Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

The Night Lords had always relied on catching their foes off guard, so it never occurred to Malik that one day he'd be out-"surprised" by his own target.

They'd deduced Lin was hiding a little secret from the bizarre weapons that kept appearing out of nowhere, but the scientific workings beneath those ork-like exteriors had ruled out any possibility that they were ork weapons.

After all, the idea of a human using ork weaponry on a mass scale was simply unheard of.

Yet as it turned out, that was the correct answer after all — an ork, actually wearing the red robes of the Mechanicus, building weapons for humans!

Malik had no interest in dwelling on why an ork that should still have been up in the sky was suddenly standing right here. All he wanted was to yank free his lightning claw and reset his stance as fast as possible.

But the Evil Sun flexed its muscles and clamped the lightning claw — its Disintegration Field still inactive — fast inside its own body.

"You little shrimp!" the Big Mek roared, his voice like thunder. "You think that little trick of yours is enough to sort me out?"

Trusting in his thick, tough hide, the Evil Sun reached out to hammer the pinned Night Lord into the same kind of tin can as Saint Guilliman. At the critical moment, Malik had no choice but to release the lightning claw still lodged in the ork's body and wrench himself backward.

He glanced back and saw that Efron's attack had been turned aside entirely by some strange shield around Lin's body. The Astartes outside, having sensed the disturbance, had already charged in, sword and shield in hand, closing in on them slowly.

He remembered the confidence he'd felt at the outset and realized their target was nowhere near as easy a prize as they had first assumed.

An ork, a Tech-Priest, and now advancing Astartes…

What kind of freakish combination was this?

How had their plan turned into this so suddenly?

A pairing that even the Ever-Changing Daemon Lord itself couldn't have puzzled out — and for once it made Efron and Malik stop blaming each other. Efron swung his blade at the shield-bearing Astartes bearing down on him, but the Caliban swordsmanship he took such pride in achieved nothing; instead the red-glowing shield shoved him back into a stumble.

Malik, down to a single lightning claw, was even less able to stand alone. A weapon designed for close-quarters slaughter was of no use now that the ambush had failed. The Big Mek, tutored by Lin, brought a dozen weapons on his frame to bear, and the fierce tongues of flame he belched out very nearly kept the Night Lord's feet from ever touching the ground.

"Run, little shrimp! Let's see how long you can keep hopping about!"

Amid the ork's wild laughter, Malik pressed back to back with an equally cornered Efron. Neither of these veterans, who had endured all the way from the age of the Great Heresy, had ever imagined they'd find themselves trapped in a dead end during an operation like this.

"What do we do now?!" Efron shouted.

"What else? Wreck something, then run!"

The two Astartes closing in weren't yet enough to seal off every escape route. The Night Lord flung down several smoke grenades to blind the enemy.

He poured the last of his galvanic charge into the cogitator responsible for monitoring the battlefield, ensuring the system would be unable to function for a short while. Then he hauled the Fallen Angel up by force, and the two of them burst out through the door.

But before long, furious cursing came from outside.

"By Tzeentch's arse, what the hell is this now?!"

A trap had triggered, injecting current laced with a data-virus into their power armour. Though it didn't cripple their power packs, the two who'd stepped into it found every auxiliary system on their power armour crashing offline.

Malik ripped off his helmet in irritation and studied the fog of his own making, only to discover it had become someone else's home ground.

A pack of feline xenos was creeping toward them under cover of the mist, and once they'd gotten close enough, they lobbed bolt barrels at them.

The bolt barrels, deliberately loaded with reduced charge, didn't blow the two assassins apart, but they still rattled them senseless.

By now Efron had stopped caring about blowing his cover: "Where's Koda?! Have Koda pull us out of here!"

He pinned his hopes on the sorcerer of the warband, counting on him to open a teleport passage that would let him and Malik withdraw straight away.

But Koda, who had always relayed the Raid Commander's orders flawlessly, was now as silent as the dead. Forget opening a teleport passage — not even his voice surfaced in either of their minds.

For a moment, all hope drained out of Efron.

Blasted while crouched on Caliban, and once the blast was done, mistaken for some Fallen Angel by his own former brothers and hunted. To wander the Eye of Terror for over a century only to die at the hands of a mob of freaks like these — how had his life become such a joke?

But Malik, beside him, hadn't yet given up the fight. He reached out and helped Efron to his feet: "It's not time to give up yet."

The words rekindled the flame of conviction in Efron. He realized that this Night Lord, who normally traded barbs with him, was a master of lurking in the shadows. "You've got a way out?"

"I've got my own," Malik answered.

Efron froze. Before he could work out what Malik meant, Malik had already shoved him out into the open.

Only then did Efron remember that, before they were experts at covert operations, these Night Lords were first and foremost a pack of scum with no honor and no bottom line to speak of.

"Malik!" he roared. "You bastard, you set me up!"

"It's the optimal solution right now."

In the instant every pursuer's gaze was drawn to Efron, Malik melted into the shadows, his voice growing as elusive as his form: "I get out first, and then there's a chance to save you. If I'm the one caught, then we're both truly finished."

"Don't fob me off with that, Malik! Screw your father!"

"Go right ahead. My father and I never got along anyway."

The Night Lord's utter indifference left Efron feeling as though his punch had landed in a wad of cotton. He kept cursing at the top of his lungs, but he never got another word back from Malik.

All he could do was glare as the Big Mek approached him with a swarm of Felynes. The cackling, jeering laughter the creatures let out made the knight shut his eyes in humiliation.

He didn't even need to imagine it to already know the fate that awaited him next.

Lin studied Efron with keen interest as the Evil Sun hauled him back, trussed up like a hog.

The Evil Sun presented the Space Marine — already stripped of his power armour — as if offering up a treasure, and Lin could see clearly that there was no trace of Chaos corruption on him.

"You did well." Lin was not stingy with his praise. "I'll teach you a couple more tricks later."

The Evil Sun, utterly heedless of his own wounds, capered about with delight. But Lin sent him away for the time being. By the time Vladilena and Issaga hurried over, the Evil Sun had already disguised himself back into an ordinary Tech-Priest.

"You knew this assassination was coming all along?" Lena caught on to something.

"A traitor's methods are never hard to guess."

At the word traitor, Efron forced a contemptuous snort out through his nostrils.

"A sage of the Adeptus Mechanicus secretly rearing xenos, and the Imperial Fists and an Inquisitor keeping your company as well? What right do any of you have to call me a traitor?"

"I'd rather call it a scientific proof-of-concept experiment," Lin replied. "And an Astartes who's joined a Chaos Warband — what right have you got to reproach me?"

Efron lifted his head proudly. Convinced he had never betrayed the Emperor, he held the moral high ground in his own mind. But he had no intention of exposing his true identity either, so he simply kept his chin raised and met them with silence.

The talk of rearing xenos had caught Lena's attention. Not yet knowing that all these weapons had been supplied by an ork, she had a real interest in getting to the bottom of it. Issaga, who knew the ins and outs of that matter, shot Lin a wary glance, but Lin shook his head to signal there was no need for alarm.

"We need to figure out this traitor's background first," he said.

Lena's attention was, sure enough, drawn to the more pressing matter: "I'll go prepare the interrogation tools."

"No need." Lin studied this Astartes, whose Chapter of origin he couldn't place. "I've got a bit of a knack for this sort of thing myself."

Ever since learning that the Inquisitor who had sacrificed himself in the underhive had been led onto the Isstvaanian path by someone else's guidance, Lin had formed a rough picture of this band of murky-motived traitor Astartes.

Guiding a Chaos ritual to be performed, yet also luring them into discovering the ritual's anomalies. Such flip-flopping seemed unpredictable, but Lin knew full well this group would keep stirring the pot.

He had treated a few things that ordinary people had never laid eyes on as his trump cards, and, as expected, the enemy had been reeled straight into those traps.

It was just that his intended target had been that Night Lord, and now he'd hauled back some man from an unknown legion instead.

It was hardly strange for a Night Lord to have non-Night Lord teammates at his side. Ever since the Chaos armies fled into the Eye of Terror and most of the legions effectively disbanded, the warbands raised by the various warlords had become melting pots where members of every faction gathered. Still, considering their purpose, this man clearly couldn't belong to those few most deeply fallen legions.

Meeting the Inquisitor's curious gaze, Lin ventured a probing question: "You came for the Imperial Fists?"

Efron gave no response. It seemed he was no Iron Warrior.

Lin thought it over, then leaned close to the man's ear and murmured, "I am Alpharius."

Efron's expression shifted to plain surprise. He scrutinized Lin with uncertain suspicion, and only after a long moment did it dawn on him that this was merely the man's smokescreen: "You know quite a lot."

Lin was well satisfied with the reaction: "So it seems you really do have some connection to that elusive bunch."

"That's as far as this goes." Efron no longer wished to talk. "You won't get any more out of me."

"That remains to be seen." Lin straightened up and gestured for Issaga, who carried a Priest's staff, to step forward.

Efron didn't understand, but the next instant, Lin's words made his whole face change.

"Issaga, make him confess!"

Cold sweat streamed down Efron's face in a rush. Issaga, gripping the Priest's staff, had no idea what special meaning the phrase carried, but Efron had already begun to thrash like a madman.

"I am a loyal guardian of the Imperium — what are you going to do?! Let me go, I don't want to share a bunk with Luther!"

Vladilena and Issaga exchanged bewildered looks, unable to fathom why a single sentence had set this traitor off so violently.

After struggling for a while longer, Efron too realized there were no Dark Angels present here. He stopped fighting, but this Mechanicum sage — who somehow knew a little secret of their legion — filled him with deep dread.

"Knowing too much can be very dangerous," he warned. "If you hand me over to those people, they'll absolutely dig into you right down to your roots as well!"

"You think that frightens me?"

"Tch." Efron simply shut his eyes and struck the pose of a man stretching out his neck for the block. "Kill me!"

"So long as you cooperate, I've no plans for that just yet."

Tom, wearing his engineer's cap, came up to Lin's side. He tugged at the leg of Lin's trousers to indicate that the previously crippled cogitator system had been fully repaired. Lin turned and switched the cogitator back on, and the situation on the battlefield unfolded once more before everyone's eyes in a cascade of data.

The situation was far from encouraging.

Lin was no professional Magos Dominus, but there was no questioning the auxiliary role a master of data played on the battlefield. Earlier, the underhive forces had, under his command, still managed to keep the daemons and the corrupted defense troops at bay to some degree. But once his command was cut off, the tide had swung wholly to the daemons' side within these brief ten-odd minutes.

Yet the underhivers had not given up. Led by Neos, they still doggedly held the defensive line, and no matter how heavy the casualties, they did not fall back an inch.

Lin gestured for Efron to look at the state of the battlefield and asked, "Is even this not enough to show you the courage of humanity?"

Efron sank into silence. Even to an Astartes, the sight was enough to stir him.

He hadn't approved from the start of the idea of culling the weak to make the Imperium stronger. But as a man who could no longer walk beneath the sun, he'd come to see it as one of the few chances left for him to keep contributing to the Imperium.

He and his comrades had become the Emperor's trials, borne out in one operation after another, yet very few ever won the approval of their warband's leader — so much so that most of those operations ended in one-sided slaughter.

In this, the largest operation their warband had ever undertaken, he had seen the extraordinary spark within these underhivers.

"When did you find out?" Efron asked.

"In the Inquisitor's journal. Heh — a fellow led down the wicked Isstvaanian path. I'd guess your warband's leader was the one who led him there."

Lin returned to Efron's side and, of his own accord, undid his bindings.

"They've already shown their resolve to pass whatever damned trial this is. If your leader truly does this for the sake of the trial, and not merely to indulge his own sick tastes, then he'll understand that the time has come to stop."

"Pain shapes no true warriors — only a herd of walking corpses gone numb to pain. Only when people are shown hope will they find the courage to keep moving forward."

"Go tell your warband leader to quit playing these tedious bloodletting-therapy games. If we can stand united with great enemies all around us, then there's no need whatsoever for some outside force to manufacture internal strife!"

Efron flexed his stiff wrists. He met Lin's eyes one last time and found a blazing fire flickering in the Mechanicum sage's gaze.

"Is that everything you want me to tell him?" he confirmed.

"Of course. You can also tell your warband leader that if he refuses to cooperate, I'll hunt him to the ends of the earth someday."

Lin made no threatening gesture at all. He simply stated it calmly, as though laying out some self-evident fact.

"I mean what I say."

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