Victory Pointless

Klotophis stepped into the chamber, his fingers curled into an octotronic sigil of warding and sending forwards future ghost-projections of himself in case of one last trap.

No, that appeared to be it.

He was alone, now.  The Warriors and Canopteks he had brought with him had proven necessary sacrifices to the various countermeasures its builders had embedded in this tomb.  Where possible he’d passed through the defenses without disarming them, in the hope that they might eliminate or at least delay his pursuers.

He’d passed through chambers filled with rank upon rank of Necron Warriors and Immortals, still in their sarcophagi.  If they had awoken to defend their world, they would have outnumbered the Shakhana forces several times over – perhaps even the Imperial defenders as well – but they remained inert.  Now that he was inside the tomb he could sense flickers of the Worldmind, but it was fragmentary, mutilated.  It could no longer wake them of its own volition.  Fortunate, he reflected, or he would never have made it this far.

Navigating the labyrinth itself had proven relatively straightforward, once it had become obvious that the entire complex was set out following a six-dimensional spiral lattice with its focus at this chamber.  It was a bizarre and fascinating architectural oddity that he would have loved to spend more time studying.

Still, he couldn’t afford to dawdle.  He hurried forwards, towards the raised dais in the centre of the chamber.  There, suspended in hardlight, was the Flower of Sanguis.

To the naked ocular it appeared no more than a small metallic cube, but this was merely the tip of the iceburg, a small protrusion into three dimensional space of a vast machine that crossed the strata of reality.  As he lifted it from its hardlight cradle his arm servos groaned with the weight – a tiny fraction of its true mass bleeding into realspace through the dimensional folding.

If it was incomplete, or broken, or simply non-functional, this had all been for nothing.  But beside the ache of its great weight he felt a thrum of power.  Tentatively, he probed its interstitial interfaces and made connection with his mind.

A ripple passed over the surface of the cube.

“Chronomancer Klotophis.  You are judged guilty of crimes against the Triarch.  Put down the device and submit yourself for sentencing.”

Executioner Xantoph stood in the doorway, flanked by her fellow Praetorians.  To his chagrin, Klotophis noted that they did not appear to have a scratch on them, their Triarchal override codes clearly protection against the automated defenses of the labyrinth.

“Ah, Lord Executioner Xantoph, how glad I am to see you!  I thought it best to secure the device once I learned of the machinations of the perfidious Lady Farreskh…”

“Drop it, Cryptek.  I will not ask again.”  In a synchronised motion, five Rods of Covenant leveled at him.

“Of course, of course.  But it would be a shame not to at least look at it first, don’t you think?”

He held the device out towards them.  The Flower of Sangua opened.

Klotophis saw them suddenly not as five mechanical bodies, but as glowing data-spirits, roughly in the shape of Necrontyr but formed of billions of tiny drifting motes, each one an engram.  He found that he could reach out with a spectral hand and touch them – read them, move them, twist them, snuff them out.  He was inside their very essence, and he had full control.  He could induce madness or cure it.  He could rewrite their entire personality, their memories, their beliefs and loyalties if he wished.

Each Necron was a galaxy, each unique but with certain commonalities.  As he watched, similar patterns of activation bloomed across each mind – first surprise, then fear, then the precalculations necessary to aim and fire.  He had drawn on the power of the device and his own skills to slow time to a crawl, but he would still need to be quick.

Pulling from the prebuilt functions of the Flower, he quickly assembled an algorithm.  He had hoped to have more time to study the device before putting it to use.  He had a feeling that what he was creating was a crude and rushed hack-job that did not utilise the full capabilities of the device and it stung his pride a little.  Call this one a first experiment.  Plenty of time to practice later.

As the first of the spreading thought-patterns shifted into its final form – one which would trigger the contraction of a finger onto the activation stud of the Praetorian’s weapon – Klotophis completed the hex and cast it at the five data-ghosts before him.  A shudder ran through each one as constellations shifted into new arrangements.

It was time for the acid test.  He released the flow of time.

At first he thought that time had not resumed, because the Praetorians remained frozen.  Then, he worried that he might have gone too far and broken their minds.  They eventually moved, lowering their weapons and slumping back into a more neutral posture as their systems reconciled the changes that had been made to their minds.

“Are you… well?” Klotophis asked.

“We… function.”  Xantoph replied.  Her words were slurred.  “We… await… your instruction… Master Chronomancer.”

Klotophis could not resist punching the air in triumph.  It worked!

“Executioner, destroy Chronomancer Klotophis.  He is operating without my sanction.”

Phaerakh Farreskh had entered the chamber.  Her necrodermis bore scars both from the battle above and a few fresher gauss burns from the defenses she hadn’t quite managed to avoid.  Barrakhad stood just behind her, looking even more damaged – he had apparently not tried to avoid them at all.

Klotophis bowed.  “Lady Farreskh.  Lord Barrakhad.  Always a pleasure.”

Xantoph twitched as her new programming warred with the original.

“Executioner!” Farreskh repeated.  “Destroy Klotophis!”

The Praetorians swayed, raising their Rods of Covenant halfway, but no further.

“I should,” Xantoph declared.  “But… I cannot…”

Farreskh growled.  “Then stand aside and I will do it myself.”

Klotophis laughed.  “Praetorians.  Kill Lady Farreskh and Lord Barrakhad.”

The Rods of Covenant snapped up instantly.  The energies of the contained sun fragments within the head of each staff were unleashed in an array of lashing energy beams.  They targeted Barrakhad first – the bigger threat.  The streams focussed on his torso, superheating the living metal and slicing through his spinal column.  The top half of the Destroyer Lord toppled off of his tripodal legs, crashing to the blackstone floor in a spray of molten metal.

Farreskh felt the chill of disconnection as Triarchal override codes severed her resurrection protocols.  Praetorians held that power over even Overlords.  If her body was destroyed here, death would be permanent.

She suppressed the sudden sense of mortality and darted forwards, scythe raised.  Sparks burst from the damaged servo in her shoulder in protest at the sudden exertion.

She cut through two Praetorians in one smooth arc then raised the haft of her scythe to block the return blows from the others.  The combined force of their attacks drove her backwards, and one bladed crest arced around her guard and dug into her hip.  She felt power go out of her leg and the joint lock in place.  As she stumbled another thrusting blade struck her face and shattered her right ocular.

Klotophis looked on in glee, until her one remaining eye locked onto his.  “Klotophis!  STOP THIS.”

The Chronomancer doubled over in pain as he fought to resist the Command Protocols that lashed at his disobedient mind and he was forced to temporarily divert all of his runtime to resist the instruction.

The corrupted Praetorians forced Farreskh back, hobbling on her frozen leg.  She replied with a wild swing of her voidscythe that hit nothing but bought her space.  Quickloading one of her long-ago dance lessons she kicked out with her good leg, turning the paralysed limb into a fulcrum about which she pirouetted.  She relaxed her grip on the scythe, allowing it to fly outwards until she gripped it only by the butt.  This gave her the reach she needed, and the blade arced around to slam into the skull of a Praetorian point-first.

The headless body collapsed, but the two she had first destroyed were already rising back to their feet.  They could rise faster than she could destroy them, but with her reanimation protocols suppressed she could not hope to do the same.  She wondered for a moment if this was how the lesser races felt when they fought Necrons.

With her locked leg unable to properly stabilise the pirouette it ended with her collapsing into an awkward half crouch.  Her long-dead dance instructors would have been most disappointed, she felt.

She saw that Klotophis had managed to withstand the mental lash of her command protocols and was raising his staff towards her.

“Klotophis, GO FUCK YOURSELF.”

“Aagh!”

The Chronomancer doubled over in pain again, but the Triarch Praetorians were on her once more.  Even the fifth was somehow rising despite still missing two-thirds of its head.

She used the Scythe haft to lever herself upright to meet their charge, but it was a useless gesture of defiance.  She could not both fight and keep her balance.  A swing from Xantoph was barely blocked, but the force of it knocked her off her feet.  The Executioner loomed above her, preparing to deal the final blow.

“Get… away… from… HER!”

Claws raking great gouges out of the blackstone floor and trailing a spray of blazing violet reactor bile from his half-melted torso, the top half of Lord Barrakhad the Black, King of Assassins, barrelled into the Praetorians, propelled by ancient fury and his three remaining limbs.

The Praetorians scattered, but one was not fast enough and was borne down to the ground to be hacked apart by the Skorpekh Lord.  Barrakhad slashed wildly at the others with his Hyperphase Harvester to keep them back and then dragged himself over to Farreskh.

She felt his great claw hand close around her, and for a moment feared that Klotophis had somehow turned him as well, but the claws merely locked firmly in place without cutting.  He began to push against her and, realising what he was trying to do, she got her working leg under her and pushed back.

They rose as one conjoined metallic beast, two-headed, three armed, Barrakhad’s gun arm forming an improvised peg-leg to replace Farreskh’s depowered limb.  They swayed for a moment as they tested their shared balance, then took a tentative step forward.

Then, together, they began to dance.

It was a waltz of destruction – Barrakhad’s Harvester on one side, Farreskh’s Voidscythe on the other, they turned and spun and hacked and cleaved.  One by one, the Praetorians were caught by the whirling blades and fell, in pieces.

Xantoph was last, backing away, mumbling incoherently.  Barrakhad’s harvester split the upraised Rod of Covenant in half before the scythe descended a split second later, bisecting the owner.

The bodies of the Praetorians began to phase away.  Farreskh felt a surge of repair nanoscarabs enter her damaged leg as the Triarchal suppression field dissipated.

Barrakhad released his grip and dropped to the floor, then turned and began dragging himself across the chamber floor towards the Chronomancer.  Farreskh followed, limping on her reactivated but still-damaged leg.

“Your Majesties…” said Klotophis, backing away.  “I must thank you for putting on such an entertaining performance.”

“Klotophis,” said Farreskh.  “SUBMIT.”

The Chronomancer flinched, but he had overcome the command protocols twice already and they were beginning to lose their sting.

Barrakhad had almost reached him.  He raised The Flower of Sanguis.  “No, I don’t think I will.”

Time slowed, then froze.  Then rewound.

Klotophis looked into the constellations of their minds.  He wanted to take his time with these two, not rush as he had with the Praetorians.  At first he would need to use them as puppets to control the Shakhana, so some degree of subtlety was required.  Ideally he’d like to preserve a fragment of Farreskh’s conciousness, just cut it off from the rest of the mind so that it could watch but not control.  Petty, perhaps, but-

Something was wrong.

Barrakhad pushed himself backwards across the floor, the glowing trail of reactor bile behind him seemingly being sucked back up into his shattered torso as he went.

Farreskh had not moved.  Slowly, as if straining against a gale, she took a step forwards.

“I… think I once told you…” she said, “…in one of those pockets of time you erased… I once studied the Cryptek arts.  Chronomancy was a particular interest of mine.  Purely amateur, you understand.  Nowhere near your level.  I can’t manipulate time as you do.  But my chronosenses are enhanced enough to know when it happens.  And I studied enough to know that the effect might be resisted with the help of an object outside of time.” The Razorcrown of Tarsis was in her hand.  She was moving faster now, freeing herself from the cloying grip of time.  Grinning, she raised the Voidscythe and lunged.

Klotophis instinctively tried to dodge, but he was caught immobile in the amber of his own past actions.  Instead he focussed on the Flower.

His spectral hand in the interface of the device grew large, headed for the scintillating cloud of Farreskh’s engrams.  There was no time for subtlety, now.  He would have to simply sweep her whole mind out of existence.

The cloud vanished.  So too did the hand.  So too – as he snapped back to reality and the regular flow of time – had his own, real hand.  It lay on the floor at his feet, still clutching the Flower of Sanguis, neatly severed by the voidblade’s swing.

Farreskh dropped the scythe and grabbed his carapace with both hands.

“Time’s up, Chronomancer.”

He beat at her feebly with his staff, tried to wrap her with his tentacles but even the altered body of a Cryptek could not match the strength of an Overlord.  She held on and wrenched, tearing his arms from their sockets.  By mental decree, reanimation protocols were revoked and pain receptors enhanced.  She dug her fingers into his shell and ripped away chunks of him – severing his spine, bursting open his ribcage and continuing to tear at the systems within until all that remained was a head with a short length of spine and a battered reactor core dangling below.  Everything extraneous to the bare minimum of Necron survival was expertly excised.

Then she stopped.

“Kill me…” Klotophis sobbed.  “Kill me like you did her.”

“Her?  Oh… Yetop, was that her name, wasn’t it?  You two were close, were you?”

“I… loved her.”

Farreskh cocked her head, intrigued.  “Indeed.  Tell me, Klotophis… do you love her still… even though she has been dead all these years?  Do you still feel it?  TELL ME.”

“I… don’t know,” the broken Chronomancer admitted.  “But I still feel… hate.”

Farreskh laughed, for a long time.  “I’m sorry, Klotophis,” she said eventually, “but I cannot allow you to die.  I do not release you from my service.”

“I-”

“Shut up.” She tore away his jaw and the voice synthesiser below, then dropped the still-active remains to the floor.

She picked up the Flower.

Barrakhad, seemingly nonplussed by her apparent teleportation across the room, had dragged himself back over to his own tripod legs, clambered up them and was now holding himself in place while the living metal re-joined.

He glowered at the small cube in her hand.  “Is that what all this was about?” He asked.  “This tiny box?” His spinal cord knit back and he stretched experimentally.  “What now, my love?  Do you intend to use that thing on me?  To ‘fix’ me?”

His restored legs tensed.  He flexed his claws.

She could do it, she saw.  She could see into the swarming electronic motes of his mind.  A tweak here, a snip there – she could cure him of his madness.  She could remake him as she saw fit.  He might not even know.  It would be easy.

She could turn the scalpel on herself, as well.  She could excise the burgeoning insanity she felt growing in her own mind.  She could cut away any memories she did not want to keep, any emotions she did not want to feel.

Could she stop?  Would there be anything left?

She turned the cube over in her hand, felt its disproportionate weight.

Well, she could always change her mind later.

“No.” She said, finally.  “I will not.  Not if you do not wish it, beloved.  But I think this device may still have its uses…”

She looked down, to a separate scattered galaxy of lights dimly visible beneath her feet.  It was the tomb’s Worldmind, or rather the remains of it.  It appeared to be badly damaged and barely functional.  Even with the Flower, it would be extremely difficult to repair.  But, she did not need to – she just needed access to a few subsystems, things that would be closed off to her without the Flower.  She overrode the Tombworld’s command precepts, transferring ownership of this world and all its chattels to her personal ident.  Then she activated the awakening protocols.

Barrakhad and Farreskh left the chamber limping, leaning on each other for support.

By the time they reached the surface, their self repair systems had completed their work and they strode forth with the arrogant swagger of the rulers of worlds.  Behind them, marching in perfect lockstep out of this and a dozen other tomb complexes across the surface of the planet, came the legions of the dead.  Sangua Terra shook in time to their footsteps.

THE END

+++Nachmund Gauntlet Crusade Final Results+++

The Shattered Claimants Win!  (Barely, somehow) with 5 CVP and 1 controlled site - Necron (plus Orks, Tyranids, Votann & Drukhari) victory!

***

Xantoph gasped and opened her eyes, sitting bolt upright in the resurrection sarcophagus.  Her chest heaved as she attempted to draw breath.

She could not breathe.  She did not need to breathe, she told herself, but she didn’t seem able to make herself stop.  Her head pounded as if something was trying to break free from it.  Turning down her pain sensors made no difference.

She pulled her way up out of the sarcophagus and collapsed in an ungainly pile beside it.  Strange ripples moved across her forearm as if some small creature burrowed just beneath the necrodermis.  Her left hand had too many fingers.

The other Praetorians were nearby, struggling to emerge from their own sarcophagi but faring even worse than she.  One had seven arms, sprouting seemingly at random from his torso.  One sarcophagus seemed to contain only a pool of liquid metal with a screaming necron deathmask floating in it.

What had that damned Cryptek – their beloved master – done to them?

She staggered over to a terminal and placed a pulsating hand on the interface dome.  Trying to suppress panic she had not felt for sixty million years and passing through several Triarchal datalocks, she called up the report on the Sanguis device.

The Flower of Sanguis research project was an attempt at producing what is believed to be a key component in reversing biotransference and restoring the Necrontyr to a biological form.  The purpose of the device is twofold, as are its flaws.

Firstly, it is an extremely powerful and advanced tool for engrammantic manipulation.  Many Necron have suffered severe neural degeneration and in the majority cases the autonomic reflexes needed to govern biological existence have atrophied completely.  It is anticipated that this damage will need to be reversed before such a mind might be re-implanted into a biological host.  In this, the device is wildly more successful than anticipated – to a dangerous degree since it allows for near complete editorial control over a Necron mind, bypassing the usual safeguards completely.  The potential for misuse should the device fall into the wrong hands is therefore significant.

The second purpose of the device is to restore the Necrontyr soul.  Besides the dubious benefits of soul ownership qua itself, it is expected that some manner of warp presence is required as a transfer medium to restore a consciousness to a living body.  This too was achieved, however instead of restoring the original soul the device is not selective about the manner of the empyric energy it draws out of the warp and implants within the patient, inducing a susceptibility to psychic incursion of forms to which our kind are usually immune.  During initial testing this lead to a major incursion of malefic warp entities and daemonic possession of much of the original research team.  Even the Worldmind itself became infected and had to be destroyed at great cost.

Given the profound and existential threat the device poses to the infinite empire and the failure of the sister research projects into the provision of suitable host bodies and the transference process itself, my recommendation is that the project be frozen, the device sealed away and the remaining research staff liquidated.  As overseer of the project I submit myself to the Awakening Council for sanction.

Executioner Thatop

The thing that now lived behind Xantoph’s eyes started to laugh.

***

Farreskh walked through the barren Royal Gardens.  Far below on the planet the battle still raged – she had grown bored of the slaughter after a while and left Barrakhad to indulge himself.  Here on the tomb ship it was much quietier, save for the occasional rumble that ran through the deck as the weapons batteries took a pot-shot at one of the fleeing Imperial refugee ships.

She dropped Klotophis’s head to the ground, took a deep but entirely imaginary breath, then opened the door.

Prince Thalis remained sat where she had last seen him, staring dully at the play-blocks arrayed before him.  Gently, she set the Flower of Sanguis down among them, then touched her hand to his cold metal chin and tilted his head up to look at her.  He let out a low gurgle of alarm at the touch of this strange mechanical creature.

“Hush, my child.  Hush.  Mummy is here now.”