United Dark Worlds's Story

Throughout the local region, amidst the detonations of vessels and munitions, the maelstrom of weapons batteries hurling their fury, and the seething energies of the warp, isolated ripples of exotic particles entered realspace in minute amounts. Insufficient on their own to warrant significant attention by those inexperienced with them, these particles marked a looming presence, a breach of a portion of a realm of non-space. Probes slipped through these minor linkages between the material universe and a dimension of alternate physical properties. Readings were taken, imagery was established, and positions marked, before these ruptures ceased.



Within the confines of Tunnel Space, a host nearly unimaginable. Vessels in the hundreds of millions resided within the white void, midnight imperfections hanging among the swirling energies and seething particle storms, the full armada of an entire nation disposed of it's anchoring moors. Trillions of souls resided aboard the armada that was the United Dark Worlds, maintaining a state of existence within a form of security that was nigh impregnable. From cruise liners to agri-ships, manufactorums to virtual flying cities, to the lurking fist within the formations that was the entirety of the UDW's naval arm. A selection of these was now shifting their positioning, responding to a hail across the militarized channels.

Realspace had been probed, in response to the anomalous churning within Tunnel Space. The Aschen were having...difficulties.

A task force was being assembled. 80 Bahamut supercarriers, with their attendant Kraken parasite supercruisers, a core fist of capital vessels numbering 400. Three strike wings of Shrike cruiser and their escorts, Hellkyte destroyers augmented by a formation of Mjolnir missile carriers. Hundreds of Fists, a subformation of Barghast frigates with a pair of Raven corvettes. In total a representative fleet of only 6,000, a number not approaching numerical parity with the forces observed in realspace.

A number that the Aschen's experience with the UDW would enable immediate understanding that the incursion was being treated with deadly seriousness.

Across the taskforce, crew entered heuristic linkage with the AI systems, men and women and machine becoming one mind, solidifying their intervessel communications and synchronizing their translation times down to the nanosecond. One second before departure, a drone was launched ahead, bearing a simple message for a single combatant force in realspace. A single word both offered in the sake of hope, and warning.

Ignis.



Six thousand TD footprints erupted like a barrage of thunder, high energy detonations of extradimensional particles and signals that spoke of an emergence that could not be ignored. Yet in the same breath that rode Taskforce Elient's arrival, targets were sighted, locked, and fired upon.

Tens of thousands of Hellbores spoke as one. The light of a dozen stars erupted through the region as the ravening bolts of encapsulated nuclear reactions tore apart the darkness of space at 0.9c like a shredded veil, each carrying the force of gigatons per second titanic power funneled into focused streams of devastation a mere meter across, at least three targeting every enemy ship larger than 100 meters in length in sight. Such coordination of the alpha strike was appalling, virtually impossible. Yet entirely within the grasp of the UDW fleet, enmeshed into a state of awareness that held human consciousness in synch with supercomputer precision and speed of thought.

The second wave of fire came from the launch of mass drivers, gauss cannons, and missile and torpedo fire, a scourging barrage from the lighter secondary and tertiary weapons platforms across the six thousand warships dispatched into the fray. Supermaterial slugs, armor piercing and mass-reactive explosive cannon shells, anti-fighter fragmentation missiles and multiple warhead fusion torpedoes howled in silence through space on their paths to deliver a reckoning to beggar the Reaper, but scarcely had they launched through space than the lighter Hellbores finished their cycle times, a horrifyingly short six seconds before those monstrous primary armaments of the UDW warships flashed with solar brilliance once again, fire control given free command to fire at will into the enemy.

The formation of the taskforce was disconcertingly tight, yet none of the destruction that flowed from it like a brutal tide came near enough to threaten a friendly hull, each wreathed in its battlescreen. Further defenses flowed within the UDW fleet, the onboard psionics woven into a chorus of psychic might, withholding from the unrelenting offensive as a reserve against the inevitable backlash.

Admiral Grayson grit his teeth when the Armageddon seemed to be resisting all of it's firepower, the concentrated firepower of three of the Aschen Empire's most powerful classes of ship.

While it was proving difficult to write a vaccine, the highly sophisticated AI Systems of the Reverence IIs were able to at the very least hold the spread of the Scrapcode at bay, isolating and purging entire key systems in real time before the code could take hold.

Perhaps it was an absolute where Sigan and Vrosh came from, that those subject to the scrapcode were doomed, but Aschen AIs were unlike anything encountered in their part of the Multiverse. The scrapcode was viciously analyzed, and purged from it's systems.

It wasn't the scrap-code that had the Aschen concerned, it was the now Sixty-Thousand Chaos warships that jumped into the system, while Aschen FTL did not in any way interact with the warp, and was thus unaffected by the warp storms, the rest of the Empire was still mobilizing it's counterattack, and Grayson knew that Aschen reinforcements were hours, if not days away. The Aschen did not anticipate the battle moving with such swiftness. But they also didn't anticipate help.

There was a collective gasp as UDW Ships began to jump in, opening fire on the Chaos Warships, but the concentrated fire on the three Reverence IIs quickly silenced that, in the split second they had to make peace with death.


Or did they?

It was Andromeda to the rescue...

The Matokey were known as an ancient, and extremely powerful race, one not to be trifled with by the Andromeda superpowers, a race of gifted mystics in tune with nature. It seemed the incursion of the Crimson Slaughter, and the warp disturbances they brought attracted the attention of one such creature.

And he had decided to intervene.

All the combined power of the Crimson Slaughter, leveled against three lone Aschen ships was halted in an instant by a power far beyond even the mightiest Chaos god, channeling the energy of the Chousin into a physical manifestation of the wings of the Light Hawk, a flowing, shimmering barrier of light between the Crimson Slaughter and the three battered Aschen ships appeared out of nowhere. Blinded by the sheer firepower wrought fourth by the Blackstone Fortresses no doubt likely blinded the Crimson Slaughter to the new alien vessel that seemed to appear from nowhere.

A construct that was roughly 100 kilometers in length, from bow to stern, that appeared grown rather than built stood between the unstoppable Daemons of the Crimson Slaughter, and the battered, beaten Aschen fleet.

There was a psychic calm emanating from the alien ship, a becalming signal that was actually taming the roiling energies of the warp, pushing them out and away from the nearly routed Aschen vessel.

Despite the firepower that should have left nothing, this lone alien vessel remained, the moment the fire died down, the shimmering barrier also slowly vanished, as the massive vessel came about, the becalming signal silencing the warp as it grew. Sigan would be unable to rend the soul of whomever was aboard this vessel like he did Raphael, as the vessel and it's inhabitant were cut off from the influences of the warp, here the immaterium existed separate, like water from air.

That lone ship's inhabitant was 'Taanz 'Velzzmkt, the Mt'kee ship-master dispatched to the Milky way to further peace and prosperity in the Galaxy, and protect AXIS Interests.

The Encompassing threat of Chaos was enough to force him to intervene, while not entirely aligned with Aschen interests, for now they sought similar ends.

A Single psionic transmission was whisker-beamed to the UDW crews on the other side of the system.

"These are the forces of a dimension known as the Immaterium, they are as evil as they are ancient; conventional warfare only serves to worsen the situation, we must stem this tide at it's source, and slam shut the jaws of the warp."

The sudden appearance of the Matokey fleet bought the Aschen mere seconds to retreat, abandoning the Cosmora Archipelago to it's fate, 500 ships down from 3,500.

One by one the fleet began to execute their jumps, winking out through wormholes, bypassing the warp storms entirely.

---

This battle was now in the hands of the remaining Aschen, Matokey, and UDW.

Positioning itself between the advancing Crimson Slaughter, and the planet Cosmora itself, the Matokey Vessel began acquiring targets, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands all simultaneously acquired.

An energy surge that could be described as akin to the big bang itself erupted in the bowels of the Matokey vessel, and searing beams of white light flashed out in every direction, beams that contained enough energy to vaporize entire star systems condensed in a beam the width of a few meters, there were thousands of these individual beams, of which void shields would be powerless to resist.

In an instant, tens of thousands of Crimson Slaughter vessels would likely be impaled, gutted by these beams of light at once. Even the mightiest void shield patterns would be overwhelmed in the first split second of impact, and the beam sustained itself until full contact through the ship was made.

A moment later, thousands of wooden like pods were fired towards the planet, streaking through the atmosphere to visit untold power upon the Crimson Slaughter planet-side.

----

The Aschen defense across hundreds of cities had collapsed, and people were now being evacuated via the planet's Bifrost hub, the Crimson Slaughter had almost total control of all but the cities of Isca, Eger, and Lyra, where the Aschen defenses were barely holding them at bay.

Where the pods landed, they seemed to disintegrate into a primordial goo, before reforming into millions of bio-mechanical insectoid creatures.

They spread like wildfire, balefire, bolter fire, psionics did little to stop them, as the began to consume everything they could reach, cultists, daemon engines, even the Chaos Space marines would be swarmed and consumed as the creatures consumed and replicated, they were completely indiscriminate in their consumption of those on the surface, but they also differentiated between the Aschen humans, and the mutated daemons of the Crimson Slaughter.



Even the power armor was useless, as these creatures swarmed, consumed, and replicated, like a cancer these strange creatures began to spread out in every direction. There was no Helldrake, Transport, or even any frigates that got too low that could escape these creatures, as once an infestation started it spread rapidly.

It would be mere hours before these creatures consumed the whole of the Cosmora Archipelago planet, as they multiplied exponentially.

With the introduction of two different fleets, Vrosh applauded himself, the slaughter that had been unending throughout the system meant for its complete demise, Sigan however had other plans raising his hand and with the click of his gauntleted hand, time throughout the sector slowed to a stand still, he turned and left the bridge, his ship the armageddon tied to his very being also seemed to be unaffected, the hull regenerating once more and the void shields going back to full power, the warp storms grew blocking navigation to the system in its entirety. And disrupting any chance of safely escaping, to jump through a warp storm through the warp or not, is to risk madness and possession. It’s just worse in the warp.

While his mind was busy plotting the intricate different fates of the crimson slaughter and his foes, he’d arrive at his sanctuary, and there his ritual began, one other was unaffected, Vrosh, his mark of khorne shielding him from the effects of the psyker. He knew this was beyond ‘Sigan’s’ power, but he needed to stop whatever was going to happen.

However as time returned the armageddon, a golden beam of baleful energies linked the armageddon to the blackstone fortress’ the prow ram reopening and the armageddon gun recharged would fire, into the retreating aschen fleet.

The crimson slaughter fleet suffered the attack of the UDW assault fairly well, the void shields going up in brilliant flashes of light, however new targets, the blackstone fortresses fired upon them as they fired on the aschen, the four main guns the stations bore spinning slowly as the shields of these ancient constructs seemed to not falter. The warp cannons never needing more than a couple seconds to obliterate a ship. And with the three linked the power of their shots were tenfold,

However Vrosh over his subvocal mic ordered the fleet to retreat, they’d been played for fools, manipulated. Vrosh drew his weapons and kicked in the door to the sanctuary where the greater daemon of tzeentch had shed its disguise, the beast turned and without a second’s hesitation released azure flames upon the Khorne champion, and so battle between the two would commence.

The crimson slaughter on the planet accepted their coming doom, free from the voices that drove them mad, the planet had been saved at a great cost and at the great pleasure of the blood god khorne.

The crimson slaughter fleet in great droves warp jumped blindly through the storms, they didn’t care, they didn’t have navigators anyway. The fleet in its entirety exited while it had the chance, though the last ship that remained was the Armageddon, warp sorceries circling the ship and to attack it would risk the wrath of gods.

Neither beast would break but he fate weaver retreated back into the warp and in his moment of clarity Vrosh destroyed the sanctuary freeing the ship from the daemon’s plans, and so the ship after but a few scant moments would exit system with its sole passenger.

Having seen more than enough the Necron ship vanished from the system recalled back home.