Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

Unfortunately, not every space hulk holds treasure.

Lin came away empty-handed from this one — and not for lack of trying. Even the ancient Terran art of reading mountain ridges and dragon veins couldn't have helped him here.

A space hulk was a catch-all term for vessels lost in the Warp and everything else that drifted with them. Crews being found dead — cause unknown — was hardly a rare occurrence aboard such ships. These ghost ships often wandered the Immaterium for centuries, until someone was reckless enough to board them in the Warp itself or they eventually tumbled back into realspace.

Space hulks frequently carried treasures of considerable worth: lost technologies, sacred relics, and the like. But just as often, they served as lairs for heretics, Chaos daemons, Ork warbands — or Genestealers.

Of course, given that this was the M32nd Millennium, the Tyranid hive fleets were presumably still huffing and puffing their way toward the galaxy on an empty stomach. As the advance scouts of the Tyranid swarm, the Genestealers naturally hadn't made their appearance in the galaxy yet.

So in the normal course of things, a space hulk would only host the first three varieties of unwanted guests. That said, given the Warp's notorious habit of scrambling time, the occasional abnormal situation wasn't exactly surprising.

Among all the abnormal situations he had already discussed with the Astartes, Lin had long since steeled himself for the possibility of encountering Tyranid specimens aboard this particular hulk.

As it turned out, that mental preparation had not quite been enough.

Lin stared down at the Tyranid specimen spread open beneath his dissection tools, and felt the blueprint schematics for Tyranid bioweapons flickering to life and blazing brightly inside his mind. He exhaled a long, slow breath.

There were no lost technologies here as he'd hoped — but gaining partial knowledge to unlock new schematics was still a find in its own right. Given how closely the Tyranids resembled their counterparts in other science fiction settings, it was within his expectations that cross-referencing them would yield partial unlocks for Zerg tech from StarCraft and Solarin parasite tech from Stellaris.

But when that "partial" unlock turned out to be suspiciously complete, Lin was the one who ought to feel unsettled.

It wasn't that the unlocking mechanism in his mind had granted him any special favors — the fundamental requirement of recreating cross-universal technology the Warhammer way hadn't changed. The reason so many progress bars had unlocked all at once was simple: these things were just way too damn similar.

Before crossing over, Lin had slaughtered untold numbers of Hydralisks in the game. The flesh-eroding guns they'd evolved from their own bodies had left a deep impression on him.

But the attack organ on the Tyranid specimen under his scalpel wasn't using a flesh-eroding gun at all. Instead, it sprayed a stream of corrosive acid at high velocity from its mouthparts.

Lin was absolutely certain the creature's anatomy conformed to Warhammer's unique biology — this was, without any doubt, a Tyranid from the Warhammer universe.

But that attack method? That was just a bloody Hydralisk from StarCraft.

Why was something that hadn't even unlocked in his head yet showing up here in the flesh?

"Cogitator array, report current time," he ordered the hulk's Cogitator array.

The Cogitator array emitted a garbled noise, as though something were interfering with it. But in the end, it managed to display the time it had recorded on the screen before Lin.

"750, M41," it displayed — and even marked the notation "current location" alongside it: "Ultramar."

That was the realspace time and location it had logged upon entering the Warp. It had come from nine thousand years in the future.

Anyone familiar with the Warp's chaotic relationship with time would understand what they were looking at — but Lin, who happened to know certain "future" events, could read even more into it. For instance, the First Tyrannic War had taken place in precisely 745 of M41, right here in Ultramar.

Lin had already spent three days investigating the space hulk. By now he had pieced together the full picture: the vessel that the Tzeentchian Greater Daemon had deliberately steered into the path of the Second Legion remnants and the Hunter Dreadnought was a Forge Ship belonging to the Adeptus Mechanicus.

Such ships typically carried factories sufficient to supply half a world's worth of ammunition and corpse-starch. The unusual feature of this particular Forge Ship, however, was that a section of it had been converted into a Tyranid research facility, with numerous Tyranid specimens preserved in stasis fields for study.

What made it genuinely eerie was that Lin and the others had swept through the entire Forge Ship multiple times without finding a single biological corpse beyond the Tyranid specimens themselves.

The crew who should have kept the ship running, the Mechanicus priests who should have been managing production, the Magi Biologis who should have been conducting the research — not one of them was present. The ship was clean to the point where it seemed as though none of them had ever existed at all.

And yet Lin had found no shortage of experimental notes aboard the ship — notes so degraded as to be nearly illegible — and the Cogitator still held partial research records on the Tyranids left behind by someone else.

Lin scrolled further down the screen, following the timestamp the Cogitator had displayed. The experimental logs were just below.

"Day X of Month X, hour X by standard Terra time."

"Experiment record… specimen… Macragge… Second… soul…"

That was all the Cogitator had left. Fragmented, corrupted logs were entirely common aboard a ship that had spent ages lost in the Warp with no one to maintain its machine-spirit — but these scattered remnants had Lin sniffing out the scent of a conspiracy.

Considering that the Tzeentchian Greater Daemon had specifically chosen this ship as the stage for its showdown with the Second Legion remnants and the Hunter Dreadnought, this vessel was almost certainly pointing toward some dark future connected to them. But these few words bore absolutely no discernible connection to anything else aboard the ship, and they left Lin completely stumped.

Macragge he could at least place — it was the site of the First Tyrannic War. But what was the "Second" that followed it? Surely it couldn't mean the Second Imperium?

Hiss... actually, now that he thought about it, for a ship to be this immaculately clean, it was entirely possible that the Ultramarines — who had their little secrets — had come through and silenced everyone...

But then what was "soul" at the end supposed to mean?

Could it mean the Tyranids had souls?

Absolute nonsense.

Lin frowned, thoroughly stumped. He had no real leads to follow — the only thing he could say with any certainty was that Tzeentch had something to do with all of this. But the very fact that it involved that bird-headed schemer was precisely what reminded him not to dig any deeper.

As the old saying went: the moment mankind starts thinking, Tzeentch starts laughing. This ship had been thrown at them by Tzeentch himself — only that feathered freak knew how many traps were buried aboard it. Following the threads of logic laid out here would be walking straight into Tzeentch's scheme.

The advantage of being a Blank lay in the unknowable nature of one's thoughts — thoughts the Warp's malevolent entities could not spy upon. But if one became too predictable and methodical, that very unknowability would become a knowability.

That Tzeentchian Greater Daemon Lin had crushed in the Dreadnought at the very beginning might have known something... but then again, that had been a Tzeentchian Greater Daemon. Lin felt absolutely no regret about not having extracted any information from it.

"In the end, this will just have to wait for later..."

Lin set down his dissection scalpel and decided to pause his investigation into the nine-thousand-year-future Tyranids.

Three days had already been spent picking through the Forge Ship and the Tyranid situation. He had no intention of sinking any more time into it — he had more important matters arranged that needed attending to.

As if on cue, the laboratory hatch slid open and someone stepped in from outside.

Lin had borrowed the Forge Ship's laboratory for his own use and had instructed everyone else not to interrupt him unless absolutely necessary. Evidently, however, the person who had just entered qualified as an absolute necessity.

"You're here," Lin said, turning around to find Admir.

"I'm here," Admir nodded. Together with the Felyne at his feet, he was carrying a cryo-preservation unit in his arms. "Just as we agreed."

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