Work Text:
The Hive World of Eridu was an anomaly.
Former Hive World, rather. Cut off from the rest of the Imperium after the birth of the Great Rift sundered the galaxy in half, its beleaguered defenders were forced to fend for themselves against the rising tides of Chaos, manifesting in the form of spherical Warp Rifts spanning the planet its inhabitants christened “Hollows”. Alone in the grim darkness of war, against an endless horde of Warp demons called “Ethereals”, its last detachment of the Astra Militarum was the only thing standing between Eridu and oblivion, where the Emperor’s light could never reach.
All things considered, however, its last city seemed to be doing quite well.
~—~
“Hold the line!”
The eleventh member of Silver Squad (not that Silver Company, existed, not anymore) ignited her blade and swung, carving into a Hati’s crystalline flesh. Somewhere behind her a muffled gunshot rang out, and a sniper round crackling with electricity impacted the Ethereal’s spine.
The dog-like monster roared in pain, snapping forward with its jaws wide open. Soldier 11 parried its lunging form, flame licking at its side, and as it careened past another shot put it to rest for good.
“Good shot.”
“Thanks.” Her earpiece crackled as Trigger replied, the sniper perched… somewhere. Soldier 11 didn’t know where, but she didn’t need to. Trigger could rain electric death down from anywhere on the field.
“Obol Squad, area clear.” The cloned soldier resheathed her blade at the order. Through the haze of dissipating Ether, Captain Magus and Seed (and Seed Sr) had arrived from securing their Hollow data pile. Regular “maintenance” was needed to navigate any Hollow, both by clearing out Ethereals and maintaining the device itself, especially since the awakening of the Creator.
“Yah-hoh!” Seed giggled, waving to Soldier 11, and slid out of Seed Sr’s cockpit, landing lightly on bare feet before her scooter unfolded from a small piece of metal embedded in the mech’s suit. “Say, do these Ethereals seem kinda strange to you?”
“Strange? What do you mean?” It was Trigger who spoke now, landing lightly beside Soldier 11 from wherever she’d been surveying the battlefield. If the sniper deemed it safe enough to come down from her perch, it probably meant they were in the clear, so the white-haired soldier let her sword fall into its back-mounted pack and her hand off the hilt. “These Ethereals were a little hardier than usual. My blade did not cut through them as easily.”
“Now that you mention it, yeah.” Trigger was staring off into the distance, but all of Obol Squad knew her Ether-vision let her sense them as if she was looking straight at them. “They’re also the wrong colour.”
“Colour?” Ethereals were normally an amalgamation of black and bright green crystals, as most Ether formations were. Other colours did exist - Miasma was red, some of the more explosive crystals were blue - but none of them should be here. And besides, as Soldier 11 remarked, the Hati she’d just decapitated was the usual green and black.
“They feel wrong. The Ether particles they’re giving off are… strange. I’ve never felt anything like it before.”
“Well then, we should get moving and report it to base.” That was Captain Magus, hovering by Orphie’s side. The red-haired clone nodded, then squeaked out something. Magus turned to face her. “What? Speak up, soldier.”
“U-Uhh… One- one of the Tyrfings had wings.”
“…wings?”
“WHAT?!”
~—~
Mayor Mayflower sighed and ran his hands down his face. Today was going to be a long day, he could feel it.
His sparsely decorated office held little more than his desk, chair, another chair for visitors, and a few personal effects. Its relatively small area and warm lighting was designed to make the room cosy, so whoever came to him would be at ease enough to speak frankly and calmly.
It certainly wasn’t designed to hold a seven foot tall giant, whose helmeted head had nearly taken out the lights as he entered. Nor was it designed to hold all the delegations from various aspects of New Eridu who were now squeezed in by his sides - the most prominent CEOs of TOPS and HAND; the General of the NEDF; High Preceptor Yixuan of Yunkui Summit; even Lady Sunbringer herself had brought a delegation down from Roscaelifer to attend the meeting.
The Astartes before them all bowed his head briefly, then spoke in a deep baritone.
“Shall we begin?”
~—~
“So you’re telling me that a full interstellar empire touched down here, negotiated with the Mayor, and then claimed us as a long-lost ‘Hive World’ or something?”
“That’s exactly what I just said.”
“And that apparently Hollows are ‘Warp Rifts’, Ethereals are ‘Warp Daemons’, and Ether is ‘Warp energy’? Someone needs to name these more creatively.”
“Correct. You’ve proved that you are capable of listening to me.”
Norma stared at Velina. The Director of the ESD regarded her with a light smile, face half-obscured by her fan.
“Okay, what.”
“Oh, a delegation of their super-warriors are arriving soon. I’ll have to go greet them with the other Department Heads. Do excuse my leave, Norma.”
With that, Velina departed with a graceful swish of cloth, leaving the Chief Engineer staring after her dumbfounded. “Whuh - superwarriors?? Interstellar empire??? Veli, you can’t just - hey! Veli!! VELI!!!”
She pointedly did not turn around.
Norma huffed and turned back to her lab. Well, if Veli didn’t want to tell her (she was probably busy, but the inventor wasn’t going to let such a slight to her reputation stand!!), then she was fully content in finding things out on her own. After all, she loved a challenge.
Two minutes later, after hacking into the citywide surveillance network, Norma was greeted with the sight of… a Bangboo’s back. Huh.
Oh! Eous! What was he doing here? She was sure this was the place Veli had said she’d meet the space people.
“Ehn-nah!” Pssst! Eous! Move over!
“Nhe-un-ne-nah?” The Bangboo looked around, confused, before turning to spot the camera Norma had hacked into. “Ehn-ne!” Huh? Oh, it’s the genius inventor!
Well, she had to admit she was flattered.
“En-neh!” Move! …please.
The Proxy’s Bangboo shuffled out of the way obediently. This camera had the misfortune of being a drone sitting in a charging bay, so the view wasn’t the best, but Norma was suddenly very grateful that Velina didn’t understand Bangboo, because she was standing right in front of Eous.
In front of that, Wise and Belle were arguing with what was definitely a space person. Norma filed away the fact that the Proxies were involved for future analysis, but she was definitely more interested in the person they were talking to.
They were tall, for a start. Norma estimated their height at slightly over three metres, easily dwarfing both Proxies and Velina. Dressed in green power armour the likes of which she’d never seen before, a bulky suit of metal that she was just itching to get her hands on, they were gesturing animatedly and almost aggressively at the Proxies. Well, mainly Wise, although Belle was doing her fair share of gesturing back.
Norma leaned closer to her screen. The conversation was getting heated, and just when she thought she’d have to start activating Securityboos, Velina swooped in with her usual grace and said something that placated both sides.
Whew. Well, she couldn’t hear anything at this range - she made a mental note to upgrade every single drone in Roscaelifer to have better sound pickup and mic quality, just in case she ever had to spy on someone again - so she tried to peek the drone over the edge of its case by leaning it forward.
Still nothing. The armoured person took off their helmet and said something (which Norma still couldn’t hear!!!), revealing ashen, almost jet-black skin. How odd.
Distracted, the inventor pushed the joystick a little too far and the drone clattered out of its case to hover a few centimetres off the ground. “Oops.”
Well, she could hear now?
Norma leaned in even further, cheek flat against the screen (she couldn’t see anything but the speakers were really bad. She made a mental note to upgrade that too). Something about… psycho? Ships? Salamanders?
Yeah, she had no idea what they were talking about.
(The Space Marine had been insisting that Wise was at least a Theta-grade psyker, not that she would’ve understood that either.)
“Oh, looks like this little guy popped out… let’s put it back in before we continue.”
Uh oh.
Norma un-flattened her face to see Velina’s hands grasping the drone. “Back to charging you go.”
For a chilling moment, Norma could’ve sworn the Director of the ESD made direct eye contact with her through the screen. She was smiling, but the inventor immediately knew she was screwed.
And then the screen went black as the charging case was slammed shut.
“Oh, Veli’s totally gonna cut my budget again, isn’t she?”
Well, no use crying over spilt charging fluid. Norma had gotten some… ideas.
“Jaaaaake! Get the lab in order, we’ve got some construction to do!”
~—~
“Colonel, we’ve received a new batch of the B00 combat drones for deployment in the next operation. They’ve just landed.”
Magus nodded, as much as a gun could nod. “Very good, soldier. Take me to meet them.” The title stung, as it always did, with every reminder of the woman she’d inherited it from; but the former Captain showed none of that on her face. Isolde was dead, after all.
The young private clicked her heels in a salute and turned, moving towards the shifting figures in the distance. Orphie followed shortly after, looking at Magus with a little concern before squinting to make out the drones’ shape. The Battlemech Autonomous Neo-Guard B00-class drones (or BANGB00 for short, which was oddly reminiscent of another New Eridan robot) had only entered service extremely recently. Some obscure research team in the Obsidian Division had cooked them up, she’d been told, based on the design of the “Space Marines” who’d recently made planetfall.
“Here you are, ma’am.”
Hovering by Orphie’s side, Magus took her first look at the B00 mechs.
On the battlefield she may not have been able to tell them apart from their inspiration, the Space Marines. Sleek blue gunmetal formed a thick armour across their bulky forms, ridged plates overlapping all across its surface. Each shoulder was capped with a white pauldron painted with a black insignia she didn’t recognise. The only difference was the head - where an Astartes’ helmet would have sat, it instead was the distinctive bunny-eared head of a regular Bangboo.
As they approached, the squad of mechs fell into step and turned to face them as one. “Colonel.” The leader bowed, recognising her rank.
“At ease, soldier,” Magus barked. The squad did not shift, although she supposed steel did not need to rest.
(Seed Sr had always liked to sit down, saying it lessened the strain on his bad leg after a rebel mech had landed a lucky hit. She’d thought him a cranky old war veteran and told him as much. He always laughed it off.)
(She wondered if, someday, she’d hear that laugh again.)
“My name is Captain Guilliboo of the Roscae Firsts,” the Marine introduced, shaking Magus out of her thoughts.
“Colonel Magus. This is Captain Orphie, of Obol Squad.”
~—~
“The new ‘Ethereals’ you speak of are Warp Daemons. Tzeentchian, from the sound of it.”
“What does that mean?”
…
“We’re authorising the use of full-scale military force in the major Hollows. If the Astartes are right, we have to shut them down before things get a lot worse.”
“What, we weren’t using full-scale military force already?”
“Well… some more unorthodox measures may be necessary.”
…
“Say… that doesn’t look too hard to replicate, does it, Jake? We need all the firepower we can get anyway.”
“En-nah.”
…
“Norma.”
“Uh oh.”
“Norma, did you or did you not create Bangboo version of the Space Marines.”
“WAWAWA IT WASN’T ME!!!!”
Somewhere in Roscaelifer, a certain Chief Engineer was about to face some very heavy budget cuts (particularly to the snacks budget). In their room, Wise and Belle looked up from the television playing the news.
“Did you hear that?”
“Eh. Must’ve been the wind.”
On the ground, a certain Void Hunter’s ears perked up, before she returned to her Consuming Food (melons) Quickly training.
Far from the city, however, and much, much further from the flailing inventor whose creations were about to march into battle, Obol Squad overlooked the Dead End Hollow, and the army they led readied arms beneath them.
~—~
“HOLD THE LINE!”
To the casual observer, the scene was almost identical to that of two months before, when Obol Squad first faced off against Ethereals touched by the Warp. Somewhere behind the front lines Trigger took aim, fired, reloaded with pinpoint accuracy; Soldier 11 carved a flaming path through the crystalline hordes; Seed, fingers flying over the controls, launched rocket after rocket that sent Ethereal and dirt alike flying. High above the battle, on a stony lip overlooking the largest section of the Hollow, Magus and Orphie watched perhaps the greatest land battle of New Eridu’s history unfold.
But this time, they did not stand alone.
Obol Squad - the Stygian Division, now - had been supplemented with reinforcements. The newly formed Roscae First Company joined them, a full complement of mechanical Marines who cared not for losses nor numbers. All along the line B00 Marines waged war against the Ethereals who had taken so much from their creators; chainswords buzzed and cracked open crystal as easy as knives through water. Some of the mechs wielded knives, too; deadly blades implements perhaps the length of a normal person’s arm. Shoulder-mounted machineguns rattled leaden death into the field.
“The left flank needs support,” Orphie commented, before turning and shouting an order down at the command camp situated just behind them. Magus grunted assent. Somewhere near where Soldier 11 had just beheaded a Tyrfing a squad of Marines had engaged an Ionized Doppelgänger; she couldn’t recognise who it was imitating, but it struck with wide scything sweeps that had already torn a battlemech in half. She scowled (not that anything changed), opening her mouth to say something, only for an electric round to crack against the Doppelgänger’s side and stagger it enough for the Marines to finish the job.
The Colonel made a mental note to ask Orphie to thank Trigger later.
~—~
“Captain!”
The B00 Marine cocked his head towards the source of the shout, chainsword buzzing through an Alpeca as he replied. “What is it, soldier?”
“The Butcher! The Butcher is here!”
He looked up at that. As the Ethereal on his blade fizzled away he realised the battlefield had fallen silent, that all the Ethereals had fled or been cut down. The Roscae Firsts had taken some losses, but they were acceptable. A battle well fought.
A battle not yet brought to its end.
Directly in front of him the air began to Warp, and twist; a round of blaster fire through the rift did little to dissuade its opening. Ranks reformed to face the disturbance as the first tear in spacetime ripped itself open and a clawed hand reached out.
But it was not the Dead End Butcher who emerged.
No, that beast had long been taken into the service of a god beyond all men; a monstrous man, towering over even the Marines, stepped through, armour adorned with spikes and rings of skulls from his fallen enemies. Fresh blood was painted all over its hellforged metal, and the Captain lashed out in a futile strike -
The last thing Captain Guilliboo of the Roscae Firsts saw was the grinding of the Daemon Primarch’s heel.
~—~
If any true Astartes had been on the field they may well have turned and fled, for the visage before them was one that could only inspire terror. But the Eridans were only human, after all, human and machine, and no whispers of Angron, of the World Eaters flitted through their ranks.
For a moment the line stuttered as human soldiers folded back behind the shelter of their mechanical brethren. In the best of times a Daemon Primarch was a worthy foe; now, perhaps he would be their executioner.
But Obol Squad would not back down from the gates of hell. The BANGB00 were steel, and the children of Norma knew no fear.
The first shot exploded against the Daemon’s side. Seed laughed, crisp and clear on the silent field.
And then, in a ragged volley that solidified into a deadly assault of fire and lead, the Stygian Division - human, machine, screaming for Eridu - surged forward with a battlecry that shook the earth underfoot.
“FOR THE EHN-PEROR!!!!”