Editing Nobledark Imperium Writing (section)

==Ork Diplomacy==

Editor's Note: Needs to be adjusted, since it was decided Fabricator-General didn't die in the Beheading.

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Deep in the heart of the Imperial Palace, decisions were being made that would affect a galaxy.

“Reports from Triton indicate that most of the moon has been taken by the enemy.”

“Give the order to all remaining forces on Triton to retreat. If the Orks take the outer planets of the Sol system any surviving assets will be blockaded on both sides, and we don’t need them cut off from the rest of our forces.”

“The facility on Cthonia has sent a message indicating some kind of combined Crone/Dark Eldar fleet has descended on the planet.”

“Alert the Fire Wasps and the 299th. Tell them the first chance they get finishing their current missions to head to Cthonia. They probably won’t get there in a while, but unfortunately we are short on free resources.

The room itself was large and spacious. It was a war room, with a large table in the center, currently home to the highest military commanders in the Imperium. At its head was the Steward, eyes closed and seated in an position that seemed almost meditative. He needed to focus. The chair he was sitting in wasn’t the Golden Throne. That little piece of Imperial heritage was sitting on a floor approximately four levels above him. The Steward wasn’t even sure whoever built that thing ever intended for people to sit in it. Instead he was sitting on a much plainer, comfier chair, albeit one built for his frame. He needed it. His mind was good, but he needed absolute concentration to process the sheer amount of information necessary to organize the Imperial war effort. He had to make the right decisions, the lives of millions of people hung in the balance, and ridding his mind of any kind of external distraction helped.

“Intelligence indicates a portion of the main Ork WAAAGH! is diverting from the main fleet. Projections say it seems to be heading to Molech…”

“Enough,” he said, having finally reached his limit.
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The Steward opened his eyes, looking at the three dozen or so concerned faces surrounding him.

“Give me five minutes. I need to take a break.”



With some consternation, the assembled military commanders of the Imperium stepped back, allowing the Steward to get up. Rubbing his face, the Steward walked out of the room and kept walking until he reached a small balcony overlooking a small garden in the Imperial Palace that was mostly untouched by all the excitement. He could feel the tension in the air. People were already anxious over the current state of the war, and recent events had only made things worse, to the point that the Steward had assigned the most significant members of the Imperium bureaucracy a Custodes bodyguard whether they wanted it or not. Truth be told, the Steward was starting to feel the stress eating away at him as well. He hadn’t had decent rest in over a month. Although he didn’t need the sleep of a normal human, even he was reaching his limits. He had spent most of that time sitting there in the war room, exploiting his ability to process information as best he could in order to organize the defense of Old Earth and its surrounding planets. He swore, if he had to sit in that chair for one more minute it was going to be the death of him.

Oscar, last of the Men of Gold, Warlord of Earth, Steward of the Imperium, was not having the best six months. To be honest, things hadn’t been going well for quite some time, what with the whole galaxy-spanning war going on, but the last six months or so were particularly bad.

First, there was the treachery of Grandmaster Drakan Vangorich, who in addition to being a master of the arts of assassination, it seemed, had a terrible sense of timing. One would think that one would wait until after all human life wasn’t under threat of being wiped out by Orks and corrupted Eldar from the Eye of Terror to spring their attempt to assassinate and replace the High Lords of Terra with their own puppet council. The Steward had found it necessary to leave the war room to personally deal with that. Four High Lords and numerous high ranking figures of the Administratum were dead at a time which the Imperium could ill-afford their loss. The loss of the Fabricator-General was a particularly devastating blow. Oscar had liked the previous Fabricator-General, who had been remarkably open to cooperation since the Unification of Sol, whereas his likely replacement, Kelbor-Hal, was a bit flaky. At least it was better than the other possible option for Fabricator-General, Zagreus Kane, who had the personality of steel wool.

Then, the Orks had decided to one-up Vangorich by teleporting an Attack Planet in-between Earth and Mars. The Imperium knew the Orks were coming, they had been blazing a path through the Segmentum Solar and had been expected to arrive on Sol’s doorstep any day now, but to teleport past the fleets blockading the way to the Imperium’s heart and just appear in the Sol System was something no one had expected. To the Imperium’s credit, between Perturabo, Dorn, and a thousand other siege tacticians, the Sol System was one of the most heavily defended systems in the Milky Way, and as soon as the leering iron skull had appeared in the sky it was immediately fired upon by the Sol system’s defense network along with some of the best ships of Battlefleet Solar and the Phalanx itself. Nevertheless, the Attack Planet was undeterred by the assault, shrugging off point defense systems and Nova cannon blasts as if they were mosquito bites.

Nothing even seemed to slow it down as the Attack Planet advanced on Earth, and as the two planets got dangerously close to each other’s Roche Limits the Imperium realized with some horror that the Orks meant to ram the Attack Planet into Earth.

The situation had seemed hopeless until the Phalanx swooped in and rammed itself into the Attack Planet that had once been Ullanor at a fraction of the speed of light, creating a bright flash which for a moment even outshone Sol. Everyone had seen that. Oscar could have sworn he felt that, even though he knew no vibrations could be transmitted through space. After that, the hollowed out planet shot through the Sol system like a billiard ball before finally teleporting out of the system somewhere around Pluto. Someone, apparently a man based on the voxcast that had gone out from the Phalanx just before the insane stunt, had commandeered the 30 kilometer ship and ordered a mass exodus before taking a skeleton crew of the bare minimum of people necessary to pilot the Phalanx and ramming it into the Attack Planet, though no one knew exactly who.



Oscar stopped. The man had singly-handedly saved Earth and the entire Imperium, and no one even knew his name.

It would be child’s play to figure out who it was, of course, assuming they weren’t all killed by Orks first. They had his voice on record, giving the order to pick up the survivors right before the Phalanx rammed itself into the Attack Planet. Still, the fact that no one on Earth seemed to know who they owed their lives to was a sobering thought. He would have liked to think that single act had killed the Beast and saved the Imperium, but reports indicated that a significant number of lesser Rokks and Ork ships had survived the loss of the Attack Planet and were currently regrouping for another push somewhere in the Oort cloud. Estimates said they would be ready to make another push for Earth in a matter of months. At the same time the primarchs and their legions were gradually trickling back into the Sol system. Sanguinius and Vulkan were expected to be back within the week. Angron was already planetside. A few primarchs were not likely to be able to get back to Earth anytime soon. Lion El’Jonson was still trying to sort out his legion’s massive rebellion issues. Perturabo was in a coma for the foreseeable future. Guilliman, Horus, and Curze were all still trying to hamstring the Beast’s hordes.

There were even reports of eldar entering the system to reinforce humanity, courtesy of Eldrad and their allies among that alien race. Regardless of what Oscar wanted, it looked like Sol was going to turn into a battleground. Not for the first time since the war began, Oscar found himself wondering if accepting Eldrad’s crazy proposal to rescue Isha from Nurgle’s mansion had been a good idea. Perhaps the war would have been inevitable, Chaos was truly a threat to humanity and the Ruinous Powers never seemed to like the idea of something that they couldn’t control, but having seen the cost of directly antagonizing said entities part of him was starting to regret having made the deal.

Oscar was so lost in his thoughts that he almost didn’t notice the small Administratum scribe running up to him.

“My lord,” he said, clearly out of breath from having run the entire way, “I bring important news.”

“What is it?” the Steward said, silently wincing at being called ‘my lord’.

“Three diplomats have just touched down on the landing pad in Uralia. They seek an audience with the Steward of the Imperium.”

The Steward grimaced. It appeared Draco Vangorich wasn’t the only person with a horrible sense of timing. Just before the War of the Beast, the Imperium had been in negotiations with the Auretian Technocracy. The Technocracy was a highly advanced human civilization spanning multiple star systems, with several technologies that appeared to be based off of STC designs that were previously unknown to the Imperium. Right before the War of the Beast broke out the Imperium had been in negotiations with the Auretian Technocracy to bring them into the fold as a Survivor Civilization. Although the Auretians were a peaceful people and amenable to the idea of joining the Imperium, they were not going to just roll over and give in to the Imperium’s demands, and the negotiations over the conditions of them joining the Imperium and the concessions both sides were willing to make had been particularly intense. Unfortunately, it seemed that total galactic war was not enough to stop that debate from continuing.

"Great, more problems,” the Steward muttered, “Tell them they will have to wait; I’m kind of busy right now.”

"But sir. The ambassadors aren't from the Auretian Technocracy. They're from the Orks."

And in response to this statement, perhaps the greatest revelation in the War of the Beast since the appearance of Attack Planet Ullanor, there was only one thing the Steward could say.

“What.”



"Nuhnuhnuhnono. No. This is a bad idea Oscar, I can't let you do this."

"I'm doing this, Arik, whether you like it or not."

The two gold-clad figures, the last Man of Gold and the gilded man who had watched his back since the Warlord’s armies had first marched out from Terrawatt, briskly walked down the halls of the Imperial Palace. The Steward had given the order to let the Orks be heard and had told the Administratum adept to have someone escort the Ork “diplomats” to have an audience in front of the assembled military commanders of Old Earth in the war room. If the Orks suddenly felt they had something important to say he wanted everyone to hear it.

"With all due respect this is likely some sort of trap. Most likely a spy to send information back to the Beast or some kind of sabotage ploy. They're Orks. Diplomacy just isn't in their nature. Since when have the Orks ever shown any signs of higher intelligence?"

"When we found out they had built an empire at Gorro. When we found out that it wasn't the only one. When we found out they could organize themselves into a galaxy-spanning WAAAGH!"

Arik groaned, but Oscar knew that response. He had won this debate, for now.

Having reached their destination, the door slid open for the two men and the two entered the war room. As the Steward entered the war room from the side, he looked over at the numerous generals of the Imperium, who were debating the best course of reaction over the map of the Sol system and its immediate neighbors in the center of the table. In the Steward’s absence, they had picked up where the Steward had left off, arranging for the inevitable Siege of Terra, as the Fabricator-General had called it.

Chief among them was the short woman standing at the side of the table, who seemed to be taking the lead in organizing the Imperium’s defense during Oscar’s momentary break, mostly by barking orders at men that were nearly twice her size. Honen Mu, former Uxor of the Geno Five-Two Chilliad.

Honen Mu was far from the most imposing figure, the recaff-colored, dark-haired woman being no more than five-foot flat and probably weighing only forty kilograms soaking wet, but by Terrawatt if she wasn’t one of the best strategists that Oscar had ever seen. Give her a regiment of soldiers, and within a few days she would have them dancing on the battlefield. Hers and the other guy’s.

When the Imperium had first encountered the Chilliad during the Unification Wars, Mu was already at the point where the rejuvenants wouldn’t do much more than prolong the use of the Chilliad’s psychic powers, or cept, which eventually burned out some time during the Unification of Sol. Although most Uxors retired to non-combat roles after their cept burned out, Mu had proved talented enough that she not only remained in the Imperial military, but had actually gotten promoted. She may have lost the cept that made Uxors of the Geno Five-Two Chilliad so dangerous in battlefield-level engagements, but she hadn’t lost any of her wider scale campaign management ability. Mu hadn’t been using her psychic powers as a crutch, she was genuinely talented at strategy. In terms of long-term theater-scale planning Guilliman was probably her only equal, and Oscar hated to think of what the two of them would do if they ever decided to go at it to see who the best was. Probably destroy half a sector in the process.

“Mu,” he said, nodding to each of the generals in turn, “MaSade, von Asterberg, Temoc. How are things going?”

“The Imperium hasn’t fallen apart in the five minutes you stepped out to take a break,” Mu said, speaking for the assembled generals and administrators of the Imperium. “So I think we’re doing fair enough.”

“I trust you all heard the news regarding the visitors we are about to be receiving?”

“How could we not? Ork diplomats. Are you serious? When we it we made the messenger repeat herself just to make sure she hadn’t misheard something.”

On that note, the door on the far side of the room slid open with a hiss.

“And here are the figures of the hour,” Taranis muttered under his breath.

Three imposing figures strode into the room, led by another stuttering Administratum adept. There were three of them, a leader and two hangers-on, all heavy-set and ape-like in proportion. The two flanking figures were nearly seven feet in height, whereas their leader could probably look the Steward in the eye. The three were clad in simple robes, which obscured almost every feature of their body. If it weren’t for the reinforced leather armor on the figures’ joints and their leader’s three meter long iron staff, topped with a roaring metal Ork skull at the tip of the scepter, he would have thought they were kinebrach. The Administratum adept continued to gibber, though one would admit that would be the normal reaction to dealing with a figure twice their size.

“And…as you can see, the Steward is already here, awaiting your message,” he said, clearly trying to square away his diplomacy training with his natural fight-or-flight reaction, “Food and drink are available for all diplomats to the Imperium. And, of course, if you need an interpreter, all you need to do is ask.”

The lead ork reached up and pulled back his hood.

“Don’t need an interpreter. We tell you how to surrender, you surrender. Easy.”



The silence in the room was palpable. The Imperials all looked at the Ork as if he had just stood up and spoke Gothic. Which, to be fair, he had. Not just Gothic at that, Oscar grimly noted to himself, but fluent Gothic. Yes, the intonation sounded like it came from a tortured Grox, but there was none of the hesitation, none of the misplaced emphasis typical of those who spoke Gothic as a second language. The Ork spoke Gothic as if he had spoken it his entire life.

The Ork seemed slightly bemused by the Imperials’ reaction, as if he was taking pleasure into finally stunning the yappy humies into silence. Nevertheless, he soon seemed to grow annoyed by the continued silence. He had a job to do here, and if the humies wouldn’t start the conversation, he would.

“Oh come on now, don’t look at me like that. Name’s Bezhrak. Here as a diplomat, just like I said, swear to Mork. I even brought you a little gift as a...whaddya call it...a peace offering.”

The Ork reached into his robe and pulled out a shiny, dark object, hefting it across the table. It resembled a Custodian's helm but with a red, ponytail-like crest and a narrower face visor. Oscar recognized that helm.

Jenetia Krole's helm.

Oscar's eyes darted to the Custodian, noticing his hand was gripped so tight around his guardian spear it would have probably left finger marks if it wasn't made of auramite.

"Taranis," he said, voice level, though he wasn’t sure if it was Taranis or himself he was trying to keep calm.

“Fought good and hard this one did. Made some of our Weirdboyz heads explode just by being near ‘em. Course, even the best warriors can’t hold up when you’re being piled on by a few hundred boyz at once. Killed nearly fifty of us before they finally went down. We know you humans have some weird rituals you perform whenever one of your best warriors gets killed, so we thought we’d bring what was left of her back as a token of…

"You monster!" Arik exploded, "Have you an idea what..."

Arik was obviously about to go on some moral spiel about how barbaric the Ork's actions were, but he was stopped by a sudden larger-than-usual excitement-induced coughing fit.

"And what are you going to do about it, shinyboy, cough blood all over me?"

Bezhrak sneered, before apparently remembering something.

“Oh, that reminds me. A mutual friend wanted me to pass this along to you.”

The Ork drew a coin from his robes and flicked it at the Steward, the coin bouncing across the table a couple of times before finally rolling to a stop at the Steward’s feet. It was a gold coin, albeit one that had been heavily stained with dried, blackened blood. Human blood, ork blood didn’t stain that color. The Steward didn’t want to know where that blood came from. Embossed on the face of the coin was a symbol that was very familiar to the Steward.

The symbol of Ursh.

"And what is that?" The Steward said, eyes darting to the symbol like he had just spotted a venomous snake.

"Oh, that? That's just a gift from an old friend of yours. Couldn't remember the chap's name, he just kept going on and on about all his titles. Said he was busy dealing with the khan, the priest, the slave, and the sorcerer, but he just wanted you to know he was back and that he'd get around to seeing you soon enough.”



“I highly doubt you were sent here just to give gifts. You said you had a message from the Beast? What is it?”

“Want to get straight to business then. Respectable. All right then. The great Beast has you by the guts. Struggle, he’ll rip ‘em out. Surrender, and all you lose is your pride.”

“And that’s it,” the Steward said as dryly as possible.

“Well, you’d have to submit to Ork rule of course. We’ll even let you keep your homeworld, even though you took ours.”

All the mirth briefly disappeared from the Ork’s voice at that last line.

“Oh,” Bezhrak said, slipping back into the role of smooth diplomat, “One other thing. You tell us where the pansies are keeping the lead pansie that the other group of spiky pansies wants back. That gets them off our back and then, as far as we’re concerned, the war is over.”

“And what exactly would Ork rule look like?” the Steward said rhetorically.

“Oh I think you already know what that would look like,” Bezhrak said, a hit of smugness in his voice.

Indeed, the Steward did have some inclination as to what Ork rule would look like. When the Orks descended on a world, occasionally some of the local people would submit and worship them as gods, considering them agents of divine wrath made manifest. If there was one thing humanity seemed to excel at, it was convincing themselves to worship powerful natural entities as gods, something he knew all too well. Sometimes he really felt embarrassed by some of the things his species did. Those that the Orks deemed sufficiently Orky were allowed to fight alongside the Orks as cannon fodder, painting themselves green and firing autoguns into the air. Digganobz, they called themselves.

And the Steward had seen firsthand from the helmetcams of the Iron Warriors on Prax what the Orks did to those they deemed insufficiently orky. Turned into cattle, teeth knocked out and pumped up with steroids and growth hormones to the point that they could barely be described as bipedal, let alone human. Brains insensate to the point that all they could do is open their mouths upon stimulation by light to have nutrient-filled industrial hoses forced down their mouths. Personally it almost reminded him of the Slaugth.

Bezhrak looked around the war room. “So?” he asked, his expression basically screaming that he was surprised the assembled humans hadn’t answered immediately “Give up or die? Choose.”

The room remained deathly silent. Bezhrak looked back to the other orks, as if seeking affirmation that they were all seeing the same thing, before turning back to the humans.

“Don’t want to die? Last chance?”

The Steward broke the silence.

“I think you know our answer.”



Bezhrak sighed.

“Useless,” he said, “worse than snotlings”.

He looked over to his fellows, throwing his hands up in exasperation.

“No reasoning with humans. They’re just illogical. Break ‘em, kill ‘em, eat ‘em, they understand that. Try to talk to them in terms they understand, and they turn around and do the exact opposite. They say they want to live but try and offer that to them and all of a sudden they want to fight, which is fine by me, but…”

"Enough."

The Steward's voice was flat and monotone, low but just on the edge of hearing. Almost more felt than heard.

"You send us veiled threats in the form of gifts. You give us an offer that we cannot possibly fulfill. This isn't a peace offering. It's intimidation. What is the purpose of all this?"

Bezhrak snorted.

“You look down on us. Call us ‘barbaric’. Look at us being proper Orky and think we’re dumb, think you’re better than us. Because you’re ‘civilized’. But look at us now. Look at what the ‘barbarians’ have done. It’s not the ‘civilized’ folk of the galaxy who beat you back all the way to your home planet and come knocking at your door, now is it? We’re much tougher than you give us credit for. You push us, we push back. You hit us on the head, and we become more clever. You try to kill us, and we just come back for another go.

And look where being ‘civilized’ has got you. You lot just let someone walk right into your halls and insult you all right to your faces. But you wouldn’t dare harm ‘em. Because they’re a diplomat. I mean, after all, it wouldn’t be the civilized thing to do.”

The Steward stood, his hand grabbing the ear of the chair and snapping it with a loud crack. His face was a mask of stone, only his eyes showing the sheer anger burning underneath.

“I have, tried, time and again, to be reasonable. Tried to be optimistic, to assume the best in people. And I keep getting it thrown back in my face. Well then. Maybe it’s time I stopped being reasonable. Perhaps it’s time I get unreasonable.”

Bezhrak grinned, teeth and tusks bared.

“So what are you going to d…”

The Steward thrust his hand up in a claw-like gesture, palm facing him, the sheer psychic force stopping the Ork' retort in his throat. As if crushing an orange, the Steward slowly clenched his hand into a fist, the Ork’s body crumpling in time with the flexing of his fingers. As he died, the Ork screamed “WAAagh!”, like many of his kin. But it was a high-pitched, wheezing WAAAGH!, one that if people heard it would have sounded more like a cry of desperation than a battle cry. Though that may have just been the air being forced from his lungs. The Ork’s body burned with golden fire, spores erupting into golden motes before they could even hit the ground. If he didn’t know better, the Steward could almost have sworn he saw fear in those eyes.

The remains of what had once been the Ork known as Bezhrak hit the ground with a wet plop., both Orks and humans shocked by what they had just seen. Then the Steward snapped his head to look at the remaining Orks, methodical and almost robotic in his motion.

“I assume the rest of you are smart enough to carry a message?”

The Steward did not even wait for the Orks to answer.

“That”, he said, pointing at the fist-sized, leaking remains of the Ork on the ground, “That is my message. Go back to the Beast and tell him that is my answer to his demands. Now get out.”

The Orks left the room as quickly as they could, having seen what happened to their leader. The rest of the room looked between another, unsure as of what to do. Even Arik Taranis and Honen Mu seemed torn between whether they should come to the Steward's aid or leave him be. For most of the people in the room the Steward was their leader, and for many he was as close to them as a family member or a friend. However, they had also just seen their friend crumple a full grown ork into a lump the size of a beverage can. Finally, it was Mu who worked up the courage to break the silence.

"Are you...okay?"

Oscar took a moment to compose himself, taking a deep breath in and out. He had let his emotions get the better of him, and that was wrong. He wished Malcador was here. Malcador had known how to get through to him better than anyone else. It was times like this that he wished his adoptive father was still around.

“Yes,” he said, easing back into the role of stoic, unbreakable Steward of the Imperium, “I’m fine.”

“So what happens now?” Arik said, looking over at the remains of the ork on the ground. "It looks like diplomacy went about as well as expected."

“I don’t know,” the Steward said, once again feeling that gnawing feeling of uncertainty in his gut, “I just don’t know.”

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