Chapter 4 Part 1

Chapter 4: Strange alliances

=ATBS=

Part 1

=ATBS=​

Necron Command Center

Thur'Abis Plateau

Kronus

Even Necron technology wasn't fully proof against entropy and sixty five million years, give or take a few thousand, was an eternity by anyone's standard. The Lord in charge of the Necron installations below the surface of the world known as Kronus by its current primitive squatters was painfully aware of that fact. Systems all over the complex were damaged, often beyond repair. Even his data-banks weren't spared by the countless eons that passed while he slept, awaiting for the galaxy to heal enough to sustain life once again. In fact, he should have awoken millions of years ago, after the warp-storms caused by the final defeat of the Old Ones subdued and the abominations spawned by them either starved out or retreated back to the abyss that spawned them.

Finding himself awoken by a group of primitives pocking through his domain, naturally resulted in a predictable violent reaction that saw all but one of the intruders neutralized in a short order. Only their apparent leader was preserved as an intelligence asset, while recon units were dispatched to scout the situation on the surface and secure the entrances to the complex. That was a simple standard operational procedure carried automatically by the now obviously demented caretaker intelligence of the complex, while it busied itself with awakening him. In this particular case, the fact that said intelligence wasn't fully self aware and particularly intelligent turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Even in his diminished form, the Necron Lord could very well imagine the catastrophe of a proper command intelligence going demented and having unobstructed access to the complex, to him.

The current state of affairs was bad enough, as the reconnaissance units placed in its charge testified with their very appearance. The Necron Lord wasn't sure what he found more disturbing, that the first batch had returned wearing the flayed skins of primitive beings just like those who intruded upon his domain, or the fact that it took him this long to notice and conclude that there was something wrong with said picture. Truly, he was currently a shadow of his former self.

The first thing he did upon that revelation was to execute all error checking programs and hardware build into his towering frame. While said maintenance and repair subroutines did their job, the Necron Lord peered at the blood splattered automatons. There was something disturbing in their appearance that scratched at his incomplete data-banks. Their presence felt wrong for a lack of better word. He set up some cycles to keep an eye on them and any others like them, before shifting most of his attention to the Command Intelligence. The state of its data-banks and programming was even worse than his own – that was probably the best explanation for what the examination revealed. A data entity like the Command Intelligence wasn't supposed to experience emotions, no Necron was supposed to have retained their own, even if the Lord himself was a proof that truth was anything but absolute. Yet, there it was – an amalgamation of corrupted code and damaged hardware leading to unintended consequences. The Command Intelligence had been "enjoying" itself by ordering its automatons to hunt down and butcher anything and everything that found its way within its domain. It was either a stroke of luck or a glitch that forced it to comply with the contingency directives, keep a captive for intelligence purposes and awake him in the first place. That was something it should have done thousands of years ago when the first of those primitives had stumbled upon the Necron tunnels, instead…

It was a testament to how much he had degraded that the Command Intelligence could surprise him at this stage. By all means, it shouldn't have been bright enough to suspect what the Lord intended to do, much less do something about it. He was about to cut the Command Intelligence from the complex and bind it safely within its data-banks for study at a later date, when the activity within its running code spiked. It knew, it felt fear and it struck.

The four automatons present in the small chamber where the Necron Lord currently resided moved as one, acting much fast than their appearance suggested possible. Within moments they surrounded him and struck as one, flensing blades slashing through stale air.

The Necron Lord moved even faster, demonstrating that even in its current diminished state he was still a power to be reckoned with. Four pairs of blades met empty air, another one merely sliced through his tattered cape, while the rest met the unyielding alloy of his staff. He might have lost much in the endless eons of slumber and decay, many of his memories, his purpose, even his name, all in the name of preserving his combat capabilities first, his tactical and strategic acumen distant second. While the order of those priorities might have been flawed, for once, the execution didn't leave much to be desired.

Metal clashed with metal, he hefted his staff and pushed away two of the defective automatons, sidestepped a swipe for a third and kicked the fourth in the chest with enough force to cave it in and send it into the solid metal wall of the room. He struck the butt of his staff into the ground and released a pulse of raw energy that cascaded all around him, washing over the assailants and more importantly, slamming into the chassis protecting the Command Intelligence's core. The discharge stunned the automatons and instead of going after them, the Lord levered his staff at the data-core and blasted it to slag. With that threat hopefully dismantled, he returned his attention to the rogue Necron warriors. Two of them were on the ground, shaking as raw energy overloaded their frames. The third one phased out of reality only to appear behind the Lord and do its best to skewer him. The Necron leader let go of his staff and twisted around impossibly fast. He caught his assailant by what passed for its wrists and squeezed, leveraging the superior strength and construction of his own frame to crush the joints. He slammed its metal forehead into the face of the automaton for good effect then planted his right foot on its chest and shoved, thus tearing its arms off. He threw them away, pointed his right palm at the crippled automaton and melted a hole through its head with the weapon built into said hand.

The time it took him to dispatch that attacker gave enough time for the other two to recover from the overload and find their feet. They charged him, one coming straight at the Lord, while the other one phased out, preparing a sneak attack. For its trouble, the first automaton received a point-blank blast that decapitated it, however the second one was more successful. The Necron Lord caught its left wrist, yet it managed to slam its other arm under his armpit. Flensing blades perfectly able to slice through any known living being with pathetic ease found little purchase into the necrodermis of the Necron Lord. He found the blunt impact a larger inconvenience than the thin blades causing shallow cuts into his metal hide. He grabbed the head of the offending machine, ignored its flailing and melted a neat hole straight through its cranium.

If he could, the Necron Lord would have sighed in exasperation, which merely underlined how far he and the facility technically under his control had fallen. While there was a lot of data left intact pertaining weapons, vehicles, even space travel, little useless things like the devices needed to communicate verbally were lost, at best stored into corrupted archived in need of thorough repair and data recovery. It was embarrassing really, considering that one of the devices malfunctioning on his frame was his voice caster.

He made sure that the four automatons were dismantled for good, then did the same for the Command Intelligence. That done, it was time to take direct control of the facility, fix himself and recover as much of his memories as possible, while figuring out the state of the planet and what must be done about it. While thinking about it, the Lord recalled that he had a captive slatted for interrogation, which might no longer be the case given the Command Intelligence's proclivities. A query to the sub-routines monitoring the facility revealed the fate of said captive. For some arcane reason the Lord wasn't sure he wanted to ponder, the Command Intelligence had decided that it was good idea to strip the flesh off from the primitive and replace it with necrodermis while doing its best to make sure said primitive retained its mind… and had been awake and aware during the whole process, which had taken much longer than it should.

By the C'tan and the Silent King, just what had been wrong with that thing?! He sent a query to the new unit placed in the corner of the facility's network designated at Tomas Macabee and to his utter lack of surprise, the primitive was on the edge of going completely insane.