Chapter 1: Falling Star
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On the second day of the week-long festival that celebrated the Emperor's ascension, a star fell over the hive world of Ceadounus. It burst from the warp in a tide of non-light and anti-colors, a vast graveyard of ships, wreathed in the corposant blood of the immaterium. It stormed through the orbits, shrouded by flame, a colossal comet of fire and death.
Gravitational fluctuations rippled out from the proximity of its emergence, tearing free kilometers-long fragments, sending the rusted remains of once-proud vessels spinning from the body of the hulk. They slashed across the skies in streaks of descending fire, disturbing even the decadent nobles whose palaces rose above the world's teeming cloud layers. They flared molten red, then pink, then white, as they hammered the victim world's continental expanse. Millions within the hive cities died without knowing what came for them, entombed as they were from any view of the sky, ignorant of the coming doom until the heat and crushing force claimed their lives. The main mass struck the parched plains between the world's towering hives, blazing through the smoggy overcast and crashing down with a booming thunder that shook the very bones of the world.
Space hulks were known to be the vectors for all manner of xenos and corrupt marauders, and the crude glyphs and jaw-plate attachments jutting from the behemoth's scrap-laden surface told any onlookers all they needed to know about the identity of its occupants. Though the greenskins were notorious for their brute resilience, the Planetary Defense Forces sent to investigate the primary crash site consoled themselves nonetheless with the idea that the crisis would soon be over. Surely, very little could have survived such a cataclysmic impact, just enough left to blood the frontline units a bit in a routine clean-up action against the remnants of a once-fearsome force.
Ceadounus had not tasted warfare in over a millennium, beyond the occasional minor rebellion and skirmish. No one living on the planet even knew anyone who had witnessed large-scale conflict on its surface. For the ruling high-borne class, who had made their wealth on the planet's considerable manufacturing capacity, such a notion was almost unthinkable.
How wrong they were.
...
"In the Emperor's name, purge the alien!" Captain Ichiro cried from his position atop a Chimera, one of the few available to the company, his voice amplified by a loudspeaker over the low rumble of the vehicle's engine.
"Purge the alien!" His sergeants roared in unison.
"Purge the alien!" Thousands echoed around him, the battlecry rippling out until it erupted from every company and regiment present. Autogun magazines snapped into place with sharp reports, and those veteran platoons with access to lasguns slapped their power packs into their slots. Pike units marched to the fore, tough, muscular men, packing themselves into walls of bristling spearpoints to receive the greenskin charge.
For a moment, Ichiro felt himself rising on a wave of defiance, buoyed by a sea of unleashed humanity. Their collective power was electrifying, swelling in his senses to smother the stink of greenskin bodies coming from ahead, and the acrid smog belched from sooty engines and rickety smokestacks. He was eager for the fight. They would exterminate the greenskin survivors, claim the glory of victory, and in doing so quash the still raw memories of the space hulk's devastating impact from their minds.
The moment was shattered by the howl of the Orks. Countless tusked throats bellowed in reply, giving voice to the deepest instinct of the greenskin race. It was a wave of noise and a fist of force, anger and joy, eagerness and jubilation all rolled into one. It drowned out the human cry, a hideous sound that caused the stones on the ground to rattle. Even the vox was choked with baying static, a roar that came not from the ragged survivors of a catastrophic crash, but from the triumphant exhilaration of eager millions.
Ichiro's eyes went wide. His voice died in his throat. His hands trembled and his face paled. He had seen pict-recordings of the aliens before, read about them in battle logs, but neither had prepared him for the sudden shock of their exultation.
Explosions lit up the hulk, sending fragments spraying across the crater and making way for the invading horde to commence their onslaught. Their flashes cast Ichiro's face into shadow. He suddenly looked gaunt. Like a peeled skull.
His soldiers paused, the same jolt white terror flashing through their minds as well. They looked to their captain for direction.
Ichiro's training rose to the fore. He gesticulated with his sword, and waved forward with his laspistol. There was only one course of action, for to falter now would risk their collective nerve breaking before the green tide. And if that happened, it would not be long before they were all trampled into the dust.
"Advance! Attack! Attack!" He cried.
The Orks were faster. Tougher. Stronger and more ferocious. They were taller than most men and more than twice as wide at the shoulder; easy to hit, but hard to bring down. If the humans were eager then the Orks were downright ravenous, a sea of starving beasts with an insatiable hunger for violence.
Autoguns rattled, their muzzle flashes rippling up and down the Imperial line, their rounds leaving divots and pockmarks in the thick hides of the Orks. The Orks came on, heedless of pain. Their own bulky weapons barked, the multitude of reports merging into a single ear-splitting buzz that mowed down men in bloody swathes like wheat before the scythe.
The pike-lines wavered, and the Orks smashed through them. They barely even slowed, slashing their way through the phalanx with blades as big as human torsos, clamped in green fists as thick as men's skulls. A few unlucky ones were pinioned, only to be hacked apart by their comrades in their eagerness to get to grips with the foe.
Lasguns strobed, one managing to catch an Ork in the face with a six-shot burst. It left a mess of charred flesh and dribbling fluids, and another shot to the exposed braincase sent the alien toppling bonelessly into the greenskins behind. They advanced regardless, shoving the body aside and trampling it beneath their heavy boots.
What heavy weaponry the company had available to them poured fire into the Orks, but autocannon rounds that would have gone through ten men were stopped by just one or two green bodies. The Orks replied with their own heavy fire, unleashing wavering beams of energy and crackling green lightning from coiled barrels and tottering, multi-pronged ends. These struck the greenskins' own lines as often as they did the humans, turning flesh to clouds of glowing cinders. Several weapons exploded before they could fire, while others melted to slag as their power relays were run into insanely high temperatures by their trigger-happy owners. It didn't matter.
Artillery struck the horde, sending broken body parts sailing through the air in bloody red arcs. The gaps in the greenskin lines were filled within moments. Corkscrewing rockets and dense balls of scrap whizzed through the air, crashing into the Imperials and smearing soldiers' bodies across the ashen plains. Orkish aircraft flung themselves from openings in the hulk, most only managing to nosedive into the ground. Those few that remained aloft wheeled about to strafe the Imperial lines, filling the air with the juddering staccato of their heavy guns.
Ichiro looked around the edges of the engagement zone. The crude but heavily armed vehicles of the Orks had already driven off or destroyed the PDF's own meager armored support. The Imperial armored platoons had sold their lives dearly, claiming a toll of greenskin armor at least as high as their own losses, their wreckage spawning spiraling columns of greasy black smoke. But the Orks had so many that even twice the number of kills would scarcely have made a difference. Kicking up clouds of dust and smoke, their bikes and battlewagons raced around to encircle Ichiro's infantry company, closing the noose with a bellowing, clanging, booming wall of rattletrap metal.
The Ceadounians were disciplined and brave, and determined to protect their home. But the Orks could endure more, had more bodies, and more guns to spare. Always more.
The Orks were close enough to Ichiro now that he could make out their individual scars and tattooed symbols. Beady red eyes glared back, glowing in the dim light like lumps of hot coal. The Chimera's pintle-mounted stubber had long since run out of ammunition, so Ichiro shot one on the head with his laspistol. Its thick, sloped forehead endured the biting light, the sizzling wound only seeming to spur the Ork on in its alien rage. A mob of them scrambled to reach him, grappling with his vehicle as the driver tried desperately to reverse. Green hands found their way onto tracks and external attachments, tearing apart links and wrenching off lights and sensors in their careless brutality. The Chimera rocked on its suspension, its exposed wheels skidding across the dirt. Nothing drove in the sheer physicality of the Orks more than watching them, feeling them manhandle a forty ton vehicle.
Something struck Ichiro hard from behind, sending him sprawling across the top of his vehicle. His skull was numb. His arms flopped nervelessly at his sides. His mouth filled with blood. His vision blurred. He was dying, and his company was dying around him. Already some of the Orks were losing interest, groups of them roaming off into the distance, spreading across the plains like some malignant disease.
And then the darkness took him.
...
Taki Tachibana sat, gazing idly between the gilded grilles of his window at the sea of white before him. An ocean of clouds stretched in every direction, fading into a blurred horizon in the distance with the blue sky above. No ground was visible from atop the highest spires of Ceadounus Primaris, the largest hive on Ceadounus, whose summits were home to most of the planet's high nobility and its planetary governor.
Some might have called it heavenly, or risked life and limb for a chance to live in such a place. Taki Tachibana had never known any other sort of existence.
Nearly three years ago, on the second day of the week-long festival that celebrated the Emperor's ascension - which in Ceadounic traditions represented the Emperor's titanic battle against the Arch-Traitor himself - a star fell from the heavens. Since then, rumors were that contact had been lost with the world's Secundi and Tertius-class hives, and that their current status was unknown. Somewhat more worrying was the occasional information filtering up about ongoing battles against the invading xenos, which raged around lower levels of Ceadounus Primaris.
Taki allowed the rumors to drift from his mind. The Tachibana Manufacturing Conglomerate was the wealthiest and most powerful business entity on Ceadounus and a dozen other planets, with the ear of the governor and nearly as much power to boot. As the family's sole scion, Taki had always had his every need and most of his wants provided for and tended to. Perhaps there was a grain of truth among all of the hearsay, but nothing in his life had really changed since the war had allegedly begun, even despite the semi-regular complaints from his father about the Munitorum wanting to draft the servants or distribute their food stores or some such like that.
Taki did not even glance back as a servant came up behind him, and took a moment to tidy up his silkweave collar and give a few brushes to straighten out his spiky brown hair. His thoughts were consumed by the matter of his recent dreams. Though the details always faded not long after he woke up, the general thread of them was the same. It was like he was living somebody else's life during them, a life very different from his own. And those dreams were way too realistic.
A more religious individual might have interpreted signs and portents from this, but there was no real place for such intense devotion in Taki's life. Though the Emperor's beacon enabled navigation between the stars, and supposedly the faithful would be able to join him after death, it was not like any of that was relevant to a person's everyday life. Though Taki took himself through the motions of prayer - as all nobility did in order to maintain at least an outward an appearance of faithfulness - he had never been able to make himself believe that the Emperor was actually there, listening to every word of it.
"Taki. There you are." His father said from behind. The servant took his cue to leave, shutting the door behind him.
"Are you feeling better today?" He turned.
"Eh? What'dyou mean?" Taki turned, quirking up an eyebrow and looking into his father's bespectacled eyes.
"Well, you woke up yesterday at the crack of dawn, about four hours earlier than usual." He counts off on his fingers. "You refused to let the staff take care of you, then got yourself lost around the house. We found you half passed out from the air pressure at this height after you got trapped in the aircraft hangar."
"Quit joking with me dad." Taki leaned forward. "You know there's no way I'm going to fall for that one again."
"You spoke strangely too. But that also seems to have gone back to normal." His father shrugged. He quickly silenced himself at the sound of a knock on the door, and waited until the procession of servants had finished assembling the evening meal that they had prepared for Taki, drawn from the crops and livestock raised within the family's private greenhouses. Some noble families insisted on utmost propriety even during private meals, but Lord Taiga Tachibana didn't care to make an issue of it as long as the proper observances were held in the presence of outsiders.
"Now I know this is probably because you're stressed about the impending marriage to Miss Okudera." He said, pulling up a seat so that he could speak to his son at eye level. "But I hope you can understand why this is necessary for us."
"But she's so fake." Taki replied, carving off a slice of braised oephlia heart and popping it into his mouth. "It's like she's wearing a mask, just reflecting back the words she's been told to say."
"Perhaps, but the both of you should eventually be able to see that this union of our companies will ultimately be of benefit to both of our families."
"Yeah, and that's probably the same reason why mom left." Taki replied in a tiny voice. He channeled a bit of his irritation into a vicious bite of his canoele-melon, only to be further annoyed when he realized he had bitten his way through the rind.
"Say, you know those men from the Munitorum came again today." His father changed the subject. "First the stockhouses, then the servants, now they're asking for our stores of heavy metals. They've been pushing especially hard on the matter of palladium for shell detonators. I don't know how much longer I'll be able to hold out."
"Why don't you just let them have it?" Taki shrugged. "It would take a lot of trouble off of your hands wouldn't it?"
Taiga sighed and rubbed the back of his head. "It isn't that simple. Our family has a certain… status on this world and many others. We can't just yield that easily and let them trample over all of the rights we enjoy as noble families. And besides, if we are the first to give in, that would make us look bad in front of our rivals."
"Oh yeah, speaking about that." Taki said. He took a final bite from his eggs argoelotte, then leaned over, reaching into a nearby drawer and pulling out a data-slate. It was quite remarkable what indiscretions some nobles were willing to talk about in front of, or how many allowances they were willing to give to someone whom they thought was just the vapid and useless son of a wealthy business magnate.
"Hmm, this will be useful. Especially what you've got about Lord Tanaka." Taiga nodded, taking the data-slate from Taki's hands and flipping through some of its contents. Though Taki was aware of what his father did with this stuff, both directly and playing their various rivals off each other with false flags, he himself had yet to get his hands dirty.
"Alright, see ya." His father stood up, making his way to the door. The sun was beginning to set, its fading light reflecting off the clouds and painting them with an orange haze.
"And make sure you review what to say at the meeting tomorrow." He closed the door behind him.
Taki sighed and went to his closet, where he opened his locked box and gazed at the golden amulet that he kept within until the tension melted away. Then he slipped into his private bath, dipping down for a long soak in the warm water and scented soaps. When the warmth at last made him sleepy, he pulled himself from the water, and dried himself off with the towels that had been silently laid out for him while he was bathing.
When he returned to his bedroom, Taki saw that his leftover food had been cleaned up by the household staff, though the drawer that he had opened was still left ajar. When he went over to close it, he noticed the corner of a piece of paper sticking out from within. He pulled it out, and stared for a moment at the words written across it.
"Who are you?" The paper asked in elegantly composed High Gothic, like the sort of writing one would expect to see on a piece of religious scripture. Taki noticed then that there was also something written on the back, and he flipped the paper over to look.
"I am Mitsuha," it said, in the exact same style.
Some vague memory stirred within Taki at the sight of that name, a strange sense of familiarity that tugged at the edges of his consciousness. There was a dreamlike quality to it, some half-remembered significance that was capable of being conveyed, but hovered just out of reach every time he tried to grasp for it.
Taki yawned. The bath had already made him sleepy, and all of that hard thought invested into the contents of the note wasn't helping matters. He fell onto his bed - roughly five times as wide as someone like him needed - slid under the covers, and allowed the blackness of sleep to take him.
...
Author's Notes: This story is already written up to its fourth chapter, and the entire plot has already been planned out, so hopefully updates will come pretty regularly. Enjoy.