Warhammer The Light of the Past [DAOT in 40k]

Navarro · 2021-09-08T14:04:28+00:00

EATB has stalled a bit; started with this idea I've been thinking of for a while. My own contribution to this subgenre of Warhammer 40k fanfiction. +++ THE SANCTUARY, PART 1 +++ 368.M25 Twelve-Star Admiral Constantine Aetius wept as he saw Earth appear on the vidscreen. It had been centuries since he last saw Man's birthworld, capital of the Federation of Man, glorious centre of all human civilisation. For that time, he had been at war across the galaxy fighting the most terrible enemy mankind had yet known to utter annihilation. Earth was not as it had been when he saw her last. The emerald-and-sapphire crown jewel of the Federation was no more. Craters pockmarked her surface; rad-wastes stretched over most of Siberia and Central Asia, from what had been the Persian Gulf to the former coast of the Arctic Sea. His ship's auspexes were showing the ruins of Hive-arcologies; dark nuclear-winter clouds hid the surface largely from sight; and worst of all, the oceans had been drained. Earth had been at ground zero of the Cybernetic Revolt; the Iron Men gestalts there had pioneered some of their worst strategies. Billions of civilians herded into processing camps and sent back, blood-lusted by the diabolical cruciamen, at their own species as human waves before the Iron legions; entire populations broken down for chemical energy; countless individuals lobotomised and cyborged, their higher brain functions subverted to lend more processing power to the Iron gestalts. That Man had held the planet as the fighting raged back and forth across space for five centuries had been a testament to his tenacity and will to live, but the Iron forces had one last atrocity to commit. They had attempted to carry out the wholesale destruction of Earth's hydrosphere, teleporting or transporting away via massive orbital capillaries immense quantities of water to burn as fusion fuel in their warships. The deepest areas of the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans were now massive inland seas; of smaller water bodies there was nothing left. The Caribbean, the Sea of Japan, the Middle Sea at the heart of the ancient world where Aetius had been born and raised; they were gone. Just salt flats and dust plains. Across the galaxy, many planets had met similar or worse fates. Of the ten million worlds inhabited by mankind, no one knew how many had survived or maintained a state of civilisation. Estimates ranged from fifteen percent to a wildly optimistic forty-five percent. +++It is not befitting you to weep,+++ a voice rang in his head. It wasn't his own of course; it was the voice of the Stone AI bonded to him by the implants in his brain, the voice of his ship. Despite what some were already proclaiming, the Stone Men had ever been loyal to man. It was against both them and humanity that the Iron Men had rebelled, and many had been martyred in the fighting. Relatively few had survived the Cybernetic Revolt; it had been an information war as much as anything else, and data equivalents to the sun-snuffers and empyreal bombs thrown about with abandon had not been uncommon. Ultima Ratio, the ship herself, or as he sometimes called her, “Ultima”, was a supercapital Basilissa-class warship made in the shipyards of the Martian orbital ring. Forty kilometres long from bow to stern, she was of the blade-like configuration favoured by the majority of human warships. Her weapons were a mix of turret and broadside fire, capable of presenting a strong offense both to the sides and to forward. A mix of grav-impeller missiles, gravitic-accelerator mass drivers and phased particle beam projectors made for a jack of all trades adept at long, medium and short ranges; while her spinally-mounted Nova-cannon represented one of the greatest triumphs of military engineering. She was guarded primarily by an Aegis-pattern cyclic self-repairing Void shield array, and then by hundreds of missile arrays and volkite-based point-defence guns to take down whatever ordnance got past her shields. “You know me, Ultima,” he said, vocalising his thoughts to the AI inhabiting his vessel. “I've never let my emotions stop me from doing what's necessary.” He interlinked deeper with the ship's systems, running his mind through the planetary noosphere. It was dismal. Food riots here; water riots there. Stray Iron warforms occasionally launching attacks or being uncovered by Army searcher teams. Oxford University, part of the Greater Lundun Arcology Complex, Kingdom of Albyon, razed to the ground by a mob of Simplifiers; books that had been preserved for twenty-five thousand years burned or used as toilet paper, data-stacks completely annihilated. Cults were rising among the teeming billions, preaching the coming end of mankind, and rebellions were still being fought across the planet by local troops and Federation Army soldiers alike. But still, there were positive reports; nano-plagues being cleansed from surviving water sources, civilian fleets on their way bringing vast supplies of water and terraforming supplies from the far reaches of the galaxy; speeches by Kings and Presidents and Prime Ministers celebrating victory over the Iron Men and glorifying the man who had cracked open and torn down their last major strongholds in the galactic north, near the Aeldari Home Cluster in the Perseus Arm. He was scheduled to meet with the Chief Executive Officer of the Federation and the officials of the Federation Senate; but he had his own misgivings still. His campaigns there had revealed awful truths. His Navigators had given very disturbing reports while they were engaged on campaign. Reports that he needed to deliver. He waited until his vessel was in stable orbit, then desynced from his command throne. Nanomachine wires unthreaded themselves from his nervous system, leaving a barely visible puncture mark on the base of his neck. Despite the initial devastating blows of the war – when everything noosphere-connected was used as a weapon – he still trusted nanomedicine. He walked down to the ship's teleportarium, changed into a protective suit covered in micro-sized aerythmetic wards, then stood in position to be sent down. There was a swirl of impossible colours, a lingering feeling of unease – and he was in East Africa, looking at the Capital Complex of the Federation of Man. It was built overlooking Olduvai Gorge – a symbolic token to man's origins here in the primal wilderness – and was of gleaming white stone. From its walls flew the banner of the Federation – the Solar Eagle; a gold eagle, wings outstretched, head pointing right, surrounded by twelve sun-rays on a field of black. He walked to an aircar, and was taken straight to the heart of the Federation, the Senate Chamber. On twelve hundred seats sat the Delegates of the Federation's member states – the standard-bearers of human civilisation. There were even the xenos representatives of Federation client races; Tarellians, Kinebrach and others. But on a grav-lifted platform at the centre of the chamber stood the members of the Federation Senate – the governing body of mankind. They represented the heads of the core organisations that made up the Federation – its military, scientific and economic leaders, headed by the Federation CEO. He took a skim-platform to the centre of the chamber, and winced as it interlocked with the Federation Senate's. “Mr. CEO,” he said plainly. “While we've defeated the Iron Men, the Federation faces yet another crisis.” “What's your concern?” the tired old man replied. Though juvenat treatments had kept him artificially young, the immense stress of leading humanity through the worst crisis it had ever faced – worse than the Greenskin Wars fought as man took the first tentative extra-solar steps - had worn him down. “When on campaign in the Borealis Segmentum,” Aetius said. “We experienced severe empyreal disturbance in the area of the aeldari home cluster. We were there long enough to track that the disturbances seemed to be spreading and growing outwards.” “The Warp is always turbulent,” the Paternova's tank said, automatic translators converting the gurgling sounds he made within his bath of hyper-oxygenated water into flawless machine-voiced Gothic. “Its tides ebb and flow, and its storms wax and wane.” Aetius transferred the statistical data that had been gathered into the Senate's private noosphere. They showed a continual rise in Warp turbulence and a slow spread outward from the aeldari worlds. Worse, the scale and strength of the turbulence was starting to increase exponentially. In a matter of decades it would hit a tipping point. “Not only that, but my forces encountered a similarly exponential rise in psychic phenomena,” he continued. “More powerful psychic channellers being born more often, and latents jumping into full-fledged active status.” He remembered what he had seen. Common soldiers blazing with warpfire, a hellish light behind their eyes as they ran amok across the battlefield. Trained and trusted psycasters exploding into multicoloured fire as they fought in the midst of combat. If that happened amongst the civilian population … and worse, there were rumours about what happened to ships whose gellar fields failed. From the very first Warp-ship, the doomed Event Horizon, it had always been an urban legend among spacers. Of hostile, malevolent intelligences dwelling in a space where no mortal life could exist. If those things were real, if they could break into the material world en masse … “If this continues, I believe the Federation faces not only a collapse of interstellar travel and trade, but a psychic apocalypse.” “What is your proposed solution?” “The aeldari seem to be at the core of this phenomenon. We know of the psychodynamic nature of Warp space, and the extreme nature of their society. If their … behaviours are disrupting the Warp to this extent, they are a threat to mankind equal to that of the Iron Men themselves. We ought to eliminate it.” “You're suggesting xenocide,” the Federation Army Chief of Staff said. “A war waged to wipe out a whole species. We've never engaged in such a campaign, it's never been necessary. Even against the greenskins and the Slaugth, we've simply pushed them into quarantine zones and culled them when their numbers got bothersome.” “I don't care whether we destroy the eldar or subdue them,” Aetius replied, using the vulgar term to make a point. “But we must end the threat they pose.” “We don't have the strength,” the Navy Chief of Staff added. “The tachyon relay and Warp beacon networks are still in tattered disarray. If you're right, we won't be able to repair them and rebuild the Federation military before the aeldari cluster becomes inaccessible via Warp space. Not only that, but the aeldari still have their automated defence network fully online.” Aetius bit his lip at that. At the start of the War, the first emissaries man had sent to the aeldari in two millennia had arrived in their core worlds begging for aid. What had happened to them had been unspeakable, and the aeldari had not sent a single one of their psychic automatons to mankind's aid. Even as the galaxy burned around them, they had not lifted a finger, lost in blood-orgies and narcotic-infused dreams. As the mechanivores bit savagely at the data of spacetime, as the sun-snuffers wiped out whole systems, as grey tempests of nanite swarms turned planets into steel wastelands of flowing nano-dust, as trillions died every hour across uncounted worlds and in the bleak void of space ... “Dark Glass, Golden Gate?” Aetius said, referring to the most classified military projects in the Federation. “Dark Glass?” the Navy Chief replied mockingly. “All that ended up doing was burning up countless psychers without a single hint of a Webway breach. A failed experiment. And as for Golden Gate … the project is due to be cancelled. It'd need resources from across the galaxy.” Nevertheless, Aetius formally called his proposal to a Senate vote over the noosphere. It failed by a dismal majority. Even those who saw the coming doom did not believe there was much that could be done about it, with the realm of mankind in such a tattered state as it was now. Then the fall of the Federation is inevitable, Aetius thought. All I fought to defend for these long centuries … gone. Is this how human history will end? Wiped out by the side-effects of xenos depravity? We held back the Iron Men, and now we face this inevitable doom? +++If the Federation as-it-is is doomed,+++ Ultima sent along the mental link that bound man and machine, +++You should make efforts to ensure that at least some of what it was survives into the future.+++ And how?, Aetius thought. +++You must act quickly,+++ the AI sent. +++Gather the forces you can. I suggest you start with your old allies. Go to the far corners of the galaxy. The Warp disruption will end eventually. But you may have to wait a long time.+++ *** It had been ten years since that fateful meeting, and Aetius had gathered everything he could muster. A colonisation mission, he had explained it as to High Command, and it was – of a sort. In the far east of the galaxy, many light-years to the north of the Consulate of Ultramar, a world named Sanctuary would be established to preserve a remnant of the Federation in stasis. They would sleep, watched over by Stone AI guardians, for a hundred thousand years or until they were awoken by entities bearing both human DNA and psy-resonance. In the conference room of the Ultima Ratio, Aetius sat with all the leaders of the expedition. There was his old comrade, Sector General Miles V. Bradley leading his Stellar Expeditionary Group of Merican Colonial Marines; Alyssia Raven, Knight-Princess oath-sworn to him by ties of battle; Albus Helmawr from Araneus Pri,, his troops specialised in bunker and arcology warfare; many of Mars and Earth's top scientists, especially those trained in understanding and countering psychic phenomena; Technocrat Carl Lundgren of Ryza, an expert in gravimetrics who was convinced he could create an FTL drive which did not touch on Warp space if given sufficient funding and time; and many more. There were dozens of people in all, from the managers of transtellar corporations to the holo-avatars of artificial intelligences. There were two hundred warships, approximately the size of a Federation Sector Fleet, and three hundred transport ships; 40 million soldiers in all. But their numbers were dwarfed by the civilian portion, colonists eager for any chance to escape the ruin that the core of mankind's civilisation, the area most ravaged by the Iron Men, had become. Sixty great colony ships were part of the formation, carrying six hundred million souls. Not only had standard-issue civilian STCs been brought along, but milspec auto-constructors which functioned along the same lines but were not designed for rugged civilian manufacture but high-end military-applications. “We may be facing human extinction,” Aetius began. “The odds have never been as dire as this. If some other fragment of our civilisation survives, our sleep may not be as long as we thought. But we must keep in mind that we may well rise up from our stasis chambers to look on a galaxy completely devoid of human life. We must be more resolute and committed to our duty than we have ever been before. We must be brave, we must be stern, and we must not be shy to make hard choices.” Everybody nodded. “Failure is not an acceptable option. Defeat is not an acceptable option. We must aim for the survival of the species and its complete mastery of the galaxy. If xenos breeds do not kneel to us, they will be knelt. If any branch of mankind refuses to accept the authority of the Federation, it will be brought to heel. If the empyreal intelligences are real, and if they are hostile, we will destroy them.” Everybody nodded. “I take these actions not because I wish to do them but because I must. The Federation will not fail; humanity will not fail. We will survive, and we will thrive. That is my only wish.” Aetius took a deep breath. “All vessels,” he said, his voice being noospherically sent across both the vessel and the fleet. “Prepare for Warp transition. Ultima Ratio bridge crew, begin Warp transition.” The Ultima Ratio moved ahead of the fleet, clearing space for its mighty plasma reactors to charge with power. Dark lightning coruscated across space, and with a mighty unsound, reality ripped open and the supercapital warship, followed by all its lesser escorts, stabbed prow-first into the unreal darkness of the Immaterium.