[M] War in the Shadows - Patriots IC

[Azazeal849]

Spoiler: Sarna Astros - Baraspine 

The left-hand door swung back, revealing a widening arc of the room beyond. Sarna saw simple lumoglobes and plain, brushed-steel walls, lined with row upon row of shelves holding everything from ration packs to data slates.

A masked face with wary hazel eyes beneath appeared between the doors, blocking her view. The man hauling the heavy wood aside wore the same black tunic as the servants upstairs, and, as near as Sarna could tell, the same wooden mask as well. Then again, since the Baraspini rarely saw each other plain, they could probably tell the knots and whorls of two masks apart as easily as faces.

Behind the servant were two tall men. Their masks were the same plain wood as the servant’s but their bearing was all different; feet apart, gloved hands clasped in front of them, backs straight. They both wore long cashmere coats, and Sarna could pick out the tell-tale impressions of guns in shoulder holsters.

The three huddled at the back could only be the noble family themselves - unlike the plain masks of the servants, theirs were scrimshawed with gold leaf and ivory inlay. The current fashion among the Baraspini ruling class seemed to be for brocaded, military-style coats and tall leather boots, because both mother and father wore them over pressed suits with stiff, gold-piped collars. Despite the uniforms neither looked particularly martial - both were of below average height, with the mother being slightly stocky and the father having a paunch that strained the buttons of his jacket. The third noble, presumably their son, was more conservatively dressed in a wine-red blazer, and by his height and gangly build Sarna estimated him to be a few years younger than herself.

“Have you no shame before the Emperor?” the mother barked at Sarna in a low, stentorian voice as soon as she came into view. “Where is your mask?”

“Offworlders, darling.” the father murmured furtively out the side of his mouth.

“Hurry, m’lady.” the serving man urged, holding out a hand to help the stately woman forward.

“Where are we going?” the noble son asked, apprehensively.

“To safety.” the mother answered, this time with a more measured tone in her contralto voice. “Remember what the lord cardinal said. The family Vel-Corosa are going to be lords of this hive.”

There was a clatter as the father scooped up an ornate scabbard from one of the shelves. Judging by the gold wiring spun around its basket hilt, it was more of an ornament than a weapon - a family heirloom perhaps. The guns of the two bodyguards were another matter.

[Atrum Daemon]

“Well, well,” Enki mused as he extracted the data and inloaded it. “It would seem we have some priority data to share. Let’s wrap this up, Zahir!”

Zahir drew in the electric energy streaming off his body, corded muscles tensing and flexing involuntarily as the current running his body grew stronger. The glow of his flesh grew brighter, patterns among the electoos appearing more defined along his arms and covering his exposed back. It was an old tradition from Zahir’s specific sect within the Luminen to carry a design upon the back emblematic of your values or convictions. Zahir carried upon his back the image of some long forgotten deity or monster from ancient tales who would punish the wicked who strayed from the right path and with it the weight of casting absolute judgement upon those he raised his hand against.

He finally thrust his arms forward and projected the gathered electric energy forth in a great blast of lightning accompanied by the gleeful shrieks of the voltgeists as their talons ripped into the machinery of the generatorium. Amidst the display, Enki strode towards the main generator engines as his HUD picked out the most pleasing areas to place a few charges and cause the most destruction. Enki set the melta charge upon the engines and set to modifying the detonation, his mind flicking back to the demon on Zahir’s back. A pledge to never waver in casting judgement upon the wicked and unrighteous and it was a conviction Zahir would never waver in. It strengthened Enki’s own resolve, as well, to prove that the Mechanicum had strayed from the Truth.

<Outside,> he spoke just as Zahir’s manic explosion of power died away. <This will be a glorious show.>

The showing from Zahir had left multitudes of volatile fluids and cores exposed. One wrong spark would be catastrophic for the generatorium which was just what Enki had hoped for. Once outside the building, Enki brought up a small haptic interface and detonated the charge with the press of a button. The conflagration that resulted from the blast of the fusion charge was a multi-colored show of light and fire that crippled the power supply perhaps indefinitely.

<The Omnissiah’s grace be in all things,> Enki said, turning to face Sova, <and I believe that means we have some valuable information to pass along. If our misguided brothers and sisters are to take such action they need be met with due resistance.>

‘And if we are to be labeled demons in this quest to show them their misguided ways,’ the Magos thought, his mind running a bit dark, ‘then so be it. It is a consequence I will shoulder gladly to return them to Omnissiah’s light. Even if they are nothing but ashes and atoms.’

[Azazeal849]

Spoiler: Enki Volkner, Omikron Zahir - Perinetus  

Arvus lighter Two-Nine-Epsilon-Three-Five
Unsanctioned course deviation

The bug-like Arvus hacked through the air towards Stilat cosmodrome, some eighty kilometres shy of its original course towards Ragnarov.

Loyalist vessels were arriving in orbit - the vanguard of a shifting tide. Stilat would likely have been one of their choice landing points, which was why all non-essential flights were due to be routed away from the area. That, of course, was the upside of servitor pilots: they didn’t consider such logistical problems, as long as they were provided with the correct command input.

Steadying herself with one hand on the overhead rail, ocularis Raechel Kuscelian looked down and saw a hell of flame. Smoke was billowing up in oily clouds from the ruptured prometheum tanks, and she could taste ash on the hot wind that was whipping in through the open bay door.

The Arvus slowed to a low orbit around the burning skyshield pads, jets angled downwards so that they cut ripples through the smoke. The servitor pilot beeped an error tone. “Landing area unsuitable.”

Raechel’s eyes twitched with a baseline impulse to roll. And that was the downside of servitors; they had no initiative.

“Return to base.” she ordered, waving her hand as she transmitted a noospheric code-blurt that would see the servitor wipe her commands from its memory stack and diagnose its erroneous detour as the product of a faulty GPS, in need of immediate rebooting.

As the Arvus heeled away over the concrete taxiways, Raechel let go of the rail and pushed herself forwards off the grated rear ramp. Her dark red cloak snagged in the wind as she fell twenty metres, dropped into a smooth roll, and came up onto one hand to steady herself. She snapped her head up towards the cosmodrome and rose, setting off at a sprint towards the burning control tower.

+ + + + + +

Enki Volkner and Omikron Zahir

Objective secured: Neutralise loyalist airbase
New objective: Locate a suitable evacuation craft

Sova pinged agreement with Enki’s words across their vox link, but his body was stood frozen, hands linked in the sign of the cog as his vocabulator roared out the blessed static of a binary hymn. The dancing flames of the generatorium reflected orange in his unblinking bionic eyes.

<As you say, magos reductor.> the tech-assassin replied as the victory rite ended and he swept his arms back down to his sides. <This little sequence will pale in comparison to the program we are about to write over Tranch. But we must take this Knowledge to the sector capital immediately.>

Sova extended an arm to point towards the orbital launch sector, where one of the rocket gantries was still engulfed in flame.

<They will be alerted to the craft we arrived in by now. We should find another to reach orbit and rendezvous with our pickup at the system’s edge.>

+ + + + + +

Someone had made a real mess of the comms centre. Machine spirits were screaming all around, blurring Raechel’s aural implants with static. She brushed her bionic hand over the terminals she passed, powering them down into a blissfully painless stupor.

One of the terminals drew her attention with its shrilling vox pickup. The cracked screen was blinking the ident codes of a mechanicus vessel named Triumphant Rationality, requesting permission to land shuttles. Raechel squinted at the lines of Tech, running them through her electrograft for tell-tale inconsistencies. Nothing indicated a false flag operation.

The headset shrilled again. Raechel shrugged, picked it up and held it to her ear. “I am sorry. All landings at Stilat have been temporarily suspended.”

There was a brief, angry blurt from the earpiece.

“Because it is currently on fire.” Raechel explained neutrally. There was a pause, and then another, more measured blurt. “Yes, I would surmise so.”

A new voice, low and very, very sure of itself. Raechel listened for a moment.

“Assistance?” the Dragon agent repeated. She looked around, analysing the weapon damage to the walls and extrapolating her odds. “Well, if you are offering...”

+ + + + + +

The three assassins hurried through the warren of fuzzed screens and black, twisted metal that remained of the cosmodrome checkpoint. Suddenly there was a loud bang, and for a brief moment Enki’s optical sensors were washed over with screeching static. From the way Sova and Zahir stumbled half a step, they had felt it too.

<Teleporter.> Sova identified the sound as he cycled his optics. He craned his neck to one side beneath his hood, and pulled his phosphor blast pistol from its holster once more. <More unenlightened sparks to be snuffed, I can only assume.>

He placed two hands on the broken security doors and sent them crashing down onto the thick concrete that separated the terminal towers from the backwash of the launching orbiters. Light flooded in, and so did the questing maser-beams of a dozen target locks. Spaced out between the terminal and the launchpad blast shields were upwards of twenty servitors, clad in sleek golden armour. Each carried a heavy weapon of the kind only gifted to skitarii alphas, gilded with silver script and stamped with binary purity seals, which fluttered in the artifical wind of the firestorm.

Standing at their head was a tall, spindly woman in a black jumpsuit and red cloak, edged with the crenelated white stripe of the Martian tech-priests. The hood of her cloak was down to reveal a round, china-pale face with wide-spaced eyes - one brown, one covered by an augmetic lens - and a small, firmly-set mouth. Her hair was a short cap of auburn red, recently regrowing, but still sparse enough to reveal the thin scars of electrograft surgery across her skull.

She stood motionless save for the fire-wind tugging at her cloak; feet spaced, thin arms folded across her chest.

“Excuse me.” She spoke Tech, but with her flesh-voice, like a priest addressing unblessed menials. “Now what the Omnissiah-loving fuck do you think you are doing, hmm?”

A derisive crackle of synthesised laughter emitted from Sova’s vox-grille. The sound died as his implants began to feed back data on what they were truly facing. It wasn’t the multiple layers of implants wired into the priestess’ brain, hands and heart. It wasn’t even the line of gilded skitarii alphas, whirring as they spun up their bewildering array of killing weaponry. It was the attack code that came lancing through the air towards him, unfolding across his ocular sensors into the emblem of a coiled dragon.

“Run!” the tech-assassin blurted, his machine-code emitters screeching at maximum volume. It was the last sound to emanate from them as the electroactive polymers in Sova’s arm began to contract, the stimulators crawling with invasive code-commands. The hijacked limb jerked Sova’s blast pistol up to the side of his head and fired, bursting his cranium apart in a flare of burning implants and vaporised brain.

[Atrum Daemon]

The pair were already taking off before Sova’s finger had fully pressed the trigger on his pistol. A parting gift from one of Enki’s weapon arms just to slow the loyalist entourage down was a blast from his rad-cleanser just to muddle their sensors. The Magos had neither the time nor inclination to engage in the sustained blast it would take to irradiate the unknown woman and her Skitarii to death. Zahir even left a couple voltgeists behind to just be menaces while the pair took off.

Trying to elude them would only work so long, that much was clear to Enki right away. He did a wide scan of the port to identify an intact vessel with which to make their escape. Enki tagged the nearest vessel to their location and fired it to Zahir’s sensory implants in case they needed to separate. In fact, such a necessity was called for as they split up to divide the new threat. All their communication was non-verbal and they both agreed that engagement was not advisable given what the priestess did to Sova.

But all the same, both were at the ready as they cut paths through the devastated base toward their destination point.

[Azazeal849]

Spoiler: Enki Volkner, Omikron Zahir - Perinetus 

Shutting down every noospheric connection and every active sensor in his body proved to be a judicious action - Enki felt invasive data-spikes clawing at his receivers in the microseconds before he clamped them shut. There was a conversion-field flash as the priestess raised a hand against his covering rad-blast, but the error beeps and angry code-blurts of blinded servitors followed Enki as he took off across the tarmac. It took the priestess a moment to reach out and slave two of the surrounding servitors to her own vision, and by the time bolter rockets were stitching across the cosmodrome Enki and Zahir had ducked into the nominal cover of a transparisteel guideway designed to funnel crew and cargo towards the launch pads.

Oxynitride windows crazed and shattered as the two sprinted along the tunnel, and Zahir’s voltagheists fizzed as they arced into bolt shells and burst them into blooms of shrapnel. Red-hot shards pinged against Enki’s body and made ribbons of his holy raiments, but by the Machine God’s providence none did him harm. After the longest six point seven-two seconds of his recent life, Enki was able to dive through the open double-doors of the loading complex, and the gunfire snapping at his heels welcomely desisted. A thrumming blast of his grav gun crushed the steel doors shut and jammed them in place, buying them a short respite.

His scan of the launch catapults had flagged several orbiters that might suit their purpose: a heavily-plated cargo lifter with a tough, stubborn machine spirit; a smaller but more fragile courier shuttle; and six orbital satellite rockets which did not have the engines and cogitators to make the short warp-hop sunward to where their transport was hiding, but could make for a useful distraction. All were on launchpads that were still free of fire, and were fully fuelled and primed for launch.

Taking brief communion with the spirits of the loader plant sent a shudder through the floor, and there was a whine of hydraulics as the gantry elevators began to descend. Enki’s audio-receptors detected another sound from beyond the doors - a cantering clack-clack, clack-clack of something bounding up the shattered passenger tunnel on all fours. Enki would have guessed a close-combat murder servitor, except instead of binharic vengeance hymns or fear-inspiring scream recordings, this one seemed to be transmitting music. The voice of a baseline female warbled over a simple string melody, softened by gramophone crackle and by the thick, closed doors.

It was somehow more disconcerting than the expected screams and growls.

The clacking footsteps syncopating the music suddenly ceased with a loud bang, and the sputtering hiss of melta-cutters supplanted it. Sparks fountained from the warped steel, and with a metallic groan two sets of knife talons pushed through, levering the doors apart to reveal a blank golden mask. The ethereal music swelled to a deafening blare as the gold-armoured servitor squirmed through, and came sprinting up the narrow corridor towards Enki and Zahir with razor claws swiping.

[dakkagor]

Sarna held up a hand, bringing the bodyguards to a halt.

"Let me move ahead. Stay with the principals. Head out the servants entrance and make sure you disable the security as you go. Helps prevent accidents if we have to back up in a hurry."

The two bodyguards nodded and turned to guide their charges forward. Sarna instead clambered back through the pipe, then moved up the stairs out of the cellar. Sure she was a decent distance away, she paused in the kitchen to open a vox channel to the sniper team.

+Go for overwatch+

"Two bodyguards with shrouded weapons. Unfavourable conditions"

There was a dark chuckle over the link.

+I thought you might have bit of more than you can chew. Get them in the open, and we can do the rest.+

Nodding as much to herself as to her unseen support team, she turned and moved to the top of the stairs.

"My support team says the way is clear, but not for long!" She yelled. "Move yourselves!"

[Atrum Daemon]

Enki’s gravity gun flipped to maximum settings and fired at the charging murder servitor. The blast was more than enough to fling the machine back, rupturing what organics it still had, and slam the body into the door it had forced its way through. The metal warped and twisted again, creating a fine seal while the Magos thought for a moment. If his spine was still organic there would be a shiver going down it as the music still played albeit warbled and broken.

“I admire her optimism,” Enki said as he set all the crafts to prepare to launch after a short communion with the local machine spirits. “And when we meet next, I will enjoy breaking her apart.”

“So how are we getting out of here?”

“We’re flying of course. We just need a distraction. Wait here in case anything else tries to get inside. I want to make sure the manual controls won’t stop us.”

Enki thumped away with his usual heavy footsteps. Standard protocol required the satellites to be set to launch manually or at least Enki assumed that was the case when he found no noospheric access to the launch controls. It was a small inconvenience that could prove useful given that the analog controls in the control room would let him set much more precise launch commands than over the noosphere link. Manually setting things to his specifications was something Enki had always enjoyed about his work, particularly when it came to demolition as could be seen in the numeric sequences for any timed detonation he set up.

Enki changed his course from the control room and headed to the gantry that led to the manual overrides for the launches. He wanted to check if those were in working order before trying to set a launch sequence via the control room. The Magos did not need a sudden unforeseen problem to arise because he had not been thorough enough.

[Azazeal849]

Spoiler: Enki Volkner, Omikron Zahir - Perinetus 

The sparks of the broken servitor faded away below them, replaced by the shuddering whine of lifter cables as the cage ascended towards the gantry. Behind the sound of the cables grinding over their runners, Enki detected a different sound - a scrabbling k-tunk, k-tunk echoing from outside the steel tower.

Ah, of course - the enemy priestess had sacrificed the single servitor to provide a momentary distraction from her other pawns who were right now scaling the gantry. Enki’s audio sensors picked up nine distinct sets of impacts from a variety of harpoon ropes, mag-clamps and tearing metallic claws. Strangely, one set ceased half way up the tower, replaced by a hissing, sparking sound that fell away as the two continued to ascend. As the elevator began to slow, the two covert operatives were left to steel themselves for what they knew they were about to see.

The two sets of steel doors juddered open to reveal a wind-whipped platform of metal, branching off with gantries towards the needle-like satellite launchers. Directly ahead were two skyshield landing pads with barriers down, half-hidden by the small, box-like shrine which held the manual launch controls. Even as Enki watched, the dragon-tooth barriers on the skyshields began to swing up, blocking their escape to the waiting shuttles. That should have been impossible, given that Enki had very thoroughly jammed the doors into the tower and its ground-level control room. Then, he remembered that if the launch controls were hard wired, they must run their cables up the length of the tower. It offered an unpleasantly fitting explanation for why one of the servitors scaling the tower had stopped and began to cut its way in - the priestess had to be splicing into the command cables to seize control of the launch systems.

Enki had two options: to take local control through the manual overrides, or to shoot the offending servitor off the side of the tower. Or perhaps Zahir could even send a powerful enough shock down through the cables and-

The magos’ thoughts were interrupted as golden servitors began to scramble up over the platform’s guard rails; gilded fingers hooking over to tear into metal, shoulder-mounted arc rifles and torsion cannons swinging down to bear. Enki revised his options: he could do any of the above, under enemy fire.

[Azazeal849]

Spoiler: Sarna Astros - Baraspine 

Jotunhel marksman Einar was a cold, scarred, cynical man from a cold, scarred, cynical planet. He hated the Imperium for betraying his people, and he hated them worse for building soaring, opulent hive districts like this one. It proved that the Imperium’s promise of a better life outside the frozen wastes of Jotunhel wasn’t a complete lie - merely a life that they considered people like him unworthy of.

The so-called Patriots of Adrantis didn’t seem to have done much to upend the old order. It made Einar wonder if the revolution and subsequent war were just a changing of the guard for the people here. After the Imperials made enough mess and noise and death down in the lower levels of the hive, would they simply surrender and claim that, truly, they had been the Emperor’s loyal lickspittles all along? Would they be allowed to keep their cosy villas, living on as if the rebellion had been the treachery of strictly lesser humans?

He hated them all. Their targets today might be some loyalist family whom the powers-that-be considered a particular security risk, but for Einar it was enough to bring a small measure of panic to this idyllic little corner of entrenched privilege. Einar’s spotter Dagfinn had the infrascope, and the device was pressed to his eyes as they looked down from the second-floor apartment they had broken into. By the looks of things the former occupants had left in a hurry, which was all to the good - no screaming civvies to attract attention; no-one to respond to an alarm in the unlikely event that Einar and his veteran infiltrators set one off.

“They’re exiting the villa.” Dagfinn murmured.

Einar grunted quietly by way of acknowledgement. A row of artfully pruned bushes rose above the villa’s garden wall, to screen it from the prying eyes of their social inferiors. Einar turned his head slightly towards the vox bead pinned to his collar. “Get them out into the main road, Sarnie. I want a clear shot. Geirolf, we’ll take out the two bodyguards first.”

There was silence from his vox bead.

“Gierolf, are you daydreaming? Answer me you useless piece of shit.”

“Fuck your mother, Einar.” another gruff Jotunhel voice belatedly responded. “Somethin’s kickin’ off at the cargo lift.”

Gierolf and his own spotter were ensconced in an old storage warehouse further up the road, with a prime view of both the villa entrance and the unloading tower where the local PDF had just gone scurrying in their repainted Rhino.

“What’s ‘something’, dipshit?” Einar growled.

“Four locals just came up the lift. The PDF’s talkin’ to them but…oh fuck me!”

“Gierolf!” Einar snapped into his vox, “If you don’t tell me right fucking n-”

“Einar!” the reply cut him off, “You’re not goin’ to believe this, but a fuckin’ ghost just shot down out of the floodlights into the PDF Rhino.”

[Atrum Daemon]

The situation had gone from passable to just irritating in the space of a few micro-seconds. The hulking Magos gestured to the cabling around the tower as a silent order to Zahir. The Luminen nodded and headed off to send a directed overcharge down the cabling to dislodge and utterly decimate the servitor splicing the control modules. Meanwhile, Enki was left to deal with the approaching murder-servitors and was regretting leaving home without his own refractor field. But his body had been built to take plenty of punishment in the absence of one at the very least
Enki’s footfalls created small dents in the metal under him as he stomped towards the golden machines, his grav-gun coming to bear again. The weapon hummed as it was flipped to its maximal settings and then by Enki’s silent command set to “inverted.” Rather than be blown away by the graviton blast, the target would become crushed under sudden and extraordinary localized weight.

Oh how he detested the tech-priests who used servitors and other such drones to fight for them. They wished to claim they were doing the Omnissiah’s work but rarely had the clout to fight properly. How he yearned to get his hands on the spindly bitch downstairs and rip her apart piece by piece!

But he would need a few firmware upgrades first. He had no desire to be killed by his own arm like she had done with Sova.

The grav-gun fired as electrical energy coalesced around Zahir’s limbs. The blast caught one servitor and made it buckle over as it was crushed into a deformed ball. Enki switched the inversion off and fired again but the other servitor juked aside and only lost part of its arm to the blast. More of his sacred vestments were ripped by the gunfire of the shoulder-mounted armament as he kept the thing’s attention diverted from Zahir who was almost finished collected enough power.

His grav-gun was soon joined by the hissing fire of his meltagun as the servitors scrambled up the sides of the platform. Finally, there was a massive discharge from behind him that momentarily scrambled his optics. The power surge coursed through the cables and down the side of the building to reach the offending servitor there in a wonderful blast of blue light and bright sparks.

Now they just had to fight their way to the controls and get the launch sequences started. All in a day’s work for a Magos Reductor and his adjunct, really.