Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

Those words fell on the room like a stone dropped into still water — and every voice went silent.

For just a moment, Hays wished he were an Ogryn who couldn't count past nine. Then at least he wouldn't have had to understand a single word of what these people were saying.

Unfortunately, he was not.

He didn't know what the 'Ultimate Wall' was. But he had heard that phrase — rally all the Imperial Fists successor Chapters — with perfect, horrible clarity.

Strip away every high-minded justification, and what this amounted to was the re-founding of a Legion.

Commander Hays stared wide-eyed, unable to pretend he hadn't heard. He turned to face Kurande — whose expression was set in iron certainty — and asked again, his voice barely steady:

"You want to rally every Imperial Fists successor Chapter?"

Kurande gave a simple nod. Lin pulled up a data chart he had already prepared and began his briefing.

"By conservative estimates, we will soon have access to approximately two thousand Astartes and a powerful Astartes rapid-strike fleet. Hold Cath Maximus for a short while, and the strategic situation will shift decisively in our favour."

Now Hays understood where Lin had found the nerve to hold Cath Maximus in the first place. But knowing the source of that confidence only made him feel more shaken, not less — far more so than when he had suspected Lin was simply acting out of compulsion.

"You're insane!" He couldn't stop himself from roaring. "Rallying the Imperial Fists successor Chapters? This isn't a muster — this is the re-founding of a Legion! The Imperium will never permit this! Whatever the justification, the Chapters formed under the Codex Astartes must never repeat the sins of the Legions!"

"The Imperium won't permit it — or the High Lords won't?" Lin replied.

Still mid-roar, Hays stopped cold.

After a long moment, he forced the words out with visible effort. "The will of any individual High Lord is not the will of the Imperium — but the collective decisions of the High Lords are the will of the Imperium as a whole. A re-founded Legion is too dangerous. It becomes a force the Imperium cannot control. Such a thing would inevitably lead to rebellion..."

Rebellion. The moment that word surfaced in his mind, his thoughts snapped into sudden, brutal clarity.

Yes. Rebellion.

What had happened on Cath Maximus was a rebellion.

The Mechanicus fleet that had withdrawn without a word. The transport vehicles that looked like they'd rolled straight off a rebel convoy. The ruins of fortifications built in the Imperial Fists' own style. Hays strung all of it together — and the thread led to a conclusion that chilled even him.

The Imperial Fists Chapter had staged an armed uprising against the Forge World on Cath Maximus. And it had been premeditated. They intended to use this Forge World as their stronghold — to rally the entire Legion here, from scratch.

Of course, a handful of Imperial Fists survivors and a single Mechanicus Magos couldn't pull that off alone. Given enough time, they could have ground down any surface resistance.

So the real variable — the linchpin — was himself. And the fleet he had brought with him.

If an Astartes force loyal to the Imperium suddenly launched a rebellion on a given planet — and at that exact moment, an Imperial fleet happened to be approaching the Forge World — and that fleet was personally commanded by a High Lord...

If Hays were the Forge Director, what would he think?

He put himself in that position, and came to a bleak answer: he would have concluded, without question, that this was a premeditated Imperial strike against the Mechanicus.

The Astartes had sent emissaries to make contact, luring the fleet to Cath Maximus. They had made unwitting accomplices of the Imperial forces — helping the Imperial Fists seize the Forge World without those forces ever knowing they were being used.

When this news reached Mars — would they see through the scheme?

Probably. But those oil-blooded fanatics wouldn't care. They would seize on it as a pretext, bring it to the High Lords' Council, and use it to publicly attack the Imperium as a whole.

The Imperium's double-headed eagle: one head was the Imperium itself, the other was the Mechanicus. A Forge World being 'seized by Imperial forces' would shatter the political balance between those two heads. And from that fracture, the entire Imperium would be swept into the chaos of a split eagle.

All of this — because the Imperial Fists wanted to re-found their Legion.

Hays felt his breathing go tight. He looked toward the Imperial Fists warriors beside him, hoping someone among them might step in and stop Kurande's madness.

But the warriors who had sworn to protect him had already drifted away in everything but body, quietly edging toward Kurande's side of the room. Only his adjutant and personal guard remained, exchanging helpless glances with one another.

Hays squeezed his eyes shut in anguish.

Wonderful. I've spent my whole career crushing rebels. Now I'm one of them.

"You can't do this," he groaned in warning. "This will tear the Imperium apart. You won't be protecting Terra — you'll be repeating the Horus Heresy."

Kurande's only answer was a cold stare.

"The Imperium is the Emperor's Imperium. It is not the High Lords' Imperium. It is precisely to defend the Imperium that I must do this."

"If my enemies oppose me, that proves I am right. If the High Lords oppose me — then the High Lords have already become the enemy."

His words rang like a struck bell.

"We are the Imperial Fists. We are the Praetorians of Terra. The glory we carry as defenders of Terra was bought with our blood and fire. No Chapter has been tempered more by the Horus Heresy than we have. No one's gene-father sacrificed more during the Horus Heresy than ours. No one!"

"You dare speak to us of rebellion? You are not worthy of the word."

Kurande gave Lin a brief nod, then turned and walked away. The veteran warriors of the Imperial Fists Honour Company who had been stationed around Hays hesitated for just a moment — then abandoned him and followed.

Hays kept his eyes shut, as if unwilling to face what was in front of him. His adjutant turned hesitantly to Lin for confirmation:

"They've gone to send the Starwhisper signal — the muster call for the Legion?"

Lin shrugged. "Some secrets are obvious the moment you look at them. Better not to dig too deep."

"I only wanted to ease my commander's burden..."

"He'll make his own choice." Lin turned his gaze to Hays. "Isn't that right, my lord High Lord?"

Hays opened his eyes and let out a quiet, heavy sigh. "I care nothing for that title."

"Others do. Which is why your choice matters."

"Is this you asking me? Your plan never left me any room to choose from the very beginning! You used the forces I brought as your weapon. You used Imperial military presence to pressure the Mechanicus fleet into leaving — that's already done and decided. What choice do I even have left?"

"It wasn't pressure — we simply took custody of a Forge World the Mechanicus had voluntarily abandoned. The method was perhaps not entirely... smooth. That's all."

"That doesn't matter! What matters is that they're already gone. News that Imperial forces have encroached on Mechanicus territorial interests will spread regardless. If you were going to do this, why not go all the way? You should have warned me sooner and let me destroy their entire fleet in orbit — made sure this news never spread at all!"

Facing the furious old general, Lin raised two fingers.

"First: with respect, had we informed you in advance, the probability of your cooperating with this plan was less than one percent. The way your mind is working right now — you're reasoning backwards from an already bad outcome, trying to identify what could have been done differently to make things better. If you had genuinely known in advance, prior experience would have steered you toward a more cautious approach — almost certainly siding with the Mechanicus to suppress the Imperial Fists and escort their fleet out safely."

"Second: do you truly believe that if we hadn't moved against a third-tier Forge World of negligible strategic value, Mars would have cheerfully assisted us in a war against the Orks?"

Hays was momentarily lost for words. "At the very least, it wouldn't give Mars justification to attack the Imperium in its hour of crisis."

"It still won't. Under the Mechanicus's own internal statutes, when a Forge World's incumbent Forge Director can no longer exercise administrative authority, a new Forge Director must be elected to succeed them. I selected a locally-born Magos from Cath Maximus for the position. Obedience is his greatest virtue — and the appointment process was conducted in full compliance with Mechanicus internal regulations."

"And my fleet arriving at the critical moment? That doesn't clear you of suspicion — and I will absolutely be seen as representing the Imperium in interfering with the Mechanicus's internal affairs!"

"'Interference' — not war. Even direct armed conflict leaves room for diplomatic manoeuvring. A single act of interference amounts to nothing more than some protracted wrangling in the council chambers. The only exceptional element here is that this concerns the Solar Segment, which lies adjacent to Terra itself. The officials expected to shoulder the blame and step down will likely be rather... prominent ones."

Hays fell silent. He understood now that the Magos before him had little concern for whatever came next — and understood with equal clarity that he himself was in all likelihood among those 'prominent' officials destined to take the fall.

Lin watched the silent Astra Militarum commander before him. He studied the old general's face — a face carved by decades of war and smoke into a landscape of deep lines and hard hollows. Even now, lost and in pain, that face still wore an expression of quiet, bedrock resolve.

Lin's actions had already profoundly altered the fates of many people. The Astra Militarum commander standing before him — currently serving as a High Lord — was one of them.

High Lords were, in most people's estimation, the political class in its most contemptible form. But this particular Astra Militarum commander was, by all appearances, an exception.

In the original course of the Beast War, Lin had never pulled the surviving Imperial Fists from Jingang. When the High Lords' Council had dispatched Hays to lead an Astra Militarum contingent alongside the remaining Imperial Fists to Jingang in search of the lost Chapter, what Hays had found on arrival was an endless tide of Orks.

As supreme commander of the expedition fleet, he had held the authority to order a withdrawal. Instead, to save the Imperial Fists survivors, he had led his Astra Militarum forces into a rescue operation that was, by every measure, an act of desperate defiance. The operation had ultimately destroyed both him and the Imperial Fists Honour Company — but he had succeeded in pulling three Imperial Fists survivors from Jingang.

Of those three survivors, the only one who had ultimately lived was Kurande.

But that story had changed now. The Imperial Fists survivors were no longer just Kurande, and Commander Hays — who in the original timeline had been nothing more than background scenery in that doomed rescue operation — had survived, along with the Honour Company.

Of course, rewriting fate doesn't rewrite character. Facing a High Lord who had once thrown his life away to save the Imperial Fists, Lin felt a measure of confidence in how he would ultimately choose.

But before that moment came, he still needed to lay the possibilities out plainly for Commander Hays.

"You can choose to leave right now — take your fleet, report everything you've seen here to the High Lords' Council, and hand this entire headache over to the High Lords to argue out among themselves. Doing so won't save your rotating seat on the High Lords' Council — but after you're removed from office and put out to pasture, the probability of living out your remaining years in peace is no lower than eighty percent."

"And the alternative?" Hays asked. He had already worked out the answer for himself — he simply wanted to hear it confirmed from Lin's own mouth.

"The High Lords will move at maximum speed to warn the Imperial Fists successor Chapters against mustering, and will cut off those Chapters' supply lines."

"The Ultimate Wall was a plan drawn up personally by their Primarch, Lord Dorn — so most of the successor Chapters will ultimately rally regardless. But completing that muster while already in open opposition to the High Lords will leave those warriors fighting on two fronts simultaneously. Against the Orks, their odds of victory will be very slim."

Lin projected a hololithic image into the air — a Battle Moon. The sheer scale of that armed satellite instantly seized Hays's complete attention.

"This is the enemy they will face. An Ork tide, led by a Battle Moon — a tide that nothing short of a Legion can hope to stop. I believe you caught a glimpse of what the Orks are capable of back on Jingang. Perhaps the other High Lords would be quite content to see the Imperial Fists — hanging over their heads like a sword — finally destroyed. But you, Commander? What do you want?"

Hays had already come to see that the Legion muster was necessary. "And if I don't bring news of the Legion muster back to the High Lords' Council?"

"Then you join us. Together, we hold back this terrifying Ork tide." Lin pointed to the ground beneath their feet. "Starting from this broken Forge World — together, we will rewrite the shape of this war."

Hays's brow furrowed. A storm of worry gathered behind his eyes. Steeped as he had been in the atmosphere of the High Lords' Council, even a man without political instincts had begun to weigh the consequences for the Imperium as a whole.

"Rallying a Legion is a dangerous signal. I don't need to think hard to understand how much it will shake an Imperium that has barely recovered from the Horus Heresy. As a High Lord — someone supposed to maintain the political stability of the Imperium — I cannot stand by and let this happen..."

He let out a long breath. But even as he spoke, the furrow in his brow eased. He had clearly stopped wrestling with the question above.

"But who really cares about that seat? Before any of that matters, I'm just a general. A general whose job is to make sure the Imperium survives long enough that anyone can afford to worry about those things."

He extended his hand to Lin.

"It seems you were the key figure behind the seizure of this Forge World all along. Let's start over. Lin — Magos — just who exactly are you?"

Lin extended his own hand and clasped it with Hays's.

"Just a Magos who doesn't particularly care for the Mechanicus," he answered.

The Starwhisper signal carrying the Imperial Fists muster call swept overhead — unseen, travelling on frequencies beyond human perception. Carried by the sacrifice of the Astropaths, a signal bearing only four words — Ultimate Wall — scattered outward across the galaxy.

The first to receive it was the Exemplary Fists Chapter, stationed on their home world of Edorika. As a planet lying directly in the path of the Battle Moon's advance toward Terra, Edorika had, inevitably, come under attack.

The Exemplary Fists had already received a warning from Hive World Nding. They had pre-mustered the Chapter's full strength and charged their void shields with enough energy to protect the hive city within. But even so, the strength of a single Chapter was a pitiful thing against a Battle Moon.

The Battle Moon's gravity weapons hammered the planetary surface outside the void shields in relentless cycles, and the resulting tectonic shifts reduced everything within the shields to rubble as well. Any attempt to construct surface fortifications under that crushing assault was proven futile within moments. Orks riding hollowed-out asteroids rained down and spread across Edorika in an instant, leaving the numerically outmatched and fortification-starved Exemplary Fists fighting desperately on every front.

Recognising that a ground defensive battle against a Battle Moon was unwinnable, the Exemplary Fists organised a boarding action. Chapter Master Alamida, together with the first company commander, led the Chapter's most elite warriors aboard an Astartes strike cruiser — using the entire vessel as a drop pod — and attempted a decapitation strike against the Battle Moon.

They failed.

Second Company Commander Maximus Sorn received no word of their fate. Meanwhile, the Battle Moon's unstoppable assault continued unabated.

Sorn assumed command of the Exemplary Fists and began planning a second boarding action against the Battle Moon. But just as the plan was nearing completion, the Chapter's Astropath burst into his command room.

Sorn frowned at the Astropath, puzzled by the intrusion.

"We have received a Starwhisper communication addressed to all Imperial Fists successor Chapters — only four words!"

"What four words?"

"'Ultimate Wall!' The priority is marked as most urgent, my lord — do you know what this means?"

Sorn said nothing. He seemed unsurprised by the news. But beside him, Zebyrean — who had just taken over as first company commander — felt every muscle in his body go taut.

Only someone intimately familiar with Astartes physiology would have noticed the tightening of the muscles along Zebyrean's neck. Sorn caught it with a sideways glance, then dismissed the Astropath.

"Understood. You're dismissed."

The Astropath obeyed and left. Sorn returned to the command table. He cancelled the Battle Moon's scan projection and replaced it with a star chart, marking the Phal System prominently.

"Abort the Battle Moon boarding plan. Muster every serviceable vessel in the Chapter." He said: "We move — all of us — to the Phal System."

"The Phal System? You're certain you want to abandon our Chapter homeworld for a muster signal that violates the Codex Astartes? Even to fight the Orks, I would rather die here!"

Zebyrean's objection was fierce and unambiguous. He flatly opposed Sorn's decision to heed the Ultimate Wall's call.

"Chapter Master Sorn — don't forget our name. We are the Exemplary Fists!"

But Sorn simply glanced at Zebyrean with calm indifference, then turned and walked away.

"Zebyrean. I am the Chapter Master."

He left it at that — and notably, he did not call Zebyrean 'Brother.'

Zebyrean stood in place, his expression shifting through storms of conflicting emotion.

But regardless of all this, countless forces — enemy and ally alike — were now converging on the Solar Segment.

The Ultimate Wall muster call had been sent. It was like a stone dropped onto the surface of water already churned by hidden currents — it could not change the direction of the flow, but it shattered the surface, and let the world catch a glimpse of the turbulence roiling beneath.

The Ork invasion had ravaged the Imperium for too long already. The Imperium's answer — was only now beginning to stir.

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