Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

A violent tremor shook the entire underground complex. The Tech-priests steadied their footing and exchanged knowing glances — another lance strike had hit the surface.

A faint haze of pulverized rock dust drifted through the air, but no one paid it any mind. Machines do not stop for a bombardment.

The Tech-priests worked the assembly lines without pause. Servitors were being rapidly armed with whatever weapons could be found and sent to the front lines to hold back the Frateris Militia.

The effect these hastily armed Servitors could achieve was painfully limited, however. The real backbone of the resistance against the Frateris Militia was the CMC powered suit production line that Lin had relocated underground.

The suits coming off the line were a neutered variant — stripped of their intelligent assistance systems — but even so, the defensive capability afforded by powered armor reinforced with ceramic-steel alloy was an invaluable commodity in their current situation. Paired with their accompanying electromagnetic rifles, a warrior in a full CMC powered suit was a significant step above any ordinary Frateris Militiaman.

And thanks to the infrastructure of the Forge World, what had taken two full days to produce on the primitive surface of the Azure Star could now roll off the assembly line in a matter of tens of minutes.

This production capacity, combined with the stockpile Lin had prepared in advance, had allowed a force of elite Servitors — those who had retained the most cognitive capacity — to be fully equipped with CMC powered suits. Under Kurande's command, they were now serving as a rapid reaction force, fighting a grueling running battle against the Frateris Militia on the surface.

"I never knew the Mechanicus could produce things this fast," Sergeant Arlo remarked from nearby, his voice carrying a note of genuine amazement.

"Given a production line, nothing takes very long to make. The Mechanicus's output is largely throttled by the endless consecration rituals. Those rituals do serve a purpose — they effectively prevent machine-spirits from being corrupted by the warp." Lin explained without looking up from his work. "But the things we're sending up right now get blown to scrap within ten minutes. When a machine-spirit gets destroyed before it can even be corrupted, there's obviously no point in consecrating it."

He was in the middle of performing surgery on a Space Marine the Felynes had pulled back from the front lines. Christina, Titan Captain in name but presently idle, was assisting him.

The Titan had been moved into an underground storage bay. With nothing else to do, Christina had fallen back on the biological expertise she had cultivated in another life.

But even their best efforts could do little to change the broader shape of the battle. A deafening explosion sent a pressure wave rolling through the tunnels, pushing a brief gust of hot air into the underground factory — a fleeting wave of warmth. Christina's hands stilled.

"The Frateris Militia are getting close," she noted, her tone flat and even.

Lin didn't seem surprised. "Half a day before they reached us — that already exceeded my expectations."

"I just hope your reinforcements arrive soon. We can't hold out in this underground factory for long." She paused. "Or is there something else you're still holding back?"

Christina's skepticism was entirely well-founded.

Control of the Forge World's hive void shields was not in Lin's hands. The earlier plan to sabotage the spaceport had not gone smoothly either.

Lin had certainly landed a surprise blow and, by exploiting Lifar's influence, had managed to stir the planet's Tech-priests into rebellion. But the nature of the Mechanicus — equal parts techno-scholastic faction and religious institution — meant that the vast majority of its resources were concentrated in the hands of a very few.

Nor was Lin capable of consolidating all the remaining forces on the planet.

Self-preservation is the first commandment of the Mechanicus. When the Forge World descended into chaos, the instinctive response of many high-ranking Tech-priests — those who had no clear picture of the situation and were not on the evacuation roster — was to seal off their factories and production lines and dig in, each becoming a petty lord of their own little hill.

The Frateris Militia's offensive was fast and ferocious. They had bypassed those factories entirely to come after Lin directly, which meant those unconsolidated installations offered him no assistance whatsoever.

The ones who could genuinely help Lin were the Tech-priests he had united during the chaos triggered by the Titan Legion's uprising.

They numbered in the tens of thousands, yet what they could actually contribute was only themselves and a handful of production-grade Servitors. Beyond throwing themselves into labor, they held almost no resources that could meaningfully aid Lin in his fight against the Forge Council.

The Forge Council, by contrast, could sustain a continuous assault — orbital bombardment from above, and an unending flow of Frateris Militia ferried down from the spaceport.

Lin had pulled together what private militias the Tech-priests had on hand, but the combined strength still couldn't stand toe-to-toe against a Deputy Forge Director commanding hundreds of thousands of Frateris Militia — a man who could direct thousands of troops with the precision of fingers on a hand.

After all, that Deputy Forge Director was genuinely capable of micro-managing a lascannon five millimeters to the left.

Lin's one and only advantage — or rather, his bait — was the Warlord-class Titan in his possession.

A Warlord Titan was an extraordinarily powerful thing. For a ground war, a single Warlord Titan was the kind of asset that could single-handedly dictate the outcome of an entire campaign. But compared to ground forces, the true lords of any battlefield were the ones in orbit.

Even with only two cruisers, there were precious few ground units capable of weathering sustained lance fire and orbital bombardment.

So Lin had simply moved the Titan underground, using the Deputy Forge Director's desperation as a lever to draw him into the underground factory — the arena where Lin intended to fight the final battle.

The ferocity of the enemy's assault told him that Admidel's reinforcements must already be close. A Deputy Forge Director burning to recover the Titan would never choose the slow and laborious option of collapsing the entire underground factory and then digging the Titan out of the rubble.

His only real option was to personally lead his forces deep into the factory and find the Titan that Lin had hidden somewhere within its depths.

The Titan itself couldn't fight in the confines of an underground factory either, but the Deputy Forge Director's Frateris Militia would inevitably be fragmented and isolated by the labyrinthine tunnels. The deliberately disrupted vox-channels would ensure he couldn't command thousands of troops with his customary precision.

And with Space Marines on Lin's side, the disparity between the two forces would be compressed to its minimum in this underground environment.

As for the Deputy Forge Director himself...

King against king. Champion against champion. His opponent was a high-ranking Archmagos of the Adeptus Mechanicus — even if the man was not quite up to that standard in practice — and that meant only Lin could deal with him.

Facing a senior Mechanicus Archmagos was an enormous pressure on Lin as he currently stood — even if his opponent wasn't quite as fearsome as the title implied.

He would need to leverage his own unique capabilities and prepare a few small surprises for his opponent if he wanted any real chance at victory.

Lin finished the surgery with a few rough sutures and gestured for the Felynes to carry the patched-up wounded away. At that moment, the heavy metal door slid open. The grinding of metal tracks mixed with the sounds of explosions from outside, and Kurande stepped through — coated head-to-toe in smoke and grime.

His powered armor was pocked with bullet craters and scorch marks. "The outer factory district has fallen. I've narrowed the front as much as possible to prevent them from committing too many forces at once. But they have far too many bodies. No matter how many we kill, they can fill the gaps without limit."

He seemed to have had a taste of the same despair his gene-father had known when organizing the defense of Terra. But like his gene-father, even in the face of that despair, his voice held not a trace of fear or hesitation.

"You can't kill all the Frateris Militia. Even if you wipe out every last one on the surface, they'll just drop another wave down from orbit."

Lin was unsurprised. "You've done well, Kurande. Begin deploying the underground defenses. We need to establish layered resistance throughout the tunnels of the underground factory — buy as much time as possible before the reinforcements arrive."

"How long do we need to hold?" Kurande asked.

Lin estimated based on the urgency of the enemy's offensive. "Approximately nine hours."

Imperial warships used reaction-mass drives — antiquated technology, to be sure — but humanity had spent thousands of years perfecting the art atop that mountain of accumulated knowledge. Even conventional chemical propulsion could accelerate a warship beyond 0.75 times the speed of light within a short span. Add to that the modest mass of the Cath Maximus system, and the Imperial fleet's transit time from the Mandeville Point would be anything but slow.

Kurande raised an eyebrow. He didn't actually care how much longer they had to hold — it was simply that the number instinctively made him uneasy.

He said nothing about it, however, and turned to consult with Sergeant Arlo — a veteran of the Imperial Fists — on the matter of the underground defensive layout.

They began directing Servitors to haul materials and construct firing positions. The Tech-priests who had been occupied with production were led by Lifar to either evacuate or pull back deeper into the complex.

But before retreating deeper, Lifar made a point of running over to Lin with one final question.

"Are we going to win?" His gaze on Lin was full of hope and desperate sincerity.

Lin didn't answer. He booted the trembling, flag-raising old Archmagos down the tunnel toward the deeper sections with a swift kick, then turned back to disassembling the signal dish he had on hand.

It was the device he had previously fitted to the Felyne's forehead to receive Starwhisper signals — its antenna was composed of psyker bone ash. Lin had used it earlier to receive news of the destruction of Hive World Nding.

The signal dish was useless now, but that psyker bone ash was extraordinarily precious.

Lin extracted the bone ash from within it and packed it into a specially fashioned grenade. Christina, watching from beside him, immediately identified the grade of the material.

"Bone ash from an Eta-class mid-tier psyker. What's the point of making that into a grenade?"

Psyker bone ash could be fashioned into explosive weapons, but it took at minimum a Zeta-class psyker for the detonation to trigger a warp phenomenon. Material of that caliber was not something Lin could ever have obtained through his exchanges with the Mechanicus priests.

As for Eta-class — one grade below Zeta...

Lin didn't bother engaging with the entirely reasonable objection. He simply held the grenade up and gave it a little wave in Christina's direction.

"Trust me. For my purposes, it'll work just fine."

"You're counting on that one grenade?"

"Of course not."

Lin pointed over his shoulder at the rows of Felynes lined up behind him. The little creatures were fully kitted out — armored up, laden with traps, Flashbombs, hunting knives, and crates packed with ammunition. Most conspicuous of all was the hammer in Tom's hands, crafted from the materials of an Uragaan.

"I've still got them."

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