Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

Since Lin had known Mars had ulterior motives before he ever set out for it, he naturally left behind a code phrase.

Only that code phrase wasn't meant for Kurande.

Knowing that every single transmission he sent would be dissected by Mars hundreds, thousands of times over, Lin told Kurande only that he would be staying on Mars for the time being.

Kurande, who understood perfectly well that Lin was being detained, didn't buy a word of it. But unable to pry any further information out of Lin, he couldn't decide what to do next either.

All he could do was deliberately slow the reorganization of his forces, and isolate the Martian contingents from the rest.

He couldn't wait long, though. If no word ever came, he would have to abandon Lin and fulfill his own duty as a guardian of Terra first.

Everything up to this point had unfolded exactly as Mars predicted. They estimated the Ultimate Wall's combined fleet would set sail in three days at the outside, pushing the whole affair onto the course they wanted.

But the Ultimate Wall wasn't the only thing aboard the Shanzheng.

"Malik. Report."

"Nothing to report. They just keep repeating the same worthless motions." Malik's voice was thick with boredom. "These slave-workers are so numb I'm starting to wonder whether fear could take root in them at all."

"Maybe not. But that only makes my disguise easier."

Occam fitted the custom mechanical arms onto himself so that he'd pass for an oversized, heavily modified slave-worker. He wasn't worried about being found out.

There were thousands upon thousands of slave-workers in Magma City. A blank face was already the best camouflage he had.

A slave-worker had little chance of getting near the heart of the project, but Lin had arranged for that in advance. As a Magos with sanctioned work to carry out inside Magma City, he had the right to demand that Mars assign slave-workers to haul his materials.

When Occam carted a basket of components into the forge where Lin was working, he successfully retrieved the chip from the paw of a Felyne.

He jacked the chip's data into himself. The knowledge inside was enough for him to pass as a low-ranking Priest, and it also marked out his next target.

That target was another testing ground within Magma City, this one overseen by Archmagos Augustus.

Lin didn't know why Kubik had assigned him here, but the hostile stares of the surrounding Cath Maximus Magi and their unprompted surveillance made the Fabricator-General's intent clear enough.

He would have to rely on outside hands to make his own moves.

Magma City was a small city built atop an active volcano, drawing on geothermal power to feed every machine within its walls.

During the Great Crusade it had been nothing more than an unremarkable corner of Mars. What made it special happened during the Horus Heresy, when the Fabricator-General had already thrown in with the Warmaster and was sowing chaos across the planet: a senior Magos of Magma City named Koriel Zeth publicly voiced her doubts about him.

The Fabricator-General denied that the Emperor was the incarnation of the Omnissiah, and demanded that all worship of Him be abandoned. But Koriel Zeth declared that she had never believed in the existence of the Omnissiah at all. She was simply an engineer, pursuing the grand ambition of humanity's rebirth.

Words like those drew the traitors down on her. Even with the aid of the Imperial Fists, the loyalists inside Magma City had no hope of victory. In the end Koriel Zeth chose to detonate the entire city, burying everything in it beneath the current of history.

It should never have been brought back into use. But with Mars starved for energy in the present day, the site had been swiftly rebuilt, and it made an excellent venue for large-scale experiments.

Cath Maximus's Director Augustus was the city's administrator now.

Lin had confirmed with the Fabricator-General that Urquidex hadn't been lying: the main body of the ork teleportation device trials was housed in this very city.

Lin had no intention of actually handing over a production line, but the pretext gave Alpha excellent room to operate.

Once Occam learned that the experiments here ran primarily on geothermal power, he drew up a plan and executed it without hesitation. He had Efron sabotage a geothermal supply conduit, and had Malik lie in wait along the route any Priest would have to take to inspect it.

The low-ranking Priest ordered to trace the fault after the experiment lost power came hurrying along. Before he could find the problem, the bat swallowed him into shadow.

"Malik, how does it look?" Occam asked.

"All clean. I've put down one low-ranking Priest doing rounds on the power lines. Unless you blow your own cover, I guarantee nobody will notice a thing."

"Perfect."

Their plan could proceed. Koda, the Thousand Son sorcerer of the Pavoni Cult, excelled at using Psychic power to manipulate flesh, and Malik could peel a human skin flawlessly. Just as they had once helped Occam pass for the planetary governor of Port Sanctus, they now dressed him as this low-ranking Priest. After that, it was Occam's turn to do what he did best.

Wearing the particular humility and caution of a low-ranking Priest on his face, he walked into the core zone of the testing ground.

A few Priests on guard glanced at him, saw the man responsible for the power lines, and let him through without much fuss. Occam bowed his head slightly, offering the deference expected of him, then walked straight toward Archmagos Augustus, who had ordered the repair in the first place.

"Honored Archmagos," Occam said, his voice carrying exactly the right trace of fatigue, "I have completed the diagnostic on the supply conduit and repaired the fault."

"Answer. What was the cause?" Augustus asked without lifting his head.

"A valve in the geothermal conduit had degraded, destabilizing energy transmission. I have replaced it and recalibrated the output. Supply is restored to normal parameters. The experiment may continue."

Augustus's head came up. His gaze swept over Occam, sharp as a blade, and in those cold electronic eyes Occam could read a very human sliver of suspicion.

"Surrender your implants. I require the fault data."

Occam handed over his mechanical implants without a tremor. The maintenance logs Lin had forged into the chip were already waiting inside. He was certain his cover was technically airtight — but then Koda cut in with a sudden warning:

"Anomalous Psychic resonance. He's using it to check your implants for signs of tampering."

"Psychic?" Occam answered inside his own skull. "He's a psyker?"

"No. More like he's borrowing something. Don't let anything slip. I'll help you resist the scan."

Now Occam understood why the Inquisition's agents had been wiped out to the last man in their infiltration attempts. Fortunately he had a professional Thousand Son sorcerer at his side, and Augustus found nothing wrong with the implants.

The Archmagos, reassured, waved a hand to dismiss him. "Remember. If there is any further problem, report to me at once."

Occam bowed slightly. Phase one had gone off without a hitch.

The commotion of an experiment on this scale could be hidden from the outside world, but never from the people inside the testing ground. Even as a low-ranking Priest barred from the inner sanctum, he could still see the heaps of orks trucked in every single day.

The picture matched Urquidex's account, and it convinced Occam that this was the crux of the Martian experiment. But to learn how far along that experiment actually was, he needed a slightly higher rank.

"Replacing a Magos would get us caught for certain, and a senior Priest is beyond anything we can fake. With the level of knowledge we've got, exposure is only a matter of time," Efron said, cutting to the heart of it.

"Which is why we have to move in the middle of chaos, so we only need one attempt," Occam answered.

"And where does that chaos come from?"

"We create it, obviously. Though I don't think we'll have to lift a finger ourselves."

Alpha's sharpened senses had already picked out the strange atmosphere in the testing ground. He could pluck several Inquisition agents out of the "staff" by sight alone.

And Occam was certain Augustus had spotted the same tells. If the man wasn't acting, it was likely because he wanted to play out the line and land a bigger fish — and Occam's job was to steal the bait while Augustus was congratulating himself on his fishing.

The Inquisition's agents were racing the clock and had no patience. Two days later, they moved.

Having probed out the "weak point," the agents used specialist Inquisitorial equipment to carve themselves a path inside. Walking at the head of the column, they never realized they had picked up a tail.

Occam, disguised now as a senior Priest, had been waiting here for a long while. He followed the agents into the core site, a place only a Magos was entitled to enter.

He took in the scene, and the heaped ork corpses made him frown. Moving closer to examine the bodies, he found that they looked less like experimental subjects than like the victims of an industrial-scale slaughter.

What kind of experiment killed these orks outright without attempting anything at all?

Occam smelled something wrong, and Koda's warning arrived right on cue.

"The might of the Empyrean is rising in this place."

"So the orks were only ever a smokescreen."

Occam kept trailing the Inquisition agents. They pushed past the ork bodies and deeper still, and before long they found the residue of rituals used to summon entities out of the Warp.

The Inquisition, whose own members regularly called up a daemon or two for company, grasped the situation at once: Martian research into the ork teleportation device had strayed into a taboo only they had the "authority" to touch.

"We have to get out now and report this to the Inquisitor!"

They turned to withdraw — and ran headlong into another party led by Priests.

"The cogboys made us?"

The question never needed an answer. The tension of finding traces of Chaos had already put fingers on triggers.

The two groups crashed together, and only Alpha, watching from outside, saw it clearly.

"Vanus Assassins?"

As a legion of Astartes who had handled this line of work before the Officio Assassinorum ever existed, Occam knew these rivals of his trade well. The Vanus were the Officio's specialists in data and search — best understood, broadly, as hackers running rear-echelon support.

And if they were here, then the Priests walking beside them…

The flesh of those "Priests" began to twist and flow, shedding a disguise for a shape better suited to killing, and revealing what they truly were.

Callidus.

"Assassins? Why in the warp are there assassins here?!"

The Inquisition agents recognized them too, and fell into brief panic.

They understood that the Officio Assassinorum might well be here for the same reason they were. But in this fractured Imperium, two departments already exchanging fire were not going to shake hands over a shared objective.

Assassins and Inquisition dragged each other down in a running firefight, and the noise soon drew in the Priests and Skitarii garrisoned at the site.

The true masters of Mars entered in force, and firepower far beyond either party pinned both down in an instant. The Inquisition agents, already losing to the assassins, were annihilated to the last. Most of the assassins, however, escaped on the strength of their extraordinary skill.

It was hardly surprising that the gifted individuals the Inquisition had conscripted from across the Imperium couldn't beat trained assassins. But Occam saw something else in it.

"These Skitarii… their firing lines seem to be deliberately avoiding the Officio's people."

An assassin could pose a lethal threat to transhuman power, but in the end they were only the pinnacle of what a mortal could be.

Men trained for infiltration and murder couldn't be wiped out completely, no — but neither could they walk away intact from Skitarii backed by Priests. For those assassins to slip cleanly out of a failed operation, someone with an agenda had to be behind it.

But whose orders?

The Fabricator-General's? Or Archmagos Augustus, who ran the experiment?

Deeper fractures were brewing inside this clash, and Occam, catching the scent of conspiracy, decided to step out of the blade's path for now.

"Time to pull back. We need to meet with Lin in person."

"He's still under surveillance. If we approach him carelessly, we go up in flames too," Malik objected.

"We go anyway. He needs to know that Mars isn't the only one on this planet with a plan."

"The Inquisition agents are confirmed eliminated to the last man," the Forge Master reported. "The Officio Assassinorum's operatives largely withdrew successfully."

"Good."

Augustus's reply was brief. He stood on the upper gallery of the laboratory, looking down over the core experimental floor below.

The ork teleportation device sat down there. That crude machine, once scrawled over with ork gibberish, had changed. The ork graffiti had warped by degrees into symbols beyond description, and unsettling violet energy squirmed through the device's innards.

Its power conduits breathed like something alive, and now and then a viscous black fluid wept from the seams.

This was no longer merely an ork teleportation device. It was a vessel for the power of Chaos. Under the ceaseless erosion of Warp energy, it was about to become a complete daemon engine.

The corner of Augustus's mouth lifted in the faintest, most easily missed smile.

"Ork machinery resists exaltation, but in the end it will yield to the might of the Omnissiah." He turned to the Forge Master behind him. "How many days until final preparation is complete?"

"Our estimate is half a month. At that point it will become the vessel of the Omnissiah Vashtorr, and usher our lord into the material realm."

"Then we must clear every obstacle from his path before he arrives."

The research programme on the ork teleportation device had split into two lines: one exploiting the orks themselves, the other relying on Psychic power. Kubik, who took an enormous interest in the technology, had allocated resources sufficient to run both approaches in parallel.

But Augustus, who oversaw the work, had already turned his back on Mars. He had pushed the Psychic route one step further, and chosen to summon daemons.

In their eyes, of course, they were merely summoning the Omnissiah's kin.

Augustus wasn't worried about the Fabricator-General learning what happened here. Because when Priests reassigned to Mars discovered that these creations, incomprehensible to Mars itself, were being driven by the might of the Warp, they were subdued almost instantly by Vashtorr's arts — and became cultists of the true Omnissiah in turn.

The infiltrators on Mars, the turncoat Priests of Mars, the Ultimate Wall, and Lin.

Every variable was in place, and only Fabricator-General Kubik, who believed he held every thread, remained in the dark. Augustus resolved to set those variables in motion and let all of Mars feel the might of the Omnissiah.

Vashtorr would reclaim the wealth that was rightfully his upon Mars!

[Author's Note 1: The idea that the Emperor is the incarnation of the Omnissiah was only a mainstream opinion in 30K; Priests were never compelled to believe it. After the Emperor took his seat on the toilet, the number of people who didn't believe it kept growing.]

[Author's Note 2: There's actually a rather entertaining chain of cause and effect behind why the Emperor came to be regarded as the incarnation of the Omnissiah. It should come up in the story later on.]

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