The incoming corridor was about ten feet wide, plenty wide for evacuating bunches of people mutated by the Warp who hadn’t bathed in a couple years.

It also had a plenty long range of fire when you are shooting Banefire’d Autolasers and holding down the trigger as psionic coolants keep them from overheating, and they actually stayed superconductive. Actually, the guns were so cold a normal person’s hands would have shattered and fallen apart gripping them, but that wasn’t much of an issue for me or my Arakne Arms.

The Warped basically were running into machine gun fire that chewed them up into white dust. It didn’t instantly disintegrate them, the lasers weren’t that strong... at least until I kicked up Holy and Axiomatic to stack the damage on top of Vivus and Bane, and the line troops were basically exploding under barrages of multi-flaming hard light.

They could sort of moan and scream as I glided down the corridor at them, dying faster than I was moving, and sort of screaming as they saw the people in front of them popping and exploding into white dust as raging purity blew down the tunnel towards them, and they were reaped.

There were thousands of them coming, but my guns weren’t running out of juice, weren’t overheating, and anything tough enough to take two shots got Spikes or Bolts to the face to finish the process. The Possessed might still be burning when I walked by, while their underlings were already piles of ash, but they were still dead and the demons inside them shaking inside their corpses as the vivus feasted on them.

I came to the fork in the tunnel, aimed in each direction at the shocked and halted forces there, and kept my finger on the trigger. There was a desultory discharge of return fire, one blast of hot plasma that swept past me that I ignored as it scorched the solid plascrete of the tunnel, and then all the shooters were dying as unceasing streams of some really hostile violet light wound about with hungry anathemic flames feasted.

I noted that the sound of the artillery was getting closer, and my eyes narrowed. There was no need to bring the artillery back that far, it was closing in on their own lines... but the Warped had been retreating anyways... how far back were they pulling?

That was a LOT of shelling they were throwing out. Was it going to stop? If not... why? Even in the far future, shells could be wasted far faster than they could be manufactured.

I pulled back my guns, and my Tails stopped shooting. There was nothing moving in either tunnel, although they were both packed with mounds of corpses burning white, and great splashes of vivid white painted the plascrete and sizzled around the runes and symbols paying tribute to the Warp daubed and etched into the walls in single-minded fanaticism.

I didn’t want to look at the symbols, but now I did, wrinkling my nose at the stench that was trying to invade my brain. Some of the symbols were just insane representations of mindless worship, fever-infected brains putting form to mad dreams instilled into the hapless fools caught up in their power, painted with pus, bile, and blood in crazed and unholy tribute to their insane masters...

But the ones done in power tools and plasma torches definitely had a purpose behind them, obfuscated by the garish painting atop them or no.

-Something big is going on...-

I turned around and booked back out the way I’d come, having some very nasty suspicions now, and keeping half an eye on those trails of Warp Runes scrawled in some mad non-pattern on the walls, ceilings, floors, forming a trail that wasn’t all that hard to follow if you were looking for it.

I came back outside. The trail of mad homage was snaking and looping along the ground, anything but efficient, plunging into buildings and back out of them. Cold and grim, I followed it.

My Null was out and hard, because this shit was charged with power. A normal man following the trail and reading it would have been infected by the Warp within a hundred yards, Possessed within two, and screaming for the demon to come take him within three. My Trembling Domain meant I could actually look at these things in three dimensions, and actually see the angles of carving and cuts, the timing of the different areas made at different times and coming together in some greater madness by different peoples and souls, and the blood and guts spilled on them to cement them and make them whole...

The city and factories proper beyond the trenches were adorned with the typical décor of the Warped. Impaled supervisors, Mekkers, the recalcitrant, borgaii, and such things that hadn’t been corrupted were impaled, mounted on display, and painted up for the glory of the Warp Gods. There were skulls metallic and human everywhere, rotting and unclean, some swaying in breezes that might or might not exist, the psychic wailing of tortured souls audible around them.

Despite myself, I was shooting them, and vivic fire was burning all over the place around me as I practiced my marksmanship while moving.

The factories were still running.

I grit my teeth at the discordance of the machinery. This place might be loud, but it should be humming and thrumming with well-maintained machinery forged to incredible tolerances, almost frictionless in its workings. The processing lines, molds, castings, fabricators, and assemblers should be very quiet in how they were functioning.

But no. There was nobody here, but they were still working, and subtle distortions had been made to tracks, gears, pistons, and joints. Servos were screeching, bearings were wailing, tracks were squealing, rollers were yipping.

I swept past a pile of bolts meant to anchor armor to hulls. Every single bolt had a Warped Rune stamped into it, and they weren’t being dropped from the dispenser in an orderly manner, but randomly, at different speeds, overrunning the loaders that weren’t moving, falling to the floor in bent and broken forms, sometimes splintering and shattering from the impact, the alloy of the steel as brittle as glass.

Everything was Fellcarven.

Warp Runes had been drawn and etched on everything. Everything! Every product produced, and still being produced, despite the lack of people, had been changed to include those Runes. Every active machine surface, every robotic arm, every field emitter, power cable, whirring generator or hauling pulley system, had been mindlessly and thoroughly scribed with blasphemic symbols. Every key of the computers and controls had been despoiled and marked, and the computer screens were flashing with symbology that could drive a man mad just watching them.

The sound was a sussurus of machines in agony, still at work, pumping out corruption under the orders of their masters.

Every machine, big and small.

I inhaled through my nose as I ghosted by the place, shooting those flashing screens, severing power cables and silencing key machines, pumping Construct-killing fire into some of the generators, capacitors, and power relays sending on a stream of corrupted power to keep the machines enslaved and making their unclean spoils.

Great armor plates electro-scribed with maddening symbols slammed to the floor of the foundry like the clattering of brazen bells, extolling doom as they tumbled and slid across the floor, somehow looking alive and greased as they repelled one another. I shot two of the molding frames, and molten steel flooded down and overflowed onto the processing line, and set off some of the runework there in chain explosions of disruption behind me.

Fucking Mekkers. FUCKING MEKKERS!

The planet was unsalvageable! The precious machinery, foundries, and forges they wanted to recover were already irrevocably tainted!

The Warped had done their work with the thoroughness of fanatics and the energy of the tireless. Everything had the runework on it; every key system, and the tainted energy of the Warp had flowed through every secondary system with a malefic aura of corruption of form and purpose.

Nothing here could be repurposed. Nothing here could be reclaimed, or reconsecrated. It all was going to have be slagged and melted down with fusion fire to remove any traces of psychic or Warp sorcery corruption before being recycled.

There wasn’t anything to reclaim on this planet, there was nothing to save. It was all lost... and the Mekkers had to know. There had to have been factories reclaimed by now, and examined by the Mechanists eager to put them back to work.

They had to know, and they hadn’t said anything. The sacrifice of manpower had continued, as the Marines and supporting forces labored under orders to spare the machines, because the Mekkers didn’t want to be caught in their error.

This planet could have been swept clean by orbital bombardment, and actually saved the Mekkers some of the deconstruction work. Millions of soldiers had died for completely nothing, when orbital lances could have done all the necessary work.

I grit my teeth at the callous attitude of the Mekkers, and sent all this data out into Markspace, to be transferred to the highest levels of command of this assault. Outraged Goldilocks started digging into the Mekker systems for confirmation that they knew about this, and had decided to continue with the hampered assault regardless, as if everything was fine and men were dying for the noble cause of recovering the production power of the Empire.

How far had they been willing to go to cover up their error? They’d effectively have to replace everything on the planet, destroy what was here, and do it without owning up to what they were doing. The waste, the expense, the secrecy, and the loss of lives, all just because they’d made a colossal error in judgement and didn’t want to own up to it.

Fucking bastards.

------

I exited my third factory, this one for making ground transports, and glanced back at a jet of flames and smoke, all of them in wrong colors, exploding forth from the overloaded power system I’d artfully jammed behind me.

I was miles inside the lines, and could see the wall of shelling had actually withdrawn to the Warped’s own trench lines, and was pounding further and further back this way slowly, a wall of obliteration that was turning their own defenses into a shattered jungle of ruins and wreckage, nigh impossible to pass.

Preventing any advance on the ground. Something big in the works.

And... um, I was blowing up stuff behind all that shelling.

I quirked a smile at my own stupidity, and booked for it.

Two minutes later, a section of the curtain wall of shelling opened up, and the shelling that had been taking out that area was redirected to the area around a certain line of factories that were exploding and burning heartily behind the wall. Great coughing crumps and multi-colored explosions erupted as thousand-pound shells came hammering down. Roofs blew out, walls were flattened, clouds of psycho-active dust painted disturbing images of burning souls in the sky as the production facilities were flattened, along with anything stupid enough to be in that area.

----

“An opening!”

Mentat Kiproth, their driver and pilot, didn’t need to be told twice. He slammed the skimmer ahead full speed, and the lifters sparked and sizzled, silver Runes sparking as they fought off the Warp influence in the air. Both Sir Mugamu and Inquisitor Hrom were Focusing and releasing into the Ward, strengthening it against the mad static in the air that wanted to fry their systems.

Far beyond, up the slowly rising rolls of the factories and habbers, they could see a line of fabricator plants burning and on fire. There was a deadly squeal from Techmeister Vahix at the sight of the desecration, which abruptly went silent as a full salvo of shelling came down on those factories and proceeded to obliterate them.

-They are shelling their own positions,- Kiproth sent out telepathically, the cool-eyed pilot probability-skimming to find the best way through the fields of static and disruption, using telepathy because it was simply too loud to speak as the skimmer shot past the wall of shelling and into the breach they’d been offered. Perhaps some of the ground vehicles of the Marines might make it in, if they could make it over the Trenches, and some of the Walkers and troop carriers were attempting to make it to the breach in time. Would they be able to-

Another factory well to the right of the chain suddenly blew up from within, and their eyes widened despite themselves. That woman had just called down fire behind herself, and now she had done it again? She was insane!