Powering up completely, the war machine rose and began to cant to its underlings, assembling an internal map of where they were positioned.
<It is time.>
The alpha individual named and numbered by the signifier KRRJ-1211 (F) could not be said to possess much in the way of personality or ambition. In that regard he was little different from most of the basic-pattern skitarii, all of whom were surgically and chemically crafted for loyalty and obedience. He stared at the world through target-accumulator lenses grafted over eyes that had had their lids removed in order to provide his masters with continual inloads of data from his senses. And in this, too, he was little different from others among his kind.
His lack of distinctiveness made him perfect for the Archimandrite’s purposes. Wholly loyal to Sacred Mars and entirely devoid of the higher brain function necessary to determine the action/reaction cause/effect of his conflict in loyalties, he obeyed the Archimandrite’s cants of <Home>, <Home>, <Home> with all the drone-like behaviour of a worker insect following a trail of its kindred back to the hive.
In this instance, however, he was leading them. KRRJ-1211 (F) signalled a halt with a raised fist and a spurt of noospheric code. The warriors with him halted with the inhuman precision of gestalt unity. The conveyors carrying Unifier supplies, and some of the invaluable priests themselves, rolled on ahead through the misty tunnels. Queries from the Mechanicum archpriests responsible for building and rebuilding these very tunnels inloaded into KRRJ-1211 (F)’s senses, to which he responded with the requisite deception.
<You are safe,> he canted to them as they managed their conveyors or walked alongside their cargo haulers. This was a lie. <We must return to battle.> This was somewhere between a lie and the truth. They were recalled to battle, yes, but KRRJ-1211 (F) simply had no intention of canting just where that battle would be taking place. He led his warriors away, leaving the Unifiers to believe he was returning to aid the rearguard.
Not long after, he plunged into the mist of a side tunnel, leading his warband with him. They moved at a dead sprint, their piston legs carrying them at great speed through the winding passageways.
The auxiliary tunnel as laid out on the Archimandrite’s map branched in over one hundred places, and one specific route would lead back to the Impossible City. Most notably, it required a brief traversal through one webway gate, exiting back into the material universe before quickly entering a nearby companion gate and continuing the journey onwards.
Unfortunately for KRRJ-1211 (F), less than a day after the skitarii warband had set off on its sprint through the side passages, they passed from the Mechanicum’s rattling monstrosity of a tunnel into the psy-resonant material of the true web, and emerged into what appeared to be a long-dead garden, situated beneath the stars. The skitarii alpha paid brief heed to the dusty remains of flowers beneath his iron tread. He paid similarly little attention to the oddly angular statuary placed around the lifeless, grey garden. His focus was almost entirely fixed upon finding the companion gateway and returning the web to complete his journey.
<Location: Craftworld!> one of his more limited underofficers canted in alarm. She had no access to the webway’s map. Her limited intellect would have struggled to sustain even a portion of it. <Location: Eldar craftworld. Procedure: Withdraw?>
<Zzzt,> KRRJ-1211 (F) canted back in irritation.
He had his back to the statuary, engrossed in his search, when the statues began to draw their swords. Even if he had been devoting his full concentration, he wouldn’t have recognised the lithe alien figures pulling blades of enchanted bone free from jewelled sheaths. He had never encountered the eldar species before, nor their funereal sentinels, the wraithkind.
<It is time,> canted the Archimandrite some time later. The words augmitted across the still garden from KRRJ-1211 (F)’s vox-feed. The skitarii lay in pieces upon the dead grass along with his warriors, but the augmetic portions of his corpse retained enough internal power to receive transmissions.
If the statues heard this static-flawed announcement, they showed no sign. Their swords were sheathed. Their heads were bowed. They waited in silence, wardens over new graves among the old.
A clade of war servitors trundled through the web, following the Archimandrite’s precise directions. This particular clade – noted as LAM-Exios in the Fabricator General’s archives – was comprised of Martian criminals sentenced to servitoral repentance, not that any of them remembered who they were or what they were convicted of doing.
Each of the lobotomised slaves bore significant firepower in the form of heavy-barrelled plasma calivers, rad-cannons and flamers enhanced by cognis targeting technology. They were perfect examples of the expendable troops that had died in their thousands defending the Unifiers over the last five years, and those that Zagreus Kane had sent in staggering numbers when Diocletian and Kaeria approached him with a requisition order.
The LAM-Exios clade, to their credit, made it most of the way back to the Impossible City. Their journey halted when they encountered the devastated remains of a XVI Legion Reaver Company and its tank support seeking to cut ahead and ambush the fleeing Imperial convoys.
As they were designed and programmed to do, the battle-servitors of LAM-Exios advanced with kill/extinguish battle subroutines, unleashing a withering torrent of firepower on the enemy units charging towards them.
<It is time,> canted the Archimandrite. And indeed it was. By that time, however, a mere seventeen war servitors survived to limp or roll onwards after the battle. These near-mindless victors were slaughtered by the next enemy wave to come spilling through the tunnel, gutted and torn apart by World Eaters chainaxes, their heads taken as trophies to be skinned and hung from belts like shamanistic tokens.
<It is time.>
Aravolos of the Cult Myrmidia, his bulky form shrouded in tattered robes of Martian red, deactivated his link to the noosphere. Simultaneously strangling an officer of the Emperor’s Children with all four of his mechandendrites, and releasing sustained beams of volkite energy at the rest of the sergeant’s squad from his fixed gunlimb, he was already engaged in the consecrated act of waging war.
His muddy, bloodstained consciousness lacked the time and focus for the Archimandrite’s treason.
Heaving with his mechadendrites he lifted the ceramite-clad warrior into the air. A second application of effort crushed the warrior’s gorget, broke his neck and tore both arms from their sockets. Aravolos hurled the remnants towards the ignited, retreating figures of the sergeant’s squad, and turned in search of another life to end.
Echo-Echo-71 abandoned the convoy and led his warriors into the ancillary tunnels, as ordered. He possessed more autonomy than many of his alpha-kind, even among other sicarii, but held little comprehension of the immensity of the Great Work even after several years of fighting inside its boundaries. The equation of his loyalty ended in simplicity: the representative of the Fabricator General had canted that Sacred Mars cried out for liberation, and that duty overruled any other.
His expedition proceeded far more smoothly than many others. Without trouble, he reached the specific rendezvous locations marked by the Archimandrite, bypassing the tunnels she had calculated as most likely to be stormed by the foe. He sent out scouts to mark the passages yet to be taken, then progressed only when confirmation arrived that they were clear. He moved his warriors in disciplined kill-teams, their stalk-tanks and ’strider units dispersed to repel, with maximum force and response time mobility, any sudden ambush.