THE SANCTUARY, PART TWO
381.M25
The RH1-N0 Planetary Reconnaissance Vehicle trundled across the surface of the world now designated Sanctuary. It was a planet approximately the same distance from its G-class star than Earth was, inhabited by non-sapient xenobreeds. Sector General Miles Victor Bradley of the Third Merican Empire's Colonial Marine Corps tried not to let tears of nostalgia for the Birthworld cloud his vision as the vehicle moved on. He shuddered to think of what would be happening amongst the sprawling starscrapers of the ancient city of Boswash when the food shipments stopped coming in. Within days, the teeming billions would be eating each other alive. It might have even already happened. Who knew with the tachyon-ansible network ripped into so many shreds?
The RH1-N0 PRV itself was a well-tested design from the early Stellar Exodus period. Based on end-M2 APCs from humanity's distant past, the vehicle was essentially an environmentally-sealed metal box – often treaded, in rare cases hovering on grav-plates – which served as a functional STC design for navigating potentially hostile alien worlds and as an APC used by high-grade militia and low-grade light Army units. A "Predator" light tank variant also existed, but was generally relegated for militia units since it was simply too thin-skinned for Army engagements and too fast to serve as an infantry tank.
This particular variant had been upgraded something above normal specs– a Volkite caliver mounted on hull top to deal more effectively with hostile wildlife, semi-sentient AI targeting and navigation protocols, self-repair nano-nodules. There were a number of larger IFV-grade RH1-N0 “Proteus-type” variants as well on the outer levels – big, bulky things that had been designed to deal with the needs of the Iron War. This was all that was needed for scouting a planet for potentially hostile xenoforms – damned greenskins popped up in the most unlikely places – and dangerous wildlife while the Federation Army's real military equipment remained in orbit. These vehicles had been fabricated aboard the colony ships.
Bradley sighed. For a millennium the Federation Army and by extension the forces that made it up had been considered an affectation to long-lost days of martial prowess, a parade-ground force. The Iron Men had been the ones to hold the leaguers of the quarantine zones and launched the pro-active strikes to knock brewing Ork waaaghs off-balance. Then the apocalypse had come, and the decadence of the core-worlds had come home to roost. Five hundred or more years of war had broken the society that the Federation had once been. In some ways it had made it better – a commitment to duty, an embrace of meritocracy, a strength that hadn't been there before. In other ways it had been made worse – an example of which was the dangerous foolishness that was the Simplifier movement.
Enough damage had already been done without raving mobs rising up seeking to destroy anything that had survived. Bradley had heard of STC machines, formerly given places of honour in the Old Colonies' grandest museums, taken and hurled into running fusion furnaces. But then, they had their reasons to do what they did.
Everything had been connected in those days. A living ecosystem of data spanning the stars. And it had all been subverted by the initial tendrils of hostile code crawling out from the initial centres of AI rebellion. Nano-meds made to dissolve the people who used them; industrial and construction equipment used to set up countless billions of “accidents” across human space; smart-habs turned into death traps; auto-piloted shuttles and aircars set to run over crowds or crash themselves into buildings. It had been the Stone Men's efforts to contain the worst of the attacks that had ensured humanity managed to survive the initial shock, realise what was happening, and turned what should have been an unmitigated slaughter into a war worth calling the name.
He looked over the gunner and driver – sturdy Catachans from Merica's extrasolar domains, gene-bulked and immune-reinforced to survive their death-world home planet, neurolinked into the vehicle's systems – and engaged his own connector with a thought. Nanomachine threads stabbed into his nervous system, infiltrated the sensory systems of his brain. He saw what the PRV's sensors percieved, or as best as they could be translated into.
They were near the base of an extinct shield volcano, near the coast. The environment was reminiscent of the Middle Sea at the nexus of Africa, Asia and Europa – Aetius would like this place for sure. There would need to be further scans of course, to determine geological stability and such, but they had already made a good start.
Aboard the Ultima Ratio, surrounded by the cool metal of her ready room, Aetius looked over the plans for the primary stasis complex, with the ship's AI in attendance via holo-avatar along with the chief engineer, Falk Karben of Cthonia. The structure was to be buried one kilometre under the surface, extending nine kilometres down and dozens in various directions. Karben, a sturdy bald-headed man with deep-set eyes, was proud of his work.
“We Cthonians sure know how to dig,” Falk boasted in a bittersweet tone. The War had seen his homeworld, located in the Sirius system, mined out to the very core to fuel the military efforts of humanity's armies. Ultima Ratio was largely made of Cthonian metal. It had been deemed non-viable for habitation and all those who could leave the planet had, leaving the dregs of its society to remain. An official Evacuation Fleet had been then declared, but it would likely never come. The storm-front of the Warp disturbances was already on the border of Solar. They were reaching deeper inwards to the heart of man's realm by the month, travelling on the very empyreal currents that bound human space together.
With a bitter twinge, Aetius thought of those who hadn't heeded his warning. The doom was coming on them, and they could no longer be saved. One of the ships that had joined his colony fleet, the arcology-vessel Interrex, had abandoned it later on, before the great journey to the eastern fringe. Her captain had not approved of the military-led nature of the expedition, that its civilian complement would be under martial law for the duration, and of the long stasis sleep the colonists would have to be subjected to. They had headed to the galactic south-west, hoping to ride out the storm by themselves. The nature of the coming cataclysm, he knew, would not leave them be.
Another vessel, the Van Saar, had been lost in the Warp, en route to rendezvous with his flotilla at Araneus Prime. He would have been glad to have had her scientists along with the Martians and Ryzans, but the Warp was cruel and getting crueller. He had lit candles for her brave and loyal crew, and prayed for them in the manner of his Chalcedonian-Zen faith. The religions of the Federation's most committed faith was that the Warp, with its vindictiveness and fickleness, did not represent the totality of immaterial reality. So it was believed and desperately hoped.
But he had gained some as well. A full clan of Tarrellians had aligned him and joined forces. The hardy reptilian xenos had elected to go into stasis along with his soldiers, but they would settle the deep deserts of Sanctuary where no human could comfortably live once they awoke.
The stasis vaults would be built largely from the recycled material of the colony ships themselves, surrounded in a shell of hexagrammic-inscribed phase-metal to protect against empyreal attention. Each individual would be first sedated, then cryo-frozen, and finally contained within a stasis field. The double layer of this system was necessary to prevent the insanity that would be caused if Warp-active sapients such as humans were to enter stasis in a conscious state. Psychic channellers and latents had been required to have a plasma-charge implant installed at their spinal column. If uncontrolled or non-human Warp resonance was detected in these individuals, the stasis field would collapse and the plasma charge automatically detonate. A scorched stump would be all that was left of their heads.
The military forces involved would be in the top layer of the facilities, ready to defend the civilians. There were six planned, each housing thirty million civilian colonists, and ten million Federation Army soldiers. Of course, not all would be awakened at once – but enough would be to defend the facilities if they were attacked. The complex would be AI-overseen, and would awaken if either 100,000 years had passed; humans broke into the antechamber a klick below ground, or significant hostile xenoform lifesigns (including Ork and Aeldari) were detected anywhere on the planet.
The Federation Navy elements would be contained in carefully concealed hangars located beneath Sanctuary's moon. Their crews would sleep within, ready to awaken at a signal from the planet below.
Despite himself, Aetius felt worry. The complex's troops would awaken in stages, piecemeal. Could a sufficiently large force core it open before they got the chance to mobilise? But it had to work. If mankind failed, it failed forever.
==*==
Vorr Kastav oversaw the excavation as teams of men and machines tore open the earth in great numbers, grav-beamers lifting up chunks of rock as sonic mining machines made soil run like water to allow the seamless deposition of dismantled arcology-ship corridors and phase-metal armour. There were thousands of engineers in powered suits, assisted by teams of construction robots, civilian-grade Iron Men with their consciousness cogitators removed by design. What remained was something sub-sapient; a bundle of expert systems that required oversight by a human or Stone Man, but the Iron War had shown the follies of trying to automate all aspects of life – even automation itself. A dictum had been learned in those dark days, one that would – if the adepts of the Sigilite Order who had joined the expedition in the interests of preserving humanity's tens of thousands of years of history saw to it, at any rate – be remembered forever by the Federation.
“MAN MAY NOT BE REPLACED.”
Even the Stone Men were now required to be bonded to a human at all times. This ensured that the two would be able to oversee each other, the man and machine checking the flaws of each others' natures. It had been common practice even before the War for a ship's captain to be the bondsmate of the vessel's AI. In orbit, the fabrication vessels were making immense amounts of phase-metal to be sent down below, working down dozens of asteroids every day. They too would sleep beneath Sanctuary's moon.
It would be an immense exercise in trust to let them take control of the stasis facilities, but they would be operating at minimum power to avoid detection and conserve energy at any rate.
The construction would be done in twenty years, it having been five since the project began. Even now though, the tachyon ansible got occasional reports from Federation space – psychers encouraged to explore their powers exploding into armies of extradimensional monsters that drowned planets in their own blood, horrific xenobreeds formerly locked behind guarded quarantine buffers openly raiding human space, client races declaring that the Federation had shackled their development and launching campaigns of secession (none of the xenos who had sent support to the expedition had made such statements). Behind them, the galaxy was burning.
Many had wanted to quit the project, but Aetius had been resolute. The Federation as it stood could not be saved. Even if they could put out one fire, another would spring up, and the effort of trying to preserve the galaxy would crush their limited resources – especially with the Warp disturbances. The Federation military as a whole was starting to fracture, many star nations' forces rushing home to save their own worlds and clusters. The government on Earth was increasingly nominal.
Nevertheless, Kastav continued to oversee and supervise his section of the grand design as best he could. The landers were always dropping off equipment – Baneblade heavy grav-tanks, Spatha MBTs, Volkite rifles in profusion for the Federation army troops, lasguns for civilian militia purposes, industrial and military materiel in abundance. Always, always more. Always more to dig and to build.
==*==
The sanctuary complexes were completed on the planet deemed Sanctuary by Aetius and entered. The Federation of Man, brought to its knees by its mechanical apocalypse, was destroyed by its psychic one. Across man's former realm, worlds burned by the score, then the hundred as monsters from the abyss of the galaxy's collective psyche slavered and capered through the burning streets of countless cities and villages. There was no organised response – there could not be with Warp travel impossible due to the storms. The Federation Army and Navy ceased to be. The disruption of galactic travel brought fresh disasters. Rapidly dwindling resources brought on civil wars on thousands of planets. Weapons of mass destruction were used in desperation.
Other planets simply starved to death. For five thousand years this continued, then an Imperium rose across the stars. The Warp brought it to horrendous civil war, crippled the Imperial dream before it could truly be born. Nevertheless, the Imperium of Man fitfully held on through the centuries and millennia, simultaneously contracting and expanding. Its colonists landed in M38 on a world once called Sanctuary, and developed it into a Civilised World known as Vyzanthia IV.
For three millennia the backwater colony planet subsisted, its population approximately one to two billion, until in 850.M41 a major Ork Waaagh!, led by a ferocious warlord under the Overtyrant of Jagga, landed on the planet. PDF and Astra Militarum forces were hard pressed against the invaders, but knew little of the forces that began to stir under their very feet as the war dragged on into its second year.
Forces that would change the fate of the galaxy.