Nostramo quieted the way a wound scabs—ugly first, then useful. Sirens learned better hours. Doors acquired polite knocks. The city's breath came on schedule. Curze's law made violence expensive and laziness unfashionable. It would not last forever. It did not need to. It needed to hold until habit learned its lines.
Kael walked the docks at low-cycle, when the rain softened and the lamps under shades made the wet stone look like varnished bone. The Watcher Above slept with one eye open—engines warm, auspex masts hooded, boarding cradles loaded like teeth behind lips. The dagger-hulled strike cruiser fit Nostramo too well; from a distance she could have been another spire.
Veyra Ancalis waited on the embark gantry where wind bullied the rain into lines. She wore dock leathers that had decided to be formal—black, oiled, buckled flat. Her skin had the Nostraman pallor that reflected lamp-light from beneath instead of above. And her eyes—entirely black as everyone's here—reflected. In their mirror he was small and correct, not a hole where light went to die.
"Captain," she said. No salute, no bow. The right word, the right weight.
"Report."
She handed him a slate. The columns were lean and honest. Crew rotations, maintenance cycles, munitions draw, dock allotments, error rate. Next to the error rate she had written 0.7% and circled it.
"Too high," she said.
"For a city," he replied, "it's a miracle."
"For a ship," she said, "it's an insult."
He read her numbers while the rain ticked. She had rethreaded the human crew along the ship's arteries: crane-masters paired with auspex, cargo apes with logistics clerks until brawn learned punctuation and ink learned to lift. Dockers who used to steal became schedulers because schedules were the only theft that made profit legal. She'd set three redundant chains for every critical function and named them after unromantic things—intake, drain, turn. She'd moved the break room closer to the fire lockers so that panic never had to learn new geography.
"You used to run a guild?" Kael asked. He already knew. He wanted to hear the shape of it in her mouth.
"I ran their calendars," Veyra said. "The guilds ran themselves into holes. Calendars didn't."
"And before that?"
"House Ancalis," she said with the evenness of a clerk reading someone else's name. "We stopped being noble when being noble stopped being useful."
"You kept something," Kael said.
"Structure," she answered. "It doesn't go out of fashion."
She took the slate back and wrote three new lines with a stub of graphite she kept behind her ear. Floodgate drills—weekly. Human crew will learn Terran range commands. All logs in both tongues. She didn't ask permission; she wrote it because it would be true by nightfall.
"Curze will tour the fleets," Kael said. "He'll see this."
"Then he'll see it work," Veyra said, and that was the end of that.
Magos Lamiad Threx clanked out from under the forward spine with one mechadendrite still polishing a sanctified spanner. He bowed the exact millimetre his augmetics allowed and addressed Veyra first.
"Quartermaster Ancalis," he intoned. "The pump-spirit in Bay Three only obeys your hand."
"It obeys my schedule," she corrected. "Like you."
Threx's vox-larynx issued something dangerously like a chuckle. He turned to Kael. "Captain. Your artificer warplate will accept today's gait calibration after fourth cycle. I have matched servo response to your stride. The armour will anticipate deceleration."
"Good," Kael said.
"In addition," Threx went on with pious relish, "my adepts have compiled thirty-seven minutes of recorded luminant anomalies coincident with your presence on Decks Two, Five, and Nine."
Veyra glanced sideways without moving her head. "Shadow again?"
Threx's mechadendrites rippled like happy snakes. "The field occlusion is not Warp-signature. It is local. An inducement in the room to behave as if the light were embarrassed."
Veyra's mouth did something that was not a smile because smiles took time. "Then use it," she said. "Map it. Teach the crew where the ship chooses to be shy."
"Already begun," Threx said, gratified. To Kael: "Permission to publish findings to the data-altar?"
"No," Kael said. "For work, not witness."
Threx's binharic sighed. Understood.
They walked the main spine together: Astartes in midnight plate with bat-winged rims on their pauldrons, Mechanicum in red veiled by oil-black sigils, humans in grey that had learned to be the right shade quickly. The ship hummed like a content knife. Veyra read the hum without looking up.
"You'll have visitors," she said. "Nostraman captains. They come to find something to dislike."
"They will succeed," Kael said, and Veyra allowed herself half a breath of amusement.
---
Curze's inspection began at dusk because he preferred to meet ships and men at the hour when they could lie to themselves least. Banners did not unfurl; horns did not sound. The Primarch moved through the docks like weather with purpose. The Kyroptera trailed like teeth in a jeweller's roll—bright, ordered, waiting to be chosen for a cut.
Kest walked among them, jaw tight, the tattoos on his cheekbones wet with rain. He watched the Watcher Above as a fighter watches a clean blade handed to someone else.
Curze boarded without ceremony. The gangway did not creak. The deck plates did not dare. Kael stood in Varanshade armour with helm under his arm and Veilrender latched. Veyra stood at his left in her dock leathers, slate under one arm, chin level. Magos Threx placed himself one pace back, an interpretive shadow with the good taste to be silent.
The Primarch's black eyes took the gallery in once. The bat-iconography remained minimal: fear for function, not decoration. The white lightning on Kael's left pauldron was the only bright thing in the room and it was the colour of bones.
"Your ship is quiet," Curze said.
"Ships work best when they are," Kael answered.
Curze's gaze slid to Veyra the way a scalpel slides to a second tray. "Name," he said.
"Veyra Ancalis," she replied. No tremor. No deference beyond the efficiency of a correct answer.
"Ancalis," Curze repeated, memory riffling old books. "A House that learned to drown above water." His head inclined by a degree. "You schedule the breath."
"I make the work arrive on time," Veyra said. "Breathing follows."
Curze's mouth made the faintest shape. "You keep her," he told Kael, not as permission but as an instruction to keep a tool in the right drawer. His eyes turned to Threx. "Mars attached itself to you."
"By writ," Threx said, and in any other room that would have counted as courage.
Curze's gaze returned to Kael. "Tools suited to work," he said, the echo of his earlier verdict. "Function first. Fear follows."
He walked the gallery, touched nothing, and left fingerprints on the nothing anyway. The Kyroptera followed. Kest lagged a half-second, long enough to look Veyra up and down with a practiced insult. She didn't notice. She had a ship to run.
"Captain," she said the moment Curze's shadow vacated the room, "your error rate is going to zero."
"Ambitious," Kael said.
"Scheduled," Veyra answered.
---
The first crack sounded in a sector Kael had not been given. The Nostraman-born of another claw crushed a minor riot the way men break furniture when they have learned to mistake splinters for instruction. Kael watched the after-action picts in the strategium: citizens pressed to walls and made examples; banners hung too low with too much blood. Not torture. Not prolonged. Just sloppy cruelty. The kind that makes tomorrow expensive.
"Assist," came the order. Curze's hand, terse. Present. Reinforce. Complete.
Kael considered the five seconds in front of obey and found a future he disliked: his men as decoration, the Watcher Above as witness. He did not parse the ethics. He ran the math.
"Denied," he said to the empty room, and then to the vox on the correct channel: "Fifteenth will remain in Khar. We will not duplicate work badly done."
Silence. The kind men use to see if they can hear their own hearts.
Veyra glanced over from the console where she was mapping crane cycles against pump rhythms. "You'll be punished," she said, matter-of-fact.
"I'll be measured," Kael said.
She made a small notation on her slate: Allowance for punishment. Then she crossed it out and wrote Allowance for measurement above it.
The summons arrived not by vox but by air—the taste of iron that meant Curze wished to speak and the world would try to help. Kael went alone. He wore the Varanshade because armour tells a man where his edges are.
Curze waited on a balcony that cut the city like a throat. The rain made a veil between them and the world.
"You refused," Curze said.
"I optimised," Kael answered.
"They will say you are soft."
"Then they miscount," Kael said. "Fear that costs tomorrow more than today is debt, not investment."
Curze watched the rain find seams and write them in water. "I found you for a reason," he said at last.
"You did not find me," Kael replied. "You found us. You chose which sons fit your edge."
Curze's teeth showed in something that wasn't a smile. "You think like Malcador."
"I work like the Emperor," Kael said, and that was the closest thing to heresy he had ever allowed himself to say aloud.
They stood long enough for the city to change key. At last Curze said, "You will leave."
Kael did not change his posture. "Now?"
"Soon. Off-world." Curze's voice made the word sound like surgery. "You will do the work out there that others will only perform for witnesses here. We will see if your arithmetic survives distance."
Kael inclined his head once. "As you will."
Curze looked at him, a surgeon deciding where the cut must go to remove the tumour and leave the organ. "You are my quiet blade," he said. "Do not rust."
When Kael returned to the ship, Veyra had already started the departure schedule. She didn't look up from the slate. "Three days," she said. "Two if you let Threx pray and drive at the same time."
"We'll let him," Kael said.
Threx's binharic rose in the gallery like incense. "Accepted."
Kael paused at the viewport and watched Nostramo do its version of resting—lamps under shades, rain smoothing new habits, Khar breathing on time. In his palm, the darkness pooled like a dog that knew the packing ritual and wanted to be taken along. He let it sit. He didn't feed it. He didn't refuse it.
"Quartermaster," he said softly.
"Captain," Veyra answered without turning.
"Do you miss whatever House Ancalis was?" he asked.
"No," she said. "I miss time wasted only on purpose." A beat. "We'll have that out there."
"Yes," Kael said. "We will."
He closed his fist. The dark settled like a promise inside the armour. Engines stirred. The ship leaned toward departure the way a man leans toward a door he already knows is unlocked.
The Watcher Above came alive like a cathedral remembering its hymn.
Pre-burn rites rippled fore to aft: valve checks whispered by red-robed throats; clamps withdrawing with the restraint of old men getting up from prayer; void shutters blinking once, then refusing to blink again. The strike cruiser's dagger hull drank every lamp on the dock until the spires around her looked dimmer by comparison. Rain slicked off her plates in neat curtains. Wind tried to move her and failed.
"Cast off," Veyra said from the command gallery, voice level, pencil ticking a faint counterpoint on her slate. "Mooring one clear, two clear… three, stand by—Magos, your cranial is too close to the hazard line."
Threx's mechadendrite adjusted by exactly seven millimetres. "Compliance," he rasped, more pleased than rebuked. "Spirits agreeable. Plasma temperament within the bounds of piety."
"Translation," Veyra said without looking at him. "Engines are ready."
Kael watched the ritual without interrupting it. The Varanshade fit his frame like a decision he had already made; the helm hung from his hip mag-clamp, vox grille quiet. Veilrender lay latched at his side, edge hooded. On the deck below, the human crew moved in lines Veyra had taught them: crane teams paired with signalmen; cogitator clerks standing in the lee of fire lockers; deckhands timing breath to the thrum of pumps so panic would have to find them on purpose. Nostramans, mostly—pale, black-eyed, hands quick from a life lived under schedules enforced by knives instead of bells. The Terran remnants in the Astartes ranks watched them with professional skepticism and began, despite themselves, to adopt their cadences.
"Seal," Veyra said.
Hatches dogged themselves down the spine with a sound like coins being stacked correctly. The great dock clamps sighed; the ship rose on internal grav-mounts, the world letting go reluctantly. The mooring tower's signal lamps flickered apology, then went dark as the Watcher Above rotated on thrusters too quiet for ceremony.
"Take us out," Kael said, and the order went through the ship like a clean blade.
Gantry rails slid past the gallery viewports, wet metal smearing into rain-dark abstract. Nostramo receded: close lights resolving to scattered constellations along the nightward curve, storm bands quilting the upper atmosphere, spire forests needled into silhouette. The docking spire where Curze's flag stood was just a darker strip against darkness—no colour wasted on supremacy here.
"Course?" Veyra asked.
Kael lifted his chin toward the holo. The mining moon's vector glowed a sober yellow in the void—a utilitarian place that did not need names to be exploited. "Direct. No flourish."
"Direct," Veyra echoed, tapping code. "No flourish."
Threx's adepts sang binharic. Plasma igniters coughed once, then purred; the main drives took a grip on vacuum and made it yield. Acceleration leaned into everyone gently; the ship's bones hummed a register lower. The rain on the dock fell behind them the way old habits do when better ones arrive.
Kael looked at Nostramo one last time without telling himself it was the last. The planet's bruise-blue weather sat over cities that had learned to breathe on time. He opened his palm on the gallery rail. Darkness gathered there, curious as a dog, warm as anything that should have been cold. He let it sit for a heartbeat, then closed his hand. "Heel," he thought without words. It obeyed and flowed back into the seams of the ship, satisfied.
"Broadcast to fleet net," Veyra said. "Departure logged. Cargo sealed. Crew complement declared and boring."
"Keep it boring," Kael said.
The vox chimed with the dry tone of professional rivalry. Kest. His image did not appear; his voice was enough, a blade wrapped in velvet. "Varan," he said. "Your knife leaves the block. Try not to butter bread with it."
"Bread is being cut," Kael replied, secure channel, no echo. "We'll leave the walls for you."
A soft chuff that might have been a laugh. "Report results," Kest said, and clicked off before he could be caught liking the exchange.
Veyra's eyebrow rose the width of a graphite line. "Friends?"
"Colleagues," Kael said. "He wants proof that restraint spends less, then wants permission to keep not learning it."
"Schedule will teach him," Veyra said, and returned to her slate.
Silence settled—the useful kind. The Watcher Above passed beyond the dock's last jurisdiction light and the stars asserted themselves: hard, white, honest. No warp-taste—this was short-range void, clean and mathematical. Kael felt the ship elongate into its function: corridors narrowing into vectors, bays into mouths ready to speak at the correct time, the command gallery becoming a metronome.
"Pre-burn checklist complete," Threx intoned, satisfied. "All praises expended; none wasted."
"Good," Veyra said. "Now switch to work."
They moved through the watch like machinists in a chapel. Terran veterans and Nostraman recruits learned the grammar of shared purpose in small utilities: a hand passed a spanner without being asked; a junior auspex-man annotated a contact log in both tongues; a deck ape corrected a line rout with the blunt patience that says I have done this wrong and will not again. Veyra circulated without haste, invisible until she wasn't, the way oxygen is. She stopped by a console where a young Nostraman woman frowned at a neat column of figures.
"What do you see?" Veyra asked.
"A seven," the woman said.
"What else?"
"A pattern that wants to be an eight."
"Make it one," Veyra said. "With work, not hope."
Kael listened, not because he doubted her, but because her voice sanded the rough edges of the ship into utility. He stored the cadence. He might want to use it when talking to men who thought tone was a weapon.
"Captain," Threx said in a lower register reserved for bafflement that wished to be veneration, "we have correlated transient electromagnetic dips with your micro-decelerations on Deck Five. The pattern aligns within a tolerance of—"
"Five seconds," Kael finished.
Threx paused, the pause of a man choosing between theology and mathematics. "Correct."
"It's timing," Kael said. "Train for it. Do not worship it."
"Train," Threx echoed, content. "Noted."
The mining moon grew against the black: a scab-coloured sphere girdled with the glitter of habitat rings and the steady wink of ore tugs. It looked tired. Places like that always did; they were built for extraction, not pride. Holo tags bloomed around it—lease claims, docking codes, distress calls gone stale, and a new layer of encrypted vox chatter that smelled of syndicates pretending to be governments.
"Contact from Kest's detachment," Joras reported from the secondary pit, voice unhurried. "He's making anchor at the far-side dock. He'll go in through the mouth." Joras's mouth quirked—his version of a grimace. "They've painted their helms brighter."
"Let them be seen," Kael said. "We'll be heard."
He leaned over the tactical layout. Shaft complexes honeycombed the moon; emergency egress tunnels had been bricked up by men who understood what 'emergency' often meant here; surface habs clung to the regolith like barnacles that had learned to breathe dust. One section pulsed a faint red under Veyra's pen. "There," she said. "Processing Hub Six. Power output higher than the other hubs. Your 'soup hall' by another name. They're bleeding it."
"Crane assets?" Kael asked.
"I can drop three pallets from orbit with line drones. Food. Lanterns. Soap. Things that make a riot settle into sleep."
"Do it," Kael said. "Silas—prep torpedoes. No warheads. Boarding pods only, latches quiet, thrust trimmed to regret."
"Regret," Silas repeated, pleased. "A good speed."
Kael donned the Varanshade's helm. The internal world shrank to the correct size: reticles, biometrics, the even sound of two hearts pretending to be one. The vox-distorter tuned his whisper to carry farther than a shout.
"Fifteenth," he said. "We don't make an entrance. We arrive. Targets are doors, not throats. If you can leave a room working, do. If you can make a man useful, don't make him dead."
Clicks answered—eighty-one small obediences.
The Watcher Above rolled onto her insertion attitude. From her belly, the boarding pods fell like patient rain. No fire tails; only the faintest bloom of controlled burns as they corrected drift. On the gallery screen, they tracked as cold motes slipping down black glass.
"Timer," Veyra said.
"Five minutes," Silas chimed.
Kael felt it—his seconds walked out ahead, peeked into a room he hadn't entered, came back with a handful of facts: a man in a yellow smock coughing too late to warn anyone; a guard whose finger would find the trigger before his mind found the reason; a ladder that had been greased because fear makes hands clever. He shifted his stance by a hair and the armour's servos adjusted in anticipation, as Threx had promised.
"Four minutes," Veyra said.
The moon turned its tired face toward them. Kael's reflection hung on the gallery glass, black within black, a bat-wing silhouette stirred faintly by the ship's breath. He didn't look away from it. You check your own mask before you ask others to wear theirs.
"Two minutes," Veyra said. "Pallets away."
Three slender drones peeled from the cruiser's shadow and slipped ahead of the pods: needles carrying food and light and soap. Kael imagined the sound they'd make when they hit the floor of Hub Six—like a schedule arriving.
"Thirty," Silas intoned. "Pods on final."
Kael opened his hand. Darkness gathered and then, obedient to habit, spread thin across the command glass, dimming the room by a shade the human eye couldn't name. The crew didn't flinch. They had been taught where the ship liked to be shy.
"Ten."
Kael's twin hearts matched the count. The ship leaned into silence.
"Mark," Veyra said.
Impact signatures came up the board like polite knocks answered quickly. Kael saw the first door breach through another man's eyes five seconds before it happened and stepped into the moment as if it were his. He breathed once, slow, and the Watcher Above's engines idled at the same rate. The operation began.
"Be useful," Kael said into the channel, and the Fifteenth dropped into the moon like an argument that had chosen its conclusion in advance.