The Unquestionable Perfection, Crash Site

“Oh, fantastic. Nothing on the auspex. Because why would the universe ever let a simple task like tracking down that warped-damned servitor actually be simple?” Incomitus huffed, stowing the finicky, unreliable piece of wargear and looking up. With the auspex not reading anything, he’d have to rely on his organic senses and the sensors in his helmet.

He quickly flipped through the various vision modes of his helmet, eventually settling on a simple thermal vision overlay. Not that it did much to pierce the thick, low-hanging clouds of poisonous smog that this particular stretch of land had become cloaked within. Many of the sections of the Perfection sealed off from the rest of the ship’s interior weren’t sealed off from the exterior, and a good proportion of those sections were sealed off because of lethally high levels of toxic materials, radioactive materials, and other such lovely substances. When the ship had made planetfall, all those contaminants had spilled out into the surrounding area, turning it into the smog-shrouded, wreckage-laden dead zone Incomitus was currently trying to navigate.

Honestly, the Scions’ Master of the Forge couldn’t blame the Chapter Serfs for preferring to stick to the interior of the Perfection. Every human crewman may have been issued a sealed set of carapace armor with built-in life-support systems that were more than enough to keep out all the contaminants out here, but no amount of armor could protect the unaugmented Chapter Serfs from their own fear. As an Astartes, Incomitus had been subject to extensive biotechnological augmentation, one of the most notable elements of which was having his ability to feel fear stripped out of him right down to the genetic level, and even he had to admit that the god-awful visibility, wildly uneven terrain, lack of natural light and looming, almost skeletal detritus and wreckage scattered around him made him feel a bit uneasy.

Fortunately, the Scions had servitors, which could go where human crewmen were unwilling to go and take care of tasks they refused to do. Unfortunately, they were nowhere near as flexible as a fully intelligent crewman, and every time they fell over and found themselves unable to get up, fell into a hole just a few inches too deep to merely walk out of, or—in the case for the servitor Incomitus was trying to track down—just randomly lost contact with the Perfection due to a malfunctioning noosphere uplink, then a Techmarine or Enginseer had to go out and manually deal with whatever complication had tripped up the servitor.

“Umm… hello?” A feminine voice, filtered through the static crackle of his vox-caster, filled Incomitus’s ears. “This is Chief Techmarine Incomitus, right?”

“…riiight…” Incomitus said slowly, raising one eyebrow. Not that there was anyone around to see it. Even if there was, he had his helmet on at the moment. “Who is this?”

“Twilight Sparkle!”

“The purple xeno Casimiria picked up?” Incomitus asked, already pulling up the relevant file Magnus had sent him and dedicating a portion of his HUD to it. “Where’d you get a vox-caster? And didn’t Magnus say that you don’t speak low gothic?”

“Yeah, I can’t, at least not yet. Fortunately, I figured out how to use magic to translate for me and to broadcast on the wavelengths you guys use for the vox-thingies.” The adorable xeno psyker responded. Had Incomitus not seen said xeno with his own eyes and thus been able to attest to its objective cuteness, he would probably have argued that that first word and the two that followed it were a contradiction in terms.

“…okay then.” Incomitus responded slowly, already using the neural interface system he’d whipped up for his armor to amend the “capabilities” section of Twilight’s file to reflect what she’d just told him. “Anyway, I presume that you have a good reason for pestering me like this? I mean, it’s not like I’m busy or anything.”

“Uh, yeah. I was hoping to get into the Primary Workshop and take a look at some of the “STCs” for the “augmetics” you guys replace missing limbs with, but I can’t seem to get the door open. There’s some kind of access panel next to it, but every time I try to use it, it keeps saying, “Access denied. This is a restricted area." Could you help me out here?”

“Absolutely not.” Incomitus heard Twilight duck in a breath in preparation to argue, and quickly cut her off with an explanation. “It’s a safety thing. The workshop is a “restricted area” for a reason; it wasn’t exactly made with unaugmented humans in mind, let alone four-foot tall quadruped xenos who are a bit too curious for their own good.” There’s also security concerns over a xeno poking around in the workshop unsupervised, but you certainly won’t hear me tell her that.

“Pleeease? I promise I’ll be careful!”

“No thank you. I’d rather NOT have Casimiria pissed at me for letting you get your face melted off, thank you very much.”

“MELTED OFF?!” Twilight exclaimed, her tone rapidly shifting from whiny to horrified. “Don’t you guys have workplace safety requirements or something!?”

“This is the Imperium of Man, Twilight. Workplace safety isn’t exactly at the top of the priority list. We try a little harder than some other parts of the Imperium, but then again, R&D is a very high-risk business for us. Contrary to what you may assume, we don’t actually know how our advanced tech functions. As a result, we’re basically stuck copying blueprints that work from STCs without understanding why they work, and trying to develop, say, a new kind of tank without first finding a relevant STC means throwing a lot of stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. And sometimes, instead of sticking or falling harmlessly to the ground, that ‘stuff’ bounces back, hits you in the face, and reduces it to a smoldering stump.”

Almost as if to prove his point, a distant BOOM reached his ears through Twilight’s magically generated vox connection, accompanied by a yelp. “Case in point.” Incomitus added. Such detonations were daily, sometimes even hourly occurrences in the Workshop. “You okay?”

“Yeah, I’m okay.” Twilight sounded the part, as well. Her breathing was a little labored, and the explosion had definitely rattled her, but otherwise she seemed fine.

“Good. You might want to move along while you still can; the Master of the Forge is not liable for any injuries, deaths, or emotional trauma that results from failure to keep a respectable distance from the Workshops.”

“…that’s not very reassuring.” Twilight commented.

“I’m a Space Marine. Reassuring people isn’t part of my job description.” Up ahead, his thermal vision picked out a familiar, bulky humanoid silhouette, face-down on the ground. “About frakking time. There’s the-”

And then he stepped closer, and it became obvious to him that there was something far more wrong with the semi-organic automaton than just a busted noosphere uplink.

“...servitor.”

“-wait, what? What’s wrong?!”

“I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I’ve found the servitor, or at least what’s left of it. The bad news is that, well, there isn’t much left of it.” Incomitus stepped closer, turning the heat vision filter off and studying the Servitor’s mangled corpse with his “natural” vision… at least insofar as any part of an Astartes could ever be truly natural.

“Hmm… no bullet wounds or plasma scarring. Just some extensive blunt-force trauma, and a whole frakton of bite marks and lacerations. Something really went to town on this thing…”

A low, menacing growl filled the air; Incomitus glanced up from the Servitor’s mangled remains, his heat-vision filter reactivating as his gaze swept over his surroundings. No heat-signatures that would indicate living things…

A flicker of movement caught his eye. Focusing on it, he caught sight of a vague, quadruped-like outline, somehow almost the exact same temperature as its surroundings.

“...am I the only one who just realized that all this sounds like a setup for some kind of horror movie?” Twilight interjected.

“…nope.” Incomitus turned the heat-vision filter off once again, instantly catching sight of a pair of glowing red eyes, leering menacingly at him from the smog. And then another pair. And another. And a half-dozen more after that. “You’re not the only one…”

“W-w-what’s happening?!”

“Local wildlife, that’s what.” Incomitus commented as his wolf-like opponents stepped closer, close enough that Incomitus’s gene-enhanced eyesight could make out . “They look lupine in form, about 6 feet tall from ears to paws. Oh, and they’re made up of a bunch of wooden twigs fused together by psychic energy…”

“Oh buck! Timberwolves!”

“...seriously? You call these things Timberwolves?!” Incomitus asked as his four-armed servo-harness brandished four custom-built lasguns, each one bearing a force-bayonet at the tip that crackled with matter-disintegrating energy. “Actually, never mind, I don’t understand why I’m surprised by that. The name of your capital city is a pun on Camelot, after all.”

“Hold on, I’m coming!” Twilight cried, oblivious to the fact that Incomitus had engaged the Timberwolves and was currently ripping them apart with casual ease, their bodies shredded by red las-bolts and force bayonets, their teeth and claws completely failing to pierce his ceramite armor even when they managed to get past both.

“You really shouldn’t bother. These things are barely even scratching my armor’s paint job even when they manage to get past my Mechadendrites and Servo-arms…” Incomitus fell silent as he realized that Twilight’s vox link to him had been severed. “She’s coming anyway, isn’t she?” The Master of the Forge let loose a sigh as he casually backhanded a pouncing Timberwolf, the blow smashing its head into a dozen pieces.

Twilight choked, gagging as the purplish-black smoke she’d just teleported into flooded her lungs, burning her throat and eyes. Her horn flashed as she quickly threw up a magical barrier, the improvised life support system pushing out the toxic gasses and leaving clean, breathable air behind. She took a moment to cast a few healing spells to purge the harmful substances she’d accidentally inhaled from her system. With that done, she glanced around, trying to take stock of her surroundings.

All around her, a thick veil of toxic fog billowed, painted a dim purplish-brown by the moon’s light. Massive, looming silhouettes of mangled wreckage hung over her, leaving her feeling like a tiny ant in comparison to her surroundings. Other than the moon, the faint glow of the filter shield she’d thrown up was the only light… wait, no, there was something else. A few sporadic flashes of red and green.

“Incomitus!” Twilight cried, breaking into a sprint. Her hooves kept slipping in the sludge and she had to reduce her pace to a fraction of what she was normally capable of lest she collide with dead foliage or heaps of scrap metal, yet she pressed on. She wasn’t going to abandon any of her friends when they needed her again, she wasn’t-

She skidded to a stop as a collection of broken sticks and smoking leaves flew over her head, what little still remained of the glowing coils of magical energy that once held them together rapidly disintegrating. The creature that had so casually destroyed the magical predator turned to Twilight a moment later.

“Oh, big surprise; turns out the bioengineered supersoldier clad in armor forged from hyper-advanced alloys and wielding weapons so advanced they might as well be magical can hold his own against a bunch of ravenous Timberwolves.” Three of the arms strapped to the red, metal-plated giant’s back lifted up, drawing a bead with the blocky weapons they each held. There were three flashes of red light, three audible cracks, and three injured Timberwolves in the process of piecing themselves back together were promptly blown apart. Incomitus didn’t even need to glance back at his targets. “Who would have thought?”

“...not me.” Twilight admitted sheepishly.

“If it’s any consolation, you’re not the only one. Plenty of the less friendly xenos we’ve had to deal with made the exact same mistake. Just be glad you don’t have to pay for it.” Incomitus turned around, moving toward a fallen, vaguely humanoid silhouette on the ground.

“Is that a crewman?” Twilight asked, stepping forward… and promptly froze, bile rising up in her throat at the sight of the mangled corpse Incomitus was standing over.

The thing had been human once—that was the Scions’ name for their species, apparently—but now it was barely recognizable. Huge swaths of it’s body had been covered by gleaming steel plating, which in turn was covered with dozens upon dozens of snaking wires and tubes. One arm was entirely gone, replaced by a huge, brutal-looking clamp. What little flesh hadn’t been replaced by cold, hard steel was almost chalk-white, the unhealthy-looking pallor combining with the way its skin was stretched tight against its bones to make it look almost skeletal in appearance.

“It used to be. Now it’s a mindless biomechanical automaton called a Servitor.” Incomitus responded, dropping to one knee as a small mechanical tendril snaking out from his back and plugged itself into a socket in the heavily augmented human at his feet.

“Used to be?” Twilight asked, shuddering. “As in, you guys turned him into that?”

“At his insistence, no less.” Upon noticing the flabbergasted look the alicorn was giving him, Incomitus elaborated further. “We give proper funerals to those among the crew who want them, but the vast majority of them insist that even in death their bodies ought to be of use to us. And many who suffer crippling injuries that prevent them from working opt to speed the process along and donate their bodies to us while they’re still alive.”

“And you let them do that?” Twilight asked. In Canterlot, and Equestria in general, the idea of a pony’s dead body being turned into a mindless automaton like the one on the ground in front of Incomitus would have been downright horrifying, a line that nopony would ever even contemplate crossing, no matter the circumstances. But the almost casual tone Incomitus spoke with as he explained all this to her made it all too clear that for him and his species, this was a line that was crossed on a daily basis.

“Not if we can help it.” Incomitus continued. “When we can, we give them augmetics that make that unnecessary and have them continue to serve the way they used to. But sometimes, we can’t.”

“So this is what you do to those you can’t save?”

“Not always. Sometimes they get turned into servo-skulls. Other times their neural tissue gets repurposed into cogitators. But most get turned into this. Many of the Crewmen and Chapter Serfs who opt to donate their bodies like that actually consider it a great honor to have them used like this after their deaths.”

Twilight shuddered a little, reminded once again of just how different from her these beings were. Among these creatures, being allowed to volunteer to be turned into a half-alive automaton after your death was considered commonplace—an honor, even, a selfless sacrifice of something deeply personal in service to the wider community. Heck, the natural products of that practice were probably seen as something to aspire to among the crewmen, as half-living monuments to the loyalty and dedication of the individuals they used to be, of their willingness to sacrifice their own bodily autonomy for the sake of those who’d come after them. It really went to show the sort of world they lived in, that someone’s own bodily autonomy was considered far less important than having one more pair of hands for manual labor.

“...Twilight?” Incomitus asked suddenly. “You have a close bond with a pony who has an orange coat, a blonde mane, and no wings or horn, right?”

“Umm… yeah?” For a second, Twilight wondered how Incomitus knew that, but then she remembered that she’d told Magnus all about her friends. Granted, she hadn’t expected that information to circulate that fast, but for all she knew their armor suits were probably hooked up to some kind of database that let them share information quickly and easily. “Why’d you ask?”

“The Servitor saw a pony that matched that description, right before it got mauled by the Timberwolves. It looks like they’d chased her here.” The red-armored giant stood up, another tendril-like arm snaking down from his back, its tip suddenly producing a glaringly bright beam of light that peeled back the darkness and illuminated a moderately large piece of scrap, like a miniature floodlight. “And I think I can see where she went.”

Applejack coughed hard, choking and gasping for fresh air, even as the only air available burned her throat and seared her eyes. She needed to find fresh air, needed to get out of this caustic smog, but she was stuck here, underneath this piece of metallic debris.

The Timberwolves from before had picked up her trail and followed her here, chasing her into this toxic, fog-shrouded wasteland. She’d managed to find shelter from them beneath a piece of skeletal metal wreckage, where their claws couldn’t reach… but not before one of them had managed to sink its teeth into her bad leg.

Another bout of coughing and wheezing shot through her body, her chest hitching as her vision blurred and the strength seeped from her limbs. She needed to get out of this area, needed to find air that she could actually breathe, air that wasn’t so full of toxic chemicals that it made her lungs feel like they were being filled with molten lava. But she couldn’t; even though the Timberwolves were gone, the damage they’d done to her already-injured leg wasn’t: she was in far, far too much pain to stand, let alone walk anywhere.

In hindsight, she mused to herself, maybe charging off into completely unfamiliar territory to swoop in and bail her friend out like some kind of big damn hero hadn’t been such a good idea.

This is how ah die, ain’t it? Applejack thought to herself as her vision began to go dark, consciousness slowly but surely slipping away from her. There was a definite faint orange glow coming from her leg now, unmistakable in the pitch darkness, but she was in too much pain to really register it, nor the faint smell of singed fur that accompanied it. Alone, broken, weak, an’ slowly chokin’ ta death cuz’ I charged off without thinkin’. I guess it’s fittin’...

The slab of metal she was underneath was lifted up, a bright light flooding her surroundings. She didn’t even have the strength to lift her head anymore, but she didn’t need to. She could feel the presence of one of those minotaur-like creatures behind her. At least she’d be too dead to really register what it was going to do to her…

All of a sudden, clean air flooded her lungs, untainted by the burning smog she’d been inundated in mere moments before. A vague lavender blob slipped into her vision as a soothing warmth began to spread out from her neck. Everywhere it spread, the pain lessened, the burning sensation in her throat and lungs fading to nothing.

“It’s okay, AJ. I’m here. I’ve got you.” A voice murmured, high-pitched and panicky. A voice Applejack would have recognized anywhere.

“T-Twi-”

Midway through the word, the sensation of Twilight’s magic reached her leg. Unlike with her lungs and throat, it didn’t reduce the pain. Quite the opposite, in fact.

A raspy screech of pain tore itself free of Applejack’s throat, a orange light flashing in her vision as the stench of burning flesh flooded her nostrils. The shadows at the corners of her vision returned with a vengeance, consciousness slipped away from her in very short order. The last thing she heard before darkness enveloped her was Twilight calling her name.

Author's Note

Another chapter published, another character nearly dies… in other words, Tuesday as usual in the WH40K universe.

In case you were wondering, the description of the vicinity of the Perfection was heavily inspired by the Crash Site in Subnautica, complete with lethal contaminants leaking from the damaged vessel.