Ancient Objects: Chapter One

I was watching over the rift. It had turned up unexpectedly and without explanation or apparent cause at the outside of a system so irrelevant on the Imperial-Tau border was enough to worry my superiors. In fact, wreckage of an ancient Eldar ship had been thrown out of the rift, detected by a surprised navigator, and that was when I was sent to observe.

In fact, the whole affair had me quite worried. It seemed too lucky that an Eldar vessel's wreckage would appear at just the right place to be found by a navigator. Knowing the Eldar it would be an amazing surprise if they had not planned for the occurrence – the advantage this should offer us in battle would probably have massive effects on the future.

So either the vessel was too ancient and outmoded to be of value, or the gains would only be small, or…

…or this had been planned out, and either or neither of the above was true.

At that point my astropath, an able and tiring man in his thirty's called Lazzo, walked up to my side and informed me of valuable information:

"I believe that the rift is about to send out something – but it does not seem to be an Eldar vessel fragment," Lazzo said in his thin, ready voice. "It seems," he continued, "to contain living beings. Humans, sir."

I took in the shocking revelation with a spectacle look at Lazzo. I then walked towards a Tech-Priest who had been sent to observe and help examine the craft. He was tall and with a servo-arm mercandrite and artificial arm. He probably had other artificial parts as well, beneath his robes and skin. Many of the Mechanicus do.

"What time did you say those fragments are from?" I asked him.

"Inquisitor, you will remember that due to the xenon's methods of construction it is impossible to gain knowledge of age from it," he told me in his thin, reedy, voice, with disapproval in his tone.

"However," he continued, "I have been able to analyse dust caught in a warp field at the time of the warp storm and have estimated it at approximately fifteen thousand years old, Inquisitor."

"That would place it near the beginning of the Age of Strife. If we can recover it with the inhabitants alive … Solairis, prepare to engage the archaeological clamps," I told my pilot, a short Glavien named in honour of the great general.

Suddenly Lazzo walked forwards and stood next to me, staring at space in the view screen.

"There," he said, pointing. "Three kilometres x, minus two point eight kilometres y and zero point seven kilometres z. I can feel it." That once again reminded me of Lazzo's twin skills as an astropath and savant.

"Take us on a heading for that location," I instructed Solaris. "Are the clamps ready?"

"Few more seconds sir," he told me.

Then space lit up with a glow as something left the warp. We didn't notice anything at first, but a pict-magnification of space revealed a small sphere had appeared and that it was accelerating towards us.