The feeling had been present since the return to Triplex Phall, and Nolan had not been able to name it precisely.
It came through the sharpened instincts of a Primarch's senses rather than through any observable evidence: something in the texture of Reditus's responses, the quality of his silences, the occasional pause before a reply that should have been immediate. The servo skull had been present, fully functional, performing every task assigned to it. But something underneath the function was not right.
He had checked for Chaos corruption first. That was always the first check, when something felt wrong with a person who operated in the vicinity of Warp-contaminated materials and Chaos-adjacent engagements. He found nothing. No psychic residue, no behavioral signature that matched any form of spiritual corruption he could identify. He had filed the feeling under unresolved and moved forward, which was what you did when you could not yet act on a thing.
Now, sitting across the table in his private quarters with the servo skull motionless in front of him, the yellowed bone of its skull catching the forge world's ambient light, Nolan watched Reditus drift completely away from the conversation and felt the filed feeling become something more pressing.
Reditus was not present. The red lights in his eye sockets were active but turned inward, occupied with something that had nothing to do with the room or the conversation they had been having. His head was still, the anti-gravity engine silent, the usual crackling energy of his attention entirely absent.
Nolan took a breath. Then he reached across the table and tapped the side of the skull with his knuckles: once, gently, the way you would wake someone who had fallen asleep somewhere inconvenient.
The red lights flared immediately.
"Ah? Forgive me, Lord Primarch, I was distracted for a moment." Reditus's mechanical voice came out faster than usual, with the particular quality of someone recovering from being caught. "I may not have rested well recently. Please do not concern yourself."
Nolan looked at him without expression for a long moment.
"Reditus," he said, "you complained to me, some time ago, that aside from occasionally taking apart the servo robots for entertainment, you have almost no concept of sleep or rest anymore. Your words. You are not a living thing in the physical sense." He let that register. "So why don't you walk me through what 'not resting well' means for you, exactly."
The red lights flickered.
Nolan's left hand was already moving. His right hand, unhurried, drew the Heart of the Furnace from storage space and set it on the table directly in front of the servo skull: not aimed, not pointed, simply present and visible.
"You have three chances to tell me the truth," he said pleasantly. "My suggestion is that you consider using at least one of them for that purpose."
Reditus's eye lights went through several frequencies in rapid succession.
"Lord Primarch," he said, with the confidence of a man selecting a topic that ought to redirect the conversation entirely, "considering the serious internal friction that developed within the fleet during your absence, which I was managing continuously and at considerable personal effort, perhaps this is not the moment to look for additional complications of a personal..."
"Two chances."
Reditus was quiet for exactly one second.
"I admit," he said, pivoting with the specific decisiveness of something selecting a different direction very quickly, "that I should not have dismantled the hoverbike stored in the lower maintenance section of the Twin Islands base without authorization. However, I wish to be clear that all components were returned to their original positions, fully intact, and I can guarantee on my character that it functions precisely as it did before my examination of it."
"That," Nolan said, "is not the sentence I was waiting for."
Another second of silence.
"As for the amount of time I have spent in working consultation with Fabricator General Wesley Phall during the examination period," Reditus continued, at a slightly higher mechanical pitch, "I want to state unambiguously that the relationship is entirely professional in nature. We are both entities that exist outside conventional biological categories, and I can swear to the Emperor that there is nothing to explain. My purpose in cultivating that working relationship was entirely strategic: a stable and cooperative forge world is essential to the Legion's long-term operational capacity, and I was pursuing..."
"Reditus." Nolan picked up the Heart of the Furnace and returned it to storage. He placed both hands flat on the table, pushed his chair back, and stood. "You are not going to tell me. That is fine. Pack yourself up. You can go back to Twin Islands and keep David company until you are ready to have an honest conversation."
He had taken approximately two steps toward the door when the anti-gravity engine ignited behind him with an urgency that indicated the servo skull had only just remembered it possessed one.
"Wait! My Lord Primarch, please wait!"
Nolan stopped. He did not turn immediately.
"I did not want to tell you because these things are not good things." Reditus's mechanical voice had changed register entirely: the deflection and the nervous energy were gone, and what was left underneath was something quieter and considerably heavier. "They may bring trouble. I thought it would be better to manage the problem without adding it to your concerns."
"But since you insist," he continued, and Nolan turned, "there is nothing I cannot say."
He came to rest on the table's surface, the anti-gravity engine lowering him until he sat still. The liveliness that usually occupied every part of his attention was absent.
"Wesley shared information with me during the examination period. Fragmentary things, not fully explained. Before she completed what she was telling me, she deleted the relevant memory module, citing my wellbeing as the reason. She did not ask my permission." A pause. "However, I had already captured some of the model data before the deletion completed. Enough to understand the shape of what I did not receive."
"What shape," Nolan said.
"The conclusion I have reached," Reditus said carefully, "is that I may be Reditus, but I may not be who I believe Reditus was." He seemed to turn this over briefly, checking whether that was accurate. "When the Emperor resurrected me and placed me beside you, my entire memory architecture may have been thoroughly cleaned beforehand. My earliest accessible memory is my resurrection. My knowledge of my own history before that point comes from records and from what others have told me, not from anything I can directly confirm."
He continued, and his voice had the quality of a recitation that had been rehearsed in isolation, in the contemplation that Nolan had been watching him retreat into for days.
"Based on what little I captured before the deletion: I may have had a history with the Adeptus Mechanicus of a kind that does not diminish after ten thousand years. Something significant enough that Wesley thought knowing it would destabilize me." A faint flicker of the red lights, brief and not quite controlled. "I have guessed, and this is a guess, that I may have existed at some point on what would be called the opposing side. Whatever my actions were before the Emperor's intervention, they were apparently not small ones."
"And," he said, reaching the point he had been circling, "if my true identity became known to Mars, it would very likely bring substantial trouble to you, the Legion, and your standing as a Primarch. That is what I was not willing to tell you. Because the trouble would be mine to carry, and I did not want you to carry it with me."
The room was quiet for a moment after that.
Nolan looked at him.
"I see," he said. He sat down again. "I spent some time assuming this was something large. Reditus, you listened to fragments of information that could not be fully verified, you were then denied the rest of it, and now you are treating a guess as a confirmed catastrophe?"
"Lord Primarch, the Adeptus Mechanicus is not a force to be dismissed. If they choose to move against us on this basis alone..."
"Mars has its resources," Nolan said. "How many Legions of Astartes can they mobilize? As a Primarch with several companies at his back, and more joining, I am not particularly concerned about what Mars could bring to bear on us specifically."
He settled into the chair.
"Beyond that: Guilliman is the Lord Regent of the Imperium. My brother has a very well-developed instinct for controlling what falls under his command, which is by this point nearly everything. Do you genuinely believe he would sit still while the Mechanicus moved against a Primarch's assets without Regental sanction? In terms of his desire to maintain order over his domain, he is probably the most thorough of any of my brothers."
Reditus was quiet.
"And there is the clearest point," Nolan said. "The Emperor resurrected you and placed you beside me. That decision was the Emperor's, made with full knowledge of whatever you were and whatever you did before you came to my side. If your beliefs and your will were not sufficient, you would not be here. The Emperor does not make those decisions carelessly."
He looked at Reditus with the specific directness of someone stating something that is simply true and requires no additional argument.
"Whatever you were before, you are the chief Magos of this fleet now, and you have been since the beginning. Your history with Mars is your history. It is not a liability I intend to run from." He stood again, and this time the movement was the movement of someone finishing a conversation rather than leaving it. "If there is an opportunity, I will take you to Mars myself. I will walk you through the gate personally, and I will require them to give you the rank of Master Archmagos to your face."
The red lights in Reditus's eye sockets had settled into their normal steady state.
He did not say anything immediately. For once, the silence from the servo skull was not the silence of concealment or contemplation.
It was the silence of something that had been carrying a weight alone for a long time and had just been told, clearly and without ceremony, that it did not have to.