Chapter 1: The Transmigrated Cog-Greaser
A wave of agony tore through him, a pain that felt as if it was rending his very soul.
It was not the pain of nerves, but something deeper, more fundamental—as though the fibers of his spirit had been ripped apart and then crudely stitched back together.
The sensation was a profound, systemic violation, like having his soul wrenched from his body, tossed into a Warp storm for a few centuries, and then brutally crammed back inside. The physiological revulsion was immense.
If he hadn't replaced his stomach with a bio-furnace reactor long ago, he would certainly be vomiting his guts out.
Joric's consciousness struggled to surface from a sea of chaos. Every flicker of thought brought a fresh wave of vertigo and nausea.
He activated his optical sensors with a jolt. The glare of the sun was blinding, forcing him to instinctively dial down his luminance sensitivity.
Before him stretched an endless, golden sea of sand.
"Throne Above… what fresh hell is this?" he muttered, his voice a metallic rasp filtered through his vocalizer grille.
The after-effects of the transit were agitating. This was somehow worse than the blind-luck jump that had first thrown him into the Warhammer universe.
He tried to sit up. Servo-arms and mechadendrites extended from beneath his crimson robes, planting themselves firmly in the sand to hoist his torso upright. Grains of silica trickled from the joints and cabling.
"Priority Directive: Commence diagnostic litany," he intoned out of habit, seeking to dispel the internal chaos with familiar ritual.
++Structural Integrity: 93.7%.++
++Motive Power Core Output: Critical. Reduced to 41%.++
++Energy Reserves: Low. Warning: Non-essential systems have automatically entered low-power mode.++
The energy warning sent a spike of alarm through his logic centers. It meant the majority of his combat capabilities were currently sealed.
His hand brushed against a cold object at his belt—the burnished gold, dodecahedron-shaped archeotech relic. Its surface was covered in flowing patterns that seemed almost alive, indecipherable to the point of inducing dizziness with a mere glance. It was faintly pulsing with latent energy.
"This was your doing, wasn't it?" he said to the object, the tone a mixture of resignation and wry humor.
This was the damned thing. In the heart of some forgotten ruin, it had flared to life, activating a teleportation matrix that had thrown him into this godforsaken wasteland.
He scanned the horizon, searching for any landmark.
There was nothing but dunes, rolling on and on until they met the sky.
He engaged his multi-spectral augur array. His vision was immediately overlaid with streams of data.
++Environmental Scan: Gravity… approx. 0.998 Standard Terran G. Atmospheric composition: Nitrogen 78%, Oxygen 21%, Argon 1%...++ He recited the data, but his voice cut out abruptly.
That ratio… it was too familiar. So familiar it nearly made his organic heart stop—if he still had one.
Impossible! How could it be?
He took a sharp, deep intake of air. Even through the filtration system, he could almost "smell" the scent locked in his oldest memories—so impossibly similar to the blue marble that haunted his dreams. The gravity was a near-perfect match.
An absurd, insane, yet utterly electrifying thought sparked through every one of his circuits.
"Could it be…? Am I back? Am I back on Earth?!" Excitement caused his voice to crackle with static.
Pure ecstasy surged through his systems like a holy current from the Omnissiah.
Home! Real food! The Internet! No whispers from the Warp! No Ork WAAAGHs!
No fellow Tech-Priests who wanted to dismantle your research for theological deviations, or declare you a heretic for using an unsanctioned watt of power!
He felt an overwhelming urge to dance and scream at the sky. After paying such a high price just to survive in the nightmare of the 41st millennium, had he actually been rewarded by fate?
But long-ingrained caution and paranoia swiftly suppressed the impulse.
Calm, Joric, calm! The data could be a coincidence… more proof is required, he told himself, though his tone still carried an irrepressible tremor.
His optical sensors locked onto a few thorny, drought-resistant plants growing low against the sand. The scanner immediately went to work.
++Flora Sample Analysis: Gene-sequence displays significant non-terrestrial splicing and mutation. Sample carries trace Beta and Gamma radiation… characteristics consistent with forced mutation due to radiological contamination. Ecological Assessment: Anomaly. Confirmed radioactive mutant species.++
Radioactive mutation? His spirits sank.
Had his homeworld's environment deteriorated to this state? Or… was this not the timeline he remembered?
"Attempt to connect to the local datasphere! Now!" he roared, the command overflowing with desperate urgency.
He raised a hand, and from beneath his sleeve, a pale, metallic object the size of a human head shot out—a servo-skull, adorned with a cog-toothed Aquila and various data-ports, its jaw chattering as it hovered at his side.
++[01010011 01100011 01100001 01101110 00100000 01100001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01100001 01110110 01100001 01101001 01101100 01100001 01100010 01101100 01100101 00100000 01100110 01110010 01100101 01110001 01110101 01100101 01101110 01100011 01101001 01100101 01110011 00101110 00100000 01001001 01100100 01100101 01101110 01110100 01101001 01100110 01111001 00100000 01101110 01100101 01110100 01110111 01101111 01110010 01101011 00100000 01110000 01110010 01101111 01110100 01101111 01100011 01101111 01101100 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01100011 01101001 01110110 01101001 01101100 01101001 01111010 01100001 01110100 01101001 01101111 01101110 00100000 01110011 01110100 01100001 01110100 01110101 01110011 00101110]++ he transmitted in a burst of binary cant.
The servo-skull's ocular lens glowed, its jaw chattering faster in acknowledgement. It ascended rapidly, beginning a spiral search pattern with Joric at its epicenter, its internal sensors and comms-arrays fully active, greedily tasting the air for any whisper of a data stream.
Joric watched the real-time feed from the skull in his own vision, his core processing cycles dedicated to the task.
At first, there was only blank noise, causing his internal chronometer to skip a beat.
But then, the skull caught something.
However—
The feedback that returned to his neural interface was not the structured data packets and bustling signals of the vibrant digital world he remembered.
There was only static, amplified until it was a piercing shriek.
It was sharp, chaotic, a meaningless roar of electronic noise. The servo-skull managed to forward a few incredibly faint, shattered data fragments, but they were like shrapnel from an explosion—no valid protocol headers, no information payloads, only unreadable gibberish against a background of catastrophic interference.
The servo-skull sent back its calm analysis: ++Warning: Evidence of large-scale signal annihilation detected. No active network beacons found. Data fragments cannot be reconstructed. Hypothesis: Global datasphere has suffered catastrophic damage or exists in a state of terminal decay. Connection attempt failed.++
Hope, like an over-pressurized vessel, ruptured instantly.
The whiplash from the emotional shift left him feeling hollowed out. The depth of his current disappointment was directly proportional to the height of his earlier ecstasy.
He could even sense a flicker of logic-based "confusion" from the servo-skull; even it could not comprehend such a total, silent void where a network should be.
"Recall. Maintain alert posture," he ordered, his voice low and defeated.
The servo-skull flew back silently to his shoulder, its jaw clicking softly, a quiet companion to its master's gloom.
This was not the home he longed for. At least, not completely.
The gravity was right, the air was right, but the biosphere was mutated and the datasphere was dead.
What in the name of the Machine God had happened to this world? Was he truly back, or was this some cosmic jest?
A sense of isolation, cold and granular as the sand at his feet, flooded every one of his sensors.
He stood in the center of an infinite desert, under an alien sun, on radioactive soil, holding a mystery from a forgotten age, his path home severed behind him.
Even his most trusted instrument of the Omnissiah could not provide the answer he craved.
His core protocols updated themselves, but this time, they were driven by a new, more personal, more urgent directive: to find answers.
He chose a direction at random and began to walk.
His precision-machined feet left deep impressions in the sand, which were swiftly erased by the ceaseless wind.
His crimson robes whipped about him in the hot air, and a heart that had soared with hope and then plummeted into doubt beat silently within his mechanical chest.