I stared in detached fascination as the arvus lighter drifted languidly out from the ruined mouth of the Vibrant Echo. Scrap metal playing off its wings reflecting through the bridge window temporarily blinded me, blinking and throwing off my stupor. I looked past the shuttle at the still rising plume of debris, totally obscuring the Lathe-class Luminous Beacon.
Intellectually I knew that a Lathe-class Light Cruiser was rated for atmospheric landings. I also know that it was not rated to do so at orbital velocity. The reactor must have lost containment before Lord Captain Explorator Magos Ryck was able to have the Enginseers preform the rites of a safe shutdown. At the edge of my awareness, I was pinged through the MIU. The Machine Spirit of the Vibrant Echo was asking permission again, and losing patience, to use the single working heavy las cannon to remove the threat posed by some of the faster moving debris around the modified dropship.
“… Acknowledged, Vibrant, you have permission.” The bridge windows darkened as the las cannon fired deflecting some of the scrap floating around the ship. “Check for asteroids too, Vibrant, we don’t need a repeat…” Dark emotions coursed through me at my own reminder. Rubbing at my tear-stained cheeks before I added to the wetness on my robes. I must have blacked out due to stress as I did not remember crying so much.
++ Flesh is imperfect, rely on the surety of steel++
My MIU, a recent gift from the Lord Captain, reminded me. Finally getting a hold on my racing heart and emotions, “Vibrant, do we have any communication with the Beacon?”
++ Negative Captain Longinous ++ Vox signals remain silent ++ The auspex sensors remain blind to the fate of the Luminous Beacon ++
“Keep checking and get me Enginseer Graven. I need to verify the integrity of the ship after that collision.” I thought, remembering the impact that had riven us from the Beacon. “And make sure to contact me via the noosphere if anything else comes up. I need to check the lower decks, so I won’t be at the chair.” I felt a faint acknowledgement from Vibrant.
++ Reminder Captain Longinous ++ A data packet from Explorator Magos Ryck ++
I frowned in confusion before diving into my messages. Indeed, there was a missed high priority packet. It must have come in after the asteroid hit and I was distracted.
** Artisan Beta-3665a Longinous, I’ll keep this brief. If I do not survive the Beacon’s Impact, I need you to find Adamantine Vault 3-Z145. On confirmation of my death open the data-packet I’ve included** The Lord Captain’s face was blurring in the recording. It must have been recorded at the incredible speed his implants are capable of pushing his cognition. The recording continued; **Inside the vault you will find the reason of our mission into the Koronus expanse. It is imperative that vault gets back into the hands of the Forge Master of Stygies VIII. May the Omnissiah be with you, Artisan.**
“And with you, Magos.” I find myself saying. Before standing I checked the Auspex sensors again. It seemed the debris around the Vibrant Echo seemed a bit sparser, though the Hulk that had impeded our warp travel hung ominously overhead. The machine spirit had happily cleared the space around and I needed to stop dragging my feet. Disconnecting my 2 mechandrite arms from the command chair I stood. “Alert me if there are any further… issues, Vibrant.” I finished in a small voice. Turning and walking down the stairs, past the stripped crew quarters and into the comfortably humming engine room.
“ENGINSEER! Report! Why have I not been able to reach you on vox?” I shout as I reach the lofted room of the engine and reactor room. Walking down past the catwalks to the lowest floor. I looked around seeing nothing besides some equipment that had shifted when the ship was struck. “Enginseer Gravis!” Checking the catwalks, I notice a portion of damaged guard rails halfway to the weapons station by the port engine. I paused and followed the damage down. A panel had fallen off the engine shielding and broken through 4m of rail. Underneath, near the lockers for the void equipment before the personnel airlock. It had struck the ground and I could see crimson pooling at the edges of dented plasteel flooring.
Continuing past at a slow trudge I commanded my mechandrites to prepare my fitted voidsuit. The second to the last one present in the lockers, 18 empty lockers sat open and empty as evidence of my failure in the eyes of the Omnissiah. Absentmindedly finished with the rite of interlocking seals I walked to the airlock. Listening to its hiss as it cycled, I tried to get control of my tears before I offended the sprite of the voidsuit with too much moisture. I walked into, and through, the entrance to the void. Luckily the gravplating held true and I did not require the awkward magnetic boots. Continuing past long adamantine beams and ceramite plating I neared the open door. Around me was the all the accoutrement needed for emergency repairs to a Lathe-class Light Cruisers main engines void based damage, past was only the void, and ruined gantry I could see silhouetted by the planet. It seemed a few servitors had mag boots which managed to cling on despite the violence of the impact. I counted, there were seven I felt on the level above while it seemed 5 persisted near the ruined gantry. Unable to fulfill the previous command they had been given.
I commanded the ones above to begin removing the worst of the metal of the gantry and the rest to retrieve and secure some void cable for myself. So secured and with any hindrance to my returning with the shuttle removed I hopped over the edge and got my first look at the galaxy above. My breath hitched and my hands grew clammy as I stared. There was no eye of terror cutting the galaxy in half. Instinctually I reached out to Vibrant with the MIU and confirmed what I saw. The star maps were all wrong. We weren’t even on the map.
++ It is holy to acquire data ++ But let not a task be undone ++
The MIU was right. I needed to figure this out, but it wasn’t time. I continued floating through the void occasionally correcting course before attaching the line to the end of the shuttle. I made time to watch the galaxy above me while the servitors reeled in the shuttle. The Arvus Lighter was around 15 tons so I had the ships machine spirit cut the grav plating before getting the shuttle to the upper deck of the ship. A devourer dropship has an incredible amount of room in a normal setting. I’m happy to say ours is even more spacious with extendable ramps being replaced with much smaller profile material elevators. We could probably safely fit 8 or more lighters in here even with most of the place taken up by the ceramite required for engine maintenance being stored here. But I also notice why there had been merely 7 servitors here rather than the 40 that were supposed to be feeding repair parts to the crew working on the Luminous Beacon. One of the unsecured curved plates of ceramite had scythed through them when the ship was hit. There was a horrible mélange of smeared and sheared flesh and broken augments coated the dented floor paneling. I was unsure if this was merely because they had been readying the panel for work or if there had been insufficient safety rites preformed on the harness.
I made a note to observe the rites of maintenance and safety across the ship. There might be many loose panels and sections caused by the collision and I did not want to repeat the fate of these servitors or Enginseer Gravis.
Once the lighter was in position, I let the gravplating take control again. Feeling more than hearing the thump of it touching back down.
“Vibrant, do we have the location of the Beacon?” I asked while looking out the front of the ship. We’d be stuck working in void for a while. The void seal door had been utterly destroyed in addition to the gantry and I knew I did not have the plasteel to mold into new doors.
++ The Luminous Beacon remains shrouded ++ The dust cloud continues to expand; its heavy metal content renders our auspex sensors useless ++
“What do we know about the system we’re in?”
++ The auspex sensors are of limited range and do not provide a clear understanding of local space ++
“Give me the best scans so far Vibrant.”
My MIU filled up with local scans and I dove into the noosphere to look through them, while resting on the flooring near the lighter. It would be hours at best before I could safely pilot the lighter down and even more before we could accurately scan so I had some time to distract myself from tasks needing done.
Sadly, the Vibrant Echo was not refitted with long range scans in mind. Everything further out than the current planetary system was at best blurry and at worst of questionable existence. The planet I was currently in orbit of was mostly a large dustball with a nitrogen atmosphere that contained close to 6 percent oxygen. Enough for a rebreather to constantly supply me. There was a single moon in the process of being finely coated in debris from the hulk we passed through the warp with. I could make out great rents in the hulks nearest side and an entire engine from a Lathe-Class cruiser embedded from a recent collision. The hulk had been the bane of our warp travel and had made the translation to real-space entirely lethal to us. I hoped it wasn’t full of xeno. The dustball beneath me was showing clear signs of a tectonic catastrophe and it seemed volcanos were erupting all over the side of the planet I could see. Hopefully I would be able to get to the ship without it being coated in fresh lava. There was also a fine asteroid belt around the planet which had momentarily intersected with our orbit, and looked like it was going to again in 16 or so hours. I sent a note to Vibrant.
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I looked further out trying to make sense of the sensor readings I had never had a lot of practice with in the past. Surprisingly I was able to adjust the auspex correctly and got a decent picture of the system. I was around the fourth planet and the only terrestrial one with a significant atmosphere. Further into the system we had an ice planet, a rocky barren one and a superheated metallic world near the sun. Which was a K-type orange star. Further out there was a single blue-green gas giant with a multitude of small moons. Strangely I detected a signal of some sort on the trailing edge of its orbit, the L5 Lagrange point. It was absolutely alien to my sensors and absolutely wasn’t imperial in origin. I marked it as a point of interest.
I turned my attention back to the hulk. Its age showed as its cumulative parts were so thoroughly fused, I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to identify any pieces of imperial or mechanicus origin without stepping on board and that likely was suicide without a million skitarii and a chapter of astartes. At least, it seemed, there was no way for anything aboard to currently ruin my day. Luckily it was relatively small as far as space hulks go. At almost 300 km and half that wide and tall it dwarfed my comprehension. Seeming to be made of a collection of large asteroids and ships fused together there could be anywhere from dozens of ships coating the outside to tens of dozens depending how deep they go. By and large though, it was smaller than those I had heard about. The mechanicus was always rife with rumors of where we could find the next mother lode of adamantium, and space hulks played a vital part of these fever dreams. I had heard confirmed reports of one in the Calixis sector that was nearly the size of a moon. A thousand kilometers across each side and a bear few giga tons of material pried free before it disappeared back into the warp. And that wasn’t even discussing the horrors of the gothic sector having Orks somehow man and weapon a hulk that probably rivaled battlefleet gothic in weight.
But I had distracted myself from my task long enough. The servitors had repositioned the ceramite that had come loose, and I checked their work. Before instructing them to retrieve the gristle and place it in one of the empty equipment storage bays along the side of the deck. All of those, 8 per side per deck, were blessedly empty as all the equipment we needed was stock for rapid retrieval in the center of the decks. I marked one of them to remain unpressurized and checked the seal. If I returned the decks to respectable pressure and temp or landed, I would need these stored as cool as possible for preservation.
Before I could second guess myself, I went to retrieve Gravis for the same treatment. He had given much more of himself to holy steel than I had, and I hoped some of his implants had survived. I had the servitors bring the detached panel out onto the first deck so it could be easily cleaned once the remains of Gravis had frozen. I gladly left the servitors to it and returned to the Arvus Lighter. A few hours had passed, and the heavier debris thrown up by the Beacon had settled. With most of the heavy metallic dust out of the atmosphere, or spread out enough, it was safe to take the shuttle down. At minimum, I’d be able to get a reliable scan from a few km up rather than orbit.
So, I gathered half of the remaining servitors, gave the Vibrant Echo permission to shoot at anything that wasn’t me coming close and took command of the lighter. Its machine spirit was unable to pilot in the current atmospheric conditions, so I gave a prayer to the Omnissiah to guide my hands and began the rites to start the rocket engines.
The Omnissiah had truly forsaken me as the ride down was anything but safe. A few kilometers into the flight I botched some rite that had the shuttles spirit in a frothing rage. The only reason I didn’t crash at terminal velocity was the MIU implant and some quick rerouting of power from life support to the engines. The machine spirit was hardly soothed but didn’t try and kill us both as long a I promised to go over every part with plenty of holy oil and to never again do what I did wrong. As I wasn’t sure what I did I agreed readily and apologized to the spirit profusely.
By the time we were in auspex and vox caster range I had the shuttle well under control and began using the equipment. There was no answer on the vox and the auspex were grainy at best. I could detect a massive crater at the end of a scar 20km long. I was unsure but it seemed some of the superstructure has survived at the far end of the crater.
I piloted the shuttle to a few hundred meters above the protrusion and got a much better look. The adamantine spine of the vessel was a mere 100 meters long sticking out the end of the superstructure. The structure itself was the armored face of the vessel. There was nothing to indicate the forward lance battery or ventral Lance artillery survived the impact and subsequent explosion. Just an empty gutted shell of metal. I tried to increase the power to auspex sensors to find anything that was shaped like the adamantine vaults on the ship and got some hits. There was a couple of adamantine cubes nearby and others scattered within 100 km that seemed whole despite the violence of the reactor explosion. I couldn’t locate what I needed from up here so I marked their locations and hoped some would contain what I needed.
On the metrics I could check it would be days minimum before I could walk on the surface and possibly months. I did not have information on the type of reactor that exploded so my numbers had a lot of leeway provided. At minimum I needed the dust to settle. So I began the hour or so long flight back to the Vibrant Echo.
⚙ 💀 ⚙ ⚙ 💀 ⚙ ⚙ 💀 ⚙ ⚙ 💀 ⚙ ⚙ 💀 ⚙
Hours later myself and the servitors had finished cleaning and, in my case, cataloguing the resources I had to work with. The Vibrant Echo was equipped for 3 days of void work before we needed to return to the berth for more supplies. That meant 800 tons of ceramite plating, and an additional 600 tons that was mostly adamantine beams but a few plasma batteries and void based actuators. All of that for the Luminous Beacon then 3 days of rations for 1000 servitors and 20 tech priests. The servitors had nearly 250 days of nutrition and I had nearly as many rations gathered from the goods of the 20 other Tech-Priests. The ship would be the limiting factor as we only had enough fuel for 90 days of operation. Its good we were consistent about keeping that topped up or I might have been doomed. The others and I had even gotten permission to place an impromptu workshop in the crew quarters. Of which everything but the fresher had been scrapped to make room for some of the more delicate parts we’d use for our void operations. I was regretting happily removing anything even resembling a bed now but at least I had the ability to fix minor issues on my own. Any new equipment or replacements would have come from the Luminous Beacon, so I had very limited stock.
As it was, I went back to the command chair to go over options after the 4 hours of work around the ship. The math was telling. Even if I found the right vault, I wouldn’t be able to get it into orbit. The lighter could haul tons, but the vaults rivaled, if not exceeded, the landers own weight. At best I had to hope the Lord Captains packet he sent gave me the keys to opening it and, ideally, all of the other vaults.
Speaking of it was time to open it. The Lord Captain had been in the part of the ship that was now scattered over the better part of a continent. I would never have visual confirmation of his death so hopefully he’d agree with my assessment.
** Artisan Beta, if you are listening to this, I didn’t survive the crash to delete it. I’m transferring my logs of this journey to be confirmed by the Forgemaster once you return. The Vault needs to return with you. If you’re unable to retrieve it whole your MIU has authorization to open it. The contents must be kept safe. I’m including our Starmap. I believe the system we’ve arrived in is the target we were looking for but my auspex sensory apparatus was smashed when we encountered the space hulk. Hopefully the planet isn’t untenable for it would only make your position more difficult. The Forgemaster and I have not told the rest of the expedition but the reason for so many additional manufactories and supply is we’ve been given permission to begin the formation of a Questor Mechanicus under my jurisdiction as a Magos of Stygies VIII. Not only that but our Production target is III-Tertious within a century. Your orders, besides returning the contents of the vault to the Forgemaster, are to assist with any means necessary and maintain Orbital control. Control of the Hulk as a resource is vital as we were not expecting such a bounty from the Omnissiah, retain it until the fleet find us. If only it came without such high a cost. Afterwards I give you permission to requisition one of the Destroyers, the Memory of Antioch. Use it to return to the Forgemaster. You have your orders Artisan. Do them well and you may be named Magos of the operation. Omnissiah watch over you.**
The end of the transmission left me silently panicking. The responsibility Magos Ryck just handed over was mind bending. Of course, he had expected one of the work horses of the Mechanicus. The Lathe-Class Cruiser. To survive the landing even if the G’s pulped everyone on board. After repair he’d have expected the fleet to catch up with me, the facilities aboard to replenish my supply of servitors and the expanded manufactories to be disembarked to begin the work of the millennia for Stygies VIII. I can’t imagine the work, deals and favors that went into this project. Just thinking about how much is riding on my efforts was making my heart race again.
If only the stars above my orbit weren’t telling me I was in the wrong galaxy. I pray my mentor and the Omnissiah will forgive me.