Monday, July 10, 2017

Backstory: Hammers of Man, Part I


Part I: Preparations

Rusov Major. What a hellish place to live. Or at least that’s what I thought, before. Now it seems a heaven, in my memories, for that is the only place it still exists.

The climate of Rusov Major was cruel, made so by its eccentric orbit. Six months of its 15-month year were what one would consider “pleasant”. Three months were torrid summer, the plant life on the surface withering and dying, the steppes becoming deserts. The remaining six months were some of the coldest noted in Imperial records. Blankets of ice and snow wrapped the planet in white. Temperatures dropped to near absolute zero. Exposure of any kind to the biting cold was fatal.

“Hellish.” That’s how I described it as a young man. How foolish that notion seems now. I didn’t know what that word meant, before.

I suppose Rusov’s climate was what made it ideal for the type of training and field testing the adepts of Mars wanted to conduct there. The first word we received that a major construction effort was needed near my home hive was from a red-robed tech-priest, more metal exposed to the eye than flesh. I still remember the harshness of his mechanically-produced voice, the metallic clicking of his numerous bionic appendages as he dictated the project requirements to me.

I worked construction, and had for years, being the youngest of eight brothers when my parents died in a hab heater failure. Like all other Rusovian older siblings, my brothers were lost to my family as soon as they were no longer the youngest, volunteering in the Guard as war-sons, never to be seen again. I had often dreamt of joining them among the stars, mowing down xenos with my mighty lasgun instead of overseeing the construction of hab block after identical hab block. If I had only known what fate had in store.

We were to build a camp, the purpose of which was not immediately revealed to us. Poring over the plans and specifications, it was apparent that it wasn’t a prison camp. There were no fences, no cells. Beyond that, I had no clue as to the camp’s function. There was a large mess hall and a firing range, which would suggest a training camp. But a large space marked “Gene Laboratory”, along with a fully functional ceramite forge, seemed odd for a boot camp. The strangeness didn’t stop there. The camp contained billets, but...large...billets. Too large. I checked with the tech-priest to confirm that the dimensions weren’t in error. If a man with a robotic face can appear miffed, he certainly did as he assured me that the specifications were correct.

The beds, mess tables, and even the lavs were all...huge. Much too large for a normal man. I had heard of the bulky abhumans known as ogryns, but I’d never heard of them fielded in units as large as could be trained in this camp. My gut told me this was something else. Something...new. The...creatures that these facilities were designed for must be large, much larger than even the fabled Astartes.

Construction on the camp began in the spring, and it was built quickly, in the traditional Rusovian style: sturdy, self-contained hab buildings that could be lowered into the ground during the winters. The tech priest oversaw it all with his cold mechanical optics, his bionics twitching like an insect. When it was complete, summer was just setting in. Most days had to be spent indoors, sheltering from the sun, which hung huge in the sky.

So when the transports flew over my hive en route to the camp, I heard them and felt them in my bones as their engines roared overhead, but I did not see them. It was this fact that fed my curiosity. It was my curiosity that led me to investigate the camp. It was my curiosity that saved my life in the end.

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