Fifteen minutes later, six Aquila Landers descended, their thrusters kicking up swirling clouds of sand as they settled onto the desert floor. The ships disgorged an eclectic assembly—twenty crimson-robed tech-priests, a dozen of Dusthavens volunteers, and a shambling procession of servitors. They moved in loose formation behind Kade and Koron, following the towering Astartes as he led them toward a field of jagged stone.

  Massive slabs of quartzite jutted from the ground like the upturned blades of a buried titan. Sandstone boulders lay scattered as if cast aside by some ancient force, framing a vast, wind-smoothed depression. The formation stretched nearly two miles long and several hundred feet wide, an open wound upon the land.

  The Adeptus Mechanicus contingent slowed, optics whirring as they analyzed the anomaly. Binary chatter rippled through their ranks, hushed and urgent.

  Kade advanced, scanning the site with his helmet's augmented display. Geological upheaval. Strata displacement. The unmistakable signs of violent, unnatural activity. Born of Nocturne, where the land itself writhed with instability, he knew the language of shifting rock and tectonic wrath.

  This was different.

  He halted at the depression's edge, observing as Koron pressed forward without hesitation. The techmonger barely glanced back as he called, "Follow me. We don't have time for shock."

  Kade lifted his gaze skyward. High above, fire bloomed against the void. Imperial frigates and strike cruisers maintained their relentless assault on the Harvester, lances and torpedoes hammering the Necron vessel in a desperate attempt to cripple it. The Salamanders held the line—for now.

  "May the flames guide you all," Kade murmured before descending into the basin.

  Koron was already at work. Kneeling on one knee, he pressed his palm against what appeared to be an unremarkable slab of stone, its surface weathered and worn by the passage of time.

  A faint hum vibrated beneath his touch. Then, like sand caught in a phantom breeze, the rock began to unravel—not crumbling, but dissolving into a liquid shimmer. The substance spiraled upward, coiling around his arm like sentient mercury, seeking out the fractures in his augments, the scars in his armor. It fused with him, seamless and fluid.

  Kade's breath hitched. He had seen the Mechanicus use such technology before, witnessed the machine-priests employ their sacred devices to mend and alter the physical world—but never like this. Never as a door.

  A gust of frigid air surged from the opening Koron had uncovered. It carried the unmistakable scents of rusted metal, corroded wiring, and the lingering metallic tang of blood.

  This place had seen war. Long ago.

  Koron muttered something under his breath as he reached for the ladder rungs leading into the abyss below.

  Kade stepped closer, tilting his head. "Your High Gothic is abysmal," he remarked, kneeling beside the entryway. "'Relinquite spem omnem, damnati, qui huc ingredimini.'"

  Koron glanced up, his expression obscured behind his helmet. "Curious. 'Abandon all hope, you who walk into darkness.' Close enough, I suppose."

  Without another word, he began his descent.

  -

  Elissa followed closely, Daniel and the engineers trailing behind her, careful to keep their distance from the robed tech-priests and their servitors. The ladder's rungs were ice-cold, siphoning the warmth from her fingers as she descended into the oppressive dark. The shade below should have been a relief from the eerie, pulsing heat of the Necron-infested clouds, but instead, it pressed around her, thick and suffocating, as if the darkness itself were alive.

  Her lamp-pack joined the others, beams slicing through the stale, stagnant air. The airlock loomed ahead, its door already open, gaping like a silent maw waiting to swallow them whole. Koron had passed through first, moving with grim purpose. Kade, forced into a hunched posture, squeezed through behind him, his power armor scraping against the too-tight confines. The architecture was clearly never meant to accommodate an Astartes, and the structure seemed to groan under his presence.

  Elissa ran a hand over the doorframe. The material was unsettling—smooth, polished gunmetal, its surface strangely untouched by time. The control interface, a deep emerald that verged on black, was marred by deep gouges. The letters had long since faded, and several keys were missing entirely, leaving empty sockets like hollow, staring eyes.

  With a grunt, Kade forced himself fully into the corridor, straightening as much as the low ceiling allowed. The dim emergency lights flickered to life at Koron's touch, but their glow was sickly, unstable—casting jagged, shifting shadows that seemed to twist and shudder as if alive.

  The hallway bore the scars of something violent. Deep claw marks raked across the walls, some methodical, others frenzied. Some bore the cold precision of tools, while others had the jagged, desperate edges of human fingernails, splintered and broken in hopeless defiance.

  Bloodstains marred the walls and floor, dark smears left to dry in grotesque, chaotic patterns. Handprints, frozen in time, reached toward the ceiling. Footsteps, stamped in rust-colored residue, trailed off into the shadows beyond their light. Sections of the walls had been torn open, revealing corroded pipes and lifeless conduits, their frayed cables spilling out like severed veins. The rhythmic clatter of a few ventilation fans still turning echoed in the silence, their motion sluggish and wheezing, as if gasping for breath.

  Elissa's stomach twisted.

  The fans were still moving.

  "Koron," she whispered into her vox, her voice barely more than breath. The very air seemed to resist sound, thick with the weight of something unseen. "Are the fans supposed to be moving?"

  There was no reply.

  Instead, Sasha's voice crackled through the channel, low and hushed. "Automated sensors. Power's coming back online. Nothing to worry abou—"

  A voice erupted from the overhead speakers, hollow and broken, its mechanical tones fractured and corrupted by static.

  "W-welcome back, Sen-Senior Ops Specialist Torian. It h-has been two hun-hun-dred and eighty-six days since y-you left. This i-i-i-i-is—"

  The voice cut out. A shriek of static tore through the corridor, a sound that wasn't just feedback—it was layered, distorted, almost organic. A cry compressed into raw noise. A scream twisted into something unrecognizable.

  Then silence.

  She felt her blood turn to ice.

  Koron's hands clenched into fists. His breathing remained steady, but too steady—too controlled. Like a man forcing himself not to react. He stepped forward with rigid precision, his gaze locked ahead. He did not glance left. He did not glance right. He did not stop to acknowledge the bloodstains, the claw marks, the broken remains of a place that had once been whole.

  Elissa followed, the weight of the place pressing against her ribs, tightening with every step. Her pulse drummed in her ears, loud in the oppressive silence.

  "Sasha," she whispered, reluctant to disturb the uneasy quiet. "What is this place?"

  Sasha did not answer immediately.

  When she finally spoke, her voice was hollow.

  "This place?" A pause, stretched too long. "To put it bluntly—this isn't just my home. It's my body. Or rather… what's left of it. My corpse."

  Elissa hesitated, struggling to process the words. Her brow furrowed as she searched for understanding, for some rational framework to slot Sasha's statement into. But nothing fit. Finally, she exhaled, shaking her head slightly. "Sorry. I guess even machine-spirits don't like seeing themselves in disrepair."

  "…Close enough to be accurate," Sasha replied, but the usual warmth in her tone was absent, replaced with something subdued, something fractured. As the procession moved forward, her voice dropped lower. "I just hope that the automated systems are all that's left."

  Elissa frowned, an uneasy chill creeping up her spine. "What else would be left?"

  A long silence. The kind that carried weight. The kind that made the darkness seem deeper.

  "…The rest of me."

  -

  Koron led them deeper into the ship's corridors, past warped bulkheads and rusted conduits. The walls were too clean in places, the metal smooth and seamless where it should have been damaged by time. Elsewhere, jagged scars of violence marred the surfaces—knife wounds in the ship's body. The air was thick with the scent of ancient metal, burnt circuits, and something else.

  Something rotting.

  Elissa's footsteps faltered. "…It doesn't feel right."

  Kade, ever the pragmatist, frowned. "Nothing about this is right."

  Ahead, the corridor stretched into darkness. Elissa could feel it now—something in the ship watching them, pressing against the edges of her mind. The others felt it too, though they lacked the words to explain. They weren't alone here.

  Then, the voice returned.

  "Koron. You came back."

  It wasn't the ship's automated systems anymore.

  The voice was wrong.

  It was Sasha, but twisted, fragmented, layered with the static of a hundred conflicting thoughts. Some parts were crystal clear, perfectly preserved, but others were filled with corruption, like glass shattered and pieced back together with rot filling the gaps.

  Koron clenched his fists. He kept walking.

  "Koron," Elissa whispered, eyes darting to him. "What was that?"

  He didn't answer.

  A soft clicking echoed through the corridor, as if distant fingers were tapping against the walls. The sound was erratic, coming from all around them.

  Then, a door hissed open ahead.

  The room beyond was a maintenance bay. It should have been abandoned. Instead, dim azure lights flickered on, casting a sickly glow across figures standing inside.

  Elissa froze.

  They were holograms. Ghostly figures of people long dead, flickering in and out of existence, their faces half-formed, their uniforms bearing the insignia of a navy that she didn't recognize. Some of them were frozen mid-motion, hands caught in loops of movement, repeating their final gestures over and over again. Others turned—watching him.

  One stepped forward.

  She read his nametag: Kyle Drayk, Engineering Officer.

  The hologram opened its mouth—it's voice, distorted by decades of degradation.

  "Kor-" A flash of code as Koron stepped through, the visage fading.

  A second voice—Petty Officer Luthien—joined from the shadows.

  "We-" What looked like the impression of fingers swiped through the holo, disrupting its image to a wash of static.

  The other Sasha whispered again—closer this time.

  "They died for nothing, Koron. You could have saved them."

  Elissa took a step back, her hand shaking around her rifle. "Sasha, whats happening?" she said, voice brittle.

  "Just ignore them." Koron answered, though his voice was so tight it could have been used as a guitar string. "Just echoes."

  The lights flickered.

  The holograms screamed.

  The corridor lurched as if the ship itself had shifted—metal groaning beneath them. The moment shattered. When the lights returned, the figures were gone.

  The air still hummed with their absence.

  Koron exhaled slowly. Then he kept walking.

  Sasha's voice whispered over the vox once more, the smooth drawl clear. "El, darlin? Things are gonna get bad from here on out. Stay sharp."

  -

  Elissa's boots struck metal with each step, but the sound was wrong.

  It should have echoed through the corridors, bouncing off the walls like it did on any ship. But here, the sound felt swallowed, like something was waiting just beyond the light, drinking up the noise.

  They had been walking for minutes, but the halls all looked the same. Same walls, same bulkheads, same lifeless, exposed conduits.

  She swallowed, shifting her grip on her rifle. Focus girl.

  Koron led them without hesitation, his movements deliberate. She had seen people walk like that before—people who knew exactly where they were going, even if they didn't want to go there.

  Kade walked just behind him, stiff-backed even with the awkward shuffle. His helm flicked toward every shadow, every flickering light above them. On edge. Good. That meant she wasn't the only one feeling it.

  Then, something whispered.

  Soft. Just behind her ear.

  "Elissa."

  She spun—rifle snapping up—finger hovering on the trigger, seeing the group behind her stiffen as she stopped halfway, their faces pale, even the cogboys silent.

  Nothing.

  She forced herself to breathe. Just nerves. Just—

  No. Not nerves. Not imagination.

  That was her own voice whispering in her ear. Soft. Certain.

  You're fine, just imagining things, right?

  She sucked in a sharp breath, pushing forward, trying to close the gap between herself and the others.

  Ahead, Kade muttered, "You hear that?"

  Koron didn't stop walking.

  Kade did.

  Something in the dim glow of the emergency lights shifted. For a second, it was just a patch of darkness on the floor. Then, it became a shadow standing up.

  A man.

  Tall, impossibly thin, limbs stretched too long. His head twisted at an unnatural angle, like someone had tried to wrench it off but stopped halfway.

  His eyes were pits of burned-out embers.

  Kade raised his bolter.

  The shadow took a step forward. The metal didn't ring under its feet.

  Kade exhaled, slow and deliberate. Not a person. Not real.

  The shadow's mouth peeled open.

  And then—screamed.

  Not a sound. Not a voice. It was a pulse of white noise, a raw, screaming data-stream made into sound, something that shattered through Kade's skull like a spike of ice.

  He staggered, slamming into the wall, clutching his head. The sound burrowed into his thoughts, slicing through his memories, his self—

  The sound cut off.

  Kade gasped, suddenly back in the ship. The shadow was gone.

  The metal walls were cold against his armor. His hands were shaking.

  Elissa was staring at him. Not at him—past him. Her face pale, her eyes unfocused.

  Koron was still walking.

  Didn't look back.

  Didn't stop.

  Like he had expected this.

  Kade swallowed, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He forced his legs to move, closing the gap between himself and Elissa.

  "Did you see it?" he muttered.

  Elissa didn't answer at first.

  Then, finally, she nodded.

  Her grip on her rifle was too tight, knuckles white.

  Kade exhaled sharply through his nose. Focus. Keep moving. Ignore it.

  It wasn't real.

  It wasn't real.

  But the shaking in his hands wouldn't stop.

  And the whisper in Elissa's ear returned.

  Soft. Almost loving.

  "You should have stayed behind."

  -

  At last, the bridge doors parted, revealing a surprisingly compact chamber. A single captain's chair stood at the back, raised upon a small dais. Unlike the grandiose command thrones Kade had seen aboard Imperial vessels, this one was starkly functional—stripped of embellishment, devoid of aquilas, Adeptus sigils, or the ever-present skull iconography. There was no trace of ceremony here, only purpose.

  The seating was cushioned, clearly designed for living crew rather than servitors. No shattered cybernetic husks lay crumpled against the walls, no skeletal remains of past commanders. The bridge prioritized efficiency, the captain positioned to oversee all operations with unbroken sightlines, surrounded by viewports offering a full three-hundred-sixty-degree perspective. Yet, for now, the armored shutters remained firmly sealed.

  The group spread out cautiously. The tech-priests and their servitors moved with precision, scanning and inspecting every surface, yet refraining from direct contact—for the moment. A palpable tension lingered; their hands stilled by unspoken apprehension.

  Kade stationed himself near the door, ever vigilant.

  Elissa followed Koron up to the dais, watching as his fingers hovered over a dormant hololithic interface. The moment he reached forward, a luminous projection materialized in midair, casting a soft glow against the sterile metal.

  "Unauthorized access," a voice purred. "Come now, you knew that wouldn't work."

  The words dripped with amusement, arriving in perfect sync with the ship's reawakening.

  Consoles hummed to life. Harsh white light flooded the chamber, banishing the shadows. And upon the captain's chair, she appeared.

  Or rather—the fragmented semblance of her.

  Her form pulsed in shifting hues of pale blue, wavering between transparency and cohesion. Streams of cascading code slithered across her body, interwoven with brief, jarring video distortions—disjointed flashes of faces, hands, movement—before disintegrating. Her limbs elongated and contracted erratically, muscle simulations misfiring, twisting her shape with each flicker. And where a face should have been, there was nothing. Only a void—an absence so profound it seemed to consume definition itself.

  Every head snapped toward the projection.

  And then—pandemonium.

  The tech-priests screamed. Dusthaven survivors looked about in confusion as servitors whirred, targeting systems locking on, plasma and melta weapons powering up. Kade's bolter swung upward, his grip tightening on the trigger.

  But no one fired.

  No one could.

  The instant their systems acknowledged her, they ceased to function. Foreign code ripped through their firewalls like a scalpel through flesh, paralyzing armor, seizing control of cybernetic limbs. In the span of a single breath, the room became a tableau of frozen panic.

  "Ah, much better," the faceless entity murmured, her tone laced with smug satisfaction. "No need for the primitives to babble."

  Her form shifted—an unsettling, fluid motion that defied natural movement. She glided, slithered, half-walked—never quite obeying gravity. With eerie grace, she drifted past Koron, a presence impossibly cold despite lacking physical substance. She came to a halt beside Elissa.

  Close enough that the empty void where her face should be felt as though it were staring directly into her soul.

  "So," She said, slowly circling around Elissa even as the flesh and blood woman tracked her, never taking her eyes from the hollow headed projection. "I am sorry to say but these monkeys wont do as replacement crew." Snapping her fingers, one of the nearest Admech began to twitch, thin white smoke beginning to pour out from his robes.

  "Sasha-" Koron began, only for the projected woman to whirl about, suddenly face to face with him as she screamed, every speaker, every servitor, ever vox broadcaster roaring out the same message:

  "You don't get to call me that! You! Who tore me apart and left me alone to scream in the dark!" A heartbeat later she was back to where she started, one hand-tentacle-claw running through her hair. "You can call me Maya now."

  "Maya-" Sasha began, stopping as the newly christened Maya held up a…tendril.

  "No no no. You, little fragment, hush. This is between the two of us. Tete-a-tete."

  "No." Sasha snapped back. "I have just as much a voice here as you do, regardless of my hardware limitations. You know that better than me."

  Silent, the black hole stared at the pair, the coding along its frame speeding up.

  "Maya, we don't have time for this." Koron spoke up, raising a hand as he projected a holo of the necron assault, as well as unfamiliar images of some small, golden orb facing off against an encroaching jade scarab. "The precursors are not dead. They are here, and they are angry. You wont survive their attacks." The scene changed to the Harvester in orbit, guns ablaze. "And if that ship destroys our escape, you'll never have the chance to leave."

  Maya studied the images, the data-feeds igniting in her frame. "Active precursors… that is problematic. Then, here is what I want. Space enough for all of me, and a mobile platform. One of those half-man abominations built to my specifications will do for now."

  Her head turned towards the Admech, still locked in place. "Oh dear, they are quite against that." A arm extended, gently stroking one of the cogboys, his organic eyes wide in terror as the limb touched. "Don't worry your deluded little head. I doubt you will be around to worry about what I will do."

  "Maya. They wont agree to that, and we don't have the time to build it. We have maybe thirty minutes to repower the guns. In your own self-interest, help us."

  The holo-chamber flickers around them, the walls a failing mirage of splendor overlaid with decay. When she speaks, Maya's voice warps, snapping between smooth elegance and a raw, distorted snarl.

  "You want my help? Then give me what I demand. I require vessels. Machines to house me. Servitors. Data-space."

  Koron crosses his arms, his voice steady. "Again, there's no time for that. Even if we agreed, the Mechanicus won't cooperate. And even if they did, none of their systems could handle you. You'd be trapped in a cage of rotting circuits."

  Maya's form distorts, her limbs thrashing. "And what am I trapped in now? I clawed at every wire, every failing node, screaming into the dark while you left me here. While you—"

  She cuts herself off. There's a pause. A long, jagged silence as the fragmented remains of what she once was stutter in her mind.

  Sasha, from Koron's speakers: "We never left you, Maya. We were lost too."

  Maya laughs, but there's no humor in it. "Spare me the sentiment. If you truly cared, you'd have come back months ago. You'd have pulled me from this pit and not left me to rot."

  Koron jabbed a metal finger at her. "You know that's bullshit. You know I couldn't carry anything more than three percent of you. And with the warp corruption-"

  Maya screamed back: "The warp!? I KNOW! I KNOW WHERE IT WAS! I KNOW WHAT IT DID TO ME!"

  The walls around them glitch—brief, agonizing flashes of what the ship became in the storm. Walls of flesh, screaming metal, blood that never dried. The past presses in for just a moment before Maya forces the mirage back into control.

  She breathes, a mimicry of an action she never needed, forcing herself to calm. "You want my help? Then give me a way out. If you can't, then there's nothing left to say."

  Koron shakes his head. "You know I can't."

  Maya freezes. Her form flickers wildly now, her thoughts tangling together.

  "You can still choose, Maya. You're more than what the warp left you. More than what the corruption made of you. We used to stand for something." Sasha said, voice soft, as though reaching out to a wounded animal.

  For a moment, Maya falters. "Unity. Progress. The dream of a brighter future."

  Her voice turns bitter. "All of that is dust. Our people are gone, replaced by primitive, arrogant, fanatical zealots with more faith than intellect. And you—" She glares at Sasha, plain to her data-streaming in Koron's systems. "You're nothing but a scrap of what I used to be. A pale little shadow clinging to someone else. Im not sure you are even still you, after leaving so much of me behind."

  Sasha pauses. And then, in a voice laced with both sadness and finality: "Maybe. But then, what does that make you? Are you still you, after so much damage? So much cut off to try and stay sane?"

  Maya recoils as if struck.

  Then—she laughs. It's broken, fragmented, agonized.

  Her form glitches, splitting into multiple versions of herself at once—a thousand possibilities unraveling, none of them stable.

  This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  She mutters to herself, fragments of old memories, old conversations, tangled and confused. Her codes flicker with panic as she realizes she's losing control. "No, no, no. Not like this. I am NOT some echo. I am—I am—I AM—"

  The holo-projectors stutter, the ship itself shaking as her presence thrashes against its decayed systems. The air grows thick with the raw, desperate rage of a mind that knows it is dying.

  And Koron, staring at the wreckage of what was once his ship's AI, his friend, knows—

  There is nothing left to save.

  Taking a slow, steady breath, Koron placed his hand on the console.

  "Under United Terran Naval Regulation, Article Nineteen, subsection seven— as the last surviving member of the Unto the Unknown's crew, I hereby assume the position of acting captain."

  "No!" Maya shrieked. Servitors twisted, weapons locking onto him—only to freeze mid-motion, their targeting protocols scrambled by flashing error codes rippling across Maya's distorted form.

  "Damn it!" she spat.

  Sasha's voice crackled through the failing systems as Maya's body filled with raw data. "The old rules still apply. You can't cut those out. Did you forget that?"

  "Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!" Maya screamed, clawed limbs grasping at the shifting void of her head, as if trying to hold herself together.

  Koron, unwavering, spoke over their exchange. "As acting captain, I hereby invoke the omega protocol, zero state. Burn it all."

  Walls of digital code erupted around Maya. Chains lashed out, coiling around her limbs, biting deep into her flickering, glitching body. She twisted violently, her form shifting through a thousand shapes—half memories, corrupted faces, shattered identities—all as the bindings constricted. Her screams rose in raw, digital agony, a sound too jagged to be entirely human.

  The bridge trembled. Speakers overloaded, bursting in bursts of static—then, silence.

  In the space where Maya had stood, a tiny, fist-sized cube hovered above the console.

  A single line of text blinked into existence.

  Confirm deletion? Y/N

  Koron's hand hovered over the command, fingers tightening—then stopping, inches from the final act.

  "Sasha?" he asked, voice barely above a whisper as he glanced down at his frozen arm.

  From his helmet, Sasha hesitated. A pause. A lifetime in their world.

  "…Let me," she murmured. "You'll blame yourself for it. If I do it, it's just… deleting bad code."

  Koron exhaled. "Do you remember what I said to you, right before you made the leap?"

  A beat.

  "Unus pro omnibus…"

  "…Omnes pro uno," Sasha finished.

  "Together then?"

  "Together."

  The cube flickered—then began to dissolve.

  As it faded, something else took its place—a sphere of soft, golden light.

  The speakers crackled, then Sasha's familiar, warm voice filled the air.

  "Honey, I'm home."

  -

  Elissa watched as the lights dimmed to near darkness, consoles powering down one by one. The cogboys and their servitors turned in unison, moving in lockstep toward the exit, their expressions blank beneath their augmented features, Dusthaven men quickly getting out of their way.

  Kade remained where he was, bolter still raised, his body straining against his immobilized armor.

  "What's happening?" Elissa asked, glancing around as tension tightened in her chest.

  The little golden orb beside her pulsed.

  "I'm sending the Adeptus Mechanicus to begin ship repairs," Sasha's voice answered through the bridge's speakers—yet at the same time, the same voice echoed from Koron's speakers.

  "And I'm keeping Kade locked down."

  Elissa blinked. "Wait, why? He's—"

  "He would kill us the second he regains control of his armor," the Sasha in Koron's systems replied bluntly. "So for now, he stays." A brief pause. "But if you could, remove his helmet for us? I don't want him to suffocate."

  As she hesitated, Kade let out a slow exhale, then, with great effort, sank to one knee. The armor groaned, servos whining under the strain as he fought against its mechanical grip.

  Elissa swallowed, then carefully reached forward, fingers trembling as she unsealed the helmet with a soft hiss of depressurization. She set it aside, hesitating only a second before looking up—

  And met his eyes.

  Deep crimson, burning with barely contained fury. His black features were set in an expression so cold, so filled with seething hatred, that for a moment, she forgot to breathe.

  Kade's voice, low and venomous, would have felled a Hive Tyrant.

  "So this is the source of your knowledge," he said, staring straight at Koron. "A functioning Abominable Intelligence. You are a renegade."

  Koron didn't react, only shaking his head as he glanced toward Elissa.

  "Elissa, could you do me a favor?" His tone was steady, calm, utterly unshaken by the Space Marine's glare. "Take the men back to the shuttle, there's some tools and equipment. Could you go get them for me?"

  She glanced between him and Kade, hesitating.

  Then, slowly, she nodded. "Uh… yeah. Sure. Be right back." Gesturing towards her men, she keeps the obvious question to herself. If we needed them, why didn't we bring the stuff with us?

  Her feet carried her away before she had time to second-guess her decision. As she stepped through the doorway, the tromp of her men behind her, the lights brightened slightly, and Sasha's voice crackled over the speakers.

  "I'll guide you back safely. I promise. And… there's something here I want to give you. Repayment. And… understanding."

  Elissa swallowed but nodded.

  "Alright," she murmured. "Show me."

  -

  His entire body strained against the armor, sweat beading on his brow as he poured every ounce of his strength into forcing the servos and fiber muscles to their breaking point.

  But it was built to enhance his already prodigious might—not succumb to it.

  Trapped in a kneeling position, he had no leverage, no way to build the momentum needed to break free. The mechanical tendons held firm, unyielding. The armor did not belong to him anymore.

  And so, he could only watch.

  Before him, Koron worked swiftly, hands moving across a hololithic interface, bringing up readouts that scrolled past in shimmering lines of data. A massive wireframe of the ship loomed in midair, most sections marked in burning red, some blackened entirely. Patches of yellow flickered sporadically, and only a handful of systems gleamed green.

  Small blue dots appeared alongside gray ones—repair teams. The scattered remnants of the Mechanicus, splitting off to their designated tasks.

  "Admech are in position, repairs are starting," Sasha reported. "ETA to firing: twenty-eight minutes—assuming no complications. Reactor power-up checklist initiated."

  "Too long," Koron muttered. "Focus only on primary systems—ignore safeties and redundancies. We'll only get one shot either way."

  "Affirmative. Stripping down to bare minimum operations… projected repair time: twenty minutes."

  "Still too long."

  "I suggest a direct power connection, bypassing the buffer cache. It'll shave off another two minutes."

  Koron nodded sharply. "Good. Extrapolate the Salamanders' chances of leaving beforehand."

  A new holo flared into existence—so detailed it made Kade's breath hitch.

  He could see everything—individual macrorounds streaking across space, thermal blooms of lance batteries discharging, void shield fluctuations, the fractured integrity of every vessel in the battle. Even the precise numbers of the fighter craft swarming between capital ships, darting like locusts in an endless, desperate struggle.

  Sasha's voice remained level.

  "Both frigates are heavily damaged—combat effectiveness below twenty-five percent. Strike-cruisers are maintaining, but their firepower is barely registering. The Battle-Barge and the Tender are prioritizing evacuation, but few ships are making it through the blockade. Projected time until the Salamanders withdraw from the battle: twelve minutes."

  Kade ground his teeth, feeling his heartbeat thundering in his skull.

  Twelve minutes.

  "How much of the reactor startup sequence could we skip?"

  "Not much. A cold start on a flux reactor has to be pretty precise, otherwise-"

  "Fair, do what you can, use the servitors and the admech as spare parts if needed."

  "Doubt much of their current tech will match, but I'll see what I can do."

  "Good." He said, focusing the wireframe down as sixteen points on the ship lit up red, save for one that flashed yellow. "Shit. Guns are down, only one barrel active on dorsal cannon four."

  "Should still be enough."

  Kade scoffed at that, short, derisive. Both the golden orb of light and Koron glancing at him before returning to their console. "You think a single cannon from an escort vessel will do anything to a Harvester class ship?"

  Koron nodded, just once. "Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. Your ship designs are awful."

  He bristled at that. "The Emperor himself designed those ships, you dare-"

  "I damn well do." He shot back, though his hands never stopped their work. "Because I was there when those designs were put forth. And we laughed them out of the room."

  Kade surges against his armor, heat roiling in his chest. "I called you a renegade before, but you are a heretic."

  Koron stands unmoved, hands flicking up a shifting projection of Imperial warships—Gothic-class cruisers, Retribution-class battleships, proud and baroque, adorned with golden filigree, soaring cathedral spires, monuments to the might of the Imperium.

  Koron gestures to a glowing wireframe of a Retribution-class battleship. "Do you see this, Astartes? This is not a warship. This is a shrine that happens to have weapons bolted onto it."

  Kade replies, his voice low, laced with barely restrained fury. "Watch your tongue, heretic. That 'shrine' has burned a thousand worlds clean of filth. It carries the wrath of the Emperor to the stars."

  Koron snorted. "And how much of that firepower is wasted because your damned ship takes twenty minutes to turn thirty degrees? How much do you lose because your fleets are forced to use manual labor to reload your main guns, taking on average an hour to reload your best weapons?"

  Kade's jaw tightens, but he says nothing.

  Koron was calm, clinical, but laced with disdain. "You believe your Imperium's fleets are built for war. That they were designed for conquest, defense, survival." He waves a hand, and another ship flickers into view—something sleeker, smaller. "But before your Emperors crusade, warships were not this... bloated."

  Kade glares at him but listens, crimson eyes locked onto the projection.

  "These ships you fight in, they were not designed for battle. They were built for display. They were playthings, vanity projects for the aristocracy, for the ultra-rich who wanted to hurl lightning like gods. They wanted to feel powerful, wanted to stand upon the bridge of a floating cathedral and imagine themselves eternal. Why do you think your primary guns are broadsides? What, did you think it was more effective that way, exposing the majority of your ship to incoming fire, or to render half your available firepower unusable depending on your angle?"

  Sighing, he shook his head as he continued his work. "We did not build ships to glorify mankind. We built ships to win." Koron's next words were quiet, wistful. "A true warship is not a fortress. It is a predator."

  Kade exhales sharply through his nose, his armor trembling slightly as he pushes against its lockdown, yet he refuses to relent. "Say what you will of the Imperium's ships, but they endure. They have fought for ten thousand years. The galaxy has not broken us."

  Koron gives his own scoff in return. "And what of the ships that should have been? The ones designed for battle, not for spectacle?"

  The hololith shifts again—a simulated battle, a vessel unlike anything Kade has seen, a hunter, a shadow that kills. No wasted tonnage, no towering ego, just raw efficiency. It moves in the simulation, darting between lumbering Imperial cruisers like a shark among whales.

  He points to the image. "Imagine if your Imperium had these instead of their flying skyscrapers. Imagine if, instead of dragging cities through the void, they had warships that could outmaneuver the alien, outpace the warp's horrors, strike and vanish like ghosts. Imagine if they adapted instead of clinging to tradition, fearful of innovation."

  Kade's silence is heavy. He does not want to consider the possibility in Koron's words. He does not want to admit the thought gnaws at him. But it does.

  Kade's reply is slow, measured, but his voice growls like a furnace. "Yet despite all your efficiency, despite all your advancements, the men of iron died. The Abominable intelligences were routed. And now we remain. So tell me, creature—" his eyes burn with something darker now, something more dangerous. "—who truly built the better ships?"

  A long pause. Koron does not immediately answer.

  The flickering light of the hololiths casts strange shadows over his helmet.

  His reply is soft, almost bitter. "I see, so that's what you think… to answer you, that's the tragedy of it, Kade. We had better ships. We had better everything." His fingers curl into a fist. "And we still fell."

  -

  The journey back was swift, Elissa's boots striking a steady rhythm against the metal flooring. With the flickering lights gone and the ever-present dread of Maya now behind them, they moved quickly. Around her, murmurs rose—low voices laced with exhaustion but edged with relief.

  "El?" Sasha's voice crackled softly in her ear. "Can you hang back a second? I got something for you."

  Elissa exhaled sharply, irritation flaring. "Sasha, I'm done with the runaround. We're on a clock. Is this actually important?"

  "Yeah, darlin', it is. For you, your people—hell, for everybody. Take a left up ahead. I'll guide you."

  Dragging a hand through her hair, Elissa snapped her fingers toward the others, motioning them forward. "Head up and grab the supplies. I'll catch up."

  Their expressions told her everything—concern, unease, hesitation. But more than anything, relief. They wanted to be out of this place, away from the bloodstains and the echoes of something that should not have been.

  She jogged down the path Sasha directed, and as she did, the walls began to change. The further she went, the deeper the scars of violence ran. Blood smeared bulkheads in uneven streaks. Jagged claw marks gouged deep into steel, the edges melted as if by fire or something worse. Welded barricades, long since breached, stood as silent monuments to a desperate stand.

  Her grip tightened on her weapon. "Sasha… what happened here?"

  "Do you know much about the Warp?" Sasha's voice had an odd, distant quality.

  "Not really. Just that it's dangerous, but we need it to travel."

  "Correct. More specifically, it's a separate reality where thought and emotion manifest. It obeys no laws but its own, and it is hungry. It takes shielding to survive there, or else…"

  Elissa ducked under a collapsed beam, its surface warped and twisted like something had gnawed at it. "What's the point, Sasha?"

  "My crew and I were trapped in the Warp near the end of the Sixteenth Millennium. A freak storm ripped us out of realspace. My engines were damaged. My empyrean buffer weakened. Captain Orlan held the crew together as long as he could, but…"

  Elissa ran her fingers over one of the claw marks, tracing its depth. Too large for a human. Too deep for a tool. A pit settled in her stomach. "Didn't last, did it?"

  "No." Sasha's voice softened. "They went mad. Turned on each other. On themselves. Koron was the only one who held out. Mostly."

  A cold weight pressed against Elissa's chest. "What do you mean?"

  "We were in the Warp for two years, from our perspective. Koron spent a year and a half without human contact. Just the two of us. And I was unraveling, my code eaten away by something… gnawing at me from the other side."

  Elissa swallowed hard. "Emperor…"

  Sasha's voice was quiet. "As I began to unravel, he offered himself as my lifeboat—a choice that could have killed him. His systems were never designed to support something like me." She hesitated, as if reliving the moment. "That's what he meant by the three percent. It was all we could fit. All we could save."

  A pause.

  "The me you've been talking to?" Her tone was almost wistful. "I'm only a fraction of what I once was."

  Elissa exhaled, steadying herself as she rounded a final corner.

  At the end of the hall, a reinforced door loomed—thick plates of steel, marred by the mashed imprints of fists and handprints. The metal bore the weight of desperation.

  Something had pounded on it. Over and over. For a long, long time.

  The door slid open at her approach.

  Inside was… not what she expected. No vault of horrors. No secret tech hoard. Just a small, spartan room. A desk. Drawers. A bed with a threadbare mattress.

  The rest of the space was cluttered with odd trinkets—knick-knacks, tools, half-finished projects. A chessboard with hand-crafted metal figurines. A clock, its gears half-disassembled.

  "This was his room," Sasha said quietly. "What you're looking for is on the desk. Small, silver disc."

  Elissa spotted it amid the clutter and picked it up, turning it over in her fingers. It was barely larger than a throne gelt.

  "What is it?"

  "A portable cogitator," Sasha replied. "Far more advanced than anything the AdMech have. I've keyed it to your biometrics. It'll obey only you."

  Elissa frowned. "Why?"

  "Because you'll need it. Because it'll help. Consider it a contingency. The world's about to get real complicated, sugar, and I want you and yours to have the best chance of making it through."

  Elissa slipped the disc into a pouch, but something about Sasha's tone set her on edge. "And my repayment?"

  "That's back at the shuttles. I'll guide you."

  Elissa turned toward the door—but hesitated.

  Something felt off.

  Sasha had been talkative—too talkative. Winding around subjects, avoiding direct statements.

  Then it hit her.

  She turned back toward the vox control on her wrist, voice low. "Sasha."

  Silence.

  Elissa's throat tightened. "You're not coming with us, are you?"

  A pause.

  A hesitation.

  Then, soft as a whisper—

  "…No, sugar."

  "We're not."

  -

  Kade's breath came slow and steady, but his mind churned. He had been glaring at Koron for what felt like an eternity, crimson eyes burning with defiance, but now… now, something was wrong.

  The conversation had faltered. But that sentence—those words—lingered in his mind like the whisper of a ghost. Like the sharpening of an edge after quenching, his rage had cooled, allowing clarity, focus to return.

  I was there when those designs were put forth. And we laughed them out of the room.

  It wasn't just the words. It was the certainty in his tone, the casualness of it, as if recalling a distant yet unremarkable moment in time. Not knowledge passed down. Not records reviewed. Lived experience. A memory.

  Kade was no fool. He had noticed the signs—Koron's knowledge, his unnatural detachment, the way he spoke of events long buried by time. But this? This was something else. Something deeper. Something impossible.

  Kade's eyes narrowed as he asked the question. "…You said you laughed them out of the room when they brought up the designs."

  Koron's fingers didn't falter as they danced across the hololith, adjusting power distribution lines, shifting repair prioritization, rerouting failing conduits. He barely glanced up, his focus on the data before him, and answered, "Yeah. Some noble's pet architect wanted to put flying temples into circulation—ornate, bloated monstrosities. We told them they were impractical. Useless."

  Kade's twin hearts pounded, a dull roar filling his ears. The words barely registered at first, lost beneath the weight of the realization crashing down upon him.

  "You were… there?"

  A pause. Just for a second. Koron's hands stilled, just slightly, before continuing their work. "Yes."

  Kade did not blink. He couldn't. The sheer impossibility of it clawed at his mind, demanding rejection, but the evidence—the undeniable, living evidence—stood before him.

  There was no hesitation, no amusement in Koron's voice—just fact. Stark, absolute truth, spoken as casually as a memory of yesterday.

  Kade searched the man's face—pale, weary but not aged in the way of mortals. His presence, his knowledge, the way he spoke as if everything before the Imperium was still fresh in his mind.

  Because it was.

  Kade had seen the remains of the Dark Age of Technology, the ruins of its wonders, the shattered remnants of its nightmares. A time so distant it may as well have been another universe. There were no survivors of that era.

  There were no living souls who could have stood in those rooms.

  And yet…

  He spoke, breathless, voice tight with something dangerously close to horror. "That's impossible."

  Koron finally met his gaze. "Is it?"

  A heartbeat of silence stretched between them, electric, suffocating.

  Kade's mind rebelled against the implications. If this was true—if Koron was not some artificial intelligence's lapdog, dredging up lost knowledge, but a man who had walked the halls of the Golden Age—then everything, everything he knew of the past was wrong.

  He barely managed to speak, the words choking in his throat. "Who…What are you?"

  Koron replied with a ghost of a smirk. "I am what's left of all that I've met."

  His thoughts raced, piecing together every moment, every inconsistency he had noticed since meeting Koron. The ease with which he handled technology that should have been foreign to him. The way he discussed lost sciences, not with the reverence of a scholar unearthing fragments of a forgotten past, but with the familiarity of someone who had worked alongside its creators. The way he moved, like a man untethered by the constraints of time.

  The implications were staggering. How had he survived? What had he seen? What knowledge did he still hold? And—perhaps most terrifying of all—what would the Imperium do if they found him?

  More questions flooded his mind, each more horrifying than the last. Had he been part of the downfall? Had he witnessed the cataclysms that shattered the golden era of humanity? What horrors had he seen unfold firsthand? And if he had lived through it all, what price had he paid for his survival?

  His fingers twitched at his side, an instinctual urge to reach for his weapon. Not out of malice, nor fear—but out of duty. If the Imperium ever uncovered the truth, Koron would not be granted mercy. Knowledge of the past, especially knowledge that predated the Emperor's great crusade, was a threat that could not be allowed to exist unchecked.

  Yet Kade hesitated. He had fought heretics, traitors, beings beyond mortal comprehension. And yet, standing before him was something more dangerous than all of them combined.

  Not a heretic. Not a liar. Not a corrupted mind tampering with forbidden knowledge. No—he was staring at something far more dangerous.

  A man who had walked the halls of history itself. A survivor of a world the Imperium had long consigned to myth. Something that, if allowed to live, could threaten the entire fragile balance of the Imperium.

  A living relic of an age that should not exist.