Chen's Redoubt Mechanicus

The ground battle was a short lived one, and ultimately futile, as was the manner of the enemies of the Mechanicus.

They had come from high orbit, falling upon the earth from beyond tainted skies, trailing vapour waves and heat distortion in their wake. Orbital sensors had failed to register them as threats beyond that of simple falling debris, and the forge's colossal las-batteries fired past them through the polluted cloud cover and into the orbital battle above, ignoring the small, fleeting drifts of unidentified metal. Smaller ground arrays occasionally tracked brief life signs as explosions dotted the skies above the forge, an immense beam of energy lancing through the falling pods by sheer chance, or environmental defences blasting those that fell directly above the forge into glowing fragments.

Explosions lit up the edge foundries before the Skitarii could respond. Reports of acceptable losses from distant areas affected by the orbital battle had started spilling into the forge's data-streams, but had been passed aside as minor incidents, simply unavoidable casualties from the falling wrecks in orbit. As munition stockpiles and material dumps detonated in a tattoo of destruction across the lower levels, the tech-priests realised their folly, and their cybernetic armies deployed to the edges of the massive forge compound, seeking the enemies they had mistakenly let into their midst.

Uudee-40 scowled beneath her sable hood, as much as her face was capable of scowling. She filtered through the local data-stream with ease, tapping into pict feeds and transmitted reports, constructing a suitable dispersal pattern for the strike and disseminating it to the Skitarii troopers she had assumed control of with a blurt of binary, but a portion of her mechanical mind struggled with the situation.

The forge was not supposed to be within range of the traitor guard's ships after the withdrawal of Mechanicus assistance. Such was known by the greatest cogitators and logisticians in the system. Their arrival should not have been possible with their limited resources, let alone appearing undetected and suddenly launching a similarly undetected ground assault.

Assertions of xenos affiliation, of heretical practices, even of the dreaded Abominable Intelligences had abounded within the system's information net, but Uudee-40 had remained sceptical through it all. The Omnissiah would surely never have allowed such heresy unfettered, she believed, but this blatant attack had begun to seed... doubts within her. She scowled again.

Her one remaining hand trailed across a trellis of ribbed cables as she watched the Skitarii's mechanical march through a dozen distinct eyepieces, cramped hallways and service shafts clogged with rubble and severed wires flooding her visual systems. She allowed herself a computational cycle to relish the thrum of holy energy pulsing distantly beneath her fingers, the restrained power calming her systems briefly, before erasing any hesitation from her cogitation banks and following after her tech-guard towards the reported contact.

Signs of destruction increased as Uudee-40 approached the locus, cross referencing the location of the demolished stamping factory several floors above and the potential points of impact. She made a disturbingly human sound, a tch of sucking teeth, as she verified within a suitable margin of error that the impact had not directly damaged the factory, but restrained her dismay in favour of vigilance. The elapsed time between impact and detonation suggested an unaugmented humanoid travelling at an unsustainable march - a hit and run, she surmised - and the elapsed time post-detonation presented an immediate contact radius.

Filtering through the feeds of a dozen augmented warriors, Uudee-40 detected an aural distortion in a sector roughly three hundred metres away from her position. The tech-priest's left arm began to whirr, a shifting mass of metallic tendrils and humming tools that tingled in anticipation. Blurting her directives through the data-stream, she and the Skitarii converged, armaments powering up and combat systems engaging. As they approached, the distortion resolved into a voice, becoming clearer and clearer as they advanced until Uudee-40 could distinguish low-pitched words in Low Gothic. Human, she surmised, isolating her disappointment. Once the visual reports spilled back to her, she excised such disappointment fully.

"Come on you alien hunk of garbage! Open up, come on, come on!" Male, distressed, twenty five metres. Uudee-40 sped through low tunnels of rockcrete and steel, increasing the power of her locomotive systems by three hundred percent. An order blurted to the Skitarii converging on the voice, static filling the tunnels. She hadn't even noticed she had vocalised the command.

A ring of black and pink robes ringed a hole in the floor in the centre of a hab unit, hunks of 'crete and structural steel spilling down through a matching hole in the roof. Angry red lights flooded the scene, emergency alarms blaring from above. The concentric line of Skitarii parted silently to admit the tech-priest, allowing her to crouch over the crater and observe with her own augmetic eyes, a quiet murmur spilling from her vox grille.

"Don't you frakking touch me, you filthy gear-" The last half of the man's simplistic invective dwindled into nothing as Uudee-40 jumped into the crumbling hollow, spiderweb cracks winding out from her considerable mass. He scrambled back, clutching a long blade between blood-slicked fingers. The tech-priest barely even noticed him, her eyes whirring and humming at the sight of the hole's other occupant.

A still form, tinted crimson by distantly flashing lumens. Massive in comparison to both humanoids, unintelligible in its design. None of the hard edges of machine, the perfection of steel and iron. Uudee-40 felt herself drawn to it, taking a step forwards. The man cried out, thrusting his blade up towards the tech-priest's belly, but she simply swallowed it within the writhing mass of her arm. Tendrils coiled around the blade's length, clamps and pliers gripped it in metal teeth while whirling saws and miniature plasma torches cut it to shreds. A moment passed, and Uudee-40 dragged her eyes from the alien machine to look back at the bloody man, dropping the broken shards of metal in front of him.

His eyes went wide as he slowly pulled the hilt of his knife back, holding nothing but a handle. He trembled and dropped the broken weapon, desperately clenching his hands into fists. Uudee-40 made a sound again, a tch that emanated from what was left of her human mouth. She focused her ocular array on him, probing for sigils and runes that might have depicted his value. She was not familiar with the basic practices of the Guard, and certainly not with their heretical spawn, but his armour had an abundance of markings around the shoulders and gorget, and she guessed - she shuddered unconsciously at the thought - that he might have some worth.

"Name," Uudee-40 rasped, speaking both with her human mouth and her vox speaker. She blinked, momentarily purging the habit from her system and running a discipline program within her to catch any more failings. She took another step forward, eyes flicking between the Guardsman and the thing he stood with his back against.

"I ain't tell-" he started again, bringing his fists up in a guard, before Uudee-40 lifted her own arm again and repeated the process with the man's hand. He gawped fish-mouthed at his fingers, now suddenly missing two. A spurt of blood pulsed from the stumps, running down his wrist to mix with the already dried stains covering his uniform. The tech-priest articulated a small prayer to the Machine God that the human had not started screaming yet, and took another step.

"Name," Uudee-40 rasped again. She flicked the two fingers caught in her tool-mechadendrites away, a dozen sets of eyes watching them bounce into a tiny fissure beneath the alien machine. The guardsman sank to his knees, staring at his hand.

"A-Aan," he gasped. "My name is Aan."

"Good. Relay the construction and use of this heretical device. Immediately." The tech-priest raised her arm a fraction of an inch, her peeling human lips curling to a rictus grin as Aan flinched away from her. Floods of data filtered through her, a nearly complete conglomeration of multi-spectrum inputs gathered from her and the tech-guard squad. She quietly ensured that such data wouldn't spill out into the forge's systems just yet.

"I-I-I dunno anything 'bout that," he stammered, pressing himself flat against the pod, eyes locked on Uudee-40's coiling arm. "We's jus' 'sposed to come down here an' hit whatever's closest." Uudee-40 sighed, soft static murmuring through her vox. She would obviously have to slow her questioning drastically if she was to get the intended answer.

"How. Do. You. Get. In. It." Each modulated word bit off into static as she crouched low and her mechadendrites surged around Aan's wounded hand. He cried out, clawing futilely at her metal flesh.

"I told'ya, I told'ya, I dunno nothin'! It jus' - jus' eats ya! Then it starts talkin' and doin' stuff, an' I -" His voice cut off into a scream as Uudee-40 began to delicately remove his remaining fingernails. He spasmed in her grip, unable to break the vices steadying his hand. Instead of clawing at her again, he curiously began to hammer against the strange material of the pod, crying at it to help.

"It speaks to you? It is not a commander that speaks to you?" The tech-priest doubted the simple man's claims, perhaps the ramblings of one blind to the Machine God's ways - but the very mention of the idea excited her. The numerous dissertations she had reviewed claiming the barest second-hand knowledge of such an Abominable Intelligence had been discarded out of hand as flights of fancy, the idea of replicating it or indulging in experimentation heretical. But...

"It ain't! Please, please, I tells ya true. It's alive, I swear." Tears streamed down his face, clearing grimy paths in the dust and blood that caked Aan's face. The skin of his hand peeled away next, bloodless in its precision. "Please, I wanna go home."

"Do not falter, heretic, I am not finished. Describe the creator of this device, in detail. Human? Alien? Other?" Uudee-40 was no Biologis, but even she could tell he was diminishing. Such superficial damage to his hand would not be fatal however, she reasoned, and continued to shuck his flesh in precise cuts and clips.

"Flowers," Aan gurgled, struggling to even breathe and keep himself upright. "Like flowers."

Uudee-40 paused, replaying the audio clip of the Guardsman's last response several times. He had broken, she concluded, and withdrew her now-bloodied mechadendrites back into her dusky robes. Her eyes returned to the pale alien device, as motionless and inert as it was several minutes earlier. She barked a binaric order to the surrounding Skitarii, and they turned in concert and began to patrol through the damaged habs.

The tech-priest gazed down to the slumped figure leaking crimson into the fractured rockcrete, contemplating the gathered data. Her remaining human hand twitched and worried at the hem of her robe, metal fingers following the embedded conduction coils. It was a pitiful offering, barely even worth questioning the wretch, but it had been a start, and with the possible confirmation of the Abominable Intelligence...

"Worry not, Aan," she said, displeased at the sound of his name through her vox. The mass of mechadendrites stirred again to spiral out towards the man's body, shears and torches and spinning blades buzzing into action as they swept over his head. "I shall make use of you yet."