Chapter 4 – Well, Shit
Atticus was terrified. He'd been hiding in the sewers for nearly a week, hoping to wait out the attack. He'd managed to ration the little food he'd brought with him to last him for a while, trying to put off making a supply run for as long as possible. Of course, the moment he emerged, a patrol of the foul xenos had come upon him and he'd known he was doomed.
Then… they had arrived.
They were small creatures, fast and precise, with a single, glowing blue eye in their featureless faces. They ran faster than a man and had claws as long as his forearm. And there were many of them. So, so many. More than he could count. Certainly, more than the xenos.
They'd fallen upon the patrol that had threatened him, butchering and shredding them apart with unholy ease. He'd run while they were distracted, any feeling of hunger gone as he sprinted as fast as he could into a nearby alleyway.
He wasn't sure what these new xenos, for that was surely what they were, wanted, but it couldn't be good. The greenskins, the raiders, and now these gremlin-things. When he'd come to this colony in search of a new life of adventure on the frontier, this hadn't been what he'd wanted.
Now, he was hiding behind a dumpster, crouched low and trying to quiet his heavy breathing. The small xenos seemed focused on the raiders, content with slaughtering them alone. For now, he thought with a grimace. He watched the battle far above him. The sky was almost blotted out by the number of tiny xenos, which could apparently fly, if only clumsily, occasionally lit up by flashes of darkness sent by their foes.
Yet, almost as quickly as it all began, it was over. The raiders retreated, flying upwards, pursued by a portion of the horde, thousands strong. Meanwhile, the rest turned to the city and Atticus knew their end had come. They gathered in the sky at the center of the city, like a swarm of insects flying high above in the air.
He sent a final prayer to the God-Emperor, asking for deliverance.
Then, the world went dark.
Roughly One Minute Prior
He had won!
Sure, he'd sort of stacked the deck in his own favor by creating tens of thousands of bots to swarm a few hundred enemies, but he had still won! Ten thousand of his Wolffes gave chase to the rising jet bikes and raiders, but the xenos craft were far too quick for him to actually reach them with his combat units. He'd mainly sent them to ensure they didn't come back, while the rest of his remaining horde held the city in case of any tricks.
The first Riflemen were coming off the line already, but he held them back behind the portals. At the moment, they were his trump card and he didn't want to reveal his ability to steal their technology too quickly.
Speaking of which, the jet bike of the xeno he'd vengefully slain had crashed into a building and was fortunately intact. He'd wanted to get a raider as well, but they'd all escaped his grasp. Still, tech was tech and a few of his Wolffes swiftly disassembled the jet bike. Surprisingly, it was similar to the Drukhari armor in that it connected to the neural network of its rider, allowing for near-instantaneous commands. The anti-gravity tech within the bike was even more sophisticated than his own and he immediately replaced every design he had with hovering capabilities with the deldar improvement.
Most interesting of all, however, was the weapon on the jet bike. Unlike the other jet bikes, which had what were essentially just larger splinter rifles, this bike possessed a heat lance, a weapon not unlike an imperial melta, though this weapon was less likely to randomly explode and destroy everything around it. It had a very short range in comparison to the splinter rifles, but it was exceptionally powerful and an excellent addition. He created a modified design that was smaller and would work in the hands of his Riflemen and began producing one for every nine standard Riflemen he was creating. They took a slightly longer amount of time to create, so he added another fabricator to assist the factories now dedicated to the Heat-Riflemen, evening the time once more.
It had been less than a minute since the first raiders had broken for the sky, but the dark eldar he'd sought revenge against was still screaming in agony as the Locusts continued to slowly tear him apart on a cellular level. He'd thought he was alright with inflicting suffering, at least on this particular being, but at this point he felt like it was more than enough. A flash of claws ended the suffering of the dark eldar.
Then he remembered where eldar went when they died and realized that the suffering had only really just begun. He suppressed a shudder at the fact that he had inadvertently fed one of the chaos gods dozens of their favorite meal today and refocused on the task at hand. Namely, the people of the city.
In stories, normally a liberating army is welcomed with cheering crowds, flowers, and alcohol. There were many reasons why that wasn't happening here. These people had just seen a strong contender for the worst people in the universe be brutally attacked and forced back by a seemingly endless horde of tiny, savage robot werewolves that could fly and shred armor like paper. Nothing about this was normal and not a single person emerged from the buildings to do so much as say thank you.
Not that he really cared. He'd done this as much for himself as for them. He'd needed guns, now he had guns. Sure, he had intervened because he didn't like watching them be hunted like sheep, he'd probably have done the same thing even if there was no tech to acquire, but he hadn't exactly rushed to their defense the moment he saw what was happening. He'd prepared himself, built his forces to an overwhelming degree, and then had attacked, all the while watching as the dark eldar snatched up more people and took them away to their ship.
Speaking of said ship, a newly constructed radar could see it was still in low orbit, despite having already picked up the rest of the dark eldar by this point. They weren't going to try attacking again after he left, were they? The pursuing Wolffes had broken off their hunt and returned to the city, so they should know any attack would be a slaughter, right?
Then, an alert pinged in his mind as the sensors of his radar detected an energy buildup along the bow of the light cruiser.
Oh
OH FU-
One Hour Later
They bombarded the city.
They bombarded the city.
All those people…
There had been no reason to kill them. Not really. Sure, his army was probably the main target, but it wasn't like his forces could even attack a spaceship at this point. They had done this purely out of spite. They lost, so they destroyed the thing he'd fought for.
They'd also attacked the rest of his forces on the planet, including the fabricators and facilities on the islands that had just begun to be built up, reducing them to the same sorry state as the city.
Most worrying had been their attack on the base his main body was located in or at least the air factory that was outside of it. He'd thought his structure was strong enough that it could survive such a bombardment. He'd only been partially right, and it had nearly cost him his life.
The first two floors of his base were gone and the third, the one where his main body was, had cracked open like an eggshell. The hill it had once been built under had disappeared in the explosion. That had all been from a single blast from one of their ship's weapons. Not even from the main cannon that had targeted the city, but the spaceship equivalent of a sidearm. His body had been damaged by the debris and force of the attack, shards of precursor metal had shredded both of his legs and embedded much of his partially melted hull, rendering him immobile. All of his forces were gone, his factories were ruined, his fabricators unresponsive. The mines and generators below him had been rendered inoperable by the blast as well, though he was guessing their structures were still relatively intact.
For nearly an hour, he had laid there, waiting for death to come, expecting a second shot to end him at any moment. For the first ten minutes, he thought they were perhaps just recharging their weapon. For the next twenty, he decided they were toying with him, daring him to hope before they snatched it away along with his life. For the rest of the hour, he'd begun to suspect they may have assumed a single shot would be enough and had left. An errant thought had finally got him operating again.
What if they were looking for him so they could take him with them?
Death was one thing. He was fairly certain he'd died before. Being captured by dark eldar and taken to Commorragh, that was another matter entirely.
Terror was a wonderful motivator.
He'd dragged himself over to a part of his base that still possessed a roof, a slow journey given that he lacked hands to grip anything. Whether it was fortune or providence that one of his fabricators was still functional, he wasn't sure and didn't care, he was just glad he had something. The first thing he constructed was a fabricator bot to repair him while he began work elsewhere. The tiny fabricator started on his legs, reclaiming the parts that were to be replaced.
With his economy destroyed and almost the entirety of his stored material gone, repairing himself was an expensive process. A commander's body was far and away more expensive than a Wolffe or Rifleman. When he realized just how slow this process would be, he moved from his partially reconstructed legs to his second fabricator, reclaiming the entire bottom half of that arm. He regained a fair bit of metal from it, enough for him to at least replace the missing arm with something that would at least let him defend himself against anyone that came looking for him. It wouldn't help against a ship, but there was nothing he could do about that at the moment.
An hour more and he had a Heat Lance, charged and ready to destroy anything that approached. Another three and his body was finally repaired fully. He departed to the bottom of his half-destroyed base, while his fabricator went to the other surviving floor. They had to reclaim the non-functioning elevators that connected them just to reach the lower levels. As he'd suspected, most of the mines and generators remained mostly intact, just inactive.
Once those were repaired and he had a decent economy going again, he built a dozen more fabricator and sent them about reinforcing the ceilings of his bunker. He couldn't be sure they wouldn't fire again if he began moving openly, so he doubled the thickness of the walls and tripled the ceiling.
Then, he started tunneling.
Twenty-Four Hours Later
A tunnel, reinforced with three meter thick walls made of precursor metal, extended from the lowest level of his base to several kilometers to the west, near the ocean. This was where he kept his main body in a chamber barely large enough to hold him, surrounded on all sides by twenty meters of precursor metal.
Was it paranoid? No. No, it was not.
He still wasn't completely certain of his own safety.
Over a day had passed since the bombardment and no second attack had come, but he would rather play it safe and be wrong than act recklessly and end up dead.
When he was finally willing to send out a scout, it was a single fabricator emerging from his base's former third floor.
"Fuuuck…" He'd know it had been bad, but he hadn't expected to end up in the middle of a crater. The forest around him hadn't burned, it had disintegrated. Trees that hadn't been caught in the blast itself had been torn up by their roots and sent flying. Dust swirled around the scorched basin. If it weren't for his sensors, he wouldn't be able to see more than a few dozen feet in front of himself. He had his fabricator build an advanced radar and first checked on the city.
The entire area where it had once been was just… gone. Nothing but scorched ground and piles of smoking rubble. There weren't even any corpses, even though he knew for a fact that there had still been people in the city.
Next, he turned his sights to the void above… Nothing.
He breathed a sigh of relief.
Then he noted the massive ork horde that was approaching.
Shit.