Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

To keep Mars from noticing, the Skitarii Augustus had corrupted were limited in both quality and number.

Augustus had originally meant to slip those Skitarii into the forces squaring off against the Ultimate Wall and fire the first shot in secret, so the standoff would boil over into a genuine war.

Unfortunately, the Fabricator-General had not taken the bait. He swapped the Skitarii out for the Iron Hands, and Augustus's design came to nothing. The overwritten Skitarii had no choice but to pull back into Magma City, where they became one more piece of his open rebellion.

But stripped of the advantage of the first shot, those few tens of thousands of Skitarii amounted to very little against a Fabricator General who had brought his own Battle-Automata legion.

Kubik ascended his data-throne. The vast tide of computation flowing through his mind settled him.

That even the data-throne could not wrest command of those Skitarii away told him a daemon's hand lay behind this. The truth had finally resolved itself.

Archmagos Augustus had long since become a daemon's instrument. His experiment to replace the ork waaagh field with Warp Psychic energy was a lie from beginning to end.

Whatever Augustus intended to do with the teleportation device, a corrupted device could no longer serve Mars's need for translation.

Boundless fury ran through the Fabricator General's pipework. He did not understand why it had taken him until now to detect Augustus's deviation, but what he had to do now required no deliberation at all.

"Augustus, you will pay for your betrayal of Mars!"

At Kubik's command, the Vultarax-pattern automata climbed hard, folding the whole of Magma City into their scans.

He spread his hands. The processing power supplied by the countless wetware units of the data-throne was woven into a logic network that blanketed all of Magma City, and the entire Battle-Automata legion was patched into its calculation matrix.

Every movement of every enemy, along with projections of what they would do in the next second, poured into the logic circuits of the Battle-Automata legion. Guided by the Omnissiah's holy data, they bared their fangs at the besieging Skitarii.

A common Skitarii is worth more than three Astra Militarum troopers in combat effectiveness. Even so, under the hammer of the Battle-Automata legion they proved brittle.

The galvanic charges and las-fire from their weapons were intercepted, all of it, by the atomantic shields the Castellax-class Battle-Automata projected in formation. Some Skitarii, at Augustus's direction, tried to flank around the curve of those shields, but behavior that had already been predicted achieved nothing.

Before they could reach a firing position, the Battle-Automata legion, its intent long since divined by the data-throne, moved second and struck first, drowning them in fire.

"Behold! The shells of the Battle-Automata legion are guided by the Omnissiah's own hand!"

Once the corrupted Skitarii's opening ambush failed to produce results, the Battle-Automata legion took the field. Under the sweeping fire of Mauler-pattern bolt cannons, the close-combat Castellax variants raised their toothed power blades.

The Disintegration Field, drawing power straight from the compact fusion reactors in the automata's frames, was unstoppable. Heavy Servitors, thick-plated, pushed up to hold the line and were churned in moments into scraps of metal swimming in oil and blood froth.

When there were no Skitarii left in Magma City able to charge the Battle-Automata legion, Kubik reviewed his tally.

Nearly a quarter of the rebel Skitarii had been destroyed in that exchange, while of his twelve hundred Battle-Automata barely a hundred had been crippled.

Augustus's rebellion was weaker than he had estimated, yet the result did not satisfy him.

These Battle-Automata were his personal army. The loss of even one of them stung.

And remembering that Augustus had given him no chance to muster other forces to encircle Magma City, forcing him to fight with his own Battle-Automata legion alone, the Fabricator General wanted nothing more than to kill this Archmagos on the spot.

Besides, the true killing stroke of a Chaos Cultist always lies with daemons. Now that the fighting had begun, Augustus, still inside the test site, was certainly performing some ritual of summoning.

Kubik knew he had to finish what he had started.

In the Mechanicus, where the strong feed on the weak, there is no room for softness. For the sake of the Fabricator General's seat beneath him, he would slaughter these traitors to the last, and he would do it now.

"Battle-Automata legion, advance!"

The Vultarax-pattern automata entered the test site first. Under Kubik's orders to disregard losses, the flyers used their agility, autocannons and rocket launchers to clear out the Tech-Priests still trying to hold the grounds.

The Fabricator General himself, escorted by Castellax-class automata, strode back toward the site of the teleportation device. Nothing in his path could survive a single exchange with him.

He would witness Augustus's annihilation with his own eyes.

Returning to the ork teleportation device took little time, but the Warp's profane energy spilling from the place made Kubik, who had not needed to breathe in centuries, feel as if he were suffocating.

At the center of the grounds he saw the device, no longer concealing its nature. It was no longer that ork brand of "looks-about-right" engineering, but a twisted thing wholly eaten through by the power of Chaos.

The Fabricator General's temper broke. "Augustus!"

He needed no specialized Psychic auspex. Through his optics alone he could see the vague silhouettes of daemons in the black mist bleeding off the device.

Those Warp entities made no attempt to hide their hunger, and looked ready to tear free of the device at any moment. Kubik understood then that this machine was no longer Mars's hope of ranging across the stars. It was a nursery for Chaos.

By Mars's own protocols, he should destroy it utterly.

Yet his logic hesitated. This was the only ork teleportation device Mars possessed. If he destroyed it, not even Mars could obtain another.

Now that he had fallen out with the Ultimate Wall, was he supposed to go and steal one off that battle moon hanging over Terra?

The calculation steered his actions in a different direction.

Kubik cut into the test site's vox-array system, and his cold voice rolled through the grounds like thunder. "Augustus! Your treachery has reached its end! I will end your madness with my own hands, and then I will purge this device!"

Augustus paid his words no attention. He was in the sealed chamber beneath the teleportation device, leading a company of Priests in the ritual that would call down a certain great being.

His hiding place could not escape Kubik's scans. Once the automata had smashed the entire test site to rubble, Kubik found the entrance to the chamber.

Linking remotely into a Vultarax-pattern automaton, Kubik was able to look upon Augustus's condition.

In only a few hours, the Archmagos's mechanical body had been eroded by the power of Chaos. But unlike the warped faces or surplus limbs of other Chaos Cultists, his corruption expressed itself with restraint. His bionic limbs, now graven with the Chaos star, had simply become colder and harder than before.

The Tech-Priests around him were the same. Having embraced the power of Chaos, they had fallen into ecstasy, mechanical arms raised high, chanting blasphemous prayers Kubik could not parse.

That failure of understanding was the thing Kubik could not resolve. How had he allowed a Chaos Cultist to lurk at his side from beginning to end without detecting the faintest trace?

The Mechanicus understands the Warp far better than most Imperial institutions. The high echelons of the Forge Worlds know of the four beings in the Empyrean, and the Adeptus Mechanicus maintains its own methods for detecting and purging their corruption.

Because of those methods, though Mars has spawned innumerable sub-creeds out of the Omnissiah's doctrine and countless self-contained scholarly cabals, not once since the Great Heresy has a Chaos faith grown as established as Augustus's.

Kubik had placed enormous weight on this project. After approving the use of Warp Psychic energy in the trials, his own people had come every single day to check the site for signs of Chaos corruption, including the signs of Sadistic Terror.

And still Chaos had come. It had come right under his optics, in a place his understanding could not reach.

"Augustus. Surrender your secret."

Kubik moved the Castellax-class automata forward, the apex of war-power below a Titan, their power blades presenting the Fabricator General's threat without reservation. "Tell me how you accomplished this corruption in secret, and I will let you go quickly."

"Corruption? No. I have only shown everyone the truth."

Augustus laughed, a cold, sunken sound. "I had no need of secrecy, because any Priest who witnesses the ritual realizes that the Omnissiah is a lie from top to bottom! What I bring is not corruption, it is the rebirth of the Mechanicus. We will no longer need prayers and censers. The true god of machines requires only endless sacrifice and endless invention!"

From this raving Kubik concluded that the Archmagos had lost the most basic capacity for logic. Deciding nothing useful could be extracted from him, he ordered the automata forward to exterminate the traitors down to the last.

The automata opened fire on the final energy barrier. The impact of the Mauler-pattern bolt cannons seemed to sober Augustus considerably. He surfaced from his fervor and looked calmly at Kubik, the way one might look at a flea in its death throes.

"Your greed gave me my opening, Kubik. Your defeat was decided the moment you failed to destroy the teleportation device at the very beginning."

"Defeat?"

Kubik could not process it. The barrier was nearly down. His enemy stood one step from death. "You are only humiliating yourself."

"Then witness it. The might of the true Omnissiah!"

Augustus did not answer further. He turned to face the teleportation device, raised both hands, and began to chant.

"Great Vashtorr, master of iron and flame, the true Omnissiah!"

His voice rose. "We offer up the flesh of the machine, the souls of gear and conduit! Let your power descend upon this place, let your will command our ignorant and rotting steel!"

His Tech-Priests joined the chant. Their voices braided together into a resonance that crawled along the spine. As the prayer converged on one specific being, the Psychic energy gathering there began to take shape.

Kubik ran a rapid analysis of that energy's properties. Its oscillation signature matched none of the Four Chaos Gods.

His logic recoiled at the unknown, yet the measured concentration told him the profane energy here fell far short of what summoning a daemon host would require.

Whatever this Vashtorr he had never heard of might be, so long as there were no daemons, his Battle-Automata legion could resolve every problem.

Kubik signaled the legion to press in and end the farce. The automata closed on Vashtorr's altar, and the feed from the linked machine blurred without warning.

Electromagnetic interference?

Kubik reflexively began troubleshooting, but the automaton's logic and conduits showed no faults whatsoever. He scanned again, and in the interference-warped ripples he finally caught an enormous silhouette.

Not a malfunction.

It was a real presence, and it was rising out of the teleportation device.

It was a colossus built of countless gears, mechanisms and forge-fire. Its dark violet body wore brass armor that looked pieced together from a thousand broken machine components; it gripped a warped forge-hammer, and its face was a bull's skull set with a vast bionic eye.

He had never known this daemon's name, but the instant he laid eyes on it, an inexplicable understanding rose in his mind.

"Vashtorr..."

In that fusion of mechanical coldness and Chaotic distortion Kubik felt a beauty that chilled him through, and the feeling drew him into something like rapture.

He found himself grasping, strangely, why Augustus called this daemon the Omnissiah, and just as he moved to understand further, to accept, the firewall in the data-throne jolted him awake.

Kubik realized he had come within a hair of being taken by this daemon.

It is only a daemon...!

Unable to comprehend why the thing exerted such pull on him, the Fabricator General forced himself calm. He reassessed the battlefield and found that the Vashtorr emerging from the teleportation device was only a projection.

What Augustus had summoned was neither the god's true form, nor were there any daemons manifested in the flesh here.

"Nothing but a bluff!"

So Kubik judged. But Vashtorr gave a soft laugh, and his projection dissolved into a data stream that surged into the very automaton Kubik had taken control of.

Kubik's firewall triggered its defenses automatically and Vashtorr pierced it with ease. Aware that he was being invaded, he scrambled to marshal the processing power of every wetware unit on the data-throne, and still he could not resist this terrible daemon.

"No... impossible!"

Kubik's consciousness shuddered violently within the data-throne. He watched his own meticulously woven logic network, his encryption protocols, his defensive matrices collapse one after another under Vashtorr's intrusion, breaking down into meaningless fragments of code.

No daemon he had ever encountered possessed data-intrusion capability like this.

Even Tzeentch's machine-spirit daemons could do little more than spew junk code as interference.

"Who are you!" the Fabricator General demanded, his voice grating.

"I am the new master of Mars, Kubik," the projection called Vashtorr answered.

"I am your Omnissiah!"

Vashtorr's data stream coiled around Kubik's logic like an enormous serpent and began to tighten. Kubik could feel his own thought being peeled away piece by piece. His memories, his logic, even his faith in the Omnissiah, all of it eroding under that power.

Fear spread through Kubik.

Since acquiring the data-throne, no one on Mars had been able to contest him in data or computation. He had styled himself the walking god of Mars, the Omnissiah incarnate who unified the thought of an entire world. And now everything he was knelt before this daemon.

Could it truly be the Omnissiah?

The blasphemy of the thought startled him. He did not dare pursue it; the notion alone was enough to strip him of any will to fight.

He severed his link to the automaton, and his consciousness contracted back into his own body.

Vashtorr's interference did not reach here, yet Kubik's nerve was still badly shaken.

"There is no safe ground left in Magma City. I must withdraw!"

He abandoned control of every automaton inside the test site, relying on the machines he had left to break out toward the city's edge.

Through the data-throne he transmitted a signal to muster his forces, intending to level Magma City entirely with weapons of mass destruction and never lay eyes on that uncanny daemon again.

But Augustus's voice surfaced, inexplicably, on the very channel he was using to assemble his troops.

"Do you still believe you control everything, Fabricator General?"

To his horror, Kubik found that the data-throne had defied his will and opened a channel to Augustus on its own. He tried to cut the connection, but the wetware wired into the throne began to writhe, refusing his commands.

Even the signals meant for the forces outside were intercepted by the wetware.

Its processing power no longer served Kubik. It fought him. Kubik traced his memory back at speed and found the source of the agitated units: the Magi of Cath Maximus, who had arrived on Mars long ago and refused to obey Mars's commands.

The brains of those Magi, rendered into wetware back then to make an example of them, now gave off the same signature as Vashtorr. They were corroding Kubik's logic circuits, contesting him for control of the throne.

At last Kubik understood why, in all the time he had relied on the data-throne, his thinking had thrown up those small illogical seams.

Chaos had been lying dormant at his side all along, and he, and all of Mars with him...

were falling into a conspiracy woven with exquisite care.

[Author's Note: GW's official description of Vashtorr runs as follows. Vashtorr manifests several miracles granted by dark power, the most common being that he can fly at high speed without any aerodynamic wings, his own wings consisting of four scythe-shaped metal blades. Personally, I don't think that pile of bricks the Aeronautica Imperialis flies has any aerodynamics to speak of either, and they fly faster than Vashtorr does. Maybe miracles are just everywhere in the Imperium. After all, the fact that the Imperium still exists at all is already a miracle.]

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