Chapter 10 – The Fall
24 Hours Later
In the end, the necrons were too strong for him to defeat via conventional methods of warfare. He'd realized this after their monoliths had rise from the ground, breaking through the crust of the planet like an eggshell, laying waste to the armies he threw at them in a futile attempt to delay their advance even just a bit long. Ranks of Necron soldiers, hundreds of thousands strong, strode across the surface and hunted down the pockets of his forces the floating pyramids had missed.
It took him four days to lose the planet all but completely. It was then that he'd given up on beating the necrons through tactics. It was then that he'd powered up the halley engines and sent the moon that orbited his first home in this galaxy careening into it.
It was then that he watched his best bet for beating them explode before even reaching the atmosphere.
They'd used some kind of weapon, like a massive gauss flayer that emerged from their largest pyramid and destroyed the moon as it was pushed out of orbit, shattering it into a million, million pieces. The planet was showered with debris, but such impacts were small, on par with the destruction caused by the dark eldar ship's weapons, nowhere near enough to do anything but inconvenience the necrons.
He had never stood a chance against them.
He took the satellite that stored the ork spores and crashed it onto one of the moons of the gas giant it orbited. They began to gestate almost instantly and he sent a few thousand riflemen and a dozen Tactical Enforcers to the planet, along with an interplanetary vessel to hopefully kickstart the process of the ork tek advancements. Hopefully, they could grow in numbers and size soon enough to be a meaningful threat to the necrons and give them something else to think about.
His fireflies noted several large orks that looked remarkably similar to Git-Crusha, but he had no time to think about that.
His expansion ships were still several days away from the nearest star systems, the closest of which was eight light years. The precursor FTL engines he'd stuck on those ships could travel at a pace of a single light year every twenty hours. If he had built them far larger and more powerful, he could have gotten a higher pace of up to ten times that speed, but he had needed a balance between size and numbers with his economy so strained and he'd chosen to send a dozen smaller ships to those systems closest to him that seemed the least likely to be inhabited. Not that he knew much about what made a good system to inhabit.
Each ship had a hundred Patents, ten Tactical Enforcers and Shock-class Gunships, and a portal large enough for him to put any of his units bar the Metro-Rex through it. It also had enough generators to run itself and the portal without relying on external sources, something he'd had to think of in case he lost the entire system. It looked like a large brick and was little more than a prototype that he had rushed into construction the moment he finished its design.
He was unimaginably grateful that his FTL, or any of his technology, didn't rely on the Warp. He was not planning on getting anywhere near any psyker bullshit until he had found someway to defend himself from Chaos corruption.
Frustratingly, necrons were probably the best at defending themselves from the Warp and cutting off the psychic power it granted.
His commander body had previously been moved to a different planet the moment he'd realized Necrons shared his world. After seeing the moon's destruction, he'd immediately boarded a ship and flung himself into the depths of the void at top speed. He'd wanted to at least set up a working economy on a nearby system before he sent his main body, possibly his greatest weakness, over but this would have to do as he did not want to share a star system with any weapon that powerful.
Meanwhile, he made plans for the final stand in the star system. He would try his hardest to not be followed and delay the necrons for as long as possible. On the fifth day he'd kept sending troops by the millions to attack the necrons for another day, but by this point he couldn't even get past the atmosphere without being shot down by anti-orbital fire. On the sixth, his focus was to create as many starships with guns as he could, but these were flimsy, tiny, and weak. Gnats compared to the rising armada of necrons, who swat hundreds of them aside with total ease without taking a single loss. The seventh day saw them attack the other worlds and moons he controlled. He fortified them as heavily as he could, but it made little difference. There were millions of necrons at this point that swept through his paltry defenses like a knife through melted butter.
In the end, the final battle came on the eighth day and he sent out his final card, the Metro-Rex. The titan was teleported from its storage in deep space by a helios titan, his own version of the deep strike, right on top of the necrons. Its weight had managed to crush a hundred necrons and one of their vehicles, but that had been the extent of the damage it had dealt. Concentrated Gauss fire had rendered it a smoking ruin that collapsed in moments.
With the destruction of the Metro-Rex, he overloaded the reactors of every unit and facility he had in the system, hopefully simulating his 'death' well enough that the necrons wouldn't think to look for him elsewhere or at least damage them enough to delay them a bit longer. By that point, there were only a few thousand orks, so he doubted his plan with them would work out. Still, they had a lot more scrap to work with, so maybe they could figure something out.
His economy was in tatters, almost as bad as after the Dark Eldar orbital bombardment that had nearly killed him. The loss of storage was particularly cutting as even the resources he'd already gathered had all disappeared, possibly annihilated or absorbed by the suddenly shrunken pocket dimension his economy relied upon.
All he had left were thirteen ships, a hundred and thirty Tactical Enforcers, a hundred and thirty Shock-class gunships, thirteen hundred Patent fabricators, one Commander, and a few gauss rifles-worth of necrodermis.
He had lost. Completely and utterly.
This wasn't like the time with the dark eldar where they had used their ship to nearly destroy him. He had nearly died, yes, but he had forced them off the planet, he had been able to beat them. They might not have ran, but they certainly didn't come back to the fight. That wasn't the case here.
He'd thought he was strong. The necrons had proven just how weak he really was.
He wanted to cry, to scream, to yell and punch the wall. Yet he did not. He had no eyes that could tear up. He no longer had any units with components that could be used to give voice to his frustrations. And punching the wall was meaningless to his metal body. The pain that might have been used to focus a human mind did not exist for him. Only this purely mental… anguish.
His logical side knew that these feelings were not just pointless, but actively harmful for him. Losing had always been a possibility, all he could reasonably hope for was the chance to survive, rebuild, and learn from his mistakes. Getting hung up on a single star system in a galaxy with countless more was foolish.
Even if it was the first world he'd truly started to consider his own.
Foolish? Yes. Naïve? Certainly. Liable to bite him in the ass? Proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Yet he couldn't help the feeling of displacement, of loneliness that permeated his thoughts as he watched his ships inch closer and closer on a mental map of the nearby star systems. That feeling of being lesser than before. Because he was lesser than before.
That world, that entire system had belonged to him. Not like how a house belonged to its owner or even how the sol system belonged to humans. It wasn't something so easily described in the terms humans should have been able to understand. He had covered its many worlds and moons in extensions of himself. Every hill and mountain had mining extractors, the ground had thrummed with the gentle vibrations of countless generators that hid underneath the surface in massive caverns. The void itself had been filled with his floating factories and countless satellites that he could peer through with less than a thought. He'd explored every nook and cranny of the worlds and moons with dust locusts, and there was nothing larger than a pebble floating between the planets that he had not been aware of. He had gone from all of that, to… this. He had never really noticed just how much information he had been able to access until suddenly it wasn't there.
He fabricated a Rifleman with the tiny bit of metal generated by his Commander and had it sit down in front of him in a fetal position, rocking back and forth, ever so slowly.
He was going insane, he realized.
He should have been scared by the apathy he felt at that thought.
16 Hours Later
The first of his ships reached their destinations, coming out of FTL to a barren system. It was a cold place, with a tiny red star at its heart. Only a single planet, a barren and mishappen rock that his scans indicated was barren of even the tiniest of lifeforms, and further checks deep into the crust showed there were no necrons that he could find. An asteroid belt circled the star, but even that was thin.
Technically, it was exactly the kind of star system he should have been hoping for at the moment, even if it was a little barren. Finding a world with life was the last thing he should have wanted at the moment. And yet, seeing this empty system only reminded him of the realm he had lost.
His expansion onto the system soon began, even as his other ships journeyed ever closer to their destinations. His Rifleman continued to rock back and forth, scraping away at the paint with every movement.
32 Hours Later
Another three ships arrived in another three systems. These were a bit more varied, two yellow stars and one blue, all larger than the first. Seven planets between them, all useable. Yet still no life.
He considered turning his commander's ship towards one of the systems, the blue star that had three worlds. The one he'd have the easiest time defending due to the amount of space. Yet, he did not. He was hesitant to keep his commander in any permanent location.
He would keep going, travelling through the empty void, far away from anything important. If attacked, he could use the teleport gate in the ship to escape.
The rest of his ships would arrive at their systems in less than two days.
His Rifleman had stopped rocking. There was no paint left where he sat.
Give me your stones ahem soul