Chapter 11: Makrimalli, Coda
You quickly move away from the command center and the bands of disorganized guards that still remains inside and around the building after the recent fights; only the dead and cowards are left in your wake, such is the natural way any confrontation between the Imperium and servants of the True Gods. Leaving survivors isn't that much of an issue, they would either spread tales of the power of Chaos or be killed in the Imperium's paranoid purges. You slip into the streets of the base, following the route found by Zephus toward the landing platform, traversing a disused part of the base, lined with empty barracks, rotting storehouses and training ground blasted by the many weapons available to the Guard. Zephus sneers at the decaying infrastructure "The foolish Imperials can't even maintain infrastructure in their most vital warzone. Pitiful."
"They think the galaxy belongs to them. Ha! We will break those delusions on the anvil of war sooner or later. And before that, their willful ignorance is useful to us, blinding the masses to the True Powers of the galaxy." you exult.
"Aren't we running away from them, though?" says Frax, looking askance your way.
"Ah, just a temporary and minor setback. But by the will of the Dark Gods we are overcoming the trials in our path to Glory!" you answer, while continuing to move towards your objective.
"I am ready to die and having known Procrus for as long as I do, it's the same for him. We do not fear death, but we're not interested in an useless or unglorious death, like being gunned down by hordes of jumped-up conscripts in a mop-up operation. Wars are not won and lost in a single battle and sometime it is better to live to fight another day. Unless you're a Khornate blood-mad killer who can't see further than his chainaxe, of course." Zephus continues the explanation.
And yes, it is true that the both of you (unlike Frax) have been together for a very long time, having been inducted around the same time in the Word Bearers legion, being blooded together in the Agrax campaign and serving in the same company during the Great Crusade and the Heresy, then in the same Host in the depths of the Eye, so much that he followed you into exile from the legion and in the warband you have subsequently led, until your present situation on Ripag's Watch.
"Even if sometime it looks like the Imperium is prevailing, do keep in mind, Frax, that the Long War is a war the Imperium can not and will not win and I intend to be there for their final defeat, when we will have revenge on the cursed Anathema and his transgressions against us and our legion." you finish, before picking up the pace, further into the darkened base.
====✳====
Using the information you have from the command center, you avoid any hostile contact, in fact you don't see anyone other than a work crew, coveralls stained with grease and grime, busying themselves around damaged armored vehicles under the flickering light of lumen strips. You reward their diligence with a volley of bolts, just because you can, leaving broken bodies in your wake and the survivors fleeing into the night.
Just after the repair yards, you reach an expanse of flat ground illuminated by floodlights and dominated by the landing platform, a metal construction, stamped with the hated Aquilla, once painted in light grey, but now streaked with rust, with the pad standing four meters off the ground and accessed by a wide ramp. Despite its state of disrepair, the platform has seen some recent use, shown by the presence of barrels of promethium, strewn tools and piles of random spare parts.
Atop the platform sits your target, a flyer in the bright green livery of the Subjugator chapter, a squat machine all hard angles and straight planes, which seems to have already gone through hell and back, with the two lascannon in the turret not matching and the hull covered in bullet impacts of various size, discoloration from melta weapons hits, holes patched with welded plates and claw marks around the turret, as if some manner of feral beast had tried to claw its way inside the craft. But from what you had seen earlier today, it is still functional and you don't see anything that'd hint it can't take you into orbit.
But before you can claim it as your own, you'll have to deal with its defenders, a large pack of servitors, mindless automatons, unblinking eyes in vacant stares, currently blocking your way, with construction and repair servitors at the foot of the access ramp, crudely refitted to fight in close combat and on the platform above a row of gun servitors equipped with heavy bolters, which pose a much higher threat to you, even with the protection of your power armour.
Without much possible in the way of tactics or tricks against such mindless but vigilant opponents, you just charge straight at the platform. The moment you cross an invisible line, the servitors activate, guns loudly loading shells, circular saws revving, pneumatic hammers punching in the air, claws snapping open and close.
"Dark Prince give me speed!", you shout, a prayer and war cry both.
You rush too fast for the gun servitors, the bolts trailing you and leaving furrows of churned earth behind you. The first servitor you slam into at the end of your charge is obliterated by the impact, human and augmentics pieces flying in all directions.
"Lord of Battle give me strength!"
Your mace breaks metal-reinforced skulls, shatters joints both organic and mechanical, while the explosive ammunition of your bolt pistol unleashed a close range wrecks the artificial constructs. But unlike normal humans, servitors don't recoil in pain or cower in face of an overwhelming physical threat, they just continue to move and strike at you until physically unable to move, until their withered flesh and crude augmentics fail to follow the directives implanted in their brain. In the confused scrum, one of your parries is too slow and a circular diamond saw dig deep in your tight, cutting armor plates, myomer muscle fibres and the flesh underneath, drawing a spurt of blood and only Zephus' help prevent you from being overwhelmed, as he stabs the offending servitor before throwing it to the ground. From the corner of your eye, you see Frax jumping out of the melee as he tries to climb the ramp, but he gets repulsed by a shower of bolts, fresh wounds opening all over his breastplate, blood pouring freely and he falls back to the ground where he is swarmed by multiple servitors.
Realizing that the gun servitors will be able to freely gun you down once you've dealt with the repair servitors you're currently fighting, you change target.
"Changer guides me in battle!"
You grab a servitor, using it as a makeshift shield and then bull rush through the repair servitors, until you're climbing up the ramp; the moment you step on the incline, the gun servitors open fire again and bolts rain on you and your "human" shield which serves its purpose, catching most of the fire coming your way.
"Corruptor give me endurance!"
With each impact on the servitor, fragments of mummified flesh, splashes of oil and blood, bits of broken augmentics shower you, but you reach the platform having taken only a few glancing hits, the bolts ricocheting on your armour. Once on the platform, you throw your burden with a wordless shout, which sends two gun servitors to the ground and spoil the aim of others and then resume your bloody dance among this group. Burdened by their heavy guns, slowed by undersized servos and without much in manner of melee weapons, the gun servitors are an easy prey to your martial prowess and are quickly reduced to piles of mummified flesh and metal scrap.
Turning back to the foot of the ramp, you help Frax and Zephus finish the remaining servitors with a few bolts, leaving them standing on a field that looks like an unholy mix between an ork scrapyard and a Khornate charnel house; still most hereteks you've met would feel right at home there. They both join you at the foot of the space marine flyer, with Frax limping quite heavily from the volley of bolts and subsequent beating he's taken, with fresh blood splattered all over his armour, though it seems he has avoided any permanent damage.
"By the grace of the Dark Gods, we've reached our goal. Now let's get off this damned planet."
====✳====
During your ascent into orbit, on multiple occasions your are momentarily locked on by auspex of the local air defenses, but with the trajectory you had chosen, the lock never last long; and any Imperial would have hesitated firing on a space marine craft, especially one broadcasting up-to-date loyalist identification codes.
Soon after the last clash at the landing platform, you stand behind the pilot's seat, occupied by Frax and in front of you, half the viewport is filled by Ripag's Watch, dirty dirt ball choked by the ashes of conflict, while the rest is filled by the starry expanse of the void, marred by the aftereffects of the space combats which have taken place and are still taking place in orbit since the start of the crusade. And if you lean a little, you can spot to the side the Eye of Terror, an haven for your kind and a constant reminder to the worshippers of the corpse-god of the reality of the powers of the Warp. At this vision, you feel elated, as you have escaped the trap that the planet had become for you, leaving you free to roam the stars once more for the glory of Chaos.
But you aren't out of the woods yet, as your current craft is unable to cross the expanse between the stars, so you look at the readings from the auspex and cross-referencing them with the intelligence from the command center, looking for ships that you could board to go back to the relative safety of the Eye.
First of interest are ships from Abbadon's crusade forces, two capital ship coming from an orbital bombardment run of a fortress on the ground and from where you are you can see the ruins still glowing from the awesome power meted upon them. The first is the Vessel of Thousand Sensations, a delicate dagger shape covered in artful tiered towers, kilometers long sigils and what looks like colorful gardens. But its capabilities belies its almost delicate apparence, as a volley of its lance batteries build into its flank break the shields of an Imperial light cruiser, before ravaging the hapless ships. The other ship is the Benediction of P'sar, its opposite in term of appearance, but not in combat effectiveness, as shown by how its macrocannon batteries finish the damaged cruiser in a titannic explosion. Bare of any ornementation save for a gigantic star of chaos on its flank, it seems the ship is just built of brutally functional blocks of iron and adamantium welded together, covered in weapons and engines. Those two are the only chaos ships left in lower orbit close to you, anything else having already left or been destroyed.
Looking at the Imperial ships, you imediatly discard the bigger imperial warships (one battlecruiser and a smattering of cruisers of various classes) as too risky to board, leaving a handful of frigate-sized ships as a possible options. The first is barely visible on auspex, a sleek and discreet courrier ship only identified as I-14.17u and you have a good read on its location only thanks to the intelligence gathered on the ground, otherwise its low profile would have made it too hard to spot with your auspex. There's also the Second Fire, a cobra class frigate, whose damaged thrusters had made it limp behind other its formation, leaving it isolated. And to finish there is a group of chartist vessels, marked as being impressed in Imperial service to ferry troops; those ships are ungainly, slow and poorly armed, but likely poorly crewed and defended and would be unlikely yo attract too much attention if you take control of one of them.
If you decide to board one of the Imperial ships, you'd have time to restock from the ammunition stores of the space marine flyer, apply first aid to your wounds and patch the many holes in your armour and decide on how to approach the situation.
So, in order to leave behind Ripag's Watch, you choose to go
[] Vessel of thousand sensations
[] Benediction of P'sar
[] I-14.17u
[] Second Fire
[] One of the chartist vessels
AN: Thank you all for following and participating so far! If you have any comments/remarks/criticism, either in general or on specific elements like dialogue, combat, story structure, CYOA structure/choices, transition scenes... I'm all ears.
When I started this quest, I though of stopping at the escape from the planet and just do one more part to serve as conclusion, with the choice of ship you're boarding having just an impact on that last part. But since I've been enjoying this, I was considering continuing it instead of going back to mysteries of Brocante (where I've got an outline for future adventures) or doing something else. So the choice of ship would condition what the next steps of the quest are: going on a chaos ship, you'd have another choice of getting dropped in the Eye of Terror and having adventures as a smaller group (channeling the Black Crusade RPG even more) or joining the warband aboard that ship, with the ultimate goal of taking control of all or part of it; on the Imperial ships, it'd either be taking control of it by hook or crook or at least using it to leave Imperial-controlled space.
So if you're interested in continuing this, say so.
