Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

When Kurande received the urgent astropathic message from Terra, sent by Imperial Commander Udin Macht Udo, Lin was busy tinkering with his Ork throne.

The device was far more complicated than Lin had anticipated. It had taken him the better part of a month just to work out roughly how it functioned.

As a machine capable of sustaining a crippled Battle Moon, its operating principle was to draw the power of 'I reckon' out of an ork's body and pipe it wherever it was needed.

But you couldn't simply sit any random creature down on it. The occupant had to be at least of Ork warlord rank for the thing to do anything at all.

Orks were born psykers. The power of 'I reckon' that knitted them into a local network was certainly less comprehensive than traditional Psychic power wired directly into the great cesspit of the Warp. In sheer magnitude, though, an Ork warlord stood on par with an Alpha-level psyker or better.

On top of that, the throne doubled as a restraint. If that particular Ork warlord and his Battle Moon hadn't both been crippled at the same time, he would never have strapped himself into something like this.

So what use was the thing to Lin?

Honestly, Lin would have liked to know the answer himself.

He could hardly rush off to Terra right now, kick the Golden One off his throne, and tell him that his gear was junk and he ought to give Lin's a try instead.

If he did, he'd need to start working out how to swim in a second Eye of Terror.

The technology he unlocked from the Ork throne, Lin decided to name the "Psycho-Frame."

This piece of mystic nonsense out of Gundam had been partially reproduced in the Warhammer universe by way of ork 'I reckon' power.

Born from ork reckoning, the Psycho-Frame could serve as a medium that gave physical expression to the user's mental force. When the user manipulated something through the Psycho-Frame, the device let him achieve an effect similar to ork 'I reckon.'

Lin found it hard to define what "mental force" even was in Warhammer terms. After repeated testing, he came to suspect the standard of measurement depended on the size of the user's Warp shadow.

The size of a Warp shadow had no absolute correlation with psychic strength, but it was undeniable that powerful psykers cast far more pronounced shadows.

Unfortunately, Lin himself cast no Warp shadow at all. Once the technology was built, he invited Issaga, the Librarian, to come and test it.

Being only a Beta-level psyker, Issaga could manage nothing more than a three-metre-odd bipedal Sentinel walker through the rig.

Forget a Gundam. It was debatable whether the thing could even measure up to a Ball.

Frankly, a Beta-level psyker using the apparatus achieved less than Issaga would have by simply picking up his sword and hacking away in person.

That miserable control efficiency made Lin realize that his lovely vision — a single pilot steering a Gundam and reducing an entire battlefield to wreckage — probably, maybe, most likely wasn't happening.

After all that fuss, Lin finally concluded that the device's real application was as his own production blueprint for a Psi-Titan.

Psi-Titans, also known as psychic Titans, existed outside the structures of the Mechanicus, a secret Titan Legion administered solely by the Ordo Sinister, an order established by the Emperor himself. They used psykers as pilots, unleashing the fury of machine and mind together at warlord-Titan scale.

During the Great Crusade, three Psi-Titans had taken part in an assault on an Eldar craftworld. They effortlessly slaughtered every Wraithknight and Titan on that small craftworld, sweeping to victory like a gale through dry leaves.

That, however, was the only recorded engagement the Psi-Titans ever fought. They and the Ordo Sinister both vanished afterward, and no one knew any longer whether those Psi-Titans still existed.

Lin had no idea what principle the Psi-Titans ran on, but he suspected that if he crammed a Psycho-Frame into a Titan, the results would be roughly comparable.

Sadly, he had no string of psykers on hand to bind together and plug into a Psycho-Frame as batteries for a Psi-Titan, and unlike the Emperor, he had no way to guarantee that so many psykers wired in series wouldn't go out of control the moment some peddler rang them up on the phone.

For now, the idea remained pure talk.

All that effort, and what he had to show for it was something he couldn't use any time soon. Lin found that rather disappointing.

Fortunately, the strength he had been accumulating since the start of the Beast War was already formidable enough. As things stood, he didn't need this new technology as a trump card to earn a seat at the table in the battle for Terra.

The forces of the Astra Militarum weren't entirely his to command, of course. But until the crisis on Terra was resolved, Hays and the men under him would remain the ace in Lin's hand.

It was only that Terra's call for aid came far sooner than Lin had expected. The reinforcements he had pulled from Cath Maximus hadn't even arrived yet, and Terra already had a second Battle Moon sitting on its face.

The news travelled from Terra's Astropathic Court to Port Sanctus, then from the Chapter's astropaths onward. When Kurande dragged Lin out of his laboratory with the message in hand, Lin was baffled.

"They're begging for help this readily? They don't even plan to put up a fight themselves? Where's Lansung's Imperial fleet?"

Kurande answered him. "When the Battle Moon arrived, Terra was holding a victory parade to celebrate Lansung's destruction of the first Battle Moon. The Solar Fleet had entered the atmosphere at low speed as part of the display."

"And then the Battle Moon turned up right on top of them? What a coincidence."

"Just so. The Solar Fleet was destroyed by the Battle Moon's gravity and its bombardment. Of a main line of eight battleships and battlecruisers, only two remain. The smaller and medium auxiliary vessels were wiped out almost to a hull."

Lin understood now. "So that's why they're in such a hurry to beg the Ultimate Wall for help."

Issaga, who had been listening in silence, spoke up, plain displeasure in his voice. "Not the Ultimate Wall. The Imperial Fists."

A single word apart, Legion and Chapter, yet worlds apart in what they signified. Even Lin felt a thread of grudging admiration for the High Lords' unwavering insistence on the distinction.

But when he set that stubbornness beside the fact that Lansung's equally stubborn refusal to give battle had ended with him losing nearly his whole fleet anyway, the situation on Terra looked to Lin less like a war and more like an absurd stage farce.

Kurande's mind was on the Imperial Fists' duty to guard Terra. The successor Chapters supporting the Ultimate Wall were aggrieved on a point of honour at having been ignored by Terra. Every Chapter Master present turned to look at Lin, wanting his opinion.

"If you're asking for my advice, my answer is to leave them hanging a while longer. Terra isn't just any world. What it has in reserve is enough to let it weather the orks' gravity weapons, and the High Lords won't fall into crisis that fast. When Terra finally understands that the strength of a Legion is a necessity — that is when we can return to Terra on our own terms."

Kurande found sense in Lin's words. That sense, together with the resentment of the successor Chapters, became the source of his agonizing over what to do next. But at that moment the Chapter Master of the Soul Drinkers, Daenyathos, stepped forward.

This was the Chapter Master who had already argued for returning to the Shanzheng, and he held to his position now, using his considerable eloquence to lay out his reasoning before the assembly.

"Brothers, my Chapter and I do not stand here for the sake of honour. Honour matters, certainly, but it is not the sole measure of our actions. We must relieve Terra because it is our duty — our duty to humanity. We fight because we must fight. Not for honour, but because it is what we ought to do."

As master of the most numerous Chapter present, his words carried weight, and they were phrased to move the heart. In moments the mood in the chamber had swung decisively toward relieving Terra.

When every gaze converged on Lin once more, he knew he could no longer refuse the decision.

"I stand by what I said. Even so, I will make preparations for the march on Terra."

When the power wasn't your own, some compromise was inevitable. The Chapter Masters let out a collective breath at his answer and thanked him for it, but Lin only narrowed his eyes and studied Daenyathos.

This Chapter Master, who seemed to give himself body and soul to the Imperium, looked more suspicious to him by the moment.

To the Astartes, honour was worth more than life. A man who chose something above honour was either a saint or had an agenda.

Was Daenyathos, author of The Catechisms Martial, a saint?

Lin was more inclined to believe he had an agenda — and that whatever he was after lay aboard the Shanzheng.

All this running around, and in the end he'd bumped into a colleague with an even bigger appetite than his own?

Lin took no pride in his origins on Forge World Huangquan VIII, but those origins had given him a flexible sense of moral boundaries. He had no intention of falling out openly with Daenyathos while the man held the moral high ground. His preparations would be made in the dark.

Once they reached the Shanzheng, everything would come out.

In the end, Cath Maximus's relief force failed to arrive before the Ultimate Wall departed for Terra.

That was only to be expected. Cath Maximus had no spaceport now. Even though Lin had used the Inquisitor's authority to send a large batch of transports back, a world that could only move troops by ship simply couldn't finish mustering that quickly.

All Lin could do was dispatch another astropathic message home. He instructed Cath Maximus not to assemble at Port Sanctus after all, but to proceed straight to Terra once ready.

Besides the units already designated, Lin ordered them to bring along the remainder of the expeditionary fleet under Matt Horner, and Hays was to come with the force as well.

By his estimate they wouldn't reach Terra until at least a month and a half after his own arrival, which meant he would have to face whatever surfaced aboard the Shanzheng with the strength currently at hand.

Lin wasn't especially worried about the Soul Drinkers. The confines of the Shanzheng were not a planet where a Chapter could freely call down orbital strikes or run a decapitation raid. With his people forewarned and morale high, eight hundred Soul Drinkers could not shatter the entire Ultimate Wall with the special operations the Astartes favoured.

The three hundred thousand strong Undying Army, drawn from underhive populations, was where Lin's confidence lay.

The Warp route to Terra proved unexpectedly calm. That calm persisted even as they translated back into realspace. The Mandeville point that should have been patrolled by the Solar Fleet was utterly empty.

This was Terra's second great calamity in fifteen hundred years, yet the defences now bore no comparison to those of the Siege of Terra.

This was the heart of the Imperium of Man, and not even a single fleet came out to verify their identity the way one had at Port Sanctus.

"So this is what the Imperium has come to…" sighed Thorne, who had fought in the battle for Terra himself. He hadn't returned to Terra since the Legion was broken into Chapters, and he'd never imagined his homecoming would be under circumstances like these.

The Imperium of Man possessed over a thousand battleships and cruisers beyond counting, yet that vast arsenal meant nothing in practice under the Imperium's bloated bureaucracy. The Beast's threat had been stalled for a long time by the combined efforts of many commanders, and in all the time they bought, the Imperium had managed to assemble a pitiful eight battleships.

Six of those eight had now been destroyed.

The fixed defensive arrays running inward from Pluto were, admittedly, still intact. They had once been Terra's proudest shield, but they counted for nothing when the orks simply parked a Battle Moon over Terra's head.

The sublight run toward Terra offered little of interest. Lin spared only a glance as they passed Mars. The cogboys appeared entirely indifferent to Terra's plight, though they had clearly been affected by the siege too: across the whole planet, at least half the forge fires had gone cold for want of raw materials.

That was not a thing the cogboys could tolerate.

If they weren't stepping forward to deal with the orks, Lin was certain they were scheming something in private, and one of these days they'd treat everyone to a spectacular boom-boom-boom of a headline.

Making contact with the Mars crowd after returning to Terra was only a matter of time, but for now the focus remained the Shanzheng. When the fleet reached Terra's orbit, they finally saw Terra's second "moon," hanging in the shadow on the planet's far side.

Terra, cradle of the Imperium of Man, the holy homeworld, lay beneath an enormous shadow. A Battle Moon with no fleet in attendance hung high in orbit, somewhat larger than the one at Port Sanctus, nearly the equal of the Shanzheng.

The strange thing was that it had activated no weapons. It simply sat there above Terra, gazing down in silence at a world humanity had already riddled with wounds by its own hand.

The Astartes could make nothing of it. Evil Sun, being an ork himself, saw the point at once.

"I reckon dat big warboss is shamin' da humies."

Just as the orks looked down from on high and sneered at humanity, that failure of a species.

The answer left a knot in every heart that would not dissolve — save for Daenyathos, Chapter Master of the Soul Drinkers, who took a different view.

"They have earned the right to sneer at us, brother. These orks have already triumphed in the struggle for survival. They have evolved a society free of pressure and anxiety. What right do we, humans on the verge of defeat, have to judge them?"

Talk that skirted so close to praising xenos rankled the Black Templars, who loathed aliens above all else. Lancelot turned the question back on him. "What makes you so certain we will lose?"

"That is precisely the problem. We are still deliberating over the causes of our defeat, while the orks can't be bothered to pose the question at all. We look upon a mighty civilization and despise it for being crude."

The air grew taut for a moment. Kurande, who was beginning to carry himself like a leader, stepped in and set the argument aside. "The orks are indeed a formidable adversary. But so long as the sons of Dorn stand as one, there is no enemy we cannot overcome."

"That is exactly why I follow the Ultimate Wall, Brother Kurande." Daenyathos inclined his head slightly. "I believe humanity will come through this trial with my help, and that the Imperium will be reborn from its very foundations through this ordeal."

The words sounded a little odd, but at least they went down easier than extolling orks.

With Daenyathos — whose sympathies plainly leaned toward the xenos — conceding the point, the friction was shelved for the time being, and Kurande set about contacting the Shanzheng.

The last of the Imperial Fists garrison answered his hail. Following their guidance, the fleet located the ancient warship between the orbits of Terra and Venus, where it had relocated to avoid battle.

The Astartes strike fleet put in one vessel at a time, ushered along by the few Chapter serfs who remained. At the docks Kurande met the highest-ranking Imperial Fist still aboard the Shanzheng — an Apothecary.

It was the burden of implanting the new recruits that had kept him from joining the earlier expeditionary fleet. Once he realized how badly things were going, he had accelerated the process, but only twenty recruits had so far completed their transformation in full.

The last strength of the Imperial Fists gathered aboard the Shanzheng, and an ancient Dreadnought was roused as well. In this hour of peril they assembled in the Shanzheng's reclusiam to await inspection by their current Chapter Master, Kurande.

It was a moment of no small significance, and Lin alone received Kurande's invitation. He accompanied Kurande into the reclusiam to review what might well be the last of the Imperial Fists.

The recruits showed no fear and stood firm in their resolve. They were clearly worthy of the title of the last Imperial Fists. What caught Lin's attention, though, was that ancient Contemptor Dreadnought.

In theory all Dreadnoughts were of comparable size, yet the one before him stood a good measure taller than the one the Hunter had piloted back on the Azure Star.

Analysing it, Lin concluded that the veteran interred within was considerably larger of frame than an ordinary Space Marine, and the Dreadnought had been scaled up to match.

Increased bulk was among the most common mutations in Space Marines; the Space Wolves even counted warriors more massively built than some Primarchs. But a mortally wounded veteran entombed in a Dreadnought should in theory have had every non-essential organ stripped away, which made retaining that much volume distinctly strange.

Lin quietly filed the Dreadnought away for closer attention.

The review ended abruptly when Terra learned of the Imperial Fists' return. Imperial Commander Udin Macht Udo invited Kurande to Terra for an informal meeting. Before departing, Kurande asked, "What did you make of them?"

"Those recruits are fearless warriors, no question. Still, I think you need a speech to lift everyone's spirits."

"A speech?"

"I'll write you something to work from next time. But before you leave for Terra, you need to tell me one other thing — where are the production lines aboard the Shanzheng?"

[Author's Note: PS1: Some of the misspelled characters are there to dodge the site's inexplicable filtered words.]

[Author's Note: PS2: The Psi-Titans' second appearance was actually at Prospero, beating up the magic ponies, and afterward they took part in the War in the Webway too. After that they're never mentioned again.]

[Author's Note: PS3: The Shanzheng avoiding battle is official Beast War plot.]

[Author's Note: This ancient warship had fallen into serious disrepair because the Imperial Fists, reorganized into a Chapter, lacked the manpower to maintain it. Unable to fight the orks, they chose to stay out of the war.]

[Author's Note: But I think the real reason is that the writers had no idea how to let a Battle Moon get right in Terra's face while the Shanzheng existed, so they found an excuse to ban the Shanzheng from the story.]

[Author's Note: In the original plot the Imperial Fists returned to Terra nearly half a year later than they do here. By that point the Ultimate Wall had assembled seven Chapters, and the attack on the Battle Moon was spearheaded by seven battle barges (the Solar Fleet by then had only a single battleship under Lansung's command, and it opted out of the fight). With that level of force they traded blows with the Battle Moon fairly evenly.]

[Author's Note: From that angle, the Battle Moon doesn't actually seem all that strong apart from being able to get in your face. But the weaker it is, the more pathetic the Shanzheng's refusal to fight looks.]

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