A Monster in Hell: A 40K Story

Chapter-34

"Fabricator-Locus of Mars, Nissan Car, has replaced the incumbent Fabricator-General in a coup and is now working against the interests of the Imperium. We have recorded them nearing the area called the Noctis Labyrinth, where the traitorous Heretic Tech-Priests have also landed, as well as a wave of Daemons. Their intentions are not good, and we have lost multiple shipyards trying to recover our position in Mars," High Lord-Admiral Mikhail Saigon of the Solar Segementum spoke.

Saigon was a well-intentioned individual, intelligent, cunning, knowledgeable, experienced, battle-hardened and innovative, not to mention less fanatical than many. However, he was more than a little power-hungry, and Grand Moff Lucas Dell had had a feud with him because he was trying to lobby for the position. I wanted him not to get that position, because not only was Dell competent, but even the likes of Drakan Vangorich could be driven insane with that much power. Allowing Saigon to get his way without any new accomplishments could feed his ego and set a bad precedent.

However, I was getting nothing but the stark truth from him, and so I was carefully listening to his description of the events.

It appeared that the Martian Hives were being assailed and the factories beset by attacks from wild Age of Strife machines, Daemons, traitorous Tech-Priests and orbital bombardments. The mass deployment of rare technology and key war machines such as Titans and Siege Engines, and Custodians had gotten involved to protect the factories, vaults and labyrinths of Mars. Joseph Rampart, High Lord-Admiral of the Imperial Navy, had unleashed a Mechanicus Naval Weapon called the Solar Quadrant, cutting off all energy to the Forge-Worlds in the Sol System, and other Forge-Worlds like Jupiter and Deimos recovered their energy systems quickly because they only suffered minor attacks and were loyalists. The traitorous Martian Conservatives and the Dark Mechanicum had become unlikely allies, to strike back at me. Veers, now High-Lord Commander Militant of the Guard, was now partaking in the Siege to recover Mars from the traitors. 

The Red Crusade had been fun while it lasted (some seven months: an additional two months since Diamat due to a sudden Warp Storm which prevented our transit to Sol), but it was time for it to end. I was already having a force assemble near Molech to retake the planet from the hands of Ahriman, who had slaughtered the Knight Houses and reduced their influence to Null. These Knights, bereft of their Houses but still numbering into a few hundreds, could form the backbone of the new Order of the Knights Templar I was planning to make.

Huron's Crusade had reached thousands of worlds, randomly slaughtering and pillaging as many resources they could find. It was clear that Huron had received the powers of the Empyrean to become a Champion of Chaos at Molech and was barely holding himself together at this point: not being a Primarch, he was being driven insane and torn apart in months. He had been deprived of his Blackstone Fortress, his genetic project had been set up, his assassination attempts had failed, his armies and fleets had been depleted to a shadow of their formidable strength, his commanders were gone, and the warlords who had backed him where now losing faith in him, not to mention I was winning the major battles. If he was unable to do something soon, his power would be lost and his Crusade would be sundered at the seams.

Mars was vast, its air toxic and stuffy, and the appearance of the behemoth known as the Imperial Pride and a mere fraction of its forces dropped on the surface of the Red Planet was enough to strengthen the failing forces of the defenders of the Holy Planet. 

After the Solar Quadrant was once again deployed to ensure that the traitors had no power sources to fall back up, I was trying to save the various Dark Age weapons underneath Mars' vaults. A few of these were enough to send me into a near-comatose shock. 

The apparent Cog of God, a mechanical wiry weapon that had worked similar to Hive Fleets and could absorb biological masses, enhancing it and allowing it to counter all biotechnology-oriented forces it faced. The Key of Eternity, a powerful psychic weapon that was used to create amalgamated clots of psychic energy. The Lancers, used by the Men of Iron and the techno-barbarian Warlord Kalgann of Ursh, that could kill psykers, even Eldrad-level Eldar psykers, with a single shot. The Omnivores, canisters of powerful nano-swarms of synthetically created clouds that could strip away matter. The vaults of Mars contained a mere fraction of Weapons from the peak Dark Age, and it was impossibly powerful.