Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

Not since the day he took up the mantle of Lord High Admiral had Lansung felt so utterly triumphant.

He stood at the observation window of the bridge, Terra's golden surface turning slowly beneath him. The cradle world of the Imperium of Man was forever wrapped in a faint golden halo — sunlight thrown back from tens of thousands of orbital defense platforms.

As a naval commander he held an almost instinctive reverence for a defensive array of such scale. Today, though, it did not make him nervous.

Today he was coming home a victor.

The array adjusted itself, deliberately parting to open a lane for Lansung's Solar Fleet. A comms officer stepped up behind him, bearing word from Terra below.

"Lord Admiral, Orbital Control has transmitted our clearance. We and the flagship will lead the orbital parade. It is expected to commence in two hours."

It was exactly what Lansung had been waiting to hear. "Signal Terra. Tell them I intend to show every citizen of the Imperium the most flawless Imperial Navy they have ever laid eyes on."

He had been back at Terra for over a month now. The news that he had destroyed the Battle Moon had left the entire council of High Lords stunned.

The High Lords had reassessed the strength of the greenskins and lowered their threat rating. Even so, with Mars itself confirming the deed, they could not scrub away Lansung's blazing achievement.

The Imperium genuinely needed a victory. It had been a long time since the last one.

Imperial Commander Udin Macht Udo had acknowledged Lansung's triumph while holding his nose, and after a month of preparation the victory parade was finally underway. Lansung, who had never once left his fleet, received his instructions: at the climax of the ritual he would lead the Imperial fleet down into Terra's atmosphere, so that every soul below might see the invincible hammer of the Imperium for themselves.

"Do you remember the look on Udin Macht Udo's face when he spoke to us over the vox?" Lansung said, needling his adjutant. "Every time I picture that face of his, twisted with envy, I feel wonderful."

The current Imperial Commander, Udo, had risen to his office from the seat of Lord High Admiral. Already a High Lord with considerable pull in military circles, he had gathered nearly the whole of the Imperium's armed might into his hands once he became the Guilliman Regent — a High Lord's seat created after Guilliman was laid in state, occupied by a mortal who stands as Guilliman's symbol and who presides over the council of High Lords. Lansung had long resented being kept under the man's heel, but shared interests had forced him to stand on the same line.

And then the operation the other High Lords had pressured them into launching had gone and destroyed a Battle Moon outright. Now Lansung was crowned a hero, while Udo, who had insisted all along on hunkering down and defending Terra, naturally found himself questioned.

If this victory parade ended in the proper blaze of glory, Lansung believed he might even have a chance to succeed Udo as the next Imperial Commander.

It was everything he had ever dreamed of.

The victory parade began without a hitch. Lansung stood on the bridge of his flagship as the first formation ahead of him began its descent. When those colossal iron leviathans slid slowly through Terra's atmosphere, Lansung issued a fresh order.

"All ships, hold formation. Reduce speed to one tenth."

He felt a faint tremor come up through the deck beneath his boots — the anti-gravity engines adjusting their output. Beyond the observation window, Terra's atmosphere began to ripple like the surface of a lake struck by a thrown stone.

He stepped to the viewport, brimming with ambition. Looking down on Terra from the deck of a warship made him feel like the Emperor.

Perhaps not merely like.

Lansung's gaze went to the Imperial Palace, that towering sprawl of architecture still plainly visible from tens of thousands of meters up. Yet from where Lansung rode the upper atmosphere, he stood higher even than the Palace's golden spires.

Following the Palace down, he found the victory ritual Terra had labored so carefully to prepare.

Millions had gathered before the Palace plaza. Beyond the carefully vetted "audience" inside the square itself, the surrounding streets were packed shoulder to shoulder with onlookers, citizens of the Imperium who had assembled of their own accord, waving Imperial banners, waiting for the fleet to appear.

When the Imperial warships came into view — hulls repainted gold for the occasion, vast Imperial Aquila markings emblazoned on their flanks — the parade surged to its absolute peak.

The people cheered. They roared. They screamed. Every ounce of dread the orks had planted in them came pouring out.

Terra had long since fallen into a food crisis, yet those lower hive dwellers who had gone hungry because the greenskins besieged the Sol System still found their chests swelling with pride at the sight of the Solar Fleet.

Look. Look at our invincible Imperial fleet.

Priests of the Imperial Creed seized the moment and worked their way deep into the crowds, the cherubim they carried projecting a speech by the current Ecclesiarchy Pontiff, Erekart Mesring, extolling the Imperial Navy and attributing the victory to the protection of the Emperor.

The Master of the Administratum trailed behind the Pontiff. When the news of the orks had thrown Terra into panic, many of the Administratum's edicts had only been enforced with the Ecclesiarchy's help.

Juskina Tull, speaking for the chartist fleets, was in negotiations with representatives of the Imperial Navy over how to rebuild the transport lanes under naval protection.

The delegates of the Inquisition, the Navigators, the Adeptus Astronomica and the astropaths held themselves aloof from it all, as they always did.

The Fabricator General had not set foot off Mars.

Imperial Commander Udin Macht Udo sat frowning on the central dais. In theory he was the master of this ritual; in practice he had already lost any ability to control the situation.

The only ones still willing to stand beside him were Lord Marshal Vernor Zeck of the Adeptus Arbites and his newly chosen Lord Commander Militant of the Astra Militarum, Abel Verreault.

Drakan Vangorich, Grand Master of the Officio Assassinorum and no High Lord at all, happened to be beside him as well — though he was not there out of loyalty. He was measuring Udo's neck with those cold, dead eyes of his.

Udo rather regretted having used a borrowed blade to cut down the Imperial Fists.

The decision he had carried out was one most of the High Lords had tacitly endorsed. Yet the moment the situation turned against him, that same crowd of High Lords abandoned him faster than the Astartes ever had.

Anyone who thought he would surrender because of it was gravely mistaken. Did they have the faintest idea how much he had poured into climbing to this position?

Udo would die before he handed over a station he had bled for.

But he did need something to turn the tide.

Word was the Astartes had pulled themselves back together. They had issued a muster order for a Legion, then halted at Port Sanctus, apparently in no hurry to return to Terra.

If he could find some way to lure those Astartes back to Terra, he could brand this reborn Legion a hypothetical enemy.

Put all of Terra on a war footing, and as Imperial Commander he would naturally have absolute authority in his grip again.

Udo was still turning over his next move when a Tech-Priest in his service handed him an urgent report.

"Commander, the Warp readings above Terra are anomalous. Our detection arrays register energy fluctuations without precedent. This is no natural phenomenon."

Udo blinked. Terra had not been attacked since the Great Heresy, and the notion was utterly foreign to him. His mind never went there, and he asked slowly, "Meaning what, exactly?"

"Some power is tearing open the boundary between reality and the Warp. And its point of origin —"

There was no longer any need for the Tech-Priest to finish.

The Imperial fleet in the atmosphere noticed the anomaly first. Auspex instruments picking up the impossible readings began to shudder, and the cogitator banks sang out a chorus of warning drones. Lansung, who had gone down to the mess hall to preside over the victory banquet, hurried back to the bridge with no idea what was happening.

"What is going on?"

"Anomalous Warp readings, sir — this is a mass translation signature!" his adjutant answered. Lansung could read the man's panic in the beads of sweat standing out on his forehead.

"Where? On Terra?"

Lansung felt the jolt of it too. The only thing he could imagine was a daemonic incursion. And then, just as fast, he decided this was an opportunity. "Ready the naval boarding parties. Let us be the ones who save Terra from ruin —"

"It isn't what you think, sir!"

"How is it not?"

"The translation signature — it's directly above us!"

Lansung froze, as lost as Udo had been. He tilted his head back on reflex and saw, with a shock that hollowed him out, the space above the fleet beginning to shiver like a shattered mirror.

No fleet was ever permitted to make a Warp translation this close to a planet, because a rift torn open by a whole fleet at once could annihilate the world beneath it. If someone was ripping a warp rift open above Terra, that someone could only be an enemy of mankind.

But what kind of enemy of mankind could produce a disturbance on this scale?

"Preliminary calculations are in. This warp rift measures — three thousand kilometers across! The only matching entry in the database is the Battle Moon we destroyed!"

The color drained from Lansung's face. Still, an admiral's instincts drove him to a decision. "All ahead! Get the fleet clear of Terra, now!"

"There's no time!"

The sky, gilded moments ago by the victory parade, turned an ominous blood red. Terra's authorities were given no room whatsoever to react before the vast ork Battle Moon came crashing down out of the rift in the Warp.

Its arrival landed like a hammer blow, shattering every scrap of resistance a Terra already in disarray could muster.

And yet the Battle Moon hanging over Terra did nothing at all. It simply sat there. Its gravity field alone was an invisible giant's hand, and it closed around the Imperial fleet cruising through the atmosphere.

The warships' anti-gravity engines screamed at a pitch that stabbed the ears as the gravity storm raged around them, and they could not resist that unanswerable pull.

The smaller vessels were already tumbling through the air like kites with cut strings. Their armor groaned under a load it was never built for, then burst apart into countless fragments.

Lansung felt as though he had been dropped into an ice pit. Never in his worst dreams had he imagined that the glory he had won by destroying a Battle Moon would be destroyed by another Battle Moon.

He stared blankly at the thing, feeling like a man trapped in a nightmare he could not wake from. His adjutant retained a shred more sense, and issued the order to the fleet in his stead.

"All hands, hold steady! Fire emergency thrusters!"

But this was not the crippled half-wreck of a Battle Moon that a Star Fort had savaged. The instant an utterly unprepared Imperial fleet met an intact war-world, their fate was sealed.

The enormous turrets across the Battle Moon's surface began to roar, and green energy beams swept through the Imperial formation like the scythes of Death himself.

Those larger warships that the gravity field had not already crushed were barely better than stationary targets in that terrible gravity well. Several battleships and battlecruisers were torn apart by the orks, the screams of their crews cutting off mid-transmission on the vox channels.

The wreckage of the Imperial fleet came down like rain, burning debris carving open the sky, dragging annihilating flame toward the ground. At first the civilians on Terra did not even run. They only stared up in terror, at the sky, at the falling ships.

Those ships had been the symbol of the Imperium's strength, the pride of mankind made solid. Now they were nothing but tangled scrap, a rain of destruction about to fall on Terra.

The pride and joy of the parade curdled into despair. However thunderous the victory celebration had been, the backlash was every bit as violent.

The moment the first civilian came to his senses, the festival became an uncontainable stampede. People scattered in every direction, shoving, trampling, desperate only to escape the death falling from the sky.

Nor was it only the commoners. The High Lords, too, were reeling.

"How can an ork Battle Moon be here?" said Ekharth, Master of the Administratum, unable to hide his shock. "Wasn't it destroyed by Admiral Lansung?"

He turned his eyes toward the Ecclesiarchy Pontiff, Erekart Mesring, hoping the man could hold Terra's order together. The Pontiff merely waved a hand.

He turned to the Bishops beneath him and gave his instructions. "Protect our cathedrals. I do not wish to see the God-Emperor's property suffer any loss in this upheaval."

Ekharth's expression soured. He knew the chaos on Terra had already passed beyond containing.

But not everyone caught in that sudden shock felt dread. Imperial Commander Udo, at least, felt a wild elation he could barely suppress once the first jolt had passed.

The chance he had been waiting for had dropped right in front of him.

He overturned his earlier stance of treating the Ultimate Wall as an enemy on the spot. "Where is the Shanzheng? We require that Star Fort's assistance."

His deputy reminded him with great care, "My lord, command of the Shanzheng is not in our hands. And the Imperial Fists, after what —"

"Then bring them back! Send a message to Kurande, the current Chapter Master of the Imperial Fists. Tell him Terra's situation is critical and we require the assistance of the Ultimate Wall!"

The adjutant acknowledged the order. He had barely set off for the Astropathic Court when Udo called him back again.

"Change the wording. Not the Ultimate Wall. The Imperial Fists."

A reborn Legion was a dangerous signal, and Udo had no intention of accepting one. He had to make his position clear in the very first communication.

But by the same token, he would show his sincerity too.

A seat among the High Lords restored to the Chapter Master of the Imperial Fists, perhaps?

He judged it a bargain that would leave everyone satisfied.

Udo swept a hand through the air, and all the swaggering confidence he had once commanded in the council of High Lords came flooding back.

"Lord Marshal of the Adeptus Arbites, you will proclaim it across Terra: as of this day Terra enters a wartime footing! As Imperial Commander I will coordinate every matter great and small on Terra under emergency authority, and I will carry our great Imperium through this trial!"

He gazed up at the second moon in the sky, and what was reflected in his pupils was his own ambition.

"There is only one man who can save the Imperium. Me."

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