Pi=3,148, northern Naggaroth
The Cold One munched on the still warm body before it. It had gulped most of the meat already and was now tearing the rib cage open to get at the intestines that were still left. The cold around it meant that the Cold One needed to burn a lot of calories just to stay alive and mobile, so it was a good thing. This would be the last service the slave performed for his Druchii masters. Two weeks ago he had been a good slave, docile, strong and capable at the tasks he had been given. Normally true elves knew better than to work his kind to death so quickly, it was a waste of good resources.
Now it was unavoidable, there was a task that needed doing right now and the thought of failure brought shivers to the stoutest of them. They knew well enough that excuses were no use at all, only results would shield them from punishments only the Druchii could dream up.
They watched liked hawks over the remaining slaves, making sure to extract every bit of labor the wretched creatures were able to provide. They laid ties in the snow before them and rammed it as deep as they would go. They brought rails of wood that held a strip of iron on its top and nailed that down.
The railroad that they formed was primitive and would not last longer than a year or so before the snow would swallow it. It was built at great cost, in materials transported to the ends of the sane world, in work, in ingenuity and so much suffering. All of that to provide the most meager of railroads.
It allowed the horses and Cold Ones pull more than three times the load they could on a road, more than five times than off-road. Every other day a small, diesel-powered contraption would make its way. It pulled more than 10.000 horses when it was working and enough fuel could be found. Together with the knock-off railroad it was protected by some of the best soldiers in Malekith's employ.
The railroad that was everything that allowed Malus Darkblade to remain in the field in the face of a fully-fledged Chaos invasion.
Xenon Communications Command Post, close to Teotihuacan
The air inside the tent was cool, having passed through an air-condition that employed HEPA filters to provide clean air. It still failed to scrub the smell of burned things, of fat that hat been partially congealed by brief periods of heat and the work of Mother Nature`s recycling systems.
None of the meeting's participants complained the odor, still it was present and all minds and while it served to concentrate all minds to the task at hand it also fueled frustrations.
The picture provided by a projector showed various parts of the old temple town. Be it road, stepped pyramid or plaza, every bit of surface seemed to hold at least one charred reptilian body. Unfortunately the gaps between them held snakes that were still moving, looking for the source of they comrades fiery demise.
"Grimnir's beard, these must be the most dangerous museum pieces in history."
"They did the job alright Specialist Gotrek, as far as they were able to reach. Currently both are down with mechanical problems and it will take at least another week to repair due to he unavailability of spare parts."
"Can you not order more of these? They are so useful? Or something younger than me?"
"First off nothing like these is build presently, and there is the problem that people are unhappy at Private Military Contractors anyway. The thought of PMCs with flamethrower tanks is not flying with our employers, which is why we acquired the Wasps as collector's items in the first place."
"Maybe we can borrow a M113 or two from the Federales, Captain? The Ronsons are not that big and they will fit the old Buckets easily. We can give them back when we are done. Could put a shooter or two inside as well, protect them a bit better."
"Sounds like a good idea Specialist Kyle, good enough that our technical team had the same. I have been in contact with the Mexican government already and we should have something done by the day after tomorrow. Be that as it may, I do not think that this will allow us to perform our mission by itself. We swept these blasted ruins four times so far, burning and shooting anything with scales twice over. And when we are done more of them crawl from the tunnels. When we demolish the tunnel entrances they show us that there are openings that we do not know about, they make new ones or reopen the ones we blasted. And there seems to be no end of them."
"So?"
"So Specialist Gotrek I have to ask you if your Power Armor is in working order and if your ax is still sharp. Because the day after tomorrow we will go in again, we will burn everything cold-blooded that we can find on the surface. Then we will send teams into the tunnels, we will see where these beasties come from and will make sure they don't do that any longer. And you will be the point of those teams."
Neustadt, Naggaroth
The corridor that Anja walked through was usually well-lit, either by windows or by electric bulbs made not so far from here. At this time of the night most of them were shut off though, and so she moved from one island of light to the next one.
She had chosen her clothing with care, exposing a bit of the breasts that Torsten liked so much without being too much of a show-off. She was a bit melancholic at the realization that the former German would be more interested in what she brought him instead of her.
She stepped through an unlocked door into the huge atelier that was her master's, husband's and victim's office when the construction urge took him. There were some aides around him, hammering numbers into pocket calculators, drawing the engineer's sketches into something the workshops could use and looking up arcane data in well-thumbed tomes. Torsten himself looked roughly as bad as she feared. His remaining hairs were pointing in ten different directions from his unconscious hair ruffling in his search for more inspiration, more ideas and the effort to keep them in his mind once they appeared. The rings under his eyes were noteworthy, as was the red color in his too-small eyes. He swayed when he walked to another workbench, probably never realizing it.
She looked at his assistants, gave a couple of winks and made shooing movements with her hands as much as they were currently capable of. They knew the routine and unobtrusively made their way from the room. The engineer realized none of this, making small additions to the drawing on the board before him. It was only when he shouted a request for information into the empty room that he found himself alone with Anja.
"Oh, uh, Anja, there you are. What are you..oh, it is that late already?"
"No, it is even later. If there were any birds left in this industrial landscape you created they would start to sing about now. Sit down Torsten and eat with me."
Anja had used the time to arrange the contents of her tablet on a table provided for that purpose. It was even money if it was her appeal or the smell of freshly baked bread that worked better, but whatever it was it brought the engineer to the table at slightly below the speed of sound.
The food had been lovingly prepared, with bread, sausages, eggs, a bit of wine and a tea that should get Torsten from whatever orbit his mind was in.
What followed was not pretty, the German had forgotten how very empty his stomach was and wolfed down with unseemly haste and a definitive lack of table manners.
Conversation was out for now. Even if Anja wouldn't know it from experience there was simply no space in Torsten's mouth that would allow the controlled passing of air usually called speech. Instead the witch watched the German as he recharged his batteries.
He was unkempt, his skin gray and the stubble that she knew would scratch her face had started another campaign of conquest on all suitable surfaces. Currently he looked not at her, the woman that shared his bed and his life, he probably did not look at the food that she had lovingly provided. His mind was probably still wrestling with some arcane problem on an area she had hardly heard of.
She did not see the food that ran down his lips, she saw the mouth that kissed her and told her he loved her. She did not see the shirt that really needed cleaning, but the broad shoulders below that were such a wonderful cushion for her when they snuggled. She did not see the red in Torsten's eyes but deeper into him, into the part that cared about her, that wanted to protect her and that loved her.
She watched the man eat she loved more than life.
Even the food she had brought could not hold out for long and when the pauses between two bites could be measured in seconds she tried to catch his eyes.
"Torsten, what is it today?"
"Malus Darkblade, it is the fucking Malus Darkblade."
"How can this be, he is more than a thousand miles north of here."
"Oh he is there, but is missives are here and they have also reached Malekith. Looks like there is another bloody Chaos invasion from the Desert, a big and nasty one. If I understood things right he can hold them for now, but he has used most of the munitions that we made for this year's campaign in a week. He wants more of it and he wants it now. He wants more rifles, he wants more mortars he wants more machine guns and can I make a heavy machine gun, please? Yes, he wrote please, a first if there ever was one. So now I have to speed up production of nearly everything, I have to make sure that Lord Silverhawk receives at least some modern weapons in something that looks like in time. And I have to find a way to do all of that without killing our people. Jeez, they work 11 hours on average already, six days a week. How much more can they do?"
"Oh my. So what will you do?"
"We'll shorten the training of the new inductees as much as I can. Maybe we use some without the introductory course for the easiest jobs. And we'll buy more foodstuff from the Lords, then we can shift some of our farmers to production. And we have to get more people, but housing them will be a nightmare. And while we are doing all of that I have to design a heavy machine gun."
"Does not sound good. Torsten, I do not understand too much about some of that, but I do understand that you have to shift some of that work to Karsten and Dehandar. They can do it, really. But all of that is for tomorrow, really now."
"Yes, yes, you are right love. Lets go to bed."
"I'd love to. There is one more thing though."
"Uh?"
"I still have to write the report to Urglieth Jerres, I have to do that today, really."
"Oh how much I`d like to tell this asshole to fuck off."
"If I had my way I would not just tell him off. I was his to use for far too long. But first off his is the second largest production capacity in Naggaroth, small as that may be compared to ours. He does have the ears, or the pockets, of too many Dread Lords tough and that is certainly not worth the hassle. Especially now. And last not least, if you tell him to stick it he will install another spy, which we will not know."
"If she is as beautiful as you I will not complain..hey, don't do that, I still wanted to eat that. So lets see how much truth we have to serve the high and mighty lord."
"Here check my draft. Remember, it is really important that we do not give him the idea we "coddle" our people."
"I know, I know my love. 11 hours of work per day plus training and decent food is coddling my ass."
Underground Sea, Naggaroth
U40 was one of the most powerful warships on the Warhammer World. She could probably sink anything afloat, be it a Reiksbund ship or something else. Ever since she had replaced her lead-acid batteries with gigacaps there had been some quiet debates in the wardroom whether she could take on a Los-Angeles submarine with any chance of success.
Currently she was hiding from the Druchii like a frightened rodent. Her mission was recognizance, not combat and like always recognizance was best when the enemy did not know that it had been performed. The main channel U 40 had been following so far was wide and deep enough for her with ease, so good progress had been made.
That was until the drones Dori and Nemo had found a place where the floor of the sea rose to 22 meters in places. At the same time they found no less than two Black Arks that were using the Underground Sea to relocate far from where they suspected prying eyes to be. The drones had obtained a decent profile of the Arks which had a rather deep draft. And that posed a problem, as it was possible that the Arks might collide with the German submarine if they met in the wrong place. Friedel Bauer decided that the best course of action was to use one of the side caverns that lay off the main channel and wait for the old Fortresses to pass.
He had expected to make his way again within 24 hours but had not counted on the Underground Sea and his resident scientists. The side caverns had led rather deep under the mountains and there was a labyrinth of caves were dry. A couple of drones had used the time otherwise wasted to do a little recon. What the small octacopters had found had changed U40's schedule considerably.
Andrea Hermanns shivered for more reasons than the cold, damp air around her. The cavern she and her colleagues were in was big enough that the powerful lamps the Germans brought hardly illuminated the walls. The floor was covered with rocks, moss, dirt and skeletons. The German marine biologist was standing in the middle of a mass grave.
"So what do you make of this?"
"If you ask Wilhelm he will give you a preliminary answer in about two years. And please don't ask him Captain, he is aghast that we have to leave in 48 hours. A single archeologist and such an unexpected find. For him a decent digging tool is a camel-hair brush and he has no problems in excavating a hole of two by two by two meters in a year or so."
"If I could show something more than a lot of rusted swords and old bones I'd be willing to extend our stay somewhat, but not that much. The way things are you lot have two days and off we go. So what do you know already?"
"Well, whoever was here was quite some time ago, really. Most iron items we find are rusted to the core and the corpses are pretty much gone, even when there are no scavengers in here that we know of. We have two rather different groups here. One look like humans, and if Doktor Kampf is right mostly males. They seemed to belong to some army as their gear seems rather similar from what we can tell by the remains. We find most of the corpses in rows, like if they died in the place they fought. And by the looks of it they had a really nasty battle. Your Leutnant Kars tried his hand and he thinks a major action was fought here. Maybe even to the end of both parties, we found so bodies outside of this cave so far."
Over there we have the others. Same story, lots of similar weapons and other gear, even if it is even farther gone than the one on these. Whoever that was, was more into leather armor and wooden bows, not so much left of that. But we can say they were definitively not human.
"So what?"
"No idea, we have never seen such skeletons?"
"Something like Orks or Goblins?"
"Nope, even if these have a pretty broad spread. But all of the Greenskins have legs. These don't"
"Uh, what do you mean..ups."
"Don't have an accident here if you can help it captain."
"I try not to. What is this?"
Both biologist and submarine captain were far too amateurish not to dig up what had caught Bauer's leg. When they wiped the dirt away and lifted it from the ground they detached whatever it was from the remains of a staff that was hardly distinguishable from the ground it had lain so many years in. The thing turned out to be made from some greenish metal. A pair of handkerchiefs and eager hands cleaned the find up to the point where they could recognize it as some kind of bird. It was mounted above a flat piece of metal. A bit of marine biologist spit and a piece of shirt cleaned that off sufficiently to have a look at the inscription. Friedel Bauer held the bird while Andrea lit things up with her torch.
"Lets see, maybe we can recognize that script somehow….fuck me sideways."
"What?"
"Look, just look."
Satt" (Full) Restaurant, Berlin
Both men were far too busy eating their stew to continue the argument they had before their dishes arrived. As always the Halfling cuisine was simply too good to leave any space for such things as the correct interpretation of laws and ordinances or the necessities of donations to deserving political parties.
In this case the stew was an Halfling version of Boef Bordelais. Beef, a hefty dose of bacon with mushrooms, spring onions and sweet chillies in a red wine sauce rested on excellent dumplings. It was more that simply delicious and both men were quite happy that the restaurant developed into a franchise that would span all of Germany soon enough.
The two were quite similar in age but rather different in appearance. One was slender and erect, with a full shock of hair and a three-day beard going to gray. The man on the other side of the table sported fleshly jowls that hinted at the not so slender figure hidden by a well-tailored suit that showed hints of traditional Bavarian garb.
Even Halfling dishes have an end, even if it sometimes seemed differently, and both men settled deeper into their chairs while the waiters did their job.
Erwin Huber tried to judge the right time to break the amiable silence. He did not want to go too soon, but the Bauernverband, the farmer's association had been quite insistent. They needed results and soon. When he deemed that a smile had pulled up the minister of agriculture's lips for a moment he recognized the opening presented to him.
"So Robert, have you thought about our proposal?"
"Yes Erwin, I did and the answer in both cases remains the same: no."
"Why Robert? I know your party does not like antibiotics, but they rarely care for the kind of grain we use."
"Most of them indeed do not. But we cannot go back to the way on Earth."
"It would make bread a lot cheaper, that should count."
"Roughly 2% if at all Erwin. But we cannot allow your members to plant only one kind of wheat any more, especially if it is a high-yield hybrid that can only survive when you use five different herbicides and pesticides to survive under the best of circumstances. No, we need to keep at least four different variants in the field in numbers in case something goes wrong. We are the only country with high-tech grain production in this world. If we fail, people die and that is not happening, especially not for 5% added profit."
"The yield of this Kerubino wheat frankly sucks and it needs more fertilizer than the farmers really like. Really, we have three different kinds in the fields if we ditch that, it is sufficient."
"And next year you will tell me or my successor that two kinds of wheat will be surely enough. The answer is still no. We get one really aggressive fungus or something similar and we wipe out an important part of our food supply. Not happening, not on this world and not under my watch."
"Can we use another wheat then?"
"Show something to the Bundessortenamt (Federal Plant Variety Office) something that is really different and we talk about it."
"And the other thing?"
"Giving your members access to the new antibiotics? No and you should know better than to ask. Feed your animals tons of antibiotics was never a brilliant idea. We both know that this played an important part in building up resistance to them. Now we live in a world that has a bloody god of pestilence and epidemics and you want to dull the sharpest sword we have to combat them?"
"It is not proven..."
"It is not proven my ass Erwin. For the money you spend you will find a scientist or two who will publicly spread doubts that the Warhammer World is a sphere. Giving everybody a small dose of antibiotics with their schnitzel cannot but help resistances to form. The answer is no and stays no."
"Come on Robert, you have to give me something."
"How about the vaccination for swine flu? We could allow that since there is no EU about. Would reduce the amount of pigs you have to cull the next time a batch of that comes around."
"Now you are talking."
