Planetfurry BBS

[Macrorufus]

Authors note: Its a really messy book with not very nice people. If you are not fond of macros or extreme politics then don't read.





Necropolis Part 1


Klaxons within the great hive began to wail though it was still an hour before shifts ended. Millions of eyes glanced at watches to check the time and faltered in their work. Children cried, VHP soldiers on the Curtain Wall radioed confirmations and clarification requests to the Main Spine command station. Plant and manufactory supervisors urged their personnel back to production. Surely it was an error? Surely the drill would end?
But the klaxons did not desist.

After a minute or so raid sirens in the central district began keening. Soon manufactory hooters and mill whistles picked up the pattern throughout the lower hive and outer habs. Vervunhive was screaming with all of its voices.

Everywhere secondary storm shutters slid down and hazard lights began flashing. Public address plates were blanked; the weather reports, business news, stock exchange and output displays fuzzed and went black with a single line across the display reading ‘Please Stand By.’

Captain Ban Daur paused to button up his double-breasted uniform coat and pull the leather harness into place. The silver grey wolf was sweating slightly. As an officer he would have had caught wind of a drill. This was real he could feel it in his bones and smell it in the air. He forced his mind to be calm and picked up his gloves and helmet and left his quarters. The corridors of Hass West wall-fort (a section of the west side of the huge 200 metre high Curtain Wall) was bristling with troop details. All wore the blue cloth uniform and helmets of the Vervun Primary, the city’s standing army. Five hundred thousand troops all told, plus another 70,000 auxiliaries and armour crews, a mighty force that manned the Curtain wall and wall-forts of Vervunhive. There were rumours floating around that the Zoicans were rising again. Another trade-war in the offing. The Vervun Primary was a very proud force but though their predecessors had fought through a trade-war, none of the current force had actually seen combat.

Daur barked out a few commands to calm the commotion in the hallways. The wolf was young, only twenty three, but tall and clearly handsome from a good mid-Spine family and the men liked him. Mid-Spine was good because it meant that ones abode lay inside the Curtain Wall and was also part of the Spine, which was like an anthill in which the a great column stands above the lower sections in this case the Spine; not like those poor gaks in the habs outside the wall. The men seemed to relax seeing him calm, not that he felt calm.

“Alert duty stations,” the wolf told them, “You there! Where’s your weapon?”
The tiger shrugged. “Came running when I heard the - Forgot it… sir…”
“Go back and get it, you dumb gak! Three days’ discipline duty – after this is all over.”
The trooper ran off.
“Now!” cried Daur, “Let’s pretend we’ve actually been trained shall we? Every fur of you knows where he should be and what he should be doing, so go! In the hallowed name and service of our hive!”

Daur headed uptower, pulling out his auto-pistol and checking its clip. Corporal Bendace met him on the steps. The otter had a dataslate in one hand and a pathetic earring on his upper lip.
“Told you to lose that,” Daur said, taking the slate and looking at it.
“I think it’s… dashing,” replied Bendace soulfully, stroking it. They hurried up the tower as more furs double-timed it down. On a landing, they passed a Corporal tossing autoguns from a wall rack to a line of waiting men.

The otter was the first to speak.
“So what’s it say? Is it the Zoicans?”
“It doesn’t say anything. It’s just a deployment order from Hive Command in the Spine. All units are to take position, protocol gamma sigma. Wall and fort weapons are to be raised.”
“It says that?”
“No, I’m making it up. Yes, it says that. Weapons raised, but not armed, until further Hive Command notice.”
“This is bad isn’t it?”
The wolf shrugged, “Define “bad”?”
Bendace paused, “I…”
“Bad is your earring. I don’t know what this is.”

They stepped out onto the windy battlements. Gun crews were raising the trio of anti-air batteries into position, hydraulic pistons heaving the weapon mounts up from shuttered hardpoints in the tower top. Autoloader carriages were being wheeled out from the lift-heads. Other troops had taken up position in the netted stub-nests. Cries and commands flew back and forth.

Daur crossed to the ramparts and looked around. At his back, the vast, smoke-hazed shape of the Main Spine itself rose into the sombre sky like a granite peak, winking in a million lights. To his right lay the glitter of the River Hass and the grimy shapes of the docks and outer habs on the far bank. Below him, the sweeping curve of the vast 200 metre high adamantine Curtain Wall curved away east to the other parts of the inner hive. In front of him in the south lay a sprawl of habs and slums outside the wall. He raised a telescope to his eyes and peered out towards the grassland. Nothing but green emptiness could be seen. He glanced at the Wall. Only a single anti-air battery was still rising up. Daur picked up a comms unit.
“Daur to all Hass West positions. Reel it off.”
A flurry of affirmatives sparked pride in the Captain’s body. Finally the last anti-air battery had locked into position and the cheer given by the gunnery crew was torn away by the wind as the autoloader docked with the battery.
“Daur, Hass West, to Hive Command. We are deployed. We await your orders.”
Everyone was convinced it was Zoica going into another trade war. Even orbital scans had shown that to be true, they were mobilizing. But no one would have been ready for the truth.





In the vast Square of Marshals, just inside the Curtain Wall, adjacent to the Heironymo Sondar Gate, the air shook with the thunder of three hundred tank engines. Huge Avakian war-machines, painted in the blue livery of Vervun Primary, revved at idle in rows across the square. More vehicles clanked and ground their way in at the back of the square, from the marshalling sheds behind the South-Hive barracks.

General Vegolain of the First Primary Armoured, jumped down from his mount, buckling on his leather head-shield, and approached the commissar. Vegolain saluted, snapping his jack-booted heels together.
“Commissar Kowle!”
“General,” Kowle replied. He had just arrived in the square by staff limousine, a sinister black vehicle that was now pulling away with its motorbike escorts. There were two other commissars with him: Langana and the cadet Fosker. The two foxes stood at attention and looked impeccable.
Kowle was a tall, lean white tiger who looked as if he had been forced to wear the black cap and black longcoat of an Imperial Commissar. His eyes were a disturbing red.

Unlike Langana and Fosker, Kowle was an off-worlder. The senior commissar was from the Imperial Guard, seconded to watch over the Vervunhive standing army as a concession to its continued maintenance. Kowle quietly despised his post. His promising career to the Fadayhin Fifth had foundered some years before and against his will he was left to wet nurse a toy army. Now, at last, he tasted the possibility of acquiring some glory that might rejuvenate his lustreless career.

Langana and Fosker were hive-bred, both from aspiring houses. Their uniform showed their difference from Kowle. In place of the tiger’s Imperial double-eagle pins, they wore the blue axe and shield symbol of the VPHC, the Vervun Primary Hive Commissariat, the disciplinary arm of the standing army. The nobility were keen on discipline and it was rumoured that the VPHC were almost a secret police force acting beyond the reach of Administration, in the interests of the ruler.
“We have orders, Commissar?”
Kowle scratched his muzzle absently and nodded. He handed Vegolain a data-slate.
“We are to form up at company strength and head out into the grasslands. I have not been told why.”
“I presume it is Zoica, commissar. They wish to spar with us again and…”
“Are you privy to the inter-hive policies of Zoica?” Kowle snapped.
“No comm…”
“Do you then believe that rumour and dissent is tool of control?”
“No, I…”
“Until we are told it is Zoica, it is no one. Is that clear?”
The General was shifting from foot to foot his tail tucked between his legs. Finally he nerved himself to speak.
“Commissar. Will… will you be accompanying us?”
Kowle didn’t reply. He marched across to Vegolain’s Avakian and clambered aboard.
Three minutes later, the Sondar Gate opened with a great shriek of hydraulic compressors and the armoured column poured out onto the main south highway in triple file.

“Who has ordered the alarms?”
The question came from three mouths at once, dull, electronic, emotionless.
Marshal Gnide, strategic commander of Vervun Primary and chief military officer of Vervunhive, paused before replying. The lion found it difficult to know which face to answer.
“Who?” the voices repeated.
Gnide stood in the softly lit, warm audience hall of the Imperial House Sondar, at the very summit of the Main Spine. He wished he’d taken off his blue, floor-length, braid-trimmed greatcoat before entering. His plumed cap was heavy and itched his brow.
“The council voted thus and agreed with the idea.”
“They unseat me! Why was I not consulted?”
The slack jawed ‘meat puppet’ of a boy, as Gnide preferred to term them, swung into his face, tubes running off the boy’s body towards the roof. The puppets were controlled by High Master Salvatore Sondar who lived in an awareness tank and relied on puppets to represent him.
“As you were no doubt aware High Master, you were summoned but did not go. Zoica is rising again!”
Marshal Gnide strode up to the awareness tank’s porthole holding up a sheet of pictures.
“Even orbital scans show this to be true!”
Silence. Then,
“Use its proper name,” came the dull, electronic voice.
Gnide sighed.
“Ferrozoica Manufactory Hive.”
“At last, proper respect. High Master Wenner of Ferrozoica is a close friend. He assures me that this mobilization is to present them for the Imperial Guard and the Empire.”
“How can that be true? Orbital scans have shown Zoican units heading our way!” shouted Gnide.
“Are you loyal to me?”
“Of course,” said the leopard, “which is why I must do this. The council thought you wouldn’t accept.”
He brought out a document and read it.
“The council has ordered the shield to be activated to protect the Hive. Salvatore Sondar is displaced in this time of war by the Council due to his dangerous conduct.”
The voice was screeching now.
“I am Vervunhive! I am Vervunhive! I am Vervunhive! You cannot unseat me! I am High Master.”
Marshal Gnide stepped up to the podium controlling the shield and activated some keys.
That was as far as he ever got. His body slid away from the console and fell lifeless to the floor.
“I am Vervunhive,” said the voice coming from the puppet holding the blood coated knife.
“I am Vervunhive.”




Necropolis part 2



The salt grasses were ablaze. All along the scarp rise, Vervun Primary tanks were buckled and broken amid the rippling grey grass, fire spilling out of them. The air was toxic with smoke.

Commissar Kowle dropped clear of the command tank as flames within consumed the shrieking Vegolain and his crew. Kowle’s coat was on fire. He shed it. Enemy fire pummelled down out of the smoke-black air. Massive boulders of earth and rock rained down on the tank column. Kowle instinctively knew this was not Zoica. The boulders looked as if they’d been scooped up and thrown. No war machine ever did that. A boulder bounced on the ground and impacted with a Vervun tank, its fuel tanks ignited and the tank exploded sending shockwaves of whickering shrapnel in all directions. Another tank, the one behind his lead tank, was hit as he watched, a boulder slamming into its front, flipping it over, sending pieces of metal and earth scattering.

One shard grazed Kowle’s temple and dropped him. He got up again. Crews were bailing from burning tanks, some on fire, some trying to help their blazing fellows. Others ran. Kowle walked back through the line of decimated hive armour, smelling the salt grass as it burned, thick and rancid in his nose.

He pulled out his pistol.
“Where is your courage?” he asked a tank gunner as he put a round through his head.
“Where is your strength?” he inquired of two loaders fleeing up a slope, as he shot them both.
He put the muzzle of his gun to the head of a screaming, half-burned tank captain and blew out his brains. “Where is your conviction?” Kowle asked.

He swung round and pointed his pistol at a group of tank crewmen who were stumbling up the grassy rise towards him from their crushed tank.
“Well,” he asked, “What are you doing? This is war. Do you run from it?”
They hesitated. Kowle shot one through the head to show he meant business.
“Turn! Face the foe!”
The group of furs, fearing the Commissar more than the enemy, turned and fled towards the enemy positions. A huge earth boulder took them all apart a moment later, the huge thing simply squashing the crew into the cold mud and grass. More boulders strafed in from the low, like meteorites and destroyed another twenty more tanks along the Vervun formation. The explosions of the fuel and munitions within the tanks were incredibly loud. Kowle was thrown flat in the grass.

He heard the thudding as he rolled over. On the far rise, giant furs marched towards him, some carrying boulders, others licking their teeth and flexing their claws in anticipation of the slaughter and imminent death.
A thousand or more.



Out of nowhere, just before nightfall, about a half-hour after the klaxons had stopped yelping, the first boulders fell, unexpected, hurled by larger macros beyond the horizon. Two fell short on the southern outer habs, kicking up plumes of wreckage from the worker homes. Another six dented the mighty Curtain wall.
At Hass West, Daur yelled to his men and cranked the guns around. A target… give me a target… he prayed.
Macros, hidden out in the burning grasslands, found their range. More boulders began to drop into the hive itself.

A gigantic salvo hit the railhead at Veyveyr Gate in the east and set the railway station ablaze. Several more bracketed the Vervun Primary barracks and smashed through them, killing over three hundred of troopers waiting deployment. More fell in the north of the hive narrowly missing upper parts of the Main Spine. Ferries floating on the Hass River bobbed up and down as screaming, fleeing passengers were drenched by the water as more fell into the river, smashing a quay. Two more dropped behind the Magnificat, sinking the ferry Inscrutable. Diesel slicks burned on the surface of the river as a shockwave shook the Magnificat.

A boulder came through the roof of Vervun Smeltery One, exploding into smaller chunks, a worker within was instantly killed by the falling projectile. The foreman, Agun Soric, was thrown flat and a chip entered his left eye blinding him forever.

Blood from cuts to the scalp streamed down his face. He rolled over in the wreckage and then was lifted off the floor by another impact that exploded the main conveyor. A piece of oily bracket, whizzing supersonically across the work-floor decapitated one of the screaming workers nearby and embedded itself in the meat of Soric’s thigh. He howled, but his cry was lost in the tumult and the klaxons as they started again.
Volleys of projectiles pounded the southern face of the Main Spine. Despite the thick adamantine sheath surrounding the Main Spine some still punctured through. A glassmaker’s showrooms on the Mid-Spine Promenade took a direct hit and blew out the rock pieces flying out and shredding members of the Houses Ordinary who were fleeing down the promenade.

Multiple boulder strikes slammed into the Curtain Wall around Hass West. An anti-aircraft post, the one that had been slow rising from its pit, was blown away and its detonating munitions tore a bite out of the wall. Captain Daur traversed his guns and looked for an enemy. The grasslands were blank. Macros, out of sight and unknown to him, were reaching them with ease. It was utterly beyond Daur’s power to resist.
If they even had the authority.
“Captain Daur to Marshal Gnide! Give us permission to arm! Give the order! Marshal, I’m begging you!”

In the dull quiet of the audience chamber, Gnide’s corpse was lifted away from the carpet by the slack puppets. The desperate voice of Daur and hundreds of other field commanders brayed unheard from his comms-plug. Three more projectiles hit Hass West Fort in series. The first ignited the battery munitions. The second vaporised Corporal Bendace and sixteen other troopers. The third, a crippling shockwave, splintered the tower top and caused a vast chunk of rampart to slump away in a torrent of stone, dust and fire. Captain Daur fell with it, caught in the avalanche of rockcrete and adamantium. He had still not received the order to arm from Hive Command.

In his iron tank, Salvatore Sondar, High Master of Vervunhive, drifted and dreamed. The satisfaction he had gained from asserting his mastery over that fool Gnide was ebbing. There was something akin to pain creeping into him across the mind-impulse links that hooked his cortex into the data-tides and production ledgers of the hive. He rolled in the warm suspension fluid and accessed the information currents of the legislature and the guilds. The hive was… under attack. He returned his link to confirm. Even when the information was verified it seemed wrong. There was a discrepancy that his mind could not resolve. Vervunhive was attacked. Yet this should not be. He needed time to think. Petulantly, he activated the Shield generators.


As dusk crept in the damage to the hive was easily apparent. Across the entire hive flares of burning oil and buildings could be seen. Deep black smoke rose from serious fires such as the one present at Hass West. The bombardment continued even though the shield was raised. A vast, translucent umbrella of field-energy extended out from the great Shield Pylon in the central district and unfurled itself in a dome that reached down to anchor substations inside the Curtain Wall. Some many projectiles burst against the shield that it seemed as if a green sky was blossoming with dirt and rock.

Observers on the southern wall, most of them soldiers of the Vervun Primary, trained their scopes and binoculars through the rising smoke and fires in the outer habs and saw the distant grass horizon flickering with a wall of flame seventy kilometres wide. The grass smoke – ash-grey but streaked with black from individual infernos below the skyline – tarnished the southern sky in the dying light. Bright, brief flashes underlit the smoke, hinting at the fierce armour battle taking place out of sight. No communications had been received from General Vegolain’s armoured column for two hours.

With the shield active, the bombardment turned towards the southern habs and unprotected manufactories and districts outside the Curtain Wall. From the wall, it was possible to see the heat waves radiating from the glistening fires. The population of the southern outer habs was in order of nine million, plus another six million workers who dwelt in the hive but travelled out to work the industrial districts and the mines. They had little shelter. Some hid in cellars or underground storage bays and many died entombed in these places. Those makeshift shelters were blown open by the continual bombardment. The bombardment dug out the citizens like rats or trapped them forever underneath thousands of tonnes of masonry.

Within the hive there were a few deep-seated, hardpoint shelters in the southern habs, reserved for suburban officials and minor area legislators. These shelters had been dug ninety years before during the Trade War and few were in decent working order. One group of hab officials spent two hours trying to find the correct code to let them into their assigned shelter and they were flattened by a boulder before they could get the vault open. Another group, a few blocks north, found themselves fighting off a terrified mob that wanted to gain access to a shelter too. A VPHC officer, leading the group, opened fire with his handgun to drive the frantic citizens away while the ranking official, a mill-boss with guild connections opened the vault.

They sealed themselves in, twenty-three rank-privileged citizens of authority level three or less, in a bunker emplacement designed to shelter two hundred. They all died of suffocation by the following dawn. The air systems, long in need of overhaul and regular maintenance, failed the moment they were switched on. By nightfall, millions of refugees were clogging the main arterial routes into the hive, bottled up at Sondar Gate, at the Hass West road entry and the ore works cargo route. They were even trying to gain access via the rail-link tunnel at Veyveyr Gate, but the terminal inside had become an inferno and was blocked. Others went across the treacherous Spoil and some gained entry through Croe Gate. The Spoil was treacherous as it was unpredictable and was often dangerous to traverse, being the dump site for all the hive’s manufactories. Those who tried to gain entry at Hass West Gate found it very slow Vervun Primary troopers manning the wall had to supervise the input and a queue stretching 2 kilometres trailed out into the outer habs. Sondar gate suffered similarly with a queue 3 kilometres long.

Inside the Wall chaos consumed the refugees. Around forty percent of the inflow was casualties of some sort. They filled up the Square of Marshals with ease and in other places had begun to attack the troopers who wouldn’t give access to certain areas. Most troopers were profoundly unwilling to shoot their own citizens. In one case an angry officer fired rounds into a crowd to keep them back, he and his men were torn apart by the crowd. Compared to the bombardment they’d faced the weapons of the troopers was nothing to be feared. Messages were radioed desperately to Hive Command in an attempt to be given more space to ease up on the already crowded areas. The legislature had an emergency meeting. Some of the Houses Noble felt that it was their duty to house the refugees, while others were worried about the refuges clogging up the main arterial routes that would stop military access.

The tank roared and bounced over the trampled grass hillocks, heading north at full throttle, its turret reversed to spit shells into the fields behind it, into the enemy at its heels. The night sky was alive. Boulders flew over head towards the hive at incredible speeds. The tanks were outrunning the macros, unlikely though that seemed. Commissar Kowle crouched in the turret of the running tank, shouting orders to fire to the gun-crew in the lit space below him. The comm-link was down. He couldn’t reach Hive Command. He had forty two tanks left out of the armoured column of more that four hundred and fifty that left Sondar Gate that afternoon. No ranking Vervun Primary armour officer was left alive. Cadet Fosker was also dead.

Kowle had command now. Using the VPHC Commissar Langana as his second officer, he had managed to regroup the shattered remnants of the tank force and swing it back towards the city. Not one tank stopped to help another’s crew if they were hit. It also delayed the macros as they stomped and killed the fleeing crew-members. It felt like retreat, but Kowle knew it was a sound tactical decision. They were facing a furry wave out there on the grass-flats, a stupendous macrofur front, pushing in through three salients.

Kowle didn’t even want to think about the size of the opposition just now. It was… unbelievable. It was impossible. A fur covered wave – that’s all he could see, the tide of giant creatures rolling over his forces, crushing them. He tried the comm unit again, but the enemy was jamming all bands. Boulders rained down amongst the retreating Vervun tanks. At least two blew out as munitions ignited, sending tank hulls end-over-end in fireballs, spraying track segments out like shattered teeth.

The driver was calling him over the intercom. “Ahead, sir!”
Kowle swivelled round. Vervunhive was in sight now, the great luminous blister of green energy flickering on the skyline like a giant mushroom cloud, glowing in the night. Kowle grabbed his scope and saw the blackened, burning mass of the outer habs fast approaching. A persistent rain of projectiles was still dropping onto them. “Kowle to column!” he spat into his inter-tank comms. “Form up and follow me in down the Southern Highway, We will re-enter the city through the Sondar Gate. Let none shirk, for I will find them wanting and find them!”
He smiled at his last words. Even now, under a storm of fire, he could still turn a good, disciplinarian phrase.

[Macrorufus]

I have to admit I borrowed the names from other books because I couldn't really think of any.

Although according to law, this is not a bad thing because names aren't copyrighted. So I am free to use them.