[M] War in the Shadows - Imperials IC

[Azazeal849]

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Spoiler: Gavin Jenkins, Sapphira Wilder, Kojiro Osada - Baraspine 

Alda underhive
Zero hour +8
Imperial objectives: Rescue loyalist nobles

The district had been too close to an orbital defence silo. Lance strikes intended for the silo had sent a scouring firestorm sweeping through the nearby shanty town, leaving fused metal and blackened rockrete in its wake. Here and there were the withered, mannequin shapes of burned bodies, tar-black and shrunken almost to the size of children.

Baraspine was hot, dusty, toxic and wretched; just as interrogator Glabrio Hybrida remembered it. Somewhere out in the burned wasteland people were sobbing, coughing and shouting for help, but no ambulances or enforcer vans ever came this far down hive.

People slaughtered, cities bombed, children starving? That's what war brings. Glabrio’s Lady Inquisitor had been right about that, as she often was. That didn’t mean he had to like it, or feel no guilt at closing his ears to the pleading shouts in Baraspini gothic.

The Guard artillery was thundering distantly, but the underhive slums were as low a priority for the crusaders as it was for the native emergency services. It was that fact that Glabrio had been banking on when he planned their route. Despite his new rosette, he had half expected inquisitor Lucullis to appoint one of his own people to lead the team - but interrogator Erdene was more a pilot than a ground-pounder, and Lucullis was pleasingly by-the-book when it came to matters of rank. Glabrio liked to think that he had not disgraced himself or the Lady on his first command - after Erdene had flown them down five days previously and allowed them to lose themselves in hive Alda, he had made contact with a Vigil sister still in the field, and through her he had located several persons of interest, passed on details of troop movements, and made contact with a noble family still loyal to the Imperial cause.

The loyalist nobles were his current overriding concern.

He only wished he had a bigger team at his disposal to extract them now. Of the old retinue, only Gavin and Sapphira were still with him - Tomas remained at the stricken Lady’s side; Kally, Crenshaw and Solvan were off on individual assignments; and the Black siblings were stuck with desk jobs, presumably still hating each other’s guts. Instead he had one of Lucullis’ men: a stoic, menacing assassin called Osada. He hoped that he would be up to the mark.

The acrid reek of fire-smoke wormed its way under Glabrio’s plain wood mask and the filtration plugs he wore beneath it as they hurried through deserted back alleys towards the import cargo elevators - their ticket up to the arranged meeting point on the hundred-and-thirteenth level of Shriken spire. First though, they had to get onto the elevator.

“Keep back! Keep back, damn your eyes!”

As they entered the plaza where outhive goods were checked and marked for transport up the spire, the cries for help gave way to angry clamouring. A crowd of underhivers were pressing towards the customs checkpoint, beating on armourglass screens and clambering over stacked cargo crates, though they gave the electrified fences around the loading area a wide berth. A cordon of Divinatory Guard were holding them back - men and women in long flakweave coats and steel facemasks stamped with Tarot symbols. An officer bearing the Knight of Mandatio was haranguing the crowd, while a Nine of Monasteria fired a warning burst of las into the air.

“Well, gentlemen.” Glabrio said grimly as the four agents emerged into the plaza. “The music’s started. Shall we dance?”

Spoiler: Kally Sonder - Perinetus 

Ankylon defence line
Day 156 of Perinetus civil war
Imperial objectives: Kill magos Delzharian

Until very recently, the snaking trenchworks of the Ankylon line had belonged to magos Ankari’s skitarii. Now the secessionists were steamrolling on towards Ragnarov forge, and the only living loyalists still within the trenches were prisoners of war. Delzharian was confident of victory - so confident that he had moved his command post forward into the former loyalist trenchlines to better coordinate his final triumph in the southern sector. Over the shattered bunkers and corpse-choked killzones, the tireless armies of the heretek mechanicus marched: legion after legion, titan after titan.

They had missed one loyalist.

Buried among the corpses where she had been lying for the last 36 hours, with ruptured stimm-cocktails, hydraulic fluids and worse dribbling into her eyes, Kally Sonder took in the scene with senses that were no longer human. Only a skeleton force remained within the trenches, and most of them were servitors clearing corpses and stripping them of salvageable parts. The Patriots’ priority was the forge city further upriver, with all of its factories, airfields and holy tech-shrines.

A smattering of radio traffic pulsed through the air, snared and filtered by Kally’s new implants. In the trench ahead of her, a clutch of scalpel-fingered recovery servitors waded through a foetid slurry of mud and blood, gathering up corpses and excising the blessings of the Omnissiah before tossing the organic refuse onto the pile where Kally now lay. A few hundred metres down the zagging trenchline, a junior tech-priest and his bodyguards were recovering the targeting uplink from a peeled-open bunker. And a kilometre beyond that, high-level command signals were emanating from what had been the comms and artillery headquarters.

Delzharian would lead her to the Nebulas, and it just so happened that both the Imperium and the ad mech really, really wanted him dead. A happy confluence of objectives that would have been useful six months ago. From what Kally understood, several kill teams had already tried and failed to end the rogue magos’ life.

A recovery servitor dumped another body on top of Kally, tossing blood-sticky bionics into the hopper on its back as it turned to head back out into the trench.

[dakkagor]

You'll do.

She slithered out of the pile of corpses, and kept low to the ground. Crouched low, she approached the servitor as it began to manhandle another corpse.

She punched it. Hard. Her hand ploughed through greasy, rank meat and she closed her hand around its cortical stack. She pulled it clean out, through its back, ripping spine and metal cabling with it. The mechorganic golem dropped heavily, clattering on the trenchboards.

Her other hand uncoiled a thin MIU jack from the back of her neck and slammed it into the stacks input port. She grimaced as she felt her conciousness intrude into the machine spirits domain. She got a feeling of tremendous fear, horror, anger, betrayal. Who had this poor bastard been, and what had been the thought going through his head when he had been lobotomised by a minion of Delzharian for his crimes. Kally briefly wondered if he had been a loyalist, or merely a rival.

She overrode the simple defences of the stack and pulled the information she needed from it. Her implants began to broadcast the rudimentary signals of the machine she had killed. As far as any watching techpriest was concerned, unless they saw her with actual eyes, she was another carrion servitor picking a battlefield clean.

Something clawed at her foot.

She pulled a knife and knelt down, throwing the cortical stack aside. An injured skitarii, in Ankari's colours, was clutching at her boot. It, she, was still alive, despite having had most of its augmetics harvested. Weeping holes in the womans skull replaced eyes, and her legs were gone. Her left arm was similarly missing, clearly harvested by the corpse pickers. She opened her mouth to say something. Kally never found out what it was, because she planted her knife in the woman's forehead.

Another mercy kill, was what she told herself.

She got moving, following the invisible trails in the air that pointed her towards Delzharian. She slipped by patrols, her skills, equipment and stolen bio-ident allowing her to get closer.

700 metres. A stinking, oil filled crater.

450 metres. A burned out onager hull that made her augmetics fizz.

300 metres. Target close. She stopped in a gunpit that reeked of blood and promethium fumes to prepare.

She drew her sword, and ran her thumb over its activation rune. She also drew a compact, rapid fire bolt pistol, and slammed her single clip of kraken rounds home. She ran through the muscle sequence that dumped satrophene from her new glands into her augmented body.

250 metres. She crawled closer, and deactivated the bio-ident.

She suspected, like many, that Delzharian was storing his brain in one of his bodyguards. Fine. She would have to disable them all.

200 metres.

[Azazeal849]

Spoiler: Kally Sonder - Perinetus 

Kally could see it up ahead, rising above the twisting rat-run where the trench ended; a vast slab of reinforced rockrete, scored and split in several places from the fight where the defenders had been overrun. The stench of rotting meat and machine oil was thinning, only to be replaced by one of gunsmoke and engine fumes.

The staccato thunder of artillery had become deafening, and indeed would have been to unaugmented ears. Patriot Basilisks and Bombards were arrayed within the artillery park that had formerly been occupied by Imperial forces, and were turning their fury on some distant enemy. Somewhere, Kally could hear a Manticore fwoom-fwoom-fwooming as it released a volley of missiles. A Basilisk not fifty metres from the trench jolted, the breech of its earthshaker cannon slamming back like a piston before the tank’s treads chewed earth to reposition it away from a potential retaliatory strike.

Ahead of Kally, the side entrance to the bunker complex was a small, dark mouth, partially blocked by stacks of sandbags. Standing directly beside the door, a good meter taller than it, was the hulking shape of a battle robot arrayed in chipped cobalt-blue heraldry. It was almost astartes-like in appearance, with the same thick armour plates and silhouette-expanding shoulder guards. A questing las-light rolled back and forth across the trench, closely followed by the muzzle of a thick tube mounted on the automaton’s shoulder. The muzzle was scorched black, and below it a grinning yellow pilot light flickered.

+Errant 404: Hello, is this a good time?+

An encrypted vox signal riding on the coat-tails of the Patriots’ own radio traffic was snagged by Kally’s implants, and decoded as a ticker-tape message that scrolled across the front of her new eyes. Errant 404 was Raechel’s whimsically-chosen new codename. Apparently it was some kind of pun that only made sense to tech-priests.

+Errant 404: There has been an incident at Stilat cosmodrome; I am going to have to divert. The Patriots have also engaged Arkani’s covering force along Arterial Two Seven. One side or the other is likely to be moving heavy units through your sector soon. What is your status?+

[dakkagor]

+Errant 404: Hello, is this a good time?+

Kally poked her head above the parapet and squinted at the battlebot. That might pose a problem. She was tough, but even she couldn't survive a flamer. And those things never died easy.

+Gunfighter2: Not really. But go ahead+

+Errant 404: There has been an incident at Stilat cosmodrome; I am going to have to divert. The Patriots have also engaged Ankari’s covering force along Arterial Two Seven. One side or the other is likely to be moving heavy units through your sector soon. What is your status?+

+Gunfighter2: You have got to be kidding. I'm practically on top of him.
I could really do with some brute force crypto in the next minute or so.+

She blinked and sent a pict-capture from her field of vision.

+Gunfighter2: Any ideas?+

+Errant 404: Oh. That would be a Kastelan-pattern battle automaton.+

There was a half-second pause, which by Raechel's standards was a long time.

+Errant 404: Alright, those things operate purely on command dataslates, without any external input to spike into. On the other hand, that means your target will be none the wiser if it malfunctions. I have a scrambler code which should overload the Kastelan's optics and force it to reboot, but you will only have 11 seconds to get past it - maybe 12 if the enginseer has not been properly cleansing its spirit after every operating cycle.+

+Gunfighter2: 11 seconds should be enough. Thanks +

+Take care Kally <3+

The text dissolved and was replaced by fulgurating pixels as her implants downloaded the Dragon agent's attack code.

Alright. Eleven seconds

She set a timer in the bottom left of her vision and emerged from cover, hurling the code like a noospheric spear at the lumbering machine. It turned at the sound of her and then paused, frozen for want of data or commands

Ten

She lunged from cover and sprinted the last fifty metres at full pelt, weapon drawn.

Six

The masterwork point of her sword met the torso of the robot and punched clean through armour plating and the components behind. With a grind of servos, the machine twisted its torso and tried to bring a cumbersome weapon fist to bear, clawed digits snapping at the air.

Five

Braced against the machine, Kally drove her sword upwards, through its domed head in a shower of sparks and a spray of machine oil before jumping clear and landing in the trenchworks that lead to the bunker entrance.

Four

Stumbling, blind and dying, the lumbering robot turned its flamer and fired in a wide fan, sticky promethium leaving a blazing arc of destruction. Kally dodged back, then plunged through the leaping flames.

Three

Her powersword carved through the torso again, hunting the secondary brain and transmitters. She found her target, and the robot lurched sideways, crashed into the trenchwall, and lay still.

Two

She killed the countdown, breathing hard, shuddering as the satrophene reacted with her natural adrenalin. She blinked rapidly, pulled an omnitool from her belt, and got to work.

+++++

Zeites Skulk paused from his order incanting to the thumping artillery above, the sensorium vanes that made up the back of his skull twitching in agitation. There was a sound coming down the security corridor that was opposed to ordered, observable reality.

Unaugmented human footsteps. Running, unaugmented human footsteps

Clacking around on his six spidery legs, he gestured sharply to the leader of his Skitarii bodyguard and augmitted a tight knot of furious code.

+Find out what is going on outside!+ This was undoubtedly some problem with the forge-guard, mostly unaugmented human levies from the serf classes.

The skitarii had been standing at ease nearby, and saluted briskly, burbling order code at two of his fellows with rad carbines. All three fell in and turned to leave the room, and came up short.

Standing in the door was short, heavily augmented human female. Zeites Skulk could feel the code bleed from her at a distance, could sense the bunching post-human muscle power in her frame, and smell the numerous combat drugs fizzing through her bloodstream like battery acid. Her equipment was a masterwork of Imperial technologies, from the bellicose spirits of the sword and the pistol at her hips, to the quiescent surety of the reinforced, assassin grade bodyglove, smeared in battlefield effluent, that covered her from head to toe.

He could also plainly see the heavy flamer, detached from the kastellan outside, she was holding in her hands and aiming into the room.

He lunged towards her, extending his data-spikes as weapons, shrieking a warning. The skitarii pulled up weapons and aimed, as if in treacle. The woman pulled the trigger on her improvised weapon, and hosed down the entire room.

To his horror, the data suggested that Zeites Skulk would not stop the weapon in time, and was perceptionally augmented enough to experience all of what came next. Sticky liquid fire filled the room, covering him and his five man skitarii bodyguard in white hot agony. The skitarii flailed and screamed, clawing at their augmetics and their still all too human flesh. Zeites legs failed and he slammed to the floor, still ablaze, his robes and flesh acting like a candle for the hungry flames. He was not combat augmented, he was a data smith, called up to fight! His blazing body screamed at him as he shut down pain receptors left and right, and panic swallowed him nearly whole as he fought to retain the the true detachment of a tech priest. He watched, still in slow motion, as the bodyguard commander, still loyal, still aflame, tried to bring a taser goad to bear, and the assassin simply stepped aside and, with a flick of her right leg, sent him crashing into a corner, very much dead, his chest armour dented inwards in the shape of a human foot.

His photoreceptors melting from his skull, the room went dark. He could still hear the skitarii cooking, now silent. He heard a bolt pistol cock and felt it press against the robes currently melted to his flesh.

"Tell me where Delzharian is, and I'll make it quick."

"Never!" He sputtered in his flesh voice. By some miracle, his augmented hearing was still intact, and he heard someone coming. Someone who was coming to help him. "I'll never betray him."

With a roar of buzzsaws and binharic battlecry, Ixion Vardis stormed into the room.

+++++

Ixion roared in anger and horror, a harsh static wash that could burst eardrums. His robotic charge certainly dead, his colleague and five skitarii dead by its weapon, perverted in the hand of an assassin. Amazingly, Skulk canted a warning from the floor, but it was too mangled by the horrible burns he had suffered for Ixion to understand. He leapt at the assassin, a mass of sawing combat blades, re-purposed omni-tools and his Omnissian Axe thrusting like a spear ahead of him. A wall of mincing blades capable of tearing anything human sized apart.

Then the assassin moved.

He watched, incredulous, as a hand smacked the spike of his axe upwards, into the bunker ceiling, arresting his advance. The flamer was cast aside as the assassin weaved through the forest of carving implements, and then he felt a hot spike of agony punch through his sternum, rip out his back, and then carve upwards through his torso. He staggered backwards, suffering a lifetimes worth of pain in a few compressed seconds, before the assassin stepped away and blasted him apart with a brace of bolt pistol shots.

+++++

Skulk decided to try to shamble away, to get help, while Ixion distracted the assassin. When his still functioning ears reported five bolt pistol shots, he knew that the cybernetica priest was dead, and such hope was folly. He felt the hot barrel of the bolt pistol again, this time pressed firmly into the back of his skull.

"Change your mind?"

He was in miserable pain. Ruined beyond repair. He started to talk. Mercy came soon after.

+++++

+ORDER CHECK: ORDERS REMAIN UNCHANGED. RESET TIMER 01+
+TIMER 01 RESET. RESUMING GUARD PROGRAM ALPHA 1-4 CHOKEPOINT CLOSE DEFENCE+
+FREIGHT ELEVATOR HAS ARRIVED AT CHOKEPOINT. ORDER CHECK: ELEVATOR MUST BE OPENED AND CHECKED FOR INFILTRATORS. ALL INFILTRATORS MUST BE KILLED. AVE OMNISSIAH+

The hulking, clawed hand swung out from the barrel chested automata as it stomped forwards a step, shaking the main transit corridor and setting the lumens swinging. Its ancient plasma blaster swung down to point into the elevator, as with surprising deftness, the Arlatax pulled the elevator cage doors to the bunkers Primary Ammunition Elevator open, the route that had been used to wrestle it down to this level in the first place. Something metallic pinged across the concrete floor, and dangerously curious for an independent machine, the robot peered in for a closer look at the collection of objects in the centre of the elevator, its autocannons whirring to readiness in indecent excitement for something to kill.

Spot welded down, in the centre of the Primary Ammunition Elevator, were five basilisk shells and a cluster of skitarii frag grenades. A wire draped across the robots huge left foot. It paused to look at the sheet of paper taped to the nearest shell. Someone had used civilian lip cosmetics to crudely draw a human face sticking out a tongue.

The Arlatax Battle Automata, a relic of a dark age of Imperial history nearly lost to mankind, had a half second to take a pict capture, send it Delzharian, and attach a query, before it, the elevator, half the stairway behind it, and a fifty metre section of bunker vanished in a fireball.

+++++

Kally descended down the freight elevator by zipline with a rad-carbine slung over her back. It was a useful weapon even if it was probably giving her a variety of interesting cancers. When she reached the bottom, she paused briefly to admire her handiwork with the Arlatax, and was dismayed to find it still functioning. In a sense. Its legs and most of its torso had been mangled and buried under a metric ton of ferrocrete from the stairwell it had been thrown into. Its complex sensor array was shattered into uselessness, and every weapon on it had been brutally broken by the concentrated blast. But, miraculously it was still twitching. She made a mental note of its location and resolved to pass that information on to the loyalist mechanicus, assuming she ever got off this shit hole planet.

Alarms had been tripped through the bunker complex by the blast. The benefit of doing something like that in a mechanicus built ammunition depot and artillery park, was that it was designed to take much worse and still keep ticking. Blast shutters had slammed closed, flame retardant foam had dumped over the blast site, and the stairwell and lift was gone, but the bunker was functional. Better yet, those blast shutters would slow down any reinforcements Delzharian could summon, and would slow Delzharians escape as well if he got past her.

Kally smiled under her hood as the shutter to the comms post rolled back up. The radcarbine spoke, and the junior adept and the pair of skitarii who had been sent to investigate died immediately. Kally strode over their bleeding bodies and entered the comm's post proper. As she did, she kept snapping off shots at panicking and fleeing adepts, carving them down with brutal efficiency. A few more skitarii emerged to try and stop her, and she shot those too, recovering ammunition for her salvaged gun as she swept the comm centre.

[Azazeal849]

Spoiler: Kally Sonder - Perinetus 

Within a shockingly brief period of time, there were no more living tech-adepts in the command hub.

In the sudden stillness, the cracked glass of an artillery plotter broke apart and slithered to the ground in pieces. Questioning vox-blurts were crackling around the horse-shoe of blood-spattered cogitator stations, as the self-propelled guns outside requested targeting updates from the geo-satellites or the recon aircraft or whatever else the Patriot tech-priests had been drawing their data from before Kally made her violent interruption.

The only thing among the wreckage and half-human corpses that mattered to Kally was that Delzharian wasn’t there. She paused for a moment, while irradiated smoke twisted up through the still air. Delzharian must have heard the explosion from the ammo lift, just like everyone else. And more than likely one of the adepts or skitarii down here had squirted off a warning to him about a heavily armed killer blazing through the bunker. That left one logical place to retreat to...and the cogboys did so love their logic.

+ + + + + +

Kally rolled up the blast shutter to the artillery magazine and let it drop behind her with a rattling crash. Above the graveyard silence she had left throughout the bunker, the muffled crump of artillery and the rattle of small arms filtered down through the air shafts. Small arms meant the fight had gotten closer - a fact that was confirmed soon after by an alert klaxon, wailing distantly up and down the scale.

The caged electric lights overhead were sputtering from connections knocked loose by Kally’s improvised bomb. They threw shadows across countless artillery shells, stacked up on wooden pallets. The air smelled of brass and cordite.

“I would leave the rad-carbine outside.” a clipped voice rang out, speaking in Martian-accented high gothic. “A flash in here would make an even bigger bang than that affront to good demolitions practice you left on the elevator.”

Soft footsteps striking against the metal floor announced a tall, slender man stepping out into the light-flicker, between two long walls of shell-stacks. Another figure appeared to Kally’s left, and then a third to her right. Another two. Another four. They were android constructions of myomer coil and contoured plate, all with integrated gamma blasters bulging from their forearms. But the curved housings over the gun-barrels remained shut - the speaker hadn’t been joking about the cataclysm that weapons fire down here might unleash. Instead, each automaton's hands hovered over a pair of short blades, mag-locked to their thigh plates.

Kally glanced around, noting their weapons, and noting their faces. Or rather, the same face on every robot: a perfect facsimile of the man who had first spoken. It was a handsome face - broad-nosed, full-lipped, with skin the colour of hardened clay. The speaker was the only one whose frame and angles looked partly human beneath his sleek red robes, but even then it was difficult to tell - lines crossed his face like the meetings of metal plates, and deeper trenches running with plasma-blue light carved back from his jaw and the tails of his eyes.

“I hope you realise that was an extremely rare battle-automaton you just ruined.” Delzharian continued, monotone. “Now I’m going to have to salvage your augments to rebuild it.”

The six automata grinned with synthskin lips, and snatched their paired short-swords from their clamps. The click of disengaging mag-locks was replaced by a soft hum as twelve sets of powerfields activated.

Delzharian shook his head, as if the preceding carnage and the post-human assassin bearing down on him were trivial grievances. The blue LEDs of his eyes roamed around to fall on the softly glowing blades of his bodyguards, and he let out a very human-sounding sigh. “Such primitive weaponry. No matter. Kill her.”

[dakkagor]

“I would leave the rad-carbine outside.” a clipped voice rang out, speaking in Martian-accented high gothic. “A flash in here would make an even bigger bang than that affront to good demolitions practice you left on the elevator.”


Kally frowned, but had to agree. She had hoped the shooting war outside had depleted this stockpile. The untouched racks of shells told a different story. With a sigh, she tossed the gun into the shadows.

"Delzharian. At last."

As each automata appeared, her sense of unease got deeper. None of them seemed to be communicating by anything other than basic haptic commands. Unhackable by any of the brute force tools she had on hand. She drew her sword in her right hand, and in her left, reached into a pouch at her waist.

“I hope you realise that was an extremely rare battle-automaton you just ruined.” Delzharian continued, monotone. “Now I’m going to have to salvage your augments to rebuild it.”

"You're the one who put your toy in harms way." Kally muttered under her breath, wary. She watched the robots as they circled her, out of reach. She knew of three kill teams that had fallen to Delzharian. And she had heard rumours of an Imperial Assassin who had also died in the attempt. The advanced, heretical nature of these robots, which she knew would send the Mechanicus into fits, explained every failed attempt. Autonomous, powerful, fast, tough. Kally knew she was staring her death in the face as she ran the fight through her head as the net closed.

Delzharian shook his head, as if the preceding carnage and the post-human assassin bearing down on him were trivial grievances. The blue LEDs of his eyes roamed around to fall on the softly glowing blades of his bodyguards, and he let out a very human-sounding sigh. “Such primitive weaponry. No matter. Kill her.”

They lunged as one, coordinated mass, and ploughed into a bank of smoke and chaff from Kally's palmed smoke grenade. It was only a seconds grace. Kally was up and over the mob, handspringing from the back of one of her would be killers and landing lightly in front of Delzharian himself.

She spent a quarter of that valuable second to plant a mocking kiss on his cold dead lips before she was gone, past him, into the shadows. The six mechanical killers needed no urging from their master, and raced after her.

She knew she couldn't take them all, especially not if their heavily augmented master decided to enter the mix. And Delzharian knew that too. Logic dictated she retreat, make an exit and try a different tack at a later date. Sniping, data breach, anything but this ballsy full frontal assault that had gotten so close. This was the moment every other kill team failed, Kally knew in her gut. They choked, they fell back, and the robots tore them apart.

The imperial assassin, well, the robots were probably worth running away from. They would kill her if she stood and fought.

But this was the only approach. Delzharian would happily spend the rest of his life in armoured, windowless boxes if it gave him victory. And the only person she guessed would be capable of hacking his data crypts was currently MIA.

She moved silently across the beams in the high vaulted ceiling, watching the search pattern pan out as they hunted for her by sound, heat, maybe even smell. But she smelled like the battlefield, just like they did. She moved soundlessly. And her suit was wicking away her heat into the environment slowly, almost imperceptibly.

Delzharian himself did not seem impressed. Two of the automata had fallen back to shadow him. The other four prowled, power swords casting long shadows amongst the shells. She knew she could take them one by one. And maybe two by two. The plan snapped into sharp focus, and she reached for some toys of her own.

+++++

The door clattered open and then clattered shut. Unavoidable. All four of the drones on the hunt surged towards it, catching the audio scatter of feet beyond the hatch as it slammed back down. They stacked up at the hatch as one braced on the handles and hauled it halfway up. One went through, ducking into the corridor beyond, deathmask face scanning left and right for the audio source that sounded close. The second followed. . .

Kally fell as the third went through. Her sword, a masterwork from the Lathes, a precious imperial relic, carved through the one holding the door like butter. Tough, but not invincible after all. It fell in two, cut shoulder to groin.

The one halfway through turned and got a boot to the face and a knife in its neck a moment later. The door came down, hard, and broke its metallic spine. Kally got a step back from the door as the two stuck in the corridor, if only for a few precious seconds, slammed into the shutter to make it shake. She turned as the pair that had been shadowing Delzharian came for her. She parried the first strike by driving the blow past her into the door. As she spun past in a move that would have made poor, dead Interrogater Javid Schafer proud, his old blade took the head clean from the second attacker. Its two short swords grazed past Kally, ripping open her suit in two places and leaving her with painful surface wounds even as the robot stood, frozen. Behind her, the shutter slammed upwards, dragging the bodyguard who had buried his sword into it from the floor. Kally snatched a sword from the dead one falling in front of her, and ended its struggle, burying the powered blade with a flick of her wrist that sawed the sword through the air to nail the bodyguard to the door like a sample insect on a slate.

The decapitated, half disarmed one jerked back into life as Kally stepped over it, and the other two barrelled through the door. Kally used the decapitated, damaged robot as cover, trusting to Mechanicus IFF as she turned, blocking a hail of blows from one of the robots in a shower of sparks. She kicked from the floor as they both got round her temporary barrier, and she rolled over the damaged robots shoulder while carving it apart. She hand sprung away again and got her sabre up in time to meet one, but not the other. A sword carved down into her thigh, scraping from augmented bone, and she screamed in pain. She caught the bastard things wrist and felt it snap as she twisted and flung it away, interrupting its other, killing strike that had been aimed for her throat, while holding the other robot with a locked blade. Grabbing the deactivated sword buried in her leg, she pulled it clear with another bark of pain before reversing her grip and carving upwards, slashing through the robots torso and up into its brain through its jaw. It slumped over and onto her. Kally grunted at the sudden weight, and threw the dead weight at the other robot as it began to rise. Both slammed to the ground, and gave Kally enough time to stalk over and carve it apart as it struggled to rise.

Breathing hard, she took a moment to assess her situation. She was alive, injured but alive. Delzharian had fled in the melee, probably when he saw two of his bodyguards disabled and the odds swing against him. She took a moment to seal up her wounds with synthskin, patch her suit, and take stock.

She retrieved a short sword and tested it for balance, making a few practice cuts and strikes in the air as the robots sparked. She strapped one as a trophy to her webbing, and set of in pursuit of the rogue Magos.

+++++

Delzharian fled deeper into the complex. An emergency escape hatch, linked to the surface by a simple ladder, awaited to get him clear. Primitive, but it would suffice.

"Delzharian"

The voice came out of the shadows of the tunnel. He turned, his right gunlimb snapping up on the tunnels darkness. The elegant gamma cleanser sighed as it built up for a killing shot. He would dump his entire potentia coils charge into one, overwhelming, killing blast to be rid of this assassin.

"By the authority of the Inquisition, I judge thee guilty of high treason, heretek research, and other crimes. You may now begin hoping for the best."

He stepped back, trying and failing to pinpoint the sound. It was close. He was getting transmission scatter as well. Very close.

"The Inquisition has no power beyond the Iron Curtain." He responded, in his flat monotone, despite his rising panic. "Which is why we are all in this mess."

"Yeah, maybe." The voice was extremely close now. "But the Lords Dragon happen to agree with me. Which is why they lent me some interesting toys."

He paused, and his left arm fumbled down the front of his robe. He found the source. A small, beetle shaped device that clung to his robes and was projecting the voice.

"Elegant." He turned the device over in his hand, even as he kept his eyes on the corridor, kept backing towards the ladder, the waiting crawler, his own forge, safety. "I assume this device doubles as a tracker as well?"

"Amongst other things."

He had enough time to recognise the battery design, and go to throw it clear, before it detonated in his hand. The electrogheist tore through him for a few painful seconds before his machines bellicose spirits channelled them away.

A shape blurred in his damaged vision as his eyes reset. He registered a hot pain in his right arm, and then watched as his gunlimb was thrown down the corridor, where it exploded with the force of a rad grenade. A blade slid out of his left palm, only for the entire arm to come clean off at the shoulder. A hot spike of pain slammed through his chest, carving between his augmetic lungs and heart, and he felt his back meet the wall, his feet dangling from the floor before the assassin he could finally see wielded one of his own knives to carve his legs away at the pelvis. She stepped away as she reversed the blade in her hand, a cruel look just visible past the eye lenses of her sneak suit.

"If you expect me"

There was a final jolt of red hot pain for the techpriest, and Kally never got to find out what she was meant to expect, because Magos Delzharians head had just fallen into a plastek bag. She dragged her sword clear of the wall, and let the ruined torso drop to the ground. She started to walk back to the shell room. She'd need to check every one of those bodyguards for a brain, just to be on the safe side.

[Azazeal849]

Spoiler: Kally Sonder - Perinetus 

Objective secured: Kill magos Delzharian
New objective: Escape back to Imperial lines

The head dropped into the waiting bag, feeling heavier than any human head should have been. The synthskin face twitched with misfiring motors, leaking milky-white fluid from its nose and ears. Kally heard the whir of noospheric connections powering down, and the bands of light along the head's scalp faded to inert grey.

She got to work.

It was the work of a few seconds each to pop open the battle robots’ steel craniums with her combat knife. Inside the first was a membrane that discharged a gout of metallic-smelling white liquid when punctured, and peeling that back revealed the remains of a sectioned human brain, blanched white by the artificial blood. The wrinkled folds were criss-crossed with data wires and impulse chips, and impaled by the probes of a still-blinking control board, which snaked wires down into a matching unit deep within the torso. Kally was no expert, but the piece of brain looked like it was wired up as a processor instead of any kind of conscious controller. Just enough organic matter to pay lip service to the Martian creed.

Kally stabbed a data probe into the pink, coppery-smelling mess, and was rewarded by a red LED. Whoever the unfortunate donor had been, it wasn’t Delzharian. The other five ruined automata yielded similar results. Perhaps the heretek magos had been too proud to forsake the remnants of his original body after all.

Whatever secrets were held within the last head would have to wait a little longer. Kally’s augmented hearing picked up screeches of command code, and metallic footfalls prowling the upper level of the bunker. Patriot skitarii were responding to the silence from the vox hub - or the massive explosion she had set off...or both.

[dakkagor]

"Gak me, thats an awful lot of the bastards. So much for fighting topside."

She briefly wondered where the missing head had rolled off to. A brief mental image of the decapitated head trying to roll itself away with its jaw and eyebrows made her chuckle darkly as she rummaged through her depleted webbing. She didn't have much left. Two micro-smokes, two flashbangs, a pair of taped together sickle mags for the bolt pistol. The tracker and the decoy were both gone. She had dipped into the medkit once already, and she took another chance to dose herself with radiation resisting drugs, cleaning out the last of her supply and hopefully meaning the next fight wouldn't kill her in the next 25 years.

What she did have was a small block of plasti-fyceline, a simple electronic timer, half of her det tape, a barely used roll of mud-tape and an unused can of bombspray. She weighed the can in her hand as she listened to the sweep above. Coming to a quick conclusion, she slapped the timer on a 30 minute wait to a medusa shell and then covered the shell in the bomb spray. The small electric shock when the timer ran down would do the rest.

She turned, and ran. She'd need to retrieve a couple of weapons.

+++++

She reached the bottom of the lift shaft as the Skitarii above realised they would need to rope down from the level above. She had found what she was looking for and rigged them up with straps in each hand, and stood briefly looking up.

8 stories. That didn't work in her favour.

Neither did what was coming down the shaft for her.

A pair of Sicarian Infiltrators were stomping down the side of the shaft on mag-clamped lines wrapped around their waists, taser goads and those curious machine pistols in hand. They raised the guns even as their audio assault began, an assault that would have left her crippled from neural feedback if not for the level of augmentation she had blown a fortune on. As it was she felt her eyes pop and her jaw involuntarily tighten against a crawling sensation that rattled her diaphragm and made her eyes ache.

She raised the paired plasma calivers and blew the monsters clean of the side of the lift shaft before they realised that their assault wasn't having the desired effect. The guns had ferocious recoil, but the rapid fire bolts of plasma they spat out were worth the jarring impacts on her shoulders and their weight. Now it was time to really put Zerlindas work to the test, and see if the money she had paid had been worth it. Kally leapt into a sprint, and placing a foot on the wall, briefly ran along it long enough to place take the corner and jump off. She slammed into the far wall, clamped a hand around a piece of elevator machinery, and fired downwards with the other hand as another pair of Sicarians entered the lift shaft below. Her shots punched down into their domed heads and out their torsos, dropping them into the shaft as she pushed off again, catching the cable in the wall on the other side, letting the caliver drop on its strap as she grabbed the other one up. By switching constantly, she was keeping the heat of both down for now, while maintaining a constant stream of plasma fire.

She could hear the Skitarii above, braced, and fired upwards as they forced open the doors on the third level and fired down. Two of the augmented soldiers tumbled past her on fire as she gritted her teeth and fired again, punching overcharge shots through the level four lift door and the ceiling into level three, cutting glowing holes in the floor that blasted augmetic legs into metal splinters even as a hail of radium rounds punched divots out of the ferrocrete around her. She pushed off and jumped again to level four, and wedging herself in the corner of the shaft, fired another pulse of full auto plasma fire up and down the shaft, and then across as someone started to force open the door at four. Kally jumped again as she heard something begin to scuttle up the lift shaft. The last Sicarian was clambering, hand over hand over hand over hand, up the shaft after her. She blasted fire into the shaft from the door at level two, and down the corridor, suppressing the skitarii pushing up to avenge their dead comrades. The door at one, already jammed open by her earlier exploits, waited for her, and she jumped into the shaft, powering off the shaft wall and into the open door, rolling under a hulking kastellan. The robot turned and rumbled a burst of warning binharic as Kally planted her hands on the floor and kicked with both her legs. The force, with the robot unstable thanks to its ungainly turning, was enough to send the automata crashing down the shaft.

She threw herself flat as its partner fired phosphor blasters that made the air crackle. She swung round the plasma calivers, and overriding their safeties, blasted the machine to melting scrap in a hail of blue bolts that made it topple over backwards, crushing its handler in a squeal of terrified binharic.

Kally cut the straps and tossed the screaming calivers down the lift shaft as she got to her feet, and was satisfied to hear them both critically melt down a second later. She paused long enough to confirm, that yes, the rest of the skitarii were now chasing after her, running back the way they had come. Her clock told her that she had about 15 minutes to clear the blast radius. She doubted any of them would go back to check for their master or find the bomb she had left.

She sprinted for the entrance. She reckoned the local artillery might have a handy centaur she could steal and use to make a break for imperial lines. If not, she'd content herself with walking.

[Azazeal849]

Spoiler: Kally Sonder - Perinetus 

Kally stumbled from the confines of the bunker, back into the wan sunlight of the trenches. The sky had darkened from static grey to heavy lead, and the acidic rain had begun to fall in thick, tarry droplets. The trench was already flooded up above the iron gratings that had been laid down as walkways - machine oil had formed golden rainbow-swirls in the pattering water, but the mix gave off an awful smell.

For now Kally had the trench to herself, save for the recovery servitors who still shambled obliviously through the knee-deep water, pulling up bodies and reaping them of their augmetics. The bomb timer in the corner of Kally’s vision ticked down to fifteen minutes. She estimated two before at least some of the surviving tech-guard picked up her trail.

The Patriot artillery was still thundering close at hand, but it seemed to Kally that they had slackened their fire without the direction of the bunker hub. Peeking over the lip of the trench between two posts of an inoperative laser fence, she saw the raised barrels of the Basilisks flaring fire and smoke from their covered positions. Further out across the muddy desert, large enemy war machines were moving distantly. Ugly four-legged walkers clanked back and forth belching smoke, and Centaurs rumbled across the space between trenches, clearing debris.

The closest vehicle to her was an open-topped Salamander, parked up against a destroyed sandbag nest and seemingly unguarded. Perhaps its crew had charged into the command bunker along with the seemingly every other Patriot skitarius in a half-kilometre radius.

[Cfavano]

"Allow me to lead, Hybrida-san." Koji says, and Glabrio sees him walking into the row...and then he's gone, vanishing into the mass of people like only an assassin can. He made his way through the teeming sea of bodies, easily, for these people were not on guard and as far as anyone knew, he was one of them. Making his way to the crates, he climbed on top of several, using one as an arm rest, as a few others were, But unbeknownst to the ones around him, he wasn't resting his arm, he was steadying it. Using his even eye, he lined up shots to the provosts guarding the checkpoint, and with a flick of his fingers, and a slight pneumatic hiss, small toxic needles shot out, and the provosts felt a slight pinch, but by then it was too late. They were already dead, but they did not know it.

Catcachan is a curious planet. A death world in every sense of the word, everything evolved seemingly to kill humans, and of the creatures none were more feared than the Catachan devils. Not only for their vicious claws and tough carapace, but for the insidious venom that attacks the nervous system, and could even bypass the blood-rain barrier. Normally meant to incapacitate, when combined with other reagents used by the alchemist mystics of the world of Tengu...it was deadly. Initially, a slight delirium sets in, similar to overconsumption of alcohol. This is followed by a series of uncontrollable muscle spasms signifying the literal liquidation of the brain. As there have been no living test subject, none are able to comment on how this feels. Before death, the victim typically violently seizes, typically vomiting, and losing control of their bladder and bowels. Death, if the assassin doesn't kill them before the poison takes its toll, occurs in three minutes. That was exactly how long Kojiro had to escape the crowd, and that was how long he set the smoke charge for.

When it went off, a large plume of smoke shot towards the sky and someone shouted "Fire!"