Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

The Deputy Forge Director fell silent for a moment. Lin could sense him trembling — his logic-core had apparently never computed the possibility that Lin would make such a declaration.

"War? You call this a war?"

The Deputy Forge Director's reply finally came, cold and clipped: "Then I will give you exactly the response you're asking for. I will tear your head from your shoulders in the course of this war and grind your mind to dust. I swear it before the Omnissiah — even accounting for the fact that you are a man of Forge World Huangquan VIII, the probability that I will accomplish this is one hundred percent."

"When my Frateris Militia drags you before me, don't you dare have regrets — because you are the one who started this war!"

With that, he cut the vox-link.

But the Deputy Forge Director was far from the composed, iron-voiced figure he had projected during the call. The moment the connection severed, he swept the table clean with a furious crash.

"These lunatics and animals from Huangquan VIII!"

He had already offered Lin a way out earlier — had the whole affair been classified merely as incitement, there would still have been room to negotiate. But the other side had voluntarily escalated matters to the level of war. A Cog War, witnessed by the Omnissiah Himself.

Scorching fury rolled through the Deputy Forge Director's chest. Since the installation of his emotion-suppressor, this was the first time he had felt anything so vivid and raw.

The blazing rage made him want to tear his enemies to pieces on the spot — but his logic-cortex forced him to cool down and confront several pressing questions.

The purpose of war is always the seizure of advantage. So what, exactly, was the enemy's objective? Where did their interests lie?

They had barely a hundred Astartes, and even if they had stirred up a portion of the tech-priests he had already written off as expendable, that kind of force was nowhere near sufficient to sustain a war against a Forge World. So where did they find the nerve?

The unknown is always logic's greatest enemy. Too many gaps left the Deputy Forge Director's thinking knotted with dead-ends he could not unravel.

The behavioral logic of that Sage from Huangquan VIII read as pure, uncomputable chaos in his mind. The sensation of his own thinking grinding to a halt made the Deputy Forge Director deeply uncomfortable.

He waved a hand in irritation. The Master Forger, who had himself sensed that something was genuinely wrong, offered no sardonic remarks this time. He simply asked: "Do you want me to detonate the production lines?"

"No." The Deputy Forge Director tried to straighten out his logic. "This rebellion hasn't spread to the entire Forge World yet. Detonating the lines now would only make things worse."

His gaze settled on the motionless Warlord-class Titan. "Can we raise Captain Christina? Has the Titan not been repaired yet?"

"Since the uprising began, we've lost contact with both the Titan and the tech-priests who were conducting its inspection," the Master Forger explained. "The infantry guard belonging to the Titan Congregation are holding a cordon around the Titan and preventing anyone from approaching. But until they receive orders from Christina, they will take no further action."

"No further action? By the time that Huangquan VIII vermin leads the Imperial Fists to consolidate the defensive line and turns around to seize the Titan's cockpit, it will be far too late for anyone to realize it!"

The Deputy Forge Director cursed the Titan Congregation without mercy, but no amount of invective could change the situation on the ground. The tech-priests, with the Imperial Fists' support, had thrown up a defense line — crude but solid — and their ferocious fire was keeping the Rangers and vanguard troops pinned flat.

Several Astartes in powered armor had used that covering fire to push close to the Frateris Militia. The galvanic rifles that unleashed electromagnetic bursts and the rad-beams that led with lethal radiation struggled to inflict lethal damage on Astartes clad in ceramite-plated power armor.

The Astartes under Kurande's command exploited exactly that advantage to punch through the Frateris Militia's lines. Chainswords raised high, they launched into a merciless slaughter.

The probability calculations told the Deputy Forge Director plainly: with only Rangers, vanguard troops, and the uselessly passive Titan guard available, the likelihood that Lin's Astartes would consolidate the defensive line and then seize the Titan exceeded ninety percent.

The Titans were his pledge of allegiance — explicitly demanded by Mars. They were his absolute vulnerability.

Though he still did not know what Lin wanted to obtain from this Forge World, the Deputy Forge Director was almost certain that this group had been responsible for crippling the Titans.

He didn't even need to run the numbers to understand it: those Titans were a lynchpin in Lin's plan.

Recognizing that the Titan guard could not be relied upon, the Deputy Forge Director knew he had to raise the stakes himself. Gritting his teeth, he resolved to commit his most carefully hoarded reserve.

"Bring the Frateris Militia transport ships into low orbit!"

He transmitted the order to the Mechanicus transport fleet in orbit, currently preparing to evacuate the production lines: "Paradrop the Rustseeker squadron down here!"

The Rustseekers were the Frateris Militia's close-quarters specialists. Extensively rebuilt through mechanical augmentation, they could burst into the enemy's midst at startling speed, then hack their targets to scrap with melee weapons at a pace and force that bordered on savage. The twin sonic blades they wielded were the Mechanicus's finest expression of absolute mastery over the laws of physics.

When activated, these sonic short-blades emitted a cascade of ultrasonic vibrations that generated high-frequency sound waves. Unlike the Disintegration Field of a Power Sword, their lethality was in fact even greater — achieved through an entirely different principle.

Their primary mode of damage worked like this: the moment a blade made contact with a target, it instantaneously flooded the point of contact with sound waves across a broad spectrum of frequencies. The reflected waves detected the molecular resonance frequency of whatever the blade had touched, and the blade then tuned itself to that exact frequency and released a matching resonance wave. The target would experience molecular-level resonance throughout its structure — and collapse at the molecular level in an instant.

This mechanism meant that a Rustseeker's first strike was almost always blocked with ease. But the moment an opponent relaxed, believing the fight would be simple, the sonic blade — having already mapped the target's molecular frequency — would bring that second strike down like a thunderbolt and split them clean in two.

The only unfortunate detail was that Forge World Cath Maximus had no local production line for sonic blades. This single squadron of Rustseekers represented years of painstaking accumulation on the Deputy Forge Director's part — his most precious reserve.

Watching the drop-pods descend from orbit with the Rustseekers aboard, the Deputy Forge Director felt a pang of genuine pain. But then he looked at the Astartes tearing through the Rangers with chainswords raised high, and decided the expenditure was worth every bit of it.

He was quite certain the Rustseekers would shatter those Astartes. And once the defensive line built around the Astartes collapsed, they would repair the Titans at maximum speed — and secure the pledge of allegiance that would earn him Mars's acceptance.

The drop-pods fell like meteors, slamming into the surface with a thunderclap that resonated through the streets where Lin's forces were dug in. Through the curtain of dust thrown up by the shockwave, Lin's sharp eyes caught the shapes flickering in and out of view within the haze.

Iron-grey limbs composed almost entirely of metal. Pale-blue blade edges. And those distinctive spherical joints...

Lin's pupils contracted. "Rustseekers?"

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