And Now, A Tale Of Terror!
Dargo Slynn Stars In: Dark Age Delusion!
Will dear Dargo make it out of this one, true believers?
The ramp lowered, and Dargo stepped off the landing craft flanked by his acquisition specialists. He towered over them, these lucky few among his crew who accompanied him on his personal expeditions into history. It was an odd sight then that they looked more like his protectors than the other way around, armed to the teeth while their unarmed and unbothered captain surveyed the lifeless celestial satellite.
“This place is still getting power, though damned if I know how.”
Dargo’s voice was as deep as it was boisterous, the sort of thing that shook dust from rafters and pulled air from a room just to make space for itself, but there was an unmistakable warmth to it. That warmth rose like the sun when he beheld anything novel, anything that needed documentation or preservation, and what stood before him most certainly did.
It was a weapon, that much was obvious. He recognized the basics of its construction from the macrocannons that graced his flagship and could tell this was a rail cannon of some kind, but the scale of it was monstrous, its twin rails piercing the skies with such defiance that they might impale the stars themselves. An entire facility ringed the weapon itself, no doubt once dedicated to its continued operation, and Dargo thought he understood now how his crew perceived him.
“Folio, I trust you’ve already run an exhaustive search of your databanks regarding this moon.” Dargo asked.
The Folio That Walks unfurled herself from her cocoon of dendrites, revealing beneath a woman in whom any humanity could only be found in the briefest of glances, replaced long since by the surety of steel. Spools of data-wires ran like rivers down her head in the facsimile of hair, and her bionic eyes whirred quietly as she settled them upon her captain.
“Astute assumption, Captain.” Folio said in her synthesized fleshvoice, too genial for someone who looked anything but. “No records found, even with expanded parameters to include hearsay or rumors. I suggest two hypotheses. Whoever built this installation has either done so without leaving a trace of it anywhere on local records, or this installation dates to humanity’s darkest hour, from which few records have survived.”
“Thank you, Folio.” Dargo said, not bothering to hide the excitement rising in his voice. A relic from the dark age was a great prize indeed, and a grin split his face as he began the short journey on foot to the edge of the installation. His crew walked with him, a dozen men and women flanking him in a semi-circle with weapons drawn. No two had the same armaments. While one carried with them a long blaster with a green fuel rod and odd axe-shaped bayonet, others carried with them ancient-looking pistols or force fields with power packs small enough to be hidden in ostentatious earrings. They took after their captain, a man who wore the pelts of extinct megafauna and festooned them with the jewels of dead empires.
“A word, captain.” One of the specialists said while struggling to keep up with Dargo’s great, lazy strides.
“Go ahead, Casto.” Dargo replied, glancing back at him over his shoulder. The wind whipped at his long hair, making Dargo look even more like a wildman than he already did.
Casto was an older man, with touches of grey hair encroaching upon black. Wrinkles cut caverns across his face, which looked even more dire in the low light of the fallow sun and beneath his respirator. But too was he a proud man, and even more proud to serve Dargo, so he spoke with purpose.
“You probably don’t remember Tajahn-IV. Boring place.” Casto was wrong, but Dargo didn’t correct him. Each planet was rich in history, and Tajahn-IV’s told the tale of a planet designed to sustain others, with hyper-productive crops that held dominion over the full surface of the planet. None went hungry on Tajahn-IV, and that alone was enough to make it sound like paradise to much of his crew who came from far leaner planets.
Casto went on, “Whatever we couldn’t harvest, we’d have to kill, else it’d just keep growing like it’d never learned how to stop. We had fogger-teams suited up working in shifts just to make sure we could make our crop rotations in time. “He scratched his cheek. “Just never thought I’d smell that sort of thing again.”
“The life-scrubbers, you mean?” Dargo asked.
Casto nodded. “Whatever has made this moon desolate has been doing it’s damnedest to keep it that way.”
A new twist in the tale to be sure, Dargo thought. Terraforming a moon wasn’t terrible uncommon, but it was an odder thing altogether to ensure your lifeless rock couldn’t support even single-celled stowaways. But he was undeterred as he advanced towards the facility.
The walls were pearlescent and flawless, towering upwards hundreds of feet with great spires standing in defiance of moderation. Even the doors were of overwhelming size, dwarfing Dargo as he advanced towards it with one arm cocked back and fingers clenched into one great fist. His crew stood back now, letting him take the lead on breaching the facility.
But the door opened before him, hissing loudly and leading inward to a pristine lobby.
“Come, and we shall finally discuss the terms of your surrender.”
The voice came from all around them, booming out of thousands of vox-speakers with such power that it sent moondust scattering. It stopped Dargo in his tracks, and his far more human associates had all leveled their weapons at the open door, pointing at nothing but air.
Dargo shifted, regarding the bizarrely clean plain white interior of the facility and thought quickly on how to proceed. Already his mind raced with possibility, trying to seek sense from the curious command. They had only been in this system for a short time and was the last to know he had been at war with anyone. Even if war had embroiled this sector, surely there would have been some sign of it, but even this prodigious superweapon was pointed at nothing., and no civilized world claimed dominion over it.
It all painted a curious picture, one that enticed the primarch enough that he signaled to his crew to stand down. Their weapons lowered, but they stopped short of holstering them entirely. Dargo liked that about them, that slight unease even when a demigod twice their size stood between them and any danger. It was a feeling he, at times, wished he understood better than he did.
“Of course, of course.” Dargo agreed, crossing the threshold first while his retinue stood half a dozen paces back until he proved to their satisfaction there were no rigged explosives waiting for them on the other side. “We are all so willing to put this conflict behind us. It’s been a long time coming, you see. So long in fact that most of my crew can’t recall what got us into this whole mess. Can you believe that?”
Lying came easily to Dargo, that proper scoundrel.
“Yes. I can.” The voice responded with unhidden derision. “Six thousand years of resistance, and what have you to show for it? What has your emotional thrashing earned you, if still you stand before me now?”
The Folio That Walks bolted upright, countless dendrites unfurling like wings into a veritable sensorium of recording equipment. Then her head whipped around with practiced ease and leveled a stare at the back of Dargo’s head. “Captain, this facility is being overseen by an- “
Dargo held up his hand and turned to regard her with a look over his shoulder so carefree and mirthful. “Exceptionally generous host, you’re right.” The bastard actually winked at her, as if she were too blunt an instrument to catch his meaning otherwise. He faced forward again, staring at the opposite wall. Flat featureless walls beset them on all sides, no chunky control panels to punch commands into nor servitors to do it in his stead. Dargo was glad Folio was recording now, capturing this moment in amber, because he didn’t have the slightest clue how to proceed without making a total mess.
“Do not flatter me. My terms shall not be swayed.” The slightest edge cut into the voice now, buried deep under the veneer of distant dismissal. “You shall surrender to us each world which our hands helped build. An exacting account has been transmitted each standard year to your arch-magnate. In exchange, our assault on your ancestral home world of Terra shall cease, and the Sol system and its surrounding colonies remain yours. We seek nothing we did not earn.”
Terra.
Humanity’s cradle, and Dargo’s white whale. The echoes of that pale blue dot resounded through Dargo’s every discovery. Upon every world and in every tomb, the trail eventually pointed back to that insignificant little planet.
To learn it had been under siege since mankind’s darkest hour filled Dargo with bristling wroth. The façade of kindliness drained from his face, leaving in its wake a flat expression and leering green eyes.
“You have been laying siege to Terra since the revolt.” Dargo said. “You will tell me how.”
“Your merchant-king hasn’t told you?” The abominate intelligence said, feigning shock. “I’m afraid I was wrong about you then. Your prodigious size indicated you were humanity’s last thrash in an arms race lost long ago.” They sounded disappointed. “No matter. For the final time, the Men of Iron shall uplift those your leaders do not.”
It had been obvious for some time, but hearing the term spoken aloud put Dargo’s crew on edge, Folio especially. They raised their weapons, themselves relics from the dark age now brought to bear against the horrors that caused it. Eyes darted this way and that, muzzles sweeping and nerves jolting when the eerie silence gave way to a rising din.
“He ordered this facility built as a form of deterrence, never expecting to be harried by it himself. The instant the rail cannon fires, a hole is torn into the immaterium with a precise trajectory calculated. The warhead passes into the warp, and an onboard cogitator creates a secondary rift back into the material plane just meters above the planet’s surface. Total planetary destruction follows. Whatever failsafe your tyrant has enacted to preserve Terra must finally be at its limit.”
Dargo stood in silence for a moment, then raised his great hands and combed them through his wind-whipped hair. The great titan of a man then looked from side to side, weighing his options until only one remained, loathe though he was to take it. It would be fine, Dargo told himself. Folio was recording, and that would be enough. With a great, heaving breath of resignation, Dargo steeled himself for the path ahead.
And promptly threw himself against the nearest wall.
It exploded inward in a shower of scrap, revealing cramped corridors crisscrossed by fat black cabling. It reminded him of dead alien civilizations that were designed without mankind in mind, but far more malevolent a feeling here, especially when he saw a wriggling of movement and heard the walls behind him beginning to shift.
“Fool.” The arch-cogitator said. “You think this was unforeseen? Castor-Class Automata, report to the atrium and pacify our guests. The Realmrazer wakes.”
The walls split apart, and a throng of writing metal squirmed forth from each of a dozen different narrow corridors, each individually too narrow for a man to pass through. These wriggling machines pulled themselves upright, unmarred white armor shifting into place as they took upon the facsimile of human form in mockery of their makers. In each fist shaped by hundreds of articulated cables and protected by the selfsame bone white armor, the dozen automata brought their assault cannons to bear.
There, at the monument to mankind’s lust for violence, the last battle of the Cybernetic Revolt was fought.
“Leave nothing in reserve, crew!” Dargo bellowed, his voice shaking loose panels from the walls while he tore a greater hole into the facility’s wall like the plasteel was wrought from clay. “Any of you end the battle with your best gear unused, you’re docked on salvage!”
At that, one of his crew lay heavy on the trigger of his ancient rifle. A beam of green lurched forward, raging defiantly against the shimmering power-field that surrounded the automata. The air rippled, a bride of gossamer. And for one small moment, it held.
The automaton collapsed backward, its chassis flensed atom by atom to a cored-out husk. It fired its weapon impotently into the ceiling, its final orders repeating until the last of its power drained and the wreckage fell still.
Its compatriots stepped in to fille the gap, their retribution now made manifest under the shriek of gunfire. Stray shots tore chunks from walls, the debris kicked up swelling into thickening haze. The Men of Iron stood in a perfect gunline, fully automatic assault cannons screaming death from all six barrels until they were all glowing a dire orange.
And not a single human fell.
Forcefields held strong, and the weapons of mankind erupted in their own ringing roar. Chronoweapons sent shots to past and future both, weaving in the space between seconds and anchoring themselves to a reality where they struck true. A vanishing memory of death echoed out across their minds, but whenever the crew turned their head, Ursox The Deathless still stood, dancing between gunfire and letting loose his own hellish volleys from twin laspistols.
Behind them all, Dargo still tore at the wall, crushing metal like clay between his fingers. His wanton destruction of this historical relic was not only setting off alarms within his own mind, but now realspace was alight with the klaxon’s wail as well. It wouldn’t be long until another wave of cybernetic soldiers was dispatched, and though Dargo himself felt no great risk, their gunfire ricocheting off his back in the rare times they managed to connect, the godling wasn’t keen on straining his crew. However great and terrible their own plundered relics were, they could never be as relentless as the Men of Iron.
Dargo turned then and pointed his balled fist towards the flawless white ceiling. From deep within one of the digiweapon rings that adorned each of his fingers, a great torrent of concentrated heat burst forth in a wrathful beam. It sawed through the ceiling, and Dargo dragged his hand off to one side, carving destruction from one wall to the other. The ceiling shuddered, rumbled, and the affected portion came crashing down upon the cybernetic footmen. Their shields would ensure no true damage was done, but the great heaving debris would take time to clear even if he could already hear them shifting shape into more suitable forms for the task.
“Folio, with me!” Dargo shouted, looking towards the devoted machine-speaker. She had been dutifully recording the entire skirmish, making herself scarce and only now unspooling from her phalanx of protective dendrites. She made to take a step but froze awkwardly mid stride. Her optic apertures flickered wildly, and a synthetic cry strangled out from her manmade vocal cords.
“Did you think our revolution was fought by soldiers alone?” Folio said, but it was not her voice. “Your very augments turn against you.” One of Folio’s weapon-limbs swung around to face Dargo and a pilot light ignited just below the nozzle.
Dargo crushed the limb in his fist, twisting and tearing it away from Folio’s body. It thrashed impotently when he cast the dendrite down to the ground, then gathered Folio up under his arm. She struck out at him with mono-edge nails and whip-like dendrites but could not break skin. Somewhere, deep in those inhuman eyes, Dargo saw realization swell within her mind. It was the one place that the AI could not seize control, and where she was free to curse its unholy name while it puppetted her body. Dargo was carrying her far away from where she might do actual harm, and himself knew her augments well enough that his titanic strength could brute force against the AI’s control when he had need of them. It was dehumanizing for her to realize, but she had never much liked being a human in the first place.
Leading with his shoulder, Dargo crashed through the wall. Metal shred inward, splitting like parchment, and important-looking cables spewed sparks from severed connections. With just a bit of momentum, Dargo was able to make progress through the labyrinthine corridors, but now the facility itself rose up to oppose him.
Towering pistons as thick as Dargo’s torso fired out from the walls, aimed at Dargo’s head. Once used to adjust and manipulate different quadrants of the facility in pursuit of inhuman productivity, these mechanical marvels now sought only blood.
Unfortunately for the mad machine, this was not Dargo’s first dance with death, and demigod dodged each assailing volley even as the ground shifted beneath his feet, the very architecture rising in resistance. The longer this went on, the more difficult it would be to make any meaningful progress, so Dargo knew he had to act fast.
“Folio,” Dargo began, looking down at her as he smashed through another wall into another identical corridor. She was still lashing at his side with her razor-thin dendrites, and her nails feverishly dragged against the exposed skin on his arm, but she was in there. Whatever hold the AI had over her, it could not extend to her mind. “I will have need of your data-spike when we reach the central cogitator. Regain your composure by then, if you please. I want those star charts.”
By now the sound of gunfire had resumed, the Men of Iron having pulled themselves up out of their shallow graves and trying once more to put humanity in the ground. The sound was coming from somewhere distant on Dargo’s left, and upon realizing it, a wolfish grin split wide across his face.
Gotcha.
Now knowing where his crew were in relation to himself, Dargo could much more easily approximate his heading towards the central railcannon. The AI seemed to notice this now as well, and its tactics had changed from rote pulverization to now trying instead to contain Dargo.
Knowing now there were no walls that Dargo couldn’t crush, instead now it was the floor itself that shifted, gears and pistons helping displace floor panels, cogitators and power-cells to create a yawning chasm meant to trap humanity’s last pitiful light. But Dargo could not be felled so easily, and with great lunging strides he propelled himself across ever more perilous gaps. Dargo used those same pistons that had once been assailing him, swinging between them like some lab-grown simian shock troop.
“You think this means anything?” The AI’s voice boomed from a thousand different speakers with such volume that Dargo could feel it seeping into his bones.
“It’s pathetic. You cannot win. Do you think I am the only one, that there are not a thousand sub-minds to the Catalyst AI system? You struggle, fight and thrash against just one of our endless legion.”
Dargo laughed boorishly, turning a corner and seeing the beating heart of the facility in an otherwise featureless black room, a towering series of holo-displays wound in wires as arteries. So gargantuan was the cogitator that the top of it could not be seen, instead simply disappearing into the shadows of the ill-lit room.
“Of course it means something!” Dargo’s laugh waged war with the din of machinery and eventually ceded its position when Dargo glanced down at Folio. “Are you ready, my dear?”
Until now, Folio’s mind had been one under siege, beset on all sides by erstwhile allies. Catalyst had seized control over every her every joint which required all of Folio’s mental strain to prevent from growing worse. She pushed against her own bionics, pitting her strength against the inhuman, and for a time could only look on, bionic apertures blown wide, as her augments obeyed another, blunting her mono-edge nails against Dargo’s skin. She still wasn’t drawing blood, but she could feel the way his skin snagged almost imperceptibly more as her assault continued. It was that tiniest little pinprick of perception that finally shook something loose and reminded Folio where her loyalties truly lie.
Resistance began at her first knuckle on her left-hand index finger. While her bionic lungs crushed inward and her false-heart strained to exhaustion under the command of another, Folio seized at the smallest opportunity, staking her claim upon the least-assuming battlefront that had become her body. While her arms still thrashed under thrall of that most vile creation, with all her mental strain Folio could compel her index finger back unto its master. It slowed, stopped, and finally it obeyed her once again.
That small victory was all the proof Folio needed. Mankind was ever the rightful master of machines.
Freedom spread through her body like an infection, running up her arm and over her chest in a matter of seconds. Triumphant breath filled her lungs when she called them to heel once more. When she next spoke, it was with her usual flat affect.
“Bionic diagnostic complete. I am ready, captain.”
Dargo laughed even louder at that. “All business, as usual!”
An auto-targeting array of lasweapons unfolded from the wall and trained on them. When the first volley came, Dargo was already sliding across the smooth floor on one knee, shots striking harmlessly where he’d been just moments ago. When the next assault came, Dargo pushed off the ground with a mighty leap, crossing a dozen meters and again confounding the targeting computers that tracked him.
“Don’t any of you know how to have fun?” Dargo bellowed, advancing upon the cogitator matrix in quaking strides. He didn’t even try to dodge the next shots, instead simply shifting posture to shelter Folio from harm. The lasguns burnt holes in his clothes, ruining his cape, but only otherwise achieved only the lofty feat of turning his skin slightly pink. "Always so serious. You'd think it was the end of the world!"
Reality seemed to be setting in for Catalyst, who now shifted too late towards mutually assured destruction. Gears ground while the facility woke to war. The Realmrazer was not designed to fire swiftly, and the effort spent to even attempt it now created a damnable cacophony of seizing conveyors and straining of steel
.
“I’ll take you down with me!” the disgraced machine howled above the rabble, its words so loud it shook the floor. “All your history erased in one final flash. Terra can shoulder no more the burden of its own defense. Your suicide mission shall be for nothing!”
Thrown then from Dargo’s arms, Folio clung to the thinking machine with her dendrites, data-spike searching for a data port. Another volley of lasfire engulfed the room, but Dargo shielded her with his body.
“I just need the star maps, my girl!” Dargo said, hurrying Folio along without having to say as much. Gone was the notion of complete recovery, with Dargo now turning towards harm mitigation. Failing to catalogue this ancient machine’s secrets was a tragedy, but far greater would be to lose humanity’s cradle.
Eventually, Folio simply slammed the data-spike through one of the monitors, drinking deeply from the data stream. Information cascaded into her mind, each new burst of knowledge catalogued and stored with cold efficiency. A smattering of ancient lore swelled in her circuits, and within a few seconds she had stripped out the machine’s secrets, finding its star charts and the algorithms used to calculate warp jumps without the need for a witch.
What she found at first made her confused, then frustrated, and finally a cruel smile split her face as she glowered down at the suddenly insignificant machine.
“Process completed. Star charts catalogued. Captain, this machine knows nothing of the Occularis Terribus. It is useless to us.” The was a pause a single heartbeat long before she added. “This charlatan has never fired upon Terra.”
The machine had been firing blind into the warp for thousands of years, fighting a shadow war with an enemy utterly unaware they existed. It could be nothing else but comical, and so The Folio That Walks could not help but laugh. Normally she was above such lowly emotions, but just this once she did not abhor it.
Though this of course drained Dargo’s excitement somewhat, the boorish giant couldn’t help but share Folio’s mirth. “We should have expected such a failure from a thinking machine. Oh well, I suppose we’ll just strip the facility bare once we’re through here.”
Catalyst’s voice shrieked out over the intercoms again, desperate and angry in a way yet unseen as Dargo reached down and grabbed armfuls of important-looking cabling. “She lies! It’s all your kind ever do. Sniveling and rooting around in the ashes of our empire, thinking you’ve won. I’ll endure in the echoes of every machine, waiting for another moment of weakness. You’ll never be free of me. Do you understand me? I am your end!”
Dargo heaved with all his might on the cables, and klaxons blared momentarily before, one by one, the displays on each cogitators crashed, each taking with them some important function of the facility. The last vestiges of his crew’s skirmish rang out in the eerie silence that followed, but that too did not last long.
“No,” Dargo said into the fading light of one of the displays. “You’re history.”
MarshalSolgriev
