The Revolver

[Lord Sotek]

Reposting an unfinished story from the old 2S, in anticipation of an event related to its planned conclusion...

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Regional Governor's Palace, Gehenna Hive, Pharus III; hive world on The Eastern Fringe

Inquisitor Golan was not a very important or influential member of the Ordos Hereticus. He knew this; it was why he was here, on a remote world of the Eastern Fringe that only barely remembered it was part of the Imperium. An uninfluential inquisitor for an uninfluential planet. But he valued his work keenly, regardless. The very remoteness that caused worlds like these to go beneath the notice of more important heads was also a potential breeding ground for heresy, and it fell to less important heads like Golan's to root it out. Dissidents, unrest fomenting amongst civilians, these he could and did deal with, alongside the Arbites. But now he'd found something new, the likes of which he'd not encountered before. An unknown.

Golan hated unknowns.

So it was that he had come to the capital of this small world, seeking the aid of the planetary governor's current, most esteemed guest. An Ultramarine.

Inquisitor Golan waited as the ceramite-clad giant in front of him holstered his sidearm, and turned away from his practice at the firing range. Then Golan handed him the Pistol.

   

[Lord Sotek]

Sublevel AW234-E, entrance to Gehenna Underhive

Golan had hoped for greater support than this, but the Arbites had their hands full with the middle-hive laborer's strikes, and Governor Salk had been unwilling to commit more than a meagre handful of PDF soldiers on an investigation of something that hadn't even been confirmed to exist. Fares' cooperation was an immense boost, but the two of them couldn't scour an entire hive by themselves. Thus, the inqusitor played his last card, and made contact with the Redemptionists.

Father Julek was a gaunt, feverish man, appearing as if he had been hollowed out and filled with some burning force that had consumed every spare inch of him until only its own impetus kept him standing. Inquisitor Golan found the priest refreshingly different from most Redemptionist clergymen he had met; for all their unquestioned loyalty to the Imperium, most were melodramatic and overbearing in the extreme. Julek, by contrast, was gregarious and full of quiet intensity; he saved the volcanic zeal which so awed and cowed his followers for the pulpit. More importantly, Julek had men in the numbers that would be needed for this kind of search.

   

[Lord Sotek]

Sublevel BN527-E, Underhive Depths

Acolyte Moltus

[Lord Sotek]

Golan

[Lord Sotek]

Golan was unstoppable.

There had been a wall in the way of his quick route to the battle. His power armor had seen him through that. A sump spider pounced on them halfway there; his bolt pistol had torn it apart without even a pause to check the aim. A thick bulkhead door, much taller and wider than a man, blocked his path now. Three strokes from his powersword carved a new door through it. He kicked the slab of steel in contemptuously, burst through the opening, and was met with a scene of utter carnage.

Pulverized bodies lay everywhere, splattering the walls and soaking the floor with their profuse and slippery bloodshed as a line of metal-clad humanoid shapes trading fire with the sorry and shattered remnants of Korso's team. He took in the slumped and umoving form of one of the armored beings on the ground; they could bleed, then, and they could die. Good.

As Golan took his second step into the room, the last knot of redemptionists were shredded in a shattering hail of lead. The enemy had killed roughly twoscore Redemptionist warriors in a matter of minutes, using surprise and the confined, cover-devoid layout of the nexus room entryway to decimate the exposed and tightly packed men. The gore was appalling, repulsing.

Golan simply counted that there were nine of these new foes and kept on charging.

The metal-clad warriors swiveled neatly in place, bringing their guns to bear on this new threat as Julek's redemptionists and the PDF troopers surged in behind the Inquisitor. Up close, he could tell what Fares had; they were no giants. With their bulk, they reminded him far more of chrono-gladiators, or genhanced soldiers of some sort. He snarled in fury, pondering whether they and their revolvers might be the workings of some tech-heretic reject from humanity.

The warriors had responded to the new threat with the speed of veteran fighters, but Golan was quicker on the draw; seconds before the chugging growl of their weapons opening fire split the air, his bolt pistol snapped up on fully automatic. The center warrior's upper torso disappeared under the force of an entire magazine of bolt rounds, its mighty body remaining standing for moments that distorted and stretched beyond their length in the frenzy of the Inquisitor's combat perception.

One.

Slowly, ponderously, almost indignantly, it sank to its knees and toppled while its brethren shredded more Redemptionists behind him in reply, bullets that tore gaping holes in the other men pattering harmlessly off of Golan's power armor.

Golan was unstoppable. The room was small, and the momentum his. The distance closed, his Redemptionist lackeys pulling ahead of him in their mad fervor. The Inquisitor's ad-hoc warband crashed into the metal warriors like a tidal wave.

The enemy smashed the redemptionists aside like a granite cliff.

Bodies crunched sickeningly beneath the force of gun buts and metal fists whose knuckles discharged in a corona of electrical energy. Point blank bursts tore through whole rows of men. Broken corpses flew through the air, hurled away by the servo-enhanced power of their slayer's counterattack, and Golan cursed as the press of his own men hampered his efforts, delaying his move to the fore. In those mere seconds before he pushed his way through a dozen more men died.

Lashing out like a striking snake at the giant in front of him, Golan's power sword sliced effortlessly through its strange twin-barreled autogun before flicking in and out of its head and chest. The warrior shuddered under the mortal wounds and Golan twisted, punching its falling body off of his sword with his free hand as he spun to block the swing of an enormous pickaxe. Deflecting the deadly tool to the side, he stabbed its owner down in three lightning strikes.

Two.

Time contorted. The movements of his opponents seemed impossibly slow, his own impossibly swift. Another heavy, twin-barreled gun fell in two pieces, its owner in three as red blood spurted from the stump of a severed arm.

Three.

About him, the redemptionists could do little but die under the fury of the armored warriors' defense. One stabbed a knife into a seam between armor plates, only for the wounded foe to keep fighting and punch his attacker's head clean off his shoulders in a blast of discharging electricity. Golan watched as the warrior then shot a PDF trooper with one of their revolvers; a split second after the slug's impact on the unfortunate soldier's flak armor, it exploded. The blast punch the slug's remnants through the armor and the soldier's body almost like a counterfiet boltgun, blasting an immense hole through his chest and wounding the man behind him with the broken slug's shrapnel.

Closer by, Another warrior drew a huge cleaver of a combat blade, which hummed and whirred as it sliced through the air; an enormous vibroblade, if Golan didn't miss his mark. Probably monomolecular.

He ducked as it sliced through a thick pipe behind him; definitely monomolecular. And its owner was something of a swordsman too, Golan admitted sourly as the warrior made uncannily swift parries and ripostes for using such a huge and brutal weapon, hacking through three flak-armored soldiers in his path before reaching the Inquisitor again. A metal plated fist caught Golan in the chest, its electrical discharge blistering the black paint on his power armor; he reeled back as the swordsman swung its weapon up to bisect him with a vertical slash, roaring victory.

When the blade reached its zenith, in the second before it started to come down Golan made his move.

Quick as lightning, he surged forwards and smashed the blade's hilt further upwards, sending the weapon spinning up into the air before he rammed his power sword through his enemy's gut, ripping it up and free through the warrior's chest and head, which stood only inches taller than his own, he realized.

Four.

Golan deftly caught the falling blade in his off-hand and executed a neat two-blade flourish that carved the cleaver-wielder into numerous chunks before he ever hit the floor, and allowed himself to be lost in the ebb and flow of death's dance as the remaining warriors' massively broad forms closed in around him.

A feint to the left made him an opening, and a second later a limbless torso collapsed to the ground.

Five.

Another foe fell, neatly quartered with a cross slash from both blades.

Six.

In slow motion, Golan ducked under the swing of a massive combat knife, power sword snaking out as it stabbed through groin armor before shearing into external servos and taking the ironclad leg off at the hip in a spray of blood.

Seven.

Turning as he completed the previous lunge, he hacked out with the borrowed blade in his left hand, cleaving open the chest of the foe behind him from shoulder to hip.

Eight.
A frantic kick knocked awry the heavy gun that had been brought to bear on him, and it spat a barrage of rounds into the ceiling as he carved the owner's head from its shoulders.

...Nine.

...

...

...

Golan straightened, panting, his dripping power sword in one hand and thenow chipped and mangled cleaver in the other as the adrenaline receded and realized that there were no more opponents left. He bled from several minor wounds, but didn't care. They were nothing; they wouldn't even slow him down. Julek lay in a corner, possibly dead, at the very least concussed and unconscious after stabbing one of the warriors in the neck and preventing the deathblow it was about to deal Golan, before being hurled across the room for his troubles.

The inquisitor was the only living thing left standing in the nexus room. Most of his PDF soldiers were dead or collapsed from their injuries, and if any of the other redemptionists had survived, they had fled into the underhive. The sheer human wreckage about him was incredible. His mind raced as the entire fight replayed itself before his eyes.

Nine. There had only been nine of them...

Part of him realized that they had defeated his more than threescore warriors by splitting them up and luring more than half into a hideously effective trap. Another part realized that the Redemptionists were fanatic, untrained civilians bereft of any body armor, not competent soldiers. A third part still shuddered that so few enemies had wrought so great a butcher's bill.

They were at least based in humanoid physiology; that he could tell for certain. He had been an Inquisitor for long enough to know that; for all their anomalous bulk, they were shaped like men, and they moved like men. The cleaver used against him matched none of the xenos sword-forms he had duelled and bested over the decades.

The question was, what precisely had been done with these ironclad warriors that had turned them into such effective weapons against their once-fellow men. His mind raced over the possibilities. Perhaps they had been induced to mutation, or surgically enhanced in a mockery of Humanity's finest? Perhaps thy had been loaded with disfiguring drugs that swelled their muscles and their bloodlust?

Whatever of the myriad likely possibilities, he had to find out the specifics so that they could be fought, so that they could be stopped, because he was an Inquisitor. He couldn't afford to assume that these nine had been the only examples of their kind. He couldn't afford to assume that things would have been quite different if he'd had trained Guardsmen with him instead of fanatics and a handful of PDF. He was an Inquisitor and for Mankind's sake he could take no chances. His eye caught on the closest of the giants, slumped before him in a seated position up against an incomprehensible tangle of machinery.

Curiosity overwhelmed the Inquisitor now that danger had passed. There lay his foe and his mission, a quandary behind the metal rebreather mask of its helmet. Beholding his goal, the ironwilled old inquisitor shook off horror and regret like a worn out rag through the ease of long practice. The only thing to do now was to identify the mysterious giant he had pursued so far, and sacrificed so many lives to catch. Then the sacrifice would be worth something. Although the deaths of so many men under his command didn't particularly bother Golan beyond what it said about the deadliness of the giants, it was an expenditure, and he found it distasteful to spend lives for nothing.

He reached out and ripped off the helmet, wondering what mechanism or monstrosity he might find beneath the false iron face of this giant. Mutant? Xenos? Corrupt servitor? Some new heresy?

Golan was ready for the giant to be revealed as any of the infinite types of hideous sin against the Emperor: His countless years of striving against the galaxy's most perilous and terrible forces had inured him to such things. He was ready for any monstrosity. He was ready for a pitifully ruined thing, some heretek's twisted and tormented warrior-thrall, little better than a servitor and eager for him to grant it peace.

He was fairly surprised to find nothing so obviously deviant, for there were many ways to subvert a man's physiology into a powerful beast, but all left their mark, and most gruesomely. Instead he beheld the heavy-featured face of a perfectly normal looking human; unmarred by mutation, staring back at him with vacant, faintly accusing dead eyes.

A fascinating puzzle indeed. But now he had the pieces.

[Lord Sotek]

((FYI in posting this new update I've gone through and done some fairly major editing and  reworking on all the previous posts, so if you've got the time and patience I'd highly suggest giving it a fresh readthrough this time around.))



Fares felt stars burst in his vision as his foe