While most of the systems within the Nexus Unity’s borders were utterly desote or at best half-terraformed before the Imperium was forced to abandon them, Nexus surveyor scans ter on picked up anomalous readings on certain pnets, particurly those once earmarked for the Mechanicum.
Most were little more than alien ruins, ancient even before humanity’s sapience. Their discovery sparked off a mix of wonder and wariness within the Nexus’ citizens, enough that Sev’s announcement of new xenoanthropology department heralded a rash of new dramas and literature of newly recruited space explorers delving into mysterious alien crypts or heroically saving the day before Sev did from horrors they accidentally unleashed by tripping over a half-unearthed artifact.
It was just another sobering and exciting development for the common citizens of the Nexus, further proof that beyond space pirates and space super mutants, there were civilizations out there who hit the dead end that was complete extinction. Despite all the interest around the topic, few actually enrolled into the studies of alien culture. Most of the Nexus’ current knowledge of the greater gaxy beyond their recovering world was cimed from the archives of the Imperium.
The rest were gained from what could scarcely be called medical knowledge gained from the imprisoned minds of the Commorite Eldar.
As such, the newly established xenoanthropology department was mostly staffed by former Mechanicum tech-priests who would soon descend upon the ruins of those dead worlds in a simir fvor of curiosity compared to their previous calling. Ancient architecture would be carefully unearthed, excavations would be conducted, and everything that could be pried for information would be archived for more thorough study back in the Nexus’ academic complexes.
For the odd world that wasn't as dead as the initial Imperium surveys had reported though, those were quarantined from the Nexus public.
“Alright boys and girls, final checks.” Edward stamped down on the unnatural itch in the back of his head as he ran through the diagnostics fshing through his helmet’s HUD. Everything was green (except for the defensive runes; those only glowed when there was trouble), just like back in training, but it would still take some time yet to get used to the sensation of being in new armor.
11th-gen Sardaukar armor saw the implementation of the ‘necrodermis’ smart liquid metal that was gleaned off the semi-eldritch C’tan thing Sev had defeated and dragged home from the Imperium’s Mars. Necrodermis (lousy name, if you asked Edward) provided an immense increase to mundane durability, as well as self-repair capability. The semi-fluid nature of the material meant that the armor system could now ‘melt’ to fit into a small case, and be worn simply by pouring it onto its wielder.
It felt like being drenched in cold, quick drying slime though.
There were limitations, however. Due to being basically a hyper-advanced form of nanoswarm, necrodermis didn’t py nice with various metanatural enhancements. Something about needing to individually consecrate each nanoparticle, which is impractical. The need for a still undeciphered mental/digital interface to shape the metal into more complex forms also restrained necrodermis into mere armor ptes, instead of giving the troopers the ability to form literal knife arms and such.
As such, necrodermis only served as the first yer of protection on 11th-gen Sardaukar armor, reinforcing the more traditional enchanted gear and multi-dimensional wards. It would, on paper, allow a soldier of the Nexus to withstand nearly twice the mundane forces than it usually could.
In reality, Edward had yet to find anything to put that cim to test, though he wouldn’t compin if that day never came.
After the various troopers sounded off, Edward and the soldiers of the 1st braced themselves for the fsh of teleportation. They emerged at the day’s point of interest, a rge sinkhole in the middle of a barren husk of a world. Robotic scouts had already picked up exotic energy readings from within, simir to the energies given off by the captured Star God. Sensor sweeps revealed a vast, blocky city buried nearly a mile underground, with a scattering of movement detected.
Sev had aptly beled the site a tomb city, which supposedly hosted the hibernating former servant/sves of the C’tan. There were Eldar folk stories about the Necrons, but Edward wasn’t interested in alien lore. He trusted Lelith and her people enough to take her words at face value, and the Nexus’ xeno-researchers hadn’t found any discrepancies so far.
Even with his helmet’s sensor suit, Edward found himself peering into the darkness of the sinkhole. It was a clean vertical hole, with nothing sticking out for at least a mile. He did spy discoloration where streaks of rock and soil had vitrified. The b coats back home specuted that it’s due to either energy emissions, or a massive blowout from one of the structures below.
Edward personally hoped for the tter; the former meant that they could be descending right as another emission was scheduled. The troops might survive the bst, but being punted out of the pnet’s thin atmosphere and into space was a humiliation the 1st didn’t need in their record.
“Is there really no other insertion point?” a deep, half-growling voice asked through the general comms.
“None that doesn’t require a lot of digging,” the commander of the 1st answered with stoic resignation. He turned just in time to see the approach of Kharn, the right hand of Angron. As they exchanged salutary nods, Edward noted the difference between the Nexus’ take on legionnaire power armor with the original design.
The engineers at Ix had miniaturized most of the internal components, and used a more optimized ceramite recipe recovered from the literal dust covered archives under the Imperium’s Mars. All that meant enough space was freed up to shrink the whole armor down a few inches, while still accommodating a new internal power system that repced the backpack powerpnt. The fusion cores that had once been an expensive commodity in Edward’s pre-Sev life were now finding a new purpose in powering the World Eaters’ equipment.
As the World Eaters were now semi-autonomous vassals of the Nexus Unity, Sev had granted them the tech and tools required for self sufficiency. As they weren’t fully integrated into the Nexus yet, the fugitive legion had been given more obsolete schematics, mostly stuff improved from the Imperium’s current tech.
Edward had initially thought Sev had been a bit spiteful to do that, but then word spread that it was actually Curie and the researchers of Ix who had wanted to prove a point to the Mechanicum. Something about giving the middle finger to superstitious shits.
The result of that was the World Eater’s equerry and the company of legionnaires behind him all having sleeker silhouettes, and each wreathed in the near-invisible shimmer of force fields. They looked a lot sleeker, and maybe to less civilized minds they seemed less intimidating, but Edward had seen the trials, and trusted these marines to perform significantly better on the field, which frankly was all that truly mattered.
“Do we jump in?” Kharn asked as he cast a gnce to the sinkhole. An expected question seeing that there were only troopers and legionnaires standing about, with no transport vehicles.
“Nah.” Edward gestured upwards with a nod. “We’re waiting for the scans to finish before they give us the green light to ‘port down there.”
“Teleportation?”
“If you and your crew want to freefall a mile into the abyss, and maybe trigger any dormant defenses on the way down, feel free.”
Kharn gave a grunt and left it at that. They waited for a while longer before Eva’s voice pinged in the general channel, providing the optimal coordinates for an entry while also warning them of potential comms disruption once they entered the tomb city.
Being potentially isoted and trapped sounded truly scary the first time they heard it, but after doomsday rituals in pocket dimensions, and heavily eldritch sunken temples with its sleeping gods just needing an excuse to awaken to end the world, Edward was beginning to feel that such warnings were obligatory precautions more than anything else
The troopers of the 1st guided the World Eaters on how to set up the portable teleport reys and how to key their suits to the relevant points. Their power armor utilized a more basic suite that didn’t exploit the Nexus’ multidimensional access, so the inputs were simpler. But these ‘posthumans’ were once supplied by tech cultists who believed that sprinkling holy lubricant onto nuts and bolts was an important step to assembling a machine, so the handholding process was a reasonable precaution in Edward’s mind.
With the fallbacks set up, Nexus troopers and Astartes legionnaires assembled side by side. A Sentinel flew overhead, and then dove straight down into the sinkhole. It took only a few seconds before there was a ping in Edward’s HUD.
“Teleporting!”
The armed men and women raised their weapons as the reys sparked to life. There was the familiar blinding fsh and thundercp, and they found themselves in near-pitch darkness. At least for a fraction of a second, before their helmets’ multispectrum sensors activated.
With some surprise, Edward found himself standing at the lip of an ugly gash of a hole wide enough for a couple of Mad Cats to jump straight into, where vitrified earth gave way to eerily dark, matte bck stonework. Looks like it was a blowout after all. Judging from the scraps of bckstone littering the gssed dirt walls, it must have been some containment failure.
“Right, boys and girls. You know the drill.”
After setting up a teleport rey, Edward ordered the 1st to begin descending, Kharn and his squad leaders did the same for the World Eaters. Their methods were simir on the surface; both groups quickly leapt down and fanned out to establish a perimeter and secure the entry point. But where the Nexus elite raised their rifles to form tight groups of overpping gunlines close to the dropzone, the World Eaters advanced further out like packs of wolves with weapons itching to be used. The stark glow of their psma guns and pistols, and the crackles of their power weapons, marked them out in the gloom, which, judging from the size of the space, occupied a stadium-sized chamber.
As Edward swept his gaze about, he noted the utter ck of furniture or ornamentation. The lightless walls of the massive chamber were just as smooth as the ground. Somewhere on the far end, there was a perfectly circur tunnel…
“We’re in a silo.”
“Come again?” Sylvie asked, and Edward turned to regard the other troopers.
“We’re in a container…probably liquid, seeing how there’s not a scrap of anything in here…”
Someone looked up at the hole they just dropped in from, and then simply asked, “Votile?”
“Probably. With any luck-”
“Don’t jinx it,” Benji interrupted dryly.
Edward grinned and gave a short ugh before nodding. “Assume whatever pumping station is offline but not broken down.” He gnced again at the tunnel. “To be safe, we’ll seal up that pipe, and make another breach.”
None of the 1st protested the idea, and neither did the World Eaters. A couple squads jogged over to the mouth of the massive pipe, and got to work summoning a crystal barrier. At the same time, other groups spread out to quietly prod at the walls with dowsing sticks or gss-encased eyeballs to figure out the best pce for a breach. With some relief, Kharn and his legionnaires were content to stand back and watch, though Edward could only imagine what chatter must be going on in their tactical channel.
After checking a few sites against the orbital mapping of the site, they picked a spot and prepped for entry. By now, the tunnel was plugged by a jagged wall of metanaturally stable crystal that dug into the bckstone walls.
With no reaction yet from the tomb city, Edward opted to continue maintaining their retive stealth, so instead of demo charges they pnted a one-way teleport beacon on the wall. Everyone backed up a fair bit (in case of a repeat of R’lyeh) before the teleporter was primed. Faster than a blink the designated patch of wall just disappeared and left in its wake a perfect circle and a faint tremor that rippled under Edward’s feet.
Sinister green light immediately spilled in, offering a view on the other side that was filled with blocky pyramid-like architecture and floating obelisks. Sardaukar and World Eaters were tinted green as they walked through the portal, and there was a moment’s pause as everyone took in the sight of the tomb city proper.
Filling their vision was a sprawling complex entirely made of bck monolithic blocks and pyramids, highlighted with green lightning here and there. It was all huge, too, everything looked like someone took a set of children’s pying blocks and supersized them to the scale of hills and skyscrapers.
There were obelisks and crescent-shaped arches and tubur buildings whose purpose were not immediately known, yet Edward got a sense that the structures were definitely inactive at the moment. Perhaps more amazingly was the fact that the dormant metropolis existed in such a vast cavernous space. The earth that encased the subterranean complex was smooth, with nary a stactite or outcrop in sight.
A forcefield of sorts?
Before Edward could consider that point any further, his helmet’s HUD marked potential movement amidst the green washed gloom.
“Possible contact.” It was an unnecessary warning, as everyone else, trooper and Astartes, picked up the same signal and fixed their attention to the source.
At first, Edward thought the arcs of lightning from the structures had come alive and begun swarming like a crackling stormcloud towards them. His helmet’s sensors quickly proved his assumption false though, marking out a ton of individual physical entities instead. Instead of some lightning elemental, the tomb city had thrown a swarm of metal and green light at them.
“Fall back into the silo,” Edward calmly ordered, and his troopers smoothly withdrew, with the World Eaters following suit a few seconds ter. A concave of guns was set up around the breach, the troopers’ sleeker T-shard rifles mingling with the blockier, glowing psma rifles and cannons of the legionnaires.
Seconds ter, there wasn’t the explosive tremor of impact as Edward had expected. The only sign of the swarm reaching the breach was when it actually poured through it with the deafening, ear grating sound of a million chittering vermin. In the back of his head, the commander was mildly impressed; the blood critters from Tenochtitn and the Swarm of Rust from the Chinese cyborgs had been far less considerate about colteral when they were deployed.
Presently, Edward noted that this metallic swarm was made of cyclopean beetle-like constructs with short stubby legs. Each had a single eye that glowed with the same light as the lightning of the tomb city. Sensors picked up unusually high energy output coming from their mandibles, though thankfully there was nothing metanatural about it.
“Fire!” On Edward’s order, a hail of T-shards cut into the bubbling swarm of metal vermin and caused the incursion to shrink back as crystalline projectiles sliced neatly through multiple beetles.
Then the World Eaters unleashed their own firearms, and fat blue psma bolts flew and detonated prettily in the swarm. As Edward understood it, the Imperium’s fvor of psma technology was far deadlier but also far more votile compared to what the pre-wastend weapons Edward’s own world had. It was also more complex and more resource intensive to produce.
For the Mechanicum, at least.
Fed by the Nexus’ fusion cores and upgraded to a more stable system, the new psma weapons had repced explosive bolt and heat ray weapon systems as the World Eaters’ new default primary weapon. Because it was still based on Imperium tech, the heat sink coils were still exposed for maximal venting, where their glow could help the wielder to know when the weapon was on the verge of shutting down to avoid melting due to extreme overheat.
It sounded bad at face value, but compared to its predecessors that would’ve instead risked catastrophic explosion the moment the coils started glowing too hot? It was a significant upgrade in Edward’s mind. Now at least they only needed to retrieve the gun and repce the melted coils, instead of picking up the scraps of a blown-up weapon and peeling off the melted remains of its user.
In the same vein, the World Eaters all wielded power weapons now, a fact that Kharn and a few others seemed to appreciate as they swung their bdes about to swat down any metal beetles that got too close. Like psma tech, the circuitry and power systems that sheathed the swords and axes in a molecur disruption field were considered rare and intensive enough to produce that it wasn’t standard kit. And like psma tech, the Nexus had taken a look at it, upgraded it, and gave the World Eaters the means to mass produce power weapons as they saw fit.
At the moment, the World Eaters were making good use of their upgrades. Streams of psma bolts filled the air, arguably doing a better job at containing the swarm thanks to their potential for colteral compared to the T-shard rifles. The rger psma cannons especially spat out blobs of superheated psma that engulfed multiple beetles in their way, and the subsequent explosions created bubbles of sgged vermin. Power axes and swords shed out to litter the ground with bisected insects. The World Eaters fought with an impressive mix of precision and brutality, tracking targets and reacting to threats far faster than a normal human could. No doubt their power armor helped a bit in accomplishing such feats, but still, quite impressive.
A good thing that Sev had blessed the 1st with his divinity, so that they could be more than a match for such standards. Edward and his troopers made up for their guns’ ck of colteral damage by spraying the air with Tiberium shards. Their rifles had a far rger ammo pool compared to the World Eaters’ psma guns, which gave them far less down time, which meant more time killing beetles.
Edward didn’t think that the 1st would need to compete with and show off to the World Eaters, but he did believe that Sev’s devotees should adhere to a standard, and that standard was to be better than anything else the universe threw at them.
The metallic swarm was slowly whittled down, and eventually pushed out of the breach. The ground became a carpet of melted and shredded robotic insects, which crunched quite satisfactorily as the troopers and legionnaires began advancing. They were about to push out of the breach when new enemies appeared, literally flowing out of the walls.
These new insectoids floated through the air like short, bus-sized centipedes with massive cws, and long and segmented whip-like tails. They effortlessly flitted through the silo’s walls and ground, utilizing the phasing capabilities the Nexus was still trying to refine. It was partly why they were down here in the first pce.
The phasing also meant that the joint expedition force would have to be careful. While in theory the forcefields would be effective against quantum phasing, Edward didn’t want to risk the overload the b coats in Ix had theorized was highly unlikely to happen. So they fired at the new enemy, and watched as psma rounds and T-shards flew through the intangible foe. A few wraith-like robots were shot as they tried lunging with their cws to nce a trooper or legionnaire, dropping them in sgged heaps. The rest of them then seemed content to remain phased as they whirled about in the air and between the walls, probably to exhaust the intruders’ ammo.
“Bind them!” Edward shouted, and immediately a few troopers put away their rifles to rummage through their pouches and began chanting. “Kharn, we need to buy some time. Keep them at a distance.”
“Understood.”
The air continued to be filled with the thrum of psma bolts and the whistling of crystalline shards, until the final words of Yog-Sothoth’s invocation were spoken. Immediately after, the air felt heavy, and the shields on the Sardaukar suits flickered as a yer was stripped from them. The insectoid robots dropped out of their phasing, some letting out aborted shrieks and slumping dead as too much of them became part of the silo’s bckstone wall.
There was no need to give the order after that. Everyone was still shooting, so their shots found the now very corporeal forms of the tomb city’s guardians. Green-glowing robots exploded or fell apart in chunks, and seconds ter the battle was over. Every beetle or wraith centipede before Edward was in various states of destruction, and nothing new came out of the breach.
A pity that didn’t st when they exited the silo once more.
This time, instead of a swarm, Edward heard the unmistakable sounds of marching feet. Columns of hunched, skeletal robots marched in lockstep down the tomb city’s roads towards the silo, each dragging along weapons that sparked with the same green lightning as the environs around them.
“Joy…” Kharn dryly commented, as everyone started raising their weapons again.
A sudden machine-like blurt from all around them interrupted Edward’s rejoinder, and with a fsh of lightning several figures appeared floating in the air before them.
Well, not exactly floating…they were all standing on a rge disc of sorts.
All of them were skeleton-like robots, like the ones marching in columns. Except these ones were not hunched over, and sported status symbols like headdresses, cloaks made of segmented metal pieces, and glowing polearms. The eye sockets in their thin skulls glowed with baleful light that would’ve once scared the shit out of Edward.
The one in the center of the group, the one that wore a rger metal-piece cloak and sported more gold in his headpiece, took a step forwards and raised its arm to point condescendingly at them. The same mechanical blurt shrieked again as it addressed them. Edward didn’t understand a word, but he understood the intent and there was no mistaking the outrage in the delivery.
This robot was either the lord of this pce, or its mouthpiece, and it was pissed at having trespassers.
Its arm swept towards the advancing columns, and then curled up in a threatening manner. Then it gestured some more, including rapping it's polebde on the disc angrily.
Oh, for Sev’s sake… It took a second before Edward realized what was happening.
It was monologuing.
Edward snapped his rifle up as the speaker had its gaze raised to the roof above and arms spread out as if addressing the stars beyond the mile of soil, and sent a stream of T-shards straight into its upturned head before its bodyguards could react. The rest of the 1st and the World Eaters followed suit, and between them the storm of fire erased everything on the disc, and then the disc itself. A few melted limbs and ribs fell away from the ensuing concentration of violence, and Edward grinned as he spied a piece of the golden headpiece bouncing off the ground.
The tomb city seemed to take affront to the act. Great arcs of green lightning shed out into the air, and the cavern visibly shuddered as the buildings twisted and expanded and rose into the air.
“Alright, tourist excursion’s over,” he said while sending a ping through the emergency comms. “Time to sit back and let the real work be done.”
Such was the spectacle before them that Edward didn’t notice at all the arrival of reinforcements until the first Sentinels flew past him. His vision then became filled with metal tentacles as the reserve came into py. There was a fsh of teleportation seconds ter, and Edward and the rest of the team were on the decks of the destroyer orbiting the barren world.
He turned to Kharn and the World Eaters, who seemed caught off guard from the sudden recall, and offered them a shrug. “We’d only get in the way. So, what’s the impressions on your new gear?”
