At Chapter Master Phoros's command, the Lamenters moved quickly to contain the wreck. The escape craft had gouged a black trench through half a kilometer of grain before coming to rest against an irrigation embankment, its outer plates glowing dull red beneath the deepening violet of dusk. Promethium leaked from a ruptured maneuvering thruster, hissing where it touched the damp soil. If the craft's magazines cooked off before the field was cleared, the fire would race through the ripened crops faster than the local labor crews could hope to stop it.
Phoros set his warriors to work. Armored hands tore a broad ring of grain from the earth while combat blades and plasma cutters carved through root mats and irrigation piping. The agri-world's Planetary Defense Force stood beyond the perimeter with fire-suppression crawlers and nervous weapons crews, close enough to help but under strict orders not to approach. From the moment the skirmish began, Phoros had refused every offer of assistance. Rian's stolen cargo might contain unstable munitions, booby traps, or worse, and the Chapter Master would not spend civilian lives to save a few minutes.
Only when a strip of bare, soaked soil completely surrounded the craft did Phoros turn to the PDF commander.
"Two melta demolition charges," he ordered. "Set for remote detonation. Your people will withdraw another hundred meters."
The commander swallowed, glanced at the smoking craft, and wisely confined his response to a salute.
Phoros primed the charges himself. He hurled one through the craft's split hatch and fixed the other against the engine housing, then strode back across the firebreak as warning sirens sent the farm crews diving behind their vehicles.
The detonation turned the wreck into a white-hot silhouette. A flat concussion rolled across the fields, bending the grain in widening circles and striking the assembled soldiers hard enough to rattle teeth inside helmets. Incandescent fragments rose above the embankment, lost their momentum, and fell within the cleared ground. When the glare faded, the escape craft had collapsed into a pool of burning metal. The crates of stolen weapons inside it were no longer weapons at all, only fused mechanisms and molten alloy sinking into scorched earth.
"Times have changed, haven't they, sons of Sanguinius?"
Rian had regained consciousness while they worked. The former Astral Claws captain knelt at the edge of the firebreak with a restraint collar and mag-shackles locked in place and his armor's systems disabled. Two Lamenters in Tactical Dreadnought Armour held him by the arms. Even stripped of leverage, he strained against them with enough force to make the ground crack beneath his boots. The Terminators did not move.
One of them finally drove a short, economical punch into Rian's face as reward. The blow snapped his head sideways and silenced him for all of three seconds.
Rian spat blood onto the ash. "So you're Talon's lapdogs now?" He probed a loosened tooth with his tongue and grinned. "The Lord of Talon throws his hounds a few fancy new toys, and suddenly you've learned obedience. Eighty years ago, you would have gutted one another for the cargo you just burned."
Phoros watched him without answering. The insults were crude, but they were not what disturbed him. Rian had once been a taciturn officer even by Astartes standards. Eight decades earlier, when the Minotaurs had annihilated one of his squads, he had received the report in glacial silence. No curses or threats. Not even a visible twitch of grief. He had simply studied the tactical record and begun planning his retaliation.
The prisoner kneeling before Phoros bore the same face, but little of the same man remained behind it.
Rian trembled continuously. The motion was too fine and rapid to be ordinary exertion, and it persisted even when he stopped struggling. His pupils widened and contracted without responding to the fading light. One moment his face shone with feverish delight; the next, his features twisted into such concentrated hatred that the collar cut deeper into his neck. A bulky tank had been grafted onto the back of his war plate, connected to his spine and ribcage by armored tubes. Something inside it pulsed with a wet, irregular rhythm.
Whatever had been done to him went beyond the corruption Phoros had witnessed before.
"Save your breath," Phoros said. "You'll need it."
Rian's grin widened. "For what?"
"The interrogation." Phoros stepped closer. "It will be thorough."
He locked a containment harness around Rian's torso. Grav-clamps bit into the prisoner's breastplate and spine, pinning his arms against his sides while leaving the grafted tank exposed. Phoros checked each restraint himself, then transmitted a teleportation request to the Daughter of Tempests, the Lamenters' flagship holding position in low orbit.
A targeting rune flashed green across his visor.
"Translation confirmed," the ship's teleportarium reported. "Twelve signals acquired."
Blue-white light climbed around Phoros, Rian, and the ten Lamenters of the capture detail. The field erased the cropland in a crack of displaced air. An instant later they rematerialized upon the circular receiving dais of the Daughter of Tempests, boots striking engraved metal as the teleportarium's discharge coils bled static into the deck.
Phoros did not pause. He seized the rear handle of Rian's harness and dragged him toward the brig while the capture detail formed a moving cordon around them.
The route carried them past the Chapter's training halls. Blast doors stood open to vent heat, revealing squads assembling for void-assault drills. Servitors rolled ammunition cages between weapon racks. Sergeants checked squad telemetry while armorers locked storm bolters and power fists into place.
Rian's taunts dwindled as he watched them pass.
At least three warriors in each squad wore Tactical Dreadnought Armour. The suits were not ceremonial relics displayed for prestige. Their plates showed fresh scoring from live-fire exercises, and their wearers moved in disciplined groups built around breaching, corridor control, and teleport assault. Rian counted one squad, then another, then a third. By the fourth, disbelief had replaced the sneer on his ruined mouth.
The Lamenters had never possessed such numbers. Even before their losses, a dozen operational suits would have represented a treasure guarded with near-religious care. Here, Terminator plate appeared to have become standard mission equipment.
"Am I hallucinating?" Rian muttered. His eyes tracked another armored squad disappearing into a training bay. "Where did you get so many suits? Did you raid Ultramar while no one was looking?"
Phoros continued walking. He had no intention of explaining Talon's fabrication capacity, and still less of revealing how thoroughly his Chapter had integrated the new armor into its doctrine. A prisoner could learn a great deal from a boast. Silence gave him nothing.
They had almost reached the brig when a young woman in a sharply pressed black naval uniform hurried toward them from an adjoining passage. She slowed only when she entered the Chapter Master's path, excitement brightening a face otherwise composed for duty.
"Chapter Master. Is the mission complete?" she asked. "Are we returning to Talon?"
"Yes, Tessa." Phoros gave a single nod. "Set course for the Talon System. Immediate departure."
Phoros remembered Tessa as one of the two sisters his Chapter had pulled from the Plague of Unbelief years earlier, when it consumed their home in the Talon Sector. She and her sister had reached Talon I with nothing but each other and the clothes issued by the rescue crews.
Tessa had repaid that second chance with relentless work, distinguishing herself in voidship navigation and graduating at the top of her class. Offered her choice of assignments, she had chosen the Daughter of Tempests as soon as her saviors received their new flagship. She now served as the ship's chief navigation officer, young for the post but trusted because she had earned it.
"At once, Chapter Master." Tessa saluted. As she turned toward the bridge, Rian twisted within the harness to watch her leave. The brief confusion in his eyes curdled into something vile.
"Nice figure, girl," he called after her. "Let me catch you alone and I'll stuff your corpse into my armor. I'll make a throne of—"
Phoros's uppercut closed his mouth. Two teeth struck the corridor wall and skipped across the deck, leaving bright flecks of blood on the steel. The Terminators adjusted their grips before Rian's knees could buckle.
Tessa had stopped. Her shoulders were rigid, but when she looked back, she gave Rian no fear to savor. Only disgust.
"Go," Phoros told her, his voice level again. "Do your duty."
"Yes, Chapter Master."
She resumed her pace toward the bridge. Phoros hauled Rian through the brig doors without another glance.
Across the Daughter of Tempests, departure klaxons sounded. Weapon batteries withdrew into travel configuration, internal bulkheads sealed, and the dimensional engine began drawing power. The energy shields rose first, shimmering around the ship's armored hull as it broke orbit. Then a second field formed inside them: a thin, precisely modulated translation envelope that isolated the ship from the spatial shear of a dimensional jump.
The stars vanished behind a spreading rift. The ship crossed its first calibrated interval and returned to realspace seconds later, far beyond the agri-world's outer planets. Navigation cogitators compared the actual emergence point against Tessa's projected solution, corrected the next vector, and opened another rift. The Daughter of Tempests proceeded toward the Talon System in a sequence of controlled jumps.
Rian saw none of it.
Phoros did not place him in a plasteel cell. A cell was intended to confine a prisoner; Rian had to be immobilized, monitored, and kept alive. Instead, they locked him into an interrogation chair forged from adamantium and hardwired into the brig's medical, security, and power systems.
Restraint bands closed across his wrists, ankles, throat, and abdomen. Ten articulated limbs unfolded from the back of the chair, aligned themselves with his armor's joints, and drove adamantine needles through the access seals.
The needles delivered paralytic compounds through the black carapace interfaces while transmitting counter-signals that disrupted the motor impulses passing through them. Rian's war plate went rigid. His body remained conscious inside it, stripped even of the ability to clench a fist.
For an ordinary prisoner, the apparatus promised helplessness, pain, and the certainty that both would continue for as long as the interrogator required.
Rian drew a rapid breath. Then another. His pulse climbed instead of faltering. Sweat ran down his temples, and an expression of almost reverent pleasure spread across his face.
Phoros dismissed the capture detail to resume their training. One warrior remained with him: an Apothecary clad in a customized suit of Terminator Armour. A compact energy-shield projector sat above one shoulder, while a reinforced medical pack occupied most of his back. Six servo-arms unfolded around him, each fitted for a different task: surgical blades, injectors, tissue clamps, gene-seed extraction tools, and scanners capable of reading an Astartes body through layers of ceramite.
An Apothecary was physician, battlefield surgeon, and keeper of the Chapter's genetic future. He knew the engineered organs of the Adeptus Astartes well enough to preserve them under bolter fire, and he knew precisely how those organs failed. If any recognizable Astartes physiology remained beneath Rian's alterations, he would find it.
"What happened to him?" Phoros asked. He folded his arms and watched the pulse hammering in Rian's throat despite the paralysis. "We both saw him eighty years ago. He was never like this."
The Apothecary made no immediate reply. He circled the chair while a servo-arm swept a bio-scanner over Rian from crown to abdomen. Data streamed across the lenses of his helm. Warning markers multiplied until they crowded the display.
"His endocrine and neurochemical systems are in catastrophic overdrive," the Apothecary said at last. "Adrenaline, dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, every measured concentration is beyond the normal Astartes range. His secondary heart is compensating for arrhythmia in the primary. The levels should incapacitate him. Some of those concentrations should already have killed him."
"Yet he appears to be enjoying himself."
"That is what concerns me."
A neural probe extended from another servo-arm. The Apothecary seated it against a data port at the base of Rian's skull, adjusted the frequency, and waited. The probe chirped once, then filled the display with incoherent noise. He tried two alternate protocols. Both failed.
Phoros studied the error runes. "Can we use the neural-scanner interrogation protocol?"
"No." The Apothecary changed the probe's angle and ran a deeper scan. His posture stiffened. "His cerebral tissue is extensively altered. Several regions are necrotic but remain integrated into active pathways. Others have been reorganized into structures the scanner does not recognize. I cannot establish a reliable map of his memory centers, and forcing an interface may destroy whatever information remains."
Phoros looked at the tank grafted to Rian's back. Its contents shifted behind an armored inspection plate, too murky to identify.
"Can you determine which alterations are mutations and which come from an external influence?"
"Not with the instruments aboard this ship."
That left one option. Phoros sent a priority report to Qin Mo and waited while the Daughter of Tempests continued its jump sequence. Rian filled the interval with breathless laughter, broken insults, and sudden stretches of silence during which he stared at nothing and smiled.
The announcement came minutes after the cruiser entered the Talon System.
"Lord of Talon aboard," the vox declared. "Honor detail acknowledged. Security seal Gamma remains in effect."
The brig's blast doors separated with a hydraulic thud. Qin Mo entered without ceremony, accompanied by a single member of his Honor Guard.
"Well done," Qin Mo said as he approached Phoros. His voice was quiet, but his attention had already settled on the prisoner.
"An honor, my lord." Phoros inclined his head. "We recovered a traitor alive."
The Honor Guard beside Qin Mo was Anruida, assigned to oversee the interrogation. He carried himself with the same deliberate restraint he brought to an archive or a battlefield survey. His helm turned first toward the restraints, then the Apothecary's instruments, then the grafted tank. He catalogued the room before looking at the prisoner.
Qin Mo stopped in front of Rian. For several seconds, he said nothing. His perception passed through scarred skin, bone, and the interfaces bored into the skull beneath.
What occupied Rian's skull could no longer be called a brain.
Pale tendrils hung in viscous green fluid, coiled around islands of dead grey matter and threaded through the remains of his nervous system. Some flexed in time with his heartbeat. Others responded to signals from the tank on his back. The arrangement imitated the functions of cerebral tissue without preserving its structure. No Imperial cogitator or Talon neural scanner could interface with it; the conventional engram map those systems required no longer existed.
Qin Mo's expression hardened. "Use conventional methods."
"Understood," Anruida replied.
He stepped to the chair and struck Rian across the face with a gauntleted fist. The impact split the prisoner's cheek against the restraint collar. Before the wound could close, Anruida caught a fold of torn flesh where it had snagged on one of the collar's inward-facing barbs and ripped it free in a single pull.
Rian's primary heart accelerated. The tank on his back answered with a wet pulse. Anruida gripped his jaw, forcing the prisoner's eyes toward him. His voice remained as calm as it had been when he entered.
"What is your objective?"
Pain alone was an unreliable instrument against an Astartes. Their conditioning taught them to compartmentalize agony, and their altered physiology allowed them to remain functional through injuries that would kill an ordinary human. Against a prisoner whose reward pathways had been deliberately corrupted, however, torture was worse than useless: it gave his body exactly what it craved.
Rian shuddered with pleasure. Blood ran over his exposed teeth as he laughed.
"More! Hahaha! Hit me again!" he gasped. "Is that all you have? Come on, impress me. Show me something new!"
Anruida released him. The failure had not changed his expression, but Phoros saw his attention shift to the tank.
Phoros looked to Qin Mo. Qin Mo, in turn, looked toward the Apothecary.
Throughout the exchange, the Apothecary had continued examining the apparatus grafted to Rian's back. Two servo-arms held its armored casing steady while a third traced the tubes feeding into the prisoner's spine. The scanner identified a continuous exchange of fluid, chemical stimulants, and electrical impulses between the tank and the altered tissue inside Rian's skull.
"Remove it," Qin Mo ordered.
The Apothecary gave a curt nod. The tank was the most likely source of Rian's psychotic state and perhaps the only thing keeping his ruined nervous system alive. He locked the interrogation chair's medical systems into emergency support, extended his surgical arms, and moved to comply.
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