Main Castle of the Kuroda Clan

The once so proud second man in command of the Kuroda Clan, Kuroda Kenjirou, was kneeling in front of the new head of the Clan, revealing the hidden mechanisms that had resulted in the death of the former head.
"… If everything would had happened just as planned, all blame would have fallen on the Takanashi, allowing our clan to rise to prominence, to triumph over our most dangerous competitors, to…"
"And yet, a small group of low-level kunoichi were able to destroy with master plan of yours. It seems that age made father and you lose your edge."
Just one week ago, nobody would have dared to interrupt the main strategist of the Kuroda in such a shaming manner. But Kenjirou had lost everything with his last bet. Several clan heads had been assassinated in the past days, everything had happened on his direct order. He even had manipulated the Takanashi to try to assassinate the Kuroda head, to hide his manipulations even further.

However, he and his confidants had underestimated the kunoichi in the service of the Takanashi. It would had been bad enough if they only had been able to kill the clan head. Kenjirou had invested many years to gain the benevolence and support of the first and second son, so even if he was close friends with his master, the clan and its rank were more important, so he had taken the risk to make his master a target. But the cunning vixens had blown up the small cruising yacht with highly effective explosives they had gotten from where only the gods would know, killing nearly the entire main family.
So now, the ostracized fourth son, way too much interested in the new German ways for the taste of the otherwise traditionally assessed main family, had returned to the clan and became the new clan head. And as the assassination had been so prominent that the Tenno himself had send confidants to investigate the case, Kenjirou had only one hope:

To gain the support of the new head, so he would help to mask his involvement. The Tenno had expressed his personal dismay about the assassination, condemning it publicly, so Kenjirou could still transform his personal defeat into a victory for the clan. Everything depended on the decision a young man would make. A man he had denounced as degenerate on several occasions in the past.

Newspaper article "Lynsk Railway Line announced"

Tzarina Katarin: "For centuries, the river had been a major trade route for the kingdom and an important natural barrier against Chaos. We will see to it that the railroad will strengthen trade and supply, while making sure in due time that the river will never be necessary to act as defense line against our enemies."

Newspaper article "The Vision"

Speaker Treumark: "Of course, our main goal is the fight against Chaos. But we are not just an order of warriors. Since our consolidation had finished, we are welcoming all people sharing our beliefs. The weak and poor may not help in a physical fight against enemies, but they can encourage, motivate, procure, construct, teach, and many other things warriors can not. In the past, we have tended to overlook the many people necessary to supply a single warrior. But the eternal war against Chaos cannot be won by weapons alone. Any lasting victory has to begin in the hearts of the people. And we will make sure to create a better future, a future build by the people, for the people."

From the monthly report of Siegfried Erler (Confidential Version):

[…] The Army of Light doesn't see itself as just another Knightly Order of the Empire, but as the melting pot combining the strengths of common people. Still relatively small, the order will soon undergo an enormous growth, with structures, already in place or still in preparation, to organize people on a national scale. It is my personal belief that the still infant military department will pose as only secondary problem area. The beliefs, messages and ideas of the order have the potential to reach a high percentage of the Imperial population. It is only a question of time until the order will reach a stage where it can wield considerable political power […]

AoL inquiry to the Luftwaffe:

[…] Building on the results of the parachuting training conducted with the help of Bundeswehr instructors, we ask you to allow a select number of training participants to receive real paratrooper training. These men have shown great results and the instructors themselves had commented that they had the skills to be paratroopers. Summaries of their training results and assessments by the instructors are attached to this letter.
Assuming you agree to this inquiry, and the selected men show acceptable results, we would want to continue to have small groups receive paratrooper training. […]

Intelligence report about the acceptance of the starting conscription, addressed to the Tzarina:

[…]The general opinion in the cities is positive, while acceptance is decreasing for the smaller and more remote villages. Most families are still unsure about the promised compensation for otherwise much-needed manpower. It is not said aloud, but not only a few families fear that they might never see their children again. Either because the conscription might not be as safe as advertised or because their children might find life far away from home more attractive.
Organized resistance on higher levels is not yet to be seen, but especially Druzhina and Boyars of more distant settlements, where they have ruled without much interference because of lacking importance until now, fear that the returning conscripts might bring with them dangerous ideas. It should suffice to revisit conscripts a few months after they have finished their service time. If a higher than proportional number of them have met untimely deaths, a demonstration of royal power should make clear how the kingdom treats those standing in the way of a better future.[…]

Newspaper article "Beginning of the End"

Today, the first heather harvesters have reached Kislev. While still in the development phase, the mark 2 harvesters already show great progress. Having learned their lessons from the fields of Sylvania, now the harvesters will have to adapt to the cold of the North. Herr Abel, leader of the team initially developing the harvesters and main consultant at Volkswagen, is confident that a large number of harvesters can begin their work until the end of the year. "We already have twelve harvesters work in Sylvania now, receiving more data by the day. It might be a Sisyphean task, but we are on the right way to reclaim the Chaos wastes."

Internal AoL memo (highly confidential):

We will take as much time as necessary to prepare for the real war against Chaos. But before we will be able to start, we will have to face another enemy. We have received reports from trusted sources, stating that certain elements in the Empire are preparing actions against us.

While it might be possible to stop some of these with preemptive actions or to teach others a lesson in the old way of simple and clear brute force, this will only increase the animosity of said elements. For the greater good of order and Empire, we will prepare in secret, but await the attack so we can display ourselves as victims. If everything will happen as anticipated, the public will be on our side, allowing us to discredit our attackers, quickly taking advantage by conducting just retribution.

Seeing that these enemies have century-long experience in the more dirty ways of hidden warfare, we cannot make sure that all irreplaceable assets can be protected in all places and at all times. Make sure to destroy any material not absolutely needed, and store the remaining material in the vaults of the order, allowing us to reduce potential targets.

May the souls of the soon-to-be-dead forgive our scheming, as everything is for the greater good of order and Empire. We will grow with each wound. We will learn with each scar. We will multiply with each dead.

For Sigmar.

20.000 kilometres from Warhammer World

At the same time as Sigmar united the human tribes into what would become the Empire a mass of Warpstone on Morrslieb had compressed itself to the point where it was "triggered". Converting from quasi-matter to energy, mundane and magical both, it vaporized more matter around it and pushed a decent-sized chunk of Warpstone into space. There had been enough energy to escape the moon`s gravity and had put the mass into its own orbit around the Warhammer World, an orbit that was slowly decaying over time. The ever-tightening spirals would intersect with the atmosphere in another 100 years at which point the mass would be slowed down rapidly. The outer layers would ablate and convert into more magic potential but a substantial core would impact somewhere on the world. Whatever area was hit would be poisoned by the Warpstone immediately and the area resemble the Chaos Deserts in short order.

Shaped like a potato the Warpstone fragment slowly rotated around itself like it had done for millennia when a very brief burst of something hit its surface. It was a beam of light but not an ordinary one. It contained light only of a single frequency and while it shone only for the smallest fraction of a second the energy it transmitted during that timespan was enormous. The Warpstone affected by the beam converted into energy instantly, exciting some of the surrounding matter to the point where it joined the party and the resulting explosion vented even more into space. This ejection of matter exerted an equal and opposite force on the larger fragment. It might consist of a matter that gave particle physicists on two worlds the willies but it still had mass. Regardless if mundane or magical matter, Sir Isaac Newton ruled and so the space borne potato slowed its rotation ever so slightly. There was another pulse of light 30 minutes later and more followed in ever shortening intervals. After a little less than an hour the rotation had stopped and now the pulses moved to another place. The resulting detonations were larger this time and the first ones resulted in new tumbling until the explosions were adjusted. The next hours saw the Warpstone fragment add enough speed that its orbit stabilized so far above the Warhammer World that it would probably decay around the same time the sun went nova.

"Nordstern" very close to Warpstone meteor

"Ground Control confirms new course, mission accomplished. Nice job everybody. Station check."
"Nathan, Erik here. Course for Kopernikus laid in, we can do it anytime."
"Nathan, Manfred. Laser is on cool-down; we can stow in five."
"Nathan, Bashur. All cores nominal, am taking gensets one and three off-line. Radiators on stand-by."
"Nathan, Irina. Both pillars are holding up well, we can run the tungsten cores against them no problem."
"Whatever"

"Nordstern" had been modified again during the last months. A new, much more powerful laser array had just taken care of the first Warpstone meteorite deflected from its course. Two additional tungsten cores provided all the power Nathan Alpers and his spaceship could ask for. Yet the biggest change were two cylinders of the purest white ice drilled many times and fitted with pipes carrying coolant. These pillars had been provided by the Tzarina herself who had been more than a little amazed that the Germans would be so excited at her ability to produce permanently cold ice. She had given DLR two pillars from Pravda`s ice caves designated by the goddess herself. She had also offered the services of Irina Kosava, one of her Ladies-in-Waiting and Ice Mage herself to keep things that way. Inevitably she was known as the "Ice Queen" by the crew, which was less related to her character than one should imagine. She was also a very useful medic by now, something that might come handy given the missions the German star ship routinely drew.

Bashur`s three tungsten cores might deliver more than 700 MW thermal power when run up full, but the pillars were able to deal with that easily, something that waxed the Dawi engineer to no end. That this was very useful as it allowed a set of three generators to produce copious amounts of power reduced his scepticism a bit.

Peenemünde Nord

Olaf Merz was not the greatest fan of press conferences and usually this task would have fallen to his boss who would have loved to receive the publicity for the hard work done by his team. As said worthy had a nasty flu at present the Deputy Director had to undergo makeup, sweating in front of glaring lights and tons of asinine questions. Still he managed to get most of what need to be said across in such a fashion that even the reporters were unable to mangle it beyond recognition.

"Last night`s test was successful. "Nordstern`s" crew managed to change the orbit of the Warpstone meteor in such a fashion that it will not impact this world in the foreseeable future. They used a specially tuned 500-kw laser array to detonate small parts of the Warpstone, causing enough thrust to change orbit. With the same means we can simply vaporize smaller fragments or break up larger ones to the point where they will burn up during entry into the atmosphere. This will be the start of the "Schild" program which will see the deployment of sensors and both manned and automated spacecraft to deflect all Warpstone objects that threaten this world. Implementing it will be costly, yet it is unavoidable if we want to keep this world habitable for human beings in the long run."
The questions were nearly as clueless as one might imagine, even if some of the reporters had obviously grown a clue. He managed to finish in time for his next announcement.

"I am glad to announce that we have finally certified the 1.5 version of the standard satellite frame. Like its predecessor it is a standardised pallet that contains a power supply, gyros, a small station keeping drive and a set of shielded servers that will run practically any set of programs you need. It has interfaces for various transmitters and sensors so that it can be used for the various surveillance and communication satellites. The biggest difference from its predecessor is that a stainless steel core with Rune of Fire is now an optional power source. While these standard frames have more mass than a custom satellite they are much cheaper as we can achieve something close to series production. And our new rockets have enough capacity to allow for the additional mass easily.

The big news is that following on the success of the "Zwilling" reusable SSTO we will start the "Phoibos" Program for a much larger spacecraft based on the same principles. In the long run it will replace the current line of "Ariane" rockets that perform sterling service but are good only for a single mission.
Zwilling allows us to achieve a low orbit far cheaper but the payload is limited to three tons, so more is obviously needed. While the new spacecraft will drop off fuel tanks in some mission profiles it allows for a payload in excess of 300 tons…

Things got a bit more lively from that point onward.

Cathay, 350 kilometres from Nanjiang

"Bang Bang Bang Bang"

There was no bell, no horn and for sure not a klaxon. Such things would have been by far too expensive for such a simple village of farmers. There was simply a stout board hanging freely from two ropes upon which a boy beat a bamboo stick with all his force. And while this alarm might lack the gravitas of a bell or the drama of a klaxon it could be heard for more than a kilometre, enough to rouse the workers that diligently tended to the tea that grew on the hillsides in the area. Some had seen the pillar of smoke that rose from the nearby mountaintop already, others had needed the board to realize the alarm. They all hustled towards the village proper where a palisade promised a measure of safety. The single wall of earth and bamboo might not be much but it was all the farmers had and that was what they clung to.

Hu Liao was the village eldest, his moderately good clothing, the leather vest that would provide some armour and his spear attested to that. He did not yet know what kind of emergency had caused the lookout to lit the signal fire and it might be hours before he learned what they had seen. Given the nature of the evil that sometimes came from the south these days he would be far happier if he never learned about it, but the long life of 45 years had taught him how unlikely that was. No matter how much he tried his voice was shriller and louder than he liked. The villagers still did as they were told, as the shou-ren had taught them to.

The men of the village stood to at the step of the palisade, holding what weapons they possessed at the ready. That would have been far more comforting if those weapons would have been something besides pitchforks, scythes and flails. If the nanjue in his castle would have allowed them decent spears at least things might be better but that would put his tax collectors at risk when the time came. So all the villagers had was a palisade of bamboo, a bit of packed earth and their tools of trade. White knuckles and trembling hands showed that this did not instil much confidence in the men. He thought about shouting something encouraging, looked to his own shaking hands and decided not to. What made the men keep their posts were the thought about what their fellow farmers would think of them and their wives who started fires to cook some water behind them. None of them saw the speck in the sky that circled the village.

Dong Cunrui still bristled at his new role. He rode a mighty Dragon, the magnificent beast that was the symbol of Cathay. Only a very few were able to tame the Golden Dragons and their power was such that armies trembled at their sight. He and his brothers should be used to strike at the enemy, to burn their disease-ridden corpses to ash, to bring glory to the Mandate of Heavens. Yes, their Dragons could do that and on several occasions had turned the tides of battle against the enemy that emerged from the south. Unfortunately the mighty beasts were as prone to catch Nurgle`s gifts as were their riders and the Degouren had not been able to make inoculations for the Dragons. So all the mightiest weapons of the realm could do was observe from great height and let others handle the battle. Yet the Germans had provided aid for that task at least, Cunrui had been extensively schooled by a shou-ren called Klawitter who rode as an observer on a Black Dragon piloted by a Druchii rider.

So all the Dragon Rider could do was watch the progress of the enemy. They should have been hard to miss as there were so many of them, but the enemy was not given to colourful uniforms and fanciful banners. Instead the great mass below him was swaddled in rags the same colour of the dirt around them, and whatever banners they had were not showing up much. If the enemy`s skin was of any other colour than dirt and sick he had yet to see it. The weapons were wood and rusted steel and so it seemed the ground itself was on the move, dirt and soil claiming the lives of all in their way.
And there was a great lot of real estate on the way, an avalanche of rusty arms, hate, strangely resilient flesh and pestilence.

The mercenary had called the wireless set "the most dangerous weapon given to a soldier" and Cunrui learned why this was so during the last year. Today would be an example of that, provided that aid would arrive in time.

The Unimog truck is not magnificent to look at, it is not the centrepiece of a collection of military vehicle miniatures and it usually is not armed. It simply looks like a boring truck with off-road pretensions. That is until you start looking for real. The Unimog sported portal axles till its inception about 30 years before the HMMV`s designers thought about such things. The box frame is built with so much flexibility that there will always be enough wheels on the ground and the transmission offers gears that allow the fully-loaded truck to climb grades in excess of 80%. Most Unimog models were not very fast, loud and "fun to drive" is usually the farthest thing on the mind of those who used them. But the engine is a hair`s breadth away from indestructible and there are very few pieces of terrain a Unimog cannot drive through that are accessible for Leopard tanks. The truck probably laughed at the off-road capabilities of so called SUVs.
As they were unarmed and not armoured the German government had sold several dozen of them to the Celestial Dragon who in turn used them to pay his most effective mercenaries. The Wild Geese modified them within weeks.

Areta Bane was thankful for the straps that held her to her seat during the wild ride. Cheng was as good a driver as one could expect after lots of training and a year of practise on the battlefield, but the road was bad to non-existent and the truck`s light load did not compress the springs much. Punching his shoulder and showing a hand motion downwards a couple of times she got him to slow down a bit. She undid the hatch above her, released her safety belt and pushed herself up against the seat until her upper body was exposed to the elements. Her eyes were protected by googles, a formerly black cloth tried its best to keep dust from her mouth and nose. Vision was marginally better from here and she could see the enemy, the village and her own forces a bit better now.
Now where to apply the hammer given to her to best effect?

Hu Liao could now see the foe and it took all his courage and the knowledge that all the people of his village were watching him not to flee in screaming terror. The enemy did not come in the orderly lines that had been drilled into him in his youth, he did not march with an even step, did neither present arms nor sung inspiring songs. They lurched forward, waddled, limped and slouched a bit slower than an ordinary human. But in their silence they seemed utterly unstoppable and bit by bit the horrible details of the attackers could be seen. Even if every new detail he could see spoke of horrible sickness the fact that these were still pushing forward made them more intimidating still. He was still watching the oncoming doom when one of his elders softly pulled his robe.

He pointed to a number of fast moving dust clouds with small secs at their front end. It took Liao a second to recognize the specs as the horseless chariots that the shou-ren called trucks and his people Mog-Mog. Was it possible that help had truly arrived in time?
And then there was the horrible moment when the trucks bypassed his village to drive past him, the oncoming horde and any hope for salvation.

"Driver halt."

Areta Bane watched the rest of her Combat Group deploy around her. Four of the trucks formed to the rear. Sweat, steel cables and levers deployed mortars which from their backs which were quickly pointed at the enemy and rounds were pulled from boxes at the trucks sides.
Two of the trucks were no longer looking like anything from a Mercedes catalogue. They had been cut back to being barely longer than their wheel base and the driver`s seat had been lowered considerably. A small turret sat on top of what had been the truck bed and housed both a machine gun and the fat barrel of a pom-pom.

While some other the other crews might argue the real stick were the squads that rode in the other 10 Unimogs. They were currently forming up in the gaps between their trucks and waited for Areta`s command. She tried to judge the right moment when to strike. Her troops were in place and her squad leaders signalled that they were ready, yet if she started the assault now she would arrive before the enemy`s attack, the place where she did not want to be. Another five minutes and she would nicely enfilade the damn Nurglies.
During that time she mused again why the Germans in the Wild Geese still grinned when they heard "Lastergrenardiere" -if mechanized infantry were "Panzergrenardiere" to them what was wrong with that moniker?

And then the moment was there. Breda used the wireless to get the message out but practically everybody saw Areta`s arm that twirled around her head a couple of times before it slashed at the enemy.
There were a couple of deep "thumps" in Areta`s back and seconds later the instant-poplar shapes of mortar explosion rose in the enemies mass. She pulled the handle on her machine gun back twice and started to fire controlled bursts while all trucks and her infantry started forward.

Life was great.

Freiburg, at night

Bernd Lucke, nursed a glass of wine and knew it to be a mistake. He did double duty as Germany`s minister of economy and being on the campaign trail for the elections next year. He needed every hour of sleep that he could get and yet that sleep eluded him. The reason for that was simple enough, he no longer understood the world around him.

He was an accomplished professor of economics, following a conservative, if German-tinted, school of macroeconomics. He knew that the state should not interfere in the economy too much, he knew that market forces would regulate better than the government, he knew that the state should not incur too much debt as a fraction of the GNP. He knew for a fact that competition was crucial. As a minister it should be his job to work using these principles and found that he could not. While there were nearly no state-owned enterprises government spending was taking a greater share of the economy than ever aside from wartime. The German armed forces had been enlarged to something close to their Cold War size, with a far stronger navy then ever before. There was a space program he had wanted to cut to size till he had been cleared to know about the Sage Killersats and Warpstone meteors. There were many public-private partnerships in gathering the myriad raw materials that Germany needed to continue existing as a technological civilization. Germany`s allies needed to be propped up and developed to the point where they could contribute on their own. The state needed to provide initial capital to a lot of industries that replaced things one could no longer buy abroad but which were crucial to keep things running. So much government spending was going against his training and yet he was told time after time again that it was "alternativlos" without any alternative.

Even what private industry there was would no longer work as he was used to. For so many things there was only one supplier as the market was too small for more. There were Siemens computers and smartphones, Bosch auto electronics, Cordenka Spidersilk…no competition. Where the government had forced competition, like in the car market, one found several brands until one looked below the sheet metal. Then things were very much the same for so many cars that it wasn`t even funny. When one went for the smaller, more specialized companies it was even worse. There were so many start-ups founded to close the gaps that had been left by the Weltensprung and usually only one company had taken up the mantle. That these coordinated their doings via the SAP-provided "Arbeitskreise" (Boards) smelled of a planned economy to Lucke.

All of that should have resulted in utter failure and funny wise did not. Actually the German economy was on a boom as raw materials were available again at decent cost, as new technologies fuelled innovation and as the Reiksbund was slowly becoming economically valid. Normally the Bundesbank would have raised interest rates to slow such a boom and to prevent "overheating" but they too had been told that so many things were "alternativlos" that they had kept lending cheap. That in turn led to inflation which was hardly surprising, even if it was a strange inflation where the prices of some commodities actually dropped like petrol and coffee while other rose like electronics and cars.
That the German government was actually making it worse by asking for hearty royalties for the technologies provided by Nathan or the data that came through the Versailles link which promptly was added to the sales prices was of less concern to him.

What added to his headaches was that some of his "Freisinnige" party members thought that they had a great idea to curb said inflation: Return to the Gold Standard. Normally Lucke would have laughed about that notion, any economist worth his salt would tell you that the Gold Standard was totally unsuitable for a modern economy.
Unfortunately, most economist's models, including his own had proven to be less than well-suited to the realities of the Warhammer World. That did not mean that Meuthen and his crazies were right but their arguments became far more compelling, especially to people whose knowledge about macroeconomics were limited.

It also appealed to the many pensioners whose pension was eaten up by said inflation, something that Lucke more or less approved of. Normally pensions rose in accordance with wages but ever since the Weltensprung this was curbed die to the "state of emergency". Pensions and government personal costs were by far the biggest items in the budget, this was a way to reduce them without being too obvious. Unfortunately, that could work for only so long and now those who were unhappy about that started to listen to those with the easy answers. The politicians with the oh-so-clear solution to the problems that vexed those who held the German government or like Lucke were at the helm of the party and who just had to be voted out so that these simple solution to all problems might be applied. He asked himself whether these oh-so-wise men and women even believed their own drivel. Lucke already dreaded the next party convention.

Sleep would not be coming tonight, that was for sure