A warp-translation signature.
My fingers froze inside the cooling cavity of the dead beast sprawled beside me. The thing’s ribs were still warm, still twitching as its biology tried to remember what living felt like. I withdrew my hand slowly, viscera dragging off my wrist in wet strands.
Another tremor.
Stronger, distorted.
Ugly.
This wasn’t how a proper warp jump felt.
This was… crude.
Turbulent.
As if the vessel ripping into realspace was barely holding itself together.
I stood, wiping blood on the dirt-smeared plating of my thigh. The fire flickered unnaturally—its light bending sideways, the shadows stretching too long across the broken street. The ruined skyline of the ancient metropolis towered around me, skeletal and jagged. My ship—what remained of it—rested at the heart of the city like a fossilized heart.
I tilted my head up.
The sky churned with warp-sheen.
Someone was breaking through.
“Impossible…”
My voice cracked from disuse.
“After this long?”
I closed my eyes and opened the null within.
The void inside me stretched, uncoiling like a living absence. Sound thinned. The air lost depth. Colors flattened into a dead, grainy wash. The warp hissed—yes, hissed—as if recoiling from my field. After all these centuries, its outrage hadn’t diminished.
Good.
I reached outward, not with thought but with the suppression of it—sending a patterned void-surge.
A carved absence.
A structured negation.
The old emergency beacon of the Interstellar Age.
A language of zeros.
A distress call impossible for psykers to hijack or falsify.
- ·· — ···
Help.
Alive.
Human.
--The signal rolled across the planet, a silent implosion that reality itself was forced to notice.
I sent another.
- ·· — ···
Stabilized.
Respond.
My jaw clenched as the null-lattice in my spine heated, old implants waking from epochs of quiet decay. They whirred faintly—no machine spirits, no superstitions, just honest ancient hardware trying to remember what functioning felt like.
I felt the ship above.
A living presence—distorted, fleshy, wrong—pressing against the edges of the warp as it exited. Not an AI helm. Not a clean transition. Something organic was steering, bleeding into the warp around it.
A human mind.
A mutated one.
Nothing from my era.
What… had happened to mankind?
My heart kicked against my ribs, a sensation so rare it startled me. In my time, human warp travel was precise, mathematical, elegantly controlled by networked intelligences and psychic dampeners. This… this was barbaric. Uneven. As if the vessel clawed its way out of the Immaterium by instinct alone.
A shadow passed over me as the sky tore wider, venting streaks of faint light and turbulent vapor.
They were coming in blind.
Nearly crashing their way between realities.
Human?
Degenerated?
Deranged?
Whatever they were, they were not the future I had been promised.
The old world—the one of elegant star-galleys, of sentient helms, of flawless navigation matrices—was gone.
Replaced by something crooked.
Something frightened.
I whispered, barely audible:
“…What did the warp do to you?”
No answer.
Only the trembling sky.
And the ship.
Descending.
The mountain’s spine groaned beneath my boots as I climbed, stone cracking in long, patient fractures. I moved by instinct—step, pull, breathe—up the ridgeline I had worn into the rock over the centuries. The air thinned, grew sharp, grew clean. Below me, the metropolis sprawled like a corpse: a labyrinth of towers fused into my ship’s broken hull, a silent monument built by a single, unwilling caretaker.
My hands brushed against jagged metal and fossilized circuitry as I ascended.
Relics.
Artifacts.
Failures.
Bits of the golden age of mankind.
Half-buried.
Half-forgotten.
Half-dead.
A solemn stillness settled over me as I reached the summit—a ridge of black stone jutting above the ruined city. My camp was a dim ember behind me, a small flame in a world that had forgotten what fire meant. The sky above… was no longer still.
The warp tremor deepened.
The clouds split.
Not torn—opened.
A massive structure descended through the breach, its hull casting a shadow that drowned half the horizon. It was shaped like a cathedral—a temple—its surface bristling with statues, gothic spires, and colossal flying buttresses. Arches big enough to shelter star-chariots curved along its flanks. Great wings of armored plating unfolded in slow, grinding gestures.
A temple-ship.
My mouth went dry.
“Humanity… what have you done to yourselves?”
In my era, starships were sleek things—pragmatic frames wrapped around logic-engines and AI cores. This ship was a shrine. A religious monument hurled into orbit. More architecture than machine. Its mass was obscene; no vessel of the Interstellar Age would waste that much volume on empty air and decorative stone.
The ship wasn’t built.
It was worshipped.
My chest tightened at the realization.
If humanity had begun turning their starships into temples…
They had forgotten.
Everything.
A smaller tremor shivered through the air—a ripple of turbulence as a lighter craft detached from the cathedral-ship’s hangar. Not smooth. Not aerodynamic. It descended like a thrown spear, scarring the air with heat and noise.
I recognized the silhouette with painful clarity—archival memory sparking across old implants.
Not a Valkyrie.
Those came later.
Cruder.
Military-grade equipment strapped onto what used to be a civilian transport platform.
But this…
This was the ancestor.
The shape that would become the Valkyrie gunship: armored prow, stabilizing wings, tail assembly braced like a diving predator.
It descended fast, too fast, boosters shrieking as they fought gravity and atmospheric drag. Light blazed along its belly, painting the valley scarlet. Dust storms curled around its wake. The smell of ionized air hit my senses—sharp, metallic, almost nostalgic.
I stood still on the mountain peak, a lone figure surrounded by the ruins of a better age.
Behind me, the silent city loomed—its towers twisted by warp weathering, its streets filled with the bones of things that had tried to kill me. My ship’s hull rose from the center like a tombstone, its once-perfect alloy pitted and eaten by madness.
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I was the last human who remembered what it had been.
And now… these descendants were coming.
The gunship circled once, engines whining in struggle, then angled toward my ridge. Its side hatches bristled with weapon mounts. I could sense movement inside—shapes, thoughts, distorted human bio-signatures. No AI signatures. No logic-engines. No clean machine-thinking.
Only flesh.
Only fear.
Only the warped echoes of what humanity had become.
My null-field stirred involuntarily, responding to the psychic residue oozing from the ship’s crew.
So many psykers aboard.
So much unshielded emotion bleeding into the warp.
Dangerous. Untrained. Degenerate.
The craft slowed. Its landing thrusters roared. Heat scalded my face as it hovered over the ridge. Wind hammered the rocks, kicking grit into my hair, ripping at the tatters of my clothing. The engines screamed in a dying-metal pitch, fighting my null-field’s interference without knowing why.
The craft faltered—just a stutter—but enough to alarm the pilot.
I stepped forward, the sky reflected in my eyes.
My voice was a whisper swallowed by the storm:
“I am not your enemy.”
But my null-field said otherwise.
It pulsed outward in a quiet, crushing wave—unintentional, instinctive.
The gunship lurched.
Screams carried over the engines—raw, panicked.
Sensitive minds collapsing into instinctive terror at the sudden pressure of psychic extinction.
I clenched my fists, forcing the field back down, crushing it into the cage of my ribs. My breath trembled. My heart hammered once, painfully.
“I won’t hurt you.”
Another lie.
Or truth.
Even I no longer knew.
The gunship steadied itself, dropping lower, landing gear folding out like crooked talons. Dust billowed around it as it touched down on the rocky plateau, engines whining in exhaustion.
Silence followed.
Heavy.
Expectant.
Sacred.
I stood atop the mountain—not a king, not a prophet, not a savior—but a fossil of a forgotten age, staring at the future as it crawled toward me in a machine that barely understood itself.
A side ramp hissed open.
Boots thudded.
Voices echoed.
Weapons clicked.
And humanity… stepped out to meet me.
A humanity I no longer recognized.
The first thing I noticed was the noise.
Not disciplined, modulated comms chatter like in my era—just raw vocal commands barked over roaring engines, carried on wind and dust. Harsh syllables, truncated consonants, a language built from the ruins of something I once knew.
Low Gothic.
Or what my implants insisted was its degenerated descendant.
The ramp slammed down with a hollow clang. Figures emerged in staggered formation—six, then twelve, then more—helmets reflecting the dying sun in dull plates of ceramite or some cheaper imitation. Not sleek. Not smart-linked. Not responsive.
Manual armor. Manual weapons.
Weapons with triggers.
I felt a cold ache behind my eyes.
A mourning.
A disbelief so old it felt new.
The soldiers spread out, boots crunching across gravel, weapons shouldered in rigid, mechanical arcs. Lasguns—primitive beam projectors, barely stabilized. Thin barrels, overcharged power cells strapped to their sides with exposed cabling. Not integrated. Not safe.
The first of them stepped out with the wind at his back, boots scraping grit across the stone. His armor wasn’t plate, nor ceramic composite—just layered flak segments stitched into a long voidcoat, reinforced at the shoulders with hammered metal that looked recycled from ship hull scraps. Functional, ugly, mass-produced. He carried a lasgun slung tight to his chest, muzzle trembling slightly from the cold or fear.
Behind him came more.
Armsmen—shipboard infantry.
Voidborn, by the gaunt look of them.
Faces pale, eyes sunken, hair shaved or tangled.
Equipment mismatched, some using naval jackets, others full flak harnesses. One had welding gloves instead of combat gauntlets.
Competent, but only by necessity.
Their weapons blazed in my vision as antique silhouettes—lasguns with unshielded coils, power packs strapped together with leather cord, autorifles with cracked stocks, grenades dented enough to question their stability. One man hefted a heavy stubber, the barrel scratched and patched like a beloved relic.
A few carried bolt weapons, but even these were primitive to my eyes—oversized, badly stabilized, firing shells propelled by chemical charges and ancient gyros. Backwater weapons. Last-resort tools.
The armsmen formed a semicircle around me with trained, if not elegant, discipline. Boots planted. Shoulders squared. Breathing fast. Fingers resting on primitive triggers.
I raised my head to face them.
So small.
So fragile.
So terrified.
A second detachment emerged—bodyguards.
They wore heavier voidsuits reinforced with metal plates and layered ablatives, more ceremonial than functional. A few carried shock mauls, others carried compact sub-carbines. And strapped to their belts were prayer-tokens, feathered scripts, strange symbols carved into metal.
Superstition.
Where logic should have been.
Then the psykers.
They stumbled out, pushed by handlers—thin young men and women wrapped in binding cloth and wire belts connected to sparking generator packs. Their heads were shaved. Their eyes were ringed in bruised purple. Their restraints dug into their flesh. One coughed blood as the cold air hit him.
Psykers treated as animals.
Not regulated.
Not trained.
Not supported by AI oversight.
Just… chained.
My null-field pressed against their minds and they recoiled instantly, writhing in pain.
They were alive only because they were useful.
And they were useful only because they could suffer.
Then came the officer.
He wore a long coat of thick naval leather, reinforced with woven impact pads. Brass studs marked his rank. A rebreather mask dangled at his chest. His sidearm was a polished bolt pistol, holstered in a cracked leather sheath. An old-fashioned power saber hung at his hip—its emitter dented, its charge pack humming unevenly.
He looked at me as though looking at a storm he could neither predict nor survive.
He shouted in Low Gothic.
My implants strained.
Interpreting.
Failing.
Retrying.
Yield.
Hands up.
On your knees.
Do not resist.
Identify.
The translations flickered—blurry, mismatched—language drift of millennia deforming every word.
He took a step closer, jaw clenched, breath visible in the cold air.
“DOWN!” he barked again, pointing the pistol at my head.
“SUBMIT!”
My interpretations lagged by half a second.
Syntax errors.
Accent drift.
Lexical collapse.
It was like listening to the ghost of a language I once spoke, now mutated beyond recognition.
I lifted my gaze and looked at them—this future humanity, armed with tools that would have been laughed at during the Interstellar Age. Their lasguns barely produced coherent beams. Their armor stopped shrapnel at best. Their psykers were caged and tortured instead of supported by neural dampeners. Their officer carried a sword that would have broken on any alloy from my time.
They believed themselves strong.
They believed themselves righteous.
But they were children holding torches in a hurricane.
The officer shouted again.
The psykers whimpered.
The armsmen tightened their grips.
Just one order from disaster.
I raised my hand slowly—palm outward—to show I meant no threat.
Instantly, half the squad flinched backward.
A few fired warning shots instinctively into the air—thin red beams stabbing uselessly into the clouds.
The officer’s mask of discipline cracked.
“DOWN!”
“KNEEL!”
“KNEEL, OR WE FIRE!”
My implants finally stabilized enough to process the sentence with clarity.
Kneel.
My throat tightened.
Not in fear.
Not in pride.
In grief.
For what they had become.
For what humanity had collapsed into.
For what millennia of terror and superstition had carved them into.
I stood perfectly still.
“I cannot kneel,” I said softly—not defiant, but true.
My voice sounded wrong to them—too calm, too articulate, too old.
Fear crackled through their ranks like static.
The officer’s face twisted.
His finger tightened on the trigger.
Someone gasped.
A psyker collapsed to their knees, screaming through metal restraints as my null-field broke their attempts to read me.
For a fraction of a moment, I considered lowering myself.
Not in obedience.
But mercy.
But my body—my ancient augments, my engineered spine, my oath to the expedition and its lost purpose—would not let me. Kneeling was not encoded in my being. Submission was not something I was built for.
“I am here,” I whispered, “to be found. Not conquered.”
The officer didn’t understand the words.
Only the tone.
He shouted a final order.
And the firing squad exhaled as one.