Unknown Colony, Milky Way Galaxy, Far Fringe
Helicon Campaign, Twenty Five Years Ago
The beasts were present. Prey.
No one knew who'd built this colony, it was likely that no one would, now, thanks to the beasts. Humans most likely, ill-informed and ill-equipped human cultures loved building things and forgetting them. If it was still inhabited when the beasts had arrived, then the inhabitants had perished, but the evidence suggested that it had been abandoned some time. Nonetheless it would be cleansed of the beasts.
The Elenaran had commanded it.
Seranar knew full well that it was unlikely that He did so personally, in this case. The colony was more a target of opportunity, a training mission to put his troops out in the field against a living enemy; this could have been done with orbital attack, the belching weapon-beast hive ships had been cleared, and there was little point in a prolonged ground engagement. The Menelmacari had a fleet and forces here too, the crescents of necrontyr ships were accompanied by the thirty ninth fleet under a Warlord Náretar, more than capable of providing support as necessary, but this mission was assigned to the Necili.
The word, a name of their race, meant slayers. The description was apt. Seranar was a small example of his breed, nothing exceptional, only twenty five feet from snout to tail, he looked like nothing so much as some ancient carnosaur. What he was was more complicated than that by far, but it was an apt description for the uninitiated.
He cut a more formidable shape than that, however. His entire body was covered in overlapping layers of metal, blended by optical camouflage layers, that blended him into the environment. Perched atop one of the refinery towers of the old colony, he watched the beasts below.
His scent was contained, blended with the acrid scent of petrochemical processes and stagnation and he did not move, wrapped around the metal girders, almost like a snake, coiled equally, around his rifle.
A formidable weapon, more normally to be found on an APC than in the hands of a soldier, it was sixteen feet long, sleek and black, scoped and railed, a device built on a scale that fitted huge, armoured and clawed hands. The weapon was more powerful than a lascannon, a weapon that bristled with gene-locks and sophisticated identification mechanisms.
He looked toward the beast, and fired.
A line of starfire, like a laser composed of sun-lightning, lit up the night, and the Tyranid Warrior burst. Ichor and blood and tissue were cooked into a cloud of vapour that exploded outwards, carapace and bone rebounding with a sound like rocks scattered onto the buildings at speed. Several nearby creatures scuttled back to their feet, looking up at him.
He ignored them, and their weapons; he was out of range of their biological ammunition and effectively proof against it. He took to the air.
The wings Seranar's people were gifted with were sheathed by the armour, but of course, less protected, pinions sheathed in retro-annealed polymetals, flexible and translucent materials with superconductivity and impact resistance. Necili were poor fliers, but then, the assistance of the grav-vanes in his suit made him rather better.
Killing the big ones was the policy for these beasts, single shot, single strike, single kill, move on. Seranar heard the rapport of another gunshot further across the settlement.
As the technology of war advanced, the ground covered by each soldier grew; a man with a club could cover its reach, a man with a javelin longer, and with a gun longer still. With heavy assault troops like these Necili, the area they covered allowed a single platoon to move through the settlement. They only cared for the synapse creatures, gargoyles and gaunts were nothing to them, outpaced and outfought, a risk to be aware of, but a nominal one at best. They were gods of war at their sport.
A large beast stood by a cluster of organic structures that had grown through the ground, in a slurry of petrochemicals, giving them a weird, night-bright sheen that contrasted with its wasplike carapace. It brought up a bio-fused weapon, detecting Seranar, from the air pressure no doubt, an fired. Seranar tucked his wings in, curling down into a nose-dive, the reaction instinctual, as the enemy tracked him to fire again. The drake spun in the air, letting off a shot toward the enemy that thumped into the ground and raised a plume of vapour and rubble.
The tyranid let out a bellow of challenge, wickedly curved forelimbs waving upward in a threat posture. Seranar's suit arrested his fall, grav-chute kicking in as he flipped and rolled with a catlike grace to land on his feet. He fired again, sunlight blasting through the enemy, coring it and cutting it off from knees to jaw, both ends of its body flopping down, with the entire torso gone, along with most of the head and limbs, turned into a spray of carapace and bone amid a hot red mist that painted the organic structure behind it with the lurid colours of its alien blood. The plasma bolts were not merely plasma weapons, but carried substantial physical force, too, immensely disruptive a seemingly reactionless force that slammed what little was left of its target across the road it stood beside.
The beast charged, blades lashing forward, and Seranar charged, head down, weapon dropped to its sling as he surged forwards, they were evenly matched in strength and ferocity, this tyrant and he, but while its eyes glimmered with malign intelligence, it was slower. Seranar took its forearm off in a single snapping attack and surged up along that side, dragging a knife blade from its sheath on his side, living metal flashing as he slammed it into the tyranid’s neck, twisting and pulling it back, ichor bursting out.
He roared in triumph, alien blood hot and acidic on his palate. The voice of General Altharan came through his communications system. “Fall back to landing area seven.”
Seranar looked up with one eyebrow, a ridge of armour, raised. "I do not understand Herunya, why are we being recalled?" he asked, as a Grave dropship shot past.
The hologram of the nemesor’s answer was simple enough, “The task is completed.”
On board, a display tank showed the local area around the dropship as it took off, ascending in a steep climb. The sleek, bladelike, form of a Egalmoth destroyer appeared on the display. It was one of the Necili-mod ones, as they were called, with an ornate figurehead on the spinal-mounted gun, shaped as a dragon; each was unique, though it couldn't be seen from the distance, many were actually Necili drakes like himself, some, the wyrms of Morgoth, echoing ancient traditions of disdain in using their image in the latter case, but an honour in the former.
It fired.
On the holo, the Sapphire Colony, an agglomeration of steel and tanks three hundred kilometers wide in its broadest expanse, like a great silvery web with a huge, ugly, smoke belching spider sitting at its center, disappeared, replaced by the hazy outline of a holo-reduced explosion.
The ship fired again and again, each time it fired the heavy plasma cannon merely dug deeper, the colony’s structure was mortally wounded in the first few shots, in the core of the chemical plant, nothing bigger than a single atom would survive the kinetic-impact of spacetime being distorted by the passage of the plas-bolt. Further out, the damage would be less... primal but scarcely less devastating.
It would take the planet years to recover. In the years between, with much of the swarm’s intelligence eliminated, it would be hunted again and again, by intelligent beings and by drones alike.
For Seranar, the next infested planet awaited.
