Editing The Tales of the Emperasque: Part Twelve (section)

==9-094-001-M42==
Shas’O Kes’y Fap’Tau was not a patient man, as anyone who had ever walked in on him practicing his favorite pastime could attest. When word came from his diplomatic team that the Astartes that had apparently been leading the expedition in secret the entire time had demanded his presence, he was incensed. “Those Imperials actually said they had all the time in the world?” Fap demanded, slamming his gargantuan fist down on his desk, denting the material and shaking something loose from the underside.<br>
“Yes, sir,” his aide said, trying not to look at the floor. “We have few options here. The Cobra is not a powerful ship, but with the railgun off line and most of the ships keeping their distance, it would be able to inflict some damage before we destroyed it. However, we do have a few ships in orbit that could destroy it one-on-one.”<br>
“If we have to. I’ll be honest,” Fap said, looking at the desk as it if had betrayed him personally, “I’m actually a little curious as to why they’re here at this point. Looks like that Space Marine was the ‘passenger’ the ship’s CO mentioned, at least.”<br>
“He mentioned several passengers,” the aide reminded him. “There may be more Marines aboard.”<br>
“I don’t know very much about Imperial command structure, but I’m all but certain Marines don’t command the Navy,” Fap said, standing up.
“They don’t. It may be a Marine ship, though, sir,” the aide supplied.<br>
“Whatever. Where is the Marine now?”<br>
“Still waiting at the landing site, quiet as you like. This shuttle has returned to the ship. He’s just standing there.”<br>
“I’ll head out and meet him,” Fap decided. “Deception or no, this needs to stop.”

Soon enough, the hovercar the Fire Warrior commandeered had deposited him at the landing site, escorted by a team of Crisis Suits. Vulkan hadn’t moved an inch in the entire period between the Water Caste diplomat leaving and Fap’s arrival. The Promethian Way allowed such centering of balance, and he knew it would unnerve the flightier Tau.<br>
As soon as Fap arrived, the Crisis Suits deployed to flank the Terminator, taking up symmetrical covering positions to allow Fap a clear line of retreat if Vulkan did something aggressive. He had no such inclination. Fap marched right up to the Salamander and started to speak.
“What is your business on our world, human?” he asked shortly.<br>
“At the time we arrived, precisely nothing. Now? Escape,” Vulkan replied in the same tone. He noted with distant amusement that Fap was trying to look taller than he actually was. As if it made a difference when compared with the vast size of a Terminator-clad Primarch.<br>
“Escape? From me, or my system?” Fap demanded.<br>
“Hah! Ahh ha ha ha, ohhhh, that, that was good,” Vulkan said, laughing aloud. “Escape. From you. Yeah, that’s great. No, we just want to leave the system and go home. We collided with something on our Warp travels that ruined our Faster-Than-Light maneuvering ability. Once it’s fixed, we’re gone.”<br>
“And you expect me to believe you?” Fap asked, angrily, poking a massive hand at the Terminator.<br>
“Obviously,” Vulkan said, still chuckling. “What could I possibly gain from a lie?”

Quite a lot. Even as the Fire Warrior and the Fire-Born were debating, Forgefather Vulkan He’Stan was clinging for dear life to a tumbling ball of wreckage. “Wilcox, I’m away, armor holding, advise,” He’Stan managed, the undampened effects of gravity cutting his words short.

“You’ve cleared the hold and are on course, Lord. Emperor’s fortune be with you,” Wilcox said, cutting the direct-beam transmission. Below, He’Stan clung to the handles of his coffin, wondering just why he had agreed to this scheme. It had been Vulkan’s idea; since only he could find the location of the crypt and the ship’s sensors couldn’t detect it, he would provide He’Stan the coordinates of the entrance, and allow He’Stan to simply arrive there. Wilcox would eject a large amount of trash and debris in an arc towards the planet’s surface, disguised as nothing more than a normal purge of the ship’s garbage and biological waste. Inside the blobs of trash, however, would be a small metal box, proofed with heat-shielding taken from the damaged primary Warp drive, and a guidance system from a stripped dropship. The rig was completed with a pair of tiny maneuvering rockets and a larger ion pulse rocket from the same dropship, all of it covered in a combination of frozen grease and heat-absorbent foam, meant to burn off in the atmosphere. The vessel would kill any human that tried to ride it into re-entry…but He’Stan was not human.

The tiny vessel, which Ir’Shal had helpfully named the “Uninspired,” was nudged into the correct course and dropped by the Swift as it orbited the moon. Because the Tau would be expecting any objects ejected by the Swift to be ballistic, the timing had to be perfect; though the Uninspired had engines, overusing them would have lit up every high-orbit sensor around the moon. Fortunately, Ir’Shal had learned his trade well, and the launch was perfect. The Uninspired was tumbling along at the right angle to enter the atmosphere without exploding.
He’Stan had forgone the equipping of the other Artefacts here, as Vulkan had assured him that they were unnecessary: the defenses around the crypt were meant to keep out grave robbers and vagrants, not the greatest living Salamander warrior, who was supposed to find it eventually anyway. The only things he had brought with him were a normal Mark Six Godwyn bolter and a satchel of drum magazines, along with a chainsword and a small bag of upgrade parts for the bolter, which Vulkan had insisted He’Stan bring even if he never saw fit to use them. ‘For surprises,’ Vulkan had said.<br>
Along with those things, a single piece of electronic hardware from the ship’s simple armory was tucked in a padded case at He’Stan’s waist: a man-portable vox-caster. Though vastly simpler and cheaper than the vox built into the Salamander’s helmet, its range was significantly greater, and could be powered by the generator at He’Stan’s back, along with a bag of copper disks.

The pseudo-assault pod dropped vertiginously through the atmosphere of the planet, spinning wildly. The temperature inside would have been unbearable for anyone but a Salamander, but He’Stan had weathered worse. A faint whistling noise of atmospheric passage sounded from every corner of the pod as the heat-shielding reacted to the atmosphere, and the coating of junk on the outside burst into flame. He’Stan kept his eyes glued to the countdown timer on the HUD. Five minutes until stratopassage, then the re-entry rockets could fire without triggering the sensors. A true assault pod would have been much better, of course, but if they had used one, the Tau would have assumed it was a prelude to an all-out war.<br>
He’Stan gripped the metal handles on the inside of his impromptu ship as hard as he dared without breaking them, and prayed that it would not become his coffin. Three minutes to stratopassage.<br>
A small number of Tau on the planet below lived near the spot where He’Stan was supposed to land. If they had looked up to the sky, they would have seen nothing yet. The pod was so small that it barely left a trail, and it wasn’t coasting for a smooth landing like a ship or a fixed-wing aircraft. The pod slammed into the stratosphere seconds before He’Stan fired off the primary engine, and the pod slowed massively, nearly crushing He’Stan against his armor. The venerable Salamander checked the guidance system, dazed. He was still on course. The secondary rockets fired, righting the pod, as the craft slowed yet further.

The pod lit up, all three engines flaring up, swerving the pod towards the crypt entrance. The guidance system suddenly switched from passive guidance to active, and He’Stan released his death grip on the handles, grabbing the control stick. The stick jerked and bucked, but He’Stan’s power-armoured hands stayed steady, guiding the pod through the low-lying clouds over the crypt entrance. From above, it looked like nothing more than a long-dried tidal trough, but He’Stan knew it to be much more.<br>
The pod dropped to a mere few hundred meters, its bottom aflame. The ship continued to decelerate, plummeting towards the ground, until it finally collided. The impact speed was enough to instantly mulch a human. Again, He’Stan wasn’t troubled.<br>
The Salamander kicked the door of the pod off once the bolts had fired, launching the metal plate away from the smoking metal block. He ran out, pausing only long enough to trigger the pod’s self-destruct meltabomb. The blinding light behind him erased the pod completely, deepening the crater the pod had made and filling the bottom with molten metal.<br>
He’Stan ran up to the well-concealed cave that doubled as the crypt’s entrance. Pausing only to sweep the cave mouth with his sensors to look for anything out of the ordinary, he pushed ahead, readying his bolter.