Hi! I'm Gigletes, machine fanboy and general nerd! Just wanted to thank everyone who has read and is reading. At the end will be an author's note, worth reading, probably.

552.M3

Near Installation 04, Threshold, Soell System, Orion Arm, Milky Way

Master Chief Petty Officer John-117 stepped out of the cryo-room doors and followed the cryo tech. For approximately ten feet, until the door ahead of them exploded and the tech's mangled body was thrown far down the hall. That was pretty typical of his month, really. First Reach, now this.

He doubled back, avoiding the merrily burning passage through the recently blown-up doors, and went through a confusing series of passages with constant explosions and gun fights around him. Emerging into a passageway, he found his first friendlies Directly to his right, a few ratings and Marines were trading fire with an indeterminate foe down a hall. There wasn't anything the Chief could do unarmed, and he had explicit orders to head to the bridge, so he continued onward, ducking what he could and trusting his shields to take the rest. He entered a maze of piping and access corridors and was on his way, trusting his internal map of the ship to get him to the bridge.

Ten minutes later it was brutally clear that either the ship or his mental map was deficient, because the Master Chief was lost. He'd picked up an assault rifle and a Magnum along the way, but he was still as far from the bridge as he'd started. Just as he was beginning to lose hope, he spotted a sign for a main thoroughfare, and followed it into a large room, filled with an almost equally large set of bizarre armor.

Master Chief could hardly believe that the thing in front of him was real. Spartans were far taller than normal humans - the Chief himself was just over seven feet tall - but this thing was massive, even taller than most Elites. It was also incredibly wide, and built out of a material that had proven impressively resistant to his initial few panicked shots. The bullets had simply bounced off the sloped pauldron, hardly even disturbing the dark-red paint. The thing was human shaped, but an exaggeratedly broad and thick human, even considering the breadth of the armor itself. Its red paint was pitted and scarred, and a large gash ran down the breastplate, bisecting the emblem of a skull surrounded by a cog. To Master Chief's trained eye, it had clearly been in combat lately, with someone other than himself. He gathered himself and began to circle the thing, keeping his weapon trained on it, and noticed that although the weapon in his right hand was recognizably a gun, even if it was outsized, bulky, and appeared to have double barrels, the weapon in his left was unfamiliar except from his historical training.

An axe. An absolutely massive axe, possibly taller than the Chief himself, and in the center of the blade that same skull and cog symbol. As he circled around, counterclockwise from his starting position in front of the behemoth, he noticed that the monster's left pauldron had a different device - a white hand on a background of black.

The odd symbology was rapidly overshadowed by the backpack, or… whatever it was attached to the armor's rear. Spreading out of it were three mechanical arms, the same color as the armor, with forklift-like grabbing devices on the end. Mounted on the backpack itself was another gun, although this one was like nothing he'd ever seen.

The Chief's consideration of the oddness of the gun was abruptly interrupted, however, when a door on the other side of the room opened. Through it poured a squad of Covenant troops, Grunts and Jackals and a pair of Elite Minors. The Chief ducked behind the suit and began firing at the grunts, taking two down with a quick burst from his assault rifle before the rest got into cover.

Chief continued to trade fire with the aliens, bullets sparking around the door and occasionally finding their mark as he huddled behind the hulking armor, plasma and needles sparking off the thick plate. The Master Chief was running low on ammo, so he dropped his rifle and pulled out his pistol, taking slow, measured shots, finishing off the last Grunt and hitting a Jackal in the leg. Then a glowing ball of sparking blue flew through the air and stuck to the wall right next to him. Shit.

He dove to the side, putting the leviathan between him and the grenade, just in time to catch a pair of needles that rebounded off his shield just in front of his visor. He slid across the floor, hitting the opposite wall just as the grenade detonated. The blue flash filled the room and blinded him for a few seconds.

As he lay there, blinking and waiting for his most important sense to return, Chief wondered why he could no longer feel the pressure of enemy fire impacting his shield. As a matter of fact, he couldn't hear it, either. And by the time his eyes adapted, the armor was entirely gone, with no trace of it having ever been there remaining. He slowly got up, gathered himself, and looked around the corner into the hallway the Covies had come in through.

Iron Hands were supposed to be emotionless, more machine than man, and to the outside world, that is what they seemed. But all Iron Hands knew a secret. It was never discussed, never admitted aloud, but every Iron Hand knew, and they all knew the others knew as well.

Iron Hands get angry.

The fatal flaw of Ferrus Manus, the emotion that ended with his head separated from his shoulders at the hands of one he called brother, was the Achilles heel of the entire chapter, and despite ten thousand years of trying to conquer and eradicate it, they had so far failed. No matter how much of an Iron Hand's body was replaced with augmetics, no matter how little of the weakness of the flesh remained on their frame, the one emotion that every Iron Hand felt was anger.

Ferenk Verrn had fought corrupted Skitarii and Lesser and Greater Daemons of Slaanesh, been thrown through a portal to who knows where who knows when, and then stuck, his augmetics and armor alike nonfunctional, forced to merely observe as the green runt in oddly proportioned flak armor studied him, until a grenade thrown by a filthy xenos of a type unknown to him shook him out of his paralysis, somehow.

He was very, very angry.

It took him five seconds to cross the room and charge his way into the ranks of the aliens, slamming his oversized pauldron into the face of a blue-clad large alien., right through the apparent energy shield he had. He thought it similar to that of an Iron Halo, but it was xenotech, and thus not worth considering. As his momentum carried him past the first rank, he swung his Omnissian axe, taking an arm and an oddly-shaped plasma weapon from the other big one. It roared and charged after him, but slipped on a pool of its comrades blood. The thing staggered and then fell onto a heap, which Ferenk promptly punched two .75 caliber explosive rounds into. The heap gave a satisfying double-thwack, then exploded. Ferenk's anger was nearly assuaged.

The only two Xenos left were the two avian ones that reminded him of the Tau's mercenaries, the ones who were known for consuming their foes. He hated them only slightly more after making that connection. Even an Iron Hand has limits.

He advanced on them, and they locked together their shields and began spraying what looked like low-powered plasma at him. It merely reflected off his armor as it had when he was being used as cover. He extended a pair of servo arms and smashed the energy shields, sending the bird-like aliens flying and leaving him with a clean shot for his Storm Bolter, which he took. He almost decided to take them on in close combat, but the calculus cogitators mounted in his armor had been screaming about inefficiency since his armor had reawoken. He had indulged enough, so he merely fired a pair of bolts and ended it.

The corridor was filled with blood. Purple and blue, the colors of the Covenant, was scattered everywhere, on floors, walls, corpses, even the roof. The Chief had seen more blood with more corpses, but never had he seen an Elite so thoroughly disassembled. One was smashed nearly flat, another way lying on the floor in a pile of shredded flesh and armor, and what appeared to be a pair of Jackals were off to one side, both with massive holes in their abdomens that made it look like they had swallowed grenades. And in the middle of it all, the red-clad giant, massive and blood-spattered, its eyes glowing bright red.

The armored giant raised its gore-splattered axe, pointed it at the Chief, and bellowed a challenge in a curiously robotic voice and a language that the Master Chief didn't even slightly understand despite his knowledge of most human languages, followed by a quick blurt of static and a curiously melodic but atonal note series. The Chief merely froze, then raised his hands to show he was unarmed (a state of affairs he deeply regretted, all of a sudden). He wasn't sure what the massive thing wanted from him, but he was pretty sure he wouldn't like it.

Ferenk just wanted the blasted thing to take off its helmet. He thought it was a human, despite its impressive height, and judging by the fluidity with which it used its clearly-powered armor, probably one that was at least slightly enhanced with something similar to his own Black Carapace. He had to be sure, however, and he'd prefer not to kill the thing. Disrespectful of an Astartes or not, the soldier had proved itself against the smaller enemies, and would likely be able to provide useful intelligence. He gestured to his own helmet with a servo arm, then with his Storm Bolter and the arm attached to that.

The behemoth pointed to its helmet with one of its freaky machine-arms, then with its two-barreled cannon. Chief was farely sure he understood what it wanted, so he reached up - slowly, and very deliberately - and removed his helmet.

"Hi."

Thanks for reading! I'd like to address a few concerns really quickly. The most common is that Ferenk will just ally himself to the UNSC immediately despite their near-constant heresy. This is not the case. While the Iron Hands don't particularly care for the doctrines of the Ecclesiarchy one way or another, the tenets of the Cult Mechanicus are a completely different matter. Abominable Intelligence is one of the reasons the Cult was founded. This is not something that will be easy (or maybe possible) for Ferenk to overlook. Apart from that, he won't be buddy-buddy with the UNSC soon if ever; Iron Hands have Techmarines; and the dialogue is fixed. Thanks for reading!