Boarding pods do not fall; they are placed.
The Watcher Above exhaled a string of them into the black like beads loosed from a careful hand, each correcting on micro-thrusters trimmed to regret—the speed of men who intend to arrive where no one will remember the noise.
"Telemetry locked," Silas voxed, every syllable a satisfied machine. "Grapples green. Atmos profiles nominal for human survival, hostile to heroics."
"Magos?" Kael asked.
Threx's binharic washed the channel like incense. "Hub Six air is poor, power is stubborn, and the machine-spirits resent their diet. I will apologize to them after you have apologized to their owners."
"Copy," Kael said. "Veyra—lantern and grain drops on my mark; stagger them by alleys, not avenues."
"Mark when you see the line form," Veyra replied, pencil ticking. "They'll teach each other how to wait."
The pods turned nose-down and bit thin atmosphere. Kael stood braced in his harness, Varanshade's servos anticipatory, helm clipped to the mag-ring at his hip. Beneath his boots the hull's hum adjusted to his breath—a ship listening politely.
He let his palm open. The dark gathered there—warm, compliant—and spread in a skein through the pod's small cabin, swallowing reflections, dampening the small metal complaints that tell a room it exists. "Heel," he thought without words. It settled, pleased.
"Impact in ten," Silas counted. "Nine… eight…"
Kael saw his five seconds on a screen that no one else had: a mesh door swinging late, a guard's shoulder telegraphing a poor punch, a pressure line grating on a rough edge where someone had filed off Inspection. He did not smile. He breathed. The armour learned the breath.
"Mark," Silas said.
Pods kissed plating. Charges coughed, not boomed. Doors went aside like decisions made yesterday.
—
Above them and far away, Curze's command gallery kept its glass floor and black water. The Kyroptera had gathered by instruction, not invitation. Their helms sat along the rail like a row of skulls that could remember. Vox-feeds climbed the dark: Kael's view pinned in quiet monochrome; another, all hard angles and glare—Kest's—already shouting.
Sevatar lounged with the deliberation of a man who works on his feet and resents it in chairs. No helm. No ceremony. The tattoos at his throat looked like notes on a staff no choir could sing. He watched Kael's feed with an amusement that wasn't cruel.
"Terrans," he said, to no one and to all of them, "always so tidy on entry. You could lay a table on that man's spine."
Zso Sahaal stood very straight, every line the argument of a first captain who had not needed to prove it today. "Tidy is only useful if it spends cheap," he said.
His eyes slid to Kest's window: a boarding claw burning bright, men screaming already to get their blood above the noise. "Yours will be expensive, Kest."
Kest's jaw worked once. "We teach by volume," he said. "They'll hear us deeper."
Talos Valcoran kept to Sevatar's left as shadow does to a wall: younger than the scorn around him, eyes black but listening. The half-light made his features look like decisions he would make later. He said nothing. He watched Kael's hands.
Curze stood where the glass met darkness and made both choose to be invisible. "Observe," he said, and the water under the floor took the verb as liturgy.
Var Jahan—quiet, scarred, a collector of debts in flesh—folded his arms and squinted at the clean geometry of Kael's overlays. "He's not hunting," Jahan said. "He's arranging."
"Arrangement kills more surely than chase," Sevatar replied, mild as poison in tea.
"Let the work speak," Curze said, and the room forgot to breathe loud.
—
Hub Six had been a refinery until profit learned to run earlier shifts elsewhere. Now it was a city on its knees pretending to be a machine: gantries over vats that steamed thin poison, walkways slatted so that judgment could drip from above and be called weather, sirens wired to men's tempers.
Kael's boots met metal with a kiss rather than a stamp. Joras took the high catwalk on the left, rifle yawning at angles that made other men pray. Malchion's squad flowed wide to swallow flanks and spit out problems in neat pellets. Initiates filled the gaps like water taught manners.
"Cut mains," Kael voxed. "Leave emergency strips. People walk better when they can see their own feet."
Silas's sequence went out like a rosary of kill-switches: one, two, three—mains offline. The world sighed into a bruised blue. Lumen strips flickered, gave up ambition, settled into the kind of light that makes men whisper.
Kael's darkness went looking for corners to own and found a thousand. It draped them, quietened them, made edges honest. Gun barrels that had relied on glare to threaten felt… silly.
Two syndicate men in stripped hazard suits stepped into the corridor with the soft incompetence of men who have been paid too long. White gloves. Nostraman affectation. One raised a baton as if the gesture could do the work.
"Don't," Kael said, and the whisper carried.
They didn't. He took their weapons and their names and made both useful. "Show me your soup," he told them. "Show me who skims."
They went ahead without the romance of being dragged.
"Lanterns," Kael said, and above them the drones released their payloads: little suns on thin lines, food in honest sacks, soap that would teach hands to be worth shaking. The pallets hit the deck with that sound a schedule makes when it arrives—inevitable, decent.
Veyra's voice ghosted the feed, never louder than necessary. "Queue forming," she said. "Children first. I'm teaching the word line in two tongues."
"Teach it with the sacks," Kael said. "It sticks better."
They moved inward, tracking power like hounds that hunt scent by habit. A door at the end of a gantry held by a lock that thought its life mattered. Kael's five seconds showed him the bolt's tantrum, the man behind it licking his teeth before work, the bubble in a pipe that would burst if he ran. He walked.
The door learned it had been opened before and decided not to be embarrassed again.
Inside: a counting room in a metal throat. A ledger on a table, ink keen as hunger. Three men with pistols lying as paperweights. A woman in a yellow smock who would be asked to blame herself for the rest of her life.
"Down," Kael said.
Pistols remembered they were heavy. Knees followed. Joras sighted a bead on a man who would shoot in two breaths and made those breaths not arrive. Malchion collected paper. Kael set Veilrender on the ledger without drama. The blade did nothing but exist; the room adjusted.
"You skim," Kael said to the oldest of them.
"You skim because skimming feels like permission when the hungry are far from your bed."
The man's mouth tried the shapes for explain. Kael's whisper arrived first. "You will pay with arms. At the line." He nodded to the woman. "You will take names and learn them. You will say please. You will not forget mine."
They obeyed. Not because fear. Because order had presented an invoice with exact figures.
—
In Curze's gallery, Kest's feed bloomed ugly: flares like wounded suns; men driven by noise into corners; steel being taught to scream. Sevatar lifted an eyebrow.
"Your boys play to the crowd," he said.
"They are the crowd," Sahaal answered, not kindly.
Talos tilted his head as if listening to something behind the sound. "Varan's men don't… echo," he said, voice unused to being heard. "They fit the room and make the room fit back."
Sevatar's mouth quirked. "You hear quiet, little brother?"
"I hear work," Talos said, and went silent again.
Curze was a fixed point. "Counting costs," he said. "Continue."
—
Kael advanced through the coolant aisles, Varanshade drinking the thin vapour, the helm's whisper carrying end to end. Shadows spread in a web out ahead, swallowing sharp edges, making rounds go wide by an inch that mattered. Five seconds showed him a spray of pellets through a mesh, a foot twisting on a step that should have been checked, a valve ready to practice betrayal.
"Left," he said, and a young Nostraman he had chosen from the docks—hands steady, eyes reflective—took the correction like physics. The round passed where his head would have been. He did not thank anyone. He made the next door open.
"Captain," Silas voxed, content as a cat at a warm vent. "Kest's telemetry reads… enthusiastic."
"Copy," Kael said. "Let him buy noise. We'll buy time."
In the processing core, the defenders tried courage. Courage is expensive when it hasn't trained. One came at Kael with a shock-maul, the kind that leaves men jerking long after the reason is gone. Five seconds: the tell in the shoulder, the overcommit, the way the man had once been taught to hold a hammer.
Kael moved through that moment as if stepping past a puddle. Veilrender dipped, kissed the haft, took its strength without breaking it, turned the man by the elbow and let him sleep with dignity between vats.
Two more came—a pair who had practiced together and deserved the respect of being separated. Malchion dealt the first a lesson in ribs. Kael's fist found the second's throat with a pressure that said you will forget how to shout. He did.
The room fell into the right shape. The men who could be useful arranged themselves to be so. The ones who would only be brave once learned to sit and hold their chests down until breath remembered them. Above, the pallet lines ran; the lanterns taught walls to be kind.
Kael lifted his head. The dark at the ceiling pooled, ready, affectionate. He let it be. Work first; weather later.
"Hub Six secure," he voxed. "Civilians intact. Machinery compliant. Begin the queues."
From orbit, Sevatar's laugh reached no ears but the ones meant to hear it. "He makes a riot into a ledger," he said. "Curze, I will steal that man for a while."
"You will not," Sahaal said, not as argument but because possession was a first captain's instinct.
Curze's mouth did not move. "Watch," he said.
The gallery fell quieter than glass.
On the moon, Kael took his first step toward the next door.
From orbit, the feeds split the screen: on one side Kael's calm geometry; on the other, Kest's storm.
The Thirty-Second had struck their target like a hammer swung by noise. Fire washed up the refinery's sides in petals of orange and black. Civilians ran because running was the only verb they remembered. Where Kael's vox carried numbers and directions, Kest's carried hymns to panic. Bodies made punctuation.
"Your brother writes in capitals," Sevatar murmured, watching both windows at once. "All emphasis, no grammar."
Sahaal folded his arms. "Fear is still a language," he said.
"Only if someone survives to read it," Sevatar answered.
Talos said nothing. His black eyes tracked Kael's feed, the way the Captain moved as if the world were slightly slower for him. The younger warrior felt the rhythm of that stillness and stored it, not as envy but as lesson.
On the glass below, Curze stood with hands behind his back. "Results," he said, and the word seemed to edit the air.
---
In Hub Six the results were neat.
Kael's men worked through the levels like surgeons tracing arteries: securing lift shafts, sealing vents, cataloguing weapons.
Prisoners stacked against walls in tidy rows; those too injured to move were tagged with clean cloth, not left as examples. Veyra's lanterns cast a gold more honest than any lumen strip. The air began to smell of grain and metal instead of blood.
"Power routing stable," Threx voxed from orbit. "I have convinced the machine-spirits that work is worship. They are content."
"Keep them that way," Kael said. He looked to his men. "Anyone still counting enemies?"
"None that breathe," Malchion replied.
"Then count tools," Kael said. "We build before they remember how to break."
A tremor went through the floor; dust trickled from the overhead. Kest's war was happening two sectors away. Even this deep, it sounded like pride eating itself.
Kael's precognition flickered—five seconds of split future: a pressure wave crawling down a corridor, a fuel line taking flame. He raised his hand; the darkness rolled out from him like a sheet being shaken. It met the blast in silence, swallowed heat, left only a hiss. The air cooled as if embarrassed.
Malchion stared for a half-second. "Emperor's breath," he said.
"Keep breathing," Kael told him. "The dark isn't for spectacle."
Outside, the sky pulsed crimson. The Thirty-Second had lit their victory like a bonfire. Kael keyed his private link. "Kest," he said. "Status."
"Compliance," Kest answered. His vox was full of static that might have been laughter. "Yours?"
"Functional."
"Functional?" Kest chuckled. "You sound like Mars. Where's the fear in that?"
"It's where it belongs," Kael said, and cut the channel.
---
Back in the command gallery, Sevatar's grin widened. "He'll fit," he said to Curze. "Not because he tries to. Because he refuses."
Var Jahan frowned. "Refusal breeds fracture."
"So does stupidity," Sevatar said, still lazy. "One can be sharpened."
Talos spoke, quiet but carrying. "He frightens them without trying."
Curze turned slightly. "And that," he said, "is the most dangerous kind of brother."
The Primarch lifted a hand. The two feeds obeyed—Kest's chaos froze mid-flame; Kael's feed widened to a map where order spread like ink in clean water. "Recall them," he said. "All of them. I will speak."
---
Kael received the summons as he and Veyra stood over a generator still complaining about its new load.
"Dock in one hour," she said, already calculating schedules in her head.
He nodded. "Leave it running. Fear works better when the lights stay on."
Veyra glanced up. "You won't like what waits."
"I rarely do," Kael said. "But we measure anyway."
---
The Watcher Above lifted from Hub Six's dust with the grace of a thought leaving a mind. Below, queues still coiled through the streets, moving toward food and work instead of panic. The lanterns kept burning. For the first time in decades, a Nostraman outpost ended a campaign with its civilians alive.
In orbit, the Kyroptera assembled. Kest's armour still smoked; soot scored his face like bad tattoos. He stood a step behind Sevatar, who looked refreshed, almost entertained. Talos took his usual quiet place near the edge, fingers tapping the hilt of a knife not yet famous. Curze faced them all.
Kael entered last, helm under his arm, Veilrender at his hip. The Varanshade was scratched but whole. He stopped at regulation distance and waited.
Curze let the silence stretch until the glass underfoot seemed to flex.
"Two wars," he said at last. "Two victories."
No one spoke. Curze's eyes swept them—black mirrors filled with the reflection of every man who thought he might one day understand him.
"One burned bright and left ash," the Primarch continued. "The other burned inward and left order. Both have value." He turned to Kest. "Yours taught fear." Then to Kael. "Yours taught memory."
Kael inclined his head a fraction. "Function first," he said.
Curze's mouth curved by a molecule. "Fear follows," he finished. He looked past them, as if seeing futures uncoiling. "From this hour, the Fifteenth shall be known by what they do to sound. When they walk, men forget to speak."
His gaze cut back to Kael. "You and yours are the Veiled Hand."
The title landed like a seal pressed into cooling wax—final, clean, irrevocable.
Kael bowed once. "Acknowledged."
Curze nodded, satisfied and weary all at once. "Go, my quiet blade. There will come a day when the galaxy itself will need silence."
---
Sevatar's laugh was low and honest. "The Veiled Hand," he said. "Not bad for a Terran."
Talos watched Kael leave the chamber. "He'll outlive most of us," he said, more prophecy than guess.
"Then the dark will have good company," Sevatar replied.
Curze said nothing. He watched the shadows close behind Kael and let them keep the name.