Davik Thune had waited for weeks. He had shut down his Gellar fields when they had impeded his path, and the Emperor, despite the claims of the now dead navigators, had protected them better than those ancient relics ever could! His men had braced, prepared to be overwhelmed by the endless tide of damnantion which owned the warp and all who served it. And yet, no such unrushing of daemons came.
Things came, of that he was certain, but they were not the vicious entities his men had been ready to die fighting. A black and white fog had blown into his ship, moving through walls and bodies without pause or impediment. With this strange mist came souls, but not many. Some were Xenos, some were human. All were dazed, drifting, and utterly uninterested in them.
He would have had his Librarians capture some of them for interrogation, but they were too busy steering his ships in place of the Navigators. Those heretics had claimed the Emperor was dead, they had claimed his light had vanished. And yet what else could this be, but the Emperor's own aiges? They died traitors' deaths, and the survival of his fleet in the naked warp was all the vindication he needed in order to know for certain that he had been right.
And he had been right for weeks! He had been waiting, watching. And at long last, they had arrived. He did not know if this galaxy was even their own, but he knew that coming here would tell him for certain. He had been here, after all, during the fall. He had watched, wounded and from orbit when Cadia was finally brought to its knees.
Davik had watched as Abbadon, sixteen times damned traitor, had hurled the ruins of his greatest weapon at Cadia, discarding the power and knowledge of an entire Blackstone fortress and several of his own men and ships to steal a bitter victory from the clutches of honorable defeat. Like a petulant child sweeping the board of a game he simply was not going to win, Abbadon bled himself, bled his black legion, and did what no one else had ever done. What no one else would ever do again, thus was how complete the shattering of Cadia had been.
It was a vision he knew more intimately and painfully than any other, and he had worked hard in the time since then to overcome the defeat they had all suffered there that day. Davik had become Chapter Master of the Crimson Razors, had changed from being a detractor of the controversial reforms of his forebears, to being their foremost champion. All of this he had done with the thought of Cadia's shattered stellar body trapped forever in his mind's eye.
It was an image he knew better than any other. And it was not the image that greeted his hungering eyes as his battle barge, The Black Crimson, emerged from the warp. What he saw instead of the haunted ruin of Cadia and its sister planets, was interesting, but unwelcomed. This confirmed his suspicions, they were no longer within the bounds of the milky way galaxy. Their desperate dash through the thinnest tendril of the Cicatrix Maledictum had somehow cast them to a different Galaxy, or perhaps a parallel universe.
He cared not for which one was the case. Before him lay a system with two heavily populated Xenos worlds, clearly at war. The most heavily populated planet was an enormous urban world, clearly some kind of hive world for the xenos who lived there. It was surrounded by a fleet of escort ships shaped like white and red arrowheads. Opposing the arrows was a more varied fleet of cigar shaped and oval shaped ships.
They seemed to be in a standoff, neither side fighting the other, their presences holding hostilities in check. But around the less populated planet, there seemed to be much more occurring. Many ships gathered around this sphere as well, but they seemed to be exchanging fire, contesting the space and making Davik certain of the conflict they were engaged in.
Already they had dispatched wings of Fury attack craft and thunderhawks to scout the area and retrieve more data. This system was where the Cadia system was meant to be. If for no other reason than the honor it's memory, Davik would purge it, and make it a mirror of the devastation that belonged there.
He did not have to wait long.
"My lord...we are receiving troubling information from the scouts." Said an officer near him, his head and face heavily augmented to allow for the receiving and transmission of broadcast communications.
"Speak it!" Davik growled.
"Yes, uh, it would appear that one of the armies is composed predominantly of humans." The officer said.
At this Davik perked up. Humans? Then perhaps there was a purpose to being in this galaxy after all. But his pondering on such possibilities were cut violently short when his officer concluded his report.
"And the other side appears to...appears to be making rampant use of abdonamble Intelligence!"
Davik rose from his command throne, his ancient armor whining as he rushed to the hololithic display.
"How much?!" He growled.
"Like the Tau? Like the Eldar?"
The officer shook his head, eyes wide.
"N-No my lord. They...they are all machines! No biologicals found amongst them!" He reported.
"Necrons!" The Chapter Master of the Crimson Razors swore.
"It will be them that we attack first. Leave no xenos machine or construct standing! Tell the Astra Militarum to prepare themselves. We are taking the planet they are fighting over, we are cleaning it of all Xenos and all AI. Then we shall move to the next planet. If the humans capitulate, then perhaps there will be a place for them. If not, then let us remember that the fate of heretics, traitors, xenos, and abominations are all one and the same!"
It was dark and red, the lights only dimly illuminating the cylindrical interior of the boarding torpedo. The marines were mag locked into place, standing in two rows. The smell of scented ashes, sweet and strong, filled the recycled air. Many of the brothers whispered hymns of wrath, most said nothing, eyes still and straight ahead, thumbs tracing the triggers of chainswords, the hilts of combat knives, the internal, cushioned suspension harnesses of their power fists.
Brother Araknus clutched his bolter tightly, both hands. In Spite of their namesake, the Crimson Razors had always been true sons of Dorn, truer even than the Black Templars. And while the original Fists had been no slouches with chainswords, it was with the Bolter that the Emperor's Vengeance was to be delivered!
And, In Spite of the many changes that had taken the chapter in recent centuries, changes that made them more and more resemble the aforementioned Templars, all of the old guard, all of the Veterans, all of the true crusaders, still executed Dorn's fury with precise, professional shots from one the small, thundering dragons the tech priests crafted for them, bolters such as the one he now carried in his hands. She was an ancient thing, built thousands of years ago, built to kill the mechanical monstrosities of the Terriphont entente.
It had done its job well, the Terriphont, and all of their constituent races, were utterly extinguished. He could almost feel its machine spirit stirring, waking from centuries of sleep in the hopes of doing once more what it had done so proudly before.
"Soon...soon…"
The Black Templars did have one thing right. Above nearly all other chapters, within and without the legion of Dorn, they did stand apart in at least one crucial way. The Emperor was not simply the greatest scion of humanity, not only the mightiest champion of mankind, it's ruler, it's Emperor. No. He who now sat the Golden throne was not merely the most formidable psycher to ever live. The Emperor of Mankind was a God! A true God! The ONLY God!
And in the bestowing of that truth through their actions at the ascension wars so many centuries ago, they earned some grudging respect from Araknus. But their obsession with swords, with blade work, had infected the younger marines in his chapter. And so Brother Araknus would show them, and would lead by example. Would demonstrate, with lethal zeal and unerring precision, why the OLD way was the BEST way!
The drill tube hit, and in milliseconds, breached the outer layer of the ship they were boarding. The front end blew open, and his fire team of five spilled out into the space. It was over in an instant, laughably easy. They had crashed through the transparent steel of the bridge of the ship, and inside were several beings. Most of these things were machines, the hated AI the Emperor himself had banned from existence!
But the exception among them was only marginally less abhorrent. A standing spider like Xeno, covered in cybernetic augmentations composed of its profane, alien technology. Still, it was the lesser priority, something all realized as they stormed the machines. And yet, despite the blinding speed of their movements, the faultless zeal and fury of their charge, the devastating power of the blows they sought to unleash upon these mechanical abominations, not one would have the chance.
Brother Araknus's bolter let loose a hail of fire, each projectile coughed out by the thundering weapon carrying itself on a micro engine, whipping through space with a velocity which tore the air itself. Reticles had appeared in his helmet display, highlighting each enemy with unerring accuracy, showing their bodies, the density of the cover that stood between he and they, if any, and singled out projected areas of weaknesses, heads, hearts, groins.
He didn't even remotely need them. Nearly two hundred years of constant, escalating training and war against foes who's numbers knew no end, and who's forms knew no boundary of reason or dignity, had honed his mind into a killing cogitator which could far outstrip anything forged by pathetically artificial means. He was the Blood of Dorn! He was the Rage of Man!
But he did not shout this, not with his mouth. He shouted it with his bolter as it rained micro missiles like death upon all false life in the room, each round finding a head, a chassis, or landing close enough to the target to destroy their bodies from proximity to the detonating bolt rounds. Chainswords slashed, power fists clenched, and combat knives gouged, but they stole no life that Brother Araknus's beloved bolter had not already taken. His younger brother turned, helmed faces masking glares, but Brother Araknus merely smiled into his mask and shrugged his shoulders.
The only one who had not even bothered, who had clearly foreseen the example he had intended to set, was Brother Tasleon, their Tech Marine. Several times the Veteran that Araknus himself was, but barely a space marine in his opinion. Even without his encompassing armor present, Araknus doubted that any flesh could be seen remaining on brother Tasleon's metal body.
Just as most of the brothers of his chapter had come to recognise the Emperor as the one true God, so too had Tasleon and the other Tech Marines of the Chapter come to worship the nearly profine concept of the Machine God and all the augmentations that came with it. They professed loyalty and faith in the Chapter and Emperor as well, in the form of the Omnissiah, but in truth, Brother Araknus didn't trust it, and he wasn't the only one.
Brother Tasleon seemed to glide across the room on a writhing, coordinated swarm of metallic tendrils and ambidextrous arms, moving over the machine corpses and consoles of the bridge with ease as he made his way to the main computer, and the organic cyborg standing near it. He crawled like a massive arthropod over the command throne of the ship, tendrils, finding access panels, producing many varied input and output slots and patterns, testing them against every type of port and slot as his central, barely human form, leered down upon the Xeno through glow mechanical lenses.
The throne sparked and chimed discordantly as several tendrils managed to connect to the machine.
"Give me full access to this ship." The Tech marine ordered the spider being, using its own language to do it.
"I-I cannot! I do not know who you are, or why you are here, but Count Dooku would kill me if I-" He got no further as several tendrils snapped out, surrounding the alien and enveloping him.
The Xeno may have begged for its life, or may have stood firm, prepared to resist all. That was irrelevant, and the unverified conclusion of its actions didn't bother brother Tasleon in the slightest as his mechadendrites found the access and input slots around the alien Admiral's collar. Its body went rigged as its mind was invaded.
The techmarine could not help but feel a grudging respect for what he found. The technology was very...clean, efficient. The mind's impulse connection between the mechanical limbs and the alien brain which controlled them was sublime, smooth, and afforded him easy, almost pleasurable access into the creature's thoughts.
That was not to say that it was without defensess, as several neural nets, firewalls, and proxy signals were deployed in rapid succession to drive him out. But they barely slowed him down, after all, compared to the religious obsession of the defense rituals which guarded Adeptus Mechanicus systems of all kinds, the timeless, almost mindless force of Necron defense protocols, and the living, and corrupting horror of data daemon counter engrams, these defenses were trivial.
And so while the alien was technically not without defenses, it would be misleading to believe that he was anything but defenseless before the dissecting data drills and sypher sundering engrams which the techmarine countered with. In the end, it was only Will and Will alone which could stand against any true invasion of the mind, and the will of the spider being was a sly, pernicious, but subtle thing, and it crumpled in his metaphorical fist when confronted so directly and so mercilessly.
And so, like a beast having brought down its wounded prey, Brother Tasleon begins to dissect and devour the information contained within the mind of the Xeno. It was called Trench, and fought for the "Confederacy of Independent Systems". The Alien screamed, panic and horror spilling over its thoughts as it began to realize what was being done to it. Tasleon wiped the desperate emotions away, like a callous surgeon wiping gore off his eyeshield.
It was here fighting "The Galactic Republic". It was about to retreat from this battle...it had set a bomb to explode, a bomb that would wipe out the planet, and the combined armies beneath them. It struggled and kicked in the marine's mental grasp, but he held it firm and tight as he forced the probes of his mind deeper, seeking the information he now needed.
The Bomb's deactivation code. Realizing his intention, the Xenos flailed one last time, using all of its strength and will. It struggled so hard, so violently, that it tore its own mind to shreds, and its mental circuits, never having been designed to maintain this kind of input and output strain, burnt out. But despite succeeding in depriving Brother Tasleon of further tertiary data, the alien had failed to keep from him the deactivation code to the bomb.
Still connected to the main console, he began eating and chewing his way through its security protocols and defenses. He had not gotten THAT access code, and he even feared that, despite the ship's inability to resist him forever, it would resist him long enough to enable the bomb to go off. The Chapter Master had expressed a desire to conquer this world, allowing the Xenos to destroy it ahead of their advance would not benefit the Omnissiah.
And then he found something...interesting. An exterior connection, another hacker doing something similar to what he was doing. And it was not merely a man or woman at a panel. It was a mindlinked unit, just like himself. He seized the individual violently and by surprise, penetrating deeply into its mental defenses before it even realized what was happening.
And as Talseon closed his fingers around this being's thoughts, he was shocked, and for the first time in a long time, stunned, by what he discovered. A human, a fellow human! Certainly of a different culture, a different mindset, but undeniably a human. Here? Among these machines? He squeezed, and compelled the mentally constrained man to identify himself. He resisted and was gradually forced to capitulate.
In a desperate, mental gasp, the being named itself.
"Echo! My name is Echo! And if you are not a separatist, then I am not your enemy!"