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Emissary (30k short-story)

LordFrancis93

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Inspired by the Weaver Option by Antony444, how would the M.30-M.31 Imperium of Man integrate aliens into its burgeoning civilization?

=][=
THE OPENING BATTLE of the conflict between the Imperium of Man and the Nephilim of Hoadh began with world-killing cannon shots above the skies of Dutera. Doom came in the form of the 804th Expeditionary Fleet; heralded by a garish warship of the Emperor's Ten Thousand.

Against a sheet of black void-space and the white sprinkle of stars, coupled with the blinding radiance of the planet's blue hypergiant, the flurry of daggers rushing at near-light speed from the Warp was undetectable to the naked eye.

Enginseers and legions of servo-automata scurried across floors, beneath walls and ceilings of burnished gold. The servants of the Mechanicum, as part of their sacred duties to the Legio Custodes strike-cruiser Emperor's Scalpel, erected firewalls, soothed machine spirits, and ensured the Dark Age weapons aboard were in working order.

With a hurriedness uncharacteristic of the void personnel serving the Imperium of Man, for just a quarter of an hour they toiled before reports of the vessel's battle-readiness hurried up to the vox of the bridge.

Sat on a golden throne, carved in the shape of an eagle, one of the Emperor of Mankind's Emissary Imperatus. Hands clasped, eyes shut in thought, the master of the ship did not shift until a frenzied report reached his ears. Martian chattering. The venerable vessel of the Custodes was prepared for war, they reported.

Anhur Qa's ancient eyes opened to the priceless, ostentatious ornaments the bridge was swathed in. Gold, off-world gems, mahogany tables and trophies of war won in blood from the likes of Ork and Rangdan.

Orders howled from the mouth of Terran admirals, and plasma drives were set to low burn as the electric eyes of auspexes prowled the void for prey. Minutes passed, filled with nothing but the din of life in the void; the deafening whir of air conditioners, the thrum of reactors and life support.

A vox-cast growled, and out came the voice of Admiral Olybrius Hribal. "This is the planet the High Lords spoke of. A refuge of the vile alien slavers, the ones who call themselves the nephilim. Burn retros, and continue augury readings."

A guttering blue flame roared from the various ships' pointed prows. The packed array of vessels came to a halt, straining inertial dampeners and sending a whining shudder through their plasteel hulls.

The scattered ranks of human crewmen stumbled, bracing themselves. Those who remained standing clung to piping or door frames. The legions of Martian robots and tech-priests aboard remained rooted to the floor, their metal torsos swinging sideways with an electric squeal of servos.
"Admiral Hribal, is this the world holding the Naiad xenos in slavery?" Anhur asked. The query that raced across the void would arrive at Hribal's ship in a buzzing, high-pitched tone, a side-effect of long-distance, non-Warp communication.

Fifteen seconds droned on. He tapped his fingers. Then, with a forced, tinny pitch, the admiral's voice returned to The Emperor's Scalpel. He remained still. "It appears that way, my lord."

His rank technically permitted him to take command of the warfleet, the Legio Custodes often did so in their missions for the Emperor.

"Shall we commence Exterminatus on this disgusting world?"

Distant from humanity as he was, Anhur sympathized with the man's hatred. Alien bioweapons had envenomed a string of imperial worlds, turning human flesh to black rot, melting buildings into wretched gray swamps. A twisted form of terraforming. It disturbed even him, he who was witness to the unspeakable war crimes of the rangdan cerebravores.

"The men of the solar auxilia have faced worlds far worse than this. No, admiral. We shall free the alien slaves. Not for the sake of blind altruism, as some may accuse, but for the sake of experience. How may we induct a non-human species into the Imperium?"

A contemplative silence fell, and the heavy stomps of patrolling Legio Cybernetica units seemed to thunder as loud as a gong bell.

"We… trust your judgement, my lord," the vox-transmission shut off with a shrill blip.

It had been he who suggested peace with the Nephilim; less enemies and more allies would ease the strain of the Great Crusade, and peacefully secure humanity's hegemony over the galaxy. And so two of his peers died.

No wonder the admiral was wary.

The order to move into orbit of Dutera came, and the hull of the The Emperor's Scalpel groaned once more as its plasma drives roared to life. Behind it, the caged stars of a hundred other ships, ready to do war on the nephilim.

In a few minutes, the fleet was close enough that the world's gravity field encapsulated its vessels. Their speed increased incrementally. With the planet within visual range of his ship, Anhur ordered immediate observation of its geography.

A thousand electronic eyes swept over the planet. The world's surface was a queasy sight; he had glimpsed worlds taken by the Ruinous Powers -no, it was the Warp, he reminded himself- the annals of Aeldari depravity in the Webway, something about Dutera's sluggish, lifeless gray mockeries of plants and nature elicited a twitch.

The hololith at the center of the bridge buzzed, and the poisonous green light of a three-dimensional image assembled before him. The Custodian's expression hardened underneath his helmet.

Hordes of diminutive, humanoid aliens cheered and prayed, worshipping faceless masses of translucent gray flesh, who moved with the ponderous unhurriedness of a slug. Piled in a corner were the emaciated, lifeless husks of Naiad aliens drained of life.

First and foremost, he knew, the nephilim were parasites. One of a myriad of abominations that preyed upon hapless races during the Old Night.

"There," he muttered. "That is the planet's central spaceport."

The hololithic display of the planet dissolved and began to reassemble itself. In place of the throngs of aliens, a terrible mockery of a ziggurat. The pyramidal structure did not resemble the ruins excavated by the Emperor in northeastern Afrik, save for the name. It was composed of a gel-like mass shaped into round, leveled shapes. A construction lacking in even the most crude and lazy symmetry or geometry.

The hololith buzzed, and once more rearranged its green shapes to ape the sensory input of the ship's augurs. Dozens of kilometers away, they spotted the nephilim ships, colored the toxic green of rotting lettuce. They shared the same shapeless forms as the planet's architecture, smooth, slimy, and ovoid.

The sluggish, ponderous trajectory of the ships accelerated as the imperial vessels were spotted. The fleshy -perhaps organic- plasma-drives of the warships blazed with the intense, blinding bright light of a star, propelling the egg-like war machines towards the Expeditionary Fleet.

The Custodian was not an admiral, nor even a ship captain, even if his command superseded theirs. Orders howled from the mouth of Admiral Hribal, and the fleet began a standard battle maneuver. Formation Alpha-X2.

His own ship ejected a vast blaze of plasma from its front-right side, and in seconds, its sharp white prow was angled away from the planet. Behind it, the rest of the ships assembled a battle line of hundreds of kilometers. Macrocannons and lance turrets pointed towards the ships, with a bark from Hribal, the energy weapons studding the ribbing of the fleet opened fire.

With the vast distances that void combat entailed, it looked like a light show. He chuckled as the lights of the Emperor's Scalpel flickered.

A single eyeblink, the lances had closed the distance, and slammed against the xenos ship. The shielding on the vessel held for a single second against the hundreds of lasers searing its slimy hull. It failed. After all, it was a cruiser-class war engine at best. The yellow cloak of protective energy swathing the vessel dissipated, and searing white-red lances pitted the hull. Whatever organic armor may have lain at the edges crumpled, and the egg-shape became crude, lumpen and misshapen.

Then it was the turn of the macrocannons.

Shells that could fit an entire baneblade division hurtled towards the ovoid vessels, cracking it like glass against stone, crashing through slaves, decks, and life support before its mass-reactive core detonated.

It swelled like a balloon faced with a lit match, straining and bulging before it broke apart. Petals of flame lashed at nearby ships, harmless to their hulls.

"There will be far harsher resistance at their homeworld," he mused. Amidst a sea of tech-priests and robots, no one listened.

The 804th repeated the process, until the dozen vessels above the planet were smouldering wrecks. Blinding arcs of light from lance batteries vaporized their vital parts, sending the tiny fragments of destroyed ships raining down into the water-choked atmosphere of Dutera.

"Admiral," he spoke into the vox once more.

"Yes, my lord?"

"I trust the men of the solar auxilia are prepared to land upon the system?"

"Your trust… is not misplaced," he replied, the vox sputtering out again. A harsh, windy noise escaped his throat. He realized it was a chuckle. At last, Anhur rose from his throne.

At nine feet tall, clad in his finely-wrought auramite power armor, he dwarfed every other being in height aboard the ship, save for the war engines of the Legio Cybernetica.

Then again, even the Emperor's own Primarchs barely reached their shoulders.

Trailed by a contingent of towering red war robots, the Custodian boarded an Orion Gunship, as a company of Castelans entered a Thunderhawk. A single datasmith walked past the vehicle's doors before it shut, lifted off of the hangar and entered the void of space.

As he prepared to make planetfall, so too did a massive contingent of the imperial soldiers. They swarmed aboard blocky Arvus Lighters. Shadowing them were monstrous, stubby-winged Thunderhawks, weighted by battle-scarred Baneblades and Chimeras.

The Imperium would not be landing at one of the aliens' hive-chapels, however.

Amidst bubbling, soupy swamps, there were shoals of land safe to construct habitats upon. Marshes where the vile water was drained, and churches more flesh than metal were constructed. Buildings where enraptured slaves were leached of their life force. Somehow, it was warp-based.

It was like metal rain, the transit of military power. Baneblades and Leman Russes settled down onto the disgusting mire that the nephilim considered soil. Anhur's own shuttle landed, and he was privy to the vast ranks of armor forming up into a circle, cannons aimed at the eerie gray hills of trees and marshland.

How long had it been since he aimed a spear at worshippers of the things in the Warp, an Adrathic blast ridding the universe of one of its infinite ranks of demagogues?

The hypocrisy of that idle thought roused a quiet laugh from him. None heard the amused sound amidst the din of growling engines and screaming aircraft.

The flocks of transports landing on the ground continued for a few minutes. After that period of time, the protected landing area provided by the Baneblades became overcrowded. However, the tech-priests, at last, finished assembling their water pumps. The Imperium could afford to construct proper infrastructure on the planet.

In just an hour, the solar auxilia had cleared a truly effective landing zone, protected by ferrocrete walls and gun-studded towers. Army engineers were erecting bunkers and sentry turrets as Leman Russ-sized pumps noisily drained the marshland of its stinking gray water.

Twenty minutes, and the process had finished. He observed soldiers laying down ferrocrete on the ground, settings of solid ground, steadily expanding across the land over the course of hours.

It seemed an instant, to his immortal eyes. With the faultless toil of ant-like workers, a crude base had been set down on the planet. Ribbed with sentry turrets, bolter guns, choked with a battalion of protecting Baneblades, it was a hardy defense and landing point that saw countless worlds across the galaxy brought under the Imperium's iron fist.

The Emperor's bodyguard was silent and unseen as the armor-clad troops rode Baneblades towards the nephilim's hive-sized chapels. The whine of water and gristle upon its tracks and the roaring engines of descending transports added to a deafening din that would leave any of the cetacean-faced alien slavers nearby in agony.

"Commander Hanzo, is the nerve agent prepared for deployment?"

The man twitched and his fingers drifted towards the hilt of his power sword. The Custodian smiled at the man's held nerve. Beneath his conical helmet, the mortal war general would not see it.

Outside the bunker, the noise of flyers and ground vehicles was drowned out by barking bolters and buzzing lascannons. The two conversed as if it was peacetime.

"It is, my lord," he sipped from a bottle of amasec, appearing puzzled. "You are showing an inordinate amount of mercy for aliens, even if they are slaves. Most would bombard this planet to ruin and be done with it."

He cocked his head. "Were this mission under your command, and these slaves were humans, would you act as I do now?"

"Of course!"

"And if they were not?"

"I would destroy the ships in orbit, then set the Life Virus upon it."

"Why?"

"Humans are more likely to cooperate; with xenos, it's a coin toss of peaceful or psychopathic. That's how this whole nephilim feth-up happened in the first place."

"It is because of your men."

The commander frowned at him. Anhur pointed at the ceiling and elaborated. "Three meters above us, your soldiers are taking a coin toss of survival or death. For the Emperor, beloved by all." he hummed, and rested his hand. "Every campaign, discovered world and entrance into the Warp is a coin toss, commander. Countless worlds have found the light of the Imperium through diplomacy instead of war. To walk this easier, 'safer' path, I have no doubt we would be overextended and surrounded, for all of the bridges we burned and time and resources wasted."

He waved. "Besides; many millennia ago, before Terra's first mud cities and petty kings, man once called fellow man xenos."

"You make a convincing case," Hanzo nodded and stood, pushing away his seat. He grunted. "I will have my Basilisks deploying the nerve agents at the chapels. I hope we will not regret this."

=][=
IMPERIAL FORCES IN the sector would discover the nephilim segregated their slave-races on individual planets. Such was the age and might of the parasitic aliens, there may have been as many as a thousand worlds in the squalid species' domains, with a thousand enslaved races to feed off of.

As tanks and soldiers approached one of the bulbous, fleshy chapels, a single artillery shell hurtled towards the building of worship, impacting the ground with a splash of orange gas.

The Emperor's solar auxilia were safe in their void-sealed armor, and the crew of the baneblades used spare gas masks in case the tank's protection was insufficient.

As the gas spread and seeped through cracks, air ducts, and windows, three of the nephilim's orange-skinned warrior caste came charging out with gargled, slimy roars.

Bolter shells and lasfire raced towards the Dreadnought sized monsters. The aliens fired in turn, with man-sized sonic weaponry, as slimy and vaguely ovoid as their wielders.

The blast would have shorn the flesh of unprotected humans, made bloody chunks of them, but the auxilia hid behind the implacable aegis of the cohort's superheavies. A Leman Russ would have crumpled, but the baneblades' acoustic dampeners bore the attack successfully. Aiming mighty turrets, the massive tanks fired.

The assailing group of Nephilim perished in deafening explosions. Squads of men armed with Volkite Chargers fired roaring Martian death rays into the mess of splattered orange flesh and smoke, before advancing into the building.

The soldiers checked every room of the building. There were few Nephilim to be found, and the vast majority of the inhabitants were a race of diminutive, blue-skinned xenos, all of them unconscious.

Similar to their masters, they were faceless; in the place of a mouth and eyes was a slimy orange mask. After several hours of scouting, the soldiers returned to find them dissolving. Wrenching them off, attached to the back, loose, paper-thin slivers of wire.

Upon further inspection by genetors, they found the wires attached to the mask to be nerve-endings, extending into the wearer's cerebrum. Somehow, it leeched the life from the enslaved and inspired a fanatical zeal the likes of which was only seen in the Emperor's indoctrinated transhumans.

The tech-priests scoured the building for hidden bioweapons, as men far more experienced and robust than the solar auxilia had perished to nasty surprises. Nothing of note was discovered, and command sent word to advance on the chapel of Kroakh.

Like ants, men in groups of five hauled the nephilims' vast sonic weaponry back to the Imperium's base on the soggy, miserable world for study by the Mechanicum.

=][=
ANOTHER DAY PASSED and imperial military might further poured onto the planet in a deluge of scarred, pitted metal. As the last flock of transports lifted off of the ground, ferrying emancipated aliens, the nephilim launched their counterattack.

Veterans of a hundred battles, the solar auxilia were prepared. The stinking gray fog their alien foes used for concealment was gone. A shower of incendiaries scoured trees swathed in slime for miles all around. Protecting the Imperium's landing area were kilometers of barbed wire, heavy weaponry clad in rockrete bunkers, and shoals of mines.

Hovering nephilim vehicles approached the fortified army position. Like floating eggs, they were a comical sight to men who fought far worse abominations. A chorus of raucous laughs reverberated across the rocky fields, cut off by shouted commands.

With a whir that sent arms shaking, Volkite chargers powered to life and set the humid air to roasting. Shielded in their Solar-pattern armor, the soldiers wielding them were unperturbed. HUDs inside their helmets assembled into target patterns, battery charge, wind currents, effective distance, and measures of the distortion of light.

They fired.

Red death rays burst from the barrel, crashing against the ovoid-shaped ordnance. This was a blast that could melt the frontal armor of the infamous baneblade; against pitiful alien flesh, the tank crumpled like fire-kissed paper.

It was the first of countless assaults to be repelled.

Aboard The Emperor's Scalpel, Anhur Qa'a began talks with the freed aliens.
 
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