Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

Lin, along with the other Chapter Masters including Dorn, attended the welcoming ceremony for the two Astartes contingents — though the focus, naturally, was Magneric.

This was a veteran who had marched all the way from the Great Crusade, a man who once shared a legendary friendship with Warsmith Kalkator — a bond regarded as a symbol of reconciliation between their two Legions. But that friendship shattered utterly when the Iron Warriors joined the Great Heresy.

Ever since, Magneric had devoted himself to hunting Kalkator down. Even after being interred in a Dreadnought following the Great Heresy, he never fell into the dormant stasis-sleep that other Dreadnoughts entered during peacetime.

Magneric had remained conscious the entire time. He rose to become a Marshal of the Black Templars, leading an independent expeditionary force across the galaxy in search of the Iron Warriors.

That was why he had been able to refuse the High Marshal’s summons and instead race to Terra.

“Seems I’ve arrived just in time.”

Though Magneric could now only speak through a vox-amplifier, everyone could tell the old veteran had once possessed a booming, coarse voice: “Terra hasn’t been gnawed clean by that pack of greenskin bastards yet!”

No one held it against a Dreadnought who hadn’t slept in fifteen hundred years for his temper. Koorland stepped forward to welcome the Marshal: “Your arrival is a gift from the Emperor. How fares the Black Templars’ campaign beyond Terra?”

“Other battlefields? Ha!”

A faint electronic crackle, like a Dreadnought’s scoff: “He wanted to gather the Imperium’s other forces through crusading — and the more we crusaded, the fewer forces we had left in hand!”

“We lost three companies in the Segmentum Pacificus, and during a fleet engagement we were ambushed by a greenskin bastard calling himself ‘Tech-Priest’ — cost us another battleship and over two hundred brothers!”

“Bohemond knows how to execute a strategy, but he doesn’t know how to respect his enemy. As if the moment he arrives, those beasts will just soil themselves and flee!”

This wasn’t good news. The Chapter Masters present felt a pang of sorrow, mixed with relief that they hadn’t chosen to follow the Black Templars.

They wanted to press for more details, but Lin — sensing the restlessness stirring in Dorn’s Dreadnought beside him — hurriedly steered the conversation elsewhere.

He was afraid that if Dorn kept listening, he’d end up gifting the Phalanx to the Black Templars.

Magneric had brought five hundred Astartes with him. More important than the numbers, though, was the symbolic weight of a full Black Templars expeditionary force joining the cause.

Compared to before, when only a single Black Templar named Lancelot had been present, Magneric’s arrival lent the Ultimate Wall real legitimacy.

Equally impossible to ignore was the Iron Knights Chapter, arriving with seven hundred Astartes.

Malfons, the Iron Knights’ Chapter Master, didn’t particularly stand out among the assembled commanders. His Chapter had been split off from the Imperial Fists’ siege specialists, and their specialty was cracking the hardest of nuts.

But Lin knew of them not from their siege-warfare reputation. Beyond the fact that they would go on to win back-to-back Blade Feast championships, he knew this Chapter would spend a long stretch of its future serving as the Inquisition’s attack dog.

Not because the Iron Knights respected those hyenas, but because — in the original timeline — every Imperial Fists successor Chapter owed the Inquisition a debt from the Beast War.

The contradiction at the heart of the Beast War was this: the Imperium genuinely needed a Legion-level force to counter the orks, but a Legion-scale Astartes force was truly more than the current Imperium — bereft of both the Emperor and a Primarch — could safely bear.

The clear-eyed Imperial Fists disbanded the Ultimate Wall once the Beast War ended, but the High Lords still regarded them with suspicion.

Not only had the High Lords nitpicked at them throughout the Beast War, hoping to force the Ultimate Wall’s early dissolution — after Drakan Vangorich’s dictatorship ended, the rebuilt Senatorum Imperialis went right on stripping away the Imperial Fists’ privileges bit by bit.

In the end, the once-proud Praetorians of Terra were even barred from setting foot on Terra itself — to so much as reach its surface, they had to report to the High Lords first.

The Inquisition intervened to keep the Fists-lineage Chapters’ situation from growing too dire — at the price of those Chapters having to routinely answer the Inquisition’s summons. Even the Deathwatch, which the Imperial Fists had spearheaded during the Beast War, all but became the Ordo Xenos’ private army.

This forced dependency meant that when the Fists-lineage Celestial Lions was later destroyed by the Inquisition, the Imperial Fists couldn’t even stand up to demand justice for them — it fell entirely to the Black Templars to hold the line on their behalf.

The Beast War was the Imperial Fists’ last great glory, and the beginning of their decline.

But Lin was here now, and he wouldn’t let this war end the way it once had.

Even if the Sons of Dorn had to become someone’s enforcers, then that someone had better share Lin’s surname.

The Iron Knights had brought seven hundred Astartes. Together with the Black Templars’ five hundred, the Ultimate Wall’s assembled Astartes now numbered twenty-five hundred.

With this fresh strength joining them, Lin felt confident he could steer them onto a path entirely different from the original one.

At his request, the Astartes began their final preparations for war. But beyond them, the Astra Militarum — who would need to buy the decapitation strike a window on the ground and pin down the ork main force — mattered just as much.

Chief among that importance was the Gate of Fate Titan Legion, which could bring heavy firepower to bear. Not having seen its Legion Commander since parting ways at Cath Maximus, Lin finally sought her out.

“You really are a busy man,” Christina complained. “Do you only remember I exist when you need a Titan?”

Lin shot her a puzzled look. “What else would it be for?”

Christina crossed her arms, wearing the look of someone who wanted to say something but couldn’t quite get it out.

The moment turned faintly awkward, until Lin steered the topic toward the Thundergod Mecha.

“The Thundergods have seen their first real combat now. What do you think of them?”

Christina’s attention shifted readily to the topic she found far more interesting. “Its firepower loadout is impressive. It lacks the ability to duel other Titans one-on-one, but the saturation bombardment from its quad 250mm cannon array actually exceeds even a Warlord-class Titan’s output. It makes for an excellent battlefield support unit.”

“Sounds like nothing but praise?”

“It would be, if its power consumption weren’t just as staggering as its firepower.”

The Thundergods had performed admirably clearing out Skitarii on Mars, and had managed — barely — to hold their own against Warlord-class Titans. But much of that credit belonged to Vashtorr, who had crippled Mars’s logistics network so thoroughly that the Mars forces had no stomach left for a prolonged fight.

Had they been willing to drag the fight out a little longer, it would have been the Thundergods that ran dry first.

Lin had come precisely to solve that problem.

He had stripped out the Thundergod’s original shield generators, made a few refinements to the mounting space, and finally installed void shields — produced by the void shield production line seized from Mars — in their place.

After a few rounds of live-fire testing, the void shields — capable of stopping any energy weapon — needed only about thirty percent of the Ion Reactor’s power output to sustain under normal conditions.

That left Lin with enough surplus capacity to upgrade the Thundergod’s other systems — such as boosting the output of the twin Thundergod’s Hammer plasma cannons mounted on its arms.

Lin couldn’t help but marvel — by the standards of any science-fiction setting he could recall, this was still an absurdly overpowered defensive tool.

“Guess you really do need Warhammer methods to fight Warhammer.”

But switching to void shields wasn’t without its downsides, as Christina sharply pointed out:

“If you swap to void shields that only stop high-velocity and energy weapons, how do you plan to deal with the solid-shot weapons that can punch straight through them?”

Unlike the meticulously hand-crafted Titans, the Thundergod’s adamantium armor plating was mass-produced off an assembly line, its material purity far lower than what went into a proper Titan.

If focused by enough low-velocity solid-shot weapons, a Thundergod could well be reduced to a heap of scrap in a single volley.

“So what will you do — just thicken the armor further?”

“No, that would make it too unwieldy, and it would hurt production rates too. I have another way to handle it.”

Lin walked over to a Thundergod that had been half-wrecked.

It was the one from an earlier battle, half-destroyed after a Titan had punched through its shields. Through its half-melted outer plating, Lin could see the core conduits laid bare.

Even with modular casting, damage this severe was no longer something a couple of swapped components could fix.

Restoring this Thundergod to combat readiness would normally mean sending it back to the factory. But the factory that built it was far away on Cath Maximus, and its production line certainly hadn’t been brought along.

Christina watched, curious, as Lin drew a stone out from within his robes. “What are you doing?”

“Repairing it.”

Needing a factory recall was only a limitation for a Tech-Priest bound by conventional thinking. Lin meant to put the iron stone Captain Kuber had entrusted to him to good use.

This Iron Hands relic was, at its core, a Necron artifact. The so-called iron stone was, in truth, a data drive built around some of the operating principles of a Canoptek Scarab.

Canoptek Scarabs were the most basic decomposers and builders among the Necrons. They could be encountered on the battlefield, but their real function was to break down any matter into energy and use it to construct Necron architecture.

It wasn’t strange for the Iron Hands to possess such a relic. After all, the artificial arm the headless senior Ferrus Manus received after defeating a great silver-white dragon on Medusa was made of living metal — the very origin of the Chapter’s name, the Iron Hands, which had always had a tangled connection to the Necrons.

The Iron Hands themselves, though, had no idea the stone’s origins traced back to the Necrons.

All they knew was that if you pumped enough energy into the thing, it could slowly repair machinery — which was, in essence, exactly the process by which a Scarab converted energy into construction.

Lin hadn’t had a clue what the stone was at first, not until the Void Dragon’s power gave him the insight to understand it.

As the inventor among the Star Gods, the Necrons owed much of their technology to the Void Dragon’s legacy.

Even though the Void Dragon’s power couldn’t hand this knowledge to Lin directly, the shared root gave him an intuitive edge — he was actually picking up the technique’s inner workings faster than he’d been optimizing his own soulstone-based Psychic techniques.

He pressed the iron stone against the half-melted outer plating of the Thundergod. The stone began to shudder, fine silver lines rippling across its surface.

Before long, those lines spread outward like living things, unfurling into countless slender silver threads that seeped into every crack and wound in the war machine’s armor.

At first there was only a faint scraping of metal, but the sound quickly grew dense — as if a thousand tiny beetles were gnawing and rebuilding all at once wherever the threads reached. The Thundergod’s scorched armor began flaking away, revealing fresh metal underneath.

This wasn’t simple patching — it was something closer to growth, its speed and efficiency far beyond anything Imperial hands could manage.

The Iron Hands had assumed the thing repaired things slowly only because the iron stone itself had no idea what it was supposed to be fixing — on the battlefield, it could only scavenge materials at random and improvise on the principle of ‘eh, just make the damn thing move again.’

Where the Iron Hands could only pump in energy and hope the stone figured the rest out on its own, Lin had loaded the full production template for the Thundergod straight into its programming.

It obviously couldn’t build a whole Thundergod from scratch on that basis, but at least now it knew exactly what shape it was aiming for and how to get there — which alone doubled its efficiency.

It wasn’t just the outer armor. As the piled-up scrap metal nearby was broken down into raw particle streams, the internal damage was filled in as well.

Severed conduits fused back together, melted gun barrels regrew from the inside out, and — most striking of all — even the Imperial Aquila was restored down to the last precise detail.

Christina stared at Lin, eyes wide with astonishment. “Where did you dig up xenos sorcery like this?”

“Just science we haven’t understood yet,” Lin corrected. “From now on, we’ll call it the Reanimation Protocols.”

“Then you’d better not let the other grease-monkeys see it. Otherwise they’ll either march an army over to burn you as a tech-heretic, or drop to their knees and start calling you the Omnissiah.”

“By the time we have the strength for it, they’ll naturally start leaning toward the second option,” Lin replied.

He watched the iron stone finish breaking down the piled metal on the site, all of it consumed, and felt not entirely satisfied with the technology yet.

“The material consumption is pretty steep, though.”

The Necrons’ bizarre construction methods and energy efficiency were tied inseparably to their use of blackstone energy and living metal.

Their technology worked fine with ordinary metal too, but it lost much of its impressive edge across the board.

“I’ll have to see if I can get my hands on a way to produce living metal. It’s not especially strong, but with it I should be able to build out a complete Reanimation Protocols.”

Of course, even incomplete, this rough draft of the Reanimation Protocols already carried real strategic value.

When a Thundergod, looking brand new, stood before Christina, she found herself instinctively checking how much time had passed.

Just six hours. A Thundergod that should have needed a full factory recall had already been restored to its pre-battle peak condition.

That timeframe meant that as long as it wasn’t utterly annihilated, the enemy would face endless, relentless assaults from this steel colossus.

In an Imperium where wars were measured in years, Christina couldn’t begin to imagine how much such technology could accomplish.

The material cost was steep, yes, but compared to shipping in another fleet’s worth of troops, hauling in raw materials was a far lighter burden.

If the battlefield itself had some existing industrial base, they could even scavenge materials on-site.

Christina was about to command a Titan Legion that would never run short of ranks.

“I’ll write this program into every Thundergod going forward. The front lines on the Attack Moon will be yours to hold,” Lin said.

“When do we start this war?”

“Right now.”

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