Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

"I'll have a Chapter serf guide you. And I'll grant you clearance to consult the archives concerning the Shanzheng's maintenance."

Kurande departed for Terra with brisk efficiency, and before he left he handed Lin authorizations most Magos would never touch in a lifetime. Those clearances were enough to let Lin move through the Shanzheng unhindered.

Within the parts of it that could still be moved through, at any rate.

As a vast ancient Star Fort capable of Warp travel, the Shanzheng had campaigned across more than a hundred worlds during the Great Crusade. But after the Great Heresy, not only the art of building such vessels but even the art of maintaining them had been lost. The breaking of the Imperial Fists from Legion into Chapters had left them without the manpower to service and operate this mighty Star Fort. Every year, more of its systems failed for good.

Lin read through the Imperial Fists' maintenance records for the Shanzheng. Those plain, unadorned entries recorded a cold truth: most of the docks had been abandoned, half the ship's star-killer cannons no longer functioned, and the engine systems had aged badly. On cruising speed alone, it might well be slower than the Battle Moon.

Small wonder the Shanzheng had chosen to avoid engagement with the Battle Moon. In a straight, brutal exchange, with no Imperial fleet to spare for support, this magnificent ancient Star Fort would most likely have destroyed the Battle Moon only by dying with it.

No one could shoulder that responsibility. Not even Kurande.

If the Shanzheng were in better condition, it might have accomplished rather more than mutual annihilation.

Under Lin's direction, a small maintenance conference was convened. The Ultimate Wall coalition, which had gathered several Chapters and therefore possessed more tech-sergeants than ever before, received their assigned maintenance tasks aboard the Shanzheng according to Lin's allocations.

Merely being permitted to take part in the work was an honour in itself, and most Chapters raised no objection to his assignments. Only the Forge Master of the Soul Drinkers put forward a different idea.

"Rather than the star-killer cannons, we would prefer to take part in the Shanzheng's internal maintenance."

"Your reason?"

"The Soul Drinkers retain certain records concerning the Shanzheng's interior. With that material, I believe I could contribute far more to the internal work."

Lin did not refuse the request. He allowed the Soul Drinkers to act on their own initiative, provided they submitted their maintenance logs to him at regular intervals.

As an additional precaution, he deployed the roughly one hundred thousand troops of the Undying Army who had come aboard with the fleet into the zones adjacent to the Soul Drinkers' area of operation.

Officially they were resting and drilling in the halls near the Soul Drinkers. In truth, Lin had already passed word quietly to Neos and Colonel William, telling them to be ready for battle at any moment.

With the burden of surveillance shifted onto the underhive men, he turned the greater part of his attention to the Shanzheng's forge districts.

As a former Legion posting, the enormous vessel retained no small number of production lines for technical equipment. The nearly annihilated Imperial Fists had no strength left to organise the running of such machinery, so Kurande had simply promised the lines to Lin and left him free to reconfigure them as he saw fit.

The warehouses held Stormbirds and Shadowswords, the super-heavy tanks reputed to be Titan-killers. That much went without saying; every parent Chapter kept some stock left over from the Great Crusade era.

What genuinely surprised Lin were the production lines.

"Dedicated lines for Land Speeders and Predator tanks?"

Surveying the stores within the Shanzheng, Lin could only marvel at how lavishly the founding Legion had once lived.

The Land Speeder was among the rarest anti-gravity vehicles left in the Imperium. During the Great Crusade these punitive craft had been issued to mortal soldiers who broke discipline, sending them out to conduct reconnaissance by fire; now they belonged exclusively to Astartes Chapters.

The Predator, meanwhile, was technology inherited from the Dark Age of Technology. In those days it had likewise been mainline equipment in human armies — not as a tank, though, but as an armoured transport.

Given how far technology had regressed since, an armoured transport of that era served perfectly well as a tank today.

These were two priceless production lines, lines whose details even Lin, a Magos, had never been given access to on the Forge Worlds.

For an ordinary Chapter, manufacturing them was out of the question. They might labour for a Forge World a decade or more just to earn a handful of such vehicles in payment.

Lin promptly tore both lines apart. He picked and chose among the pieces, and in the end he pulled out exactly the technologies he wanted.

From the Land Speeder, anti-gravity. From the Predator, the ceramite and adamantium composite plating that offered more than five times the protection of conventional steel.

He had entertained several designs for upgrading the siege tanks, and with these two technologies in hand he judged that one of them was now within reach.

In the Imperium, a tank was less a tank than a heavy weapons platform. Apart from the super-heavies, which carried a single high-yield gun expressly to crack heavy armour, every other pattern was crammed with as many turrets as possible to maximise its efficiency at clearing light targets.

There was logic behind designing tanks that way. It simply did not match Lin's vision for siege tanks.

He intended to use the anti-gravity system and the composite plating to cut the hull's weight, then mount penetrating shockwave cannons on it. The engine would be upgraded from a conventional powerplant to a fusion reactor, raising overall output.

The old siege tank, built on a Leman Russ hull, had suffered from low speed, poor survivability and heavy fuel consumption. All of that would be swept away. The new siege tank would no longer be limited to providing supporting fire; it would deliver assault firepower.

There were drawbacks, of course — the cost was high, and fusion reactors emitted radiation. But Lin had no intention of replacing the original Leman Russ pattern siege tanks wholesale.

Those would remain the mainstay of mortal formations. The upgraded anti-gravity variant Lin meant to issue solely to Space Marines.

After all, a fusion reactor was also what powered a power pack. Space Marines who already carried dedicated fuel for their packs could supply the upgraded tank with more than enough energy, and their power armour's radiation shielding would let them crew it safely.

It would become a new generation of high-speed assault vehicle capable of advancing alongside the Astartes, and a mobile heavy weapons emplacement that would teach any enemy sheltering behind fortifications a lesson he would not forget.

That was what a siege tank was actually for.

Lin was well pleased with his design. He was confident the upgraded siege tank would deliver a shock the greenskins — or whatever other enemy — would never see coming.

Once he combined the dismantled Predator and Land Speeder lines, he could put the new hull into mass production.

But that was not the whole reason he had come to the forge districts.

He spent a week finalising the new siege tank's design, and in the same week he mapped out the full layout of the forge districts.

Production required coordination across every department, so the manufactorum stratum generally integrated control equipment of every kind. Under the pretext of retooling, Lin quietly threaded his own code into the stratum's central control chamber.

The clearance Kurande had granted him served as his initial disguise. His data ran back along the manufactorum stratum's central control and merged into the Shanzheng's data streams, hunting through that vast ocean of information for one particular location.

For a man who knew exactly what he was looking for, it was hardly complex work. One unexpected complication, however, cost Lin more time than he had budgeted.

"Another intruder?"

Realising he was not the only one tampering, Lin spent a while tracking down who it was.

The intruder — trapped inside a firewall through sheer lack of skill — noticed the presence of another party, and, apparently recognising who Lin was, drew a cat's paw in the data stream with binary code and presented it to him.

Lin: "…"

He had considered the possibility. That the cat thief would actually infiltrate the Shanzheng still caught him off guard.

It took some effort to extract Occam. The delay, though, let the Shanzheng's machine-spirit register the anomaly, and with a measure of self-awareness of its own it began tracing Lin in return.

But Lin's capacity to annihilate a machine-spirit outright made the Shanzheng fear him like a beast fears fire. Its firewalls circled him warily, never daring to close.

That was the source of Lin's confidence.

He could not, of course, obliterate the machine-spirit of something this enormous. But so long as the machine-spirit dared do nothing to him, he could run riot on the data level as he pleased.

Ignoring the Shanzheng's machine-spirit, which would not pursue him, he finally located his target: the cryo-vaults aboard the Shanzheng.

"So the Gene-Seeds are stored here…"

That location lay outside the areas Kurande had permitted him to enter. Trust or no trust, matters bearing on a Chapter's very survival were too sensitive.

Lin did not need Kurande's blessing. He pulled up the route to the cryo-vaults and hijacked the data to forge himself an access permit.

Given Thorne's earlier belligerence, Lin decided that before he redesigned the hull production lines for the siege tanks, a visit down there was necessary.

After leaving behind falsified records showing him still at work in the forge districts, Lin confirmed his destination and set off through the Shanzheng.

The half-derelict fortress made his infiltration remarkably convenient. Abandoned compartments the Imperial Fists themselves had never known about were pulled from the data streams and plotted into a route. After crossing one long, narrow, disused maintenance corridor, he arrived at an enormous lift platform.

Lin reactivated the rust-caked control panel, and at his urging it shuddered into life. The low rumble sounded like a warning from the Shanzheng itself.

Lin did not care. He simply poured in more binary code, harder, forcing the fortress's machinery to work for him.

Compared with a constitution that delighted loyal machine-spirits, Lin much preferred what he had now — that coercive sensation, as though he had a machine-spirit by the collar and was asking it, "Now, machine-spirit, you wouldn't want…" He found it thoroughly satisfying.

Compared with dancing and chanting to placate those temperamental lords, his method worked better than any other Tech-Priest's most of the time.

The lift platform came to a grudging halt in the Shanzheng's deep levels. The plunging temperature marked this as the site of the refrigeration plant that fed the cold vaults. From here he had only to follow the coolant lines and come up through an access shaft into the chamber where the Gene-Seeds were stored.

He lifted the shaft cover, then jammed the surveillance inside the vault. Nothing stirred throughout; everything unfolded exactly as smoothly as Lin had predicted.

Lin swept his gaze around the cryo-vault. Like everywhere else aboard the Shanzheng, the shrinking of a Legion into a Chapter had left every corner of it looking empty.

Even so, he identified one cryo-tube at a glance: the Gene-Seed of Brother Eljer, which Kurande had commissioned him to extract with his own hands back on Cath Maximus.

Lin knew then that he was most of the way to success.

Every cryo-tube here was a hope for the Imperial Fists' continuation. Today, though, those hopes were about to get a little something extra mixed in.

Lin produced the Second Legion Gene-Seeds he had brought with him and began altering their serial designations, folding them in among the existing stock.

The most common method of verifying identity through Gene-Seed was comparison against the parent Chapter's holdings. It was precisely such a comparison against the Imperial Fists that would one day reveal to the Soul Drinkers that they were not sons of Dorn.

In other words, so long as the parent Chapter's gene-vaults also contained Second Legion Gene-Seeds, then even if a genetic audit found the Second Legion veterans diverging wildly from ordinary Imperial Fists, the matter would be shelved — because the parent Chapter demonstrably held corresponding samples — and their status as an Imperial Fists successor Chapter would be acknowledged.

Pulling that off obviously took more than shoving Gene-Seeds into a rack. Lin also had to splice into the Shanzheng's record-keeping systems and add the "evidence" that these seeds had been in the gene-vault all along.

The method would never work on a Chapter with an unbroken lineage. If anyone cross-checked with anyone else, they would realise at once that the data had been altered.

But the near-annihilated Imperial Fists of today were, so to speak, dead men who could not testify. So long as these seeds — and the Apothecaries recorded as having extracted them — were attributed to brothers already fallen, the present Imperial Fists would find nothing amiss.

Perhaps one day they would investigate why their Chapter possessed two distinct strains of Gene-Seed. But by then Lin would have his legitimate name, and that would no longer be his problem.

The Shanzheng was thoroughly incensed by Lin's tampering. The lights in the vault began flickering erratically. Such surface tricks could do nothing to stop him.

In high spirits, Lin went on daubing away inside the fortress's body. "Flicker all you like. Blow every bulb you've got and it still won't—"

"Stop."

A low voice, timed with the flickering lights, cut him off. Lin started violently and turned toward the source, but under the Shanzheng's interference his visual sensors caught only a vast, blurred shadow.

So the flickering had been cover for the newcomer all along?

He drew his Plasma Pistol and backed away, guard raised. An oversized Contemptor Dreadnought stepped out of the vault's shadows as he retreated.

It was the same Dreadnought that had appeared in the reclusiam when Kurande reviewed the last of the Imperial Fists' neophytes.

It looked as though it had been waiting here a long time.

Lin's spirits sank.

He knew perfectly well that the sarcophagi housing such veterans were kept within the vault's stasis fields. But this Dreadnought had already been woken once before. With every step of his operation seamless, how had it come to be here?

"You should not have come here, Magos."

There was an unshakable authority in the Dreadnought's voice. "Your actions have betrayed the trust the Imperial Fists placed in you."

"So are we fighting now, or what?"

The Dreadnought was silent for a long moment. It seemed to have choked on Lin's bluntness.

"No. Leave now, and I will guarantee that you may continue cooperating with the Imperial Fists under supervision."

Lin shook his head regretfully. "Then there's nothing to discuss."

"You are attempting to force your way into a Legion's most private sanctum. Continued cooperation is the greatest trust we can extend after such a transgression. Does even that not satisfy you?"

"Has it occurred to you that I'm laying the foundation of trust for what comes next, and it's you barging in here who's wrecking it?"

The Dreadnought did not answer again. It raised its Power Fist and advanced. Lin sighed, recognising that this fight could not be avoided.

"Before that, I'm curious — how did you know I was here?"

"Nothing you do aboard the Shanzheng can be hidden."

So the Shanzheng had given him away.

Lin gave ground several steps, sliding clear of the Power Fist's arc, mind racing through countermeasures.

He knew exactly how capable the surviving tech-sergeants aboard were. They might sense a machine-spirit's general mood, but they could never hold a specific conversation with one, still less obtain his precise position.

He had no idea how this Dreadnought had found the place, but the Imperial Fists, short even of men for patrols, would not notice the disturbance down here for some time.

If he could deal with the Dreadnought before then, the situation was still salvageable.

The Dreadnought appeared unwilling to damage the cryo-vault and had chosen close combat. That choice gave Lin his opening.

He understood that any head-on clash with a Contemptor was futile. But a Dreadnought was, in the end, a machine. If he could destroy part of its counter-interference gear, he would have a chance of paralysing it with a galvanic charge.

Unfortunately, the Dreadnought's experience exceeded Lin's expectations.

It seemed to have fought the Mechanicus often enough that its movements alone shut down any chance of Lin improvising a crude microwave bomb from materials in the vault. Barely able to parry as he twisted and dodged, he could find no opening at all.

Then, in a gap between the Dreadnought's relentless hammering, a faint sound from the vault ceiling caught Lin's attention.

He looked up on instinct. A black shape dropped like a phantom, landing precisely behind the Dreadnought. The newcomer's power armour bore dark paintwork embroidered with lightning bolts, and the bat-wing crest on his helm looked especially savage in the dim light.

The Dreadnought clearly had not anticipated this. It reacted, but its own lack of agility limited what it could do.

Malik drove his claws into the joint at the Dreadnought's back. The linkage sounds along its limbs turned instantly to discord, and its movements slowed.

Efron struck from the other side, his Power Sword forcing the now-hampered Dreadnought onto the defensive.

Lin glanced sideways. Occam, in power armour of dark, snake-scaled blue, had appeared at his side at some point. Coiled on his shoulder was the Felyne he had lifted from Lin earlier.

The Felyne sprang from Occam's shoulder onto Lin and licked his cheek affectionately.

"Looks like our Magos ran into a spot of trouble," Occam said dryly. "Good thing he once made an ally of an Alpha."

"How are you here?" Lin remembered clearly that he had pulled Occam out of the firewall without ever exposing his own destination in the data stream.

"I am Alpha. We are everywhere."

[Author's Note 1: By the lore, a power pack running at full power needs its nuclear fuel replenished once a month. So a tin can with no supply line at all isn't nearly as durable as everyone thinks — though shutting down all non-essential systems will keep it going a long while.]

[Author's Note 2: The production lines aboard the Shanzheng were seized from rebel Mars during the Horus Heresy. Dorn sent fourteen thousand Astartes. That force should have been formidable, but the Titan Legion ran right over their faces, so after the raid they grabbed the handful of Martian loyalists and got out fast. Incidentally, the battle in question took place at a site called Magma City.]

____

Gift for Everyone: Once we hit 50 Powerstones, I'll release +1 bonus chapter

________________________________________

If you want more chapters, please consider supporting my page on (P). with 50 advanced chapters available on (P)

👻 Join the crew by searching Leanzin on (P). You know the spot! 😉