[SPEAKER_00]: The forge moon came up to meet them out of the dark, and brother Corvac fell towards the surface, the way the raven guard had taught him to fall.
[SPEAKER_00]: Silent, patient, with his whole body folded into the shape of a thing that did not want to be seen.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no fire on the descent.
[SPEAKER_00]: A drop pod would have come down screaming, a comet of retro burn and serimite that any orga array in the void would have read from 100 kilometers out.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so they had not come in a drop pod.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had come in the belly of a gun cutter flown by a mortal pilot, whose name Corvac had never learned.
[SPEAKER_00]: A man who had taken them in low and dark, and dead engine over the moon's nightside, and tipped them out into the thin poisoned air, like a handful of black stones, and then banked away.
[SPEAKER_00]: The cutter was already gone.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was only the falling now, and the five of them falling, and the great iron face of Kiran's Anvil opening below.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corvac read it as he dropped.
[SPEAKER_00]: He could not help it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was how he was made.
[SPEAKER_00]: The moon was a worked thing, a world that had been hammered into a tool and then left to rust around its own furnaces, vast manufacturing spines lit from within by the dull red of forges that never cooled.
[SPEAKER_00]: Void docked gantries, reaching up off the surface like the fingers of something drowned and grasping, and threaded
[SPEAKER_00]: This moon was a dark, mechanical ship factory, and its capture would hamstring the enemies reach in this sector of space.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a net, and it was awake, and it was looking for them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sixty minutes said the Krono in the corner of his sight, counting down in the amber of the Death Watch display.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sixty minutes until the fleet translated in system above them, and committed itself irrevocably, to a planet four that would either land in the shadow of a blinded grid, or break apart against a living one.
[SPEAKER_00]: The clock had been set before they ever boarded the cutter.
[SPEAKER_00]: It would not move for them.
[SPEAKER_00]: It did not care that they were falling, or that the air was poisoned.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or that a man could die in 60 minutes, 100 different ways, on a world like this.
[SPEAKER_00]: It only counted.
[SPEAKER_00]: They struck the Gantry Shadow together, five points of impact, softened by suspenses and old skill, and the falling became crouching, and the crouching became a war
[SPEAKER_00]: Corvac came up, already reading angles.
[SPEAKER_00]: The gantry was a forest of cover.
[SPEAKER_00]: Pillars, conduit runs, and the slumped iron bones of cranes that had not moved in centuries.
[SPEAKER_00]: And his eye went through it, the way water goes through a riverbed.
[SPEAKER_00]: finding the dark lines, the dead ground.
[SPEAKER_00]: The places a body could be that an enemy's eye could not follow.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was the part of himself he trusted without thinking.
[SPEAKER_00]: Shadow and Angle and the killing patients underneath both.
[SPEAKER_00]: The long stillness that the Ravenguard prized above all loud virtues.
[SPEAKER_00]: do not strike until the strike cannot miss.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had been a shadow before he had been anything else.
[SPEAKER_00]: Around him, the others were each their own way.
[SPEAKER_00]: Watch Sergeant Hadrian set the line by instinct and Corvac felt it more than saw it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The imperial fist settling into the ground like a stone meant for exactly that socket.
[SPEAKER_00]: His whole attention
[SPEAKER_00]: Hadrian did not read the dark the way Corvac did.
[SPEAKER_00]: He read the plan and held it and measured every meter of the moon against the schedule scored into him.
[SPEAKER_00]: And his stillness was not a shadow stillness, but a warms.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sixty minutes was not a fair to Hadrian.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a structure.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had already built the next 10 of them in his head and was simply waiting for the world to fill the rooms he had made.
[SPEAKER_00]: To the sergeant's right, brother Vasque did not so much hold position as suffered.
[SPEAKER_00]: The space wolf crouched with the bad grace of an avalanche.
[SPEAKER_00]: asked to wait at the top of a hill, and Corvac could hear, beneath the discipline.
[SPEAKER_00]: The low animal idle of a man built to go loud holding himself quiet for love of the mission and nothing else.
[SPEAKER_00]: Vask wanted noise.
[SPEAKER_00]: Vask was made of the noise he was swallowing, but he swallowed it, and his eyes moved, and once, only once, they found Corvac across the dark, and the wolf gave him the
[SPEAKER_00]: You're here.
[SPEAKER_00]: Good.
[SPEAKER_00]: Stay close.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was nothing.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the warmest thing anyone had given him in days.
[SPEAKER_00]: Behind them both, Brother Care filled his patch of shadow, the way a furnace fills a room, banked and waiting.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Salamanda carried the breaching gear and the heavy weapon, and something heavier than either.
[SPEAKER_00]: A watchfulness that was not for ambush, but for the living.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corvac had already learned to know it without understanding it.
[SPEAKER_00]: the way the big warriors gaze kept going out past the threat lines to the lit spines of the manufacturing, to the places where the moon's bound thralls would be working even now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Mortal and ignorant and doomed, and the sorrow that lived in him, that he did not let slow his hands.
[SPEAKER_00]: And last, apart, brother Seventh Nelt with one gauntlet pressed flat to the
[SPEAKER_00]: The tech marine had not spoken since the cutter.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not need to.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corvette could see the data light flickering under the lenses of him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Could hear the faint dry noise, as Sevoth's Macadendrite's tasted the air and the metal and the slow electric blood of the grid, running beneath the deck plate.
[SPEAKER_00]: And could feel, in the part of him, that had never grown used to it, how little of what severed her was meant for any human ear.
[SPEAKER_00]: He spoke the machine's language, he spoke it the way the enemy here spoke it, that was the whole reason he had come, and it set a cold thread of unease through even Corvax disciplined heart to watch a brother lay his hand against a dark mechanical floor,
[SPEAKER_00]: It knows it's being touched, Seventh said, His voice was very calm, not by whom, not yet.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then we move before yet, becomes now, Adrian said.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was when Corvac made his single small mistake.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was nothing a lesser warrior would have caught, and nothing a kinder one would have named.
[SPEAKER_00]: The line shifted to advance, and Corvac flowed to the Overwatch angle, the way he had 10,000 times.
[SPEAKER_00]: Except that the angle he chose was a Ravenguard's angle.
[SPEAKER_00]: a half metre and a half second different from the one the team's muscle memory expected.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corvac was new to the team, a replacement for another death watch brother who had fallen, Leandro.
[SPEAKER_00]: That brother had stood this watch before, and had stood it just so, and Corvac was not that brother.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was close.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were both raven guard.
[SPEAKER_00]: His doctrine was Leandro's doctrine.
[SPEAKER_00]: His instincts cut from the same dark cloth.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so the team kept reaching for Leandro, and finding a shape that fit the socket to within a hair, and grated faintly.
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly because it's so nearly fit.
[SPEAKER_00]: The half-second costum.
[SPEAKER_00]: Kovac crossed a sliver of open deck that Leandro would have rounded, because Leandro had known to round it, and the grid's auger skin caught the edge of him.
[SPEAKER_00]: A flicker, a fractional return, a single cold pulse of something fed up into the enemy net.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was very small, but the team felt it land.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corvax or Hadrian's helm turn a fraction, saw Vasque go stiller, saw the data-lights stutter behind Sevath's lenses, as the moon somewhere far below, registered a touch it had not been able to name.
[SPEAKER_00]: No one said the dead brother's name.
[SPEAKER_00]: No one had to.
[SPEAKER_00]: The gap where Leandro had been was its own kind of presence among them, and Corvac stood in it, and knew he stood in it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not a cruelty in them.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was only grief worn into the shape of a habit, reaching for a man who was gone.
[SPEAKER_00]: Logged but not located, Sivoth murmured, reading the moon's slow pulse.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then we spent it walking, Hadrian rose, and the line rose with him, and the sergeants' voice came flat, and certain, and entirely without blame.
[SPEAKER_00]: he laid the three truths down like rounds into a magazine, and they were the only briefing any of them needed.
[SPEAKER_00]: The clock is running, and it does not stop.
[SPEAKER_00]: The grid is awake, and we just told it we exist, and we are one short and feeling it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, we move on, brothers.
[SPEAKER_00]: The way into Kiron's anvil was a wound in the world's iron skin, and they went into it quickly.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sevath had found it for them, and maintenance shaft sunk into the Gantry's southern root, a throat of rust and cable that dropped down out of the poison night, and into the forge's body proper.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not on any chart the watch possessed, it was on the chart the moon kept of itself.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Corvac had learned already not to ask how a thing built to serve the Dark Mechanicum had let one of its own secrets be taken from it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The answer was always the same answer, and it was Savoth, and it was the reason none of them quite sat easy beside him.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had a destination, and Hadrian named it once, at the lip of the shaft, in the flat voice he used for things that were not to be discussed again.
[SPEAKER_00]: Central control nexus, deep core, near the geothermal taps, the heart, the whole grid hangs from.
[SPEAKER_00]: He looked at each of them in turn and last and longest at Seventh, because the nexus was Seventh to take.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everything between here and there is just road.
[SPEAKER_00]: We get severed to the Nexus, severed blinds the grid from the inside, and the fleet comes down on to a moon that cannot see it.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is the mission.
[SPEAKER_00]: There is no part of it that matters more than getting in their alive.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a simple thing, said plainly, and it was the spine, the whole of the next hours would hang from.
[SPEAKER_00]: Blind the grid, or the fleet broke against it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Reach the nexus, or there will be no blinding.
[SPEAKER_00]: Keep severed breathing, or there will be no nexus.
[SPEAKER_00]: The mission folded down to that one bright thread, and they went down into the dark to follow it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the dark,
[SPEAKER_00]: Corvac learned the team by moving with it and feeling where he fit and where he did not.
[SPEAKER_00]: he fit almost everywhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: The forge's body was a raven guard's country, all low red light and long shadow, and the deep machine thunder that swallowed sound, and Corvac moved through it comfortably, and the team moved with him, and for long stretches it was very nearly seamless.
[SPEAKER_00]: He took point without being asked, and the others let him have it.
[SPEAKER_00]: because point had been theirs to give to a man who moved exactly like this.
[SPEAKER_00]: He read an ambush Angola to cross Junction and flowed wide of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Vask flowed with him a half-beat later, and care a half-beat after that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the whole team bent around the danger like a single thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: The trouble lived in the seams, and the trouble was Hadrian.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was nothing so crude as dislike.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corvac had served under hard captains and easy ones, and Hadrian was neither.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hadrian was a wall, and a wall does not dislike the water that runs against it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the imperial fist had a way of holding ground, that ran exactly counter to the way Corvac had of giving it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the close work of the approach, the two doctrines ground against each other, like ill-cut gears.
[SPEAKER_00]: At a long gallery flanked by silent forge lines, Corvac read the ground and wanted to flow across it fast and broken, using the cover in motion.
[SPEAKER_00]: Never still long enough to be fixed, that was the raven guard way.
[SPEAKER_00]: Be everywhere and nowhere and let the enemies eyes slide off a thing that would not hold still to be seen.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was already moving when Hadrian's voice came low across the vox.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hold the doorway, Corvac, anchor it, we move past you in bounds.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Corvac held the doorway because Hadrian was the sergeant and the order was sound, and it cost him nothing but the small friction of doing a right thing the wrong way.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hadrian wanted a held line and measured bounds, each man covered past a fixed point.
[SPEAKER_00]: The whole advance a thing you could draw on a slate.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corvac wanted to dissolve the line entirely, and let the team pour through the gaps like smoke.
[SPEAKER_00]: Both were correct.
[SPEAKER_00]: Both had kept a start as alive on a thousand words.
[SPEAKER_00]: They simply could not both be true in the same gallery at the same moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so one of them gave, and it was always Corvac who gave.
[SPEAKER_00]: because the team was Hadrian's and the doctrine of the team was Hadrian's.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Corvac was the new thing trying to fit a shape already said.
[SPEAKER_00]: He gave without resentment.
[SPEAKER_00]: But he felt every place he gave, the way you feel a stone in your boot, not pain, only the constant small knowledge that something does not quite fit.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was Vasque who closed the distance and Vasque who chose to.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had stopped in the lee of a great dead stamping press, to let Sever 3 the way ahead.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Corvac had drifted to the edge of the formation, to the Overwatch angle, the way he always did.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was a part, watching.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was the shadow at the rim of the fire light.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had come to expect the appartners, and then Vasque was beside him, dropping his bulk down against the presses iron flank with a grunt, close enough that their poldrons nearly touched, settling in to share the watch as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: You hold the corner like he did, Vasks said quietly under the thunder of the forge machines.
[SPEAKER_00]: Leandro, same corner every time, drove Hadrian half to madness, he'd want Leandro in the bounds with the rest of us, and Leandro would just...
[SPEAKER_00]: The wolf made a small, flowing gesture with one gauntlet, water around a stone.
[SPEAKER_00]: Be somewhere else.
[SPEAKER_00]: Be where the trouble was going to come from before it came.
[SPEAKER_00]: A pause.
[SPEAKER_00]: The data light flickered on seabeth's lenses across the way.
[SPEAKER_00]: You do it too.
[SPEAKER_00]: The same.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a good thing to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: He never could explain it to Hadrian.
[SPEAKER_00]: And neither could I.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it kept us alive more than once.
[SPEAKER_00]: A man standing where the trouble was going to be.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corvac did not know what to say.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had braced for the team to hold him at the length of the dead man's memory, to let Leandro's ghosts sit forever in the gap between them, a thing they reached for, and he could never be.
[SPEAKER_00]: It would have been the easier path for all of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: It cost nothing to keep a stranger a stranger.
[SPEAKER_00]: Vask had chosen the harder thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had looked at the man standing in his dead friend slot, and decided deliberately against the grain of his own grief to let him in.
[SPEAKER_00]: We are both Raven God.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have the same teachers somewhere up the line.
[SPEAKER_00]: We came off the same stone.
[SPEAKER_00]: He paused.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm sorry he's not here.
[SPEAKER_00]: So am I. Vask said, without heat, without weight, the way you say a true thing you have already finished weeping over.
[SPEAKER_00]: But you're the one who is, so you'll do.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he reached over and struck Corvac once on the Paldron, a short heavy blow that rang faintly through the ceremony, the wolf's rough benediction.
[SPEAKER_00]: Stay close to me when it goes bad.
[SPEAKER_00]: It always goes bad, and when it does, I'd rather have a shadow at my shoulder than not.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was nothing, it was a few words in the dark beside a dead machine.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the whole of how Corvac came in from the cold, and he would remember it long after the forge and everything in it was ash.
[SPEAKER_00]: Care heard it, Corvac thought.
[SPEAKER_00]: The big Salamander missed very little, but Care said nothing, because Care's attention was elsewhere, where it kept going, outpassed the team and the mission to the moon itself, and the people bound into it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It came on them in a lower gallery, a long vaulted space where the red light brightened to a working glow, and Corvax saw the team's heavy warrior go still.
[SPEAKER_00]: There were thralls here, mortal men and women, all what the dark mechanical had left of them, bound to their benches by cable and rivet, and the surgery of centuries, laboring at the building of the very ships the fleet was coming to take.
[SPEAKER_00]: they did not look up.
[SPEAKER_00]: They could not perhaps.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were part of the machine now fed by it and feeding it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they would go on building for a master.
[SPEAKER_00]: They could not name until the fleets guns or the fleets boarding parties or simple age and made them.
[SPEAKER_00]: They don't know where here, Keras said very low.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had stopped fully, and the team had stopped around him, and Corvac understood that the Salamander was not asking to act.
[SPEAKER_00]: He knew there was nothing to be done.
[SPEAKER_00]: The thralls could not be freed in the time they had, could not be carried, could not be saved, and the world they were bound to, was about to be bombarded and stormed and taken, and most of them would die in this place, on the right side of a war that had never once asked their opinion.
[SPEAKER_00]: They don't know anything, they'll build until the sky falls on them, and they'll never know who side they died on.
[SPEAKER_00]: We can't carry them, brother, Hadrian said.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know it, care-turned from the working line, and his face in the red light was the face of a man closing a door he would have given much to leave open.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know we can't, I only wanted counted, someone should count them.
[SPEAKER_00]: When we tell this story after, someone should say they were here, and that they were ours.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's all.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they went.
[SPEAKER_00]: But Corvac counted them, because care had asked it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the Salamander's gift and the Salamander's burden, this compassion.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Corvac understood now why the others kept care close.
[SPEAKER_00]: A team of blades needs one man who remembers the flesh.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was at the next junction that Sivath stopped, and the texture of the mission changed again, and far more coldly.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had been reading their way the whole descent, palm to the wall at every branching, listening to the moon, tell him where it's arteries ran.
[SPEAKER_00]: It had been a smooth thing, almost a conversation.
[SPEAKER_00]: and the machine answered, and they followed the answer down.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corvac had stopped marking it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It had become simply how they moved.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now Sevoth note at a four-way branch where great cable trunks ran down into the dark toward the core, and he laid his hand against the nearest, and he went still in a way that stopped the whole team, without a word being said.
[SPEAKER_00]: What is it, Hadrian said?
[SPEAKER_00]: Seventh did not answer it once.
[SPEAKER_00]: His head tilted, the way it had on the gantry, the way that always set the cold thread through Corvac's chest, a brother listening to something no brother should be able to hear.
[SPEAKER_00]: The data light moved fast behind his lenses now, faster than the reading had asked for before.
[SPEAKER_00]: The machine is answering me, Seventh said slowly, but the answers are odd.
[SPEAKER_00]: odd how, Hadrian's boulder came up an inch, a grid speaks one language, threat and range, a wall talking to itself about the things that come at the wall.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is all a defense grid is brothers, a wall that listens.
[SPEAKER_00]: Severoth's hand stayed flat against the cable, and his calm voice had taken on a quality covac had not heard in it before, something almost like
[SPEAKER_00]: This is not only that, there is a second tongue running under the first, down toward the core, and it is not talking about the war.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is talking about something the war is for, something the grid is feeding.
[SPEAKER_00]: He took his hand from the cable and looked down the trunk line into the dark where it ran, toward the nexus and the heart, and whatever labour loatham in the deep red glow.
[SPEAKER_00]: I do not yet know the word for what it is feeding, but the moon does, and the moon
[SPEAKER_00]: it.
[SPEAKER_00]: For a moment no one spoke.
[SPEAKER_00]: The forge thunder rolled up from below, somewhere in it far down, the second tongue went on, saying it's odd words, and only Sevoth could hear it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Sevoth would not say what it had begun to sound like.
[SPEAKER_00]: The nexus will tell us, Hadrian said it last.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because there was nothing else to be done with the chrono running, and the grid awake, and the road only leading one way.
[SPEAKER_00]: We hold the mission, we go down, move.
[SPEAKER_00]: they moved.
[SPEAKER_00]: But they moved closer together now, and Corvac took point with the small misgiving of being told the ground he reads so well is reading something else underneath.
[SPEAKER_00]: And behind him, he felt the team feel it too.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first cold suspicion that the thing they had come to blind might have an eye they had not been briefed on.
[SPEAKER_00]: Open and looking right at them.
[SPEAKER_00]: The deep forge was built like a body, and they went down through it the way a sickness travels along the hidden vessels toward the heart.
[SPEAKER_00]: Seventh's reading gave them the map, and Corvac made it real with his feet.
[SPEAKER_00]: The way to the Nexus ran through a vast assembly hall, they could not cross openly.
[SPEAKER_00]: a cathedral of iron, a hundred meters on a side.
[SPEAKER_00]: Its floor are frozen river of half built house sections and gantry cranes, lit from the high vaults by the same dull furnace red that lived in everything here.
[SPEAKER_00]: The open floor was death.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corvac saw that at a glance from the entry gallery where they crouched, saw the long sightlines, the sentry plinthed spaced along the walls where server to guns slept on their mounts, and the killing emptiness of a space designed to be watched.
[SPEAKER_00]: A team that walked the floor would be seen, and ranged, and ended.
[SPEAKER_00]: But a cathedral has a triforium, and this one had a service gantry, running the high wall in a black iron ribbon, 13 meters up.
[SPEAKER_00]: Threaded between the vault lamps, where the light failed, and the shadow pulled thick.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the road.
[SPEAKER_00]: Kovak read it, the way Hadrian read a timetable.
[SPEAKER_00]: Entry at the gallery's north corner.
[SPEAKER_00]: the gantry running east along the high wall to a control spur above the halls far door, and fall back to the stairwell behind them if it broke.
[SPEAKER_00]: He laid it out on the vox in six words, and Hadrian took it in one breath and made it the plan.
[SPEAKER_00]: They went up into the shadow, and for a while it was the most beautiful thing
[SPEAKER_00]: This was the work he had been made for, and the team flowed through it like a single dark thought.
[SPEAKER_00]: He took the point along the high-gantry, and the others fell into his rhythm.
[SPEAKER_00]: Vask closer to his shoulder is promised, Kear's weight set careful and silent behind.
[SPEAKER_00]: Seventh in the protected center, and Hadrian anchoring the rear.
[SPEAKER_00]: The two centric constructs on the gantry itself were core vacts to take, and he took them out.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first he reached across a six meter gap of shadow, while its optics swept the empty floor below, and he was behind it before its sensorium finished the sweep, and his blade went into the cable junction at the base of its skull housing, and through the cojetator beneath, and he caught the weight of it, as it died, and lowered it to the gantry deck without a sound.
[SPEAKER_00]: The second never knew the first was gone.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corvac flowed the length of the gantry to it, through the failed light between two lamps, holding still in the dark each time its optic tracked his way.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do not strike until the strike cannot miss, and when its head turned at last to the floor, he crossed the final stretch and killed it, as he had unmade its brother, clean and silent.
[SPEAKER_00]: The two threats gone, and the whole never knew, Vask's hand found his shoulder in the dark, good brother, good.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they moved on along the high road, and for those few minutes, the team was a perfect thing, an edge with five points all flowing the same way, and Corvac felt the cold uponness of the descent thought into something he had not felt since before Leandro died.
[SPEAKER_00]: the simple animal warmth of being exactly where he was made to be.
[SPEAKER_00]: Among brothers who let him be it, it was at the control spur above the far door that the warmth went cold.
[SPEAKER_00]: The spur was a small iron platform where the gantry met the wall and a single centri stood watch on it, taller than the gantry pattern, a heavier thing, its optic cluster slow and many
[SPEAKER_00]: Corvac read the approach without breaking stride.
[SPEAKER_00]: Come at it from the dead angle on its left, where the wall shadow ran deepest, faint to sound to the right, to turn its head, and take it while it looked the wrong way.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the same shape of kill, he had made twice already.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the shape of kill he had made a thousand times.
[SPEAKER_00]: He gathered himself in the deep shadow at the spurs edge, and he made the faint, a single small scrape of Sarah might on iron, thrown to the platform's right.
[SPEAKER_00]: The kind of sound that turns a century's head for the half second ablade needs.
[SPEAKER_00]: The constructs had turned left.
[SPEAKER_00]: It turned toward him, toward the dead angle, toward the killing line he had not yet committed to.
[SPEAKER_00]: Turn to look at the place the attack was actually going to come from.
[SPEAKER_00]: A half second before the attack came, as though it had read, not the faint, but the man behind the faint.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corvac froze in the shadow, and the cold went all the way through him.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not move.
[SPEAKER_00]: That saved him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every instinct he owned screamed commit.
[SPEAKER_00]: Take it, you are seen.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he did not, because a deeper instinct, the oldest one.
[SPEAKER_00]: The one that had kept raven guard alive in worst dark than this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Said if it knows your kill, it knows your doctrine.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if it knows your doctrine, then doing the thing it expects is how you die.
[SPEAKER_00]: The construct's optic cluster swept the dead angle where he crouched, slow, many-eyed, looking for the shape its logic had told it would be there, and Corvac was not there in the way it expected.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had gone still instead of striking, broken the rhythm of the kill, and done the one thing the doctrine forbade.
[SPEAKER_00]: held the blow past the moment it should have fallen, and so the things prediction reached for him and closed on empty shadow.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because he had stepped at the last instant outside the pattern of himself.
[SPEAKER_00]: The optics swept past, found nothing at understood and held, and in the half-breath of its confusion, Corvac did the wrong thing entirely.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not the silent dead-angle kill it was braced for, but a brute lunge straight across the platform's open center.
[SPEAKER_00]: The loud, clumsy frontal rash that no raven guard would ever choose, and that the construct therefore had no answer ready for.
[SPEAKER_00]: His blade went in through the optic cluster before the thing could re-ame, and he bore it down to the deck and killed it with his weight on the hill, and it died still searching the shadow on its left for a patient killer who had chosen, for once in his life, to be neither.
[SPEAKER_00]: He crouched over the dead thing with his hearts hammering, and Vask was beside him, and the wolf had felt it too.
[SPEAKER_00]: It knew where you'd be, Vask breathed.
[SPEAKER_00]: It knew where a raven guard would be.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corvac said, and the distinction was the whole of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it put a chill in both of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: It read my doctrine off me before I moved, something in this place has been watching how we move.
[SPEAKER_00]: It knows how we think.
[SPEAKER_00]: He looked down the gantry, down at the dead constructs behind them, and the great red hole below, and the beautiful seamless infiltration of the last hour, curdled in his memory into something else.
[SPEAKER_00]: not a team flowing unseen through a sleeping facility, but a team performing exactly the doctrine, a watching thing had been waiting to see.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're not sneaking past it, we're showing it how we fight.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then stop fighting like you, Hadrian said over the varks.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had heard all of it, and the wall in him had already turned the problem over and found the only answer.
[SPEAKER_00]: All of us, from here down, nobody moves the way the manual says.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corvac, you've got the eye for wrong things, you read us a path that isn't doctrine, and we walk it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ugly, predictable, is dead now.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was, Corvac thought, the first time the sergeant had ever asked him to flow, instead of hold.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the asking cost Hadrian something, and Hadrian paid it without a word, because the war would bend before it would let its men die against its own rigidity.
[SPEAKER_00]: The friction between them did not vanish, it simply turned for the first time to face the same direction.
[SPEAKER_00]: They came down of the gantry at the halls far door into the lower galleries, moving wrong on purpose now, broken rhythms, doctrine deliberately abandoned, every man making himself unpredictable, to a thing that fed on prediction.
[SPEAKER_00]: and it was there, in the lower dark, that the Ford showed them what it did to the ones who could not run.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corvac smelled it before he saw it, not the clean machine smell of the upper horns, but something organic woven through the oil and ozone, a stench of meat and preservatives.
[SPEAKER_00]: The gallery opened onto a working line, and the working line was tended by thorns, and Corvac had braced himself for that.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had already seen throws in this place before, but these were worse.
[SPEAKER_00]: These thralls had been changed, where the upper benches had held men merely bound to their work.
[SPEAKER_00]: These had been built into the weapons they served.
[SPEAKER_00]: Fused to gun mounts and sensors, their faces still human, above a body that was no longer theirs.
[SPEAKER_00]: Their eyes wired open and lends over, so they could not look away from the sightlines they were made to watch.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were the facilities eyes, they were the patient watches.
[SPEAKER_00]: These ones were not active, perhaps they were broken, or perhaps they were failed experiments.
[SPEAKER_00]: Care made a sound Corvac had never heard a salamander make.
[SPEAKER_00]: The big warrior stood over the nearest of them, a lensed face above a weapon mount, the eyes wired wide, tracking nothing now in some idiot loop of its ruined purpose.
[SPEAKER_00]: And care's hands were shaking on the breaching gear.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not with fear, but with something far worse than fear.
[SPEAKER_00]: They made them watch, care said, his voice had gone very quiet and very terrible.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what saw you, brother.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what the grid sees with.
[SPEAKER_00]: They took the people of this moon and they cut out everything but the eyes, and they set them to guard the thing that's killing them.
[SPEAKER_00]: He could not close them.
[SPEAKER_00]: The lenses would not let him, and his hand fell.
[SPEAKER_00]: He stopped.
[SPEAKER_00]: When he spoke again, the terrible quiet had a floor of iron under it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll do the mission, I'll do all of it, but I want the thing that did this Adrian, whatever's down there in the core that the grid is feeding.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to be the one who burns it.
[SPEAKER_00]: You will be, Adrian said, just that, and they went on down into the red and the machine thunder, a team of blades with their one man who remembered the flesh walking point of his own grief now, toward a heart that had learned to make watches out of the people it consumed.
[SPEAKER_00]: The forge stopped pretending to sleep, all at once, and the manner of its waking told Corvac everything about what they faced.
[SPEAKER_00]: It did not wake the way of facility wakes, no rising whale of alarms, no floods of light, no blind general alert thrown up across the hole of the moon.
[SPEAKER_00]: That, Corvac, could have understood, that was a war during what a war did when it found a crack, shout and seal, and poor defenders at the breach.
[SPEAKER_00]: What happened instead was infinitely worse.
[SPEAKER_00]: The machine thunder around them shifted in pitch, the way a held breath shifts before a word, and the working lines they passed fell still one by one, as they approached and woke again behind them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the lensed watches in the walls turned their wild eyes to follow the team's passage.
[SPEAKER_00]: Kovac understood that the moon had not been startled into noticing them.
[SPEAKER_00]: It had simply decided to stop letting them believe they were unseen.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's been watching us the whole way down, he said over the vox.
[SPEAKER_00]: And his own voice sounded strange to him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Since the Gantry, since the first return I gave it, it let us come.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why, vast ground, not doubting him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Probably because a thing that wants to learn needs to see what we do first.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was severed, who answered, in the flat machine calm.
[SPEAKER_00]: It has been reading us as we descend.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every kill, co-vac made, every bound, the team made around an angle, every order, the sergeant gave.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not defending the road.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was studying the man on it.
[SPEAKER_00]: A pause, the data light moving, it knows us now, and it has decided it has learned enough to begin.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the forge turned on them, and the hunt began, and it was a hunt run by a thing that had done its homework.
[SPEAKER_00]: the first ambush told the whole story.
[SPEAKER_00]: They came into a transit junction.
[SPEAKER_00]: Four ways meeting in a chamber of dead conveyor lines, a place Corvac read in an instant for what it was.
[SPEAKER_00]: A killing room, with three of its four exits offering cover, and the fourth, a long exposed throat.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hadrian saw it the same as Corvac did, and the sergeant did the correct thing,
[SPEAKER_00]: He called the team to the cover on the left, the strong corner, the anchor point from which a held line could break an assault.
[SPEAKER_00]: The defenders were already firing into the left corner before the team reached it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not at the team, at the corner.
[SPEAKER_00]: At the place in period doctrines said the team would go, ranged and presided.
[SPEAKER_00]: A wall of lads and solid shot slammed into the strong cover, a half-second before Hadrian's men could fill it.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had read the room, the way Hadrian read it, drawn the same sound conclusion from the same ground.
[SPEAKER_00]: and laid their fire on the answer before the question finished being asked.
[SPEAKER_00]: Kovac saw Vask check hard, saw a shot crack off Kair's portrait, and saw the whole beautiful textbook maneuver turned in an instant into a trap with the team's name already written in it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Off the corner, Hadrian Road, and they broke clear, and they survived it.
[SPEAKER_00]: but the lesson sat in all of them now, like swallowed ice.
[SPEAKER_00]: The enemy was not reacting to Hadrian, the enemy was thinking ahead of him, down the same rails his own training ran on, and meeting him at the end of the line.
[SPEAKER_00]: It went on like that, and it got worse, because Hadrian could not simply stop being what he was.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was the cruelty the forge had built for the servants of the Imperium specifically.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hadrian's whole worth as a sergeant was that he planned, that he held the whole game board in his scar, saw three moves down, chose the sound and proven answer, and committed the team to it with certainty.
[SPEAKER_00]: and now every sound and proven answer was a door the enemy stood waiting behind, because the enemy had studied the same tactics and learnt the same proofs, and the very reliability that made Hadrian formidable made him readable.
[SPEAKER_00]: He called a bounding withdrawal, the defenders cut off the bound.
[SPEAKER_00]: He called a flanking element wide, the flank met a prepared gun.
[SPEAKER_00]: Twice more the team nearly died inside maneuvers that should have saved them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Corvac watched something in the sergeant begin to crack under it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not his courage, which was bottomless, but his certainty, the thing he stood on.
[SPEAKER_00]: Therein my head, Hadrian said, low in the lee of a stilled press where they had gone to ground to breathe.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was something close to horror in it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He clearly did not expect to be outthought.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every call I make brother, they are behind the door before I open it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then stop opening doors, Corvac said, Hadrian looked at him.
[SPEAKER_00]: You taught me the Held Line, Corvac went on fast, because the Krono was burning.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me teach you the other thing, everything you know, it knows, because what you know is doctrine, and doctrine is what it has learned.
[SPEAKER_00]: It may have never learned the complexities of the Raven God, so stop calling the sound move, call me, and let me call the broken one.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a hard thing to ask of Hadrian, Corvac knew it as he said it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was asking the war to stop being a war, to hand the shape of the fight to fluidity and instinct, and the untouchable read.
[SPEAKER_00]: The very things the imperial fist had spent 200 years distrusting.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was asking Hadrian to lead by not leading, to hold the team's discipline,
[SPEAKER_00]: and Hadrian, because he was a better sergeant than he was a proud man, did it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The team takes movement calls from Corvac, he said over the box, flat and final, and Corvac heard what it cost him in how little he let it cost his voice.
[SPEAKER_00]: I hold us together, he decides where we flow, vast, clear.
[SPEAKER_00]: When the new man tells you to do something that makes no sense, you do it fast, and you do it first.
[SPEAKER_00]: What followed was the strangest fighting of Corvac's life, and the most alive he had felt inside it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He led them by breaking every pattern the forge had learned, where doctrine said hold, he ran, where it said run, he turned and stood in the one spot, no fleeing squad would ever stand.
[SPEAKER_00]: He sent them across the open killing throat of a junction, because it was suicide by the book.
[SPEAKER_00]: and the guns cited on the same covered approaches never swung in time.
[SPEAKER_00]: He split the team, and recombined it on no logic a cogeotator could model.
[SPEAKER_00]: Fed the enemy a faint that was real, and a real move that looked like a faint, and felt the forge's terrible prediction, reaching for them again and again, enclosing again and again.
[SPEAKER_00]: On the empty place where a doctrinally sound team would have been.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was the static in the machine's hearing.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was the one thing it could not read, and around that one unreadable thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: The whole team moved unread.
[SPEAKER_00]: And for a span of galleries, they were not the hunted, but the ghosts again.
[SPEAKER_00]: and Vask was laughing low in his throat as they ran.
[SPEAKER_00]: The wolf in his element at last, but the forge did not need to catch them to hurt them.
[SPEAKER_00]: It only needed to make them choose.
[SPEAKER_00]: They came near the bottom of the descent into a long sustaining hall where the moon kept some of its thralls alive, a gallery of the bound and lensed hundreds of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: racked along the walls in their fusion of meat and metal, and the forge had wired this place as a full crumb.
[SPEAKER_00]: Covac saw the trap hole in the first instant, and it was a trap built not of guns, but of conscience.
[SPEAKER_00]: The defenders had positioned themselves behind the thrones, among them, using the rack-living as a wall of flesh.
[SPEAKER_00]: and worse had set charges into the sustaining cradles themselves, so that the fast broken path Corvac would have called.
[SPEAKER_00]: The wildflow straight through the gallery would carry the team across cradle triggers that would burn the thrones alive by the hundred as the team passed.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a clean way through, Corvac found it in a heartbeat, his eye laying it out cold.
[SPEAKER_00]: Go through the cradles, trip the charges, and let the thrones burn, and the fire itself would cover the team's crossing, and gut the defenders sheltering among them in the same stroke.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the unreadable move.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the move that would work.
[SPEAKER_00]: It would cost them nothing but 400 souls who were already as good as dead, and it would get severed to the nexus alive.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corvac, Hadrian's voice tight, the chrono in the corner of every helm, the clock, I know the clock, then call the move, and it was care who answered before Corvac could, in a voice scraped down to the bone.
[SPEAKER_00]: I see it too sergeant, the fast way is through the cradles, we burn them, and we cover behind the fire, and we make the nexus with minutes to spare.
[SPEAKER_00]: The big Salamander was already shifting his grip on the breaching gear, already turning towards the harder road, the slower road, the one that might cost them the clock.
[SPEAKER_00]: He clearly looked uncomfortable with the sacrifice.
[SPEAKER_00]: We take the fast and direct route, Corvac said.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no time to delay, if they did not complete their mission in time, they would allow the moon to defend itself when the imperial fleet broke into orbit.
[SPEAKER_00]: They couldn't allow this.
[SPEAKER_00]: As they moved, the thrones burned.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a sound that none of them would soon forget.
[SPEAKER_00]: When they left that place they paused to take stock.
[SPEAKER_00]: Talk to me, Sever, Adrian said as they ran.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Nexus, how far and have we lost it?
[SPEAKER_00]: Seeverth's reading came back clipped.
[SPEAKER_00]: The machine calm, fraying at last with the speed of the run.
[SPEAKER_00]: close now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Two galleries, perhaps three.
[SPEAKER_00]: The grid's second tongue is loud here.
[SPEAKER_00]: We are near the thing it feeds, a pause that none of them like.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the fleets window is narrowing faster than our road.
[SPEAKER_00]: I can hear the moon making ready for them, Sergeant.
[SPEAKER_00]: It knows the hour as well as we do.
[SPEAKER_00]: If we are not into the nexus and working before that hour falls, the fleet drops on to a living grid, and many will die in the void, and we are left down here in the dark, with a moon that knows our ways.
[SPEAKER_00]: The data lights started.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have minutes, not many, and the moon intends us to have fewer.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then we stopped talking and we run, Adrian said, and we trust the new man's eye, and we get our brother to his work.
[SPEAKER_00]: A beat, and in it, something that in Adrian was almost warmth, almost the closing of the long friction between them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lead Corvac, ugly as you like, where behind you,
[SPEAKER_00]: and Corvac led down the last galleries toward the heart of Kiron's Anvil, with the clock screaming and the team flowing on red at his back and the second tongue of the grid growing louder in the darker head.
[SPEAKER_00]: The voice of the thing the moon was feeding, close now and waiting and learn.
[SPEAKER_00]: The last galleries did not let them pass.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had to be taken, meter by meter, against a forge that had stopped watching and started fighting.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was in the taking that the moon finally told them what they had come into.
[SPEAKER_00]: Where the forge world up to this point had been a held breath.
[SPEAKER_00]: This new stage was a breath let out as a scream.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no sneaking the last stretch to the nexus.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corvex saw that the instant they came out of the maze, into the high, and vaulted at Proch Hall.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the Approch Hall came alive around them.
[SPEAKER_00]: The forge had given up watching.
[SPEAKER_00]: It wanted them dead now, fast before the hour fell, and it threw its body at them to do it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The century plinthes that had slept on the upper gantry's here stood woken and turning.
[SPEAKER_00]: Their lensed watches wired live, their guns swinging to bear.
[SPEAKER_00]: The conveyor lines that had lanes still shudded into grinding motion
[SPEAKER_00]: Even the architecture turned hostile.
[SPEAKER_00]: Blast shutters slamming down across the open exits, pressure doors grinding shut on the team's chosen paths.
[SPEAKER_00]: The whole hall reshaping itself in iron to herd them into the killing lanes that it's guns already covered.
[SPEAKER_00]: cover the stamping base go call that call and then before they had taken three strides broke his own order because the base were the obvious cover and the obvious cover was where the guns were laid move left the conveyor housings get behind the moving lines move now
[SPEAKER_00]: They moved in odd patterns, trying to act unpredictably, and the volume meant for the stamping bays, cracked into empty iron, and the team made it to the conveyor housings alive, and then the real fighting began, and it was nothing like the silk of the gantry.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was loud.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was Vask's country now, and the wolf rose into his roaring.
[SPEAKER_00]: His boulder hammering the woken plinthes off their mounts.
[SPEAKER_00]: His whole leashed appetite for noise finally.
[SPEAKER_00]: Gloriously slipped through.
[SPEAKER_00]: Cares heavy boulder opened up beside him.
[SPEAKER_00]: The big Salamander anchoring the team's fire, while Corvac read the broken paths through the storm.
[SPEAKER_00]: And for a few thunderous minutes, they fought their way up the approach hall meter by meter, loud and cornered, and giving the forge back blood for iron.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was severed, fighting one-handed with his boat pistol, while the other hand kept reaching for the walls, who put the truth together.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he said it in the middle of the firefight, in a voice-gone strange even for him.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have the second tongue, he said.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have the word now, brothers the grid is not a defense grid.
[SPEAKER_00]: a plinth gun rattled the housing above his head.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not flinch.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that is the smaller half of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The void-shoes, the macro batteries, the organet, all of it draws power down a single spine to the core, more power than any defense needs, oceans of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And at the core, the power is not spent on the wall.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is spent on a binding.
[SPEAKER_00]: His hand pressed flat to the shaking iron, reading even as he fought.
[SPEAKER_00]: There is something held in the heart of this moon, something the dark mechanicum has been calling for a long time and has not yet finished calling.
[SPEAKER_00]: The grid is the summoning, every shot the wall fires, every auger sweep, every watcher in the wall, it all feeds the same slow birth in the core.
[SPEAKER_00]: The defense of this moon and the calling of the thing in it are the same machine.
[SPEAKER_00]: the pieces fell into place in Corvac, even as he flowed the team up behind a grinding conveyor line, and the cold of it was worse than any gun.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's why we were expected, he said.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's why it let us come down and use us to learn from, instead of just killing us.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're not interrupting a defense, we're walking into a birth, and it wanted to know what kind of midwives the Imperium would send, before it decided what to do with us.
[SPEAKER_00]: then we are not only blinding a grid, Hadrian said, and the imperial fist in him took the horror and made it a new task, because that was the only thing he knew what to do with horror.
[SPEAKER_00]: We are aborting a summoning, same act, same nexus, same hour, several.
[SPEAKER_00]: When you blind the grid, you also strangle the thing it's birthing,
[SPEAKER_00]: if I do it right.
[SPEAKER_00]: Several data lights started, and if I do it in time.
[SPEAKER_00]: The binding is near complete sergeant.
[SPEAKER_00]: The moon is racing the fleets window for its own reasons.
[SPEAKER_00]: It wants the thing born before the imperium arrives, so that what greets your fleet is not a forge to be taken, but a horror to be fled.
[SPEAKER_00]: If we are late to the nexus, we do not merely fail to blind the grid.
[SPEAKER_00]: we are present at a birth.
[SPEAKER_00]: We need to move.
[SPEAKER_00]: They moved and the forge spent its body to stop them, and the approach hall became a grinding meat grinder of iron and fire that the team could only cross by paying for it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Their boaters spat fire into the monstrosities built into the walls and they ground forward.
[SPEAKER_00]: The bill came due at the last barrier.
[SPEAKER_00]: The approach to the nexus door ran through a pressure junction, a heavy iron throat with a hall nicked down to a single armoured portal, and the forge had made of that necking point.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's last and best killing ground.
[SPEAKER_00]: Two mounted guns were set up to fire directly down the length of that choke point.
[SPEAKER_00]: Their lendsed watches were tracking live, and the only way through was across their interlocked fire.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corvac Reddit and found, for the first time since the Gantry.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no clever broken path.
[SPEAKER_00]: The throat was a throat, geometry was geometry, and someone was going to have to cross that fire to reach the mounts and silence them, so the rest could pass.
[SPEAKER_00]: care was already moving before the read was finished.
[SPEAKER_00]: Breachers work, the big salamander said, and there was something almost like peace in it.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is what the heavies for brothers, you hold the flesh, I hold the fire.
[SPEAKER_00]: He came up out of cover with his heavy bolt of roaring and his whole great bulk square in the throat, drawing both guns onto his grabis armour deliberately, soaking the turrets so the lends watches tract him and not the team.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the lane his body bought, Corvac and Vask flowed up the throat's edges to the mounts and tore the guns down.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corvac's blade into one watches cogitation and Vask's fist through the others housing.
[SPEAKER_00]: The killing ground silenced in the space of ten seconds.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ten seconds was nine seconds too long.
[SPEAKER_00]: Care had stood in the open the whole of it, taking the fire so the others would not have to.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the forge made him pay the breaches price in full.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corvac turned from the dead gun, in time to see the second plinth's last burst, catch the salamander, before Vask's fist reached it.
[SPEAKER_00]: a stitch of heavy fire that walked up care side and through the join of his armour and into the body beneath.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the big warrior went down in the throaty-ed cleared, folding slow, his heavy boulder clanging silently against the iron.
[SPEAKER_00]: Care.
[SPEAKER_00]: Vasquez at him first called back a half-striped behind, and they dragged him out of the throat and into the lee of the nexus door, and the wound was
[SPEAKER_00]: Corvac saw at a glance how bad.
[SPEAKER_00]: The kind of bad that a space marine survives only if the work of the apothecary is fast, and there was no apothecary on this moon, only for brothers and a clock.
[SPEAKER_00]: And don't care said, his voice was wet and slow, but the iron floor was still under it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't you dare spend a second of the clock on me, get the door, get severed in.
[SPEAKER_00]: His hand found Corvac's gauntlet and gripped it with the last of the terrible strength in him.
[SPEAKER_00]: You counted them on the upper line.
[SPEAKER_00]: I heard you.
[SPEAKER_00]: You counted them when I asked.
[SPEAKER_00]: A breath that cost him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Burn it brother.
[SPEAKER_00]: The thing in the core.
[SPEAKER_00]: The thing that made watches out of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: You get out brother to his work and you burn it for all of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Promise me the fire.
[SPEAKER_00]: I promise you the fire, Corvac said, and meant it down to the marrow, and Caer's grip eased, not into death, not yet, but into the grey waiting place where a wounded estate is goes to hold himself together, by will or long, while his brothers finish the work.
[SPEAKER_00]: Seventh, Hadrian's voice did not shake, the door
[SPEAKER_00]: Seventh was already at the portal, both hands and every McAdendrite buried in its control, speaking the machine's tongue fast and low, and the door fought him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corvac heard it in the Tecmarine's voice, the strain of a man arguing with a lock that had a will.
[SPEAKER_00]: The nexus did not want to open.
[SPEAKER_00]: The summoning's near-finished logic clenching, shut around its own heart, and severeth, wrestling it open, syllable by syllable, in a language that hurt to hear.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is fighting me, Sivoth said through his teeth.
[SPEAKER_00]: It knows what is on the other side of it, and it knows what I will do there, and it does not want to open.
[SPEAKER_00]: and then the portal screamed on its hinges and ground apart.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the second tongue of the grid that had whispered through the whole descent was a whisper no longer.
[SPEAKER_00]: It poured out of the open nexus in a wave that Corvac felt in his back teeth and the roots of his soul.
[SPEAKER_00]: The sound of a thing being born, vast and patient and almost finished, and beyond the door
[SPEAKER_00]: the light of the summoning at its climax.
[SPEAKER_00]: The thing the grid had been feeding, pulling itself up out of the moon's heart toward the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: The chrono in the corner of every helm burned down toward the fleets hour.
[SPEAKER_00]: The summoning burned down toward its birth.
[SPEAKER_00]: Both clocks screamed at once in the open mouth of the nexus, and the two of them had almost run
[SPEAKER_00]: all of it ends in there.
[SPEAKER_00]: Vasque, carry care, he comes with us.
[SPEAKER_00]: No brother dies in a doorway.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corvac, sever to the heart, move, and they went in into the screaming light.
[SPEAKER_00]: Toward the thing the moon had been calling, with the clock at its last minutes, and the birth at its last breath, and a wounded brother's promise, burning in Corvac like a second furnace.
[SPEAKER_00]: The heart of Curean's Anvil was a cathedral built around a wound.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corvac took it in as they came through the screaming door.
[SPEAKER_00]: The nexus was a vast spherical chamber sunk into the moon's core, ringed by tears of cogitation, banks and offering houters, and at its centre where a floor should have been.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was instead a shaft of red light plunging down,
[SPEAKER_00]: The summoning lived down there, vast and half-born, and the whole chamber was its cradle.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every cogeotate a bank on every tear was turned inward and downward, pouring the grid stolen oceans of power into the birth.
[SPEAKER_00]: The control spine of Seventh needed rows of the chamber's edge, a pulpit of brass and cable overlooking the shaft, close enough to the light that to work there was to work at the lip of the thing they had come to kill.
[SPEAKER_00]: There, Seventh said, the spine, get me to it and hold the door and I will blind this moon and strangle what it carries in the same stroke.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was already moving for the pulpit, mega-dendrites unfurling.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whatever comes through that door while I work, it cannot reach me before I finish.
[SPEAKER_00]: Buy me that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Buy me the time, and I buy you the moon.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they bought him the time, and it was grim and ugly work.
[SPEAKER_00]: The nexus had one door, the screaming portal they had come through, and that turned out to be both a mercy and a curse.
[SPEAKER_00]: Curse because everything the forge could still throw was now converging on it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The woken hunters of the whole lower core pouring up the approach hall toward the one breach.
[SPEAKER_00]: Mercy, because one door is a choke point, and a choke point is a thing even a thinning team can hold.
[SPEAKER_00]: If the men in it are willing to be the wall that does not move.
[SPEAKER_00]: Adrian set the minute without a wasted word.
[SPEAKER_00]: He invasced shoulder to shoulder in the throat of the portal.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corvac at the pulpits foot with care laid behind him.
[SPEAKER_00]: The wounded Salamanders heavy boulder dragged up into Corvac's hands, because Corvac could cover the highters from there, and care could no longer lift it.
[SPEAKER_00]: We hold, Hadrian said, and they held.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was close work and brutal work.
[SPEAKER_00]: The inverse of everything Corvac's doctrine loved.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no flowing here, no broken path, no killing patients.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a door to armoured bodies could barely fill, and a tide of hunters trying to come through it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the holding of it was a matter of bolt and blade, and refusing to give the half-metre that would let the tide pour in.
[SPEAKER_00]: Vasque was magnificent in it, the wolf at the height of his terrible appetite.
[SPEAKER_00]: His boulder ran dry and reversed to a club, and then dropped for the blade, fighting in the red close press where he had always belonged.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hadrian, beside him, was the war-made flesh at last, immovable.
[SPEAKER_00]: His whole life's discipline poured into the single task of not stepping back.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Corvac worked the high angles from the pulpit's foot.
[SPEAKER_00]: Cares heavy boulder, hammering the lensed creatures off the upper toes before they could range the working tech marine, covering the door from above.
[SPEAKER_00]: The way he had covered a thousand doors, the raven guards eye, finding every threat that tried to come at 7th side long.
[SPEAKER_00]: and severed work.
[SPEAKER_00]: Kovac heard it under the din, and it was a stranger sound than any gun.
[SPEAKER_00]: The tech marine speaking the machine's language at the speed of a litany, fast and cold and precise.
[SPEAKER_00]: His hands and mechadendrites buried to the wrist in the control spine, arguing the grid down syllable by syllable.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was not smashing it.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the thing Corvac understood.
[SPEAKER_00]: Listening.
[SPEAKER_00]: A lesser saboteur would have set charges and run, but charges would only have wounded a thing this large, and a wounded grid still births its horror.
[SPEAKER_00]: Severoth was doing something finer and harder.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was speaking to the grid in its own tongue and telling it to stop, unwinding the summoning's logic from the inside, turning the moon's own machine spirits against the binding they served, persuading the war to forget it was a war.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the work he alone could do, the reason he had come, and the cold unsettling gift that made the others sit apart from him, and made it at last into the team's salvation.
[SPEAKER_00]: The shields are failing, Seavoth said, and a tear of cojitators went dark across the chamber, and the wrong coloured light in the shaft, gutted for the first time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Void shields down, macro batteries are powering down.
[SPEAKER_00]: Another tier dimmed, the grid is going dark brothers, the fleet will have its window.
[SPEAKER_00]: I am taking the moon's eyes out one by one, and it cannot stop me reading faster than it can reclence.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the summoning Fort Ark.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corvac felt it before Sevoth named it, a change in the light, a gathering.
[SPEAKER_00]: and the half-born thing in the shaft, turning its not yet finished attention up toward the pulpit, where its midwife was being murdered.
[SPEAKER_00]: The cojitator banks that seavoth had darkened, began one by one to wake again.
[SPEAKER_00]: The litany in the tecmarine's mouth faltered, picked up, faltered again, and Corvac heard a thing, enter his brother's machine calm voice,
[SPEAKER_00]: It is undoing me, severed, said.
[SPEAKER_00]: The binding is reaching back up the spine.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every system I blind, the thing in the core, relates behind me.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is using its own near completion to fight the sabotage, and it is faster than one man's hands.
[SPEAKER_00]: The data light behind his lenses was a storm now.
[SPEAKER_00]: I can take the grid down.
[SPEAKER_00]: I cannot make it stay down.
[SPEAKER_00]: The moment I release the spine to run, it reclentures and the summoning finishes.
[SPEAKER_00]: And all of this was for nothing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then what holds it down, Hadrian called from the door, not turning his blades still working, a silence from the pulpit, a short, terrible calculating silence, and Corvac, who had stood apart and watched this team long enough now to read its silences, near the shape of the answer, before Sevath gave it, and his heart went cold.
[SPEAKER_00]: A hand on the spine, Sivath said, mind, forcing the unwinding manually, holding each system dark against the bindings pull, faster than it can re-light them, until the summoning stars and collapses for good.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was said in a flat and certain manner.
[SPEAKER_00]: The machine calm was back in it, because he had finished the calculation and found the answer, and made his peace with it in the space of a breath.
[SPEAKER_00]: It cannot be done from a distance, and it cannot be done on a timer.
[SPEAKER_00]: It must be a living hand on the spine, holding the moon blind by main force for longer than the living hand can survive this close to the birth.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a one-way work sergeant, and it is mine, and I will not pretend otherwise, and we do not have the seconds for anyone to argue.
[SPEAKER_00]: No one argued, there were no seconds for it, but Vask made a sound in the door, a low, broken thing, and Hadrian's blade did not pause, but his voice did, for half a beat, and in that half beat was everything the war would not say.
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone asked to carry it out of here, Sivoth said, not the work, the work dies with me, the knowing.
[SPEAKER_00]: In case my hands fail before the starving finishes, in case it needs one more voice in the machine's tongue to close.
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone who can finish what I begin.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, in the screaming heart of the moon, Brother Seeverth turned his lensed and data-stormed face from the spine for the first and only time.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he looked at Corvac.
[SPEAKER_00]: You, the silent one, come and stand here.
[SPEAKER_00]: and Corvac understood why it was him.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the understanding broke something open in his chest, even as he moved.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not Vask, who had loved this team longest.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not Hadrian, who led it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the outsider.
[SPEAKER_00]: the new thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: The man who had spent the whole descent standing in a dead brother slot.
[SPEAKER_00]: Almost belonging, fitting the socket to within a hair and grating because he so nearly fit.
[SPEAKER_00]: He went to the pulpit and put his hands where Sevoth showed him, beside the tech marines, into the screaming machine.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here, feel it, the pole, when it recalenses, you hold out against it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when the light gutters, you do not let go, whatever it costs, until the birth starts.
[SPEAKER_00]: It will fight you with the voices of everything it has eaten.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do not listen.
[SPEAKER_00]: Listen only to the machine, and tell the machine no.
[SPEAKER_00]: His mechadendrites guided Corvac's hands deeper into the spine, transferring the work living hand to living hand, the silence of the raven guard, learning the litany of the tech marine in the last seconds, either of them which share.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is good that it is you, Seventh said.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corvac nodded
[SPEAKER_00]: then take it, Sevath said, and send the moon dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he gave Corvac the last of the work, and the last of himself, in the same motion.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corvac felt the bindings poor redouble, and met it with the words Sevath had given him.
[SPEAKER_00]: and held the system's dark with his own hands, while his brother burnt out the last of the summoning strength against the place no one could survive.
[SPEAKER_00]: Savoth did not cry out.
[SPEAKER_00]: He spoke the machine's tongue to the very end, calm and precise, telling the moon no, in the language it had been born, speaking until the thing in the core gave a final shudder, and began, at last, to starve.
[SPEAKER_00]: and the tech Marine who had been the team's cold technical spine, spent the last of his life to make it so.
[SPEAKER_00]: The grid went dark, Corvac held it dark, alone now at the spine.
[SPEAKER_00]: The dead weight of his brother beside him, and the starving summoning shuddering below, and felt the whole moon go blind around him as the last of Severth's work, and his own held the heart of Curons and Ville, shut against the thing it had tried to birth.
[SPEAKER_00]: The moon went blind around Corvac, and because his hands were on its nerves when it happened, he felt the blinding as though it were his own.
[SPEAKER_00]: It came up the spine and through his gauntlets and into him.
[SPEAKER_00]: The great dying of the grid, not a thing he watched, but a thing he was inside of.
[SPEAKER_00]: The way a man feels his own pulse slow.
[SPEAKER_00]: He held the system's dark in the way Severoth had given him.
[SPEAKER_00]: and one by one, he felt the moon's senses gutter and fail beneath his hands.
[SPEAKER_00]: The organet first, a vast pressure that had lained across the whole world, like a held breath.
[SPEAKER_00]: The searching electric weight of it that Corvac had felt since the gantry, as a shiver in his armor.
[SPEAKER_00]: And now it thinned and frayed, and let go.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the silence where it had been was so total that for a moment he thought something had gone wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: the moon's invisible roof folding away into nothing.
[SPEAKER_00]: A thousand years of voidcraft shipyard suddenly laid bare to the sky above.
[SPEAKER_00]: The macro batteries last.
[SPEAKER_00]: The moon's teeth going dark in their mounts across the whole curve of the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the guns that could have shredded a fleet, falling silent and stupid and blind.
[SPEAKER_00]: Kiran's anvil opened its eyes for a thousand years to watch the void, and Corvac, with his hands in its heart, and his dead brother beside him, closed them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Grids down, he said, and his voice did not sound like his own.
[SPEAKER_00]: All of it, the moon is blind, and the fleet which had been counting the same seconds from the cold dark above, came.
[SPEAKER_00]: They did not have to be told, none of them did.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fixed hour that had hung over the whole descent, the clock that did not care and only counted fell at last.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the answer to it came down out of the mark overhead, a sound and pressure rather than sight.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corvac felt it before he heard it, a deep concussion rolling down through 40 km of forge and into the bones of the Nexus.
[SPEAKER_00]: the overpressure of drop engines burning hard for a moon that could no longer see them coming.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then the sound vast and descending, the thunder of an imperial fleet committing itself through a roof that had folded away, drop ships and gun cutters, and the great falling weight of an army pouring down onto a shipyard it had come to take hold.
[SPEAKER_00]: The blinding had worked.
[SPEAKER_00]: somewhere above them the void docks and the manufacturing spines and the half-built homes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every ship the enemy would have raised against the imperium for a hundred years.
[SPEAKER_00]: Past in the space of those concussions from one master to another, taken intact, taken because four brothers had walked into the dark and put the moon's eyes out.
[SPEAKER_00]: It had worked, the mission had worked, and it had not been for free, and it was not over.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because the dead do not rise to hear that they won, and the wounded do not heal to the sound of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there was still the small matter of living long enough to be among the taken, rather than the last.
[SPEAKER_00]: Up, Adrian said from the door, it worked brothers, and we will be proud of it later, if there is a later, severed borders a blind moon.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now we carry his price and cares out of here before this place dies on top of us.
[SPEAKER_00]: Vasque, care, covac, can you leave the spine?
[SPEAKER_00]: Corvac felt the question in his hands, the summoning still shudded below, starving, and not yet dead, and he understood, holding it the shape of what they had, and had not done.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not dead, he said.
[SPEAKER_00]: The thing in the core, we didn't kill it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He held the word in the machine a moment longer, feeling the starving birth claw weekly at the dark he held it in.
[SPEAKER_00]: Seventh didn't strangle it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He couldn't.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was Tuneer born.
[SPEAKER_00]: He sealed it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The blind grid is the lid on it, brothers.
[SPEAKER_00]: As long as the moon stays dark, the binding has no power to finish and no power to break.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's held, caged, starving in the dark, behind a door we shut.
[SPEAKER_00]: He made himself say the rest, because it was true, and because care had
[SPEAKER_00]: We didn't burn it.
[SPEAKER_00]: We buried it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's still down there.
[SPEAKER_00]: It will be down there when this moon is the imperiums and the shipyards are running and men have forgotten anything was ever wrong in the deep core.
[SPEAKER_00]: Still waiting, still patient, just blind and buried and hours to keep buried.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the grimest kind of victory, and it was the only kind this place had to give.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Corvac thought Care would have understood it better than any of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: That you do not always get to burn the horror.
[SPEAKER_00]: That sometimes the most a team of blades can do is shut the door and make the keeping of it someone's burden forever.
[SPEAKER_00]: He took his hands from the spine, slow, leaving the moon dark behind him.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the ceiling held without him, because Sivoth had oated to hold, the dead tech marines last work was standing on its own at last.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then they ran, and the forge tried to take the rest of them on the way out.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was blind now, but blind did not mean toothless.
[SPEAKER_00]: The woken hunters of the lower core were still loose in the dark, and the team had to fight back up through the approach hall they had led to take, carrying their dead, and their dying through galleries that had not stopped wanting them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Vask carried care, the wounded salamander slung across the wolf's back, and that meant Vask could not fight.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hadrian carried severed spotty, but could still use his bolt pistol.
[SPEAKER_00]: That meant the fighting fell to Hadrian and Corvac.
[SPEAKER_00]: The wall and the shadow, the two doctrines that had ground against each other the whole way down.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now the only two guns left to bring
[SPEAKER_00]: and they found, in the running fight back, that the two doctrines had finally learned to be one.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corvac read the broken paths, and Hadrian held the team to them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corvac flowed, and Hadrian anchored.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whether descent had been a constant small friction of give and take.
[SPEAKER_00]: The ex-fill was a single thing moving two ways at once.
[SPEAKER_00]: Fluid and solid in the same motion.
[SPEAKER_00]: Each man covering exactly the gap, the other left.
[SPEAKER_00]: They went up through the dark, with care's weight between them, and severed body born with them.
[SPEAKER_00]: No brother left in that place, not even the dead.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the moon could not stop them, because the moon was blind, and the men in it were not.
[SPEAKER_00]: And had it last stopped being two kinds of warrior arguing.
[SPEAKER_00]: and become one kind that simply worked.
[SPEAKER_00]: They reached the upper gantries as the first imperial boarding parties were already securing them from above, and the long descent reversed itself into a climb toward light and air, and the thunder of a fleet that had answered, and it was at the last gantry.
[SPEAKER_00]: the high-service road above the Great Assembly Hall, where Corvac had killed the silent centuries a lifetime ago, that the moon made its final reach for them, and Corvac held the position right.
[SPEAKER_00]: A last not of hunters came at them, across the high gantry as they crossed it, fast and blind and desperate, trying to take the team in the open span, 30 meters above the whole floor.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Corvac, reading it, did the thing he had failed to do on the drop.
[SPEAKER_00]: held the exact angle the team needed, not his own angle, and not a half meter off it, but the one true position that covered Vask and his wounded burden completely, and gave Hadrian the clean lane to break the assault.
[SPEAKER_00]: He set himself in it like a stone, meant for that socket.
[SPEAKER_00]: The way he had watched Hadrian set himself on the gantry at the very beginning, and he did not flow wide, and he did not improvise.
[SPEAKER_00]: and he did not give the half meter that was his nature to give.
[SPEAKER_00]: They came off Kairun's Amville on a gun cutter not unlike the one that had carried them down, and the difference between the two flights was the whole of the story.
[SPEAKER_00]: Kovaksat against the troop bay wall with the engine steady under him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lit engines now, no need to run dark, the moon below them, blind and taken and imperial.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he took the inventory, a soldier takes when the work is done.
[SPEAKER_00]: The same cold accounting he had run on the Gantry, a lifetime ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: Care lived.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the first fact and the best one.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Salamander was strapped to a casualty cradle across the bay.
[SPEAKER_00]: Deep in the grey sleep, the cutters, medicy servitors, had put him in to hold the broken body together until a proper apothecary could be reached.
[SPEAKER_00]: and he would not be whole again soon, and might not be whole again ever.
[SPEAKER_00]: But his chest rose and fell, rose and fell.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Corvac found he could not stop watching it do so.
[SPEAKER_00]: The most ordinary miracle there was.
[SPEAKER_00]: Vask lived, and Hadrian, the two of them were bloodied in empty, and silent in the way of men who have spent everything, and are only now feeling it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Sevoth did not live, but Sevoth was here, and that mattered.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hadrian carried him out, not the body only.
[SPEAKER_00]: The body was born with honour in the cradle beside cares.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the gene seed, the chapters future, the thing the Apothecarees would harvest and the thing a space marine's brothers are sworn past death to bring home.
[SPEAKER_00]: The shipyard was the imperiums, taken whole, taken intact.
[SPEAKER_00]: The void docks and the manufacturing spines, and every half-built hole, were captured rather than burn.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every enemy ship that would have been raised here to wage void war against the imperium would not now be raised.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every hole burned elsewhere that would have been rebuilt on Kiran's Anvil, within the month would stay burned.
[SPEAKER_00]: The moon that had been the linchpin of the enemy's power in the system was a linchpin of the Imperiums now, and the reach of mankind extended by exactly the span of one captured forge, again measured in fleets and decades, and the slow grinding ledger of a war without end.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was worth it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corvac believed that he had counted the thralls on the upper line and understood the stakes well enough to mean it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Vask came and sat beside him in the bay.
[SPEAKER_00]: Close the way he had sat beside him at the dead stamping press down in the dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not say much, Vas could said the important thing already, at the press, when he chose to let the new man in.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what he said now was only a confirmation, the closing of the circle.
[SPEAKER_00]: Across the bay, Hadrian was watching the exchange.
[SPEAKER_00]: He inclined his head, a fraction.
[SPEAKER_00]: The imperial fists, whole-grudging recalibration, compressed into a single small motion.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not warmth, Hadrian did not have warmth to give.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was respect.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Corvac sat in the steady-engine dark among brothers.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had come on to Kiron's annual standing in a dead man's slot.
[SPEAKER_00]: Leandro's ghost in every gap, the team reaching for a brother who was gone and finding someone else there.
[SPEAKER_00]: He left it standing in his own.
[SPEAKER_00]: The slot had stopped grating.
[SPEAKER_00]: He fit the socket wholly now, filling the place Leandro had been not as a substitute, but as himself.
[SPEAKER_00]: the belonging earned in the one currency the adept as a starters ever truly spent.
[SPEAKER_00]: The old ghost had eased.
[SPEAKER_00]: He no longer stood in the Andros place.
[SPEAKER_00]: He stood in Corvax.
[SPEAKER_00]: The cutter climbed toward the fleet and the next war and the one after that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Corvax watched care breathe and felt the two ghosts settled into the quiet he had made for them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he did not speak.