags as it produced a ballistic weapon between its jaws. Relentless sensor pings scanned its surroundings, but whatever had done this was long gone. He exloaded an imperative, ordering it to advance further down the tunnel. It would be out of linkage range in another few hundred metres, but if the assailant was close, he had to know what it was.

A small pinpoint of red light appeared in the distance. The servo-skull immediately ducked to the right, combat cogitators coming alive as it calculated the trajectory of the lasgun moments before it fired. A superheated red line streaked past, straight through where it had been an instant earlier. More lasguns fired from the darkness, but the drone weaved deftly between their shots, blaring scrambler codes to confuse their targeting systems. The high-calibre Stubber in its mouth spoke again and again, each loud bang followed closely by the wet crunch of a slug hitting flesh. Within seconds, Zeta-21 counted twenty kills. The Lexmechanics had done a splendid job on its targeting routines.

The twenty-first shot pinged against solid metal instead. An instant later, the feed cut out. The skull was gone. He inloaded its final trauma report. High-velocity impact followed by a ballistic explosion. Bolter rounds. In an instant, the information was exloaded in Noospheric bleed to all combatants. Combat engrams sparked, inloading centuries of combat doctrine perfected by Secutors to their minds. The battlespace became a shared jumble of thoughts, visions, smells, and sounds: the minds of the Skitarii linked in perfect harmony. Zeta-21 invoked a battle-cant, feeling its strength pulse along their Electoo conduits. Techpriests barked binharic commands to their gun servitors, and the lumbering beasts trundled forward, levelling lascannons, storm bolters, and every other heavy weapon imaginable at the doorway. Galvanic weapons whined as their capacitors charged up.

For a moment, all was silent. Then a slobbering, hungry code-mass slammed against their data-sphere, held back by Hexamathic wards. He felt the terrible and righteous fury of his troops spark across their links.

"Scrapcode!"

Security protocols activated, self-compiling purge programs assaulting the intruder with data-hexes and hunter-killer routines. Zeta-21 felt a familiar pressure at the base of his skull as the Ark exloaded a data packet to their Noospheric space: updated security directives, generated in moments to immunize them against this new threat. He ordered the defensive programs to integrate them, watching with satisfaction as the corruption was effortlessly quarantined and neutralized.

As soon as the digital threat was over, however, the physical one began: lasgun fire streaked out of the darkness, aiming for their positions. But their attacks had already been anticipated. The battlefield shimmered, dissolving into a sacred data-scape as their processors linked and communicated. Every move exploded into a thousand-petalled realm of predictive algorithms. Every speck of material flashed with stress tolerance ranges and recommended destruction procedures. Every shot fired was anticipated in an instant with impact analysers and probability engines. The Skitarii moved like quicksilver, maximally efficient as they weaved through the deadly red lines. A galvanic rifle discharged, and a spark of electricity lit up the tunnel for a brief moment before its hapless victim collapsed with a sigh and a muffled thud. More followed, mercilessly leeching the energy out of their targets in brief bursts of static. With a heavy roar, autocannons and bolters discharged into the darkness, rewarded with screams and sounds of flesh rending apart. Zeta-21 partitioned a portion of his consciousness and spooled the auditory feeds through a constant analysis rite, listening for the tell-tale sound of bullets pinging against metal. That would mean that power armour had joined the battle.

A few lasgun shots impacted uselessly against the steel cladding on the servitors, leaving only pinpricks of red-hot metal as their wielders died milliseconds later. Searing thermal rays issued from the mechadendrite-mounted volkite weapons of the Techpriests, their auspexes effortlessly piercing the darkness to find targets to boil alive. They saw the same things he saw. Only some ill-equipped lasgun-wielding fools… for now.

There it was. A single sound, almost indistinguishable to biological ears in the cacophony. A bolter round pinged off masterfully crafted ceramite. He exloaded the information to the Noosphere immediately. The Skitarii stiffened, wordlessly ramping up power allocations to their mobility and combat systems. They knew what was coming.

With a displeasingly loud sound of a corpse's skull crushed underfoot, a blur of yellow power armour charged out of the hallway, heading straight for the Skitarii frontline. The seven-foot figure raised his left arm, holding a bolter as easily as he would a pistol, but before he could fire, a galvanic round slammed into the armour on the limb. It did not penetrate, but with an electrical discharge, the arm fell to his side, the weapon dropping from his lifeless fingers. He continued his charge, however, heading straight for the closest Skitarius while seamlessly drawing a sword-sized knife with his right hand. His target rolled to avoid a brutal chopping blow, slinging the rifle across his back in the same motion. When the Astartes turned around to face him, he had already drawn his own weapon: a brutal maul, the head crackling with disruptor fields. More rifles fired, but the transhuman effortlessly sidestepped their aim, bringing his sword down in an arcing blow. Zeta-21 felt the soldier's actuators scream with effort as he dodged the blow, bringing the mace around with the force of supercharged pistons onto the giant's side. The power field exploded with enough force to turn an adamantium bulkhead to rubble, tossing the marine away like a toy as his insides liquefied. As he tried to stand again, a burst from a servitor's lascannon turned his head to fine mist.

Fifteen more Astartes charged out of the tunnel. Binharic expletives and warnings filled the air as Skitarii brought weapons to bear. The first three died instantly, drained of their motive force by a well-placed headshot, but by then the rest were upon the frontline, melee weapons arcing down like thunderbolts. One raised a bolt pistol, only to have it slapped out of his hand by a quick servo-arm. A moment later, transonic blades separated his head from his body. A brutal punch sent one of his soldiers to the ground, cranial plates dented from the blow. He exloaded a repair imperative to his systems before jumping into the fray himself, drawing his own maul. It arced with flashing tendrils of electricity. One blow from it could make a Hive Tyrant's brain run from its ears. He had had an opportunity to test that claim.

He closed the distance between them in one leap, bringing the weapon down on the marine's head before he had a chance to react. The smell of burning flesh assaulted his nostrils as his opponent immediately collapsed, dead. The shattered head of a Skitarii flew past his peripheral vision, one of his subsidiary ocular implants auto-tracking it as a Noospheric link blacked out. It had achieved lethal projectile speeds as it ploughed into a close-combat servitor, shattering its metal form. He could not help but feel a surge of admiration for his foe.

He caught a blow from the next on his vambraces, power field micro-generators harmlessly deflecting the blade. The sheer impact, however, almost wrenched his arms from their bio-interface sockets. The self-repair alloys kicked in immediately, but before he could respond, the transhuman was neatly bisected down the middle, his halves collapsing to either side. The Techpriest whirled away with impossible speed, already hunting the next target for his crackling Omnissian axe. Giant vat-grown slabs of muscle surrounded him on every side, brimming with metal plating, power tools, and heavy weapons; even the Astartes' strength would only tickle these guard-servitors. Zeta-21 could only offer a brief devotional liturgy in binharic for the priest's aid before his combat sensors squawked for his attention. He turned, just in time to neatly deflect the power-gloved fist of another space marine.

His vision flickered, the cramped and dark interiors of the hulk changing into a vast, burning plain of red sand. Before him, a massive Astartes towered, but he was not of the Imperium. Foul Empyrean energies leaked like suffocating smoke from every orifice in his pitted black armour. His exposed face was twisted into a sadistic smile, crisscrossed by throbbing purple veins. Dimly, he felt his neuro-circuitry flash and crackle, energized by an overwhelming data-presence. The Archmagos. He immediately surrendered his body to the sacred flow of motive force, allowing his memory exload to take full control. With millennia of combat data and experience, no move and no opponent could be novel. Every twitch of the muscles, every darting glance of the eyes, every form of weapon—it was all known, repeated a thousand times over by a thousand enemies across time. And every single move had a singular, perfect counter, revealed to those blessed by the Unmaker God's hand.

He moved as the Archmagos did, every scrap of energy spent utilized efficiently as he sidestepped the blow by the slightest movement. The opening in his stance was clear as day, a floating island of trauma prediction data in the combat inloads. The sacred force travelled through his limbs, evoking them to untold speed as he blitzed past the marine's guard and sent him flying with an augmented blow from his maul. In the memory, the Chaos Lord fell to a graceful, contemptuous sweep of his hallowed axe, but now, his assailant rose again. The memory shifted, and he was now a hulking Ork Nob, charging at him through dense jungle growth. A change in combat patterns. His legs thrummed with energy as he charged in return, deftly ducking under his blow and sliding between his legs. Replacing his maul at his belt in the same motion, he instead drew his sacred revolver. A relic from before the Old Night, the blessed archaeotech had belonged to his creator. The Magos had bequeathed its revered possession to him upon his promotion to Alpha status. This would be the first time it tasted blood in his hands. And what better initiation could there be than to lay low a mighty Astartes, guided by an avatar of the Omnissiah's wrath?

He pulled the trigger. With a deep, foreboding hum, it discharged, the bullet intelligently curving through the air as its target attempted to avoid it. The Nob changed to a Drukhari Wych, and then to a heretek Skitarius, as the Archmagos matched the enemy's movements to his libraries. When the projectile made contact, it flashed and disappeared into a swirling, inky vortex. Zeta-21's psi-sensors went mad, screaming warnings about unfiltered Warp exposure. He silenced them with a rune of acknowledgement as the entire right chest and arm of the Astartes disappeared into thin air. As the towering creature collapsed to his knees, still unwilling to die, he felt the holy presence leave his engrams. The withdrawal left the bitter taste of anguish in his mouth; they were parted too soon. How he envied his men. So many were undergoing the Rite of Pure Thought nowadays, excising these intrusive thoughts and letting the hallowed logic of the Omnissiah lead them in devotion. For him, however, the directive was clear: for the sake of 'lateral thinking in combat', his flawed emotions had to be preserved. Yes, how he envied them, whose loyalty and love for the Omnissiah led them to the same place. His paths diverged almost exactly.

Around him, the battle was already over. The Skitarii had worked together to take down the Astartes in record time, but the destruction was sub-optimal. Smoking ruins of at least forty servitors littered the battlefield, gun-blades and mounted weaponry wrenched off their supports with inhuman strength. At least thirty Skitarii warriors were dead or crippled, being tended to by repair or salvage drones as the need arose. While not perfect, losses were within acceptable ranges. Their coordinated combat protocols had stopped the enemy from concentrating on any one target, minimizing the damage they could inflict. On the other hand, those who had dared to face the Techpriests themselves had died before they even understood what was happening. He gathered the combat data and exloaded them to the Ark's War-Temple, along with a requisition order for replacement troops. Maybe the Secutors would find their performance worthy of study and dissection. He would also need more heavy weaponry and Sicarian troops, for the Astartes.

While compiling the data, however, he noticed a discrepancy, flagged multiple times by low-level IFF protocols that had been overridden by more pressing combat doctrines. The symbols on their pauldrons. A black, curled fist, set on a white circle.

The protective metal sheaths over his eyes opened and closed, roughly approximating an organic confused blink. "Designation identified: Imperial Fists Astartes Chapter. Status last confirmed as loyal. Query: Reason for hostile actions?"

Blood was spurting freely from the gaping hole in his victim's torso, beyond even his enhanced ability to clot. Yet, he still remained conscious, balancing on his knees but refusing to answer or even acknowledge Zeta-21.

"Repeating query. Why did you attack us?"

He simultaneously parsed more data from his combat inloads. The mortal soldiers that had accompanied them bore the markings and followed the tactics of traitorous Astra Militarum regiments. Why would the Traitor Guard and the Imperial Fists work together?

Instead of answering, the Space Marine got to his feet with an unexpected burst of energy and charged. In a flash, his men had their guns trained on him, but before they could fire, a lasgun bolt tore right through the eyepiece on his helmet and into his brain. Zeta-21 turned to see a Guard officer lowering a lasgun. His bionic eye twitched and swivelled, the targeting algorithms searching for more hostiles.

His men were arrayed behind him: at least a few score, with more streaming out of their freshly landed transports. Their chest-plates bore a familiar mark: a stone tower in black.

The shooter handed the gun back to one of his guards and gave him a smart salute. "Colonel Sand, 21st Ferrite Guardians. Happy to be back in service of the homeworld, sir."

He nodded, making the sign of the cog across his chest. "Query: You are here under Inquisitor Loran's requisition?"

"That's right, Galen. We just got pulled from some backwater Agri-World theatre a few weeks back, so we sure are grateful for this."

"This unit now possesses the identifier Zeta-21."

"I… Yes, of course. My apologies."

He blinked again. "But it is… good to see you again too, Sand."

"Thanks. Oh, and are you going to get that, or do I?"

His soldiers had already informed him via Noospheric link. The colonel was pointing at a small insectoid organism that had crawled out of the deceased marine's armour approximately one second ago. Before it could go any further, however, a servo-skull swooped down and caught it in its manipulators, like a hawk catching a mouse. Similar creatures appeared from every terminated hostile in quick succession, and were captured as well. The priests took charge of the specimens, ordering that some be sent back to the Ark in strict containment. Some were transferred to their own makeshift Laboratoriums for study, while others adjudged inadequate for some reason were incinerated with a binharic blurt.

"I don't know why I even bother with you people. It's like you Mechanicus types know things are going to happen before they happen."

He raised his arm to a servo-drone, allowing it to repair accumulated micro-stress points accumulated from combat. The metal, while capable of self-repair, seldom did so in perfect alignment. "With the requisite amount of data…"

"Yeah, yeah. Speaking of which, I have a few more guests with me. I think you'll enjoy them a fair bit less." He jerked his head towards some people disembarking from the transport, seamlessly switching to lingua-technis. That came as no surprise: as one of the rare few regiments raised on a Forge World, the Ferrite Guardians had to be conversant in basic Mechanicus linguistics.

What did surprise him was the identity of these 'guests'. For the first time in a while, he was glad that he could still feel anger. "Of course. Just my luck."