Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

Kurande had been waiting for word from Lin.

Knowing Lin was somewhere inside Magma City, they had kept the place under close watch from orbit, but until now the city had been perfectly calm. Desperate to break the siege of Terra, Kurande had been forced to give the order to move out. Then, three hours before they were due to depart, firelight bloomed across Magma City.

"What is happening in Magma City?" Kurande sent for his tech-sergeant at once.

"Technically speaking, that is illumination produced by las-fire and detonations."

Gamas's answer told Kurande everything he needed to know. He halted the entire fleet when it stood one step from launch, and at his command the Shanzheng swung in close above Magma City's orbit.

"Chapter Master Kurande, what do you think you are doing?"

The Magos Dominus in command of the five hundred thousand Skitarii accompanying the Ultimate Wall came looking for him, accusation sharp in his voice. "Why are we not advancing on the Battle Moon?"

"I think Mars needs to answer our questions first." Kurande pointed down at Magma City. "What exactly is happening down there?"

"I do not know. I know only that our mission is to assault the Battle Moon. Chapter Master Kurande, we must avoid any unscheduled action."

The Magos answered with absolute firmness, and Kurande heard the hard edge of purpose behind it. He was still weighing whether to extract his answers by force when a Priest came stumbling up to the Magos in a panic.

The man used a private channel, but transmitted in the clear. "Lord Magos, the plan has failed! Lin has escaped Magma City! The Fabricator General orders you to delay the Ultimate Wall at any cost!"

The Magos went rigid. "Idiot! Is that something you say out loud?"

His hand came up to strike the Priest flying, but the shadows of enormous armored bodies had already fallen across him. He turned. The Space Marines around him had raised their weapons, closing into a ring at Kurande's lead.

"Why shouldn't he say it out loud, Magos?"

Bolters clacked all around him as safety catches came off. The Magos, who understood perfectly well that his transmission had been intercepted, retreated a few steps with a strained smile.

"I am not familiar with the specifics either..."

That was a lie.

He had already received the coded order: press the Ultimate Wall to quit Mars as soon as possible so that Lin could be quietly assassinated on the surface. This unforeseen mess had robbed him of any chance to even attempt it.

He weighed his own life against obedience and the duty of holding the Ultimate Wall in place, and in the end his nerve failed him. He compromised.

"If Chapter Master Kurande wishes to know, I could dispatch someone to inquire?"

"No need. We will go and look ourselves." Kurande kept his muzzle trained on the Magos. "Let us hope Mars does not turn its own stupidity into open opposition to us."

The Chapter Masters were assembled at speed. Realizing Lin was in danger, they settled the matter fast: an entire force of Astartes would deploy near Magma City to guarantee his safety.

The task went in the end to Admidel, who volunteered for it. He would lead the reconstituted Soul Drinkers into action as their Chapter Master.

The Soul Drinkers hungered for a battle that might wash away their earlier disgrace, and the veterans who had served at Lin's side all along would lead them in. Handing them the mission left Kurande easy in his mind.

Prepared to be intercepted by Mars, they did not even use Thunderhawk gunships. They went straight down from orbit in drop pods, in full combat posture. The pods dropped so fast that they had punched into the Martian atmosphere before the planet's defenders could react, slamming down hard around Magma City.

Watching the blazing contrails of the pods tearing through the sky, the Magos felt nothing but weary resignation.

"It is not that I lack loyalty to Mars. It is that my colleagues are fools. This body of mine still has uses, and it will not be spent dying for Mars here."

The plan to keep the Space Marines off Mars had failed, but the five hundred thousand Skitarii were still aboard the transport fleet in orbit.

Given that relations with the Ultimate Wall might rupture entirely in the hours to come, the Magos — still under Astartes guns — decided he would have to find an opening to redeploy those five hundred thousand.

There was, however, one thing he could see to immediately.

"You there. I want this Priest rendered down into wetware. Now."

His personal servitors pinned the messenger to the deck with brutal efficiency, and a Datasmith jacked into the Priest's brain. Intending to sever his reasoning from what remained of his humanity, the Datasmith swept through his mind — and turned up a secret instead.

"You are telling me the order he delivered carried no Martian authorization functions at all?"

Orders issued by the Forge Worlds came wrapped in layers of interlocking functions that verified one another. Every order passed through that authorization. If it had not, then the content of that clear-channel transmission had not come from the Fabricator General — had not, perhaps, come from Mars at all.

So the open transmission had not been an accident, but a plot?

The Magos knew he had to report this to Mars at once, but the Space Marines around him killed the thought before it could grow.

There was no trust left between the Astartes and Mars, and they would give him no opportunity to make contact.

He could only let the conspiracy ferment.

The man who had laid that conspiracy with his own hands was already standing before the Fabricator General.

Augustus walked slowly into the sanctum of Fabricator-General Kubik, the heavy metal doors sealing without a sound behind him.

Kubik, in the middle of servicing his data-throne, did not acknowledge the Archmagos. He had already read the anomaly in this second, irregular visit.

The Fabricator General simply let the silence spread, as though a storm were gathering inside the chamber.

"Lord Fabricator General," Augustus said at last, breaking it, his voice carrying a carefully manufactured unease, "I... I must report that the plan has suffered an accident."

Kubik did not answer at once. His mechanical eyes rotated slowly toward Augustus, cold red light sweeping across his face as if to bore through the metal shell and strike straight at his logic core.

After a long pause, Kubik spoke. "An accident? Tell me, Augustus. What accident?"

He spread his hand, pulling up imagery captured from Martian orbit. "Was it also an accident that those insolent Astartes made a combat drop onto Mars?"

Augustus lowered his head. "Yes. Lin... escaped, with the assistance of several Astartes. I suspect the Ultimate Wall had prepared for this well in advance."

"Astartes? You are saying the Space Marines of the Ultimate Wall were already involved before the drop?"

Augustus did not answer directly. He continued in a low voice. "I dare not draw conclusions, but the facts speak plainly. We intended to act only after the Ultimate Wall departed. The Astartes who appeared at his side changed the situation. Those elite squads moved fast and precisely, like men who had been waiting for the signal. Our entire deployment was thrown into disorder."

He submitted the pict-feeds from Magma City along with the testimony of several other Magi to prove he was not lying. Kubik reviewed every piece of evidence in a matter of seconds.

"The Astartes at Lin's side. Their combat doctrine diverges from that of the Imperial Fists by more than fifty percent."

"It may be an Imperial Fists successor Chapter we know nothing of. Only that would explain why the Shanzheng reacted so quickly and fired drop pods at Mars."

Kubik offered no reply to the theory.

It looked internally consistent. In truth it explained nothing about the Ultimate Wall's motive.

Even the assassination of Lin had been a decision made on the spur of the moment. What opportunity could the Ultimate Wall have had to insert a squad onto Mars without Mars noticing a thing, and have it emerge at precisely the critical instant to save him?

Were the Imperial Fists sleeping with the Officio Assassinorum now?

Kubik did not believe in probabilities that uncertain. The suspicion in him had already turned its point toward Augustus, though he would not say so outright.

"Whatever the case, Augustus. Your meticulously prepared operation was overturned by one Magos under house arrest and a handful of Astartes. A result like that can only disappoint the Omnissiah."

"Fabricator General, I acknowledge the failure as mine. But I ask you for one chance. I have already revised the plan. If we can respond quickly, the situation can still be turned."

"In the face of Astartes who have already landed?" Kubik gave a cold snort, but gestured for him to go on.

"Our core objective has always been the ork teleportation apparatus. Everything else is irrelevant. Since Lin has escaped, Mars has no reason to kill him now, and no reason to break irreparably with an Ultimate Wall determined to keep him alive."

"That is showing weakness. Are we to let a Magos who may already know the truth walk back to the Ultimate Wall?" Kubik would not accept the framing.

"Of course we will not show weakness, and we will not release Lin. We will pin him to the surface of Mars, and use him to maintain a tense standoff with the Ultimate Wall's forces — tense, but without a shot fired."

Augustus laid out the plan he had prepared long ago. "Under such a standoff, Mars can enter a wartime footing with perfect legitimacy. We can concentrate the Skitarii around Magma City and declare martial control across the entire planet. So long as it holds until the project is complete, no rat will ever sniff out our true purpose."

A justified pretext was a valuable chip. The earlier counter-espionage measures, rather than outright martial law, had existed precisely so Terra could not seize evidence of Martian irregularity.

That mattered. Even Augustus, who wanted Martian affairs thrown into chaos, had no wish to see several thousand golden corncobs — the Custodians — convening a conference on Mars.

With the whole plan on the verge of exposure, the presence of the Space Marines could become the fig leaf that carried them across the final stretch.

Kubik caught the wrong note in it.

By reflex he reached for the calculative power of the data-throne, and found it unavailable, still under maintenance. The sensation of a missing portion of his brain irritated him.

"The Skitarii will not be used for the standoff." He vetoed it flatly. "Mars may enter martial control, but there will be no direct confrontation. The project to teleport Mars cannot bear the risk of a shot going off by accident."

Augustus frowned. "Then what does my lord propose?"

"Send the Iron Hands who have come begging favors from us. We will provide them every form of support short of direct engagement."

Those three companies of Iron Hands.

Augustus knew the strength garrisoned on Mars. "They are beaten dogs with no home to return to."

"Which is exactly why they will serve us. Tell them Mars will back the founding of their own Chapter once this operation concludes. Let them dress the standoff up as the sort of quarrel Space Marines have among themselves all the time."

Augustus wanted to say more, but the Fabricator General's decision admitted no revision. He could only take his leave, intending to return to Magma City and make further preparations.

Kubik called after him. "How goes the research on the teleportation apparatus?"

"The approach of studying the orks themselves is not going smoothly. Barred from attacking the Battle Moon, we lack sufficient material to push the work forward. But progress on substituting the Warp for Waaagh! energy is good. Give me two weeks of delay and I will finish it."

That answer, at least, satisfied the Fabricator General.

"Since the Great Heresy, the Mechanicus has been reorganized into the Adeptus Mechanicus. Even with the Emperor seated upon the Golden Throne, the constraints laid upon us exceed anything we knew before. Only a free Mars can restore the authority we once held."

He fixed Augustus with a final emphasis. "I will inspect the project's progress personally in the near future. My tolerance for your negligence and for your crossing of technological red lines is furnished by the project itself. Never let anything go wrong with its schedule. Never."

"Of course. I will give everything I have."

Augustus bowed his acceptance, and lifted his head only once he had withdrawn from the Fabricator General's sanctum. His face was clouded with the darkness he had not dared to show inside.

He had felt the Fabricator General's suspicion settle on him. Once Kubik learned how those Space Marines had come by their information and made their drop, that suspicion would only deepen.

Mars's need for planetary teleportation was no longer a shield he could hide behind. Yet until the apparatus was thoroughly corrupted, Augustus still had to preserve this last veneer of respectability.

"Lin..."

He murmured the name of the culprit. His plan to set Mars and the Ultimate Wall tearing at each other had been reduced to loose sand by that man's interference.

But Augustus had to step around the Magos for now. What he needed to work out was how to keep goading Mars and the Ultimate Wall toward conflict when the Skitarii could not be involved, and how to survive the Fabricator General's coming inspection.

His deliberations pointed toward accelerating the ritual, and toward Magos Viktor, currently out in the Rust Wastes.

"The will of the Omnissiah must be enacted, whatever the cost."

He returned to Magma City, ready to drive this long-prepared conspiracy to its climax.

On the far side of Mars, at the Iron Hands encampment.

Iron Captain Kuber welcomed the arrival of Magos Calxus of Mars.

Perhaps they could no longer be called Iron Hands at all. These homeless curs out of Medusa had been half-exiled aberrations from the beginning.

Ever since the Primarch Ferrus lost his head, severe fractures had opened inside the Tenth Legion. Those fractures had split the ten companies of the Iron Hands into independently operating clans with utterly incompatible philosophies, and brutal internal friction flared between them from time to time.

The sons of Ferrus explored their clans' differences of technology and faith with bold physical argument during these frictions. The losers of such debates were ordered to change the clan they belonged to, or else exiled outright.

Kuber and his brothers were among the losers.

Half-exiled, they had come to Mars, always on good terms with the Iron Hands, hoping to trade their assistance to the Adeptus Mechanicus during the Green Tide and the holy relics they had brought with them for Martian support.

But Mars had been noncommittal, neither granting their request nor refusing it. Only when the conflict with the Ultimate Wall erupted did the Fabricator General remember these Iron Hands, whom he had once waved at Lin as a threat and then left sitting for a very long time.

Understanding that Mars had come to talk terms, the Iron Captain warmly invited the Magos to be seated. The Priest declined.

"Captain Kuber, Mars has only one condition."

The warmth drained out of Kuber's face and his eyes went wide. Across from him, Calxus, the senior Magos come to deliver the Fabricator General's will, was pointing a finger at the Shanzheng hanging in Martian orbit.

The muzzle of that colossus's star-killer cannon, aimed squarely at Mars, was plainly visible even from the ground.

"I'm to fight the Shanzheng? Are you serious?"

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