Ten hours after drop pod landing.

  Kala drifted through the undercity’s winding corridors like a leaf caught in a slow current, her long red braid spiraling behind her in playful coils. The air here carried the faint scent of metal dust and nutrient water from the hydroponics bay. She corkscrewed effortlessly on the anti-grav, humming to herself, arms folded behind her head as if the whole ship were her personal playground. Her armor’s grav-plates barely pulsed—every drift and spin a dancer’s motion in zero-G.

  Behind her, Tara followed with all the grace of a dropped spanner. Her boots scuffed and over-corrected against the wall, momentum fighting her every move. Her scowl could have stripped paint—and almost did, judging by the bulkhead she narrowly avoided. With a huff, she kicked off after her sister, attempting the same corkscrew spin… and nearly went cartwheeling into a trio of older women on their way to hydroponics.

  Kala waved cheerfully as she zipped past. “Morning, Aunties!”

  Tara jerked upward at the last second, arms windmilling to keep from colliding. One of the women barked a wheezy cackle.

  “Mind your rear, girl, or I’ll plant you in the hydroponic beds!”

  “Sorry!” Tara grunted, finally stabilizing herself and shooting a glare at her sister that promised future violence.

  The corridor widened into the small medical annex. Its pressure doors hissed open on freshly greased runners, releasing a faint chemical sterility into the air.

  Kala hit the deck in a perfect landing, her anti-grav plates exhaling a soft sigh. She skidded to a stop, blinking at the sight before her. “Uh….”

  Koron lay facedown on the med-table, his armor and undersuit pulled down to his waist, the upper skin and muscles of his neck delicately parted by a halo of surgical arms. Beneath the skin, polished metal and complex plates glinted under the clean white lighting. His spinal column—sleek, built with machine precision—clicked softly as a tool whirred near the base of his skull. Despite the macabre display, the man himself was quietly snoring.

  “Mornin’, ladies,” Sasha’s voice purred through the hovering med-drone, warm and amused as the projected pixel face glanced at them. “Koron’s a little preoccupied. Would you like to leave a message with his vastly overqualified secretary and partner in crime?”

  Tara took an instinctive step forward, then froze as a faint ring of blue light pulsed outward from the med-table, making her hairs prickle. “What are you doing to him?”

  “Upgrade,” Sasha replied breezily, a hologram blooming beside her: a tiny disc the size of a dime spinning in midair. “And please stay outside the sterility field until I’m done. Even with his resilience, I’d rather not roll dice on an infection.”

  Kala leaned forward on her toes, eyes sparkling. “Ooh. What kind of upgrade? Combat, defense, or…” her voice dropped into a conspiratorial whisper, “bedroom?”

  Tara flushed crimson. “Emperor’s teeth, Kala!” She smacked her twin’s shoulder. “Can you not be like this in public?”

  “It’s a private medbay,” Kala replied with a grin. “And he’s unconscious.”

  “Utility-focused,” Sasha said, deadpan. “A short-range Slipvector engine. Same spatial-folding tech we used for our military and our ships before Warp travel got fashionable.”

  Tara’s curiosity flared instantly. “Wait—pre-Warp drive? What’s the practical effect?”

  “Personal-level displacement via gravitic lensing of local spacetime curvature,” Sasha said smoothly as she guided the disc into a recessed port at the top of Koron’s spine.

  Kala blinked. “That’s… folding space so two places touch at the same moment, right? Elly’s been hammering us on that stuff, but I still feel like I’m trying to do algebra in a sandstorm.”

  “Close enough.” Sasha purred, adjusting the field alignment with a flick of her robotic limb. Sasha tapped the stabilizer filament once, watching the spinal plating seal itself with a faint hiss. “Different from the teleporter tech, but useful all the same for local work.”

  Tara raised an eyebrow. “Wait—there’s more than one teleport system?”

  “Oh, honey.” Sasha’s voice took on a delighted tone. “This is the quiet one.”

  The drone she was currently operating hovered back and let the table reorient Koron into a neutral recovery position, the surgical lights dimming slightly.

  “The Slipvector implant bends space. Like Kala said, think of it like grabbing the map of reality, folding it so two places overlap, and walking through. You’re still you, still whole, still present in the equation—you just skipped the commute.”

  She held up a limb, protecting a schematic of the Indomitable, zooming in on a room that pulsed green.

  “Now, the teleporters? Different trick entirely. They’re based on putting you in quantum suspension—your atoms stop agreeing on where they are. For a moment, you’re a probability cloud, every possible you spread between departure and arrival. The beacon gives that cloud somewhere to collapse, and all the probabilities resolve into the version of you standing where we want.”

  Kala looked faintly alarmed. “So…your turning us into math?”

  “Yes and no darlin,” Sasha said cheerfully, “we’re just converting you into all the possible versions of yourself, simultaneously. Then we pick the one that ends up where we want. It’s like rolling a die that’s rigged to always land on the footpath instead of the lava pit.”

  Tara blinked slowly. “…That’s mildly disturbing.”

  “Good! Means you’re paying attention.”

  She sealed the medical case shut with a pneumatic hiss and clapped it lightly, as if to dust off her hands. “Teleporters, like long distance Slipdrives, need anchors. Beacons. Otherwise you’re basically shooting a letter into a hurricane and hoping the mailman’s psychic.” She raised a limb and gestured vaguely upward. “And don’t even get me started on trying to teleport using the Warp like the current Imperial models do. That’s how you get existential origami.”

  Kala, still hovering with elbows propped lazily on a suspended support rail, lifted one hand like a student halfway through a joke. “So—Slipvector is map-folding, teleporter is math-gambling, and both are better than listening to a demon monologue mid-jump?”

  Sasha turned to her, her pixilated face lit with the self-satisfied grin of a teacher finally appreciated. “Exactly. We had our own ways of breaking the universe—just with less screaming and fewer flaming skulls.”

  From the table, a muffled grumble stirred beneath the soft hum of the sterility field. Koron, face pressed into the medical padding, muttered something incomprehensible that ended in what might have been “napalm calculus.”

  Sasha leaned in and gently rubbed his back with a metal hand, voice dropping into soothing sweetness. “Yes sugar. You still have all your atoms. Most of them are even in the right places.”

  Tara stepped closer to the medical bench, hands clasped behind her back, eyes sharp despite the soft dim of the surgical lighting. “So if both systems need beacons” she asked, “why use different methods?”

  Sasha let out a sigh, a faint flutter of her internal fans giving the gesture a mechanical edge as she slid sterilized tools back into their tray.

  “Energy and dispersion,” she said, in the cadence of someone reciting a lecture she’d given a thousand times. “Gravitic lensing is light on power and easy to maintain. It’s clean, local, and precise.”

  She rotated a scalpel delicately between her metal fingers, its edge catching the glow of the med?lamps. “Waveform teleportation? Entirely different story. It takes a lot more power to suspend a person in quantum probability and collapse them somewhere else. But the payoff? It’s harder to stop. Slipvectors can be disrupted by heavy gravity distortion or proper shielding harmonics. But waveform transit?”

  She snapped her metal digits, the click echoing faintly in the sterile room.

  “You arrive because, from the universe’s perspective, you were already there. Harder to jam, harder to block. That’s why it’s better for military insertions and… certain unpleasant emergencies.”

  Kala drifted down, letting the anti-grav relax with a low hum as she perched lightly on the edge of the medical bench. Her fingers moved with surprising gentleness as she brushed back a few strands of hair from Koron’s forehead.

  “So why not use that kind of stuff now?” she asked, quieter this time. “Why risk the Warp if you've got this tech?”

  Sasha froze for half a second—just long enough to be noticeable. She looked at the twins then, her optic shifting in brightness as if recalibrating more than picture quality.

  “…Because,” she said at last, “when you start folding gravity in the same region too many times, the laws of reality get… cracked.” Her voice had gone soft, distant. “We learned that the hard way. Entire sectors where light wouldn’t travel straight anymore. Systems collapsing into geometries they were never meant to inhabit. And…. other problems.”

  She exhaled. A sound not from lungs, but from heat-dump valves in the drone’s chassis.

  “So we compromised. We stopped pulling at the fabric. And we decided—” she bobbed side to side “—that the Warp was the safer option.”

  Silence followed. Only the faint rhythmic beep of the bioscanner monitoring Koron’s vitals, steady and indifferent.

  Then Kala, ever the mood-shifter, gave her sister a sideways smirk. “Safer, huh? See, this is why I never let Sasha explain bedtime stories.”

  Sasha’s optic narrowed in mock indignation. “That was one time, and I maintain the structural instability of dreamspace was relevant to the narrative.”

  Kala shook her head. “You told us Goldilocks and the Three Bears.”

  Sasha’s multi-limbed body shrugged. “Yes. A story of boundary violation, resource misappropriation, and an unstable local dreamscape where spatial logic fails under emotional pressure.”

  Tara jerked a thumb over her shoulder in the vague direction of the kitchen. “You made porridge a metaphor for entropy.”

  Sasha replied with: “Because it was. ‘Too hot,’ ‘too cold,’ ‘just right’—clearly a thermodynamic allegory for equilibrium collapse.”

  ...

  WHAM.

  Koron hit the mat like a dropped toolbox, limbs sprawled, breath shoved from his lungs in a long-suffering oof. He lay there for a moment, blinking up at the ceiling of the training hall, trying to decide if he still had bones.

  To his left, a narrow circle—just a foot across—gleamed smugly in red tape at the center of the mat.

  “Attempt forty-three,” Sasha intoned helpfully from the overhead vox. “Landed twenty-eight feet wide and nine feet high. That’s your third parabola today.”

  Koron exhaled through his teeth. “You don’t need to track my failure audibly, you know.”

  “True,” she replied sweetly, “but it’s required for the betting pool.”

  “Damn right it is.” Milo grinned from the benches, tearing into a strip of jerky one of Lucia’s cargo trips had dropped off earlier. “I had ‘undershoot by fifteen and scream this time.’ Lost a throne, but worth it.”

  The benches were packed—Dunthaven crew in various layers of uniform, cloak, or grease-stained shipwear, laughing and shouting bets across the floor. They weren’t supposed to be here, technically. But nobody had the heart to kick them out. Watching the seemingly all-knowing tech-wizard faceplant repeatedly?

  It was too good.

  Kala sat sideways on a bench rail, kicking her heels and collecting IOUs with entrepreneurial glee. Elissa was busy chatting with the older crowd, catching up on local news as she watched Koron continue to fail. Tara, at least, looked like she was pretending not to enjoy it—head down, neural link active, eyes flicking occasionally between the notes from Elly and the spectacle in front of her.

  ‘Gotta focus, sugar,’ Sasha’s voice nudged gently in Koron’s mind, warm and chiding. ‘And it’s not a failure to use the gestures. Or to let me handle the math. I am the math.’

  Koron kipped to his feet with a grunt, muttering, “I know. But we have to get this down cold. No crutches, no split-focus. Those subsurface readings aren’t waiting politely.”

  ‘Then why are you taking the extra time?’ Sasha asked, her tone somewhere between curious and concerned.

  He reached the edge of the mat again, rolling his shoulders. His breath came slower now, focused.

  “Because something will go wrong. You know it. And when it does, I won’t have time for neuromuscular link delay or pulling bandwidth from your other tasks. If I don’t hardwire this instinctively, someone dies. Probably me.”

  There was a pause.

  ‘You’re not wrong,’ she admitted, softer now. ‘But it’s still silly. We don’t have a timetable.’

  “We don’t have a timetable that we know about,” Koron replied grimly, activating the Slipvector again. “Big difference.”

  The crowd leaned forward.

  The air around him vibrated faintly, humming in sympathy with the Slipvector engine buried at the base of his skull. Koron exhaled, narrowing his eyes.

  Reality folded.

  No flash. No bang. Just a crimp in space—like someone had pinched the world and given it a gentle twist.

  The air thinned. Colors bent inward, smearing around the mat. A low-pressure pop echoed in his ears. A faint blue corona edged his vision, as if gravity had briefly forgotten which way was down.

  His heart skipped—not from fear, but confusion.

  Then—

  WHAM.

  Back on the mat. Slightly scorched footprint behind him. His shaggy hair still fluttered with the momentum of wherever he’d just been.

  From the benches, someone let out a low whistle.

  Kala clapped once, mock-grandiose. “Sixteen feet off. But the hair flip gets a solid nine outta ten.”

  “I hate you all.” He shouted back from his spot on the floor.

  ...

  One Hour Later

  The gunship lay in the Indomitables hanger bay, a predator at rest, its hull all sleek geometry and brushed alloy sheen, a quiet menace wrapped in elegance. Soft blue light pulsed from its gravity drives, painting the hangar deck in rhythmic glows that danced across the polished floor. Its turrets—six twin-barreled cannons—sat retracted behind armored veils, indistinct under their gunports. Compared to a Thunderhawk, it looked fragile—unarmed.

  But Koron knew better.

  What he didn’t expect were the two figures waiting by the ramp—both armored, both smirking, and both very clearly up to something.

  Tara and Kala stood shoulder to shoulder at the boarding ramp, rifles slung, boots squared, and faces radiating identical expressions of mischief barely restrained. They looked like someone had just handed them a detonator labeled “DO NOT PUSH”—and they’d already pushed it twice.

  Koron sighed, snapping the last of his combat webbing into place with a sharp click.

  “No,” he said flatly, pointing an armored finger at both of them. “Not just no. Hell no.”

  ‘Told you he’d say that.’ Elly’s voice chirped in the shared neural link, smug and cheerful.

  ‘Bet you he still lets them come.’ Sasha replied, half a laugh tucked in her voice.

  “Koron,” Kala began, hands on her hips, helmet tilted back on her head. Her armor still bore the dust of a dozen undercity patrols, but her eyes were bright, restless. “I’m losing my mind down here. Two weeks of ship corridors, recycled air, and nothing to shoot. We’re rotting.”

  She rapped a knuckle on the hull beside her with a metallic tonk. “And this baby’s just begging for a test flight.”

  “Kala—” he started.

  But Tara cut in before he could finish.

  “And I,” she said, stepping forward with her glare already loaded, “just found out you’re going down to check subsurface anomalies. Without inviting me.”

  Her tone had all the subtlety of a falling orbital platform.

  Koron exhaled hard, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Ladies,” he said, tone flat but sharp. “This isn’t a picnic on a pleasure moon. It’s an active combat zone with no clear front lines. We have no idea what reaction those anomalies might provoke. And despite every cloaking measure I’ve built, I cannot guarantee we won’t be detected by something unpleasant.”

  “Which is exactly why you shouldn’t be going solo,” Tara shot back, arms crossed. “Backup isn’t optional out here. It’s survival.”

  Kala nodded emphatically. “Besides, you’ll fly the ship like a like a sulking servitor. I’ve practiced with the grav-throttle system.”

  “One: I fly perfectly fine. Two: You had Elly hijack the simulator.”

  “Semantics.”

  Koron opened his mouth, shut it again. His gaze flicked between the twins, each wearing the same unyielding stare. He felt the slow grind of familiar pressure in his chest—protective instinct colliding with the hollow echo of Dusthaven and two long years in the dark.

  “No,” he said again, this time slower. “You are not coming. This isn't some scavenger run for spare parts and old ration bricks. It's a recon mission with unknown variables, underground structural irregularities, and—just for flavor—warped atmospheric readings and seismic chatter.”

  Tara arched a brow. “And you were planning on going alone?”

  “Better alone than dragging people I care about into something I haven’t scoped yet,” he snapped.

  “Oh, now you care,” Kala muttered.

  Koron leveled a look at her. “That’s not what I meant and you know it.”

  “Actually, I think it is,” Tara said. “You keep doing this—pushing us away the second it gets dangerous, like we’re fragile.”

  “You are compared to the god damn Astartes.” Koron replied, voice all edges. “You think I didn’t run every possible route this mission could go sideways that I could? That I didn’t factor your safety into every permutation I could imagine? I didn’t ask you because the amount of variables here are too damn high.”

  “Oh, so we’re variables now,” Kala said, deadpan. “Great. Does that mean I can file for predictive hazard pay?”

  “Not variables—constants,” Koron growled. “You’re–“ He stopped, fists curling, metal fingers creaking under strain. For an instant, faces flickered across his mind, old memories quickly shoved away. His voice roughened. “Important. To me.”

  That hung in the air a moment. A low hum from the grav-drives filled the silence, pulsing soft blue against the gunmetal walls.

  Tara’s voice dropped to something quieter, tighter. “Then stop trying to keep us in a box. We’re not just survivors, we’re fighters. Always have been, always will be. Just got better gear now is all, thanks to a certain someone.”

  “We always had to think for ourselves,” Kala added. “To act. And now you want us to just sit back and watch while you risk yourself alone? Again?”

  “I didn’t—” He faltered. His gaze remained on the deck for half a heartbeat. “I didn’t want to put you in a position where you might die for my curiosity.”

  “Well tough,” Kala said, stepping forward. “Because we chose to follow you, Koron. Not as liabilities. Because your important to us too.”

  “And we’re not letting you walk into a potential ambush without backup,” Tara finished.

  ‘…Damn, they’re good.’ Sasha muttered in his head, faux-reluctant. ‘Ten to one odds you cave in the next thirty seconds.’

  Koron glanced skyward in silent frustration, then exhaled slowly through his nose.

  Quietly counted to thirty-one.

  ‘Cheating bastard.’ Sasha grumbled.

  ‘Love you too.’

  Looking back to the twins, he shook his head. “You two are relentless.”

  Kala smirked. “It’s part of the charm.”

  “I hate this.”

  “You’ll love it once we’re flying,” she said, already walking toward the cockpit like the matter was settled.

  Tara gave him a pat on the shoulder as she passed. “Besides, if it goes wrong, we can always say it was your idea.”

  “You realize I have this entire conversation recorded, right?”

  “Mom won’t believe you anyway~”

  ...

  “Does she have a name?” Kala asked, her fingers dancing across the flight controls with lazy precision. The gunship wove through the drifting bones of shattered hulls and orbital clutter, gliding as if it were skating on glass. In the forward camera feed, the war-torn face of Vigilus loomed ever larger—scarred, seething, and impossibly vast.

  “What? Oh. No,” Koron said, distracted, checking telemetry. “Technically, she’s un-named. But you could call her Nyx. After the classification.”

  Kala hummed thoughtfully. “Nyx. I like that. Has a sharp edge to it. Mysterious, but dangerous.”

  “Formally, it’s a Nyx-Class Interdictor,” he added. “Heavily modified. Naturally.”

  “How modified?” Tara asked, her arms folded as she leaned in behind her sister, eyes scanning the readouts.

  Koron ticked them off on his fingers. “Boosted the power-core. Rerouted the primary conduits for better efficiency. Engine output’s up thirty-six percent. Added another shield bank and redundant backups in case someone gets some good shots in.”

  “And the weapons?”

  He winced slightly. “...The gravity lances are just point defense turrets. Quick, easy to make, but not nearly the punch of the actual guns for ship to ship combat.”

  “So,” Kala said slowly, “you took a gunship… put a bigger engine in it… and left the weapons at home.”

  “In order: yes, and depressingly yes.”

  Tara finally glanced back at him, braid swaying with the motion. “And you still thought going down to the surface was a good idea?”

  “I had planned on going alone,” Koron replied, sighing. “Then some people decided to tag along.”

  “Because some people didn’t want you getting yourself killed trying to flirt with ancient subterranean anomalies by yourself,” Tara said.

  Kala smirked from the pilot’s chair, hands on the Nyx’s controls as the gunship banked toward the planet below. Her long braid drifted in the light cabin breeze from the environmental vents, and her eyes sparkled with mischief. “Too late,” she said, all teasing warmth. “We’re already on the first date.”

  Koron groaned under his breath and shook his head, the harness creaking as he turned to face the viewport. Below them, Vigilus sprawled in ruin—ashen plains and stormfronts the size of continents writhing in slow, predatory arcs. The Vhulian Swirl churned at the horizon, a spiraling scar in the planet’s flesh, its clouds moving with the restless intent of a hunting beast.

  This is stupid, he thought, jaw tight. I should turn us around. Lock them in the hangar. Go alone. That’s the smart play. The safe play.

  In his mind, the scenarios unfolded as clear as any predictive model: a misstep underground, an ambush in the tunnels, one wrong seismic reading—and he’d be left holding the aftermath again.

  His fingers flexed against the armrest, a phantom ache of memory stirring—the cold, echoing, endless weight of too late.

  “You’re spiraling,” Sasha’s voice whispered through the link, warm but firm. “I agree—they shouldn’t be here. Not yet. But Elly and I talked, and… all three of you need this.”

  “Need what? To be put in danger?”

  “To strengthen the anchor,” she said gently. “Guilliman said it himself, echoing my own advice. Find your people. Let them keep you grounded. You and I both know…the Brandts have become that for you.”

  He was silent for a long moment. “…Isn’t that all the more reason to keep them out of harm’s way?”

  “Yes, and no. Yes, because anyone would want to protect their own. But no, because they’re like the Salamanders—you can’t keep them in a gilded cage. Kala would never accept a life of safe walls and stale air. Stagnation becomes resentment. You know this.”

  He exhaled slowly through his nose. “…I know. I just think there are better ways to grow whatever this is between us than in a literal warzone.”

  “I agree. One hundred percent,” Sasha said with a soft hum of amusement. “But when have we ever gotten what we wanted?”

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  “…Never.” He hesitated, a flicker of wry humor breaking through. “Next time you want emotional growth, maybe start with movie night.”

  “Only if you add a sofa big enough for four.”

  “…Fair enough. I’ll put in the order when we get back.”

  With a flicker of thought, he summoned the geo?map into a hovering holographic display. Soft blue light bathed the bridge’s panels, tracing a path across the scorched surface to the anomaly site. A single ping shot toward Kala’s console; her interface beeped in acknowledgment.

  “Coordinates sent,” he said, voice steadier than he felt. “Keep an eye out. This shouldn’t take long to complete… but I’m putting the defense systems on high alert.”

  The words were automatic. The worry was not.

  Kala gave him a mock salute. “Aye, captain.”

  As the Nyx descended, the horizon became dominated by the monstrous storm system sprawling across a quarter of the planet, grinding soil, metal, and bone into its endless spiral. Lightning flickered in the depths of the maelstrom, illuminating jagged curtains of dust and shrapnel that could strip a man—or a tank—to bare frames in minutes.

  The Nyx approached the desolate edge of that storm, where the pale ground fractured into a no-man’s-land of scorched rock and shallow craters. Here, the ship hovered in silence, its hum swallowed by the vast emptiness. Far from the patrol routes of Orks, traitors, or anyone sane enough to step foot on this windswept land, Koron hoped they were unnoticeable.

  “Bring her to a stop over the site,” he said, stepping toward the deck hatch. His cybernetic hand brushed the hatch controls in passing, the hum of the ship’s core resonating faintly in his bones.

  “Don’t land.”

  Kala half-swiveled in her seat, brows furrowed. “What? Why?”

  Koron glanced over his shoulder, pointing towards the floor “Because we’ll need the lances to drill into the surface. Otherwise…” He gestured vaguely toward the bone-white landscape below. “…it would take days to reach the site.”

  Lightning rippled in the storm’s edge, briefly painting the interior of the cockpit in stark white. Kala leaned back, exhaling slowly as her fingers slid across the controls to bring the Nyx into a smooth hover, a mere twenty feet above the broken world.

  “Alright,” she said quietly, a trace of excitement in her voice. “Let’s poke a hole in hell.”

  “Can you please not jinx us before we even start?” Tara said, lightly jabbing Kala’s shoulder.

  Dropping down the hatch, he passed into the main corridor of the gunship, coming to a stop at the starboard side, the door opening at his approach.

  Even well over a hundred kilometers from the stormfront, the winds were a shrill scream, dust and pebbles flung through the air, sparks of light erupting as his shield ate the strikes. Without missing a beat, he stepped out into thin air as his helmet folded into place, anti-grav plating igniting to buoy him to the surface.

  A moment later the girls floated down, comm-links active as they looked around at the barren wasteland.

  “Kinda reminds me of home. Though the lack of sand is a bit problematic.” Kala said as she scuffed the dry dirt. “How long do you think this will take?”

  “Not long.” Koron replied as one of the gunports on the gunship opened. One of the ventral dual barreled turrets released from its moorings, now free-floating in the air as it spun to face down at the ground.

  ‘Target locked, distance to puncture, approximately four kilometers. Circumference of lance drill, one foot, minimum output. Shall I?’ Sasha asked.

  “Fire away.” Koron replied.

  Koron heard the emitter hum, a sound felt more in bone than ear. Dust and grit rose in a hesitant spiral, caught in invisible fingers as the air itself began to lean toward the barrel.

  Then the beam appeared—thin, sharp, and strangely understated.

  A single line of dark?red light lanced down into the earth, no brighter than a welding arc, but impossibly precise. Where it touched, the ground didn’t shatter.

  It yielded.

  Soil and stone vanished, edges curling like paper under a slow flame. A lazy plume of steam drifted upward, carrying the mineral smell of wet rock and scorched iron. Every few seconds, a soft hiss escaped the borehole as trapped moisture flashed into vapor and fled into the cooling wind.

  The beam slid deeper, unhurried, a quiet dialogue between impossible technology and stubborn geology.

  Four kilometers below, stone would be whispering into vapor; up here, the earth seemed to sigh and make way.

  Koron watched the sensor feed as the Nyx’s drilling lance descended through the planet’s crust. Each pulse registered on the display as calm and methodical, a needle of energy stitching its way downward.

  Beside him, Kala watched, fingers tapping a restless rhythm against her armored bicep as the beam fired away. “Why is it red? I figured weapons tech wouldn’t be so flashy.”

  Tara, half?plugged into Koron’s sensor feed, answered absently. “Gravitational stress-shift. The photons are being stretched and compressed as they ride the gravitic field. You’re literally watching spacetime flex around the beam.”

  She tilted her head, curiosity sharpening. “Though I am wondering—how are you keeping all that energy from scattering?”

  Koron didn’t look away from the readout as he answered, voice calm and clinical. “Graviton waveguide. The barrel’s lined with a quantum?locked lattice—basically an optical fiber for light and gravity. It pins the energy into a coherent pulse and prevents dispersion.”

  A thought laced down his neural links, and the schematic bloomed in the corner of the twins HUDs: a thin column of light tightly coiled in the overlay, its edges held by a semi-translucent spiral of energy.

  “Once the pulse exits the barrel,” Koron continued, his voice steady, “the confinement field collapses. The wavefunction resolves into free-space dynamics, and the graviton coupling drives the energy straight through the crust. Any matter in its path is dragged into the axis, spaghettified and stripped to bare nuclei. Electrons peel away as hard radiation, and what’s left is nothing but a filament of plasma and dust finer than smoke. Armor is meaningless. Shields without the right latticework might as well not exist.”

  The earth gave a subtle tremor as the lance continued to fire. A low hum resonated up through the soles of their boots, the kind of sound that carried in teeth as much as in ears. The tang of hot metal and ozone crept into the air as ionization skittered along the barrel’s emitter, and a faint shimmer of heat rose in waves across the ground.

  Outside, the lance carved downward—a perfect column of crimson light, silent and straight as it stabbed into the planet. The beam didn’t flare or flicker; it simply unwrote anything in its way with exacting precision.

  Tara, her eyes wide, glanced at Koron. “And you said these were… point-defense weapons?”

  Koron’s gaze stayed on the readout, fingers tapping idly against the console as he absently answered. “Yeah. They were mostly for swatting down kinetic projectiles, working on the same principle as my sidearm—just on a bigger scale. Really, they’re not all that impressive.”

  Kala, not paying much attention to the engineering discourse, gave a low whistle. “I was kidding before, but damn it if doesn’t look like it’s drilling straight into hell.”

  Koron allowed himself a tiny, dry smile. “If it is, let’s hope hell’s not load?bearing.”

  ...

  The little squid-drone glided forward through the darkness, its delicate tendrils curling and flexing as it swam through a void of black liquid metal. Tiny bursts of sonar and gravitic pings radiated from its body, painting the unseen world around it in Koron’s visor with slow, elegant strokes. The drone’s faint lights reflected off the liquid surface, before vanishing into the depthless gloom.

  “Definitely liquid metal of some sort,” Sasha said at last, her warm voice resonating through the speakers in Koron’s helm. Each word was accompanied by a subtle ping of sensor returns. “I can confirm a spherical cavity, three kilometers in diameter. One central spire present—two kilometers long, maybe half a kilometer across. It’s just… floating there, right in the center.”

  The image sharpened in their HUDs as Sasha’s feed layered the space with geometric clarity. A perfect sphere, utterly smooth on the inside, cradled an obsidian spire like the core of some alien gyroscope. Tiny ripples of liquid shifted with the drone’s passing, catching the faint glow of the drone’s lights before sinking back into shadow.

  “It’s not anchored to the walls,” Sasha went on, the mild fascination in her tone edged with disbelief. “It’s just… suspended in the liquid. Rotating with the planet’s spin.”

  Koron leaned closer to the display, eyes narrowing. Even in the blue light of the HUD, the spire had a gravity to it—an intent. “It’s not spinning on its own. It’s compensating,” he murmured. “Like a gyroscope that refuses to acknowledge inertia. It’s locked to something light-years away… and by the alignment, I’d say the Gauntlet.”

  Tara, standing near the rim of the drill shaft, traced the smooth edge of the borehole with her glove and peered into the black. Her voice was hushed. “So… it’s aware?”

  Koron didn’t look up. “Aware, or instructed. Either way, this isn’t a rock. This is a node. A piece of something vast, watching the galaxy spin and refusing to move.”

  His fingers traced the sensor overlay as he calculated orientation and vector drift. “No signal emissions, no gravitational anchors. No triangulation. That means either it’s using FTL reference frames that I can’t detect… or it simply doesn’t care about distance at all. It’s fixed in space in a way our physics doesn’t politely allow.”

  Kala, floating lazily upside down, cocked her head at him. “There’s stuff you can’t explain?”

  Koron shot her a sidelong glance and gave her faceplate a light shove. “My bet? Necron tech. And this liquid metal? Once I analyze it, I’m guessing we’re looking at blackstone again.”

  “To what end? Just to keep the Gauntlet alive?” Tara asked, her eyes never leaving the abyss below. Wind from the Nyx’s environmental venting brushed past her, carrying the faint metallic scent of disturbed dust.

  “Depends on the vector,” Koron said. “But that’s my working theory. We’ll know for sure once Sasha confirms the alignment.”

  “Oh, the builders? That much I can confirm,” Sasha chimed in, her voice carrying a mischievous warmth. “The nice thing about the metal bastards—they leave a signature on everything they touch.”

  “Necron sigils?”

  “Big ones. Four faces, one for each cardinal axis. Center of the spire, plain as day.” Her voice shifted, more focused now. “Hold on—calculating the vector lock… gimme a second.”

  Kala drifted into a slow orbit around her sister, spinning like a lazy satellite. “I’m surprised the Imperium hasn’t drained these things dry. From what Elly said, blackstone’s priceless when it comes to dealing with psykers.”

  “Yeah, well…” Tara’s eyes flicked to the storm?choked horizon far beyond the borehole. “If these things are holding up the Gauntlet, ripping one apart would probably make half the sector wish they hadn’t.”

  “That, and—” Koron started to say, but Sasha’s voice cut him off.

  “Heads up. I’m picking up readings deeper down, near the mantle. Matching Necron energy signatures, like what we saw on Morrak.” Her tone shifted from warm to surgical. “We might be looking at another structure… a bigger one, beneath this node.”

  Koron straightened slightly, his eyes flicking across the layered sensor returns. “Any connecting tunnels?”

  “Checking,” Sasha said, “Aaaaaand….its…Huh. Hey, Koron? The Swirl? I think there’s a structure in its center.”

  “What did you find?”

  “Got faint geomapping, will have to get closer to confirm, but extreme range sensors are indicating that there’s continuous gaps in the crust under the Swirl that don’t appear natural.”

  Kala, floating, planted her chin on top of Koron’s head, arms loosely draped around his shoulders as the readouts scrolled past. “Can the girl handle those winds?”

  He didn’t flinch. Just let her rest there, his fingers dancing over the holo.

  “From what I read, she should be fine.” Tara replied.

  “I’ll task recon in that area,” Sasha said. “Should have something in an hour, give or take.”

  “Thanks. In the meantime, let’s collect a sample.”

  The Nyx’s gravitic lance pulsed again—this time without the crimson beam of drilling energy. Dust and fragments swirled upward as the liquid metal was drawn into collection traps as the hull resonated with a deep, subtle thrum.

  “Copy that,” Sasha replied. “I’ll take a chip off the spire, too. Just to be sure what we’re dealing with… before someone in the Imperium gets a very bad idea.”

  ...

  Hovering in orbit above the Vhulian Swirl, the lights bathed the hall in soft, sterile hues. Through the viewport, the storm’s eye churned, a celestial whirlpool, distant and silent—but the tension in the chamber was anything but.

  Tara hovered just above the deck in the main compartment of the gunship. The sliver of blackstone twisted in the palm sized scanner, glassy, and unnaturally dark. Sensor beams played across its surface in tight spirals, blue light wrapping it in a cage of data. Lines of code and waveform graphs danced across her HUD.

  "Crystalline latticework," she murmured, voice low with awe. "Definitely not natural.”

  Koron drifted beside her, lounging in free-float with his arms tucked behind his head, suspended by a bias in the local gravity field he casually manipulated. His gaze flicked across displays. "Agreed. And it’s refracting gravitic emissions, too. Here—check this."

  Tara blinked as new data piped into her HUD. The gravitic scans painted a stuttering silhouette of the shard, its presence outlined not by what it emitted, but by what it devoured.

  "Emperor… this stuff is weird."

  Koron’s eyes lit with a flicker of admiration—the kind engineers reserved for strange, defiant problems. "Yeah. But weird is just science that hasn’t been properly flattered yet. What next?"

  A curl of satisfaction warmed her chest as he let her direct their investigation. She managed to keep the smirk from her lips, barely. "Thermal and EM spectrum. I want to see how it reacts to entropic wavelengths."

  "The floor’s yours."

  Tara held it out towards him. His arm came down, a fingertip igniting, encircling the cradle with glimmering orange halos as the thermal output climbed. Humming filled the lab. The light spilled across the shard, glinting off obsidian edges.

  "Baseline forty Celsius," she said, her voice even. "Step it to one hundred."

  Nothing.

  No expansion. No heat bloom. No radiation. No anything.

  "Dead," she muttered. "Either it’s a perfect insulator or it just… doesn’t care."

  Koron slowly rotated in midair, watching the readouts with that infuriatingly calm glint in his eye. "I’ll kick it up to three hundred. If it doesn’t blink, we try entropy cycling."

  The flame whined higher, heat blooming in waves. Still, the shard remained a negative-space silhouette, perfectly outlined by absence.

  Koron frowned. "It’s not ignoring the heat. It’s absorbing it. Redirecting."

  Tara leaned in closer, eyes narrowed behind her lenses. "The auspex keeps showing edge distortion. It’s not moving, but it looks like it is."

  He toggled to EM and photonic scatter. His fingers changed again, tools unfurling as they pulsed against the shard, projecting bands of light and signal across its surface. The HUD filled with lattice reflections and scattered ghost-signals—then glitched. Static fuzz. Nonsense echoes. Readouts looped through data that didn’t make sense.

  "...Huh." Her brow furrowed. "It’s not just bouncing the signal—it’s sending it somewhere else."

  Koron stilled. His voice dropped. "Somewhere that isn’t here."

  A low, almost physical hum filled the compartment. Not sound, but something in the bones, like a tuning fork struck in the core of her skull. The shard pulsed—not with light, but the absence of it. A halo of non-existence shimmered around its edge, as if space was bending away in protest.

  Tara’s breath caught. "Did it just—"

  "Yeah," Koron said, all levity vanished. "It pinged back."

  Silence fell again, the shard dormant, playing innocent.

  Koron floated upright, his expression sharpening to razored focus. "Alright. Let’s see you without the mask."

  His pupils narrowed. The faint glow of his eyes brightened as layers of perception peeled open—infrared, EM, gravitic, particle decay, and then… quantum.

  The shard erupted in his vision. Not with color or light, but with architecture.

  A cathedral of frozen lightning.

  A recursive lattice descending into infinite depth, folding dimensions into precise geometries that should not exist. Gravitic waves slipped through its structure like fingers through braided silk—redirected, reshaped, never reflected.

  Particles entered the shard… and did not come out.

  "It’s not solid," he murmured.

  Tara turned to him, frowning. "What do you mean not solid? It’s right there."

  He shook his head slowly. "No. It’s anchored. Partially phased. Everything that hits it—light, heat, kinetic force—it bleeds sideways. Into somewhere else."

  A chill ran through her. "The Warp?"

  His jaw tensed. "Possibly. But… maybe not. Honestly? I’m not sure.”

  He lingered a moment longer, studying the probability distortions. A vibration shivered the air. For a single heartbeat, Koron knew the lattice was aware—not sentient, but reactive, as if it had always been waiting for something exactly like this moment.

  He blinked hard, then shut down the sensor array.

  "We need to test this against an actual warp event. Soon."

  Tara opened her mouth—but Kala’s voice cut across the comms, tense.

  "Guys, get up here. Now. We’ve got a contact entering the Swirl."

  They were already moving. Grav-plating pulsed. Data streams closed as Tara put the shard away.

  Kala already had the viewscreen filled, showcasing the Black Legion Thunderhawk skirting the edge of the atmosphere, headed straight for the Swirl. “Picked it up a minute ago, figured it was just another transport headed for the battlelines, but then it kept going. Sensors are coming back with some weird readings too.”

  It’s projecting some manner of cloaking field.’ Elly spoke up, another readout popping up on the viewscreen. ‘Light refraction and improper air displacement for a ship its size.’

  ‘Psyker mindgames?’ Sasha piped up.

  “Likely.” Koron answered. “Contact Guilliman.”

  ...

  The hololith stuttered slightly as the Thunderhawk glided through the atmosphere, distorted by cloud-shear of the Vhulian Swirl. Guilliman leaned forward, arms on the table edge, his gaze narrowing at the vessel’s silhouette. Black Legion. Subtle only in their own minds.

  But it wasn’t the ship that truly disturbed him. It was the boy beside it.

  It was the first time he had seen the boy in real life. Koron’s face hovered on a corner inset of the display—lit in profile by the interface glow, features too symmetrical, too familiar. Sharp, youthful. Calculating.

  We really do look alike.

  The realization wasn’t new. But it was louder now. Brighter. A shape behind the curtain that refused to step forward.

  The resemblance wasn’t in the features. It was in the burden.

  Maybe fate just has a type, the Brandt girl, Kala, had said. Flippant, but not without sting. Not without weight. He pushed the thought aside, a piece on a board he refused to play just yet.

  “Can you identify the occupants?” he asked, voice level, but tight.

  Koron shook his head. “Nope. The psykers cloak’s doing a number on my sensors. I can track the ship’s movement, but beyond that? Scrambled.”

  Guilliman didn’t frown—but something in his jaw locked. Of course the Arch-traitor wouldn’t send a messenger. He sends blades, shadows, monsters in golden masks.

  “And this structure in the storm? You're certain?”

  “Eighty percent. There’s a unnatural tunnel network. Straight lines, not formed. Everything leads to a single point, and that point’s emitting Necron energies.”

  Lovely. Just what they needed: xenos mysteries stirred awake by Chaos greed.

  “Is it a tomb world?” he murmured, mostly to himself.

  Koron gave a slight shrug. “Could be. I was heading down to investigate when Kala flagged the Thunderhawk. You want me to blow it out of the sky?”

  There it was again. That infuriating blend of irreverence and competence. Guilliman didn’t know whether to be annoyed or impressed.

  “…No.” He said at last. “I want eyes on them first. I’ll dispatch an interception squadron. If this is stealth mission, I need to know why they’re hiding.”

  “I’ll meet them there,” Koron replied without hesitation.

  Guilliman turned fully to face him. “You’re going in yourself?”

  “Like you said, this is important. And time’s likely a factor.”

  “Koron,” Guilliman said slowly, “I advise you to abort. If that Thunderhawk is on an important mission, then it’s carrying the Chosen. Abaddon’s personal elite. You don’t stumble near that kind of danger—you’re swallowed whole by it.”

  “I know,” Koron said, his voice suddenly quieter. No wit this time—only resolve. “But I’m not planning to fight them. I’m going to watch. If I wait for your troops, we may be too late.”

  And that’s the problem, Guilliman thought. You’re always ahead. Always moving where I haven’t yet decided to act.

  He looked at the boy with eyes too old for his years for a long moment, trying again to understand him, to parse what parts were machine, man, or myth. He still couldn’t tell.

  Finally, he nodded. “Very well. Proceed.”

  A pause.

  Then, with quiet weight: “Emperor protect you.”

  Because if He didn’t… Guilliman suspected no one could.

  ...

  The trio watched as the Thunderhawk was battered by the raging winds, even as it carried its cargo deeper into the storm. Dents were punched into its hull, long tears of the paint as drifting debris shredded its length, but the growling engines held strong as it plunged in.

  By contrast, the Nyx slid through the storm less than a hundred meters behind the Thunderhawk, gliding on invisible gravimetic currents, shields deflecting the shrapnel, its cloaking field obfuscating the auspex scanners.

  “Their ships taking damage, minor, but its accumulating. If they don’t reach a safer zone soon their gonna crash.” Tara spoke up from her console. “I’d give them about twelve minutes till engine failure.”

  “Shields are holding steady, no damage on our end.” Kala reported, left hand tilting slightly to the left, the Nyx responding as it kept its distance from the thruster wash of the traitor ship. “Weapons are charged and locked, and we’re approaching two thousand meters off the ground, sensors are picking up a faint energy reading from the structure below, looks to be some manner of shield.”

  “There is plenty of open space to land, we’ll have lots of room to avoid being near them.” Tara said, flicking the holo onto the viewscreen.

  The structures wireframe bloomed.

  It did not rise from the wastelands so much as it emerged, like the vertebrae of some titanic, forgotten leviathan forced up from beneath the crust. Where Imperial fortresses were cathedrals in steel, shouting their purpose with buttresses and gun-spires, this place was quiet.

  Uncomfortably so.

  Its surfaces were seamless, the walls flowing with the precision of a machine that had never heard of weld lines or rivets. Massive, angular faces sloped at impossible gradients, their metallic sheen flickering subtly as if remembering stars that no longer existed. Not a single aquila, not a banner, not even a unit marking adorned its carapace.

  It had no need for such declarations.

  It simply was.

  A perimeter of spires encircled the fortress, their thin, tapering forms humming with a soft pulse that wasn't quite sound, more a pressure at the edge of hearing. Between them, the air shimmered—not with heat, but with the delicate warping of local spacetime. Light bent. Shadows slithered at angles that defied the sun's position. To look at it for too long was to feel your brain begin to itch, as though it couldn’t quite convince itself the structure belonged in reality.

  There were no visible gates or doors, only recessed alcoves and smooth cavities that might have once been entryways—or weapons. The outer walls curved inward as they ascended, giving the structure a sense of hunching forward, like a predator waiting for prey to step too close

  Koron felt his lips quirk. “Oh, sweet. Research facility.”

  The twins stared at it with the wide-eyed awe reserved for places where gods lived or nightmares were born. To Koron, it was just… familiar. The sloped gravity-dispersal fins, the harmonic lattice spires humming away, tuning forks for spacetime, the subtle fold of light along its walls where localized inertial dampening kept the structure from collapsing under its own weight.

  The damn thing breathed infrastructure.

  No skulls, no gothic arches, no screaming cherubim. Just clean function.

  “Sensor veil’s active,” he muttered, noting how the light bent just a fraction too much around the perimeter pylons. “Good calibration too. Probably won’t even register on standard auspex sweeps unless you really know what you’re pinging for.” He patted the side of his helmet like an old friend. “Lucky for us, huh?”

  In the back of his mind, Sasha murmured, ‘Koron… this place has a defensive grid, that’s not normal.’

  He grinned wider. “Nope. Not normal at all. But it’s nice to see someone remembered proper research facilities don’t need half a cathedral built on top of them.”

  The twins were still staring, Kala’s mouth slightly open. Tara muttered something about “wrong angles” under her breath.

  Koron floated a little closer, hands tucked behind his head as if he were just out for a stroll. “C’mon, you two. This is a workplace. A lab. A nice, quiet, carefully designed nerve center for poking reality where it hurts. It’s not ominous.”

  The silence that followed said they disagreed.

  ...

  They watched, wind whispering across the barren plateau. The air here was thick with static and iron—the smell of storms and age-old violence, rising from the stone itself.

  Kala’s adjusted the video feed with a faint whir, her eyes narrowing. “They’re setting down.”

  The Thunderhawk breached the protected layer around the site with thunder on its heels, a sleek black dagger slipping between stormbanks. It didn't descend with the ungainly roar of Imperial dropships—it slid through the air, its cloaking veil flickering briefly as it pierced the final hundred meters to the ground.

  It touched down with a hiss of thrusters on the plateau’s lower expanse, throwing up dust and grit, the storm above churning in time with its engines. The front ramp yawned open.

  And out came monsters.

  Ten Terminators—broad and terrible in black and gold—stepped onto the rock. Their armor was carved with ancient hate, trailing strips of desecrated scripture and broken aquilae. Furnace slits behind helm lenses glowed with an ugly crimson light. Each moved with the inevitability of a guillotine.

  Behind them came thirty mortals—well-armed, well-armored, and unmistakably loyal. Not cultists, but sworn followers. Soldiers of the Long War. Their armor bore marks from ten thousand battlefields, sigils of dead worlds, brands of oaths long since broken.

  Kala hissed through her teeth. “That’s not a raiding party. That’s a procession.”

  Tara nodded, her face drawn tight. “Look at how they move. Not a single one of them breaks formation.”

  Koron, silent until now, narrowed his eyes. He wasn’t watching the Black Legion. He was watching who came to greet them.

  Two figures emerged from the edge of the facility—hooded, armored in green so dark it was nearly black. Time had not been kind to their heraldry. The winged swords on their shoulders were scratched and twisted, paint scoured by centuries of exile. Yet their movements held the grace of warriors, and their weapons were still pristine.

  Tara’s breath hitched. “Those are—”

  “Astartes,” Koron finished flatly.

  As the two approached the Chosen, the tension was palpable. They stopped before the Terminator at the head of the formation.

  And then—slowly, deliberately—they dropped to one knee.

  The wind paused.

  “Are they…” Kala whispered.

  “Kneeling,” Tara said, voice low with disbelief. “What is happening?”

  A shape emerged behind the Terminators, tall even among giants. Black armor etched in crimson and gold, its edges humming with barely contained spite. A clawed gauntlet that pulsed with malevolence. A sword on his hip that burned with azure flames. The air itself recoiled as the man stepped forward. His crimson gaze swept the plateau not with curiosity—but with ownership.

  This wasn’t a battlefield.

  It was a claim.

  “Well, he looks important.” Koron said.

  The shadows around the group seemed to deepen, as if the stormclouds above recognized what had landed. The very world held its breath.

  Sasha’s voice, quiet in his ear, broke the silence. ‘I’ve cross-referenced a hundred posture analysis sets. They’re not preparing to fight. They’re here to talk.’

  “More than that,” Koron murmured. “They’re here to join.”

  Down below, the commander extended a hand. The green clad Astartes—an older warrior with a ragged cape and a burn-marked helm—took it.

  The oath wasn’t spoken aloud, but it didn’t need to be. The act echoed across the plateau.

  Koron’s jaw clenched. The models hadn't predicted this. No scenario accounted for angels kneeling to devils. Even the worst simulations had assumed schism or ambush. Not this.

  Not allegiance.

  The Long War had come to Vigilus.

  “Okay,” Koron said as he directed the video feed to the Nyx. “Contact G, let him know what we found.”

  ...

  “Repeat that,” Guilliman said, his voice taut.

  Koron’s voice came through steady. “The structure is an intact research facility from my era. Not a ruin, sealed. Preserved. It’s dormant, but not dead.”

  Guilliman’s fingers curled behind his back. “You are sure?”

  “Yeah. I recognize the architecture. The patterning. Even the stabilization web is using frequency harmonics I remember running calibrations for. My bet is that this place was built to monitor the pylon network beneath Vigilus. Not a weapon site.”

  The Primarch exhaled slowly through his nose. Not a weapon.

  Worse. Research meant information. And information meant leverage.

  “I assume it’s not abandoned.”

  “No, and here’s where things get weird. Two Dark Angels came to greet the Black Legion.”

  Guilliman’s knuckles whitened.

  Koron didn’t hesitate. “They knelt to the leader. Publicly. Openly. They're not here for a skirmish. They're here for diplomacy. Possibly an alliance. Sending video now.”

  The image resolved on the hololith—and Guilliman went still.

  There, standing at the heart of the storm, hand outstretched to traitor kin, was a figure clad in black and gold. Not an echo. Not a servant.

  Abaddon the Despoiler.

  The warlord who broke Cadia. The architect of a thousand tragedies. The clawed shadow of the Long War made manifest.

  He was here. In person.

  Whatever purpose brought him to Vigilus… it was not ambition. It was certainty.

  Guilliman’s mind snapped through possibilities like a blade slicing parchment.

  The Fallen. Secrets older than the Heresy. Abaddon is seeking ties not just with the warp-spawned, but the lost sons of his uncle’s legion. An intact pre-Imperial archive with direct links to the Blackstone network. If he gains access—if he learns even a fraction of what Koron understands…

  He turned from the hololith. His voice didn’t rise—but it cut. “Status of the facility?”

  “Externally intact. Weather protection systems only. No sign of AI activity yet. It’s asleep. But if they’re inside already, they may be attempting to power it. Still sealed, but I don’t know for how long.”

  “And you’re certain this is a research hub?”

  “Positive, I helped build several.” Koron replied. “The architecture is wildly different from military setups.”

  Guilliman felt the cold settle in his chest.

  Not a weapon. Small mercies.

  He looked back toward the hololith, the outlines of the building shining like a forbidden thought.

  “Koron, the leader? That is Abaddon—the commander not just of the Black Legion, but of the entire Chaos host. He is likely the most dangerous man in the galaxy. He must not be allowed access. Not to anything.”

  “I agree.”

  “And we are already behind.”

  Too many ghosts in this storm.

  There was a long pause before Koron’s voice returned—quieter now, grim.

  “I’ll buy you time.”

  He paused before severing the line, one hand resting on the hololith table’s edge.

  “Koron.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Be careful. And remember: Abaddon does not gamble. If he’s here, it’s for a reason.”

  The line cut.

  Guilliman turned to the vox-officer and made a sharp gesture. “Activate Protocol Gamma-Nine-Two. Emergency preparation—orbital precision drop, heavy pattern.”

  Guilliman’s hand lingered for a moment over the hololith’s edge. Then he turned, the warmth already gone from his voice, cold fire in its place.

  “Prepare the First Company for assault.”

  He didn’t pause as he left the bridge, headed for the flight deck.

  “Bring me my father’s blade.”

  ...

  Kala’s knuckles went white on her lasrifle. “So… what’s the play? Infiltrate, tag the big guy, and bail before the explosions?”

  Koron didn’t answer immediately. His gaze was locked on the gathering below. When he finally spoke, it was quiet. Final. His jaw worked once, like he was chewing the words before letting them go.

  “You’re going back to the ship.”

  Silence.

  Kala turned toward him slowly, shoulders stiff, like she was waiting for a punch. “Come again?”

  “You heard me. You and Tara. Back to orbit. Now.” He turned to face them—expression grave, leaving no room for argument.

  This wasn’t a suggestion.

  Tara frowned. Her hand curled slightly at her side, tension winding tight through her shoulders. “You really think we’d stay behind?”

  “This is no longer just an excavation,” Koron snapped. He stepped forward now, voice rising with each word, hands half-raised like trying to hold back the very gravity of the moment. “This is Abaddon. Leader of all Chaos, with ten of his elite. An entire company’s firepower, condensed to a spearhead—backed by rituals, demonic pacts, and a galaxy’s worth of blood.”

  “We’re not children, Koron,” Kala said, eyes narrowing, shoulders squaring as if bracing for impact. “We’ve survived Necrons, a ship-wide cult uprising—”

  “And none of them were him!” Koron’s voice cracked like a whip, loud and sudden enough to silence the wind itself. “You don’t understand. This isn’t a fight. It’s a statement. An existential threat. And I won’t risk either of you becoming part of that.”

  “But we could help,” Tara’s voice dropped, trembling—not with fear, but fury at being left behind. “We know your tactics, your gear. We’ve fought with your drones. You need people you trust at your side.”

  “I do trust you,” he said, pain threading through his tone now, strangled behind command. “That’s why I’m sending you back. If you follow me into that fortress and something happens, I won’t be able to—I won’t choose. I’ll hesitate.” he said, and the word seemed to gut him. “And then we all die.”

  Tara stepped forward, one boot planting hard in the dirt. Her hands were clenched at her sides now, white-knuckled. “And what about us? What if you don’t come back? You’re just going to walk into a research base full of traitor Astartes and hope it’s fine?”

  “I’m not hoping,” he said. “I’m planning. I’ll use stealth, predictive modeling, the terrain. I’ll go in ghosted. Get intel. Slip out. No engagement.”

  “Like Dusthaven?” she snapped.

  That stopped him. Just a beat. A flicker of something behind his eyes.

  “You say it’s different. Safer. Smarter. You said that before the Necrons crawled into the reactor. Before we dragged you out of a radioactive hellscape, barely alive.”

  Her voice trembled now—not just with anger, but with something deeper. “I sat by your bunk for three days, just holding your hand like that would keep you breathing. I didn’t even know if you could feel it. I just… couldn’t leave.”

  She glanced at him, quickly, then away. “I just kept talking to you, like that’d fix something.”

  She shook her head, braid whipping behind her. “So no. You don’t get to protect us by pretending we’re not here. You are part of us now. And we protect our own.”

  He exhaled, long and heavy, and stepped close, reaching out to touch her shoulder. She stiffened but didn’t pull away. Her lips pressed into a line, biting back a thousand words.

  “I know,” he said softly. “I know I do that. I know it’s unfair. But I also know that if you walk down there with me, and something happens to you… I wouldn’t recover. Not from that.”

  He turned to Kala, who stood now with arms folded, jaw tight.

  “You’re both—” He swallowed, but the words didn’t come. “I refuse to bury you,” he said, voice low. “Not for this. Not today.”

  For a long moment, neither sister spoke.

  Then Kala’s shoulders slumped, just a little. Her fingers loosened on the lasrifle grip. Just a bit. “You’ll keep the channel open?”

  “Every second.”

  Tara’s eyes glistened, but she nodded, jaw clenched tight. “One toe out of line, you tell us. You so much as think about bleeding out, we’re coming back in guns blazing.”

  “…Deal,” he murmured, voice almost too soft to hear.

  He pulled them both into a hug, a wordless gesture.

  Kala wrapped herself around him instantly—head against his shoulder, arms tight, like she’d done a hundred times.

  Tara hesitated. Just for a breath. Then she stepped in, her arms shifting. Not shy—controlled. Her hands settled low on his back, firm but brief.

  When he let go, she held it for a long second before at last letting go.

  He turned away, down to the exit ramp, vanishing into the storm.

  Kala waited until he was gone before muttering, “We’re totally ignoring this if he gets stabbed again.”

  Tara nodded grimly. “Obviously.”

  ...

  The wind shifted as Koron made his way down the slope.

  Dust clung to his armored boots, scouring his legs with every stride. Above, the storm clouds churned, thick with static, gleaming with the roil of a bruised sky. Below, the research station rose from the earth: smooth, tapered, alive with movement that should not be.

  He moved with purpose, but not speed. No sudden shifts. No cloak-distortion. Just walking into a place where mankind had once grasped meaning from the impossible.

  A pulse ran through his implants—sensor sweeps, probability threads, countermeasures. All green. All steady. For now.

  Ten Terminators. One Warmaster.

  No backup.

  A choice.

  He could survive a thousand failures. But the model where one of them died? That didn’t end.

  That unraveled.

  He exhaled slowly. Not fear—focus. A different kind of breath, stripped of oxygen and emotion, meant only to purge the noise from his mind.

  The cloak shimmered faintly, then vanished, his form swallowed by mirage-light. Not invisibility—irrelevance. Let the eye pass over him. Let the gaze slide off like oil on ceramic.

  His fingers flexed once at his sides. The left was steady. The right trembled—just a flicker, gone as quickly as it came.

  "Not here to win," he murmured, the words lost in the wind. "Just taking a look.”

  He pressed onward.

  Toward a fragment of his past.

  Toward the Despoiler.

  Toward the edge of reason.