Maeleum Datum : 505.M34
The first sign the Imperium received of the new peril it faced was when a dozen worlds of the Eastern Fringe suddenly fell silent. Through the liberal deployment of anti-Empyric matrixes first designed to fight the Aeldari and later perfected against the Enslaver Plague, these systems were unable to send astropathic messages, while their ships were destroyed by the Nightbringer's fleet before being able to escape.
Though they were caught without warning due to the eldritch methods by which the Necrons travelled the stars, the border worlds of the Imperium were by necessity used to stand on their own against raiders and pirates both human and xenos. The ease with which their space assets had been eliminated combined with the effects of the null-zone spreading ahead of the Necron fleet shook them, but they prepared to defend themselves as best they could, bringing civilians to reinforced evacuation vaults and arming militias along with their PDF troops. When the Necrons made planetfall on each of these worlds, they found them ready to fight back.
In each and every case, it was a complete slaughter. The human defenders were annihilated to the last, unable to stand against the superior technology of the Necrons. Tens of thousands of infantry were wiped out without doing any more damage than temporarily disable a few hundred Necron Warriors, which were reassembled at once within the reconstruction forges of the attackers. Imperial commanders were killed in their most secure bunkers, either by teleporting Deathmark assassins, wraiths phasing through walls, or Flayed Ones drawn from their extra-dimensional lairs by the carnage unleashed by the Nightbringer. Terror and powerlessness were all the unfortunate victims of the Necron onslaught had to look forward to, leading to a miserable death.
Within a few months, billions had perished, mercilessly harvested by the Necron armies. The Nightbringer moved from world to world, feeding on the death and despair its slaves had wrought. Once the human population had been exterminated, the Necrons turned their engines toward the annihilation of all life on the planet down to the last microbe, a process directed by the Destroyer Lords the Nightbringer had made of the Larkorakh nobles. With every world so consumed, the Transcendent C'tan grew a little stronger, a little closer to its original, god-like power.
Worlds falling out of contact was hardly an unheard of occurrence, and given the size of the Imperium and the inertia of Imperial bureaucracy (especially where border worlds were concerned), it might have taken years for the Imperium to react to the Necron advance. But fortunately for Humanity, the Segmentum authorities of the region had been put on high alert in recent months at the command of the Primarch Guilliman himself. The losses of contact were noted, and soon (by the standards of the galaxy-spanning Imperium at least), an alarm was sent up the chain of command.
At first, the Imperial commanders believed this to be a new ploy by the Traitor Legions. But, mindful of the warning his brother had sent to him, Roboute Guilliman suspected otherwise – besides, the void in the Warp his Librarians claimed they felt in the affected region seemed at odds with their usual methods, as did the fact that an outright invasion of Imperial space went against the corrupting approach the heretics had adopted in the Long War. It was of course possible that one or more of the Traitor Primarchs, or another influential figure among the heretics, were behind this, but the words of Sanguinius – precise, exact words, from someone the Avenging Son knew not to be the kind to exaggerate or use misleading terms – hinted otherwise.
On his Legion's homeworld of Maccrage, Guilliman had gathered a treasure trove of knowledge that the rest of the Imperium might deem too dangerous for mortal minds – but which few would dare question a Primarch for hoarding. Within the Library of Ptolemy, the Avenging Son had accumulated records salvaged from a thousand ravaged worlds his Legion had liberated during the Scouring. While a great deal of that lore concerned the Archenemy and its myriad facets, and was sealed behind great psychic wards far from the reach of all but the highest-ranked Ultramarines, a not inconsiderable portion concerned the xenos races that had survived the purges of the Great Crusade.
Among these were records of ancient Eldar legends, transcribed by human scholars during the Dark Age of Technology, prior to the Fall of the Eldar Empire and the rise of the human Imperium. Within these scrolls, Guilliman found mentions of a 'deathless plague' with which the Eldars' forebears had waged a terrible war in the distant past, and which, according to the xenos, would one day return to the stars. Unfortunately, these records provided precious little concrete details as to the nature of this 'plague', but Guilliman wasn't discouraged by it : instead, he saw it as more evidence of the scale of the threat, for either the Eldars themselves had dreaded to speak of this ancient foe, or its last rise was so far in the past that even the long-lived aliens didn't remember them as anything more than the vaguest of myths.
Regardless, his duty was clear. The worlds of the Ultima Segmentum were under his protection, and Guilliman wouldn't let anyone, be they his treacherous brothers or so antediluvian xenos menace, prey upon its worlds with impunity. The Primarch gave the orders, and a great fleet began to assemble on the borders of the Imperium, with the Ultramarines themselves providing the tip of the spear.
The Thirteenth Primarch had at his disposal the full might of the Realm of Ultramar. The Ultramarines had always been one of, if not the most numerous Legions, and despite the terrible losses they had sustained during the Heresy, their numbers had been rebuilt since then. Beyond his own gene-sons, the Avenging Son had also access to billions of loyal Guardsmen, trained and equipped with the product of Ultramar's prodigious industry. Within months, a truly colossal armada had been mustered, and Guilliman left Maccrage in order to lead it in person, forewarned by his brother that only he could stand against the dark terror that led this new yet ancient scourge.
Meanwhile, as the Nightbringer's advance continued, its forces began to stretch thin, leading to several systems being attacked without the presence of the anti-Empyric matrixes. This allowed for terrified astropathic messages to be sent – not all of whom were of Imperial origin or destination. Despite the efforts of the Inquisition and the Ministorum, the cults of the Traitor Legions could more easily take root on frontier worlds, and these cultists now called their distant masters for help as they too faced annihilation at the cold, unfeeling hands of the soulless Necrons.
"THE DEAD ARE NOT SAFE", "IT SEES ME", "I KNOW IT KNOWS I KNOW", "THE BLADE, THE SHIP, THE EYE, THE FORGE", "THE GODS OFFER NO SUCCOUR FROM THIS PAIN"
Collection of graffitis written in blood, found on the wall of a house on a world harvested by the Nightbringer
These astropathic communications served as beacons to Guilliman's relief force. While multiple systems were calling for aid, Guilliman hardened his heart and kept his fleet focused into one single group. At this stage of the campaign, information on the exact nature of the enemy was the most important objective. Several Inquisitors of the Ordo Xenos and Hereticus (for not all shared the Primarch's conviction regarding the nature of the threat) were present in his fleet, along with their retinues and hundreds of magi of the Adeptus Mechanicus eager for specimens to dissect in the name of the Omnissiah.
A single engagement with overwhelming force on their side was, the Primarch decided, the best way to gain the information they desperately needed. Once a proper tactical doctrine had been built upon that knowledge, the fleet could be separated and sent to relieve the threatened worlds. It was a cold decision, but the Avenging Son had become all too used to these during the Heresy.
The first true battle of the war took place in Kallidos, an otherwise unremarkable system with a single inhabited world and a handful of orbital installations. The stream of astropathic calls had suddenly ended, and the Navigators of the fleet could sense only a great emptiness where the system had once stood, but Guilliman pressed on. When the fleet emerged piecemeal from the Warp, it found that Kallidos still stood, though the entire system had fallen under the shadow of what the tech-priests identified as an incredibly large null-field.
"We are Necrons. Surrender and die."
Sole message broadcast by the xenos fleet in the Kallidos system, 505.M34
The ships orbiting Kallidos belonged to no category recorded in any of the Imperial fleet's data-banks, and their speed and armaments were far superior to those of the Imperial ships. Many vessels and tens of thousands of lives were lost as information regarding their capabilities was collated, but eventually Guilliman managed to reach Kallidos' orbit and sent his Legion down on the planet to rescue its beleaguered population. So began the first recorded battle between Space Marines and Necrons, though it would later be discovered that previous engagements had taken place, only to be erased from history at the command of the Emperor Himself.
It was a disaster. The armor of the Space Marine Legions had been redesigned following the Heresy in order to offer the best possible protection against those weapons most commonly fielded by Traitor Astartes – bolters and chainswords. They were little help against the Gauss weaponry of the Necron hosts, however, as were the tactics of the Thirteenth Legion, for the Necrons were unlike any enemy they had previously faced.
Guilliman and his sons were nothing if not adaptable, however. Within days of the first engagements, the Avenging Son had seized upon the two main weaknesses of this new and terrible foe : the slow speed of their troops, and the complete lack of imagination and inability to improvise of their commanders. The compiled observations of the Ultramarines and their allies made it clear to the Primarch that they were facing a foe that reacted more like a cogitator than a living being, which the appearance of the creatures seemed to confirm.
By changing their tactics to focus on mobility, the Ultramarines were able to achieve much better results in subsequent engagements. Entire Necron divisions were wiped out in hit-and-run assaults inspired by the White Scars' tactics, while random movements of troops threw the Necrons' machine-minds for a loop and allowed the Imperials to catch them by surprise. Slowly, and at great cost, the Necrons were pushed out of Kallidos, though only a few tens of thousands remained of the planet's billion-strong population.
Worse from the point of view of the war effort, thousands of Ultramarines had perished in the first days of the war, and few were in a state where their gene-seed could be recovered. Few pieces of Necron technology had been obtained either : their infantry seemed to phase out whenever it was struck down, and high-resolution auspex scanning of certain key figures within the invaders had led the Imperium to believe that these warriors were somehow repaired before being sent back to the field. The motives behind the attacks were also undecipherable : the sole transmission of the newly-identified Necrons seemed to indicate genocidal aims, which fit with the Mechanicus' views of soulless anima, but Guilliman wasn't satisfied with that explanation. The great engine responsible for the system-wide null-field had also escaped, disappearing before it could be boarded by the Thirteenth Legion's kill-teams, which had at least allowed Guilliman to deploy his Librarians and battle-psykers, which had proven effective against the soulless Necrons.
In any case, though Kallidos had been saved, many other systems called for help. Having partially accomplished his goal of securing the tactical information he required, Guilliman split his forces to answer as many calls as he could while keeping each battlegroup combat-effective. He himself remained in command of the main force, while entrusting the others to proven Ultramarines Captains or even Astra Militarum officers – the Primarch showed no favouritism in this, simply choosing those he believed were best suited for the arduous task awaiting them.
After a few more battles, it became clear that the war against the Necrons would not be quickly ended. The xenos' ability to repair their troops meant that they could recover all but the most grievous of casualties in time, and their mastery of teleportation technology (though it was obvious it operated on completely different principles than that used by the Imperium) meant that they could re-deploy these repaired troops on the frontlines nigh-instantaneously. Destruction of the 'Dolmen Gates' through which this teleportation was possible became an absolute priority, but it was still clear that the war would last years, perhaps decades.
It was during that period that the name of 'Pale Wasting' came into usage. It originated from observations by the Adeptus Mechanicus elements accompanying the Imperial forces battling the Necrons. They noted that the stars of systems where the xenos menace had been present were weaker than records indicated they should be, their light slightly weaker, paler, than they ought to be. Combined with the psyche-crushing effect of fighting under the null-fields of the anti-Empyric matrixes, the name of Pale Wasting came to be, eventually becoming official when Guilliman himself used it during a war council.
This, the Primarch declared, was a trial for which the Kingdom of Ultramar, with its vast industrial base, productive population and enormous manpower reserve, was perhaps best suited out of all of the Emperor's territories. Guilliman vowed that, no matter how long it took, he would send the Pale Wasting back to its graves, and its dark master into the oblivion it deserved.
Elsewhere in the Eastern Fringe, the Nightbringer learned of this new obstacle to its plans. Whether it felt fury at being opposed by mere beings of flesh, amusement at the presumption of such insignificant creatures, or something else entirely, can only be guessed at.
AN : Yes, the situation isn't solved in this chapter. I feel something like the Pale Wasting deserves several chapters to address it, at least given their short length.
The next chapter of the Roboutian Heresy is at 16k words. It's going to be a long one, though not, hopefully, ridiculously so. For one thing, there is no army list inside it : it's all action.
As usual, tell me what you thought of this chapter and hope to see in the future. We will get more Chaotic action soon, I promise.
Zahariel out.