Thank you all for the memes and omakes! They inspired me to edit and polish up the next chapter of the Liberator's day off.
The Liberator's Day Off (Part 5)
The trouble with having a heroic reputation for gallantry and derring do is that people assume you enjoy being in deadly danger and go out of their way to provide you with some.
Trazyn was proving no exception.
Trazyn had agreed to drop me off at Galavant Hive, a moderately-sized hive world at a crossroads to pretty much everywhere in the galaxy, then confirmed my worst fears by proving extremely easy to sidetrack.
Both Jurgen and Liar-haz were lurking behind me as I stood with Trazyn in some uncomfortable room aboard his ship. Both doing a good job guarding at my elbow and pretending to be inscrutable, helped by the fact that they were swaddled in some absurdly, impractically primitive void suits. Necron ships being unfamiliar with organic niceties like 'air' or 'heat', we needed the suits. The vacuum suits had been grudingly provided by the Curator after I had politely refused his first plan, which was to put the eldar, Jurgen and I into stasis for the voyage. I'd been prepared to extend the argument I dropped of exhaustion rather than actively consent to being frozen, when the Curator had abruptly paused, hastily agreed, grabbed the what appeared to be the first halfway suitable object to hand out of, apparently, nowhere, and hustled us aboard his ship. Despite his obvious rush, the Curator favored us with an extremely detailed catalog of how exactly to use the primitive things, along with several parenthetical threats to be extraordinarily careful with his irreplicable Apollo Program Spacesuits or suffer the wrath of an upset museum archivist with unlimited power.
He clearly expected their immediate return as soon as they were no longer necessary. That was fine by me, since the things were obviously the product of some indescribably primitive feral world and barely rated to survive more than a few hours, which was all the time the voyage was promised to take.
Then Trazyn decided to show off.
"I have a duty to collect something here, and there's a show you might be interested in!" he explained as his xenos ship came into orbit a blue ang green ball that was even more obviously a obvious war zone. He hummed cheerfully, then absently granted my request for a proper tactical display. "I thought you might like to see how your war against Nurgle is proceeding in the Imperium." The megalomaniacal metal moron said, with the absurdly pleased air I'd last seen on my daughter in the middle of toilet training, when she proudly held up the evidence of learning to properly and thoroughly wipe by waving the stinky toilet tissue two centimeters under my fatherly nose.
"Isn't this a bit close?!" I said in a strangled voice, watching the hololith and icons the curator had provided. Veteran of far too many liberation marches and void battles, my eye had no trouble decoding the icons arrayed before me, after Trazyn had helpfully pointed out the position of his ship, tucked in well within point blank lance range of an imperial frigate.
"They can't see us." He said. "It's perfectly safe."
I wondered what the necron equivalent of a the emperor is, and if Trazyn was in the habit of feeding such an entity straight lines. The instant he said it, the whole ship shuddered.
"Huh." The metal creature said. "How odd." I watched in horror as half the imperial icons hovering above the nameless world abruptly went red and vanished, and my eyes flew one of the live feeds and watched as a frigate...came apart at the seams.
My eyes flared wide in horrified recognition. "That was an entropic curse!" I cried.
"Yes, interesting." Trazyn mused. "A very strong one, too. This must be a major incursion. It usually doesn't much of have an effect on Necron ships. Not much a problem for us, though quite the disaster for Imperium.""
"Why?" I asked.
"That, well, that *was* an expeditionary force guarding a relief convoy of important medical supplies to Lantonia." Trazyn explained. "One of which happened to be carrying a new and potent weapon against the forces of the plague lord. I thought you might have a proprietary interest in seeing the results of your life's work, but...the ship carrying the panacea shipment and manufactoria instructions just disintegrated." The Necron lord shrugged. "This world is doomed, which unfortunately leaves far less time to recover the staff of honor from the Eternal Garden." The creature clicked in annoyance. "I'll be back soon, then we can be on our way."
I watched on the Necron equivalent of a hololith as a sprinkle of lifepods and drop shuttles cascaded from the stricken convoy like drops of falling blood onto the world below. My eyes darted, looking for signs I desperately hoped I wouldn't find, and my blood congealed as it did. It's never a good sign when you can spot the demonic incursion with the naked eye from orbit.
I knew the Emperor was probably not returning my calls these days, but on the off chance he was I begged Him for succor for all those doomed souls. Aloud, and conscious of my audience, I whispered the Remembrance Creed, the ecumenical prayer on the doors of the House of Remembrance in Slawkenberg. Then I paused.
"Trazyn," I demanded, with a sudden, cold suspicion. "Where in the imperium are we?"
Trazen waved a casual finger, summoning a galactic map. It didnt' take me long for logic to confirm what my instincts had been shrieking at me: if this world of Lantonia fell to the plague lord, an entire sector would fall with it: a sector key to the bulwark of support against the tyranid invaders and holding a blocking position in orkish space. I could see, with icy clarity, the domino potential of the disaster. I swore and said as much to Trazyn, who agreed, absently collecting supplied and adding details to the strategic assessment. "I'd rather hoped I'd been able to enjoy a victory with you before we part ways, but," The being shrugged with all the indifference of a diehard scrumball fan watching a game played by two teams he wasn't particularly fond of in an entirely different league several sectors away from his home team who, in his opinion, weren't playing the sport correctly anyway.
I closed my eyes, hideous images of a hundred worlds as stricken as Adumbria racing through my brain, and cursed. More to the point, the sector sliced a line of potentially tainted worlds across my path from Galavant towards the subsector I had privately chosen as my destination for a quiet disappearance far, far away from war. I spun the map, and considered the angles, before swallowing another curse. To go around the obstacle, I'd have to travel through ork space, or tau space, or...a through a little pocket empire called the Cainite protectorate.
"We have to do something." I said, my mouth running ahead of myself. "Trazyn, you kill the nurgalite magister, and I'll-"
"No." In my whirling thoughts, I felt a stab of sheer terror. My habits as the Liberator had betrayed me. I'd just tried to order an almost infinitely powerful being around like he was one of my hideously capable Cainite subordinates. I concealed an internal flinch. My only excuse for such a lapse in survival instinct is that, somehow, in all the improbable calamities that constituted my life, it had always worked when I'd done it before.
"Or rather, I could, but why should I bother?" The thing shrugged. "Life, death, war, the rise and fall of empire, dull diseased creature doing dully diseased things...hardly culturally significant." The Curator shook his head. 'I'm a curator of history, not an exterminator of vermin. Not my area.' He made a final adjustment to the hang of his belt, and strode out of the room, calling over his shoulder. "I'll be back shortly." The phrase dropped into my ears like a ring of the Doom bell as the 65 million year old creature who operated on a completely different timescale and definition of 'shortly' promised to return. I felt, with all the cold clarity of prophecy, that it would be a century at least before I saw him again, and If I lost sight of him now I would be trapped on a metal ship orbiting a world lost in the clutches of Decay until I ran out of air, which in these pitiful excuses for voidsuit would be a matter of bare hours.
I hastened after him. Jurgen and Liar-haz followed, and I fell in at a trot to keep up with the Necron's wide stride, "Trazyn," I panted as he turned down the hall into a vast room dominated by the seething green of an active necron warp portal. "I will trade you one culturally significant item- to wit, the commissarial hat of Ciaphas Cain, Liberator of Slawkenberg and Leader of the Cainite protectorate, for the extermination of a that dull vermin of a nurgalite magister, it's coven, and it's summoned entities."
The Necron lord stopped, the light of avarice blazing in his eyes. "The hat and the sash." he immediately riposeted.
I faced him squarely, gazing into his interested oculars. I thought about what I knew about my luck, and made my decision. "If there's more than one nurgalite magister, or a demon, or any other nurgalite threat to Liberation on Lantonia, and you protect my people from it," I said, "You can also have the bloody sash."
I had to follow him, of course, and the ruthlessly self-interested part of me drank in every last detail I could as the excited Necron bounced his way through the ship, summoning a host to battle. Thousands of scuttling scarab horrors responded to his call. Hundreds, perhaps even upwards of a thousand, skeletal robots bearing arrayed themselves in serried ranks, some spindly with things that looked rather like guns, some thicker, with three legs, wielding massive blades my tactical mind immediately worked out three different ways to parry.
I couldn't hear any clanging, or banging, or crunching, or any of the whirring I'd become so familiar with while helping Trazyn rearrange his museum displays, because of course the airless interior of the necron ship didn't transmit sound. But I felt the vibrations of the deck through the soles of my overly large boots as a host obeyed the Curator's whimsical commands.
I did my best not to goggle at the sheer size and scale of the necron portal room, nor the glowing green obscenity of the portal itself. The warp energies were obvious to my Emeli-schooled eye, as was the skill with which they were clearly, wholly contained.
A few other, more distinctive Necrons surrounded Trazyn, and I studied them with a mixture of terror and interest. I hadn't interacted with any but the Curator, and had barely seen the other mechanica, but...while most of the necrons seemed as mindless as servitors, these had the malevolent green eyes that gleamed with the same dire intelligence as the Curator himself. And while the rank upon rank of the metal killers I strode past ignored me with the same disinterest as an uncrewed tank, these ones...seemed to be deliberately ignoring me with the studied indifference of a high society dame with a grudge.
I mentally marked these as the most dangerous.
Trazyn, with the fine disdain of someone convinced they have absolutely nothing to fear, stepped through the portal first, and I, conscious that he was the only thing resembling an ally I had on this whole dead tomb of a ship, dogged his heels like a coursing hound, Liar-haz and Jurgen right behind.
The portal was every bit as terrible as I had come to expect of any form of warp travel. I felt like my bowls were yanked, twisted inside out, and used to decorate the wrong side of my skin, all the while a hundred shrieking demons bolted through the ears I suddenly certain I no longer possessed- and then we were through, and down, and at war.
Trazyn, while obviously in a hurry, nevertheless took the time to very carefully strip us out of his exceedingly precious voidsuits and make them disappear back into whatever pocket dimension he'd summoned them from.
This, of course, left me running around a plagueworld barefaced in nothing but the informal Liberator uniform I had been kidnapped in. Bare-assed naked in...was this really the fifth time this had happened? No...there had been that one time on Delta sigma, and how should I count that webway misadventure, and...
I violently shook my head, and drew my new lasgun and chainsword. You'd think I'd have become properly paranoid about it the second time this had happened, but it was pointless now to think about the number of previous times when we were about to fight infected Nurgal-spawned horrors at any moment.
Maybe I was just emulating Imperial commissars from the cheaper sort of escapist fiction that I remembered being passed around the commessar cadet quarters at the schola progenia. The adventure stories where the commessars showed up on fetid forgeworlds without respirators or trotted around iceworlds without goggles or who slogged through sewers without muckboots, always using their comessarial sash as a sort of makeshift subsitute for proper equipment.
As I tagged along, cursing my lack of material preparedness, also had reason to mentally bless all the running around I'd done raising Zeraya Cain in her toddler phase.
It was good practice for the absurdity of prosecuting this war, when my main weapon, to wit, one infinitely powerful Necron lord and his thousands-strong Necron host, kept getting distracted by something shiny.
For the first time in months, ever since meeting the docent, I met and another of the metal monsters who could, and did, speak. Though not to me. He never gave me a name and glanced over my small band of organics trailing after his lord with the sort of contempt used for cockroaches.
It was a good thing, too, because a graveyard was about the worst to be on Lantonia. Especially this graveyard.
"Where are we?" I asked Trazyn as he hustled through a vast and rolling parkland. My legs were long, but his were longer, and while not to put too fine a point on it I am one of the fastest humans I know, he was a metal machine from the dawn of time and could be considerably faster if he wanted.
"This is the City Park," Trazyn cheerfully explained. "It's part of a large complex of green space in the city, and this one connects to the Palace grounds. He waved a casual hand at several bushes that had been carved into elaborate shapes and fanciful creatures. "You can see that the Lantonian art of topiary has reached it's finest expression along this particular boulevard-"
"My Lord" The Necron loping along beside us says, "It also leads to the Eternal Garden."
"Of course it does!" Trazyn chuckled. "Every sentient spieces reserves it's highest expression of art and culture for the decoration of it's richest tombs, and that's the best place to find the most culturally significant artifacts. The governors of Lantinia take their final rest here."
"But sir, this is the middle of an undying plauge-" The necron pacing Trazyn protested, as I simultaniously found enough breath to bellow- "YOU'RE FRAKKING WELL GOING TOMB ROBBING?"
"Why yes!" The necron giggled, as we rounded a corner and nearly ran into a hundred-strong hoard of rotting, walking, richly dressed dead. "Fire at will!"
Thus I managed to establish a solid working relationship with the being in record time, as this was but the first time he and I bolted after Trazyn not deadly danger. The howling hoard of Lantonia's not-quite-deceased-enough governors, assorted nobility, and a few rotting corpses holding antique lasweapons were no match for my inidental allies. Fortunately the Necrons made short work of them and I only had to bisect two of the rotting horrors with my chainsword and pot three with my rifle before the rest of the army caught up and undying robots swarmed undead monstrosities under, all the while cursing Trazyn for being a distratable toddler and he was snickering over his capture of no less than three bejewled gubenatorial Lantonian death masks only slightly covered in gore.
The nameless necron politely reminding his lord of his current duty to pot the magister while I played bluff miliary man who spoke the truth without fear or favor and cursed a blue streak at him to keep his damned promises get back in the fight, or, if he couldn't concentrate worth a damned, delegate to someone who *could.*
"Oh all right," The kleptomaniac pouted after thinking over my suggestion to delegate for far too long, long enough for me to fear that the mad machine would stick me in charge of a whole host of machines. Lest you think this was excessively paranoid or perhaps arrogant of me, I suggest reviewing literally any event in my career so far and then tell me I was a fool to fear being handed the controls to yet another army of terrifyingly deadly machines with no idea of the capabilities.
From that auspicious beginning the nameless Necron and I quickly developed into the sort of well-oiled teamwork that, between the two of us, managed to get the nutty keptomaniac properly cajoled into taking aimed at a Tallyman ranting his sickening creed to a thousand-strong hoard of shambling dead. The thing didn't look particulary strong, but boiling up out of a hole in the ground behind it came something even stronger- a death guard demon prince of Nurgle. I'd never seen one before and I hope to whatever powers I eventually dare pray to that I never see such a hideous thing again.
It landed a solid kick on Trazyn, and sent him flying through the air like a scrumball aimed at the scoring loop, the nameless necron lord and I abruptly found ourselves back to back in melee nearly swarmed under by lesser cultists while Jurgen, with a pained grimace, let off his first and, as it turned out, only, blast with his melta. A crawling burst of wrongness spread over the field, followed by a shriek of utter dispair and half the demon durned away in flare of actinic light. Then a furious Trazyn scrambled back into the fight obliterated the remainings of the creature.
But the fight wasn't over. Nurgal armies aren't really noted for their brains. They're a bit like tyranids that way, in that most of the creatures in them attack according to some preprogrammed stragety unless directed otherwise by a governing intelligence. And when you put paid to that intelligence, the rest...well the rest revert to being mindless.
But not in this fight.
For all the Grandfather claims to love his children equally, his children are entirely unwilling to share power. The most powerful goes out of their way to obliterate any inconveniet free will in their subordinates, and as a result create powerful engines of destruction that nevertheless have a single point of failure.
I had cause to be very, very grateful I had made the gift of my sash conditinal upon the destruction of 'any nurgalite threat' because, I will say, the damned necron earned it that day. There was a whole, damned, cooperating *council* of infected mages.
After nearly getting his chest stove in by a demon prince, Trazyn stayed on task far far better, only needing to be remined ten more times to see the business through. By the time we interrupted two separate ritual sites before they could complete whatever warptainted foulness they were attemping, I decided the nameless tinhead who was playing earnest advisor to my foumouthed wasn't all that bad for being amember of a race of abominable killing machines from the dawn of time.
Despite my attempts to use the galaxy's most distractable demigod as my personal shield, I'd ended up in melee with demonspawn on far too many occasions, Trazyn was chortling over his bulging sack of culturally significant lantonian loot, and, finally, finally, declared the world free of active chaos taint.
"You are certain?" I asked.
"I could attempt to explain how I know," Trazyn said, "but you would be here for another centruy while I discussed the complextied and subtleties of necron technology. So you could take my word or don't. " He held out expectant hands.
"I can't thank you for what you are." I said formally, every inch the Liberator. "But I can thank you for what you have done today." I passed him the sash and the hat, confident that those, at least, were artifacts I was was unlikely to ever see again.
At that point, our formal little ceremony was interrupted by another Eldar Harlequin. It barreled into Liar-haz,snatched him up, bounced over Trazyn, then the both of them tumbled into a hole in reality that was neither a necron warp portal or a demonic warp portal, and something in me whined at the fact that there were more than one way to tear the materium a new hole and my life was such a joke to the gods that I had *seen three of them that day.* The door to the webway shivered, and began to close like water settling back into place after being disturbed by a thrown rock.
My head whipped around as Trazyn bolted up with a shout of thwarted rage. "That was the real Lierahaz!" He shouted, enraged. "AND HE TOOK MY LIBERATOR HAT! AFTER HIM!" The nameless necron, who for an eyeballless, expressionless metal robot, managed a remarkably good eyeroll, and strode off to stick some long necron stick into the rapidly closing webway portal for all the world like a pole proping up a tent. Trazyn bolted through it, his entire army on his heels.
I froze, torn between two incalculably great dangers.
Follow a childish, overpowered ancient into an unknown labrynth in pursuit of an eldar? Or stay trapped on an Imperium world in the aftermath of a major Chaos incursion that may or may not actually be over?
The nameless Necron held the portal open while all of Trazyn's army bolted through it, then glanced at me, the question obvious in his stance.
Like so many other choices in my life, it was an impossible choice.
I made it anyway.
I flourished my chainsword, flicking rot from my blade, and held it out in a farewell salute.
He gave me the smallest, most infintimal nod, and vanished, leaving Jurgan and I alone, stranded in heretical clothing deep in Imperial space, on a battlefield knee-deep in the corpses of thousands of my greatest enemy's rotting dead.