NOVEL SIMPLE Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-One
I step out of the Thunderhawk on to Kinbriar, twenty four days after our first assault on the North Tomb. The turbofans of the blocky orbital assault craft throw small quantities of dust and grit all around me, pinging off my armour like driving too close to the grit spreader on an icy day. The external sound coming through my sensors is distorted, barely able to travel more than a few metres in the feeble atmosphere.
Behind me, Odhran stomps down the ramp, laden with an almost impractical quantity of weapons and ammo. He’s followed by a mastiff carrying his private stash of destructive goodies, mostly explosives, including a krak missile launcher and ten reloads, and a spare MOA shield.
Odhran gives the mastiff a scratch behind the ears and it barks at him. He’s only had the dog for two hours and they already seem the best of friends.
The logistics mastiff, or ‘gun dog’ as the Heralds call them, is a hundred and thirty centimetres at the shoulder, broad chested, and covered in fake fur patterned like urban camo. Like the upgraded Servitors, the new Cyber Mastiff is almost entirely mechanical, with only its brain being organic, but it has enough sensors that the dog within can’t tell its skin is fake and its body is metal. They have a mechadendrite for a tail, letting the dogs open doors or load and unload items onto their own satchels.
It also doesn’t poop everywhere, though it does spray minute amounts of holy oil at every opportunity. Yes, really. The dogs are much easier to control when they can still perform some of their natural behaviours.
The Mastiff Riders use much larger models, that are one hundred and seventy centimetres at the shoulder and possess conversion shields.
Our forward base has received additional infrastructure since its initial deployment, and now has a proper landing pad, though it can only fit class one D-POTs, Thunderhawks, and other craft under thirty metres long.
The landing pad is surrounded by sixty-four armoured cargo containers, housing prefab barracks, power, armouries, and all the other buildings one needs to maintain habitation and defence on the hostile planet. A void shield covers the base, but it won’t do much if the Necrons get serious. The main defence is a lot of tanks, gun emplacements, and ferrocrete embankments and bunkers.
Even as we assemble for our main assault, the engineering company overseeing the base is digging in further. Many empty crates and shipping containers have been cut into scaffolding, then used to secure rocks and ferrocrete domes over the armoured cargo containers. Diggers and trucks are out in force, building trenches, placing tank traps, and hauling rocks.
I’m not sure what the tank traps are supposed to achieve against hover vehicles and give them a scan. I don’t detect anything unusual, but I receive an authorization request and send in my credentials. The request is passed and I receive a burst of data, revealing that the tank traps are actually mines that fire a focused blast above them. I make a note to reward whoever thought of that and stride towards the marshalling area.
I’m not getting any ‘kills’ for the Necrons we permanently destroy because they are soulless robots and E-SIM cannot use them to enhance me. Taking part in this attack is a large risk for zero personal reward, but I’m also our most resilient infantry unit and we can’t afford to fail the operation.
A third of my bodyguard company has followed me down. We left all the line infantry and scouts in my bodyguard company behind as I couldn’t see a use for them in this conflict other than fodder, and I have Servitors and criminals for that.
My bodyguard company has an unusual composition as seven of the twenty heavy infantry squads have been swapped out for additional special weapon teams. With fewer line infantry, each of the specialist companies are able to have representatives in my bodyguard company. There are five Vanguard Armours with twenty-five accompanying tech adepts, thirty Mastiff Riders, thirty Power Armour Infantry, and fifteen light infantry scouts.
I have one representative from the engineer, command, logistics, and armour companies too: four tech adepts in the six strong officer squad. The other two officers are tech-priests. I don’t have any of the other companies’ specialist units though, as I really don’t need tanks to guard me on my own vessel, or the services the engineer, command, and logistics companies provide for a single company under my direct command.
Sergeant Odhran has joined my bodyguard company for now, though he doesn’t fit into its composition just yet. I may remove an eighth line squad and fill it with all five Space Marines once the other four are fit for combat, but I haven’t decided if that is the best way to use them or not.
Giving the Space Marines more freedom and a support network of their own, rather than insisting they protect me, would let them fulfil tasks others cannot. The entire point of Space Marines, really. On the other hand, I don’t have many tasks like that available and something to do is better than nothing to do. Given that I brought them back from the dead, I shouldn’t have to worry about them viewing guard duty as an insult either.
Five Wyrms lie motionless in a line the marshalling area, just outside the base’s walls. Their scaled frames and lamprey-like front end inspire fear and awe, and I can’t help but shiver as I board the middle Wyrm. Each Wyrm can ferry two to three companies with us at a time, depending on their equipment. Design teams are already looking into improving the Wyrms transport capacity.
The middle Wyrm is stuffed full of kataphrons, a somewhat endangered Servitor pattern, as they need the ‘soul of a violent man’ to be made. While I have a thousand of them in my service, without a ready source of replacement material, like Marwolv’s criminal populace, I have begun replacing them with Praetorian Servitors.
As I wait for my guard to finish boarding, I flip through the pict-feeds, looking at the nervous men and women who constantly check their gear, or talk with exaggerated motions to get their point across, even with their faceless helmets.
Twenty percent of the Heralds are all the same height, as all members of the Fleet and Corps are gradually fitted with a black skeleton. While this makes them much tougher and stronger, the main benefit has been in logistics as all these people are the same size. It might be an expensive and time consuming procedure, but if they live long enough, or their bodies can be recovered, it will actually save resources and manufacturing capacity in the long run.
The other side benefit is that my equipment, especially the armour, will be quite useless to anyone who isn’t identical in size, so if, in the far future, someone actually manages to steal my stuff, by the time they can make it usable, they might as well have built their own wargear.
After a few seconds of flicking through the feeds, I catch sight of the twenty Praetorian Servitors assigned to this assault. Praetorian Servitors are usually built from oversized human clones, and sometimes mindwiped Ogryns. I have yet to design one in the mechanical style of my normal Servitors, so they are mostly cloned flesh and reshaped armour plates salvaged from broken tanks. I intend to improve the design over time.
At three metres, Praetorian Servitors are even taller than me and tower over Odhran and my own troops. Praetorian designs all have mechanical legs or tracks because of their weight and I’ve built mine as a cross between arachne and octopi, with the body shape of an arachne and extra thick, eight mechadendrites for legs, as opposed to jointed spider limbs. They’re like miniature spider tanks, almost.
Note to self, that would actually be a better design. The torso is somewhat exposed, and while it is good for shielding me, there are better ways to achieve that.
The last of my bodyguards boards the Wyrm and the door slams shut. The moment they’ve secured themselves in the harness hanging from the ceiling, the Wyrm hums to life. It raises its head and pushes into the ground, chewing through hundreds of tonnes of rock with its overlapping powerblades and pushing its immense bulk into earth.
Slowly, we start to accelerate, moving deeper and deeper. Without windows or a point of reference, the irregular movement of the Wyrm is quite unsettling. Despite the extensive zero-g training all the Heralds undergo, a couple still throw up in their helmets and I really can’t fault them. This is quite unpleasant. I’m also finding out first hand why there wasn’t a proper transport version of the Wyrms in my STC, but I don’t have any intention of stopping our project to design one.
For two and a half hours we ride without speaking, slowly getting used to the uncomfortable movement, intense vibrations, and loud, grinding noise. Then, the Wyrm lurches as it hits something hard and it slows. I can hear the whine of its teeth even over a hundred metres away as the vibration passes through the hull and makes my own teeth ache.
A handful of seconds pass, and the Wyrm is through, slithering through vast empty corridors and chewing through the occasional wall. The other four Wyrms are still with us and we make good progress, punching up through the bottom of the tomb towards a spot a kilometre below its centre.
As we repeatedly punch through walls I catch glimpses of the tomb through the external sensors. Everything is built from blackstone and necrodermis to absurdly high tolerances. The walls of the corridors are all slightly angled, like triangles with their tops cut off, with thick and regular supports. While they vary in size, none are lower than twenty metres in height, and others are tall enough to fit an Imperator-Class Titan, a fifty metre tall war machine.
We pass dozens of rooms filled with assembly lines, strange forges, and large marshalling areas stuffed with sleeping war machines. Everything gets smashed aside, or chewed up as we pass through.
We punch through a stasis room. The stasis room is over a kilometre long, filled with hundreds of thousands of sleeping warriors in stone sarcophagi, green energy fields flickering over their inert forms.
The tomb starts to wake in full.
Scarabs pour from the walls, chasing after us and the last Wyrm in our convoy spots thousands of warriors jumping from their sarcophagi. The highest Warriors are too high up for their degraded bodies to make the landing and they faceplant on the stone floor, then slowly pull themselves together and join their marching brethren. I’d laugh, but the swarm of Warriors chasing after us is chilling.
We are ascending almost vertically at this point and the scarabs launch themselves at the Wyrms, deconstructing them. It doesn’t quite work as they get continuously scraped off the hull each time we pass through a new wall, but within two minutes, the scarabs have made enough small holes that they are able to cling on, gnawing through the hull and into the clockwork guts of our transports.
One by one, the scarabs drop into the hold upon our heads, only to be grabbed and stabbed by Heralds and Servitors. The Wyrms start to slow as they are disabled from within and the scarabs fall upon us in ever greater numbers.
At last, we smash through the final wall to our destination. It’s the biggest room yet, over one hundred metres tall and half a kilometre wide. The Wyrms fire up their spotlights and launch flares high into the room.
Seven vast pyramids lurk in the gloom, each eighty metres high and sixty metres wide. The Necron Monoliths are nothing like the dinky little models I used to mess around with my son. Nor do they resemble in role or scope the large tanks and transports I believed them to be. A single one is said to be capable of conquering a world, and now I know why.
These are titans, bristling with guns. At their apex is a portal, inactive for now, called an Eternity Gate, capable of pulling fresh Warriors and other constructs from anywhere on the planet, or perhaps beyond.
An eighth pyramid, wider and shorter than the others and split into four pieces, hovers in the midst of the other grand pyramids. A figure, suspended in the centre of the pyramid, crackles with green energy, screaming and writhing within its bonds.
I am hit with an awful realisation. This figure is why we were allowed to penetrate the tomb. There is nothing we can do to disable the Necrons power source, for there lies the multiple, amalgamated shards of a C’tan. Destroying it would kill us. Freeing it would destroy the fleet.
What can we possibly do against a god?