The vat filled with green fluid was fused directly to Rian's flesh. Various metal tubes, some thick and some thin, ran from it into his spine and the back of his skull. Removing it wouldn't be easy; the apparatus was practically part of him.
For an Apothecary of the Adeptus Astartes, however, that made the task delicate rather than difficult.
The Lamenters Apothecary braced Rian's torso with one gauntlet and set to work. His narthecium unfolded in a sequence of precise clicks. An autoscalpel passed through metal, scar tissue, and nerve bundles one junction at a time, its edge giving off a thin, high whine. Each severed line was clamped before the next was touched. Coagulants, metabolic stabilizers, and synthetic tissue sealants followed immediately, injected through the same wounds the machine had occupied.
It was not mercy. The prisoner had information, and dead men answered no questions.
"No!" Rian's body bucked hard enough to make the deck plates ring beneath him. "Don't take it! Kill me! Just kill me instead! Don't touch it!"
The panic in his voice held nothing of an Astartes' discipline. He clawed at the Apothecary's forearm, heedless of the surgical blades working beside his spine, and screamed with the raw desperation of a parent watching his child dragged away from them. When the final cranial filament came free, his back arched and a strangled sob tore from his throat.
Everyone in the chamber understood at once. The vat mattered to Rian more than survival, honor, or even escape from pain. He would have accepted death willingly if death meant keeping it.
The Apothecary remained unmoved. He sealed the last lesion, disengaged the reservoir from the ruined mounting on Rian's back, and carried it to Phoros. Diagnostic runes crawled across his helm display as he watched the prisoner for signs of systemic collapse.
Rian's frenzy collapsed almost the instant the device left him. He sagged against the black spines pinning him in place, all resistance draining from his limbs. His pupils dilated until only thin rings of iris remained. A fine tremor still ran through his hands, driven now by withdrawal rather than resistance. The expression on his face was not calm but vacancy, as though the reservoir had taken something essential with it.
Anruida stepped closer. Unlike the Lamenters, his Thunderborn plate bore none of the Chapter's ritual ornamentation. Its reinforced sensor housings and compact data ports gave him the look of a field scholar forced into the shape of a siege engine. He studied Rian for several seconds before repeating the question.
"What was your mission?"
Rian gave no sign that he had heard. His gaze followed the vat in the Apothecary's grip with desperate, animal focus. Even when Anruida moved into his line of sight, Rian leaned aside to keep the reservoir visible.
Anruida drew back one armored fist. Qin Mo stopped him with a raised hand.
"Beating him will only reward him."
His voice remained level, but disgust tightened every word. Rian's behavior made the nature of his corruption unmistakable. This was Slaanesh's work, not merely lust, as the ignorant often reduced it to, but excess without limit: sensation pursued until pleasure and pain became interchangeable, then pursued further until deprivation itself was unbearable. The Emperor's Children had once been among humanity's proudest warriors. Now many of them mutilated their own bodies simply to feel something new. Rian had reached the same kind of slavery by a different road.
Pain would not break such a prisoner. It might excite him, focus him, or give him exactly what he wanted. Withdrawal was another matter.
"Give it back," Rian whispered. His tongue dragged over dry lips. "Please."
"Get it yourself," Qin Mo said.
The black spines piercing Rian's limbs and torso dissolved into motes of dull light. Freed without warning, he dropped to his knees. For a moment he remained there, swaying, as though his body had forgotten how to balance on its own. Then he planted one trembling foot on the deck and forced himself upright.
He lurched toward the Apothecary. Each step was smaller than the last. The transhuman warrior, built to cross killing fields under fire and slaughter mortal soldiers wholesale, now staggered like a fever patient on the edge of collapse. His breathing came in shallow, rapid pulls. Strings of saliva hung from his mouth.
When he reached for the vat, the Apothecary pushed him away with the flat of one gauntlet. There was no visible effort in the motion. Rian struck the deck on his back and lay there, stunned by a rejection that would once have been no more than an invitation to violence.
The Apothecary rotated the reservoir beneath the chamber lights. Green fluid sloshed across the glass, exposing banks of micro-needles and pulsing injector valves within. "This device has made itself as necessary to him as a bodily function," he said. "Not respiration or circulation, but the dependency is comparable. His nervous system has adapted to expect continuous chemical and sensory input. Without it, his autonomic functions are beginning to fail."
Rian rolled onto his stomach and crawled. His fingers scraped uselessly over the deck until he reached Phoros's boots. Then he raised his head.
"Give it back," he rasped. "For the sake of what we were. We fought side by side once. You remember. Please..."
Phoros looked down at him without answering.
The plea reached farther into the past than Rian deserved. Before the Red Corsairs, before the Astral Claws had openly become what their enemies accused them of being, the Lamenters had fought beside them in the Badab War. They had shared battle lines, void assaults, ammunition, and blood. The Lamenters had paid for that loyalty with disgrace, a penitent crusade, and losses from which lesser Chapters would never have recovered. Rian now tried to spend that dead brotherhood like the last coin in a beggar's hand.
Phoros's expression did not change. Whatever memories moved behind his eyes, none softened them.
Rian's arms failed. He collapsed onto his knees and struck his forehead against the deck. Once. Twice. The impacts left dark smears of blood on the metal. "Then plead for me. Ask them. Beg them. I'll do anything."
Phoros placed one armored boot against the side of Rian's head and pressed him down. "Look at yourself," he said. His voice was cold, but not loud. "Look at what you chose to become. You are not a warrior. You are a sniveling beast with no dignity left to lose."
"Then I'm a beast." Rian did not even try to resist the weight pinning him. His eyes remained fixed on the vat. "I'm whatever you say. Just give it back..."
Anruida watched the exchange, then lowered his fist. The method was obvious now. He took the reservoir from the Apothecary, crouched beside Rian, and held it close enough for the prisoner to see the bubbles moving through the green fluid.
"Answer my questions," Anruida said, "and you get this back."
Rian nodded so violently that his cheek scraped against the deck. "Ask! Ask me anything!"
"What was your mission?"
"The ritual." The answer burst from him. "We were sent for the ritual."
Anruida did not move the vat any closer. "Whose ritual?"
"Huron is working with Abaddon. Huron gave him a gift, a gift for the Warmaster—"
"What ritual? What gift?" Anruida tightened his grip around the reservoir's armored neck. "Speak clearly, or I smash this against the deck."
For the first time, Rian did not answer at once. His body had spent what little strength remained. He lay limp beneath Phoros's boot, chest barely moving, eyes locked upon the vat with the helpless concentration of a suffocating man watching someone hold an oxygen mask beyond his reach.
Qin Mo thought of Lucius the Eternal.
Lucius had once been a proud swordsman of the Emperor's Children. Now he was Slaanesh's favored joke: when an enemy killed him and took satisfaction in the deed, the killer could be consumed and reshaped into Lucius, their soul left imprisoned within his armor. The curse made him hideously difficult to destroy. It did not make him free. Lucius was still dependent on his stimulants, combat drugs, and sensation-enhancing wargear because immortality did nothing to cure appetite. It merely gave appetite forever to grow.
Rian was not Lucius, but the same principle ruled him. His strength, enhanced physiology, and long record of slaughter meant nothing once the object of his need was taken away.
"The gift was a psyker," Rian finally croaked. "And..."
His jaw worked without sound. Anruida leaned closer, helm microphones amplifying the broken gasps. Phoros removed his boot so the prisoner could draw a fuller breath. Even then, the account emerged in fragments, each sentence bought with the promise of the vat.
Two years earlier, Rian had led a Red Corsairs warband against an Ecclesiarchy world. They had expected reliquaries to plunder, clergy to ransom, and a population too poorly armed to resist an Astartes raid. Instead, they found a planet already dead in every way that mattered.
Flesh had spread across the settlements in layered sheets. It sealed doors, filled transit ways, and climbed the walls of basilicas until statues of Imperial saints stared out from swollen red tissue. Roads vanished beneath cords of muscle thick enough to move when the raiders crossed them. Buildings had been drawn together by growths that hardened around stone and metal alike. Farther from the cities, the corruption covered valleys and crawled up mountain slopes. Even the cloud cover had taken on a bruised, organic hue, as though the atmosphere itself reflected the diseased world below.
Most of the inhabitants had not simply died. They had been incorporated. Human shapes protruded from the biomass in places, faces, hands, the curve of a rib cage, distorted beyond recognition and still warm when the Corsairs found them. Whether any awareness remained inside, Rian either did not know or had never cared enough to discover.
Only one human being appeared untouched.
He was a psyker. He came to Rian without warning, walking alone through the ruins while the Corsairs' auspexes failed to register him until he was already within speaking distance. He showed no fear of the traitor Astartes surrounding him. He asked for no rescue and offered no explanation for the world behind him. He merely looked at Rian and said:
"Take me to the Warmaster of the Black Legion. I will call upon the power of the Dark Gods across the galaxy for him."
By the end of the account, foam gathered at the corners of Rian's mouth. His words blurred together, but the last admission was clear enough. "That's what he said. He knew rituals, hundreds, thousands, I don't know. Huron sent him to Abaddon as a gift. This ritual... what it does... they didn't tell me. I swear they didn't."
Anruida looked to Qin Mo. The others remained silent, waiting for him to make sense of it.
Qin Mo turned the testimony over in his mind.
The Warmaster of the Black Legion could only be Ezekyle Abaddon, the Despoiler. Huron Blackheart had found or been approached by a psyker capable of surviving a world consumed by uncontrolled mutation, then delivered that psyker to the architect of the coming Black Crusade. Rian might be lying about his ignorance, but his dependency had stripped away whatever discipline he needed to construct a convincing deception. The broad shape of the account was probably true.
That was the problem. Qin Mo had no memory of such a figure.
In the history he knew, Erebus of the Word Bearers had served as one of Abaddon's most important ritualists during the Thirteenth Black Crusade. Erebus was a gifted sorcerer, a dangerous Dark Apostle, and perhaps the most punchable architect of catastrophe in human history. He had helped corrupt Lorgar and set the Horus Heresy in motion. But this unknown psyker did not fit any role Qin Mo remembered from the campaign. Nor did he remember any ritual of that scale being tied to the Cadian Gate.
Perhaps the claim was inflated. Chaos servants lied as naturally as they breathed, and prophecies became less reliable with every mouth that repeated them. Yet dismissing the warning because it contradicted remembered history would be idiotic. Qin Mo's own existence had already changed events. Talon's fleets, its dimensional engines, the Celestial Engine, and the survival of forces that should have been destroyed had all placed new pieces on the board. The future could no longer be treated as a script waiting for actors to recite it.
Whatever ritual Abaddon had begun, its scale suggested more than a raid or local summoning. If it affected the routes, populations, defenses, or Warp conditions around Cadia, then every Imperial deployment to the Gate could be compromised before the first major fleet engagement began.
Cadia was already preparing for war. Now it would have to prepare for a war that might not resemble the one Qin Mo remembered. More forces were needed at the Cadian Gate, and they were needed sooner.
Qin Mo turned to Phoros. "Your Chapter must depart for the Cadian Gate. Cadia needs the Lamenters more than Talon does."
"Yes," Phoros answered immediately.
He had already reviewed the reports from Cadia. Every instinct honed across centuries of warfare told him the same thing. A major assault was coming, and the defenders would need every available blade. The Lamenters had never lacked willingness to answer such a call.
But he hesitated before issuing the order.
The Imperium had never forgotten the Chapter's part in the Badab War, even after its penitent crusade. Some commanders treated the Lamenters as cursed; others regarded them as traitors who had escaped the punishment they deserved. Their close relationship with Talon created a fresh vulnerability. They sailed in Talon-built ships, relied upon Talon technology, and had accepted support from a sector whose independence already unsettled Imperial authorities. At Cadia, suspicion could cost them docking rights, resupply, access to defense networks, or lives lost while officials argued over jurisdiction.
Qin Mo read the concern in the slight turn of Phoros's helm and the pause that followed his answer.
"Do what you can," he said. "Do not waste time fearing the politics. Once you arrive, the Lord Castellan will welcome any Chapter prepared to stand on Cadia's walls and kill what comes through the Gate."
Phoros inclined his head. Creed was practical enough to count guns before pedigrees, especially with a Black Crusade gathering beyond his borders. Reassured, the Chapter Master opened a command channel to the bridge.
"Tessa, chart a course for the Cadian Gate. Begin departure preparations immediately. I want the ship ready to translate the moment the route is confirmed."
Acknowledgment came over the vox. Beyond the interrogation chamber, orders would already be spreading through the ship: navigation solutions updated, strike craft secured, weapons magazines inspected, serfs recalled to stations, and every battle-brother informed that the Chapter was going to war.
Phoros closed the channel, then faced Qin Mo. He stood silent for a moment, as though weighing a promise before allowing himself to speak it.
"If Talon is attacked," he said, "then no matter where the Lamenters are or what enemy stands before us, we will return."
Qin Mo nearly told him not to bother. Two C'tan remained in the Talon Sector, backed by defenses that most crusade fleets could not breach. Unless the four Chaos Gods intervened in person, even Abaddon would find attacking Talon a brutally short exercise in strategic regret.
But Phoros was not offering a calculation of force strength. He was offering loyalty, and answering loyalty with a lecture on comparative firepower would miss the point.
Qin Mo gave him a single, grateful nod.
Then he turned and left the chamber. Anruida fell into step beside him, already opening command and intelligence channels through his armor's data systems. Behind them, the Lamenters decided what to do with Rian and the vat; ahead, the vessel's corridors filled with the controlled urgency of a warship changing course.
"Send word to Admiral Adam," Qin Mo ordered. "Tell him to make all speed for the Cadian Gate."
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