9: Vaultfall

The Aegis of Orion, its cathedral form a dark spire that pierced the warp. Its obsidian plates rimmed in cold light, an ancient relic of the War Born of old. Commander Jol Kareth stood on the bridge as if carved from the same stone: set jaw, hands practiced in the language of command. The vault ahead hung in orbit of a ruinous planet like a silent grave in the void. Its surface was an impossible mesh of old Imperium alloys and newer scars, a ringed station that pulsed with a faint, hungry light.
“Status,” Jol said.
“Scans are stable but erratic,” replied Taren, his tactician, voice steady even as the tactical panels filled with red. “Power spikes. The vault’s nesting field is active - ancient design. We can’t be sure how long the interface will hold.”
Around the glittering ring, the battlefield coagulated into the forms the galaxy had came to know to well sense the Great Collapase: Karnage war bands streaking in black and crimson like torn banners, their fighters darting with animal grace and painted faces; Psiker Warstars, hulking and luminous, their hulls drifting on a pulse the mind could feel more than the eyes; Corinth Man-o-Wars hulking against the starlit void, instruments of commerce and destruction. And Ramus - the Aegis at their heart - fleet lines braided in phalanx, guns and shields executed with the ritual precision of a people for whom war had been a liturgy for generations.
“This is more than a contest for salvage,” Jol said. He had chased rumors and shards for months - whispers of a relic from the Imperium that might not only name the architect of the Great Collapse but hold the schematics of the phenomena itself. If the vault contained the answer, Ramus could consign a kind of debt the galaxy could never pay: truth, restitution, and revenge.
He watched a Karnage dreadnought approach from the dark and aimed the Aegis’ guns. “Focus on the boarding wings. Protect the shuttles. Do not - under any circumstances - let them breach the core.”
The Karnage fleet’s approach had the blunt arrogance of raw power. Their ships carried bone trophies and ritual scars. At their head strode Herrase - a man in armor that looked carved from black slag and runes of old blood. He moved as if the very space bent to his will: brutal, magnetic, convinced.
Herrase’s laugh was a dark bell across comms. “Bring them low!” he roared through the feed, and the Karnage pilots answered with fervent cries of vengeance. For Karnage, victory was not simply seizure; it was a blood spectacle. They fought to watch the galaxy burn, to leave all worlds as ash and bone.
In the quiet pockets between the beams and explosions drifted Corinth warships, their hulls radiating with powered shields. The Broker I’tsh rode one such warship. It moved with the patience of a predator that had learned the economy of blood. Where Ramus sought to protect, and Karnage to devour, Corinth dealt in margins: opportunity, leverage, information.
A cloaked Corinth shuttle with I’tsh aboard was the first vessel to reach the vault. I’tsh’s trendrals - long, delicate, tipped with polished tools - danced over a pane as its drones probed a battered console from the vault’s outer ring. “Delicate,” it murmured into its membrane, voice like silk over wire. It hummed with the kind of pleasure only a true merchant feels - something old and priceless within its grasp even as the world exploded around it.
The Psiker warfleet was the last to arrive: Eryndra’s Warstar, Vaelith, exited the warp, ripping a hole into existence, followed by the rest of what was left of her Covenant. The Psiker ships stood tall, bristling with psychic energy. Archseer Eryndra herself was an island of focus in the purple-lit sanctum aboard Vaelith, veils of psionic energy coiling around her as she reached toward the station’s signal.
When the rest of the boarding teams made contact with the vault, the vault shook on impact. Jol watched as they entered: a Karnage explosive tore through an outer door; a Ramus boarding party answered with well-drilled shock tactics; Psiker tendrils reached into the station’s memory like hands into water. For a moment, it seemed that the four forces might share the relic’s spoils by degrees - a diplomat’s fantasy - but such balance had never been the point.
Inside the vault, the air tasted like static. Jol led a small team into the main chamber, consoles bearing the faded sigils of the Imperium humming with unreadable scripts. The core waited like an old heart beneath glass: a lattice of light and etched circuitry so delicate Jol’s mind could not quite reconcile its age with its power.
“Core is active,” called a Ramus tec, breath coming hard through her suit. “It’s interfacing with our arrays.”
“Begin the extraction,” Jol said. His voice was flat with the weight of the moment. He had wanted this with a hunger and many nights of restless watch. To know what had led to the downfall of the Imperium could build an empire, or destroy it.
Herrase’s entry was announced not with subtlety but with the thunder of hull against hull. The Karnage warlord came through the breach like a storm made flesh, flanked by warrior cultists. He hurled curses in an ancient guttural that made even the Aegis’ marines glance over their shoulders.
“You will not take our prize, Ramus,” Herrase seethed as he met Jol in the vault’s dome. His power blade caught the light, sparking with angry embers. “We will carve our name into the bones of the Imperium.”
“Stand down or die,” Jol growled. Herrase’s blade struck a console; the vault’s tremors sent them both to their knees as a shield absorbed the strike.
Beyond the dome, I’tsh’s craft drifted and dove, catching fragments as they spun free. Its drones plucked up sloughed data nodes, small and glowing like stars - partial, corrupted, but valuable. “Yes,” it said, a smile in the creaky cadence of its voice. “Even this corrupted, this will sell.”
Eryndra felt the station before its alarms screamed. She stood in Vaelith’s sanctum, palms outward, and the psionic tapestry unfolded: images poured forward as her mind probed the station’s data center. She saw the Collapse - not a single event but a cascade: something from the galactic core. Darkness spreading. Planet after planet falling as trillions of voices cried out before being silenced. Fear filled her mind.
Eryndra’s palms curled. She could - if she reached - translate the lattice of the core, make the Collapse a map for any mind that could read it. She could hand the galaxy forensics that would answer the cause of the Great Collapse. Or she could close the book and let the secret sleep. The galaxy didn’t need more fear…
Herrase laughed as he stood, bringing his power blade back down on the council. This time it pierced through. Metal shrieked. For a beat, the vault was still, then it erupted as the vault began to shake itself apart. The secrets it had been guarding, destroyed by the blade.
Eryndra rose to move toward the lattice, hands already bleeding light. “No,” she said aloud into the swelling static. Her voice was tiny with the fear of her visions. “I need more time.”
Herrase turned to walk away from the destruction he had caused. Jol raised his blaster, and in a quick motion of practiced military precision, shot the trator in the back. Herrase did not die instantly; Karnage men ran to their leader as the old technology fell around them. Herrase’s face was a mask of triumph, turning suddenly to shock as the core’s integrity unraveled. He staggered forward and fell, the light leaving his eyes.
Jol’s hands flew across a console as the data corrupted in front of him. “Get it! Get whatever you can!” he barked. But the lines of code dissolved as if eaten by some internal flame. The Aegis’ arrays took feed after feed back aboard his command vessel, but the vault’s last gift was an array of broken code.
I’tsh cursed, then steadied its mind: perfectly calm, perfectly enraged. It had saved a sliver - a single spike of fractured code. It wrapped it in encrypted layers like a connoisseur wrapping a jewel and fled aboard its cloaked craft.
The vault detonated in a green flame: old algorithms designed to prevent acquisition triggered and burned the station’s heart. Light collapsed inward with the slow inevitability of a star imploding. The collapsed vault became Herrase’s grave.
When the light settled, nothing remained but shards of metal alloys and the scent of ozone. The Aegis drifted among wreckage while Ramus crews counted losses. Karnage ships limped away, dragging back what they could in hollowed triumph. The Corinth fleet vanished into the warp as quickly as it had appeared.
On the bridge of the Aegis, Jol Kareth sat with hands that trembled and a chest that felt too full for breath. He had wanted the truth and had watched it die. There was grief, sharp and immediate, for the souls that had burned at the vault.
“We failed,” Taren said quietly.
“No,” Jol answered, though his voice had the grain of defeat. “We survived.” His hands closed around a Ramus locket - the thing he had kept since he was a young officer - and he let its weight anchor him. Surviving was not victory, but it meant they would live to fight another day.
In the weeks after, Ramus held memorials - candles in the hush of habit and faith. Karnage renewed their rituals in blood-soaked silence, their warbands fracturing into new coalitions with teeth bared. Corinth’s markets hummed with the same thrum they always had; I’tsh sold the data spike on the black market, earning itself a wealthy guild. The Psiker Covenant was broken. New political powers within the Psiker Union rose to replace it.
There were rumors afterward that fragments of the vault had slipped into black markets; that the Imperium had left other similar vaults; that watchers in the dark had noted the disturbance. Jol read such rumors but knew his time as a warrior was drawing to an end. The cause of the Great Collapse lay buried too deep and scattered in pieces too costly to reassemble.
When at last Jol gave his report, his voice had lost the fever of a man hunting answers. It carried instead the weight of a man who had lost everything. “The Great Collapse is out of our reach. Ramus will survive as we have always done.”
Somewhere, in safe rooms and in darker places, new shapes watched. A figure observed the market on a distant Corinth ring and smiled thinly as it examined the shard I’tsh had stolen. A sensor array far beyond Ramus flickered, as if a hand had brushed it. The galaxy was quieter for a time.
The Aegis sailed home wounded. Commander Jol Kareth looked at the stars and understood, finally, why some doors had been closed. He had led men into battle for honor and for duty, and he would do so again, but his time as a soldier was ending. The story of the vault would forever haunt him.
The Great Collapse remained an old wound, its edges raw. The vault’s light had gone, leaving more questions than answers.