Warzone Dantin
Belligerents
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| [//Dantin Tertiary's tithe was depleted in the short term as the conflict between the Wormwood Sons, Flesh Eaters and Mechanicus forces was worked out. More corrosively in the long term, the conflict caused considerable additional hardship on its already-scanty population. Huge numbers of injured or irradiated civilians were forced to flee, shepherded along by minor Mechanicus officials.] [//onson_s/@onson_sweemy+] |
The Scheme of Gerontius
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| [//michael_j/@muttork+] |
The few ragged trees that remained standing had been completely stripped of foliage. The ground had been baked hard, any liquid flash-boiled away and the dune scrubland turned to glass in the heat.
For his primary speech, Reclaimator Gerontius relied on an older and rather aggressive-sounding vox-caster. It was hardly designed for reciting tech-psalms, but it certainly carried enough weight to ensure his subordinates followed his orders with no questions asked.
He used it to bellow his commands at the shuffling servitors he’d been given for this research landing party. He’d have preferred to hand-pick his party members, but these had been assigned to him by that malfunctioning old fool Faberström Delta-8. Another of Faberström’s attempts to sabotage his landing party in the hope that he would not come back. Gerontius couldn’t wait to show that walking water-heater’s efforts that his efforts were in vain. He noted a minor surge of seratonin at the thought of returning to the ship and detecting the bristling outrage in Faberström’s circuits.
For the moment, however, he stowed the emotions away for him to experience later and concentrated on the matter in hand. Inefficient as his underlings were, they could at least obey simple tasks like 'stand there', 'hold this' and 'don’t drop that'.
Surveying the barren wasteland, he thought how this had come about.
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| [//michael_j/@muttork+] |
His data-banks recalled the millennia-old Terran tale of Uttenheim and how, in his hubris, he stole the secrets of atomic fire from the gods. As punishment, they created him anew as Death so that he would forever have to reap the souls of the deceased and never be allowed to forget the destruction he had wrought. That’s what the tales said anyway. Gerontius didn’t believe a word; the Machine was the only god and flesh-death meant little to the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus.
Why did the Wormwood rebels use such filthy devices in war? Even for one as augmented as he, Radiation was most inconvenient. The Reclaimator shook his head. Inefficient. There were far more nuanced forms of destruction available, with none of the collateral damage. Besides being primitive, atomics inevitably delayed occupation of the ground.
He mused. On the other hand... their use was still rare and Gerontius’ professional curiosity and desire to study old tech was what drew him to this wasted planet in the first place.
Already his boosted auspex and rad-meter were pinging and crackling at him, competing with each other for his attention. They were picking up what appeared to be small pieces of metal, buried nearby under the sand’s glassy visage in peak radioactive areas. They were too near the surface to be of any great age; the blasted remains of detonation sites maybe, or perhaps even leftovers from the rebels’ mechanical devices?
With a bit of remote excavation and getting the most out of these docile servitors before they succumbed to radiation poisoning, Gerontius might be the proud owner of some rebel archaeo-tech pieces – even if they were no more than scrap metal with a long half-life.
That would really rattle Faberström’s face-plates.