A/N: Sorry about the short chapter, I'm making up for it with a larger than normal codex update.
When consciousness returned to Ryan Taylor, he was aware only of the dimly illuminated interior of his cryostasis tube, and the bitter taste in his mouth and throat courtesy of the cryogenic preservative that he had been coated with prior to being frozen. That had only seemed moments ago. His vitals had been reduced to the most minimal state possible, and thus he had not dreamed during that time. Who knew how many centuries he had slept away?
A bowl with a drainage canal in the center extended from a panel to his left, he waited in silent resignation as the most unpleasant part of the reanimation process came over him. A prod emanating a precisely tuned electromagnetic pulse struck him in the small of his back, the effect it had on him was instantaneous. Ryan doubled over in his restraints and vomited a long viscous steam of preservative compound straight into the bowl.
The evacuation bowl retracted back into the side panel, and the illuminators inside the tube slowly brightened. The hatch then slid open, revealing the cryo bay beyond it. When the restraints slid away, Ryan slowly emerged from his tube, every muscle in his body ached and he felt very lethargic. Cryosleep for any amount of time often produced feelings of weakness and discomfort upon waking, but this bout of stasis sickness was much more pronounced than he had ever felt before. Again it begged to question how long he had been in that tube.
All around him, other people were crawling out of their tubes, or heading for the showers to wash off the cryo-preservative that remained on their bodies. All of them looked as weak and disoriented as he felt. As his hearing fully returned the blaring sound of an alarm reached his ears. It was a call for combat readiness, which meant trouble.
Ignoring his discomfort, Ryan double-timed it to the showers, where he waited his turn to be doused in a cold soapy spray, and quickly cleaned off with a sonic wave. He then returned to his stasis tube where a simple grey jumpsuit and a pair of boots was waiting for him.
After quickly dressing, he joined the stream of people trying to get to their duty stations.
Rapture City was not designed with rapid deployment in mind. It would take weeks for everything to be fully squared away. From the cavernous stasis-sealed armory blocks filled with highly sophisticated military hardware, vehicles, aircraft, and the towering war-machines of the Titan Corps; and don't forget the thousands of entombed warships, some of which could count as spacefaring cities.
For now it was the infantry's show.
Ryan took a massive high-occupancy express lift to the armory blocks where all the Marines and Army troopers would be suiting up for a possible confrontation with whatever could have happened upon the subterranean mega-structure. Heck the site above ground was hardly inconspicuous, especially with those ridiculous mountain formations. What was the Corps of Engineers thinking?
At any rate, trouble had come to their doorstep. He was going to face it head on.
The various leaders of the Federation Enclave quickly assembled in the Conference Room which was located adjacent to the Command Center. All of them were clearly suffering from a stronger than usual case of stasis sickness, nothing that a few stimms and a few hours of actual sleep could not remedy.
"Fifteen-thousand years," a man wearing the uniform of an Army general said, breaking the silence that had followed the revelation of their current situation. Fleet Admiral Kerensky, the chairman of the Enclave was still silent. He too was shocked, they had greatly overshot their intended date set in the late 30th Millennium. The implications this made for their reclamation schedule were daunting to say the least.
And that was what was the unspoken question on everyone's mind; was the mission still viable? The date had been chosen due to the fact that by then, the miasma of warp storms would have ebbed away allowing for real-time FTL communications, and general use of warp travel. Also humanity would have been sufficiently weak and disorganized around that time to gather up under a single banner with manageable difficulty. But with so much time having past...
"This changes nothing," said Keeper, the head of the Office of Strategic Intelligence. Nobody knew his real name. But he was easily the most dangerous individual in the room. "We have scarified too much to stop now."
"I am inclined to agree," Admiral Kerensky said, "But that can wait, for now we have an Ork infestation to deal with; Nyx draw up the map."
Light covered the surface of the circular table, and a realistic holographic image of the terrain above Rapture City appeared, numbered tags indicated the positions of buried ships, and hidden entrances. White lines pointed out the underground tunnel network, yellow ones the immense powerlines that connected to the antimatter reactor deep within the City.
The image was a live feed from a SpySat probe that had been launched into orbit by a graviton catapult minutes after the discovery of Orks on the planet.
The Orks themselves appeared as a red blob approaching from the north. Their lines were loose and disorganized.
"I suggest a nuclear strike, it will buy us more time to prepare," a general stated. Nuclear weapons were a very old technology, but they were still very useful, and relatively cheap compared to WMD's of similar caliber and had a long shelf life.
"The flash would act as a beacon and only excite the orks in the long run," Kerensky replied, "The use of seismic weapons will be more effective to our purposes."
Seismic weapons, despite the name did not cause earthquakes, instead they created a destructive sonic pulse of intense magnitude that shattered anything caught in the blast radius. On the plus side they also did not produce lingering side effects like radiation fall out as in Nukes and antimatter bombs, or thinning the veil between the Warp and Realspace as Vortex ordnance would do.
"Nyx, what is the current status of our forces?" Tarson asked.
"Eight Army infantry companies have assembled and are awaiting orders, three Marine companies are also prepared. The Titan Corps reports that the Castigator Titans Liberty Prime and Eisen Kaiser, Nephelem Titans Strider Foxtrot, Midsummer Knight, Dangerous Intent, and Nemesis King will be ready for deployment inside the hour. Everything else is in the process of being mustered, and ABACOS has achieved limited functionality."
Kerensky nodded, "Not enough to take on the greenskins, Nyx send our new incomers a welcome package, three level 2 payloads ought to do it."
"I've already begun," the AI stated with a hint of amused inflection in it's voice.
In between the Panopticon's outer ridge lines, a powerful explosion forced away the earth like a ripple in water; revealing several meters below, a metal surface slightly tarnished by time was visible. Three dilating hatches hissed open, three large anti-shipping seismic torpedoes elevated through the openings. One after another, they shot roaring out of the tubes riding on long tails of blue ion exhaust plumes before steadily arcing northwards toward their intended target.
The Orkish army sent to occupy the distant Panopticon was rushing towards it's objective with no regard to order or cohesion. Buggies, looted tanks, and wartrukks raced ahead of the greenskins running on foot literally trampling the smaller gretchin underfoot.
"Eh? Wots dat up in da sky?" One Nob said. As if a switch had been flicked, nearly half the horde looked up to see the three trails of vaporized air coming towards them. It was the only warning they had.
The first seismic torpedo struck the earth, and detonated with the sound of a million thunderclaps going off in unison that rent the very air asunder. The earth bucked and split violently underneath the boots of the aliens, sending them skyward as the harmonic shockwave reduced immense boulders to dust, and tore vehicles to shreds; ear drums imploded, ruined eyes popped out of skulls, green hides split open and sloughed off shattered bones, internal organs turned to paste as everything in a thirty mile radius was completely destroyed, and pieces of debris numbering in the trillions was scattered over an ever wider area at the speed of sound.
The second torpedo hit the horde in the center, wiping millions of greenskins off the face of the planet in an instant.
The third struck the final prong of orks, adding to the chaos and devastation created by it's two predecessors.
When the dust slowly cleared, a wide flattened expanse of churned up terrain extending more than a hundred kilometers in either direction around three small craters was all that was left of the orks, everything had been obliterated and buried under tons of dirt and sand. Nothing had survived the Federation's first strike.
Codex: Ancients
"It was a vast monster that knew no equal, looking at it as it fired on our position was like looking over the lip of an erupting volcano, everything we threw at it either bounced off it's invincible skin or scuffed up the paint, the only way to survive it is to not be there when it comes. Emperor have mercy on us." -Lieutenant Jaskon Price, 303rd Vendoland. Executed for scaremongering.
M33 Baneblade: The M33 Baneblade Super-Heavy Tank is one of the pinnacle achievements of Consolidated Dynamics Land Systems, combining a formidable balance of the properties of speed, durability, and firepower. Anything short of a titan will suffer critical existence failure upon entering it's line of sight.
It is superior to the Mars-pattern Baneblade in nearly every category, only the fabled and rare Fellblade super-heavy tank can hope to compete with the Federation Army's primary super-heavy vehicle. The very appearance of the M33 has prompted several Forge Worlds to actually share STC data with one another in an attempt to restart Fellblade production to counter this threat, among many others the Federation has unleashed upon the battlefields of the Eastern Fringe.
A full third larger than it's Mars-Pattern hillbilly cousin, the M33 Baneblade is notable for featuring a four-track design, each mounted on an independent, modular, computer-controlled suspension system, which allow for deft maneuvering around large debris and other obstacles. Thanks to it's cold-fusion reactor technology, the range of the M33 is not measured in kilometers, but decades.
The super-heavy tank's primary armament is it's turret-mounted twin-linked rail guns. Immense eleven-meter-long cannons capable of projecting football sized projectiles at speeds exceeding mach 20. The devastating power of these cannons produce almost no recoil, and can only be heard as a dull thud inside the tank thanks to multiple layers of advanced acoustic dampening material.
The M33's secondary armaments consist of a pair of hull-mounted twin-linked rotary plasma cannons for cutting down infantry, and hardpoints on the side of each track pod, each one with a twin-linked rotary plasma cannon, and a Particle Projector Cannon. Each of the side-mounted rotary cannons has a 150 degree horizontal, and 45 degree vertical angle of fire, though the four PPC's mounted atop the track pods, have a wider horizontal range of 270 degrees. All secondary weapons draw energy directly from the powerplant, allowing them to fire indefinitely so long as they don't malfunction. Finally a pair of 2x3 smart missile launchers are mounted on either side of the turret, for shooting down airborne targets or destroying enemies hiding behind obstructions.
Wrapped in layers of Adamantium and Metaplas coated in a reflective/ablative matrix bolstered by atomantic field technology, the M33 is among the most well-protected vehicles ever to be deployed into the warzones of the 41st Millenium; it can survive countless weapon impacts which would reduce other tanks to a molten pile of slag. Nothing short of a Shadowsword's Volcano Cannon, or repeated hits from a Stormblade's Plasma Blastgun is capable of taking this massive tank out of commission in a timely fashion. Although it should be noted that the M33 hosts limited self-repair functionality, further increasing it's longevity.
Many of the sophisticated technologies which go into producing the M33 are long forgotten or completely unrealized by the Adeptus Mechanicus. The tank is packed with advanced sensor gear, such as tachyon detectors that are capable of piercing the Holofields utilized by Eldar vehicles. High-precision targeting arrays, and remote optics allow the commander an unobstructed view of the battlefield. Advanced FTL communications equipment allows for communication anywhere up to a few Astronomical Units and uplink with ABACOS, and if a relay is nearby, the entire Federation CommNet which links to every planet, ship, and space station in Federation Space in real-time.
Length: 16.5m
Width: 13.4m
Height: 7.2m
"These are without a doubt one of the most vicious weapons I have ever encountered, an entire Terminator squad had been brought down by one squad-support level weapon in seconds. Their screams of agony as they were cooked alive inside their own revered plate haunts me still to this day, and my hearts yearn evermore for vengeance."- Brother Sergeant Emil Nyran. Sternguard of the Ultramarines First Company. Killed by a Volkite weapon ten years later.
Volkite Weapons: In a nutshell, they are martian deathrays. Volkite weapons are based on the principal of imparting so much heat the target that he/she/it literally bursts into flames inside their armor. These flaming victims then proceed to cause more damage to their own squad, as they run around screaming while emitting the temperature of a large and unwieldy furnace. The primary drawback is that they are considered short-ranged, although not to the same extent as Melta weaponry.
The Imperium in the glory days of the Great Crusade, had enough of these things to equip every single Space Marine Legionnaire with them. But as the Crusade grew older, demand overtook supply and the Volkite guns were relegated to 'special weapons' status. And when the Horus Heresy came to Mars, leading to the defection of large parts of the Mechanicum. Add ten-thousand years of technological stagnation, the knowledge of how to repair and maintain these fearsome weapons gradually disappeared from the galaxy.
When the Ancients returned, they brought these weapons with them, and utilized them to great and terrible effect, using them in the same way other races use flamer weapons.
"You do not understand, Inquisitor. We are not trapped in your world; you are now trapped in ours," -Fleet Admiral Tarson Kerensky. Federation Commander in Chief.
ABACOS: The Advanced BAttlefield COntrol System. Or simply Abacus. Is the pinnacle of the Battlefield Revolution which occurred in the 18th Millennium during mankind's first wars against alien powers. Humanity won these conflicts due to an astonishing level of tactical coordination that only the warhosts of the Eldar craftworlds have been able to match.
With the advent of the Iron Men, human participation in warfare became redundant, as did the technologies that allowed humanity to achieve such high operational tempo.
When the Iron Men turned on humanity, ABACOS was brought back, and given an upgrade.
The ABACOS network is designed to collect and sort every iota of information from the lowest ranking soldier and his weapons, to the colossal super-capital ships of the Federation Navy. It is operated by several dedicated tactical AI (Men of Stone) who process the information into a format that can be used by military commanders to monitor and enhance the performance of all soldiers deployed in combat.
ABACOS serves three main functions. The first is to allow multiple members of a military unit to maintain a technopathic link to one another through their neural implants and work more efficiently as a team. ABACOS basically runs this unit like a network of computers, allowing it to rapidly coordinate tactics. This provides a massive tactical advantage to the Federation Defense Forces.
The second function is to monitor the chemical balance of every soldier engaged in combat. This allows the neural implants to induce an artificial combat high by managing the release of adrenaline and endorphins, elevating the senses and accuracy of every soldier. One's sense of pain is also subject to the same treatment, preventing minor injuries from distracting a soldier in combat.
The third main function of ABACOS is to monitor and control the use of weapons, vehicles, and equipment on the battlefield and in space. As every weapon and vehicle is ID locked, only authorized individual soldiers can use that particular weapon. It also prevents soldiers from firing on their own and committing human rights abuses. ABACOS governs all small arms and ammunition, as well as vehicles such as gunships and tanks. It does not however govern titans, FTL capable ships, and Weapons of Mass Destruction, these are locked for usage on a higher-authority system, more specifically one keyed to high ranking officers and the Federation President in the case of Weapons of Total Destruction, ie Exterminatus grade weapons.
ABACOS does have weaknesses though, severing the link at the source will make the entire system invalid, to mitigate this risk the neural implants will give a soldier unlimited access to all weapons and equipment, soldiers are also drilled vigorously in coping with the loss of ABACOS were such an event to occur. The only power known to be able to remotely block ABACOS are the Necrons.
Lately a system derived from ABACOS is being used by federal law enforcement on various planets. Coining the phrase, 'What one officer knows, they all know,' making police corruption completely non-existent. It's like the NPC guards in Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, (STOP RIGHT THERE CRIMINAL SCUM! YOU HAVE VIOLATED THE LAW!) In the grim darkness of the 41st Millennium, there is no privacy.
