Praise the Omnissiah

Creak, creak. Creak, creak. Creak, creak...

Magos Morok was still laughing as he returned to the Dark Mechanicus flagship with heavy, intricate steps. He could hardly contain his delight. Those Astartes were idiots—fools, every last one. Their Forge World had come out ahead in every possible way.

This was The Maelstrom. It was a relatively stable region, yes, but it was still inside The Maelstrom. The Imperium could barely manage its outskirts, let alone control anything here.

The Maelstrom was a vast region ravaged by Warp Storms, one that even humanity in the age of Old Night had failed to master. Countless colonists had entered it and lost contact, been wiped out, gone astray, or crash-landed on some planet where their descendants had regressed to primitive technology. For any organization, finding a relatively stable region amid those storms was an achievement in itself.

The place was dangerous, certainly. But danger also meant it had barely been developed. Gold lay everywhere in The Maelstrom—or rather, compared with the resources here, gold might as well have been sand.

The Warp Storms here were a natural phenomenon, or so countless scholars had concluded. That left everyone in the same position: chart the most stable routes they could, hire better navigators, travel through space with the utmost caution, and spend every day of the voyage praying to the God-Emperor, the Four Gods, the Omnissiah, or Gork and Mork. Sometimes they simply gambled that their dozen-odd ships would survive the trip, or at least that they would not lose too many.

It sounded dangerous because it was. All things considered, though, the resources were well worth the risk. No one could do anything about Warp Storms; everyone simply had to adapt.

Then there was the fact that the Imperium could not police the region, so outlaws from across the galaxy flocked to The Maelstrom. Dangerous as it was, it was no Eye of Terror—that Warp cesspit where ordinary people could mutate and fall to corruption after a few years, perhaps even growing a second head.

As a result, The Maelstrom was crawling with pirates and outlaws. And when outlaws gathered, they certainly did not take up farming or start tightening bolts in factories. Instead, the whole region burst with vigorous, irrepressible energy.

The great age of piracy had arrived.

At the starports and on the planets where pirates and outlaws gathered, humans, Eldar, Dark Eldar, Orks, and Chaos Space Marines mixed freely. Somehow, under some sort of pirate code, they managed to coexist. That order could be maintained in such places was downright bizarre.

But these people had not gathered in The Maelstrom because they disliked farming and wanted to hold conferences. What else would they do—open factories?

Of course they raided. They raided the Imperium, each other, the Adeptus Mechanicus, whole planets, the Dark Mechanicus, and anyone else they could or dared to rob. That was why The Maelstrom could not develop: its routes were unsafe, and its producers kept getting robbed.

Yes, Daedalus had been robbed. More than once. Daedalus belonged to the Dark Mechanicus, but like every branch of the Adeptus Mechanicus, its army was called the Defender Army. It was not called a missionary army or a mechanized assault force because defending the faith had genuinely been its original purpose.

If Space Marines boarded a warship, the Defender Army guarding it would likely be beaten until they leaked oil. The Space Marines would wipe them out. When a pirate fleet arrived at a small resource extraction site, the priests and Defender Army stationed there were better off retreating into underground defenses. They could only watch as the pirates loaded their harvested resources aboard ship, furious and powerless.

The Defender Army excelled at large-scale, coordinated campaigns on planetary surfaces. If those Space Marines dared to deploy openly on a planet, or if a small extraction site had a substantial Defender Army garrison, none of this would be a problem.

Yet it was almost as if some unseen force held the Defender Army back. Losing small engagements against Space Marines in cramped terrain was one thing. Sometimes, even against the Astra Militarum on open plains, they still lost despite having roughly equal numbers.

Many Adeptus Mechanicus sages blamed it on the priests' augmentations. They believed the priests had lost some passion or quality essential to war, leaving them less effective at commanding troops in actual combat.

Biologus Sages had dissected the brains of countless commanders, yet they still could not understand it. Against the Astra Militarum, they had more soldiers and better equipment. Why, then, did they so often fail to win?

The fact was, they sometimes had no choice but to fight boarding actions, and they could not station a large Defender Army at every small extraction site. In The Maelstrom, that made them the vulnerable ones. No one dared attack Daedalus itself, given the Forge World's defensive firepower. But the moment its forces ventured out, countless wolves watched them.

Then this band of Space Marines arrived. They were absurdly generous, offering an STC of incalculable value right away while asking surprisingly little in return.

Morok already had plans for the fifty-fifty split of extracted resources. The servitors doing the mining were theirs. So were the lower-ranking priests and all the storage and transport equipment. Did the Space Marines intend to watch every moment of extraction?

Impossible. They could not keep track of it all. So who would decide how much had actually been extracted? Fifty percent of what, exactly? They could now mine the resources in this star system freely and determine the share at their discretion.

That foolish Astartes leader had even given them a planet, effectively providing free bodyguards for their local extraction sites. If pirates came again, they could say the resources belonged to the Astartes too. Come and rob us, and we'll send truckloads of Astartes after you. It was not as if the Astartes would line up to be counted. No one else knew how many there were.

Morok was beginning to like this band of Astartes. They were honest, trustworthy, generous, and so dim they were scarcely more cunning than Ogryns.

When he returned, he would propose increasing their support at the council. If they could obtain Gene-seed through trade, he would even be willing to sell to them a little more cheaply.

Perhaps... perhaps they could bring Daedalus over here. They did not have the technology to move a planet, but the Omnissiah surely did. Their Forge World had found the true Omnissiah and embraced him at once. Surely the Machine God would grant them such a gift.

At the thought, Morok gave a contemptuous snort at Mars.

There was no almighty Machine God on Mars. That Terran warlord called the Emperor was no incarnation of the Omnissiah, either.

But the Omnissiah was real. He simply did not dwell in Realspace. He was in the Warp, in a place called the Soul Forge. There they had found the Omnissiah and devoted themselves to him.

"Prepare to depart. We're returning to the Forge World."

Magos Morok began to command and pray in his grating metallic voice:

"This universe is a dangerous realm, and the soul storms hunger to devour us.

Ring the bell once! Throw the lever, engage the pistons and pumps.

Ring the bell twice! Press the button, start the engines, ignite the turbines, and breathe life into them.

Ring the bell thrice! Sing as one and praise the Machine God."

"Praise the Lord of the Soul Forge. Praise the almighty Machine God, Vash'tor."