Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

Kurande was startled to find that the Shanzheng's orbit had drifted from their planned course.

"What's happening?" he demanded of the captain.

"The Shanzheng isn't responding to my control!" the captain said, anxiously running through the data. "The machine-spirit is refusing my correction commands — it's as if someone with higher authority has overridden us!"

He tried to seize back control, but the Shanzheng gave no response. The machine-spirit adjusted the fortress's position on its own, moving it directly above Magma City, and all the captain could do was watch on the data panel as a mech he'd never known existed was carried out onto the Shanzheng's launch platform.

The Shanzheng launched the mech into the atmosphere on its own initiative, and the captain used the observation equipment to catch a glimpse of its form.

It was a roughly thirty-meter mechanical warrior, blood-red from head to foot, with a sharp V-shaped antenna crowning its head.

"What is that thing?"

Kurande had never known the Shanzheng carried such equipment, yet something inexplicable stirred in his chest. "Who's piloting that?"

"It looks like a Titan, but the design is... rather..."

The captain struggled to put it into words. At the very least, he'd never heard of a Titan that could fly under its own power, let alone plunge straight from orbit into the atmosphere.

To them, this humanoid war machine was mystery from head to toe.

Once the Gundam had launched, the captain regained control of the Shanzheng. He and Kurande could only swallow their misgivings and turn back to commanding the Shanzheng, projecting the fortress's presence over Mars's orbital defenses once more.

The doubt shifted from them to Vashtorr.

The red meteor falling through the atmosphere was far too conspicuous to miss, and Vashtorr naturally noticed the searing streak it tore through the clouds.

When he saw the Gundam, he realized it was yet another creation beyond his comprehension.

Its design, its energy signature, even the very fact of its existence — none of it matched anything he knew of.

Just like the siege tanks...

No — worse than the siege tanks, even!

"Another of Lin's tricks?"

The red meteor decelerated abruptly as it neared the ground, its thrusters swiveling to bring it to a steady halt directly before Vashtorr and his Chaos Titan.

The Gundam, standing barely thirty meters tall, looked minuscule beside the towering wraith-taken Titan. Its frame, kept light for the sake of flight, seemed far less imposing than the massive bulk of a proper Titan — even less than an Ironrider.

Yet gazing into those human-like eyes, glowing with a cold blue light, Vashtorr tasted an unfamiliar flicker of unease.

He felt ashamed of that unease.

"It's nothing but a flashy machine — watch me tear it down to scrap!"

The siege tanks, and even the Tiantu-class Titan — even without grasping their inner workings, Vashtorr had to admit their designs held an internal logic.

But this Gundam before him — from his own professional standpoint, Vashtorr found it utterly devoid of practicality.

Never mind combat capability — that a toy this size could even get off the ground felt like a miracle.

He gestured, and his Chaos Titan raised its enormous power claw, bearing down on the Gundam with annihilating force.

But the Gundam's reaction speed far outstripped Vashtorr's expectations.

Its rear thrusters flared in an instant, and the machine sidestepped with astonishing speed, evading the Chaos Titan's blow entirely.

Vashtorr's eyes went wide, disbelief flooding him for a moment.

Could its weight even support a maneuver like that? Did its thrusters really have that much power? Wouldn't the pilot inside be crushed to paste by such sudden g-forces?

That stunning dodge served well enough as an opening move. Unwilling to be outdone, Vashtorr drove his Chaos Titan to press the pursuit, but inside the cockpit, Dorn met every attack with unshaken calm.

The Psycho-Frame was running at full capacity.

This vessel, able to turn the impossible into the possible, was the very root that drove this Gundam. Through his own psychic power, Dorn could once again cut loose on a battlefield — something he hadn't done in far too long.

Not since losing part of his Warp-essence had he felt so utterly full.

He even surpassed his former self!

He raised the beam rifle in his hands, and high-energy particle beams lashed out like a driving storm at Vashtorr, perched atop the Titan's shoulder.

Vashtorr didn't dare take the hits head-on. He darted and weaved across the corrupted Titan's shoulder plate, but the lethal beams clung to him like a wound that refused to heal.

The moment he curled up among the hydraulic conduits at the Titan's neck, Dorn's precise strikes blasted his hiding place into a spray of molten metal.

Who in the world was piloting that thing? How could anyone shoot with such precision!

Vashtorr realized he'd made a fatal mistake.

He'd assumed Lin's forces had no heavy weapons capable of threatening a Titan, and so he'd never bothered restoring the corrupted Titan's void shields, leaving its adamantium frame bare beneath enemy fire.

As it turned out, the enemy really did lack the firepower to threaten a Titan — but he himself was about to be killed by this baffling mech!

Gritting his teeth, Vashtorr fed his own treasured essence into the Titan, using his primal power to restore its void shield generator.

The high-energy particle beams burst into gorgeous ripples against the newly risen void shields, and Dorn's next volley scattered into a harmless rain of light.

Vashtorr slumped, relieved at having patched things up just in time.

He was safe. For now.

It had cost him no small amount of power, but at least now he could face that strange machine from behind a shield...

Wait.

What was that mech doing?!

Before Vashtorr's bulging eyes, Dorn drew a hilt from the mech's frame. With a thought, a thick beam surged forth, forming a blade of light.

Charged with psychic power, the blade gave off a faint golden glow. Dorn raised the beam saber high, and his rear thrusters flared, driving him straight into the range of the void shields!

The blade fell, and surging psychic power tore through the profane energy of the Warp clinging to the armor.

Metal that had lain buried underground for thousands of years could never withstand a blow of such crushing force. The Titan's shoulder plate was seared clean through by the beam, tearing open a gaping wound.

So it had melee tricks too?

Just what kind of power was this?!

Horrified, Vashtorr drove the Titan into a counterattack. He even threw himself into the fight directly, trying to corrupt the mech with psychic power to hinder its movements.

But just as before, the Gundam's thrusters spat blazing flame and carried it nimbly clear of Vashtorr's interception, its frame flipping through the air with ease to dodge his attack entirely.

Before the Titan could check its momentum, Dorn swept instantly around to its flank, swinging the saber again to carve open the other side in the same manner.

The advantage of flight was on full display in that moment.

Just like the Emperor-class Titan captain once beheaded on the battlefield by Saint Celestine, Vashtorr realized he simply couldn't keep pace with this uncannily agile machine.

"Godsdamn it, this makes no scientific sense!"

Cursing furiously, he seemed to forget that he himself was the least scientific thing here.

Vashtorr felt as though the Titan he'd shaped with his own hands was being torn apart like scrap, without mercy. He tried every trick he had to hold the line, only to find he simply couldn't sustain the situation.

Not unless he kept pouring in his precious power — but what he'd already invested here outstripped everything he'd gained on Mars combined!

Should he retreat? Should he evade? Should he flee?

A thousand thoughts churned through Vashtorr's mind as he weighed his best option.

The strange mech seemed to sense Vashtorr's hesitation. It hovered directly before him of its own accord, its deep blue visor level with his gaze.

Somehow, Vashtorr could read in that visor an indifference that didn't even regard him as an opponent worth the name.

"Why does the weak fight?" he heard the Gundam ask.

There was no mockery in it — it sounded like a simple statement of fact.

And that was precisely what cut Vashtorr to the core.

The weak.

He turned the word over and over, humiliation piling up until it swelled into an ocean inside him.

How many years had it been? He'd struggled in the cesspit of the Warp, enduring the mockery of the Prince of Pleasure, the contempt of the Blood God, the taunts of the Changer of the Ways — all for the chance that one day he might truly stand among the Chaos Gods, an equal among equals.

But those beings had never cared about him. No matter how many ten-thousand-year spans he'd spent striving, he'd never drawn so much as a flicker of attention from any of those great powers.

Only because he was weak. In his weakness, he was never a threat worth their notice.

Just like now. Just like this Gundam standing before him!

If it had been one of the five, fine. But a mech of unknown origin, a metal puppet whose pilot he couldn't even see — how dare it call him weak?

"You... you understand nothing!"

Vashtorr roared, his voice laced with hysterical madness.

He held nothing back now, no longer counting the cost. Every ounce of power — the strength he'd so carefully hoarded, the essence he'd meant to use for his own ascension, the profane energy he'd intended for corrupting Mars — poured out all at once.

That surging power dragged up the wreckage littering Magma City's ground, tearing it apart into components, and fused it together with his profane energy to fill the gaps the Gundam had torn open in the Titan.

"I am Vashtorr! I am the embodiment of the forge! I am the creator-god of Chaos! I — will not lose!"

The Gundam hung suspended in midair, offering no further response, as though Vashtorr's fury were nothing more than futile thrashing.

"Why does the weak fight?" it asked again, its voice calm to the point of cruelty.

"Because I want to rise above! Because I will never let anyone trample me underfoot — never!"

The fallen Titan and the Gundam clashed once more.

Even having thrown everything into it, the situation hadn't improved for Vashtorr in the slightest.

The only good news left to him was that his opponent's attacks, at least, couldn't destroy the entire Titan in a single blow — and that Magma City had no shortage of scrap to draw on.

His endless repairs kept turning the Gundam's assaults into wasted effort. Vashtorr had assumed his opponent would eventually reconsider its tactics and give him room to gather up the production lines, but instead it kept attacking with stubborn persistence.

He was starting to lose his composure: "Stubborn as a damn rock!"

His winning trick had been bogged down by the Gundam, and now he had to stay tethered to the Titan, constantly patching it just to hold the stalemate. For a moment, Vashtorr felt utterly out of options.

Watching Lin, who had already led his men into Magma City to loot it, while he himself had to fight the Gundam with everything he had just to keep from collapsing, Vashtorr's eyes seemed ready to split with rage.

"LIN!!!"

He roared the name, but the man he roared it at paid no attention at all.

Amid the looting, Lin still found the leisure to appreciate the battle.

"Scavenging junk, in the end," he remarked first on Vashtorr's fighting style, then turned his gaze to the Gundam.

"Not bad, actually — when close-in defensive fire is lacking, a Gundam really does work wonders at closing the distance."

He toyed briefly with the idea of mass-producing Gundams, but after running the numbers, he realized it wasn't feasible.

"Pity there's only one Dorn."

Not even an Ork warlord could do what Dorn did — sustain the operation of a machine whose very existence defied science, purely through the power of 'I reckon.'

Unless Lin could mass-produce Primarch-tier pilots, the idea wasn't even worth entertaining.

A Gundam simply had no place making sense within the Warhammer universe — after all, Warhammer had no Gundanium alloy, strong enough and light enough to keep the whole thing under a hundred tons.

The Gundam currently running was held together entirely by Dorn's own conviction that 'I reckon it makes sense.'

Apart from its shape and the Psycho-Frame, every other part of this Gundam was through-and-through native Warhammer make.

Honestly, it could have been shaped into anything at all — making it a Gundam was purely a matter of Lin's personal taste.

Swap in any other psyker, and none could likely have satisfied his whims the way Dorn did.

That the grievously wounded Dorn could return to the battlefield through this machine was a miracle only a Primarch could achieve, granted by the Psycho-Frame.

But even that miracle had its limits — even with Dorn piloting the Gundam, he couldn't fully dismantle a Titan bolstered by Vashtorr's own power.

Lin wasn't greedy about it, though — so long as he could carry off most of the production lines Vashtorr had stolen, that was enough.

His Deathless and Soul Drinkers had this sort of work down to a practiced routine by now.

"An ion weapon production line? Take it!"

"A bolt round production line? Can't leave that behind either!"

"Well would you look at that — even Lance schematics? Ninety-nine percent sure that's a rare find!"

The haul so far was a vivid lesson in how looting truly was the shortcut to riches. Lin wasn't quite satisfied yet, but the clock told him it was time to withdraw.

Vashtorr's daemon army was still on its way back to Magma City. If they kept this up any longer, they wouldn't be able to fully withdraw before it arrived.

He'd only just humiliated a certain Sadistic Terror Greater Daemon, and he had no wish to run into it again right now.

He signaled everyone to prepare for withdrawal. But it was just then that Evil Sun came looking for him.

"Big Mek, can't leave yet — I found something good."

"Something good? Bring it here and let me have a look."

"Can't bring it here. Don't even know what it is."

Evil Sun scratched at his head in frustration, wanting to describe it but coming up short on words.

"I found a big pit in the ground. I reckon there's piles and piles of good stuff, all down under. Neos thought it made sense too, so he sent me up to find ya!"

"...?"

Sensing something was off, Lin studied Evil Sun closely. "You're sure it was Neos who told you to come find me? Why didn't the two of you go down and look yourselves first?"

Evil Sun, thinking Lin meant to credit Neos for the discovery, thumped his chest anxiously. "I found that road down there myself, ain't got nothing to do with that kid! Any good stuff, I bring straight to the boss first — you're the only sun in my sky, boss!"

A road leading underground?

Any more delay and a clean withdrawal wouldn't be possible — yet some voice inside kept telling Lin to go take a look.

In the end, he chose to trust his instinct. "Take me there."

Evil Sun led Lin to a massive fissure. Just as he'd said, a nearly forgotten path led down into it.

Both Thorne and Neos were already there.

Facing Lin's puzzled look, Thorne spoke first. "This was probably opened by accident when that daemon was scavenging Titan wreckage. I think it used to be a stairway somewhere in old Magma City — with the shifting terrain over the years, it's ended up as a path down into the ruins of the old city."

"You all think I should go down and take a look?" Lin asked. The two men — and the one Ork — nodded in unison.

"It's all ruins down there — what good could possibly still be left?"

"There might be something. I recall that back when the Fabricator General laid siege to Magma City, he was trying to seize something from a Magos named Koriel Zeth. But Magma City was destroyed in the end, and they never succeeded."

Thorne's implication was clear — going down now might let them recover whatever that had been. But Lin still hesitated.

The pull inside him grew stronger by the moment, but the stronger it grew, the more it unsettled him.

His instinct told him to take the production lines and leave right now. Compared to something unknown, he'd rather secure the wealth already in hand.

But the yearning welling up inside him ran directly against his own judgment, and that told Lin something was definitely influencing him right now.

That he was immune to psychic influence had been proven again and again. If this wasn't psychic manipulation, then what could possibly conjure such an intense craving inside him?

"Maybe we should just—"

Lin decided to set aside the strange impulse, but Thorne cut him off.

"I'll hold this position with the Exemplary Fists."

"You're serious? There's no telling how long this exploration might take — we could all end up wiped out down there."

"I won't let a single enemy pass me by."

Thorne made the promise. He glanced up at the Gundam still locked in battle midair, his eyes full of unshakable resolve.

"Just as you promised me before. This time, we will not fail!"

With things having come this far, Lin knew there was nothing more he could say. He resolved to yield to the craving and head into the ruins of Magma City to see what awaited.

Thorne began establishing a defensive line. Only Evil Sun and Neos went down with Lin.

Lin sighed. "Let's hope whatever's down there is worth Thorne's sacrifice."

Evil Sun said nothing, just fiddling with his own gear. It was Neos who answered instead. "It will be."

"You sound awfully sure."

"Nobody wants to come back empty-handed, right?"

Fair enough.

Lin took the lead, descending slowly down steps long since worn away by time. The deeper he went, the more oppressive the air became, and the light around him dimmed by degrees.

Lin switched on the lighting equipment on his person, only to find, to his surprise, that it gave off no light at all.

"Neos? Evil Sun?"

No one answered. Ghostly images began to flicker into being around him.

The scenes played out like a replay of history, unfolding in chronological order as Lin advanced.

"At last, we've completed our masterpiece."

The female Magos in the vision said to her assistant, "The Akashic Reader. With this, we can extract the residual traces of the material universe left within the Warp, and draw endless knowledge out of it."

"We'll still need a great many psykers as fuel, and someone capable of bearing the knowledge we recover," her assistant replied.

"Of course, Dalia. I believe you're the best candidate."

The scene shifted. It was still the female Magos and her assistant, but the mood had turned visibly tense.

"There has never been any Omnissiah. If you need my answer, Fabricator General, then my answer is, and always will be, no."

The female Magos cut off the transmission with the Fabricator General and ordered her assistant, "Dalia, continue the Akashic Reader experiment. Even with the enemy already at Magma City's gates, I will complete it."

"Coriel! Half the Storm Lords Titan Legion garrisoning Magma City are traitors! Our defenses have collapsed! The Fabricator General's men are already on their way here — their target is the Akashic Reader!"

"This is the only successful trial we've had. Can't you all hold on just a little longer?"

"There's no time left!"

The female Magos turned back to look at her life's work, resolve flickering in her eyes.

"I won't let it fall into traitor hands. Let me destroy it with my own two hands!"

She terminated the experiment on the spot, and the body of the psyker bound to the Reader — the one who had used his own psychic power to dredge knowledge from the Warp — was utterly incinerated. But before he dissipated completely, he exchanged a brief word with Dalia, the experiment's assistant.

Lin never learned what was said, because the vision ended there.

When the vision faded, he found, to his surprise, that he'd already reached the end of the path.

He had no idea when he'd gotten there. More importantly, he'd only just noticed there was a person lying on the ground in front of him.

"Inquisitor Vladilena? Why would she be here?"

Lin stepped closer to check on Lena's condition. She still had a pulse — she'd simply been knocked unconscious by some outside force.

Vladilena was certainly not the only one here.

Just as Lin suspected, the faint sound of footsteps rose in the dark.

Lin raised his Plasma Pistol, already primed, and leveled it at the source of the sound. He could just make out a silhouette with his naked eye, but neither thermal nor psychic scans registered anything at all.

What in the hells — did ghosts actually exist in this world?

"Who are you?" Lin asked, hoping to see if the figure could communicate.

The figure reacted to his words. She lifted her head, letting Lin see her face.

Lin's hand trembled — her face was identical to someone from the visions he'd just witnessed.

"Dalia?"

The name seemed to stir some ancient memory in her. Dalia's expression softened for a moment, taking on a gentler cast.

But she quickly returned to her earlier coldness. "Names no longer matter to me. But if you need something to call me, you may still call me Dalia."

"Coriel's experiment assistant — Dalia?" Lin asked, testing the waters.

"No. Dalia, Guardian of the Dragon."

[Author's Note: The Akashic Reader, and Dalia's transformation from experiment assistant into Guardian of the Dragon, aren't my own invention — both are mentioned in official canon. Dorn losing part of his Warp-essence, Vashtorr's situation in M32, and the state of Mars during the Beast War, however, are all my own additions. That said, these additions are key points for the plot, and I hope you'll accept them.]

[Author's Note: In the Beast War, the only direct depiction of Mars's military strength is the five Skitarii army groups and seven Knight houses they sent to the Ultimate Wall. Beyond that, there's only indirect description — from when Kurande dispatched Thorne into Mars to fight alongside them, rescue Urquidex, and learn from him that the orks' origin was Ulanor.]

[Author's Note: Considering that in the original history, Mars capitulated as soon as Kurande sent the Exemplary Fists down, and in the end the plan to make Mars a wandering world never came to pass, I didn't set Mars's strength too high at this point. (Though in the original history, Mars eventually used the teleportation technology they'd developed to send Ulanor away — the cogboys hid that planet and renamed it, and it later became Armageddon, home of Commissar Yarrick.)]

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