Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

Watching the Hunter successfully tear free of the battleship, Lin let out a breath of relief.

He slotted the soulstone back into the Solar-Powered Warblade, paying no heed whatsoever to the protests of the soul within it.

He reckoned the Aeldari inside was cursing him with some truly foul language, but it didn't matter—he couldn't be communicated with directly via psychic means, so no matter how filthily Bean Sprout swore, he wouldn't hear a thing.

Lin had not gone along on this boarding raid; he had merely remained aboard the Perfectionist, exercising overall command of the operation. This was partly out of safety considerations, and partly because he was the only one who could prepare a fallback.

That fallback was psychic teleportation by way of the soulstone.

Most Forge Worlds expressly forbid research into psionic technology, but the severity of this "express prohibition" was far lower than the ban on AI.

After all, even the Adeptus Mechanicus themselves frequently had to produce psionic-related technological products for the Imperium.

As a Magos who had made a bit of a name for himself in just about every field, Lin of course also commanded a portion of the knowledge concerning the psychic arts.

After all, he had, in a manner of speaking, dug up a few Aeldari graves.

Energy Shield, Solar-Powered Warblade.... To a great extent, Aeldari technology in Warhammer corresponded to the Protoss in StarCraft. Although Lin's grasp of it was still rudimentary, he had already managed a preliminary form of teleportation similar to the Protoss using psychic power.

Of course, he himself possessed no psychic ability. So if he wanted to perform a teleport, he could only rely on something that inherently held psionic power to serve as a conduit.

Such as that soulstone in his hand.

This soulstone could act as a Protoss pylon during the process of psychic teleportation. If things went south, Lin could use the teleport beacon Admidel carried on his person as a fix, and—at the cost of exhausting the soulstone—teleport everything within a small area back.

But the rudimentary teleportation technique he currently commanded could not designate targets, and would inevitably drag a batch of greenskins back along with it.

Just what sort of fun a horde of greenskins might kick up aboard this strike cruiser, already riddled with holes by boarding torpedoes... Lin didn't dare hazard a guess.

But at least the situation hadn't come to that.

As for what would become of the Aeldari inside the soulstone—that hardly mattered. At the very least, for the time being he wouldn't have to think about switching weapons.

He turned his head toward Sorn, who stood off to one side. Sorn nodded and patched through a communication with the fleet commander, Matt Horner.

"Colonel Horner, the operation to rescue the Black Templars is complete. Please direct the fleet to provide cover for the Hunter. Once we've brought the Hunter in, we'll pull out of here."

Horner's expression was grim: "Understood, Magos Lin."

He asked one more question: "Forgive my presumption, but how many of the Angels' lives did we save?"

"Six hundred and forty-three, Colonel Horner. The Imperial Navy's sacrifice was worth it."

"I hope so, my lord."

Horner's grim expression was not without cause; in this rescue operation, the Imperial fleet had suffered irrecoverable losses.

The Black Templars' the Abhorrence had, in the end, failed to hold out until their reinforcements arrived. That battle barge, boarded by far too many Orks, had at the last moment launched the escape pods carrying its Gene-Seeds and detonated the battleship's plasma reactor, perishing together with the Orks aboard it.

The Imperial fleet that rushed to the rescue recovered the Black Templars' Gene-Seeds, but the outnumbered Imperial Navy fared no better in a head-on slugging match against the Orks.

The two Ork fleets combined fielded two battleships and eight cruisers—a number a full twice that of the Imperial warships.

At a time like this they should have adopted craftier tactics, but the boarding torpedoes were anything but nimble. In order to receive the Black Templars coming back via boarding torpedo, the Imperial fleet had no choice but to hold the front line and trade fire with the Orks.

The Orks' unscientific construction made their naval gun firepower even denser than the Imperium's. Even if their aim wasn't great, so long as the general direction was roughly right, they could grind down the energy reserves of the void shields.

Although the structural defenses of the Imperial warships were equally excellent, when the enemy's firepower was two or three times one's own, a void shield going down meant death.

In this battle the Imperial Navy lost two cruisers and seven escort frigates. Although they likewise destroyed five Ork cruisers and countless smaller craft, the ever-widening gap between them and the Orks' increasingly massive capital ships filled every naval officer who took part in the operation with despair.

Had it not been for the Orks' sudden infighting at the very end...

The battered Imperial fleet had no intention of swooping in to steal the spoils during the Orks' moment of internal strife either. The remaining Imperial warships began, one after another, to pull away from the battle line where they'd been trading fire with the greenskins. Thunderhawk gunships carrying Space Marines set out from the Perfectionist, bringing back the Space Marines who had been dispersed across the Imperial fleet to guard against Ork boarding actions.

Sorn had deployed a squad of five to ten men aboard each warship; the sinking of nine Imperial warships meant they had lost nearly fifty more Space Marines whose seeds couldn't even be recovered.

Fortunately, Lin's personal forces had suffered no losses. When the Hunter docked with the Perfectionist, the Second Legion veterans who came down from it carried out several severely wounded men—cripples, and others whose Sus-an Membranes had already activated.

Lin performed some emergency procedures on them to ensure their lives were out of danger. As for the rest, they need only go to the treatment room for surgery to repair their severed limbs, and at the fastest they could return to the battle order within half a month.

But Sorn, who accompanied Lin to welcome these veterans home in triumph, noticed something amiss about the wounded being carried down.

"Your Sus-an Membranes... they actually still take effect?"

The warriors of the Second Legion exchanged glances, unsure how to answer the question.

What did he mean, take effect? Could this thing somehow fail to work?

Lin's heart skipped a beat.

He hadn't overlooked this detail, but now that it was raised like this, he couldn't shake a sense of ominous premonition.

To make up for the losses of the Great Heresy era, the Imperial Fists had broken with their former recruitment standards, taking in countless mortals from all over who could be made viable for conversion, and performing large-scale conversion surgeries on them to fill the gaps left by their casualties.

In the pursuit of conversion speed, the Imperial Fists' Apothecaries, with Dorn's tacit approval, simplified the conversion surgery; they deleted the Betcher's gland and the Sus-an Membrane from the procedure, a move that could accelerate the Imperial Fists' conversion by nearly forty percent.

But this measure also caused the Gene-Seeds of these rapidly-raised troops to begin degrading, so that even when Space Marines converted using the Gene-Seeds left behind by these crash-trained forces had these two organs correctly implanted, the organs would not function.

This degradation had already begun in the middle period of the Great Heresy, and with the splitting up of the Second Founding, these crash-trained Astartes were distributed among the various successor chapters of the Imperial Fists, so that today nearly all of the Imperial Fists lineage no longer possessed these two superhuman organs.

The explanation wasn't hard to give—after all, their backstory was that they were veterans of the War of Cthonia. With a little deduction, one would realize that they had become Astartes long before the middle period of the Great Heresy.....

"Chapter Master Sorn, why do you ask such a question?" Lin asked, feigning ignorance.

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