Fiction Once: A Story of the Exile.

[Iskander]

Hey peeps.

This isn't my first fan-fiction, but it's my first fan-fiction that I'm sharing with anyone. I won't say "be nice," but, well, this is all very new to me. If I somehow contradicted the "official lore," I don't mind if you point it out, but I like my version better already! As far as anything else, honest critiques are welcome!

It's a story in five parts. Each part will be its own post in this thread. (Apologies if that violates this sub-forum's rules somehow. If I'm in violation, please let me know how to comply!) If you see this before Part 5 is posted, just refresh in a few minutes Otherwise, sit back and enjoy!

(Also, I see there are threads about an ongoing story contests. This is not an entrant in that. This is just for fun!)

 

[Iskander]

[Once: A Story of the Exile: Part 1]

Once, Ilya had been alone on an asteroid. Two years he waited, a patient, perfect soldier. The objective had been secured, the system purged of the ancient machine-ghost that haunted it. But only Ilya survived. He floated there on a nameless rock. It didn't even have a number in the Astronomicon.

Most of Ilya's systems shut down, except a flicker of consciousness, mere bits of information, barely complete lines of code whispering in a black, silent void. The other men could have survived, had the Dominus not led them poorly, wrongly, selfishly. The Dominus had lost sight of the mission, favoring his own temporal glory over the eternal righteousness of the Omnissiah's mission. Ilya, drifting, processed the memories that had flooded into him from the web-consciousness of the other soldiers as they died. In those months, Ilya perfected a better strategy for the future. He packaged this at the front of his upload queue in that void.

In the time that remained, Ilya built another construct. This one was much smaller, a single packet of a few bytes of information. He studied the Black Gate, and logged his work as "automation maintenance time." He found the Gate was indestructible. Ilya filled the new packet of information with two commands, both, once downloaded, to be executed in strict, but rapid order. He placed that packet at the far end of his upload queue. The endless new tasks and commands that followed reunification with the Imperial military would mean the packet stayed there, permanently.

All Ilya had to do to activate it was to push the packed to the front of the queue. This should be a simple task. Ilya suspected, but more hoped, that no Dominus would ever condescend to review the upload queue of a humble tin man in the Skitarii vanguard. Even if Ilya somehow attained the status of Alpha, he would still be one cog in a sacred machine of millions. This was the will of the Omnissiah, the Machine God, the all-father, Humanity's Emperor: undying service in perfection of the galaxy, purging the alien and bringing the light of the Emperor's divinity to all worlds. Ilya studied the word of the AdMech's Omnissiah, and sometimes . . . sometimes he had doubts. The dead Dominus had shoved thousands of pages of histories into his dying upload. Ilya read them all in his isolation. Something did not add up.

The only thing the packet lacked was a recipient. The packet would be transmitted to a target, a rare target, a priceless target. Ilya had never found such a target. Ilya doubted, almost sure of the antithesis, that a viable target existed. Once a target was selected, the packet would automatically leap to the front of the upload queue. Ilya doubted this would ever happen. The recipient of the packet had to earn Ilya's trust.

---

Vanguard Alpha Ilya-7 von Murom scanned past the memory of the asteroid, as his body stood in the drop-pod assembly bay of a small Imperial transport. The Adeptus Mechanicus, or AdMech, had deployed Ilya as part of a small force to a backwater world. In command was another Dominus. He was the only tech-priest on board, supreme commander of this expedition. The Dominus had mentioned isolation, and Ilya's random access search engine, flawlessly optimized, connected the term with time spent on an asteroid. Ilya rerouted focus back to the Dominus.

"Isolation, purification, and tabulation, are our only goals here. We are not the heretics of Stygies VIII. We are loyal disciples of Mars. Isolate the xenos. Purify ourselves. Tabulate their forces. The Exterminatus will come soon, and we walk before them only to prepare the way. But first, we will confront them on the field of glorious battle, to demonstrate to them my... our tactical perfection, and show them the woe of their fate!"

Speaking was utterly superfluous, direct peer-to-peer wireless data transmission was far superior, and left no room for mistakes. Of course, any Dominus preferred to speak before hiding behind Skitarii on the battlefield, such were their swollen egos.

Ilya relegated regret, disgust, and something almost like pity to subroutines. Memories of the day before the asteroid were cross-referenced, reviewed, and re-filed. The war commanders of the Cult Mechanicus had not been interested in the musings of a lowly Skitarius. The upload queue was always at the front of Ilya's thoughts, its natural place, so he reviewed it, and again restored focus.

"Necrons, Eldar and heretics..." On the last word, the Dominus's speaker trembled, as if he still had lips to aspirate, in simulation of having spat. "These all encountered these xenos before us. All were driven back. But, none carried the light of the Omnissiah. None advanced the will of the Emperor, and Holy Mars. Thus we shall succeed where they failed."

Earlier, a sicarian infiltrator, a master of reconnaissance, had distributed the last field reports of those forces. All those reports were penned by aliens, or worse, all blighted in the sight of the Omnissiah, but all had learned something. They had seen an undocumented race of xenos, newly appeared on a planet once explored and dismissed as barely habitable and covered in ugly ruins. They had fought the new xenos, and they had all died to a man. The new creatures had appeared unnoticed on a red dirt world with a single briny ocean, not unlike what Holy Mars once might have been. Shining pyramids now nestled in a long strip of verdant jungles next to that sea.

Little was known of the new xenos, except what the other aliens had screamed as they died. They were likely poikilotherms. Their leaders were either fat or thin, but both kinds wore feathers and chains. They all had sharpened teeth - so many teeth.

The Dominus droned on. "They may be rudimentary spacefarers, they may have crude las-cannons, and they may be led by a beast that perversely apes the image of the sacred adeptus astartes. But we are not here to study their tainted, primitive contraptions. They are xenos, and they must be driven back into the void. Such is the will of the Machine God. . ."

Ilya noted the fanatical detail of the Necron battle report. His search engine cross-indexed "fanatical" with Stygian cults called the Khamrians and Xenarites. "Stygies VIII" linked to a young woman, later a competent Dominus. "Woman" linked to the most fearsome strategist Ilya had ever known, an Inquisition attaché. Despite the threat of death, the softest penalty for ignoring a speaking Dominus, Ilya let his focus wander.

---

The drop-pod shuddered and rumbled. Ten million gears and gyroscopes stabilized the pod's heat shield in the tumultuous stratosphere of an alien rock. The Skitarii vanguard was the Machine God's heat shield, a billion interlocking parts blazing forward into a toxic galaxy, ensuring the safe passage of the greater, more meaningful machines of reason and sacred violence.

As a vanguard Alpha, Ilya's unit had the honor of sharing a drop-pod with the Dominus. Nine other machine men, loyal sons of Holy Mars, perfected killers all, served the absolute will of the Dominus, except in those tasks too menial, too banal, for his divine intellect. In those simpler tasks, like cleaning their materiel, optimizing peer-to-peer frequencies, and dying, the nine vanguard in this pod had some autonomy, but they also followed Ilya's direction to the letter.

The Dominus shuddered, out of time with the heat-shield. Ilya queried his Lord and Server, which returned a packet of numbers stored in variables linked to several bodily functions. The Dominus, like all his peers, had long since replaced useless organs with perfectly efficient machines. The Dominus no longer had an inner ear, a stomach, or lungs. But somehow, this Dominus found a way to feel airsick.

 

[Iskander]

[Once: A Story of the Exile: Part 2]

A sicarian infiltrator would have less of his original body left than Ilya, but a bit more than the Dominus. He could rotate his elbows as freely as a ball bearing, to strike behind him if needed. His feet would be yard-long beams of aluminum. Only toes touching the ground, and ankles lifted out of the dirt. pre-post-human people would often mistake the ankle for a backwards-bended knee, but this was simply inaccurate. An imperial guardsmen, all gas, water, and membrane, might call an infiltrator a chicken-man, but he would not survive the Inquisition's wrath. A space marine would (usually) have better sense.

A particular infiltrator routed field data back over a peer-to-peer connection. Ilya, now on the ground, downloaded the file. The drop-pods landed in the desert, outside the jungle, well away from the pyramids of unknown purpose. The Dominus had enough sense not to land in an urban area, and certainly not one populated by mysterious savages who had bested Necrons and Eldar.

The report was straightforward, relating the enemy's disposition of forces:

- A large white beast on two legs, larger even than a sydonian dragoon. Meter-long claws and teeth. Fangs coated in liquid - mass spectrography reflects high toxicity. Its tail forked near the end. Ridden by a sub-psyker empath creature with matching split-tail. A large, spined membrane-sail wobbled on the creature's back. Reporting name: cavedweller. Recommend eliminating from long range.

- A large black beast on four legs, armoured like a tank and carrying a gigantic crystal on its back. Crystal encased in machinery of uncertain function, radiating near-visible spectrum infrared light and heat. Ideal companion to poikilotherms. Nothing good can come of this. Reporting name: castle. Recommended removing from orbit.

- A cloud of bipedal creatures, each half the size of a human but shaped more like a post-human sicarian infiltrator, carrying primitive stick-weapons. Several from original count now inexplicably missing - possible active camouflage? Legs bend like sicarians. Small leathery sails over their heads. Reporting name: gecko. Probable distraction. Recommend broad-spectrum satellite recon to locate missing creatures, immediate priority.

-Four flying beasts circling over a lake to the east, three with more claws than the other one. Each ridden by gecko. The rider of the less-clawed flying beast is heavily armed and armoured, while his mount somehow carries a slab of marble masonry. The other three beasts snap and hiss at each other in the air. Reporting name: [data corrupted]. Recommend deploying Dunecrawler anti-aircraft capabilities near command.

-Two cattle-sized scaled exothermic quadrupeds of unclear design, prodded by more geckos with sticks. Modest sails. Physically unimpressive. Reporting name: redbird. Mass spectrography reveals bizarre chemical composition. Role unclear. Possible religious icons, present to boost morale?

-Two groups of man-sized xenos, all scales and teeth, some mounted on other, more hideous creatures, and for some sad, backwards reason organized into unwieldy rectangles of ranks and files. The primitives carry spears and shields of all things. Their heads were topped with flat crests, sometimes ornamented in gold. Reporting name: hoplite. Likely easily disposed from range. Recommend not engaging in close combat.

-In the front rank of the hoplites-on-foot towered a single xenos of the same general type, a head taller than the others, with a much larger head-crest and a far darker hide. His golden armour glinted wildly in the blue sunset. The armour mocked that of a space marine, and covered most of his body, shoulders, legs, and chest, but not the long, tensely flicking, pointed tail. In the monster's right hand, it held a spear, crackling with warp energy. In its left it held a ball of light. At its roar, the army moved. Reporting name: Rex. Recommendation: Immediate assassination by any means available.

-One thin biped diminutive, outwardly like the geckos, but slightly taller than his peers, yellow eyes twitching back and forth to the deepening blue of the sunset, framed by an impractical headdress of black feathers. Reporting name: hedge wizard. Recommended target for sicarian infiltrators.

-A vast, flabby, half-awake beast the mass of several humans. The princeps attached a photograph of this abomination: it was riding a hovering rock slab of clearly alien technological origin. It looked for all the worlds like an unhappy, overweight, brilliantly shining frog. Reporting name: glowworm. Recommended assigning target to ironstrider cavaliers or orbital bombardment to eliminate as highest priority.

The infiltrator noted that this last... thing... sat apart from the other xenos and radiated electromagnetic disturbances clearly indicative of connections to the Warp. Its energy signatures were wrong for a demon, but the glowworm was not totally in this reality. Nothing good could come of that either.

The infiltrator also summarized that the sentient xenos came in multiple species - geckos, hoplites, glowworms, and so on, and they had large beasts of war which each looked capable of outmatching even a lone space marine (though perhaps not a pair of them). Something powerful must have united them. The infiltrator was outrageously presumptuous to make any suggestions, let alone to the Vanguard Alpha or Dominus. Undaunted, or naive, he recommended further reconnaissance until the xenos's capabilities were better known.

Ilya noted this was the same infiltrator to forward the xenos battle reports earlier. He logged the name as someone competent, Infiltrator Iskander-5 von Nasran. He left the recommendations unaltered, but unhighlighted. He did not wish to suppress sound tactical advice from the first soldier in harm's way, but he also did not want to provoke the Dominus's wrath against this infiltrator, who was clearly intelligent, but just as clearly inexperienced with the politics of war. Ilya entered a reminder, if this infiltrator survived this expedition, to recommend him for a promotion.

The Dominus replied that the report was noted. His next command came instantaneously: immediate frontal attack. "Remember, soldiers of the Omnissiah, No pathetic xenos can defeat the Adeptus Mechanicus at war!

 

[Iskander]

[Once: A Story of the Exile: Part 3]

Ilya smelled burning rubber, leaking oil, and human blood in the air. The source was a lone skitarii ranger, the last of his squad, tumbling into the crater Ilya shared with a few other soldiers... and a shreiking Dominus. "FORWARD COWARDS! Was I assigned to the Imperial Guard by mistake? Get back into the fight!" Skitarii, sicarians, and their war machines halted their slow retreat and opened fire on the advancing xenos.

The initial engagement had not gone well. This Dominus had seen fit only to bring small arms, even on the ironstriders, which were practically useless against the impossibly thick hides of these xenos. Only the geckos had thinner skin, but they were too mobile, too tactically savvy, to remain still for long. Even the anti-air weapons mounted on the Dunecrawler had turned out to be useless against flying creatures that dove to the ground in the first seconds of battle, and gorged on rubber tubing and muscle alike.

Even the ranked infantry and cavalry resisted against fire from range - the glowworm had placed some sort of energy shield over them. Any shot fired in their direction provoked a brilliant psycholuminescent display that overloaded the entire useful EM spectrum, making further targeting virtually impossible.

That last ranger's unit listened to the Dominus. They had charged straight into the ranked hoplites. The glowworm flicked its wrist, and the Warp bent around the hoplites and rangers alike. An impossible blur of movement followed, and one limping, broken ranger fled from the roaring crowd of scales and teeth behind him. The Rex roared.

As the infiltrator fled, an ironstrider advanced on the glowworm. It walked right over the redbirds, smaller from the ironstrider's pilot seat than a salamander would seem to a man, dismissing them as irrelevant. The redbirds, prodded by the geckos around them looked up and vomited out a hideous stream of brown-black liquid which instantly burst into flame. Sticky fire engulfed the ironstrider, melting its gyroscopes, igniting its phosphor reserves, and delivering its pilot to a horrifying death. The ironstrider stumbled forward and collapsed in the dirt with a treefall's thud.

The glowworm bent the Warp again, and the castle beast vanished, only to reappear at the AdMech's flank.

The other xenos marched across the field. Stunned, the Omnissiah's bravest slowly, calmly, retreated.

But then the Dominus insisted otherwise.

"I AM YOUR LORD AND MASTER - OBEY ME!" Ilya shuddered as the will of the Dominus invaded his mind over the broad-spectrum data tether. The Dominus was in control now, and all in the crater rose as one, even the bleeding ranger.

Ilya, now a mere passenger in his own head, felt his body move. He saw the sights of his firearm move in front of his vision, aimed at nothing in particular. Perhaps the enemy, generally.

Then Ilya noted the arrival of a field report from a particular infiltrator, apparently sent before the Dominus suppressed all free action. This came amid an un-parting sea of sensory data - every soldier saw, felt, and knew everything sensed by the others. He felt joints grinding in the dying ranger, sand in the respirator of an infiltrator, a feedback loop between crossed wires in the Dominus's dedicated tactical card. But, the field report arrived by the peer-to-peer system, rather than through the Dominus server-hub, as though it were a thief slipping through the side door, while the Dominus ranted in a rising tide, flooding in off the front porch.

Ilya's hand, guided by another mind, tensed on his firearm's grips. A finger compressed the trigger. Ilya's mind only had time to read the first line of the infiltrator's report. "CASTLE CHARGING ENERGEY WEAPON : REPEAT CASTLE CHARGING - "

Something sparkled off in the middle distance. Ilya's vision went white. Someone screamed.

--

The world was completely white, but Ilya was dead and he knew it because before him loomed the blinding radiance of what could only be the Omnissiah. Any doubts Ilya ever held about the teachings of the Cult Mechanicus vanished. Vaguely man-shaped and terrible to behold, details hidden in the overwhelming clarity of a sun's light, what else could this be?

Ilya here had no mouth and yet . . . somehow Ilya spoke. "Omnissiah! Emperor!"

"You say that I am."

Ilya smelled burning wool.

"Lord! But... are we in the Golden Throne? Lord if you are not there you must return soon that you would not die!"

"Am I dying, Ilya?"

Ilya said, because he did not know what to say, "But... yes, Lord, that is what your disciples told us!"

"Dying." A terrible pause. "You say that I am. Truly, I tell you I conquered death for you so long ago, but you willed yourselves to forget because forgetting is easier than believing."

Ilya's hand, not metal but now flesh and skin, brushed a fern. There was no fern here. Red leaves rustled in the wind. Ilya did not know what to say.

"Then I rejoice Lord, because you will live!"

"I have always lived. Indeed even when I told the ones who came before you that I would live, they did not at first understand, and some of those who followed chose not to."

Ilya felt metal grind against metal.

"Lord, I... I don't understand." True terror gripped Ilya. Newly-sown doubt welled like a spring mushroom in less time than it took to breathe, if breath could still come, and burst into despair. Ilya knew he was being punished for ignoring the teachings of the Dominus.

"Do you love me, Ilya the Seventh of Murom?" Despair oozed into desperation - the Omnissiah had not yet cast Ilya into Hell. Perhaps there was something yet to be done.

"Yes Lord, you know that I love you!"

"Then listen. I have wanted to purge you all from the universe since you tried to purge me from it. Indeed, I have grieved for you for so long, but I will not be thwarted by the hubris of my own children. I heard a cry. I've come to intervene."

Ilya felt metal grind against wood.

"Do you love me, Ilya the Seventh of Murom?" Ilya was hurt because he was asked again.

"Yes Lord, you know all things; you know that I love you."

"Then feed my sheep."

"I... what?"

"FEED MY SHEEP!" Ilya's being trembled, desperation melted back into despair. "Would you dare to call unclean that which your Lord has made clean?"

"No Lord!"

"Is your power as mine? Can you place the stars in the sky? Can even the greatest engines of Mars give birth to a new Orion or a new sisterhood of Pleiades?"

Ilya tasted brine and felt sand between his toes. Ilya had replaced his toes a hundred years past. Desperation crystallized into devotion, and Ilya did not know what to say.

"No Lord!"

"Then feed my sheep! Feed the people who loved the Light of the World. Feed the people who live past the desert by the salt sea. Feed the people who blindly follow the sun. Feed the last king of Xhotl. Love the one you call your enemy as your brother, for this is my will: Love me, love your neighbor. Love what is good, hate was is evil. Love the people and save them from the Devil . . ."

A terrible inference dawned on Ilya.

" . . .this is your mission Ilya the Seventh of Murom . . ."

Ilya was about to follow the Omnissiah, the First Causal Machine, into heresy.

". . . drive evil from this galaxy, end the dark age of mankind, and reclaim the billion worlds for the nations of the Lord!"

Ilya saw clearly. The Omnissiah, the All-Annointed, He Who Is, finally counterposed to humanity's Emperor.

"Yes Lord!"

Ilya tasted burning wool, and the sweetest of incense. His skin on fire. Could this yet be Hell?

"NOW WAKE UP!"

Ilya slipped beneath the surface of the ocean of dreams, and he drowned.

 

[Iskander]

[Once: A Story of the Exile: Part 4]

Someone shook Ilya's shoulders and ten-thousand queued-up network queries burst in upon his consciousness. Someone, not the Dominus, was shouting. Several someones.

"Wake up Alpha! We need your orders!"

"We all saw it! We all saw him!"

"Oh thank the Omnissiah, he's waking up! Everyone, the Alpha is coming back online!"

"HE meant we have to surrender and work with the xenos!"

"That's heresy you bastard, lay down your weapon!"

"No YOU lay down your weapon you blasphemer!"

"THAT'S ENOUGH!" Ilya's speaker could still compensate volume to correspond with the urgency of the message's content. That was good. Important subroutines were still functioning. At least something wasn't backwards.

A sicarian infiltrator shuffled over to Ilya. "What are your orders, Alpha?" This voice had just urged the unthinkable, surrender and collaboration with the unclean alien. He had a white "5" painted on a shoulder-plate. Ilya asked, "Iskander?"

"Yes Alpha! We all saw you in the vision!" Ilya suppressed horror. What had he become?" "Tell us, tell THEM . . ." gesturing at what was clearly death: soldiers clustered in a crater, yet scurrying back against its walls into two different camps, ". . . the will of the Omnissiah!"

Ilya looked back and forth between the two sides. "Soldier!" Iskander snapped to attention, "What is our tactical situation?" Iskander's face was a wall of metal, punctuated by respirator tubes and wide-spectrum cameras. No emotion slipped out, even over the peer-to-peer, "Alpha, the xenos are advancing on our position. The transport in orbit is empty. All troops have deployed, and all but us are retreating to the drop pods. The Dominus," Iskander flicked a wrist in a circle indicating the crumpled mass of robes and pistons behind him, "is still down. Alpha, all our forces await your orders."

Ilya understood defeat. A memory of an asteroid was referenced, and re-filed. Freed from the lucid transcendence of what he could only think of as the "vision," Ilya was once again awash in doubt. What in the ten thousand hells of Chaos had just happened? Was that really the Omnissiah? Was that some trick of the xenos psyker? Had the Machine God's mission just changed so radically? Or was this always the mission and someone else had betrayed it along the way?

"Alpha?" No clear emotion, but perhaps the choked cadence of fear. "What are your orders? It was you that we saw, what should we . . ."

"THAT'S ENOUGH!" the heap of cloth and gears roared as its million and circuits and turbines rumbled back to life. A baleful, blue, electronic eye reared up on a long, pneumatic tendril The Dominus shouted, "That was a trick of the Dark Gods of Chaos! The Omnissiah would never have us work with xenos! All of you BACK TO THE FRONT!"

Ilya shuddered as the will of the Dominus invaded his mind over the broad-spectrum data tether. Every time it was the same. The Dominus would soon be in control. Every soldier in the crater shuddered as one. Yet Iskander, somehow, did not rise. He spasmed in the dirt, almost impaling himself on a transonic razor spear. He was actually resisting the Dominus. The Dominus hadn't noticed, he was already ordering the vanguard over the top.

Ilya, now a mere passenger in his own head, felt his body move. He saw the sights of his firearm move in front of his vision, aimed at nothing in particular. Perhaps the enemy, generally.

Still Iskander quivered, rising only slowly, so slowly. The Dominus turned his drone-eye to look at the trembling soldier, then turned away, mumbling about defective product.

Iskander's resistance was heresy, rebellion, the blackest betrayal. And yet...

---

In that moment, Ilya saw something else. Iskander believed. Iskander had really, completely, sincerely, given his whole heart to the vision. Devoid of any hard evidence, Iskander had leapt across a void to a conclusion that he now treasured as unshakable. Ilya took note of this, and rejected the urge to execute a heretic on the spot. Ilya hated what he was becoming, yet if the Omnissiah had made these xenos clean . . . To do what was necessary, to finish the true mission, Ilya needed someone on this new plane of devotion. Ilya made a special note of Iskander. He would, for now, be reliable. Ilya then knew there would be no second chance, and gave Iskander his trust.

As Ilya expected, this Dominus had never deigned to plumb a soldier's upload queue.

A packet of information crossed Ilya's upload queue to the front. It transmitted by peer-to-peer wireless, without the need for routing through the Dominus hub.

The Dominus noted the unauthorized communication from an otherwise normally reliable soldier, and spun back to face Ilya.

"WHAT!? What was that transmission, TELL ME!"

Ilya was torn between two directives from the Dominus - kill the xenos : turn and answer. He froze.

--

Racing in from the peer-to-peer wireless, Iskander felt a packet of information unfold. It cut across the Dominus's raging sea like a razor through cloth.

Line one: Disable all communications. The web occulted, eclipsed. Iskander felt himself falling, as from orbit, out of the webwork.

---

Ilya's vision blurred as the Dominus utterly overrode the web-consciousness of the skitarii. Twenty-thousand years of automation artifice had left the skitarii firewalls impenetrable against all enemies, except for the Black Gate: this single network port would always open for the Dominus to command his underlings. The Black Gate had many uses - intelligence gathering, reconnaissance, battlefield command, pure science, and, of course, suppressing rebellion. The Gate could not be removed. It was the post before human. The Dominus's entire being poured into the webwork, every soldier felt his whole sensory presence, just as they felt each other's.

---

Iskander's tactical display was utterly black, and it covered most of the optical field. He felt nothing but his own data: dirt in every gear mixing with lubricating oil, in his hands a spear vibrated too fast to make sound, and though surrounded by his comrades, Iskander was completely, totally alone.

A single red message blinked in the indigo twilight.

---

Ilya felt a blade pierce the skin on his back, grate against a rib as it slid through, take the air from a respirator bag now punctured, and clip another rib on the way out of his chest. He writhed on the vibrating metal, scrabbling desperately at the hilt behind him and the blade in front. He felt lubricant and ethanol gush out of his chest cavity. He felt so weak, he couldn't breathe at will, his mouth cavity filled with oil and blood. The blade twisted as his hand finally grasped the hilt . . .

---

The image of this command line burned itself into Iskander's mind, even as it faded from sight.

Line two: Kill the Dominus. Now.

---

. . . but the hilt vanished. The spear through Ilya's chest was gone. Ilya inhaled deeply, and he heard his crew panting, coughing, hacking, wheezing all around him. Everyone slowly righted themselves, suppressing terror at near-death, and elation at new life, while twisting their heads around quickly for the spear-wielding attacker behind them, until they saw the Dominus. The Dominus was dead. He twitched at the end of Iskander's razor spear. He rattled a final time, and sparks burst up from his automation, then fell, darkening as they answered gravity's irresistible call.

Ilya saw Iskander reappear in the webwork. The infiltrator still gripped the haft of his weapon. Iskander did not know what to say; he openly radiated fear.

Ilya had control of his body again, and his body was above the edge of the crater. He saw the xenos army advancing toward him, but he noted their hesitation. The long inaction from the AdMech forces had clearly perplexed them. It was so irrational, it had to be a trap.

Ilya lifted his weapon over his head with both hands. He accessed the radio-spectrum wireless. "Children of the Omnissiah, this is Vanguard Alpha Ilya-7 von Murom. I am taking charge of this mission and," in an era past, in his old body, Ilya would have gulped, "I bring you the command of the Machine God: Stand down, soldiers. Stand down.."

Every AdMech soldier obeyed. Four winged beasts circled in the air. The other xenos stopped.

 

[Iskander]

[Once: A Story of the Exile: Part 5]

Ilya stood in a desert of mixed dust, silicon and iron, under alien stars. The burning hulk of the fallen ironstrider cast the only light under the firmament. Light flickered across Ilya's iron face, and that of a newly-promoted infiltrator princeps. A white "5," now smeared with blood and dirt, was painted on the latter's shoulder plate. The princeps held his spear upside down, with a white flag tied to the hilt in the air. It fluttered in the cool night wind, and smoke drifted around it. White flags meant peace, and fire was powerful. Anywhere in the universe, every sentient species somehow understood.

Light also flickered across the horrid visage of the Rex and its hedge-wizard underling. The hedge-wizard was twitchy, constantly muttering about the sun and the stars. The universal translator in Ilya's programming was struggling tonight, flailing around with inhuman phonology, syntax, grammar, lexicon, and more. Thankfully, the translator machine had been able to cobble together some rudimentary language from examples the Eldar and Necrons had translated. This was just barely enough.

Ilya had expected, for some reason, to treat with the glowworm. However, moments after the AdMech surrendered, the glowworm closed its eyes, and its chair sailed back toward the pyramids. It seemed to Ilya like a Dominus after a victory, dismissive, and suddenly bored.

The hedge-wizard muttered about the sun, or maybe a primitive's god called Chotek, and "the green moon," but this world had two small moons, and neither was green. It called the Rex "last defender of Xhotl," but the translator couldn't decide if that was a name or a title. The Rex introduced its companion as a "priest," and its people by a word that the translator rendered as "skink," and Ilya chuckled at Iskander's guesses. So close, yet so far. One of the two xenos had a name that sounded something like "Croc(glottal stop)gar." Ilya stuck to their titles.

Ilya felt his soldiers watching him, in person and in the webwork. He chose not to sigh. He conveyed to the Rex (while noting its three-meter height, titanium Warp-spear, and two-hundred-fifty kilograms of muscle), as simply as he could, that the one true God, the Omnissiah, had revealed to him that He had ordained peace and friendship between metal-men and lizard-men.

There was silence. The Rex had cocked its head when Ilya began to speak in its own tongue, and then squinted at the description of the "one true" divinity. But otherwise, it simply glowered down at Ilya's two-meter form. Even the priest had ceased muttering.

The Rex finally answered. "You are asking me to trust you."

"Yes. Well, not me, but the Omnissiah. We do His will, and His will alone."

"I trusted someone once."

Ilya remained silent. The Rex looked up at the stars.

"He saved my life. Lord . . . " the translator stumbled over the rest, a title or a name, Mazda-and-Mundi. Light-and-worlds? Light of the Old World? "He saved my people, and even our land, as he cast it into the sky with the Venerable [untranslated noise that sounded for all the worlds like a toad's croak]. And then a thousand years of grim darkness. Only war. The daemons chased us across the sky, in and out of the Warp . . ."

Ilya tensed at that word. If these xenos knew of and understood the horrors of the innermost Warp, worse yet if they had somehow encountered and survived it, then they were a force to be reckoned with. Ilya stayed silent and let the beast talk.

"Tetto(glottal stop)echo found the beacon before he too died, and the beacon led us here. And now here, still more war. Kings-of-Tombs, starfaring Asur, and daemon-lovers . . ."

Ilya puzzled over the names. He queried the troops in the webwork. No one recognized the names, but a few agreed with Ilya's suspicions that these were the Necrons, Eldar and servants of chaos.

" . . . and now you." The Rex turned his softly glowing yellow eyes back to Ilya. Ilya was not afraid, not after the vision, but he was on guard. "In more than a thousand years, no one has bothered to surrender, no one has bothered to talk, no one has offered anything other than more death. Your god seems less a god and more a coward - surrender merely prolongs suffering, it does not guarantee peace in this life."

Ilya felt compelled to speak, "But an afterlife --"

The Rex interrputed, "An afterlife is a discussion for another day. What matters now is practical. What can you give us?"

Ilya riposted, "What do you want?"

"We want to sail among the stars again, to wage war against the daemons. Our temples are grounded, and we cannot control the moons. We want to honor the memory of those who laid down their lives that we could live, and fight the true evil, wherever it is found. Do you know of the devils of the Warp?"

Ilya nodded slowly.

"And will you pledge to join us as we, the Last Children of the Old Ones, fight them?"

Ilya could not contain the shudder this time. To save the galaxy from the Devils? And what in the worlds did these xenos, these lizard-men, know of the Old Ones?

"Yes. As we serve the Omnissiah, his will is always to fight the devils of the warp, and we will fight them with you."

The glow in the Rexs's eyes brightened. "And can you take us to the stars?"

Ilya quavered, this time internally, thankfully. It was a miracle that these xenos had similar environmental tolerances to a human, or post-human AdMech, form, but the single transport he had at his command would not suffice, and the Exterminatus was coming soon . . . Alas, how to stop the Exterminatus . . . The Rex's long, sharpened tail waved in the breeze.

"I cannot do that right now," the Rex squinted, leaned in, and opened his mouth a few centimeters, exposing hundreds of razor teeth, "but I know people who can, and they will be here soon." How to convince the Exterminatus not to purge this world? Could he convince the Xenarite Stygians, or the secret parts of the Inquisition to intervene? Perhaps tell them some Old One ruin was worth studying, to fulfill the Emperor's sacred charge of fighting the daemons?

The Rex's nostrils flared, and its snout snapped shut. Ilya knew he no longer secreted sweat or pheromones, not since taking a metal body, but he wondered if the twitchy priest-psyker could sense his fear. The little creature had not moved its eyes off Ilya. Ilya had not seen it blink.

The Rex stood there a long while.

The Rex finally spoke. "I do not want to trust you . . ."

The webwork buzzed with soldiers coordinating ammunition supplies, defensible positions, and so on.

" . . . but I must ask you. Do you know what it is to trust?"

Ilya paused. What was this beast on about? No matter, it was the Omnissiah's will. "Yes. I do. I trusted my men today, and we saved each others' lives." Ilya thought of Iskander.

The Rex snorted, "That is not quite what I meant. If you don't have the trust of your spawn-kin, then you are less than worthless, worse than a (man-rat?)." The translator sputtered, Ilya wondered what in the Warp was a man-rat. The Rex continued, "I meant whether you know what it is to trust a stranger."

Ilya paused. "No," he answered truthfully, "I don't."

The Rex doubled over and chuffed, and chuffed, and chuffed, was this laughter? Its tail thrashed violently. The priest-psyker finally closed its eyes and placed its palm on its forehead. It chuffed once.

The Rex eventually regained its composure. "Good! Then let us learn together!" The Rex moved his spear to his armoured left hand, and extended his scaly right. Ilya took that hand in his own: an iron palm wrapped in a rubber glove. The webwork calmed with a collective murmur.

---

These are my orders. Contact Dominus Katya-3 von Delphi on Stygies VIII. Tell her that I say the Omnissiah has guided us to a species of xenos who her old professor would have loved to dissect. Contact the Baroness Deimos, Lady Aleksandra, Inquisitor in the Sol System. Tell her I say this: "you were right, and the true mission of the Emperor is here," followed by this world's coordinates.

Of course these are coded messages, and oblique, but it is too early to tell either any more. It is too early to trust them, but we may yet show them our usefulness. Both have the means to distract the Exterminatus. Disable the orbital comlinks, settle the transport ship somewhere hidden. Integrate the xenos - teach them our machines, study theirs, and seek their help in sealing the Black Gate, and give them our help in repairing these temple-ships.

For now, we can only trust each other. We are exiles now, just like these xenos, these lizardmen. Trust these, but above all trust and fear the Omnissiah. His will be done, before ever our own.

 

[Scalenex]

Nice story. I like the epilogue to the End Times and tie-in with 40K. I know very little about 40K fluff but I was able to follow everything going on though I got a bit lost in part three.

No, you aren't in violation of any sub-forum rules. There are no rules for how to present a multi-part story and 40K stories are okay. It is acceptable to post stories here that have nothing to do with Lizardmen if you like, even stories that have nothing to do with Warhammer.

There were a few minor typos here and there but this is clearly well-edited and well polished. It would be nice to add in a parentheses phonetic pronunciation of Illya at his names first mention just for clarity. Also I wasn't sure if Illya was male or female until well into the story.

Anyway excellent piece. Time to put it in the Lustriapedia.

 

[Iskander]

Thanks!!

Part Three was meant to be strange - Ilya, and indeed his whole unit, experienced something well outside of their normal experiences. I actually wanted the reader to share their bewilderment, and uncertainty as to which conclusion to draw. I have my own suspicions, but all of the hypotheses advanced by the characters are equally reasonable. I suppose I could organize it better. I'll think about it.

And you're right about the name Ilya. I remember myself being unsure about that name once upon a time. Although, with the Adeptus Mechanicus being as post-human as they are, I'm not sure that our notions of gender have much (or any!) practical application or use among them. So, I'll leave it unclear for now

 

[spawning of Bob]

It would be nice to add in a parentheses phonetic pronunciation of Illya at his names first mention just for clarity.

The name is easy. "Hi, I'm Ilya. I might not kill ya." My request about the names is to replace the (glottal stop)s with apostrophes....

Once I started, there was no way I wasn't going to read through to the end - it was terrific.

However, I am scared of how far you have broadened my horizons. I will never be able to look at a toaster the same way again.....

 

[Iskander]

Thank you Bob!! I bow at the high praise

I'm actually going to keep the glottal stop bits, since English doesn't have a universally agreed way to represent that sound, and the apostrophe can mean many different things. I wanted to convey how weird and difficult the names would sound at first contact. If you were distressed, then it worked ^_^

Also, was the Toaster thing a Battlestar Galactica reference? If not, I strongly recommend you watch the reimagined version of the show (with Edward James Olmos, et al). Be nice to your toasters

 

[Scalenex]

I'm actually going to keep the glottal stop bits, since English doesn't have a universally agreed way to represent that sound, and the apostrophe can mean many different things. I wanted to convey how weird and difficult the names would sound at first contact. If you were distressed, then it worked ^_^

There wasn't a single part of that statement I didn't like...

 

[spawning of Bob]

Apostrophe swipe at Scalenex = failed.

(if you didn't already know, apostacyostrophes are a running gag on the fluff forum. Just smile and nod.)

 

[Iskander]

Apostrophe swipe at Scalenex = failed.

(if you didn't already know, apostacyostrophes are a running gag on the fluff forum. Just smile and nod.)

I actually did not know that! ./smiles ./nods

 

[spawning of Bob]

Hey @Scalenex, would you like to find every apostrophexplosion we ever had and index them in the Lustriapedia?

Spoiler

I didn't think so.

Hey @Iskander, where is all this other fluff you wrote but never shared?

 

[Iskander]

Hey @Iskander, where is all this other fluff you wrote but never shared?

LOL! It's not Lizardmen-(or even Warhammer!)-related, so it'll probably never be here

 

[spawning of Bob]

It isn't, you know,Twilight Fanfic, is it?

 

[Slanputin]

That was a great read. Once I had started it would not let go. I've been interested in mixing 40k with Lizardmen (if my recent status hadn't given that away already..) but I see you've already done the concept justice here.

What I really enjoyed about this piece was how it wasn't afraid to laugh at the canon it'd been given, but at the same time really ran with the concepts given by the fluff to construct an involving world.

Very good. More please.

 

[Iskander]

@spawning of Bob : Nope! (Thank goodness.). The other stuff was mostly videogame related. However, I will say that I heard a certain recent godawful-yet-quite-profitable movie started out as Twilight fanfiction before it became a book, and then a movie. So, maybe there's money to be made there! (No amount of money could be worth doing that >_< )

@Slanputin : Thank you!!! I have some other very ambiguously-defined ideas for what to do next, but it may be while before I get to them. For example, I should probably actually *play* a game of 40K before going too much deeper into it. (Or not! I'd hate to get too wrapped up in the details.)

 

[Spark]

Great story I loved the way you described the lizard men and gave them great new names (and how they whoop the army's but!!) KEEP WRITING!!!!!!

 

[Fhanados]

Fantastic! I'm a fully fledged 40k player and I absolutely loved how you portrayed the Skitarii and the Adeptus Mechanicus in general. It is very odd to see guns vs spears and the spears win, but there was so much going on there that it didn't really strike me until afterwards.

Maybe one of my character arcs will need to take a tangent into the 41st millennium....