Proximal Orbits II: Conquerors and Conquered
We came here to conquer.
We found ruins. Old ruins; stacked on top of older structures. The ones beneath beggared the mind and made a jest of the word ‘ancient’. We thought, in our supremacy, that nothing could contend with us.
First there were the machines: they tumbled from sparking portals that appeared without warning, without pattern. Deep within our established lines. Wakening from sweeps of desert thought empty and abandoned. They swept over our hardpoints, flooded garrisons and firebases.
We held them off. It’s what we do. We build lines, we carve out strongholds and we endure. We were the Siege Dancers. The machines managed a stalemate. We lost much of our foothold on this world, this world of dust and ruin. But we were not pushed away completely and confidence was high.
The machines surprised us. That was all. We were stronger and hardier than metal. More unbreakable than stone. As uncompromising as time.
Then the dead ones arrived.
They were not like the machines. The machines came in their thousands, in orderly ranks, pressed from molds and templates. They came with slaprifles and torch hammers, they came with blares and shouts of static and undecipherable code. They built glass and clockwork and geometric shapes.
The dead ones slunk in.
They crept in like vermin, they slipped through the cracks. A patrol would vanish here. Another there. No pattern. No reason. A psion studying the old technology would be found slain, scorched and torn to pieces, it’s protection detail dead to the last. When we started seeing them in the open they appeared singly, in pairs, sometimes in trios. Never more than six, or seven. So few.
And they never died.
We called them undead because we killed them and they never died.
With a swing of my shield I had shattered the body of an undead. I had stomped it into a red paste on my boots, shattering the plastics of it’s armor and soaking it’s robes in gore.
Then it popped back up, hearty and hole, and it killed my entire squad. I survived, barely, gasping past agonizing burns and armor cooked to my flesh.
The undead did what the machines did not. Alone or in pairs, in trios or cadres they slaughtered through a Legion that had held the line for years and years.
And that was not all. In our desperation we mustered our fleet, we gathered all our forces. The undead came from a City, their only City, the last City of their wretched kind. It cowered beneath the corpse of an unknown machine, some vast and great edifice - a relic of their fallen civilization.
We would break them, as we break all things, by striking at their core. Unrelenting, unremitting firepower.
Something found us first. It took our strength, it stole our ferocity. It turned brother against brother, Valus against Valus, oath against oath. It tore our plans apart and took no notice as they burned. In a single night our backs were broken.
It was a God, a God worthy of the name, a God who came to square off against the Angels of it’s foe.
In this forgotten, silent little star system, so far from any of importance, there are Gods, there are Angels, and there are Demons. They look at our might and they do not laugh, they do not spit, they do not even deign to care. They are so far beyond us that all our might is as the dust of the world I am to die upon.
I send this message, I broadcast this signal in the hopes it might breach the deep black and find purchase far beyond the bounds of this wretched space.
I am Phalanx Mol’usk, of the Siege Dancers. I am dying.
If you hear this message, do not respond. Do not come. Take note of it’s origin, and if you are wise, if you value what you have built, you will do one thing.
You will mark down on every map, you will take note in every database, you will teach your spawn in their creche, you will tell them one thing:
Here are monsters.
Fear them.
And pray they do not look beyond their war.
