The warning came like a splinter under the skin of the world.
Kael felt it in the thin space between one breath and the next, a hitch in the rhythm of the Watcher Above's gravitic hearts, a tremor in the shadow that lay at his heel like a hound.
Five seconds opened, sharp and clean: a chamber of glass and iron, gene-vats pale as a winter sea, Raven Guard in black plate screaming without sound, Alpha Legion runes flickering like oil on water—then nothing. The seconds snapped shut like a book.
He didn't say what he'd seen. He never did.
"Plot a course for Deliverance," Kael said, eyes on the void. "Full burn. Don't announce."
Malchion looked up from the hololith. "Orders from Titan were—"
"They were for yesterday," Kael said. "This is now."
There was a heartbeat's hesitation. Then Malchion nodded once, as if conceding to a law of physics. "Aye."
Joras lifted his gaze from the comms board, his one good hand already dancing through authentication strings and suppression routines. "Alpha Legion are fond of false traffic. The moment we light the engines, they'll hear the delay in our silence."
"Then let's give them silence worth hearing," Kael said.
The Watcher Above pivoted in place like a knife deciding which way to fall. Docking clamps hissed release. The engines came alive in stages, a soft building whisper, the vibrations threading up into the bones of everyone aboard.
The ship's intelligence core pruned the transmission nets around them, snuffing out stray pings and mechanical coughs. The Watcher Above did what it had been made—remade—to do. It made space forget it existed.
"Course set," Silas would have said. He was gone, and the gap he left spoke in the way the navigators hesitated before confirming. Veyra would have written the departure in two ledgers, one for the Mechanicum and one for her own stubborn accounting of the world; her empty chair at the back of the bridge was a fact they no longer looked at. Threx's enginarium hymn rose in a tight band, disciplined as a drill square.
Kael let his palm settle on the forward glass. The darkness rose to meet it and then stilled, a trained animal choosing to be a tool.
"Make it quick," he said.
The stars stretched and broke into storm.
---
Deliverance was not welcoming. It never had been. It was a world that remembered prisons and had made a friend of industry, a moon of black forges and hard rain—Kiavahr's twin shadow. The surface burned in strips where manufactoria ate mountains and exhaled ash. The planet's skies wore lightning like jewelry.
The Raven Guard kept their homeworld dark and efficient and honest. They did not bake soap operas into their vox-traffic. They did not sing. They breathed, and their breathing was off.
"Something sits on their net," Joras said as the Watcher Above slid into system-space on a burn so clean it left no scent. "Repeat-pattern interference, layered on top of legitimate calls. If it were anyone but Alpha Legion, I'd call it art."
"It's them," Kael said. The five seconds had come without respect for probability. "Masks on masks."
"Do we announce?" Malchion asked.
Kael considered the sky over Deliverance, listening for the shape of a trap. He heard only the wide, damp silence of a wound. "No. If Corax wants our names, he already has them. If he doesn't—"
"—he'll kill us and apologize later," Malchion finished, mouth almost smiling.
Joras bled the Watcher Above into the planet's night like ink into water. The ship's shadow baffles opened in petals. Their emissions signature dropped to a line thinner than truth.
Below, a ribbon of lights traced the forge-line of Kiavahr's calderas. Above, the orbitals that should have been steady on their cycles wobbled, lights flickering in wrong rhythms. One of the high manufactorum spires coughed a gout of chemical fire.
"Alpha Legion activity confirmed," Malchion said, eyes narrowing. He tagged the irregularities in quiet red. "They've penetrated the gene-vault grid."
Kael's hand tightened on the rail. The vision's glass ellipse had been a gene-vat's surface. Corax must have set aside his pride and gone to the workbench of gods—accelerating sons in a crucible. The Alpha Legion had walked into that hope in Raven black and smiled.
"Pods two through six," Kael said. "Load cutting teams and medicae. Malchion, you lead the manufactorum breach. Joras—relay sniffers. Find the false captains."
"Targets?" Malchion asked.
"The ones issuing orders that arrive half a heartbeat too late or early," Kael said. "The ones who smile. And the ones who don't ask questions when they should."
Joras's mouth made a shape that wasn't quite a grin. "That last category is large."
"Start at the edges," Kael said. "Bad actors pull on a net to test it. Real officers pull on their men."
The pods rattled in their launch cradles like dogs straining at the leash. Kael sealed his helm. The world snapped into a tighter geometry, readouts burning green and pale across his vision, his own breath a measured tide.
"Cut chatter," he said, and the bridge settled into useful quiet.
The Watcher Above spat its teeth.
---
The manufactorum was a black throat full of old coughing. Oil smell and heat pressed on armour seals. Machines the size of temples slept with engines humming low prayers. The lighting was the particular red of emergency and lies.
Malchion's boots hit the catwalk with a sound like punctuation. His squad fanned with the neat hunger of men who liked correctness. The Raven Guard made dark shapes at the far end of the aisle and did not shoot—best they could do in a system that smelled wrong.
"Friendlies," Malchion voxed, encryption triple-layered. "Talons. Captain Malchion, Silent Company."
The reply was a handful of hand-signs in Raven cant, so clean they could have been cut from stone. Proceed. Identify. Don't turn your back.
"We won't," Malchion said, and meant it.
At the next junction, a captain in perfect black stood under a lumen ring, his helm off, his face chiseled on the line where handsome becomes untrustworthy. The men around him moved like actors who knew the stage by heart.
"Corax orders the north vats flooded," the captain said, voice carrying just enough gravel to sound earned. "You will secure the west hinge."
Malchion let the five seconds ride the request from his ear to his shoulder. It sat wrong, like an ill-fitting gauntlet. Corax's orders never came without context. They wore intentions like armour.
"Your designation," Malchion said.
The captain's eyes flashed the faintest suggestion of inconvenience—then softened to fellowship. "Brother, we don't have time for—"
Joras's knife appeared from nowhere and drew a line along the man's cheek. The captain did not bleed. The pigment under his skin twitched a fraction too slow.
"Alpha," Joras said. He drove the blade up through the hinge of the jaw and into the false captain's brain. The man—the thing—staggered, clutched at his own helmet as if for comfort, then crumpled without a sound, the vox-unit on his gorget chattering one last syllable in a language no one had reason to love.
The Raven Guard at the corridor's end didn't hesitate. They fired. Two Alpha Legionaries died before they could reach their own shadows.
The third shouted something that might have been a name and took three bolts in the chest in a pattern a professional might have complimented in peacetime.
"Cut their net," Malchion said. "Every relay you find, whisper it to sleep. No alarms. We're surgeons, not heroes."
Joras moved. His one hand worked a breacher's kit faster than men with two. He popped access plates and threaded whisper-wire into conduits, his lips moving with the unselfconscious concentration of a craftsman.
Servitor processions clanked by with cartloads of components that had never come in whole in the history of the forge, and he flicked kill-switches concealed beneath devotionals.
Above, in orbit, the Watcher Above angled like a hawk. Alpha Legion skiffs hunted the stratosphere for shuttles and found none. Kael had chosen not to fly where they expected flight. He had chosen to remove the need to run.
"Contact—gene-vault nine," Malchion said, voice low. "They're in."
"Proceed," Kael replied. He was already running, the ship's intelligence laying a line of green through the manufactorum's contemplative hell for him to sprint along. The darkness spooled in his wake and then rushed forward, pooling ahead like a promise.
He reached the door and felt the seconds widen. Inside: glass, steel, the reek of chemicals and aspiration. Raven Guard tech-priests slumped along walls. A string of corpses in glossy black, their armour plates sealed at terrible angles by human hands who had begged them to live faster.
Alpha Legionaries around the central vat, their shoulder guards unmarked, their movements precise. One turned and wore Corax's face for a twitch of a heartbeat and then made it bland again.
Kael didn't announce.
He opened the door and crossed the world.
The first Alpha died without understanding that anything had happened. Veilrender cut through the gap between plates under his arm, and the legionsman stumbled into the vat, staining it with a ribbon that flowed like ink.
The second raised a bolter; Kael kicked it out of his hand and slid into the man, elbow to throat, hand to pauldron, twisting—neck snapped, helm dented backward like a prayer denied. The third parried and almost made it matter; Kael turned the blade and cut the cable on the man's backpack, then stabbed twice—kidney, kidney.
The fourth had lined up the shot that would have taken Kael's head off and replaced his story with a nicer ending; the shadow on the floor rose in a pane of almost-substance and turned the bolt two degrees. It killed a lumen coil. Light went out, and in the half-dark the fifth Alpha assumed his brothers were alive.
They weren't.
Kael stood breathing, helm lit with the cold illumination of things done exactly right. The vat burped. The shape within it made a noise like a child being born wrong. The Raven Guard tech-priest nearest to him moaned and tried to rise. Kael knelt, one hand supporting a head that had queued too long at the relic of sleep.
"What happened?" Kael asked, voice lowered to the register where men tell truths to themselves.
"Acceleration protocols… corrupted," the tech-priest whispered, vox-synth fracturing the syllables. "We… we made monsters."
"No," Kael said. "They made them. You tried to make sons."
The tech-priest's eyes flooded with the relief of being forgiven by someone who had no right to absolve. He slumped and let the medical servitor take his weight.
From the far side of the chamber, an Alpha Legion officer stepped into view, hands spread, blades sheathed. He had chosen a face that would have been forgettable without effort, the kind that survives wars by never being seen.
"Captain Varan," he said pleasantly. "We were told you preferred the dark. I brought some."
Kael didn't reply. He crossed the grate slowly, Veilrender low.
"You know," the Alpha continued conversationally, "this would have worked without interference. Your interference, perhaps. It is hard to keep track of such things when one wears so many names."
Kael stopped two paces away. Up close, the Alpha's armour was immaculate, scrubbed of dust and sorrow. The man's eyes were pale and clever and utterly innocent of shame.
"What is your name?" Kael asked.
The Alpha smiled very slightly. "Which one would you like?"
"The one someone who loved you used," Kael said.
The man's cheek twitched. It was so small a motion a younger Kael would have missed it. He didn't.
"I had a grandmother," the Alpha said after a breath. "She called me Erem."
"Erem," Kael said. He put the syllable in the air like a stone on a grave. "You will die with it."
The Alpha moved. He was fast in a way that pleased the hands that had trained him, feint high, cut low, heel out to sweep. Kael watched five seconds and stepped where the blade would not be, then put his shoulder against the man's center and drove him into the vat's rail. Metal screamed.
The Alpha twisted, made a dagger appear, stabbed for the seam at Kael's hip. The shadow caught his wrist like a vise. Kael saw the man understand something he had never believed—that the dark could be owned—and put Veilrender in under the breastbone up to the script on the fuller.
Erem shuddered. His hand loosed its knife. Kael eased him down as if laying a brother to rest.
"Grandmothers deserve better," Kael said.
Erem tried to laugh. Blood came instead. "So do… we all," he managed, and died with more dignity than he'd earned.
A cough came from the far door—sharp, angry, taken personally by the air.
"Varan," said a voice like a knife used for surgery and murder by men who hated both. "You are a long way from your cage."
The space shifted. The temperature of the room changed without changing. Corvus Corax stood by the shattered glass, armour wet with chemicals and grief, his eyes a black that made Kael's seem polite. He moved like an answer that had lost patience with questions.
Kael bowed his head an inch. "Lord Corax."
The Primarch of the Raven Guard took in the scene with a sweep that catalogued, weighed, and condemned without losing its sadness. He looked at the dead Alpha Legionaries, at the half-born things in the vats, at the tech-priests who had tried to save their own work and failed. He looked last at Kael, took in the blood on Veilrender and the steadiness of the hand that held it.
"They made monsters," Corax said.
"They made them in mine long ago," Kael answered. "I learned to own them."
Corax's mouth made something like a smile and like a wound. "And what did that cost you?"
"Everything worth counting," Kael said. "And everything I didn't need."
Corax moved through the wreckage without touching it, a man for whom the world leaned aside. He came to the vat with the worst of the failures and laid his palm against the glass. Inside, something that had wanted to be a son twitched and tried to salute with a hand that hadn't finished existing.
"End them," Corax said, to the room, to Kael, to himself. "End all of it."
Kael interfaced his helm to the vault's control slate. He found the lines of code that had been sung wrong and sang them still. The power lines hummed. The vats drained like tears. The things within sank to the bottom quietly, like secrets taking their place among other sediments.
When the pumps wound down, Corax closed his eyes. He stood with fists clenched until the shaking stopped.
"You came without being called," he said, not looking up.
"I saw five seconds," Kael said simply. "Sometimes that's enough."
Corax's head turned, just enough for one eye to find Kael's. "Not for me."
"Then take mine," Kael said. It was not a platitude. It was the offer of a tool from one craftsman to another. "Five seconds at a time. I will stand where the cut needs to land before it does. You will swing for both of us."
That got the ghost of a laugh. It sounded dangerous and good. "You speak as if you had the right."
"I speak as if I refuse to watch good men drown in someone else's prophecy," Kael said.
Corax turned fully. Up close, the man's face wore years men like him were not supposed to have to count. There was a cut on his jaw he hadn't noticed and a smear of grease across his cheek. He was beautiful in the way storms are, if you love ships.
"What do you want, Kael Varan?" Corax asked, and somehow it was not a challenge.
"Nothing," Kael said. "But I will take what I'm given."
Corax snorted. "You are a Night Lord who doesn't lie. That should be impossible."
"It is difficult," Kael conceded. "Not impossible."
From the corridor beyond, Raven Guard voices rose: tight reports, casualty lists, orders given without panic. Malchion's tone threaded through, steady as a metronome, organizing, redirecting.
Joras's laconic grumble answered in monosyllables that counted like hammer-strikes. The Watcher Above's presence pressed at the windows, an animal waiting at the door, unwilling to come inside the sickroom.
"You saved more than you could have," Corax said. It was not flattery. It was a measurement.
"No one will remember the number," Kael said. "But they will remember you ordered the end to a mistake."
Corax's jaw worked. "Do you think that absolves me?"
"No," Kael said. "But it will let you keep moving. That's all there is, this side of statues."
The Primarch regarded him for a span of breaths longer than was polite and exactly as long as was necessary. Then he reached to his own pauldron and pulled free a feather made of Raven Guard plate, hammered and folded until it caught light like a living thing.
"Then keep moving," Corax said. He set the feather in Kael's palm, closing the Astartes' fingers around it with a weight that felt like oath and trust and grief. "Brother in night."
"Always," Kael said, without heat, without surprise.
Outside the vault, the false-captains died wherever they had forgotten to pretend they were human. The Alpha Legion ships in low orbit began to pivot, their patience exhausted. The Watcher Above marked their vector shifts and slid into the one place they hadn't learned to fear yet.
"Enemy flotilla inbound," Joras voxed, tone professional with a tremor at the edge that had not learned how to lie. "Six signatures. Two heavy. Slaved augurs. They're blind in their own light."
"Then we'll fix their eyes," Kael said. He turned to Corax. "I will clear your sky. Get your people off this floor."
Corax's smile, this time, had no knife in it. "Do what you were made to do."
Kael inclined his head and left.
---
The Watcher Above loved the work. That was not heresy; it was a truth the ship's bones hummed quietly. She stretched out under Kael's hands like a bow drawn to the ear.
The Alpha Legion flotilla entered low orbit on efficient trajectories, convoy lanes rendered in mathematics, behaviours disguised as doctrine. Kael aimed for the seam between the truths.
"Shadow-curtains," he said, and the ship bled a vapor of chaff and phase-baffle grace that painted the void with a wall the enemy would believe.
"Feints?" Malchion asked.
"Three," Kael said. "Then quiet. They'll correct for cleverness. They won't correct for dignity."
The first two volleys went where they were supposed to and didn't matter. The third cut a destroyer in half along the line men design when they hate the idea of redundancy. The enemy's heavy cruisers widened their formation almost—but not quite—enough.
Kael rolled the Watcher Above on her long axis and put her under the plane of their shields, then breathed out. Lances spoke, low and patient and fatal.
"Boarding," he said. "Cadres one through four. Doors, then throats."
"Understood," Malchion said.
Pods tore away in a bouquet of black seeds. They struck hull. The explosions were controlled, modest. The battles that followed weren't. Malchion moved through a shrine-deck with a pistol and a blade, verses and viscera mingling.
Joras crawled a duct half his width and wired a communications trunk to speak in the voice of silence; when a legionary tried to wrench him free by the ankle, he replaced the ankle with a ragged nothing and kept moving, one-handed and smiling like a man who had just figured out a stubborn hinge.
The ship's intelligence did the thing Kael had asked of it: doors slid open a beat before his men reached them and shut a beat after they passed.
On the bridge, Kael's five seconds showed him a Heavy on the enemy's starboard broadside getting ready to fire against a temptation he had no reason not to trust. Kael offered him a new one, an uglier one, a gap made of arithmetic. The man took it. Watcher's return volley climbed his barrel and killed him through the gun he loved.
"Transport is clear," Malchion reported. "Ravens lifting. Our casualties—light."
"Good," Kael said. He watched the enemy formation fray, then tear, then decide to be elsewhere. "Let them go."
Joras made a noise. "Sir?"
"Let them go," Kael repeated. "They will take the story of today and poison it with their pride. I want it to spread."
The Alpha Legion ships turned to flee. The Watcher Above let them. Only one, the last, the one that hesitated—Kael shot that one in the engines in a way that didn't kill the crew and did kill the career of the man who'd paused.
"Message to Deliverance command," Kael said. "Silent Company: present. Situation: contained."
"Reply from Corax," Joras said, and if there was wonder in his voice, he stapled it down to professionalism. "It's one word."
"What word?"
"'Owed.'"
Kael looked out at the black ribbon of space above the broken manufactoria, above the drained vats, above the men who would live because he had come and the men who would die later because that was the way of things.
He closed his hand around the metal feather. It warmed, either because his hand was warm or because the world had decided it would be.
"We don't keep that kind of ledger," he said. "But if he insists, we'll carry it."
The bridge shifted back toward the rhythms Veyra had taught it, the ones that made death survivable: count, file, breathe. Crew moved. Names were logged. The Watcher Above dimmed one polite fraction as if to ask, More?
"Form on Deliverance," Kael said. "We'll nurse them through the worst of it."
"Course set," Malchion replied.
Kael turned and caught his reflection in the glass—tall, armoured, eyes black with a hunger that no longer frightened him. Behind his shoulder, for the fractional beat before cognition caught up, he saw a woman with a ledger and a pencil, and he did not turn. He did not need to.
"Keep counting," he said under his breath, and the shadow stirred and lay down and waited for the next fight.