Chapter 26: Solar System
Like a general conducting slaughter, Omega carved through the burning field with terrible grace. Combat skills honed across twenty years of endless war became pure motion: stop, strike, advance.
Only when enemy bodies mounted impossibly high did he pause, and then only when a charging war beast forced repositioning.
Omega moved through chaos with unsettling lightness, his footwork blurring into phantasmal patterns. The war beast crashed through empty space where he had stood moments before and found instead the bite of his sword meeting its charge.
'Psychological suggestion.'
The mechanism crystallized when Omega applied deciphered alien knowledge to his own spectator ability.
His enemies didn't fail to perceive him through technological deception or light manipulation. Instead, he had learned to weaken his presence beneath conscious recognition, a psychological annihilation deeper than invisibility.
He stood before them in full height: two and a half meters of armored flesh. By diminishing his presence to that of a mosquito, he rendered himself beneath notice. Human attention was drawn to stimuli of greater weight.
What occupied their blind spot might as well not exist.
When enemies finally perceived him, it was as though he materialized from the void, the discontinuity between absence and arrival making him seem a phantom born from carnage.
Twenty years of constant warfare, each day a crucible demanding survival and transcendence. Omega had methodically pushed beyond every limit his enhanced physiology imposed, reshaping his consciousness until it spanned continental scope. This forged strength now allowed him to regard hundreds of thousands of enemies with something approaching calm.
Behind him, Alpha Space Marines advanced in coordinated formations while Titan walkers and Star Realm battle-groups carved through enemy positions in great swathes of annihilation.
Within the hour, Omega's infiltration had fractured the enemy army into chaos. Beneath precise Imperial command, millions of Human Civilization troops executed systematic annihilation.
Three days sufficed. The alien presence on this world was erased from existence. Omega led his legions onward to the next contested field, cycling endlessly through warfare's bitter crucible.
Twenty days hence, two Gene-Seed Primarchs descended personally upon this system to eliminate the Rangdan aliens entrenched in its depths. The main force mopped up fractured remnants while Omega and Alpharius returned to the bridge of their flagship.
The aliens were extinguished, yet the war endured.
The Alpha Legion's burden stretched across star systems without end, and they would march toward the next at best speed.
This time, however, no Gene-Seed Primarch would lead. The Company Commanders had received systematic strategic and tactical instruction orchestrated by Omega himself. They were more than capable now.
Ten great warships detached from the fleet proper and carved through the Warp toward Holy Terra.
...
Months passed in the cold dark between stars.
Light-years fell away beneath their passage until the Pluto Warp jump station resolved before them, a nexus of ancient architectural fortifications bristling with weapons systems.
The fortress architecture of the Solar System manifested in cold certainty: every world layered with defenses, each planet a bulwark against the void.
The void gleamed with distant radiance. The sun burned eternal, radiating its heat and light across the planets in its dominion while merchant fleets and warship swarms conducted endless commerce, thousands upon thousands of kilometers of starship traffic wove through the heavens in ordered chaos.
'Damn.' Omega had seen a lot in twenty years, but this... This was something else entirely. The sheer scale of it hit different when you actually saw it with your own eyes.
The Solar System held eight worlds. Terra served as the Imperium of Man's political heart. Mars held the throne of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Luna orbited as Terra's stalwart guardian. Jupiter and Saturn bore titanic defensive installations. Pluto hosted the great Warp jump stations, the Gates of the Underworld, while Uranus harbored yet more military strength.
Every world sustained vast populations, and every world served the greater mechanism of Human Civilization.
Omega observed the commercial freighters and warships, some kilometers in their terrible length, flowing through the void in streams of ordered purpose. For the first time, he truly comprehended what stellar civilization meant.
In other systems, advanced worlds existed, scattered like rare gems. But to see an entire star system developed in such totality, every world bearing the mark of human dominion, this was unique. This was the Solar System's singular achievement.
Omega's knowledge approached that of the Mechanicus Sages themselves, and his understanding had transcended its former limitations. The periodic table held countless resources awaiting exploitation within any star system, yet outside Terra, few powers pursued such comprehensive development.
The technological regression suffered by most Human civilizations across the stars played its role, indeed. Many worlds boasted legacy technologies beyond counting, yet their overall advancement had significantly degraded over the long centuries.
The Imperium's scholars understood three fundamental categories of matter: ordinary matter, dark matter, and antimatter.
Yet the Imperium's technological foundation rested almost entirely upon ordinary matter at the atomic scale. The subatomic and quantum realms remained largely inaccessible, save for ion reactors and energy shields, rare exceptions in Man's arsenal.
Dark matter and antimatter applications on any scale approached impossibility. Indeed, few enemies encountered across the galactic span possessed such mastery, and those who did numbered among the galaxy's most ancient and terrible powers.
The fleet pressed onward, Mars resolving from the darkness ahead. From void-space, Mars revealed itself as a Forge World entire, a planetary factory of incomprehensible scope, its surface etched with the geometric beauty of industry itself.
Julius and the other Mechanicus Sages expounded upon Mars with something approaching reverence, their enthusiasm evident in every measured word.
"Mars," they explained, "is the sanctum of the Mechanicus. It is the temple of mechanical and technological knowledge. What we have achieved exists only because of our studies here, yet we have barely glimpsed the ocean's surface."
The Mechanicus had gathered STC Templates across the Galaxy for ten thousand years, assembling them into their great repositories. Each Template represented a complete archive —a self-contained machine intelligence that recorded every construction parameter, every process requirement, requiring no prior knowledge from its operators.
Given the materials and methods, one could build a shelter, a generator, a transport, or a reactor. The most sophisticated Templates encoded the knowledge to construct nuclear furnaces.
Countless legacies from the Golden Age rested in STC form across the galaxy, scattered and hidden, waiting for recovery.
Though the Mechanicus venerated the Omnissiah as their god, Omega recognized them for what they truly were: a scientific institution, an academy of accumulated human knowledge. They excelled at manufacturing the Imperium's war machines, though command of combat belonged to the warrior castes.
'Religion wrapped around science,' Omega thought. 'Not the worst way to preserve knowledge through the apocalypse, honestly.' He'd spent enough time with the tech-priests to understand the method behind the madness.
STC Templates functioned as civilization's backup, failsafes against complete extinction. The Mechanicus pursued their recovery and reorganization not out of superstition but out of necessity. These knowledge caches allowed humanity to rebuild without returning to primitive struggle. Yet like Gene-Seeds themselves, Templates could degrade and become inert.
The vastness of the stellar void exceeded the capacity of any mortal lifespan to traverse fully, even if spent entirely in the attempt. An ordinary human measured their years in mere hundreds.
An Astartes warrior, superhumanly enhanced, might endure five centuries or more.
But the Gene-Seed Primarchs, Omega had posed the question to Russel the Apothecary, who smiled with certain knowledge. A Primarch could live ten thousand years, certainly, perhaps more.
Alpharius had approved of the ten-thousand-year estimate, though he suggested even greater spans remained possible. Omega had once thought twenty years of warfare passed swiftly, yet now he confronted the prospect of ages vast beyond mortal reckoning.
'Ten thousand years.' The number still didn't feel real. How did you even process that? What would the world look like after ten millennia? Would he even remember who he'd been before all of this?
In that moment, he truly understood what a Gene-Seed Primarch represented: a demigod made manifest, immortal and vast in capability.
...
Upon approach to Terra's orbital docking facility, the fleet descended through layers of atmosphere into the mid-air of the great world's interior.
Countless flying vehicles wove through organized traffic lanes, a symphony of motion suspended between the sky and ground.
Terra itself blazed with illumination.
The planetary surface lay buried beneath towering architecture climbing thousands of meters skyward, each structure ablaze with the light of countless inhabited chambers. The forest of buildings seemed to ignite the entire world in electric brilliance.
From the transport vessel, Omega observed the aerial traffic —vehicles of every design flowing in coordinated streams —and comprehended viscerally what planetary crowding meant. Yet the masses represented more than mere congestion: they embodied extreme prosperity.
In the distant mid-air, a pillar of white stellar radiance dominated the skyline, the Astronomican lit by the Emperor himself, eternally illuminating the Warp's treacherous currents and guiding astrogation through the void.
Alpharius had departed Terra decades prior. Witnessing the world's transformation under the Great Crusade's prosperity, even his formidable intellect could not suppress the remark:
"The architecture has multiplied. The population has swelled. This is… remarkable."
"Under the Emperor's leadership, the Imperium grows ever more mighty and prosperous," Julius proclaimed with genuine warmth. "Humanity will come to dominate the entire Galaxy. We shall ensure it."
Alpharius offered a faint smile, a flicker of acknowledgment.
So long as the Emperor willed the Galaxy's conquest, Alpharius would follow until the extinction of his ten-thousand-year span.
The unfamiliar beauty of Terra reconfigured itself in Alpharius's perception as he directed the transport toward the distant fortress-monastery of the Alpha Legion, a bastion of stone and steel rising from the earth below.
Each Space Marine legion maintained similar strongholds, complexes of rest and restoration, adjacent to one another.
Rare were the opportunities when the legions gathered upon Terra, creating moments of singular importance as warriors from different branches of the Imperium's strength reunited and shared knowledge across the fraternity of the Gene-enhanced.
[End of Chapter]