Chapter 303: You Cannot Only Love the Imperium When You Have Lost Control
The Veiled Region – Forge World Cypra-Mundi
The vast Ramilies-class Starfort was dying. Its steel skeleton twisted in the void, the carcass of a leviathan in its death throes. It had been grievously wounded in the unprecedented initial assault, and now, the artillery of Chaos traitors and hereteks continued to tear relentlessly at its ruined shell. The starfort's outer armour had been stripped away entirely, revealing the scorched adamantium frame beneath. Its once-lethal weapon emplacements were now just burning, cauterized wounds, vomiting plumes of smoke and flame.
The planet was suffering a siege of unimaginable scale.
For both the Nachmund Gauntlet and the surrounding Cadian Sector, the Forge World of Cypra-Mundi was no ordinary world. Its strategic value was incalculable. As one of the primary birthplaces of the Ramilies-class Starforts, Cypra-Mundi's orbit was perpetually guarded by six to eight of the iron behemoths. They formed an unbreakable defensive line and served as the Imperium's most important military bastion in the Veiled Region.
A fully armed Ramilies was a mobile fortress of death. Its firepower was sufficient to make any fleet commander quail; its batteries were charged with annihilating energies, its macro-cannons could tear capital ships to shreds, and its close-in defense grid ensured that no strike craft or boarding torpedo could approach.
To conquer such a fortress through conventional fleet action? It was the stuff of madmen's dreams. The forces required would exceed the capacity of any single warship.
Unless… the attacker was a Space Hulk.
Unless… the attackers were several Space Hulks.
BOOM! BOOM!
The void ignited with silent fire. The shockwaves of the explosions propagated through the vacuum, and only the thin vapour washing over warship sensors carried back a muffled echo, like the dying gasp of some ancient beast.
In the silent command sanctum, the shrill alarm of the bio-monitoring system was deafening.
Fabricator-General Fabian Vancz, curled within his protective amniotic tank, watched the scene with optical sensors widened in horror. The colossal, twisted Space Hulks, screaming with the energies of the warp, had been thrown like the gods' own destructive spears, embedding themselves deep into the superstructures of the Ramilies Starforts. The immense pressure of the collision triggered a chain reaction of explosions at the points of contact. Molten metal poured forth like waterfalls, creating a tidal wave of fire in the void.
The battered starfort could take no more. Its frame buckled and collapsed with a silent scream. The wreckage of the Space Hulks, the debris of warships, and the steel bones of the fortress shattered together, raining down upon the skies of the Forge World like a meteor storm. From space, the fortress's end was silent. For Cypra-Mundi, its fall was a terror of world-shaking, geological trauma.
"No!" the Fabricator-General wailed in a burst of pure binharic code.
He was filled with regret. He regretted not heeding the counsel of the Magi from Stygies VIII. He regretted offering sanctuary to the renegade Mechanicum factions. He regretted refusing the Primarch's—
He was filled with anger. He was furious that these traitors had betrayed him, using lies to mask his own foolish attempt to secure his 'interests' with what amounted to a permanent contract of servitude.
He was filled with sorrow. His Forge World was being destroyed.
While Agrippina had recalled its Explorator fleets to consolidate its power, and while Stygies VIII had eagerly joined the Primarchs in constructing the "Vigilus Defence Line," Cypra-Mundi had chosen to wait and see. Vancz had made a token show of compliance, providing some resources to the Primarchs' consolidation effort, while simultaneously sheltering those Mechanicum elements who resisted them, hoping to use them as leverage should the need arise.
Now, he had lost everything.
The impact of several starforts raised a planet-spanning dust cloud, shrouding tens of thousands of square kilometers of the southern continent. The foul smog churned and roiled, blanketing everything. From the wounds in the planet's crust, molten slag wept like pus.
It had all happened so suddenly. Whether by coercion or by their own design, the hereteks had chosen the most violent path of destruction. The knowledge lost in their assault would far outweigh anything they could hope to scavenge from the ruins.
The Fabricator-General's vision struggled through the swirling clouds, jumping from one damaged pict-capture servitor to the next. He found his Magos Biologis in a desecrated shrine. The impact from above had annihilated his Skitarii protectors, and the shattered dome had collapsed, pinning the Magos beneath the rubble.
He was still alive. He lay on his back, surrounded by the blasphemous hereteks. Tubes had been connected to his exposed cranial plate. His eyes were wide, his mouth locked open in a silent scream of agony.
There was no time. The forces of Cypra-Mundi could not repel the assault. Traitors of the XII Legion were already scaling the battlements through rivers of lava, and behind them swarmed the members of the Dark Mechanicum, greedily plundering what little knowledge remained.
'Zzzzt… zzt…'
The only reply was the static hiss from the Magos's broken augmetics, followed by a wave of infinite, second-hand agony flooding his senses. The Fabricator-General then realized the truth. The tubes the hereteks had connected to the Magos's head were not data-extraction devices.
They were Butcher's Nails.
Madmen. They were all madmen.
On pure impulse, he plunged his consciousness into the tides of the Empyrean. The warp was a cacophony. To open one's mind to it was to open a door to millions of screaming supplicants. Countless souls praying, countless voices crying out, countless beings desperate for an answer. And to find a single, specific cry for help in this ocean of chaotic noise was an impossible task. He pressed his manipulators against the glass of his chamber, desperately sinking his mind into the psychic static, listening to the roar as if it were a gale.
The gale was drawing near.
"You cannot only remember the Primarchs when you have lost control of the situation."
The storm still howled outside the psychic veil, but an unseen barrier, now solid as adamantium, had just yanked the Fabricator-General's unravelling consciousness back from the brink. His thoughts still trembled, as if he had just woken from a nightmare of drowning.
"Hm. This tech is quite fascinating. Constructing a temporary stable channel by sacrificing living beings? And it's delivered by daemons of the unaligned? So, daemons take delivery orders now?" a low voice murmured, its tone a strange mix of derision and clinical curiosity. The Fabricator-General's audio sensors picked up the garbled bytes but could not parse their meaning through the chaotic aftershocks.
"Er—Old Ro, maybe you should take this one?" The voice suddenly lowered, a note of subtle hesitation in its tone. The words were still indistinct, as if spoken from behind a heavy curtain.
And then—
"...Am I addressing Fabian Vancz, Fabricator-General of the Forge World Cypra-Mundi?"
From within the veil, the voice was suddenly, perfectly clear. Even across light-years of empty space, even as his soul still shuddered from the warp's caress, the Fabricator-General could feel the power in that voice. Not of volume, but of an innate authority carved into the very essence of its being. It was the authority of an uncontested ruler. A natural-born emperor.
"Report the attack," the voice commanded, steady and flat, offering no introduction. None was needed. To hear the voice was to know who he was. "Enemy fleet composition, belligerents, your status."
Vancz replied at once, his vox-caster buzzing with frantic energy.
"How long can you hold?" The question was calm, measured, as if such catastrophic losses were already factored into the Primarch's calculations.
Three months. Could an Imperial fleet break through the warp storms and reach him in three months? Impossible. And after three months, could he possibly defend the last vestiges of his Forge World with this shattered fleet and these broken fortresses?
A processor core overheat warning flashed across his vision. Battle-damage reports from the last millennium, supply logs, reinforcement response times—all the data flooded his mind, converging on a single, straight line to despair.
He was already dead. It took a Rogue Trader three weeks to reach Cypra-Mundi from the nearest stable system in peacetime. And the countless cries of agony he had heard in the warp confirmed that every sector around the Cadian Gate was already on fire.
Could the Primarchs make it in time? Could they truly be that efficient?
"Hold the line."
In the face of that near-sobbing query, the voice remained as unbreakable as forged adamantium. Every syllable carried the weight of a world.
"We are coming."
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