Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

Even the sobbing stopped. Silence fell over the entire council chamber.

At least they could answer the Proletarian Crusade's defeat with weeping. But for those few simple sentences of High Gothic spoken by the ork envoy, silence was perhaps all they could offer now.

Neither the Attack Moon's arrival above Terra nor the Proletarian Crusade's failure struck Vangorich as hard as those few words out of an ork's mouth.

They had panicked when the Attack Moon first appeared above Terra, then grown complacent when it made no move to attack for nearly two months.

Though the Attack Moon still hung over Terra, though a hundred billion civilians cut off from supply were starving below it, they no longer thought the orks a real threat — they'd convinced themselves the greenskins feared humanity too much to strike.

But they were wrong.

Everything the Imperium believed it knew about orks was wrong.

These newly-appeared ork envoys delivered a blow far worse than the Proletarian Crusade's tragic end.

They proved that the greenskins had not caused this catastrophe through brute force alone. They had numbers. They had technology. And at least some of them had transformed into something entirely unprecedented.

Faced with a nightmare that could speak fluent High Gothic, what response was there but silence?

The Beast cared nothing for the High Lords' silence. He strode to the podium himself, shoved the pale-faced Udo roughly aside, and took the center of the dais for his own.

He faced all the assembled nobility below and continued in a High Gothic that sounded as if it meant to gut its prey alive.

"I am Bezhrak. I bring the terms of surrender from the Beast. The Beast holds your heart in his fist. Struggle, and he tears you apart. Surrender, and you live."

The silence held.

Bezhrak swept his gaze across the hall.

"So?" he said. "Surrender, or die. Choose."

A single stone thrown into still water — the silence shattered under the roar of sound that followed.

Among the voices, Vangorich could make out desperate prayers to the God-Emperor, and even blasphemous pleas begging the orks for mercy.

Screams, curses, wails of despair, and roars of defiance rose ceaselessly from the floor below.

Vangorich found all of it exhausting. He looked to the other High Lords, wondering if any of them could offer something useful in this critical hour.

Ecclesiarch Mesring was the first to step forward. He seemed to have forgotten that he too had been one of the architects of the Proletarian Crusade, and wanted only to distance himself from it now.

"Tull, what have you done?! Your Crusade has brought blasphemy to this sacred place! Holy Terra has been defiled!"

"That isn't what you said before!" Tull shot back, her back turned to the greenskin diplomat — as if she could ignore the wretched reality of the ork's presence simply by facing away from him while she argued with the Ecclesiarch.

The remaining High Lords crowded around the newly appointed Lord Commander Militant of the Astra Militarum, Abel Verreault.

Lord Sark of the Chamber of the Astronomican, his voice cracking with hysteria, demanded, "Why do you still say nothing?! Give the order! Kill those abominations!"

"The Lucifer Blacks could take them down at any moment!" Minister of the Interior Ekharth was no better. "These beasts don't even carry weapons!"

But what did that prove?

Vangorich began to think it through — why hadn't these intelligent beasts struck first? Why send an envoy to demand surrender at all?

Watching the panicked High Lords before him, an answer took shape in Vangorich's mind.

They were mocking the Imperium with its own civilization. They were trampling on its dignity.

What they wanted was an honest, unambiguous victory — an ork triumph over the human race, won fair and square — and they had already gotten that from the Proletarian Crusade's defeat.

If the High Lords gunned down the ork envoy here, if the Imperium's conduct sank low enough to make even orks look civilized by comparison, what glory would be left to this empire at all?

From the battlefield to civilization itself, they had already lost everything.

Verreault did not give the order to fire — not because he understood these truths as Vangorich did. As a High Lord raised up by Udo's own hand, he turned a hesitant gaze toward Udo instead.

Udo realized he had to step forward, but he had long since lost any real backbone.

Faced with beasts that so thoroughly outmatched them, all he could do was hide his cowardice behind bluster.

"We will never surrender!" he bellowed at Bezhrak. "We will wipe out you filthy xenos—"

Udo lowered his voice, trying to summon a harsher curse. But when he found Bezhrak's eyes fixed on him, he froze, his mind going blank, unable to string together another word.

"I won't! We won't! You can never—!"

No one knew what he was trying to say. His defiance dissolved into incoherence.

Before long, he couldn't even manage to shout.

Vangorich watched this farce in silence, a rising tide of disappointment filling him at the High Lords' performance.

He turned back to the Beast and saw that Bezhrak's two attendants were openly amused by the High Lords' display.

They bared their teeth in wide grins, making no effort to hide their contempt for the shrieking puppets on the dais.

But Bezhrak wasn't laughing. He simply regarded the High Lords with disdain, his expression touched with something that looked almost like pity.

Vangorich almost wished he were laughing instead.

Bezhrak rapped his staff against the marble floor of the Imperial Palace, and the sound silenced the High Lords. They had no choice but to face the enemy they despised, and the horrifying reality they could not escape.

"Humans, useless. Worse than Gretchin. No use reasoning with humans. Destroy them, kill them, eat them. That's good. Don't try to make them think. They can't."

Bezhrak explained this to his underlings first, then shrugged and turned back to the High Lords. "So. Want to die? Last chance."

The High Twelve had nothing to say.

Vangorich opened his mouth, then found he had nothing to say either.

Udo's babbling had, in its way, been right. Refusing to speak with the beasts was the last shred of dignity this empire — built atop the corpses of xenos — could still cling to.

There would be no surrender. There could be no negotiation.

Before an ork that could speak, silence was the only answer worth giving.

Bezhrak looked them over one last time, then nodded.

"So. You choose death."

He slammed his staff against the floor, turned, and walked out of the council chamber.

Every eye had been fixed on the ork envoy. When he left, the chamber fell first into a long silence, then erupted into an argument even more furious — and even more pointless — than before.

The High Lords had always been too idealistic, carrying an arrogance that assumed everything as their due. Now that this arrogance had been shattered, everything about them had shattered with it.

"There's no point staying here any longer," said Veritus.

The Inquisition's representative, equally shaken, was the first to recover his composure.

He turned to leave Vangorich's side. Vangorich asked without thinking, "Where are you going?"

"To speak with the Custodes Commander. Care to come?"

Vangorich didn't answer.

He wanted to go, but the weight of a civilization on the brink of collapse pressed down on his soul, and he found himself unable to move.

Veritus left without him, leaving the Grand Master alone.

The High Lords filled the chamber once more with their foolishness, their bickering settling over Vangorich's ears like a melody of despair.

He even heard some of them begin to discuss what surrender terms they might offer the orks, should it come to that.

The man who first raised the idea claimed it was merely a precaution, "just in case" — but Vangorich could read the fear and weakness in their eyes plainly enough.

Resistance no longer seemed to be part of their calculations. Even with the orks gone from the room, these men continued trampling on what was left of the Imperium's dignity all on their own.

Why did it have to be these people who led the Imperium?

What would become of their great empire?

Vangorich didn't know the answer.

He thought of the Emperor. He thought of Lin. He thought of the assassination list he'd drawn up himself.

I will fight, he told himself. I have to fight.

He would fight in his own way.

He shook off his despair and steadied himself. He realized that saving this empire could not be as simple as assassinating the High Lords and replacing them with others. He realized that Magos Lin — who had already made plans for the future of the Senatorum Imperialis — might well have foreseen exactly this moment.

He left the council chamber and paced the Palace plaza, turning over what he should do next.

Then, without warning, a violent explosion tore through the council chamber.

Vangorich spun around in shock to find the entire High Lords' council chamber splitting apart and collapsing amid the blast.

The corpses of the Imperium's useless dignitaries tumbled down like a waterfall of rubble, while alarms wailed alongside panicked screams.

This building had been constructed from the finest materials the entire Imperium could offer — what kind of explosion could do this to it?

Vangorich sprinted back to the chamber's entrance and found the Lucifer Black Captain he'd briefly met upon his own arrival, working frantically to hold back the chaos at the door.

"Malcador! What happened? Was it the orks? Did they plant explosives underground?"

Vangorich didn't think the orks could have had the opportunity to do such a thing, but it was the only enemy he could think of.

The Lucifer Black Captain gave him an answer he hadn't expected.

"No. This place was only caught in the blast radius." Malcador's voice was thick with disbelief. "The real explosion was underground — beneath the Emperor's own palace!"

Vangorich was stunned. He grabbed Malcador and shook him. "What did you say?! Who did this?!"

"The Aeldari!"

"How many?"

"A lot! But the important ones — seven or eight of them, dressed in bright colors, like clowns—"

Vangorich didn't wait to hear the rest. He shoved past Malcador and ran toward the palace.

The Captain shouted after him, "Where are you going?!"

"To face the crisis none of you can handle!"

He summoned an Officio Assassinorum skimmer and sped toward the palace as fast as it could go.

The skimmers of other nobles blocked his path, everyone desperate to flee the scene. Vangorich almost gave the order to simply open fire and clear a path through the air.

But he didn't need to. The orks did it for him.

The skimmers rushing toward the Imperial Palace began dropping in terror. Vangorich looked up and saw the second moon hanging above Terra erupt in blinding green light, countless beams and boulders streaking down toward the surface.

Just as the ork envoy had promised, the greenskins had begun their rain of destruction.

"Emperor above..." Vangorich closed his eyes.

He didn't believe in the Emperor. But right now, he truly needed the Emperor to fix this mess.

The void shields covering the entire Imperial Palace flared to life, and the anti-air defenses on the ground began roaring, holding the ork bombardment back for the moment.

Vangorich forced himself to focus on the Aeldari crisis. By the time he reached the palace, he found hundreds of Lucifer Blacks locked in combat with a dozen or so Aeldari around its perimeter.

It usually took a dozen or more Lucifer Blacks to pin down a single Aeldari, and even at that ratio, the Aeldari held the advantage in the fight.

They moved through the Lucifer Black squads like dancers, and no mortal could match them blow for blow.

Vangorich leapt from his skimmer and threw himself into the fight. Several Aeldari noticed the Grand Master and advanced on him.

"You filthy beansprouts — what's the purpose of attacking the palace?!" he demanded.

The Aeldari facing him gave no answer. They drew their throwing blades and swords. Vangorich took a deep breath and dosed himself with specially formulated stimms.

The fight happened in a blink. The Aeldari moved so fast that a mortal could only catch blurred afterimages, but Vangorich's experience, aided by the drugs, let him keep pace.

He raised his pistol and fired to cut off his opponent's approach lines. But the Aeldari dodged most of the shots effortlessly and sliced the rest out of the air with a blade.

He closed the distance fast, engaging Vangorich directly. The sharp edge came dangerously close to Vangorich's throat again and again, each time barely dodged.

This precarious standoff couldn't last. The power blade in Vangorich's hand began to fracture under the repeated clashes. Sensing his opponent had lost his bargaining chip, the Aeldari stepped forward quickly, intent on finishing him for good.

But it was a ruse.

When the arrogant Aeldari came close enough, Vangorich twisted his arm sharply — a hidden wrist-blade sprang from his sleeve and drove into the skull of the Aeldari, who never expected such a trick.

The Aeldari collapsed, lifeless.

The other Aeldari shrieked in fury at the sight, but even they couldn't fight off so many at once.

The small band of Aeldari had relied on mutual support to hold against so many Lucifer Blacks in the first place; with one of their own down, the dominoes began to fall.

As some of the Aeldari, realizing the fight was lost, began to retreat, the Lucifer Blacks quickly won the engagement.

Vangorich looked over the Aeldari corpses.

These beansprouts, with limbs slender as reeds, looked less like living creatures than custom-made dolls some wealthy noble had commissioned for personal amusement. He found it hard to believe such a frame could hold this much combat power.

This ancient race certainly had the arrogance to back their pride — but that same arrogance was also a weapon they wielded against others.

But when he thought of how the orks had used humanity's own arrogance to humiliate them, he couldn't find any joy in this victory either.

The Lucifer Blacks approached, thanking the Grand Master for his aid.

"Thank you for your support, Grand Master. Without you, we might have let those filthy xenos reach the Emperor's own sanctum."

"Reaching it wasn't their goal," Vangorich replied.

This band of Aeldari was far too small in number. No matter how arrogant the Aeldari were, they wouldn't be foolish enough to send just a dozen ordinary warriors to storm the palace outright.

And besides, none of these Aeldari matched Malcador's description of the ones dressed like clowns.

Vangorich realized that these ordinary Aeldari were likely just a diversion — the real core of the strike force had probably already made it into the sanctum.

"Follow me. They're already inside the palace!"

He led the Lucifer Blacks deep into the sanctum and found the Custodes — who never left the sanctum — locked in combat with those clown-garbed Aeldari. A body or two of Custodes lay scattered on the ground, but far more belonged to the harlequins.

The Aeldari's reckless advance, heedless of cost, unsettled Vangorich. He looked up and saw, in the final antechamber nearest the Golden Throne, the Custodes had surrounded the sole remaining harlequin.

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