Adeptus Mechanicus: Tech-Priest by Rob Sanders

Author:Rob Sanders
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2015-04-30T00:00:00+00:00

0111

SELECTED: DENTRICA I OF I

ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED

UPLOADING… +THE GELLER EFFECT+

‘Screen aft,’ Omnid Torquora said as he arrived on the command deck.

‘Screen aft, aye,’ Tech-priest Captain Voltram echoed, having the pict feeds from the rear of the arkcruiser brought up on the lancet screens.

The tech-priest stomped across the bridge in his armoured suit, shaking servitor-manned runebanks as he passed. In his wake followed his hench-unit, Haldron-44 Stroika. Eating up the deck with his tracks, the destroyer waited patiently for orders. The deck priests, transmechanics and servitors might have noticed the arrival of their master on the command deck but for the apocalyptic scene that afflicted the bridge lancet screens.

The aft pict feeds showed a world undone. Like the Maestrale, Adeptus Mechanicus cruisers and frigates had broken orbit and were blazing away from Velchanos Magna at full speed. Skitarii troop carriers, forge ships, Mechanicus arkfreighters and Collegia Titanica temple barges followed in their sub-light wake. Some were leaving orbit while others, like the giga-barges and arkfreighters, had barely left the planet’s surface with their Ordinatus war machines and Titans minutes before.

Torquora’s fleet was not the only one to be leaving. With the battle-barge Forgebreaker coming up behind and Iron Warriors strike cruisers and destroyers joining the capital ship, it seemed that Idriss Krendl had given the order to abandon the Traitor forge world. Torquora could only imagine the warsmith’s fury. A powerful and productive forge world taken, contested and lost.

The tech-priest took in the catastrophic spectacle of the dying world. The Geller Device had successfully detonated at the bottom of the Ortorqus Chasma deep core mines, close to the daemonic heart of the planet. At the test detonation of the original device, the Geller effect had spread rapidly through the warp storm of the Great Gyre, imposing the stability of a fortified reality on the area and driving back the rift of immaterial intrusion.

Torquora could only hypothesise that detonating the Geller bomb within the confines of a planet had delayed or contained the effect. Surveying the dreadful demise of Velchanos Magna, the archmagos did not believe that such containment would last long. The planet was turning itself inside out.

Quakes and chasms were visible, even from the void. Huge swaths of the planet’s surface – its twisted industriascape, its forge temples devoted to otherworldly entities and the cratered wastelands across which the servants of the Adeptus Mechanicus and the Dark Mechanicum had fought – were gone. At the core of the planet there was an elemental battle for supremacy, with the irresistible force of the Geller effect asserting its reality over the infernal presence of the mighty daemon. The entity had indeed been powerful but could not hope to survive the explosive intensity of an expanding bubble of reality opening up within its very core.

The seething, thrashing, hissing iron had raged up the walls of the great chasm that ran like a scar across the forge world’s surface. Swallowing the shipyards whole, with vessels under construction and daemonships blessed in its name, the Abystra-Dynomicron broke its banks.

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