Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

While Lin was hard at work at the Moravec Forge Station, assembling brand-new production lines in a fever of activity, Skarbrand came back to Magma City with his daemon legions of Sadistic Terror — and nothing else.

He stopped beside the teleportation device and found himself locked in a staring contest with the flickering image of Vashtorr hanging above it.

"So. You come back to me empty-handed?"

"I am hardly empty-handed!" The Exiled One stiffened his neck and argued back. "I brought home a production line!"

He jabbed a finger at the air-conditioner assembly line standing off to one side. Vashtorr spared it a single glance, and his headache deepened.

"And what use is this thing to me?"

"…Refrigeration. For the Blood God?"

"Skarbrand, get a grip!"

Vashtorr's patience snapped, and he roared: "You are a Greater Daemon. I am the demigod of inventors and artificers! What I need is data, invention — not to stand here watching you drag home an air compressor with less chill in it than one of Tzeentch's cold jokes!"

Skarbrand said nothing. He knew as well as anyone how badly the operation had gone.

First the Priest called Lin had stolen the production lines out from under him. Then he had run into Cawl and failed to hold him — after Cawl slipped away he had not given chase, only vented his fury on the laboratory. Not until Viktor arrived did he understand that he had let a genuinely important figure walk free.

Both objectives, missed. Hot-blooded as he was, he did not dare raise his voice in front of his employer.

Vashtorr's projection paced back and forth, no less anxious, turning over what came next.

If he meant to win anything out of Mars, he could not allow Mars a moment to breathe.

Vashtorr knew perfectly well that a world of twenty billion souls was nothing to trifle with. Martian strength did not end at a few million Skitarii and a handful of Battle-Automata legions.

Skitarii numbers were strictly capped in peacetime — but by raising the rebellion himself, he had effectively handed Mars the excuse to mass-produce troops. Let the war drag on, and Mars would drown him under sheer weight of bodies sooner or later.

Corruption from the Warp, then?

That drew directly on Vashtorr's own power, and not even the Four Chaos Gods in the flesh could corrupt an entire planet or fleet single-handed.

Raising one ghoul army, or two, was manageable. Spreading corruption across the whole of Mars would take ten Vashtorrs lashed together, and even that would fall short.

He had not skimmed a single benefit off Mars yet. He could hardly throw himself into the furnace first.

"It doesn't matter… we still have one last measure."

Vashtorr pinched the space between his brows, then waved Augustus over and gave the order: "Spread the Plague Scrapcode."

"Your will, Omnissiah."

Augustus's eyes blazed with fanaticism at the prospect of working a miracle the Omnissiah had granted him by his own hand. Vashtorr himself held no great hopes for what the Plague Scrapcode would achieve.

The Plague Scrapcode spread through Mars's data networks like an invisible toxic mist. It seeped soundlessly into every terminal, every cogitator, every data node, plucking gently at the arteries of the planet.

The life-support systems felt it first. The machinery that regulated oxygen, temperature and humidity fell abruptly into chaos.

Air circulation systems that had run rock-steady for ages began spiralling out of control. Oxygen levels plunged, temperatures swung wildly, and district after district found itself either drowning in damp or parched bone-dry.

Mars's civilians, who carried only a handful of mechanical implants at best, could not stand alone against shifts that violent. Once life support failed them they were as good as dead: Mars was a death world, and it offered such people no environment in which to go on living.

As those civilians — the ones who worked the last links of the production chain — collapsed or died one after another, Mars's production chains could no longer close their own loops.

The Priests, realizing that Servitors alone could not keep production running, scrambled into action, fumbling to isolate the sudden faults. But their divided attention gave the Plague Scrapcode its opening into the production facilities themselves.

When Mars's power regulation valves began to fail, production lines that had turned day and night without pause ground to a halt.

Skitarii armament lines, Titan repair yards, even certain mechanical implants inside the Priests' own bodies — all of it seized up under the Plague Scrapcode's assault.

The Priests discovered, to their horror, that their control panels were flooded with unreadable garbage, and that even the most basic reboot command refused to execute.

"What… what is happening?"

One Priest groped for an answer. Beside him, a Magos had already recognized the scene from memory.

"It's Plague Scrapcode! This is exactly what happened fifteen hundred years ago!"

During Horus's Great Heresy, Kelbor-Hal — Fabricator General of Mars at the time — had secretly thrown in his lot with Warmaster Horus.

As the one man who understood every piece of production machinery on the planet, he had personally released a Plague Scrapcode against the whole of Mars, plunging it into years of dark upheaval and, in that time, all but slaughtering the loyalists to the last.

The Magi who remembered that lesson moved fast with countermeasures, fighting the Plague Scrapcode with the censers and hymns of the Omnissiah. Though it carried Vashtorr's own power, the scrapcode was effectively contained.

Even so, it had barely done what Vashtorr expected of it.

"Mars's production facilities are wrecked. They won't recover their output for at least a month. They will have to fight us with the strength they already possess and whatever limited supplies remain."

Vashtorr was rather glad now that he had not killed the Fabricator General.

He turned to Skarbrand and pressed the point: "Mars will be dragged into a whirlpool of power and profit before this chaos ends. This time I will hold the rear in person and watch you seize the production lines for me. Don't get any ideas about using my army under cover of the confusion to settle the score for your little humiliation. My temper is better than the Blood God's — but it is not without limits."

Skarbrand grunted, plainly unhappy. He offered no argument, only hefted his twin axes and stalked out through the door.

Vashtorr gave the order to attack. The ghoul army and the daemon legions of Sadistic Terror advanced together on Mars's forge stations and hive cities. The situation seemed to be back in Vashtorr's grip.

Yet Vashtorr still had one worry.

Not long ago he had been in the Warp with M'Kachen, working together to lay a trap for the Cath Maximus relief force. He simply had not expected Skarbrand to be this worthless.

Now he had to come back and hold Mars in person, leaving matters in the Warp to M'Kachen alone.

Compared to the brainless Skarbrand, a Tzeentchian Greater Daemon who lived on calculation surely would not cause any problems…

There wouldn't be any problems, surely?

The sudden upheaval on Mars threw the entire Forge Council into alarm.

Magi who held forge stations or governed small cities converged on the Forge Council, and beneath the Omnissiah's gaze they fell to endless argument.

"We must restore production at once!" one Magos bellowed, slamming the table. "The Omnissiah will never tolerate a Mars whose forge-fires have gone cold!"

"Restore production? Do you imagine Plague Scrapcode is so easily purged?"

Another Magos sneered back at him. "What matters now is concentrating our strength against the daemon army! That Greater Daemon has already destroyed the Macarius Forge Station. If we don't stop him, our own holdings are next!"

"Our own? I think you mean yours. Your forge sits squarely on his line of advance — don't stand here waving the banner of fighting daemons just to protect your own interests!"

"And the rest of you? Do you truly believe you can sleep soundly simply because you aren't threatened directly?"

The quarrelling Magi were dividing into two camps. One argued for throwing everything into the fight against the daemon legions of Sadistic Terror; the other insisted that restoring production came first.

They vented the anxiety and greed running through their logic circuits without the slightest restraint — a pack of beasts caged together, tearing at one another and finding no way out.

It was then that Kubik walked into the sanctum.

The arguing died the moment he appeared. Every Magos turned, every gaze fixing on the half-ruined Fabricator General.

Kubik still did his best to carry himself with authority, but with his data-throne broken, the old awe had drained out of their eyes. What replaced it was coldness and doubt.

Their anger had finally found somewhere to go.

As one, without a word passing between them, they turned their spears on the wounded Fabricator General.

"Kubik! How did Mars fall into chaos like this under your governance!?"

A senior Magos struck first. "The Plague Scrapcode has left our production lines completely paralysed! You owe us an explanation!"

"Why should I explain a catastrophe aimed at all of Mars?" Kubik answered coldly. "You call yourselves Magi. Did not one of you notice a thing?"

"The Plague Scrapcode spread out of Magma City, and Magma City is precisely where you went to inspect in person! Should you not answer for that?"

"Answer for it? Only now do you remember to make me answer for something?"

Kubik was so furious he laughed. He strode forward and hauled several Magi out of the crowd. Half-wrecked as he was, his sheer physical advantage let him crush their resistance without effort.

The others recognized the men at once as Kubik's own retainers — the very ones who had supervised the Magma City project and reported on it to the Forge Director.

Kubik ripped out every mechanical implant in their bodies, brutal and thorough. The savagery of the punishment sent a stir through the watching Magi, but since the victims were his own subordinates, they held back and watched for now.

His standing rebuilt on the punishment of his own retainers, Kubik turned and swept a cold gaze across the rest of the chamber.

"I have sinned against Mars. I have failed the Omnissiah; I have failed the Omnissiah. I would gladly strip myself of office with my own hands! And you? You Magi — are your hands so clean?!"

"I know that some of you are filthier than my retainers ever were! For your own gain you bury intelligence, you lie to those above you and cheat those below, and some of you have even made pacts with Chaos! Mars has fallen this far, and you bear no responsibility for it at all?!"

The Magi said nothing. A few lowered their heads; more remained unmoved, watching Kubik with cold indifference.

Naming the private agendas the Magi were nursing won Kubik back only a portion of the authority that belonged to a Fabricator General. Until the clash of interests among them was settled, his seat was not secure.

Passing between those who had declined to declare themselves, Kubik walked back under their encircling stares to the highest seat of the Forge Council — the seat that was his.

With his Battle-Automata legion gone and his data-throne lost, he felt the weight of that seat for the first time.

His defeat had been sealed the moment he chose Augustus to carry out the teleportation project. But he would let no one strip his seat from him because of it.

He would be the eternal king of Mars.

"Project the current state of Mars," Kubik ordered the cogitator.

A map of Mars unfolded. The line of advance of the daemons and the ghouls was marked in a stark crimson — though set against the whole of the planet, the threat still looked negligible.

Most of Mars's civilian and production facilities were marked in fault-yellow. The scrapcode lacked the power to destroy them outright, but bringing them back would demand enormous effort and no small amount of time.

Military installations, most of which could sever their links to the main network at critical moments, had escaped the worst. But Skitarii combat power was inseparable from logistics; until production recovered, their fighting strength would be badly blunted all the same.

In the eyes of most of the Magi, though, the forces already at hand were enough to deal with the daemons.

They still had no idea what kind of threat had taken root on Mars, judging from its scale alone that it would not spread. What most of them wanted was simply someone else to carry the blame, so they could keep their production lines and private armies intact.

The Fabricator General, who had felt that enemy's peculiar talent for corrupting machines firsthand, did not share their view. He knew exactly what letting these enemies run loose would cost.

But words alone proved nothing, and with his authority in tatters he could not squeeze a single credit out of these Magi.

Kubik was silent for a moment, turning solutions over in his mind.

His failure with the teleportation project had spilled out to touch all of Mars, and had curdled into a crisis of confidence in him.

He had no data-throne now, no Battle-Automata legion; the old method of enforcing his will through raw power no longer worked. If he wanted these Magi to stop questioning him, he would have to end this crisis himself.

But how?

Mars held no shortage of forbidden weapons of terrible power — yet the Priests understood neither their principles nor how to control their yield. There was no circumstance in which such killing tools could be dropped on his own head.

In the end the problem would have to be solved by conventional means. If only the Titan Legion were willing to attack…

At that thought, he looked to the Titan Legion colonel standing to one side.

"Is the Fire Wasps Legion combat-ready?"

"Regrettably, no. Our God-Machines have all suffered scrapcode contamination to one degree or another."

The Titan Congregation, standing outside the Forge Council's hierarchy, was the absolute pillar of Mars's defence. The Fire Wasps, a Titan Legion raised long before the Unification Wars, were Martian might made manifest. Vashtorr understood that as well as anyone, and when he loosed the scrapcode plague he had concentrated his attack on the Titan Academy where the Fire Wasps were stationed.

The God-Machines had not lost their ability to fight because of it. But the Titan Congregation judged that sending those Titans to the battlefield would mean unnecessary losses.

"If the Titans are given maintenance, how soon can they take the field?" Kubik pressed, and his question was refused outright by the Titan Legion.

"We do not march out while we lack the capacity to maintain them."

The Fire Wasps had once been a colossus of more than three hundred God-Machines, only to be crippled in Horus's Great Heresy. Of Mars's three original Titan Legions, only the Fire Wasps remained — and even they had come within a breath of extinction.

A thousand years of rebuilding had barely restored them to a hundred machines, and once the forces away on distant campaigns were subtracted, only fifty God-Machines were left.

Faced with a request from a Fabricator General whose influence was already slipping, the Fire Wasps had no intention of sending these precious possessions of the Omnissiah out to run both a military and a political risk.

Kubik had expected as much, and was displeased anyway. Even at the height of his power he had never been able to compel the Titan Congregation's full obedience. He turned to the Deputy Forge Director. "How many Skitarii do we still hold under direct command?"

"One million at full readiness, deployable at any moment, and two million more who can join the battle after minor adjustment. But our power and munitions reserves are both a problem. If we are to sustain a high-intensity offensive, our supplies will only support five hundred thousand Skitarii."

"…That will do."

Kubik weighed the balance.

The Fire Wasps' refusal to involve themselves taught him something: if he gambled everything on ending this crisis, these people would simply impeach him the moment it was over.

He had to let the crisis ferment, in measure, until everyone recognized the threat these enemies posed. Then he would extend favour to a chosen few and draw them into a united front behind him. Only that would keep him seated as Fabricator General.

With that, he made his decision.

"Priority goes to purging the scrapcode and restoring Martian production. I will allocate Skitarii under Mars's direct command to assist those Magi lying in the daemons' path."

The Magi whose holdings lay off the line of advance had the answer they wanted. Those whose immediate interests stood in danger accepted that losses were unavoidable, but now owed the Fabricator General a debt for the joint defence.

The friction between the two camps gradually subsided, and the Magi began returning to their own domains to prepare for what came next.

Kubik imagined that these Magi, content for the moment to sit on the mountain and watch the tigers fight, would come in time to appreciate how dangerous Vashtorr was, and that those unable to hold back the invasion would have no choice but to attach themselves to him and become his new retainers.

When that day came he would consolidate the strength of Mars once more, securing his seat as Fabricator General and annihilating the threats that had stripped him of face inside Magma City.

It would leave the enemy some room to exploit, true. But Kubik believed everything remained within his plan.

He rose to leave, meaning to return to his private temple and see to the repair of his broken frame. The Deputy Forge Director stopped him and laid out one further piece of intelligence.

"Magos Lin has turned the Iron Hands and seized the Moravec Forge Station. The Ultimate Wall has also sent down a force of roughly fifty thousand, along with the Exemplary Fists, to link up with him on the surface. They have begun raiding production lines in every direction, using the Moravec Forge Station as their hub. How should we deal with them?"

Setback after setback had nearly driven the matter from Kubik's mind. He had turned hostile toward the Ultimate Wall over the teleportation project only because Augustus had deceived and manoeuvred him into it. Now that the project had failed and Augustus had turned traitor, he had no reason left to remain their enemy.

"One forge station and a pack of failures the Iron Hands threw away. Leave them where they are for now, but forbid them from bringing any more troops onto Mars. As for their looting while the house burns…"

Kubik thought for a moment, and realized these people might well become an asset to him in the coming struggle against Skarbrand and Vashtorr.

A small band of Astartes, given the right exchange of interests, could help him drive the daemons back and steady his throne.

More to the point, however large their appetite grew, they would never threaten him as much as the Archmagi of Mars circling the Fabricator General's seat.

Kubik decided he ought to extend them a little goodwill to ease the friction.

After confirming that there were no important production lines anywhere near the Moravec Forge Station, and no property of his own either, he waved a hand and made his ruling.

"I will treat their conduct as compensation for our earlier conflict. Tolerate it quietly and make no declaration either way. At the same time, send an envoy to make contact with Lin. Whatever negotiations pass between us and the Ultimate Wall will need him as the intermediary."

[Author's Note: Come to think of it, the Deathwatch was founded during the Beast War, though I've already rewritten the plot pretty heavily, so a rather different Deathwatch will turn up later on. More on that when I get to it.]

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