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hello, dakkaites!

I have started a book recently, about the Fall of Tyran when the Tyranids first encroached into the 40K universe. I first wanted to write this book because my little brother is collecting Hive Fleet Behemoth, but this has evolved into something new.

I will soon be starting an Adeptus Mechanicus army, and I decided it would be cool to base them off of the skitarii at Tyran. I wanted to capture the religious rift the Adepts are experiencing. It was general knowledge that all races used a form of the Omnissiah's holy alloys, and the Nids come along and they don't have a scrap of any metal on them.

I have a somewhat ambitious goal for this, To make an OMNIBUS!!!. this will collect three tales. The fall of Tyran, the battle at Thandros, and the Battle for Maccrage. my more doable goals are to have the first chapter done by the upcoming school year's first quarter is done (that's nine weeks), and to have the second and third chapters done in the next two quarters. that will leave me the last qaurter to polish up the first three chapters, and work on the fourth. I will send in the first three chapters in to the Black Library come the next submission time.

C&C is needed for this project to maintain its momentum. Here is the first part of the first chapter:
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The world J73-O3 was a barren, dead shell of its former self. Auspex scans had shown an endless sea of unbroken rock stretched from horizon to horizon. All other scans, from psychic gauges to thermal depth-finders, had shown the same. The world was barren, a completely useless husk that didn’t even harbor the basest minerals. That didn’t mean that the Mechanicus was taking the chance of a surprise attack. A single Adeptus Mechanicus cruiser moved forward, leveling all gun batteries at the space directly around itself, standing sentinel over the dead planet below. The cruiser Righteous Destiny, being a Mechanicus Ship, was one of the most heavily armed and armored ships in the Segmentum; boasting enough armor to take a volley from the forward lance-batteries of an Oberon-Class battleship, and armed with enough weaponry to cripple the offending ship with relative ease.

Making sure that no psychic manifestations, thruster signatures, and heat changes of over 80 degrees centigrade were in the area, the Righteous proceeded with preparations to launch a wing of Marauder Destroyers. Hundreds of servitors flooded the flight decks, each one an almost grotesque mesh of mechanical limbs and human brains, and proceeded to refuel and pressurize each ship with pressure-hoses and thermal sealants. Each Marauder was heavily modified from the original versions; each and every one had their standard, sub-atmospheric engines replaced with system drives which resembled that of the ship’s mighty plasma stacks, giving all the craft Extra-atmospheric flight capabilities.

A full wing was 80 flyers, which was divided into Eight Squadrons of Ten armed fighters. In general, every plane had a standard set of markings and iconography to show over its standard matt-red paint job which fighter belonged in which squadron, what forgeworld it was manufactured on, and the call sign of the plane itself, and its serial code. That in no way meant that the crew kept to those guidelines; each pilot had added some form of pin-up, shark’s teeth, and fiery wings to each flyer, most ostentatiously decorated was the fifth plane in third squadron, bearing a 5-meter tall pin-up across the wing where it joins with the fuselage, the title “death from the skies” on the right wing, and an image of a winged Daemon on each side of the cockpit.

As the orders for launch procedure was given, crew members scurried across the flight deck. Each plane had a crew numbering five people. There was the pilot which took the plane out and followed the designated flight path, the aft-gunner would keep the plane‘s rear protected in a dogfight, the navigator detected differing wind currents and updrafts and warns the pilot accordingly, the bomber co-ordinates with the pilot when dropping bombs, and a Techpriest to oversee repairs and targeting information.

Ladders and hydraulic lifts were used to ferry the crew aboard, as each plane was docked in a support nestles, making sure that the aircraft’s finer instruments and less durable workings were safe from harm if the Righteous was to take a hit. These nestles also acted as a catapult, launching the planes into the void and maximizing the time the flyers could be away from fuelling stations.


Servitors trundled from the flight deck, the doors sealing airtight behind them in preparation of the Explosive decompression generated by the ship’s launch bays opening. The combination of all atmosphere emptying into the void in 3 seconds, and the nestle’s flinging the planes out at over six thousand Psi, made sure that the flyers were well away from their mother ship when they activated their drive-trains.

Entry into this planet’s atmosphere went very well, as there was hardly an atmosphere left. Thermal build-up was practically non-existent, no cross-winds that could be felt by these metal behemoths was absent, and the only thing the Navigators had to worry about was Gravity.

Once the full wing had entered the atmosphere, each squadron took a compass-point, and proceeded with an Ultra-pattern sweep of the Mechanicus drop-site, flying low at 5,000 feet up they each hardly went over 600 km per standard Terran hour. This allowed the planes to relay enough information on the actual appearance of the landing zone for the Righteous to create a Hololithic map that was an accurate 1:5,000 scale.

After an optimal landing zone was selected, five Imperial shark-class transport ships were released from the cruiser’s belly, drive-trains roaring as they descended into the planet’s atmosphere. Every ship had giant murals of the Machine-god attached to their hulls; alongside kilometer-wide void-proofed parchments covered in Binary prayers and religious paraphernalia. The Sharks contained a Demi-legion of Tech-guard, over ten thousand low-grade humans were strapped into crash-couches and inertia-dampers.

Tech-guard are the bulk of the Adeptus Mechanicus fighting forces; usually they were requisitioned from newly-raised battle groups, or taken from the populace of a pre-industrial world, and given specialized training in rare simulatori facilities, giving them an edge over some of the most veteran guard units. None of the troopers were actually a part of the Machine Cult, and therefore only had the basest of upgrades, only having access to optical processors and simple sensori attachments. Many magos looked down upon these regular guardsmen, but Magos Vikl viewed them with more of a curiosity.

Magos Vikl was relatively new to the Machine Cult, being only 65 years old, he had only recently been deemed worthy enough of the Machine God to be given life-prolonging bionics and artificial organs. He still retained some of the quirks that he had when he was unaugmented, such as verbal slangs and emotions that the more advanced tech-adepts had deemed distasteful for work on a Forgeworld, but it was deemed necessary for work with the Tech-Guard.

Magos Vikl looked over the Tech-guard, checking amour plating, giving binary blessings, and aligning optical sensors. Unlike the Tech-guard, the Magos didn’t require a stability harness, as he had an internal stabilization system. As the ship lurches and rocked in the heat of re-entry, the mago’s mind reeled in fear and nausea, while the mechanical side of his brain started to catalogue information on altitude, aerodynamics, and shuttle speed.

It would have been a simple thing to actually shut off the fear center in his brain, thus quelling his nausea and easing his descent, but Vikl was one of the few members of the Cult Mechanicus that actually enjoyed human emotion. He viewed it as a link to the unaugmented, regular people that he served alongside, and allowed him to better communicate with them. Though he would never admit it, he enjoyed the rush of fear that surged through him whenever he went on one of these missions; he enjoyed the thrills of dropping through thousands of meters worth of atmosphere with nothing stopping the ship from crashing into the ground, save himself.