Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

Everywhere?

"I'm guessing the Felyne led you to me."

"You didn't have to blow that quite so fast."

Lin offered no comment, though it was simple fact that they had helped him.

The Dreadnought, seeing all this, clearly understood that the situation had slipped out of his control.

He drove Efron and Malik back and warned Lin, "Abandon your collaboration with traitors, Magos. It will steer all of this toward an outcome you cannot bear."

"Still better than surrendering meekly." Lin shrugged and turned his head toward Occam. "Can you tie him up?"

"He won't guess where my attack comes from."

Occam joined the assault like a cold-blooded serpent, using Malik and Efron as a feint to buy himself one chance to cripple the Dreadnought outright.

But the opening that seemed to promise a crippled Dreadnought was bait the machine had laid on purpose. The moment Occam sprang out of the shadows, the Dreadnought swung its Power Fist in a full arc and hammered it into his breastplate.

Occam flew backward faster than he had attacked, landing in front of Lin with a great crater punched into his chestplate and blood leaking out from under his helm.

"He really couldn't guess?" Lin asked, just to be sure.

"...He seems very familiar with the way we fight."

That single blow had left Occam gravely wounded, and the Dreadnought hadn't even activated the energy field on its Power Fist, wanting the strike to stay silent. Two shots of stimms went in, and Occam clawed his way back to his feet.

"This opponent is far stronger than we thought, Magos Lin. I hope you still have some other method."

"Where's the sorcerer in your warband?"

"He has more important work."

"Then buy me a little more time."

Wounded as he was, Occam threw himself forward again. The three of them switched to pure harassment, dragging at the Dreadnought together. Lin sent the Felyne off to gather materials.

The cogitator, ridden by its machine-spirit, tried to purge itself, but Tom's claws opened the local cogitator system first and pulled out the chips inside, the ones that could carry an electromagnetic charge.

At speed, Lin assembled a directed electromagnetic weapon powerful enough to knock out part of the Dreadnought's auxiliary systems.

The Dreadnought understood what he was building, and stopped holding back from his heavier armaments. A stream of bolt rounds drove the Expunged Warband away from him, and then he strode forward and pressed his gun barrel against the forehead of Lin, who had only just finished the assembly.

"You will pay the proper price for your betrayal, Magos!"

"You really want to do that?" Lin pointed at the electromagnetic bomb in his hand. "I'd say there's still room for us to talk this over."

"I am never swayed by threats."

"Neither am I. And honestly, this doesn't frighten me much."

A pale blue Energy Shield shut the barrel out before it could touch him, and the weights slid off the scale on which each of them had been able to destroy the other.

The Dreadnought fell silent, but he still didn't move the gun aside.

Lin was in no hurry to trigger the bomb. Even with the odds now in his hand, wrecking a Dreadnought whose rank began at Chapter Venerable would be a colossal headache for him.

If it was at all possible, he still wanted the machine in front of him to compromise. So he waited, patiently, for the other to choose. But Occam, still breathing hard, came up beside him and pressed him.

"We have no time to waste here."

"Meaning?"

"I don't know why you came running to the gene-seed vault at the very moment you were guarding against the Soul Drinkers, but those Soul Drinkers really are a serious problem. If you don't move soon, the situation aboard the Shanzheng will spiral out of anyone's control."

Occam's words caught the attention of both Lin and the Dreadnought, but they didn't break the deadlock between the two. Only when a new comm request cut in did the atmosphere between them ease at all.

"I assume you don't mind if I take a call first?"

Barring an emergency, a comm request from the Colonel would never have punched through to Lin's channel.

The Dreadnought's attention was drawn to that blood-red priority signal as well. He weighed it for a moment, and at last gave ground.

On the other end was the Colonel, whom Lin had assigned to watch the Soul Drinkers. Lin could hear bolt rounds clattering off metal behind his voice.

"It's the Soul Drinkers! The Soul Drinkers have attacked!"

He shouted the situation down the line loudly enough that the Dreadnought beside Lin could hear every word. "Ornis was leading a patrol and ran straight into a fully armed Soul Drinker infiltration squad! They wanted no witnesses, so they hit us first!"

"What about Neos? How does it stand now?"

"Neos is fine, and they haven't broken our line. But once they got their bearings they started going around us, deeper into the Shanzheng! We can't stop them, and we don't know where they're headed!"

The Soul Drinkers had risen far earlier than Lin expected. At least the pieces he'd placed in advance were doing their work. He looked at the Dreadnought in front of him, who had heard all of it.

"You heard it yourself. All I did was try to add two gene-seeds to the vault. But someone aboard the Shanzheng is doing something far worse than that."

"From the conversation to the transmission, it is all your side's word alone."

"Please. You're not so stubborn that you think no son of Rogal Dorn could ever turn traitor, are you? I'll admit I have a few plans of my own, but framing someone aboard the Shanzheng isn't one of them."

"...The Soul Drinkers are admittedly different. But the Mechanicus are no more worthy of trust."

Lin sighed. Settling the Dreadnought with violence was looking more and more like his last remaining option.

Then the Shanzheng began to shudder. The auxiliary systems that had been feeding the Dreadnought support went haywire all at once. The Dreadnought seemed to sense something; at last he drew the barrel away from Lin and said in a low voice:

"I can feel the Shanzheng's fear. It is the Soul Drinkers."

No further persuasion was needed. Now that he knew the Soul Drinkers had truly risen, the Dreadnought set aside the confrontation of his own accord. He demanded that the Expunged Warband and Lin leave the gene-seed vault with him and make for the scene, and Lin finally had a moment to press Occam for details.

"You came aboard the Shanzheng because of the Soul Drinker anomaly?"

"Not only that, but yes, that was the main purpose."

"So what did you find?"

Occam called up a rough topographic map of the Shanzheng. He drew a circle linking the Soul Drinkers Chapter's billet to the sections they had requested be repaired, then tapped the circle. "Inside this area there is a sealed warp gate."

"A warp gate?" Lin had never heard of such a thing. "Aboard the Shanzheng?"

"According to the records I dug out of the Shanzheng's archives, the gate was moved aboard by the Primarch Dorn himself. I don't know where it leads, but I believe it is what the Soul Drinkers are after."

An opened warp gate would bring devastation no matter where it led. Lin grasped how bad this was. "Where is the gate?"

"My sorcerer Koda is working on locating it, but it is a sealed warp gate. Right now, clearly, only the Soul Drinkers know."

If all they could do was follow the Soul Drinkers, they would always be a step behind. Fortunately the Imperial Fists Dreadnought, who knew a great deal, showed off his learning once again.

"It is the Predator's Eye."

He blew a corridor of the Shanzheng open with a single shot, opening a shortcut toward the warp gate for Lin and the rest.

"This way!"

"Colonel, how much longer do we have to hold?"

"Until we win!"

"I hate that kind of empty talk!"

Faraday threw himself aside by a hair's breadth as a shell shrieked past him. He raised his lasgun and tried to answer, and failed to leave so much as a scorch mark on the Soul Drinker power armour opposite.

He found himself missing the weapons they'd carried back at Port Sanctus.

All Faraday could do was keep his head down behind cover. But even the Shanzheng itself had turned against them.

The corridor walls began to warp and twist, the metal kneaded by some invisible force until it set into faces of daemons. Pipes and cabling that had been hidden behind the plating became tentacles at the urging of the machine-spirit daemons, lashing out at them fast.

At the critical moment the Colonel threw a microwave grenade. The storm of electromagnetic radiation made the weak machine-spirit daemons flinch back, and for a while they didn't dare come again.

But the Soul Drinkers had used that brief pause to seize their chance and cross the passage. Their objective was clear; they ignored the mortals entirely and pushed on deeper into the Shanzheng.

The Colonel yanked his cap off his head, furious at being dismissed like that.

After Port Sanctus they had partially re-equipped with Imperial pattern weapons. Safer, certainly, and far more reliable in that respect, but the stopping power had been halved.

"We have to catch those traitors! Where's Neos?"

"The lad's right here!"

Evil Sun's answer came in with the roar of an engine. The Colonel turned and saw a cargo truck barrelling toward him.

The truck looked as though it had been bolted together from scrap picked up off a battlefield, its surface a patchwork of crudely welded plating. But the ram fixed to its nose and the big shootas and flamers bristling all over it advertised terrifying firepower.

The Colonel could see the Tech-Priest called Evil Sun perched astride the prow, driving the war machine together with Neos.

William's eyes bulged wider than brass bells. "That thing actually runs?"

Evil Sun took offence. "You questionin' my work? Me an' the Neos lad cobbled this together ourselves. Dead reliable!"

The Colonel looked doubtfully at Neos. Neos nodded, clearly enjoying himself. "Reckon this toy's got some kick to it."

"It ain't a toy! This here's a proper weapon!"

Over Evil Sun's loud objections the whole squad scrambled aboard the battle-truck. Neos drove it forward, grinding under its wheels every machine-spirit daemon that dared work the machinery in their path.

They caught up with the Soul Drinker column — but the truck's bizarre shape only hardened the Soul Drinkers' conviction.

"The Chapter Master spoke truly! There are unclean things within the Shanzheng after all!"

These ordinary warriors, deceived, believed they were purging corruption from the seat of power itself. They turned and opened fire on Neos and the rest. But Evil Sun's blessings on his creation meant that, lacking heavy weapons, they couldn't destroy the vehicle quickly.

The Soul Drinkers' advance was delayed again. Facing mortals whose preparation and will to fight both far exceeded his expectations, Daenyathos, who had set all of this in motion, was displeased.

Still, remembering the contingency he had left behind, he wasn't especially worried.

"We must reach the Predator's Eye as quickly as possible. Leave a portion of our number to hold them."

The Soul Drinkers carried out his order at once. The brothers still at his side numbered barely four hundred.

Even so, they were the strongest single Astartes force aboard the Shanzheng.

"Bring back our genetic father, and end the hypocrisy and decay of the Imperium..."

He murmured it to himself, hunger for an entirely new future in his eyes.

"In that great evolution we shall save all of humanity, and save the Imperium entire!"

Thanks to the Undying Army's efforts and the Dreadnought's guidance, Lin reached the Predator's Eye before the Soul Drinkers could achieve their goal.

Something seemed to be calling to the warp rift that had been sealed for a thousand years. The space around it had already twisted, forming a small vortex.

Lin tried touching the vortex, to no effect — it had not yet been opened from the Shanzheng's side, and strictly speaking it wasn't a warp phenomenon at all yet.

"It seems the trouble aboard the Shanzheng is worse than we thought," Occam said.

"The gate has one last safeguard," the Dreadnought answered. "When this warp gate was moved into the Shanzheng, the Librarians of the Imperial Fists sealed the warp rift together. Only an Imperial Fists gene-sequence can unlock it."

"Sounds like the Soul Drinkers could manage the unlocking on their own," Lin said, deliberately.

The Dreadnought didn't answer.

Lin raised an eyebrow, realizing this Dreadnought must know the Soul Drinkers were not sons of Dorn. He simply changed the question. "Why not destroy it outright?"

"We found no way to destroy it. Moving it aboard the Shanzheng was the safest course available. For a thousand years it has stayed sealed in the depths of this vessel without a single incident."

"And one incident is all it takes."

With the Predator's Eye as the anchor point, Lin began summoning the Chapters gathered aboard the Shanzheng.

But the machine-spirit daemons running riot had severed many channels of communication, and Lin could reach very few of them. In the end only a little over two hundred warriors mustered at the Predator's Eye. They looked at the warp gate before them with the same blankness in their eyes.

"How can there be a warp rift inside the Shanzheng?"

Thorne asked first. Until Lin contacted him he had assumed the mortals aboard had mutinied; only afterward did he understand that it was the Soul Drinkers who had risen.

"Nobody knows why it's here, but this is what the Soul Drinkers are after," Lin answered, and looked at Zebyrean, the first-company captain who had come with Thorne.

This warrior kept to the Codex with iron rigour and wore his helm in battle exactly as the Codex demanded, so Lin could read nothing from his face.

Then Lin turned to Issaga off to one side. As a Librarian, Issaga shook his head, signalling that he sensed no taint of corruption on anyone present, nor on the Soul Drinkers.

For all the machine-spirit daemons rampaging through the ship, this uprising did not look like the work of Chaos.

"Perhaps a handful of fallen officers at the top of the Chapter incited this. Whatever the truth is, right now we build a defensive line."

At Lin's direction, the Imperial Fists, the Excoriators and the Exemplary Fists set up firing lines in several narrow corridors on the outer approaches to the Predator's Eye.

The Second Legion veterans led by Admidel, Lin placed on the inner ring, closer to the Predator's Eye itself. The Dreadnought stared at those veterans and their Monster Hunter weapons for a long while. He seemed to have caught a clue somewhere in it, but in the end he said nothing.

This Dreadnought seemed to know a little too much.

A pity Lin had no time to dig into why a Dreadnought should know more than Thorne, who had once been a Captain of the Imperial Fists himself. The Soul Drinkers appeared at the far end of the corridor soon enough. The Colonel and his people had done their best to slow them, yet half the Soul Drinkers still arrived at the Predator's Eye.

The Soul Drinkers, who had once brought eight hundred warriors and stood as the single largest body of reinforcements at the Ultimate Wall, were now the Ultimate Wall's enemy. There was a stir among them as they came face to face with Space Marines of other Chapters, but Daenyathos stepped forward and quelled their doubts.

"Brothers, look around you! The greatest Star Fort in the Imperium of Man, and it has chosen to avoid battle with the greenskins! All of this is because we are caught in a vast conspiracy. A conspiracy that rots our Imperium and corrupts our warriors!"

"But we Soul Drinkers have awakened! No longer blinded, no longer bound! We shall defeat these lost brothers, we shall make the Shanzheng serve its true purpose, and we shall save this Imperium from the corruption and decay devouring it!"

His voice was pure incitement, every word kindling the fire in the hearts of the Soul Drinkers. The stir died away, and under their Chapter Master's false words they roared out their war cry once more.

"For Dorn! For the Emperor! For freedom!"

Dorn?

A mocking smile tugged at the corner of Daenyathos's mouth, but he said nothing more. He merely raised his Power Sword and levelled it at the Imperial Fists ahead.

"Now, let us clear away these obstacles standing before our great work."

Led by him, the Soul Drinkers surged like a tide against the Imperial Fists line, and the Imperial Fists answered the traitors with bolt rounds.

An absurd civil war raised its curtain in that hasty, headlong instant.

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