++Facility 2W6379BJ, Denton III++
++3.637.879.M39++
Alex Aisen was not a man lacking in tales of personal woes, many of them self-inflicted. But he could honestly and with considerable accuracy rate the passage through the turbulent Warp as the most terrifying thing he had ever done.
One moment, he was standing in the familiar if cramped crew compartment of a Valkyrie transport. The next, he was pulled into a whirling maelstrom of otherworldly nightmares. All around him was darkness, an endless void of pure black. No, it wasn’t darkness; it was an indistinct purple-pinkish glow. No, it was a green mist filled with wailing faces, human and otherwise. No, it was all of them at once. Screams and pleas for a mercy that Aisen somehow knew would never come echoed in his ears from across space and time, overlapping with yet distinct from the cruel laughter of otherworldly beings. In the distance, Aisen saw himself pass through a purple cloud, peeling his flesh from his bones in a graphic display of gore. He saw his soul taken apart then rended down and consumed by a vast, pink nightmare creature. Aisen wanted to shriek, but his lungs were empty. He watched himself die a dozen deaths on as many planets: from being viciously torn apart by aliens on his home hive to being buried beneath an avalanche on a frozen ice ball to slowly drowning underneath the murky green waters of a great sea. He felt every death as if it were actually him there. He heard his own screams joining the dark chorus of the Warp for all eternity, and Aisen knew then that he was dead.
And then, just as suddenly as it had started, it was over.
Aisen found himself standing in darkened room somewhere. He didn’t know where, and he didn’t care. He doubled over, vomiting chunks of brown sludge and blood all over the grated metal floor beneath his feet. He gasped for breath like a drowning man, desperately trying to fill the aching void in his chest. There was a sensation on his back and noise in his ears, but he ignored them, his panicked mind seeking only to consume air as fast as possible
*smack*
Aisen tumbled backwards and onto his arse as grey club hit him roughly across the face. More sounds resounded in his ringing ears. He stared blankly at the club that had just hit him until he realized that was attached to something. His eyes traced the origin point of his attacker while his brain struggled to cope with what had just happened.
“No, not a club,” he realized as something resembling reason began to reassert itself in his head. “A hoof. Attached to…” Aisen looked further “A purple horse.” Its mouth was moving, and with a start Alex Aisen realized that it was the source of the noise he was hearing. So he tuned in.
“-OUT OF IT!!!” the funny-looking equine was shouting at him. “WE HAVE A JOB TO DO!”
“A job?” Aisen blinked uncertainly. “What’s this thing going on about?”
Without warning, a rush of memories flooded the human’s worn brain. He recalled who he was, who and what this violet creature was, and why he was there. He almost wished he hadn’t.
“I’m awake,” he mumbled in a voice that sounded strange to his own ears, but seemed to register to Twilight.
She hit him again. “Get up! Yes, we ran into a bit of unexpected turbulence, but I pulled us all through. You’re fine and we have work to do!”
“Work. Right,” Aisen said vaguely as he slowly regained his feet. His whole body shook violently with the effort, until the purple one’s horn lit up again, and the tremors died down.
“There!” she said in a huff. “Honestly, no one else took it that badly. As you people put it: man up, son.”
“Ugh…”
“Just shut up and follow me. We have men to extract. And put on your night vision goggles.”
The small team followed the little purple creature, Aisen near the center. For the first time since arriving, he bothered to examine the room around him. It was dark, but filled with row after row of tanks with murky blue fluid inside. Peering closer at one of the strange machines, he was startled to see a human face float by in the ooze. He almost jumped, but then his mind filled in the blanks: this was a servitor farm. Where humans were grown in tanks to be made into the hideous half-mechanical, brain dead slaves of the Imperium.
Aisen shuddered.
Twilight peered carefully down the black hallways of the Mechanicus facility. The lights, even those powered by emergency backup generators, had gone completely dark. That meant either that the inhabitants had voluntarily shut off the lights themselves – unlikely to do anything to deter or hinder their attackers – or else all power generators had already been compromised. She had memorized the base’s layout during the ride here, and knew that the squad was roughly three hundred meters under the earth, deep below the occupied surface. If there were any survivors, not to mention their intended extractee, they would most likely be huddled down here.
But then, the Necrons never were strict about following the laws of physics. Distance was no guarantee of safety.
The prison cell where their target had been kept was, by Twilight’s recollection, some two hundred meters from where her spell had deposited them, through a twisting maze of corridors and Mechanicus laboratories. A little further away than she’d been going for, but precision teleportation was always a tricky act, much less during the times when the Aether was as tempestuous as it was then. That they had all made it through relatively intact and not possessed was about as good as could be reasonably expected.
“Hold,” came the low voice of Durrane, the cybernetic-eyed man with their auspex. “I’m getting something. It’s faint, but close.”
“How close?” Twilight replied, her voice barely more than a whisper.
“32 meters and closing.”
Twilight nodded and looked at her men. “Spread out and assume ambush formation… let’s say five.” It was a shame she’d only had time to drill them in the most basic of her prearranged maneuvers, but such was life.
The six humans and one alicorn fanned out across the hallway, the humans pairing off and taking cover as best they could in the doorways around them, the alicorn casting an enchantment on herself and simply walking directly up the wall and hanging upside down from the pipe-infested ceiling. From her perch, Twilight was difficult to spot unless someone chose to look directly up at her.
Below her, all was silence for several seconds as the impromptu “Stormtroopers” held their collective breath, Durrane being the only one to not truly look at least nervous. He eyes, cybernetic and organic, looked up and down from his auspex, checking the hall for signs of the approaching blips. Aisen took a swig of his flask; Titus and a few others muttered low prayers to the God Emperor. Other than that, there was no sound at all.
Just when Twilight was on the verge of calling off the team, her sensitive ears swiveled in response to stimulation. The slightest pang of metal on metal rang out through the hall. No one moved, or even dared to breathe. Then the sound repeated, louder this time. And again. And again. And again. Each time, the sound resonated more and more strongly. Getting closer.
Time slowed to a crawl. Seconds felt like hours. Twilight could feel the heightened beating of her heart in her chest as adrenaline pumped through her. Her bolt pistols teasingly made their way from their cases. Below her, fingers twitched over triggers.
Around a bend in the hallway came the skeletal form of a Necron Warrior, the eerie lime glow from its long-barreled weapon illuminating the hall around it. Metal feet impacted on metal floor, clanging echoing throughout the deathly silent tunnels. Two more followed the undead warrior, marching in a twitching shuffle befitting those long bereft of minds of their own. Two more still followed those, and the five machines made their way down the hall where Twilight’s men lay in wait.
“Hold…” the alicorn thought to herself, holding her breath tightly as the xenos approached. “Hold… Hold…”
The creatures passed directly underneath her.
“Now.”
Twilight’s twin bolt pistols opened up on the metal warriors, .75 slugs punching holes into their armor and exploding into their intricate insides. Simultaneously, she released the spell holding her to the ceiling and dropped directly on top of the Necrons. One, already riddled with wounds, staggered under her weight and dropped to the ground underneath her hooves.
A wave of telekinetic force swept from Twilight in all directions, blowing the four abominations still on their feet off of them and into the metal walls. Her men took their cue and struck, unloading high-intensity laser shots from their hellguns into their downed mechanical foes. Self-repair systems struggled to cope as damage poured in from all angles; simplistic targeting programs experiencing slight delays in determining threat priorities.
Twilight leveled a pistol at the back of the head of the Necron she stood atop. Its arms released its weapon and twisted at an unnatural angle to grab at her, clawed fingers scraping along her carapace armor. She fired once, twice, three times. The metal warrior’s head was reduced to so much metallic pulp, overwhelming its ancient repair systems at last. While Twilight hopped off its limp form, the metal carcass vanished in a flash of green light.
The alicorn’s eyes darted around to each of her enemies in turn. One, half-melted and thoroughly peppered with bolt holes, had slumped back against the wall and disappeared even as she watched. Another, missing and arm and with its chest torn open, struggled to regain its footing and aim its long gauss weapon. A third, despite enduring three hellgun shots in as many seconds, had clambered back to its feet and was aiming its gun towards the most visible target: Twilight.
Twilight reached out with her telekinesis, and a purple aura surrounded the gauss weapon. She forcibly yanked it to the side at the last second, her strength greater even that the undead warrior’s. Instead of vaporizing her, the weapon swung to aim at the last of the four remaining Necrons before discharging. The green energy flayed the prone metal xeno as well as it did anything else. Before the warrior could adjust its aim back to her, she shot it five more times with her bolt pistols, and it crumpled to the ground before vanishing.
“Status?” Twilight whispered into her comm bead. “Everyone alright?” Once they affirmed that there were no casualties in the first engagement, Twilight gave a small smile. “Congratulations, men,” she said in a genuinely pleasant tone. “Our first firefight and it ended well for us. Now, come on, let’s-”
The alicorn stopped herself. Her ears swiveled again. There was another sound coming their way, but different from the first.
She furrowed her brow. “Not the sound of metal on metal… Just one… And hurried…”
“Hold your positions,” she ordered her men, resuming her own place on the ceiling. “Someone’s coming, but if my guess is right.”
Another figure rounded the corner. But this one was alone, and human. A very familiar human.
“Interrogator Kylara,” Twilight said from her elevated perch.
The woman looked up at her with an unreadable expression. “Acolyte.”