From
Official Recordings of the Inquisition
Inquisitor Lord Gabel pours himself
another drink as he listens to Inquisitor Musgrave give his report. "So
you say he mishandled their initial encounter with the heretic?"
Musgrave nods eagerly, "Of
course! He had the creature alone and outnumbered, had a sniper placed for a
killshot, yet instead chose to put on some elaborate facade. He claims in his
after-action reports that there was no way to tell if a strike at the time
would be enough to neutralize the heretic, and that they were unarmed. He also
claimed his plan was to get the entire cult at once. Personally, I believe he
was just covering for cowardice at best, and considering joining the heretic at
worst."
"Serious charges." Gabel
said in tones of warning, "Not to be leveled without serious
evidence."
Musgrave swallowed and noddes,
"Yes, of course sir...but what's not in question is what happened next.
After winning the heretic's confidence, he set about to enlist the support of a
pack of degenerate techno-heretic thugs, as part of some grand plan to let them
do The Emperor's Work for him..."
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From the Journals of Augustus Torchwood
We'd made our connection and found out who we need to contact to help us out with the mission. This Red Chrome Legion sounded promising, and I knew just to send to shake prosthetic hands. I sent Bolt along with Otto, just for good measure. I see myself in that boy, sometimes and I'd be doing him a disservice to deny him the chance to be mocked and abused by Otto as often as possible.
We'd made our connection and found out who we need to contact to help us out with the mission. This Red Chrome Legion sounded promising, and I knew just to send to shake prosthetic hands. I sent Bolt along with Otto, just for good measure. I see myself in that boy, sometimes and I'd be doing him a disservice to deny him the chance to be mocked and abused by Otto as often as possible.
What's more, the day following
our meeting we received an engraved invitation to a religious service he'd been
planning for the following week. He made it clear in the invitation that
Professor Talsorian, the self-proclaimed Magos of the Red Chrome Legion was to
be a guest of honor if we could arrange for his transport. It was all there in black
and white, along with what little he knew about the movements of said guest of
honor...I love it when people are too clever for their own good...
"So where in this skag-ridden sump are we supposed to find a gang
of mad religious cyborgs, anyhow?" Bolt asked, kicking a bit of debris at
a scurrying sumprat.
"That's an easy one, boy." Otto said, sucking on a stubby
cigar end, "Just follow yer ears, assumin' that gospel yer always
listenin' too hasn't deafened ya." Otto himself had lost his natural sense
of hearing decades ago after a career spent in the special weapon teams on the
front lines of the IG, but with his record of courage and gallantry on the
battlefield he was always first in line for half-decent augmetics...the kind
that doesn't constantly whistle and pop when you're trying to sleep. Heightened
hearing range, autosense filtering and noise dampening, the works. Otto could
tell you what denomination of coin you just dropped, and whether it landed
heads up or not.
"What do you mean by that?" the young ex-initiate said, not
bothering to turn down the volume on his pocket mediaslate "And for the
record, my hearing is still far beyond baseline human norms...one of the
earliest blessings you receive from the geneseed is the ability to pick the finer
notes out of the concherto of battle without ever losing your sense for the
song."
Otto snorted and rolled his one good eye, "Which is ta say, they
breed ya so's one of yer battle brothers can let rip with a boltgun next to yer
ear and you can still hear Sarge bawlin ya out."
Bolt scoffed a bit, but had to
admit it was basically true. "What am I supposed to be listening
for?" he asked, deigning to pop one earphone out so he could focus better
on the noise outside of his own head.
Otto grinned, "Machines,
o'course...and not jus yer regular background noise, but the sound of a machine
that actually works properly. These boys are wannabe admech acolytes, right?
Well, anyone who wants the blessin' of the Omnisiah is gonna do their damnedest
to suck up to every machine spirit they can lay their hydraulic rams on in the
hopes that one'll put in a good word fer 'em. I'm hearing a nice regular sound
in the edge or my spectreum right now...about a hundred yards into the warrens
ahead of us...sounds like a pump...it's clicking over every stroke like
clockwork and sounds like it;s even lubed. Find a machine that works worth a
damn in this rakk-infested sump an' you'll find a Red Chromer."
And so it went, the pair of them
keeping an ear out for the sound of that pump as they cautiously picked their
way through the labyrinthine tangle of underhive infrastructure. Immediately
they sensed that they were being watched, and after about ten minutes, the
watchers finally made themselves known.
As the duo entered a relatively
large enclosure the lights came on with a flickering buzz, and before them
stood a hulk of a being. Bolt had seen fully-fledged Space Marines who were
smaller than the beat before them. Shirtless and hairless, his huge chisseled
torso was laced with scars and implants. His arms were crossed at first, but as
he uncrossed them there was a sputtering roar as the giant industrial chainsaws
that had replaced his hands came to life. There were pullcords attached to
them, each hooked to the opposing arm so the act of throwing his arms open
pulled both ripcords at once. Otto had to admit, it was fairly clever...though
as he was about to point out, a far more clever thing would have been not to
replace your hands with saws.
"Oi, charlie chainsaw..."
Otto said around his cigar butt, "how'd you piss with yer hands in that
state? You get one'a the junior associate Legionaries ta hold it fer ya, or'd
ya jus' have 'em replace yer tonker with some sorta' waste reclamation
system?"
Bolt was surprised by the old man's
approach to the situation, but he'd been working with the Torchwood crew long
enough to know not to let it show. Instead he just crossed his arms (where his
hands could easily dip into his jacket for his holsters) and sniggered,
"Bet'cha his first day after the upgrade he chopped the bloody thing of
himself on accident."
Otto let out a raucous little hoot
at that, "Aye, fess up laddie, that's how it happened, didn't it?"
The massive cyborg glared with his
one flesh and blood eye and growled in a voice like a vox at the bottom of a
pipe, "Your tech is old and outdated. Go home, relic, you are of no use to
the legion...and take your fleshling with you."
Otto laughed, "Oh, I bet my
rusty old tech can do one thing yers can't." he held up his left fist with the back of his hand
facing the biomechanical monster, then with his right hand he made a cranking
motion as h slowly, methodically raised two fingers from his left fist before
reversing the invisible crank and winding them back in. "I don't give two
tugs'a whatever they replaced yer borghood with what you gotta say. Me an' the
boy here got a message for yer Magos, an' we means ta' deliver it. Now you can
either get outta my way, or else I move ya outta my way."
The hulking brute let out a
terrible, gurgling laugh, "I like you, relic...When you're dead, I'll ask
the Magus to put your parts to better use." And with that he let out a
megaphone bellow and charged, saws swinging ahead of him. Bolt immediately
leapt right and drew his pistols, but before he could do much else with them,
the beast recoiled, just out of reach of Otto. His head snapped back on his
thick, bullish neck and he raised one whirling, chainbladed appendage up
perilously close to his own face in an instinctive reaction that nearly cut his
own head off.
Bolt stared, dumbfounded as Otto,
now without his cigar, took two long strides and closed the distance with the
screaming cyborg. Faster than even Bolt's finely tuned senses could fully
register, the old man's iron fists snapped out and back again and again, like
the pistons of a great wrecking machine. The impacts were like bolter rounds
going off. Shattering the motor of one chainblade, snapping the bar of another
so that the whirling chain slashed up and bit into the beast's own arm for a moment
before coming completely off the wheels. A series of fleshy smacks like a meat
tenderizer followed as he worked over the creature's exposed abdomen, then at
last a stomp to the inside of the brute's artificial knee shattered the
mechanism and toppled the giant.
Before Bolt knew it the fight was
over and Otto was standing on the thing's great barrel chest. He reached down
and plucked the end of his cigar out of the smoking ruin of his one eye socket
and frowned disapprovingly, "Damn thing's gone out..." he said,
flicking the soggy remnant away. "Any'a you boys watchin' got a
light?" he asked as he produced a fresh stogie from within his flack vest.
Bolt watched as several pieces of
machinery seemed to detach themselves from the walls and shadows around them,
exposing the presence of a half-fozen other cyborgs who had been watching the
entire time. One of them, wearing a tattered red robe approached them. From his
back sprouted a servo arm and several mechadendrites, one of which housed a
blow torch whose pilot light flickered to life as the tendril extended towards
Otto. Heedless to the peril of having his face torched off, the old man simply
leaned forward and puffed a few times, drawing the pilot flame in and building
up a nice little cherry on his cigar before nodding and leaning back,
"Much obliged, padre."
The Magos simply nodded the mass of
augmetics under his hood that stood in for a head, "It is I who am in your
debt." A machanical voice rasped from somewhere inside the frayed red
robe, "Brother Ripperjack was due for a lesson regarding hubris. It is one
thing to embrace the new, but one must always respect and revere the technology
of the past, for only in understanding it do we have a chance to improve upon
it."
Otto grunted and nodded, "Somethin'
like that." He knew enough about cogboys to know that what the supposed
Magos just said as tantamount to blasphemy. Most of the othrodox cult of the
Omnisiah revered old tech above all, devoting itself to the upkeep and
pains-taking replication of ancient designs. Anything new and so-called
improved was something like heresy to them...he could see why they were little
more than an underhive gang as opposed to a fully ordained arm of the Adeptus
Mechanus...but techno-heresy wasn't really their department, and right now they
were the closest thing to well-armed servants of the god-Emperor as could be
found under the circumstances.
"Got someplace private we can
talk, padre?" Otto asked, stepping down off the wheezing pile of metal and
meat that was Brother Ripperjack. "Come along, boy, pick yer damned chin
up or a sumprat'll make a nest in yer gob."
Bolt snapped his mouth shut and
fell in step behind the old sergeant, flush with newfound respect for the wily
old veteran as the Magos led them into his sanctum.
They wound their way through the
tangled warren of old service corridors until they found themselves in an
ancient workshop that had become a chapel to the Red Chrome Legion. All around
them, untold dozens of mechanically augmented gangers watched as they made
their way inot the heart of their turf. From the looks of them, they'd do
nicely for the job at hand. Even the least among them was a hardened underhive
ganger, veteran of a hundred dark and dirty little skirmishes in the bowels of
the hive, and nearly all of them sported heavy duty industrial or combat
augmetics. Most of the toughs like Ripperjack could pass for combat servitors
after a lobotomy.
Otto nodded to himself as the Magos
led them into his private chambers, these boys would do nicely. Once they were
behind closed doors, Otto laid out his master's master plan, starting with the
note from Father Blak, and ending with talk of how great it is to have the
favor of an inquisitor when your beliefs may...stray from the norm...
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