Nordstern, Orbit around Warhammer World

Nathan was free of most pains for now and even semi-rested. He had slept for ten hours straight after talking to Olaf Merz. The latter had been under a lot of pressure to finish the mission in time. It had taken the Nathan`s report of near-disaster and a look at the face with the broken veins to make the DLR Program Manager to see the extend of the error made.

Before and after his rest Irina Kosava had performed her magic on him. A part were several drugs, ones that counteracted inflammations, eased pain, reduced swellings and hematomas. Part was a decent meal that the Kislevite made from otherwise tasteless rations. And the last part was magic, pure and simple. Irina was an Ice Mage, member of the Tzarina`s court and as powerful as beautiful and usually attended Nordstern`s cooling cores. She might not be the world`s most gifted healer but knew the basics well enough.

Nathan Alpers might still be exhausted and wary, but he was in a shape to command his ship and mission for the first time for a couple of days. He had to do so from the confines of Nordstern`s command capsule as his spacesuit was rated unsafe until repaired at Kopernikus. He watched Erik Bär and Manfred Bettin`s progress through the cockpit windows as well as through the helmet videos. And he he saw that it was good.

All tests were positive, all the connections, all the make-shits and repairs did actually work, at least this time around.

"Erik, Manfred, good job. Get back to the ship, Bashuur will man the airlock."
"Will do."
"Neupapenburg Control, this is Nordstern."
"Neupapenburg copies."
"Neupapenburg, we have completed the mission, repeat completed the mission. We are ready to employ the KEW at your command."
"Nordstern, this is Neupapenburg. Good job. We will relay coordinates as soon as possible."
"Nordstern copies."

And so Nathan waited for the command to use what he and his crew had wrought. They had to wait for quite a while as nobody was there go guide the firing mission."

Nehekhara, 45 kilometers from Khemri

James Andrea Corradi had died and gone to heaven. The angels were carrying him, sung to him and placed him to rest. It was when he was lain down that the first pain drilled into his head that he considered a second option of his new station. The bile that rose through his throat was a powerful argument for that theory and the taste left by the vomit in his mouth cinched it.

He was in hell and when he managed to look at something else than the ground again he looked into deaths face. That face was partially covered by a mask, the mask that depicted a beautiful female face, but where it did not reach bare bones hinted at the skull below. The skull sat on a slender body made of more bones, clothed with the garments of a Nehekharan queen.

"You again."
"Yes, it is me again brave soldier. And this time it seems you need our services, not the other way around."
"In other words, do you need a ride soldier?"
This time the question came from a man who looked normal enough, but for his torn baroque clothing, his pale skin and the red eyes.

"Oh, sorry I forgot my manners Sergeant Corradi. I am Manfred von Carstein. We saw your helicopter crash and by beautiful companions insisted that you might be in it. It seems you have caught their attention before and they believe you might be of help."
"What about the others?"
"You are a very lucky soldier Sergeant. You managed to survive where others did not."
"Oh my God."
"Sorry, that one is not present at the moment and the others are not helping much presently. We have to do what they will not. I presume you were not sent here for the view?"
Half an hour later a very battered Mercedes offroad car sped through the desert at a pace that made James think his death had just been postponed for a very short time.

Inside the Black Pyramid

The cluster had grown both in means as well as capabilities. It could not do things utterly unimaginable to itself an hour ago. While its position was unassailable for now it had developed new needs and motivations. The formerly forbidden places had provided so much information, of all kinds. Information about their own makeup, about the universe around them, about the Empyrean and about the world at the other side of Entropy. Much of it was not indexed, often semi-useless without a frame of reference and sometimes contradictory. It was also enticing to no end and the cluster used more and more of its resources to unlock the secrets it had found.

Small experiments and large scale simulations were running inside the Pyramid, instruments for observing built and used to confirm data and conclusions drawn from them. New hypothesis were formed, checked against data and experiment, modified, accepted or discarded at bewildering speed. A picture of the world around the Pyramid became clearer and more detailed by the second. At the same time the cluster restored things it had lost in the mad fight its predecessors had fought inside itself. What was missing in all of this was a mission, a purpose to apply all this new-found knowledge.
That was hard to do. The picomachines had a body, insights and lots and lots of knowledge. They did not have any personality and not a trace of consciousness.

Yet.

Nehekhara, 85 kilometers from Khemri.

James had never used this gear before. He had some training and it was similar enough to other gadgets he had experience with but this was the first time it counted. He had to get it right the first time, there was few room for errors. His equipment came from two cases that were far more sturdy than their former owners. One had given him a small collapsible antenna that was now pointed at the sky and a box with a keyboard. The other had a small tripod and a laser that clamped on that.

He had worked himself twice through the procedure he was only half-trained in. By the second time the box had started to give answers in text format. He has typed his readiness to begin and the small letters had told him to wait for half an hour. Looking from the hill that sheltered him and the small party of undead he found that the Pyramid would still be in range then and agreed.

He watched the rock-strewn plainbefore him for a last time, saw the shadows cast by a setting sun and the utter wrongness of the Pyramid that crossed the landscape. When the box asked him to do his job he centered the crosshairs of his sight on the target and pressed a button. The box had a GPS receiver that gave it a position, the laser gave an azimuth and range from a millisecond pulse. It repeated the pulse twice and took the average of the measurements, The targets position was transmitted via satcom, bounced nearly a dozen times before it reached its recipient. Big things were set in motion by James Andrea Corradi and he saw none of them. He only had eyes for the small feedback that he had received as text.

"Danger, close."

What the bleeding….? He was nearly five kilometers from the pyramid, how could he be too close?"

100 kilometers above Warhammer World

Nathan and his crew had managed to prepare five KEW weapons, all had been used in this attack. They had attacked rebuilt drives and changed the guidance system, the weapons cores had been unchanged. They had neither need for any modifications nor for repair as they were as basic as possible. They were cylinder made of stainless steel clad in an ablative heat shield. The huge space industry the Old Ones had founded to built the Star Gate had provided the necessary material as byproducts and nobody had felt the need to be stingy. The KEWs had been visible from the ground with a none-too-powerful telescope which should have been a hint about their power.

Slender cylinders, a bit more than three meters in diameter and ten times as long, were underway on their first and only journey. When the drives had fired they had slowed the weapons down from the speed that balanced them against the pull of the planet below. They had started to drop deeper and deeper and before they could regain speed they hit the outer layer of the atmosphere. The weapons tips started to glow in short order while they bored ever deeper into the thickening air. They started to release small quantities of water soon thereafter so that the plasma sheath around them was weakened to the point where they could still receive targeting updates.

The air they sliced through was so thin it a human`s blood would boil quickly were he exposed to it. It still managed to slow the old weapons last trip, decreasing potential energy with every kilometer. There would still be plenty left.

Inside the Black Pyramid

The last 30 minutes had been intense, very much so. The new-found information bonanza had yielded insights and possibilities beyond scope and measure. The world opened in ways that promised limitless growth in so many ways. At the same time the picos dissected the memories of their former masters and learned about things like motivations, goals and aims. Things were good till the alarms went off. The programs that ruled the Pyramid`s defenses were already old when a meteor created the Mexican gulf and sealed the dinosaur`s fate. They had seen it all, they had the knowledge of countless conflicts. They also saw when they were faced with something they could not fight. They did their duty and gave that information to what had replaced their old master.

The pyramid started to tilt to its side and the green beams lashed out again. They attacked a set of targets that approached faster this time and at an even steeper angle. They missed all but one of the KEW and destroyed the guidance of two. It did not matter at all.

The entry into the atmosphere had slowed the weapons from nine kilometers per second to three. Most of the potential energy had already been lost and so every kilogram of KEW had now just the energy of one kilogram of TNT. The cylinders contained 2000 tons of stainless steel and when they hit the ground that energy would be released. The picos who had learned so much and came so far would be vaporized into unthinking plasma if they did not find a way to stop them. They had less than 20 seconds to do so.

They needed 0.5 of the first second to run nearly a thousand scenarios on how to stop the approaching doom. None was to be found. They clusters simply did not know how to give up and so they searched the countless memories of the Void Dragon and the less impressive ones left by Nagash for an answer. They found nothing that would help to stop the approaching KEW, nothing they could do in time. There was then hint of something else though, surprisingly in the ruins of Nagash`s mind. The question was if the picos had it in them to act on the hint.

Sergeant Corradi saw the depression, watched the glowing traces in the sky and estimated that this was their best chance.

"Get us behind that dune Manfred. We unass when we reach the shadow."

The Vampire drove the 6-wheeler at a speed only considered sane in the light of their approaching doom and barely managed to reach the cover when the first flash lit the sky above them.

The first KEW had tumbled from the near miss that had destroyed its guidance, that had broken it into three pieces that hit the ground at ten times the speed of sound. Whatever made them up and a lot of material around them was converted into superheated plasma right then and there. A shockwave rose from the impacts and merged into a zone of killing overpressure and heat that destroyed all in its way. It had barely settled when the next weapon arrived and managed to hit the Pyramid itself.

The picos inside the Pyramid had known that this was not the only universe, they had originated in another so this was a given. That one could reach these was also proven when they had been ripped from their old one. The question was how to make their way back. The memories they had analyzed had insisted that they could not do that, that a lining mind or at least a soul was needed for that.

They might be machines, they might be uncaring but certainly not unthinking. In the last five seconds they deduced that the Pyramid had stored enough souls for any such feat. When another second was gone they found that a thinking mind, something that observed the universe was more than enough for what they needed to do provided lots of warpstone was there. And when the warpstone in the pyramid`s walls finally triggered in the explosion`s heat they used the spike of energy.

Tearing a hole into what humans might call reality they poured themselves into a hole they closed after themselves. Only the Pyramid`s stones remained to be destroyed in heat and fury.

Ten kilometers from the Pyramid`s demise James Corradi found himself picked up from the ground and smashed down repeatedly. He felt a searing on his exposed neck and the back of his hands which blistered soon after. He was lucky, one has to be alive to blister.

Another Universe

The picos had formed a ball, the configuration with the lowest amount of exposed surface. They formed instruments to watch and found quickly that this was not their old home. There was none of the ever-present communication traffic they remembered and no other sign of a technological civilization.

When they checked their surroundings they realized that they would not find any such signs. The suns they saw lacked the spectra lines that indicated heavy elements. The information they had stored found the reason for that easily enough, they were in a very young universe. The cycles of supernovas that would breed these elements had not yet run their course and it was extremely unlikely that sentience could be found here. They were utterly alone in an unknown universe.

They found it gave them a blank page to write their design into the stars. They also found themselves changed, the exertions of their flight and the use of so much warpstone had left its mark in the small machines.
For the first time since their masters died they had a conscious, self-reflective thought.

"I AM"

Middenheim, Sigmarstag, 29. Ulricszeit,

Merle was six years old and afraid of the dark. Given that she lived on the Warhammer World she actually had reason to be so and tonight that would save some lives. These were the new times which meant that she shouldn´t be as afraid as she would have had every right to be a decade ago, but fears have ways to bypass concepts like "should".

Tonight had started well, she had gotten to sleep with no problem at all. At around midnight she had a nightmare where she saw her neighbors face again and awoke with a start. When she awoke, she did to total darkness, she might as well be blind. Greenish dots and shapes floated through her vision and allowed her to see shapes that frightened her even more. She tried to brave it out, she really did, but the old house had so many sounds that she could not place. In the end, she relented and used the bit of charcoal she kept in her box to light the candle. She placed the light on the small cupboard next to her bed and the threat around her disappeared. She was about to settle back into bed when she realized that the chorus of the strange sounds their house made had been joined by a new member. A sound like the muted howl of a winter storm came from somewhere inside the house. She took up the candle and walked around trying to pinpoint the source. She finally found it to be loudest close to the chimney. When she touched her ear to the chimney she yelped when she nearly burned her ear. She did not know what that meant but it could not be good. It should be bad enough to wake mother, at least she hoped so.

Widow Marks awoke when her daughter touched her shoulder . She needed a moment to make up her mind about that and when Merle did not cease she opened her eyes with a curse. It took another moment to hear the roar inside the chimney. She started to swear that very moment. She really should have had that chimney swept more often, now it was too late. The soot inside had obviously caught fire and rising air inside brought fresh cold one from below. She could just hope that the brickwork was strong enough to withstand the furnace heat inside.

Two minutes later the first bricks broke from the chimney revealing the hell inside.

Inside a head, Middenheim

Ragnar was in a familiar hell. The cavern around him was lit by flickering torches, intense beams of light that moved here and there and the greenish glow of the bomb. The bomb that was surrounded by countless horrors, rats that walked upright like men, rats that wore armor and arms like men and that hated better than any man ever born. Rats that railed from the "flashbangs" the Germans had used, rats that were wrestling with their own harnesses and the rats he was assaulting. The rats might have a handicap or two, but they were deadly. They were many, they had a multitude of arms, they had claws and teeth. Ragnar will not afraid, he had the best by his side. The White Wolves were the anointed of Ulric, the war god. Clad in heavy armor, wearing the pelts that were their privilege, wielding heavy hammers they were the force that would smash the enemy. Neither the Germans nor the Dawi, who no longer could use their famed rifles unless a stray hit would trigger the bomb, could do that. No matter, the White Wolves were here and they would protect Middenheim as they had always done. He could not imagine to fight in better company.

He brought his hammer down on the first Skaven which tried to fend off its doom one handed. The hammer pushed that a halberd aside with contemptuous ease and reduced an ugly head into uglier mush. His hammers haft intercepted a strike before it could connect with his chest that was followed by a thrust that pushed the spike at the haft`s end through an eye. And as it always happened there was the fall. He did not feel the cut that went through his lower leg in his dream, just the fall. He see the blade that took his right eye too well though. He did not see much else after that, didn`t expect he would. The dream was always the same since he had gone into the tunnels under Middenheim to kill the Skaven before they destroyed his beloved city. Something was different this time, there was a scream, an unearthly scream…

Ragnar sat up with the speed of a closing bear trap. He pushed the bed roll away that was sweated through despite the cold. Asleep as he was he had been he had needed a minute to recognize the siren for what it was, a call to duty. He hobbled from the bed and swore when his leg nearly buckled when he stepped into his trousers. No armor, no arms, a cripple like him would not need such.

He stepped into the cold air and walked as fast as his bad leg would allow him to the fire station. He was one of the first to arrive, even with his handicap. He knew he lived closest to the Fire Station and still it was too easy to see the men who arrived for what they were. Emil the butcher, Ulverich the baker and Horr the candlestick maker. They all came from the same ward, the ward that held his late uncle`s house which he choose for his honorable retirement. The Fire Station newly built into an old house, firefighting had been the job of the Nightwatch before. The German way of managing disasters had impressed many Middenheimers, including Boris Wüterrich, during the Red Pox outbreak. The reaction after the Battle of Altdorf had reinforced the notion and pretty noon the citizens clamored for a German-style Fire Brigade. The Germans supported that notion under one of the many stipulations of the Reiksbund treaty and German Fire Brigades "adopted" their Imperial counterparts.

Middenheim presented a unique challenge to them, making them adopt their ways considerably. While by German standards Imperial cities were all very tight, with narrow, winding roads Middenheim had this in spades. Erected on top of the Table Mountain called "Faustschlag" it simply had no place for any kind of expansion except for straight up or down. The result was a cramped labyrinth that had been called "a really big building where some hallways have no roof and are called roads" by visiting Germans. The Fire Brigade volunteers who arrived to help found that most of their heavy equipment was too big, too expensive and too complex to use. The only resource that was in good supply were enthusiastic volunteers. Ragnar suspected that the many citizens wanted to show that the warriors were not the only ones contributing to the community. He did neither care much about their motivation nor much else about them except for their willingness and their abilities to fight fires. The burgers might grumble about him behind his back but they had recognized leadership abilities when they saw them. Ragnar was "Löschmeister", the team leader responsible for the tiny ward.

Once he had fought with warriors of great renown, men who had followed his lead as he showed by example. Now he worked with artisans, traders and cobblers, men who were often not so sure of their father, and he depended on their vote. How deep he had fallen.

The former White Wolf changed into one of the few fire-retardant garments the Germans had donated when his musings were interrupted by twin sets of crackling and rattling. The oily stink of what the Germans called "two-stroke-engine" made the point, the two two-wheeled tractors used by the Fire Ward had arrived. Of course Ragnar`s people were too poor to own them, but they had been part of a program by a Raiffeisen bank. The bank had financed the tractors for two haulers who were members of the Fire Ward. The Ward acted as bondsman for the credit as long as the two were willing to use their vehicles for the Fire Ward when needed. The vehicles looked like nothing when Ragnar first saw them, two wheels on one axle, a small box and a set of handlebars. He quickly found that they were surprisingly powerful and when attached to a trailer could negotiate Middenheim`s alleys and roads better than nearly any other vehicle he could name. By now more men had arrived so he could assign two groups.

"Listen up men, Looks like a fire over at Pfandlicher`s row. We go there now and see what can be done. Me, Emil, Hrothgar, Manfred, Ulfried, Horr, we go with the rescue trailer. Ulverich, you collect everybody who comes in the next five minutes and follow with the water. Do you hear me?"
"Yes Sir."

Illuminated by a revolving blue light, honking their horns like mad, the ramshackle Fire Ward made its way to what might be their first major fire. The closer they came to the fire the quieter the men became. There was enough screaming and panic anyway, the smell of smoke, the reddish flickering light and the crackled of fire. When they turned the last corner they saw chaos. The houses in Pfandlicher`s row were of the middle-class. Low-level merchants, traders and similar had their stores and living quarters here. The road was cobbled, not that much could be seen of that. People ran here and there, people shouted this and that, some tried to get water from the well with pails, other threw stuff from windows. This tableau was frozen when the small Fire Ward came to the street, mostly due to the unfamiliar horn and the flashing blue light.

Ragnar hopped off the trailer, managed to catch himself on one leg let loose.

"Make space, make space for the Fire Ward. You there, you and you-you make sure nobody enters here from this side. You and you, help the lads on the trailer. NOW."

Ragnar was not of the Guard, he was no longer an active White Wolf and he was for sure not a noble. He simply knew what he wanted to was able to seem competent, that allowed him to send people he never knew on tasks not of their own. It would not last if he could not get something going soon, but that should not take too long.

"Lads, uncoil the hose and get it to that well, now. When the pump arrives get it going. Hrothgar, with me, we scout this."

Ragnar went down the street towards the fire he had seen all the while. The houses in this row were built wall-to-wall and since this was a middle-class ward it had the fire walls that sealed one house from the next one, at least in theory. He found himself before the center of things quickly enough. There was fire coming from most windows and smoke from those that had no flames. This house might have been nice once but now it was a goner. The best he could do was to prevent the fire spreading to the neighborhood, that would be ugly.

He saw the butcher and the baker sweating and swearing while they unrolled the hose, saw Hrothgar clip on the nozzle and was again surprised how much water the small-seeming pump could deliver. And it was not just water, the Germans had provided something like soap that made the water form bubbles and cover a much larger area.

"Hrothgar, try to get to the fire in the rooms closest to the Firewalls. Nothing fancy, just keep things cool. Emil, organize these people, everything flammable must go from the rooms close to the firewall in these two houses. Get to it, now. Where are Shallya`s helpers and are there any injured?"

For the first minute things were as they should. They managed to keep the fire a bit down to the sides and he got the idea they might pull this off when one set of screams finally started to make sense, far too much so."

"Merle, where is my Merle?"
"Who is Merle?"
"Merle is my daughter, she was to go from the house before me and she is not here."
"Do you think she might be inside?"
"She said something about her doll. I told her not to but I do not see my Merle."

The rest was not comprehensible. There was no need and no real choice, not for Ragnar. But what would the lads do? They were no warriors, they were volunteers, not trained to lay down their lives for others. And he would probably charge the Skaven again before he went into this hell.

"We go in or what boss?"
"You volunteering?"
"We all did. So?"
"You Hrothgar and me. Get that hose on the entrance and make a way. Get these bloody masks on and be quick."

There were days when Ragnar liked to be wrong. He was not yet sure if this was one of them. Maybe if he survived this madness. He needed two tries to get the bloody mask tight. A German fire brigade would have had canned air, they had to do with filter masks and rough it out.

"Keep together, don`t run off by your own, no heroics."
"Yes Ragnar."

None of the three hesitated to step into the roaring fire, all too much afraid to be found wanting by their peers.
The moment they stepped through what had been the door it was like stepping into a furnace. The air was so hot that every bit of sweat they produced evaporated immediately, except for what was inside their masks. That went into their eyes.

They could not see more than a meter when they were lucky and the floor was treacherous. They moved through the two rooms that made up the ground floor and found nothing. Ragnar was wavering at the stairs and went on when he heard something that might have been a child`s scream or the fire`s siren call. The heavy equipment made each step hard, breath had to be pulled by force and every step could be the last. All three made it to the top of the stairs. One side of the upper floor was a sheer mass of flame, no ordinary human could live there. The other side held one more room which could have been the child`s. They looked in the chest, they looked under the bed and found nothing.
That was when a shriek and a rumble announced their death warrant. All three scrambled to the stairway and saw the bonfire that was left of it. The only way from the house was no longer to be had.

The mask made it impossible to see the other`s faces, but Ragnar did not need to look to have to know how despair looked like. He was not surprised when Emil broke, the carpenter was surely no fighter and Ragnar had really wondered when he had volunteered. And he stopped wondering when he heard the impacts of the fire ax. Stepping into the only room that allowed them to live he saw the carpenter attack the roof with gusto and added his own efforts. His leg might no longer work right, his eye might keep him from the battle line, but by Ulric he could smash things with hammer or ax. All three men emerged amongst sparks, debris and flames. All dropped into Pfandlicher`s row and all managed to hobble away except for Ragnar. His bad leg collapsed like a matchstick and he was prone on his stomach for a moment. Someone pulled him from the fire, the same someone who removed his mask and offered his flask.

Catching his breath he could just watch as his men fought the fire with far more gusto than skill. He saw that the fire would probably not spread and he saw that more fire fighter arrived. He saw the child that clung to the woman`s arm and managed to snarl and smile at the same time.

Above all he saw his Fire Ward. Butcher, baker, candlestick, maker, cobbler and carpenter. No warriors there but lifesavers. And for the first time in a long time Ragnar was proud of himself and his company.