' A Future In the Past '
AU: yo, feel free to review, first time writing, like, at all, no srsly, first time writing something that was not an essay in high school, wrote this over a 3 hour period once i got home, well, on with the story:
The sky was dark, save for a few orange smudges on the horizon where the few working lights were attached to the ceiling of the underhive, the place was dingy and dim, with the collected dust grime and rust of centuries of neglect showing on every surface. Pipes, small, enormous and every size in between, twisted and wound their way in every direction, some even still functioning for whatever purpose they had been designed for so, so long ago. Many had been used to carry nutrient paste to the hive dwellers here, back when there had been a population to sustain this far down in the bowels of the hive city.
Now though, the only denizens who braved this desolate place were dust and echoes, and the lost soul who found herself in this forsaken place. Sister Tianna, battle sister of the much vaunted (and feared, in equal measure!) Adeptus Sororitas concluded the lower levels of the underhives of terra –sucked-.
She had to say though, that she could have been worse off, much worse. She kicked a small chunk of rock-crete as she walked, the stone skittering across the floor (or was it a roof?) she was currently traversing, before falling into a crevice and out of her sight. Tianna checked her helmets display idly, seeing that the chronometer had indeed, not changed since she had last checked in what seemed to her to be five minutes ago. She sighed gently before she kicked another stone. "where by his light AM I?" She thought, "I came down in section 51B and im-" she checked her (so far useless) map. "in sector 91A? Sector? They changed naming conventions!?"
Tianna let a frustrated growl loose as she stopped to look at the map in more detail, her brows furrowing in displeasure. "Those ingrates at the administratum better hope I don't make it back to the upper levels before they, or I, expire from old age!" she almost felt like shouting, but that would make her head ache even worse then it already did. She HAD taken quite the beating on the way down, and the spot between her shoulder blades STILL hurt where she had been shot, though the power armour she wore had reduced the power of the stubb round she had taken enough that it had ONLY felt she had been kicked in the back by a grox.
She continued along (what she concluded) was a roof, thinking about how she had even gotten into this situation, she couldn't blame anyone, really, except for the utter BASTARD who had shot her, of course, the man had been(for he surely wasn't alive NOW, her squad wouldn't allow THAT) a frenzied rioter, apparently the feeding pipes that brought food down to the mid-level hive had stopped up, despite the prayers of the tech-adepts maintaining it, and as a result food riots had started up in the demetress district of level 76, normally, the local Arbites would have been able to handle it swiftly, but as it turned out, several large hive gangs had' had large presences in the area, and the purge attempt had ended in a bloody stalemate.
Luckily (or un-luckily considering her situation) her convent had been contacted to help clear the steets of the area, her prioress, Isabella, had sent several squads of sisters, including her own, to the heaviest afflicted area's to root out the entrenched gangs, she and her squad had been doing an admirable job with their flamers, right up until she had been shot.
Tianna still remembered the brief glimpse of shock on her sister superiors exposed face as she had tumbled down the vent, blown forwards by the shot in the back that had been somehow angled to miss her power-pack, thus hitting her with the forces of an ork warboss... well, maby not a warboss, she still had her ribs after all, she thought, maybe more a nob? No, boy? No, well, it was a stubb round... maybe a Gretchen? Yeah... well in any case it had been enough to make her lose her footing, she had fallen down that shaft for what felt like forever, not knowing if it led to a boiler or an air-vent fan, though the decent had not been on a straight course, (she would be a mere smear on the ground if it had been.)
When she had finally landed on a long since decomposed midden heap in the lower levels, she had been on her eighth catechism of purity, having been praying to the Emperor since the halfway mark of her decent for protection. And now here she walked, hoping to find an elevation shaft through which she could return to, if not her squad, then to a populated area of the hive to seek transport to them. She had to admit though; she had never seen architecture like what this place held, for all she knew, these shambled ruins were older than the dark age of technology! Tianna spotted another stone lying in her path on the tiles that made up the (floor?) and aimed another kick, sending another vanquished rocky foe to hurtle off into the distance.
Then she heard the crack of old, fossilized timber.
...
From directly beneath her feet.
"FUC-" she started, but she never finished, as she was too busy trying not fall to her 'death' a second time that day...
...
Tianna slowly and painfully straightened from her latest fall, throwing aside the traitorous floor(apparently roof) boards that had given way under her armoured form , she plucked a particularly vicious looking splinter from the hardened composite rubber lining around her neck, and flicked it away in annoyance. "Administratum. Lackey. Dead." She ground out, the vox built into her helmet giving a mechanical, sinister tone to her voice. She checked her map again, "-,Friar lane, Nottingham -" it un-helpfully supplied. she blinked, and shut off the map, and quietly, almost gently, set the flamer that had accompanied her so far on the other broken half of the counter she had fallen through on the way to the floor.
She flicked off the outgoing vox-link to her helmet, the outside worlds ambient noise cutting off immediately.
Then she swore her power armoured pants off.
She cursed the idiot who shot her, she damned the useless arbiter judge who had contacted her convent, the cursed up and down at the thrice damned stupid-ugly-HOLE she had fallen down, and she cursed that stupid ugly smug looking ultramarine across from her!
..."what?"
Silent(to us) temper tantrum thrown aside, she cautiously, almost reverently, walked to the poster, for that's what it was, and stared, and stared, And STARED. She reached out to touch it, but thought better of it, letting her hand fall back, limp at her side, "how?" she thought, and said aloud, "this place must be cen-no, millennia old, older than the great crusades even! How did an image of his glorious angels of death find its way here?!"
She cast her gaze about, suddenly becoming more aware of her surroundings, at the half smashed counter, at the faded low-gothic letters for 'G' and 'W' at the doors, at the stacks of shelves, at the many, many small packages lining said shelves. She was in a merchants shop, she belatedly realized, one that had known of the astartes -well- before their inception. She turned back to the poster, and gently, ever so gently, reached out her power armoured hand, to brush away the rest of the dust that kept parts of the image hidden. There was writing, she realized, and, now heedless of the danger to the posters integrity, redoubled her efforts at removing 39 millennia's worth of grime. Tianna finished her task, and stood back to look at the image, this time, in its entirety, what she saw, she couldn't accurately describe with thought or words, she just blankly looked on with the gaze of the truly astonished.
On the poster, above the very detailed image of an adeptus astarte's of the ultramarine chapter, were the words: Warhammer 40k: in the grim and dark far-future, there is only war.
AUTHORS NOTE: this idea came to me when I was working at 12 o'clock in wallmart as nightshift, no idea as to why, but it didint leave me until I got home the next morning, 'what would happen if gw had been a franchise in the 40k universe in the 2nd millennium? And had predicted EVERYTHING that had taken place there? And 'what if someone had found the dillipated ruins of a gw store on terra?