@ultramarineblues asked: What if… someone actually threw Erebus an Kor Phaeron through an airlock, as they deserved ? :D
It was an accident. Everyone even peripherally involved with The Incident, from the tech-priestess overseeing the work of constructor-servitors on the far side of the docking bay, to the Remembrancers, there to witness the arrival of
the envoys from the XVII Legion, agreed that it was just a freak accident.
The two Rememberancers, who’d been in close proximity to The Incident, were so frightened they could barely recount the events. The taller of the two, a woman with a set of aerophones and an odd cat that rode everywhere on her shoulders – insisted that there had been no negligence. She saw the servitor trip, beginning the tragic turn of events.
The other Remembrancer, shorter than her friend, with ink-stained hands, with red flecks of paint in her hair, swore that without the Techmarine’s swift action, everyone in the airlock would have died.
The Tech-Priestess, though she was inconsolable about the loss of the Thunderhawk and the irreparably damaged machine spirits of the Word Bearer’s armor, provided a stack of datafiles when asked. The servitor whose clumsiness started the Incident was known to be suboptimal, and she had filed numerous reports about it.
After examining the Tech-Priestess’s reports, surveillance-vids in the docking bay and the helmet-scans of the honor guard, the story came out, bit by bit.
When the Word Bearer’s Thunderhawks landed in the docking bay, the Tech-Priestess was by the far wall, overseeing servitors as they unloaded ammunition boxes from a cargo scow and working on rewiring a section of the landing bay’s cabling. The honor guard, mostly Luna Wolves, but with a handful of others – an Imperial Fist Captain and a Techmarine, and a Blood Angel Apothecary, stood near the center of the bay, accompanied by the two Remembrancers.
As the Word Bearers filled from their Thunderhawk, one of the servitors stumbled, dropping the ammunition crate it carried. There must have been a defective shell in the box, because there was a deep pop and the crate began smoking. Immediately recognizing that the Machine Spirits were lethally offended, the Tech-Priestess scrambled backward, mechanodendrites flailing in distress. Within seconds, the rest of the shells in the crate began cooking off, accompanied by billows of greasy black smoke that indicated a heavy metal fire.
The automated safety systems within the loading bay, controlled by always irascible Machine Spirits, became offended by the smoke, and initiated the venting procedures. The voidshield that made up the far wall of the docking bay, flickered then collapsed inward on itself like a popped bubble. The Techmarine, recognizing the danger - with the shield down, every unaugment in the bay would die and everything unsecured would be lost to the void – lunged for a nearby control panel and slammed his hand down on a emergency toggle, activating a stasis bubble that encompassed most of the bay.
That was when the testimony of the observers, and the vid of the surveillance cams cut off, and when the real trouble started. The abrupt surge of power through the exposed wiring that the Tech-Priestess had been working on, and the damage caused by the intense heat of the shells cooking off, infuriated the Machine Spirits. Half the bay went up in sparking blue-white electrical flames.
The atmosphere dump, then the explosion shoved the Word Bearer’s ship, along with the parade-assembled Word Bearers right out of the airlock.
Desperate to help, the Blood Angel Apothecary, and Imperial Fist Captain immediately helmeted and entered the void to retrieve their endangered Battle Brothers. With the sus-an membranes, and fully-inflated multi-lungs, the Word Bearers would survive the cold of the void long enough to be recovered.
To the Apthecary’s profound grief, Erebus was grievously wounded in the explosion. Unhelmeted, he’d been flung headfirst against the wing of the Thunderhawk, injuring him too much for the sus-an membrane to form. Truly, the explosion must have had horrific force – when Erebus’ body was recovered, it looked as though someone had taken a chainsword to the First Chaplain’s face.
Kor Phaeron faired no better. Between the sudden vacuum, the explosion then the freezing touch of the void, the containment chamber in the power reactor of his armor blew. Clearly, the Tech-Priests of the XVII had failed to properly inspect his wargear. Astartes’ armor was built to withstand hard vacuum with a minimum of stress on the system. It was not intended to fail with the kind of catastrophic explosion that resembled a direct strike by a power fist.
It was an accident, and every survivor in the bay swore it so.
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