V3 Chapter 43: Early Effects and Pre-Campaign Preparation
Two weeks had passed since the crusade fleet entered the Warp.
Beyond the hulls, the tides of the immaterium churned in constant motion, while the Gellar Field readings held steady on every instrument. Inside the fleet, however, things were considerably less calm. The Crusade Ground Force Unified Combat Awareness and Discipline Protocol had generated significant disruption across the entire expeditionary force.
Astartes, Astra Militarum Generals, Commissars-General, and Inquisitors all found the protocol deeply questionable.
None of them had ever encountered anything like it.
Soldiers seeing red outlines in combat. Vehicle machine spirits exhibiting anomalous elevated response. Mortal formations receiving measurable enhancement in battle. Any one of those elements, presented to any Imperial force, would ordinarily trigger an immediate investigation.
The problem was that this protocol had been issued directly under the authority of the Lord of the Thirteenth Legion, Roboute Guilliman.
The Thirteenth Legion's Successors retained their doubts, but Guilliman personally summoned each Chapter Master and company commander in turn and explained the tactical necessity behind the protocol. For warriors who carried the Thirteenth's bloodline, once their gene-sire had made his judgement, they were willing to execute the orders in the field even while reserving their personal concerns.
The Salamanders and Blood Angels companies were more cautious.
They did not carry Guilliman's bloodline, but they respected a returned Primarch and they respected a battlefield protocol confirmed by the supreme commander of the expeditionary force. Doubts persisted, but they would hold silence until the fleet reached Terra.
The reaction among the mortal officers was more complicated.
Astra Militarum Generals and Commissars-General did not dare openly oppose a gene-sire Primarch's orders, but they submitted a continuous stream of requests for supplementary clarification, disposal procedures, and commissarial authority guidelines. Most of them were not primarily concerned with whether soldiers would actually see red outlines. Their concern was what to do after the sighting.
This was the point the protocol had emphasised repeatedly.
When a soldier observed a red outline on a squad-mate, no one was to carry out a summary execution without orders. The immediate requirement was to report to the direct officer, commissar, or Inquisitorial liaison. Guilliman's personal signature held the most dangerously reactive officers in check, but it did not settle their nerves.
The Mechanicus priests had fixed on an entirely different section.
The prospect of what they were privately calling machine spirit elation produced intense interest among them.
They wanted to record, analyse, and make use of the phenomenon. Several had already submitted formal requests to conduct controlled trials on specific vehicles. A number of Archmagi had debated the matter for the better part of a day before Guilliman ordered it all deferred.
The Inquisitors with the actual standing to challenge the protocol on grounds of purity were intercepted by Heinz and Juno.
Heinz used his authority as a Thorian Lord Inquisitor to suppress the most aggressive voices. Juno informed several Inquisitors through her particular style of smile that creating additional complications for a newly awakened Primarch before the fleet reached Terra was something they would do better to avoid.
The only parties who could genuinely be described as pleased were the Ecclesiarchy.
Their priests began preaching across troop transports, prayer rooms, and temporary worship areas that everything described in the protocol was a miracle of the God-Emperor. The enemy outlines were a manifestation of divine judgement. The machine spirit responses were the will of the Omnissiah. The changes in soldiers' bodies were evidence that the Emperor's gaze had fallen on the crusade.
This gave Guilliman a significant headache. He did not want the Imperium explaining everything as divine miracle, but he could not directly antagonise the Ecclesiarchy at this stage. He was also forced to acknowledge that it was effectively settling the confusion among soldiers who had no other framework for what they were experiencing.
What gave him a deeper headache was that the first effects of Duvette's capabilities were already becoming visible across the expeditionary force.
The passive influence of Flesh Engine had begun spreading through the crusade army. Large numbers of mortal soldiers were showing elevated metabolic rates, increased energy levels, and noticeably faster recovery times.
For an army of over a million, this was not straightforwardly good news from a management perspective.
The number of training conflicts aboard the transport vessels increased noticeably. Some regimental soldiers were landing harder strikes in combat drills. In several cases, regiments with historical antagonisms quartered on the same vessels broke into physical altercations that required ship security details and naval riot elements to handle repeatedly.
At the same time, food and nutrient paste consumption began climbing. Medical logs showed more reports of insomnia, irritability, and hyperactivity than before.
Ship captains and regimental commissars were developing headaches of their own.
They were dealing with training accidents, brawl punishments, and discipline reports every day. The commissars had not relaxed their standards and had in fact increased penalties, but they could not avoid acknowledging that many soldiers were genuinely faster and stronger than before, and considerably harder to get to stand down.
The Astartes showed the effect even more clearly.
Many warriors were spending entire days in combat cages and training platforms. Already high-intensity training regimens were being pushed further. Salamanders and Blood Angels warriors began running more live-exercise drills against Thirteenth Legion Successors.
When the reports reached Guilliman on the bridge, he stood in silence for a long time.
Duvette had shown him only the physical capability enhancements at the demonstration. Guilliman had expected the man to be holding something back, but he had not expected the extent of it. The physical improvements were already significant enough. These ancillary effects spreading across the entire army were something else entirely, and they gave Guilliman a considerably more complicated concern than the original question of Duvette's loyalty.
Tarasha Euten's return had genuinely made him more willing to trust Duvette. But trust was one thing. Placing a force that could not be fully explained inside a massive expeditionary army and managing the consequences was another.
He had begun working out how to handle it.
Duvette was entirely unaware of any of this.
He was in his cabin, working through force structure files, past campaign records, and target system archives at speed.
His average sleep over the past several days had been under three hours.
This was not as serious a problem as it would have been otherwise. Flesh Engine was affecting him as well, keeping him in a state of unusual sustained clarity. With elevated metabolism and recovery speed, he could sustain extended work periods, though his mind still felt the pressure of absorbing this volume of data.
At the moment, he was reviewing the two worlds the crusade was heading for.
Mechanicus forge world: Vulcantia.
Agri-world: Cereris.
With the reconnaissance fleet completely out of contact, Duvette had no current information on either world's status. He was working from pre-loss-of-contact records only.
Vulcantia's most significant zone was the vast foundry belt built around the equatorial space elevator.
That area held major forge complexes, ammunition production lines, heavy armour maintenance domes, and orbital transfer infrastructure. The Mechanicus would not permit large-scale orbital bombardment. The crusade force would have to advance across the surface.
This was a problem.
If the enemy held the foundry belt, the fight would have to be carried into exactly the locations the Mechanicus was least willing to see damaged. Every factory building, every transfer rail, every power node would be a potential Necron ambush point.
Beyond the foundry belt lay extensive ash wastes, scrap seas, slag mountains, and contaminated plains.
From the Mechanicus perspective, these areas held limited preservation value. From Duvette's perspective, they held significant military value: large-scale landing zones suitable for armoured regiments, Knight houses, and Titan Legions to deploy.
The underground ore deposits were what genuinely warranted attention.
Vulcantia's groundwater had been thoroughly contaminated by long-running and unrestricted extraction operations. To keep the forge world functioning, it had depended entirely on Cereris for food, fresh water, and agricultural products.
Duvette looked at that and found himself unable to avoid the thought that perhaps some Mechanicus team had excavated too deep and broken into something they should not have touched, which was how the system had gone dark.
The Cereris file was a completely different picture.
This agri-world's major landmasses had been converted into large-scale food production zones. Thousands of kilometres of continuous crop fields, starch plants, algae pools, protein stock enclosures, and automated harvest strips occupied the vast majority of accessible surface.
Beyond that, Cereris had an extensive irrigation canal network.
Massive pumping stations, artificial lakes, sluice gates, underground reservoirs, and purification storage facilities linked the entire agricultural system together. It supplied Vulcantia with food and water in exchange for Mechanicus maintenance of climate control towers, weather monitoring stations, and large quantities of automated harvesting machinery.
The planet looked easier to retake than the forge world at first consideration.
Duvette did not think so.
The canals would break up armoured advance routes. If the climate control towers went out of control, the landing window could become very difficult. The massive grain storage facilities and processing cities also held large civilian and labourer populations, and the crusade would need to account for rescue, containment, and order restoration.
In Duvette's current operational planning, Vulcantia was the primary assault axis.
The 112th Combat Cluster, Mechanicus Skitarii forces, the Astartes combined strike group, Titan Legions, heavy artillery and siege combat groups, and part of the Knight house contingent would all go into this front. Duvette would personally manage this axis to ensure the foundry belt and the space elevator were recovered as quickly as possible.
Cereris would be the secondary axis.
Ultramar Auxilia, mechanised infantry regiments, armoured regiments, airborne and rapid reaction combat groups, a portion of the Knight house contingent, and Ecclesiarchy and medical logistics units would operate there. Evan, serving as Chief of Staff, would have command of this front, with all battle reports continuing to route to Duvette.
Duvette understood clearly that plans never survived contact with the actual battlefield.
If the main tomb complex was under Vulcantia, everything could proceed along the current axis.
But if the main complex was under Cereris, the whole deployment would need to be immediately restructured. The worst case was that both worlds were surface shells sitting above a connected Necron tomb network belonging to the same force.
Duvette leaned back in his chair and pressed his fingers against the bridge of his nose.
Then he stretched.
"Let us hope this edge-of-nowhere system does not turn out to hold any significant Necron tomb complexes," he said.
He had barely finished the sentence before concluding he did not find it particularly convincing himself.
He exhaled, and looked back down at the data-slate.