Sage Neil's specialization, as it turned out, was not research in the traditional Martian sense.
She was a data artisan. Her primary skill was programming teaching chips to direct Kastellan mechs through specific combat operations, a discipline that sat at the intersection of machine control and tactical field work. The title she carried was not that of a research-pattern Sage, the kind who spent decades in a laboratory chasing incremental advances on ancient formulae. She was an explorator Sage, the kind sent out to recover technology from ruins and recover it from places where most people did not come back from.
If she had not chosen to run when she did, and if she had survived both the exploration roads and the attention of the Inquisition, she might eventually have reached one of the rarer titles: something approaching a universal acquirer, the Adeptus Mechanicus equivalent of a great sage, the kind of recognition that only came to those who had recovered enough lost knowledge to reshape what the Mechanicus understood about itself. An almost unimaginable summit.
Of course, none of that would have applied unless she had actually found a genuine Standard Template Construct record from the Age of Technology or the Dark Age itself, and produced results for the Mechanicus without unwanted side effects. Without that, the title would remain theoretical.
Nolan walked the three of them to the foundry on Second Son Island himself.
The underground passage connecting the two islands ran cool and quiet, lit at intervals by strips of pale lighting. The Tech-Priest and the engineer both turned their heads as they moved, cataloguing the infrastructure with the reflexive attentiveness of people trained to notice what other people built and how well they had built it. Sage Neil watched everything with a stillness that was, in its own way, more attentive than either of them.
Above ground, on the foundry floor, the servo skull Reditus had apparently just finished delivering a correction to one of the autonomous robots when the group arrived. It took precisely one second to register the newcomers, and then it launched itself off the bench and began circling the entire group in wide arcs, the anti-gravity engine spinning with an enthusiasm that the skull usually reserved for the acquisition of new materials. It was, by any observable measure, genuinely pleased.
Anyone who was not Doom had been a rare addition to the foundry's social ecosystem for quite some time.
Nolan waited until Reditus finished its third orbit before pulling it aside and outlining the arrangement in brief, direct terms. The newcomers were to be managed. Whatever technical knowledge or schematics they carried, individually or combined, was to be extracted and applied to the base's production capabilities. Reditus was responsible for making this happen without disrupting the existing production lines. If disruptions occurred because of poor management on Reditus's part, the responsibility would be Reditus's to answer for.
The servo skull assured him, without hesitation and with considerable confidence, that it would have these new colleagues producing results for the Twin Islands Base before the week was out.
Nolan nodded and left it to work.
He had his doubts, but he kept them to himself. Reditus usually performed better when given room to attempt things on its own terms before interference became necessary.
The foundry settled into a division within the first two days that nobody had formally declared but everyone could observe.
Reditus took the Tech-Priest and the engineer under its wing without ceremony, absorbing them into its existing workflows with the efficiency of a machine that had been looking for additional hands. Sage Neil, operating outside the established hierarchy and carrying the specific disadvantage of having arrived via the Carcharodons' less-than-orthodox hospitality service, found herself isolated.
David, noticing the practical problem before anyone else did, arranged a casting platform and a temporary residential space for her without comment. It was a functional solution to what would otherwise have become a basic survival issue within the week.
What Reditus had not accounted for was speed.
Sage Neil produced a prototype Taurus assault vehicle and a preliminary production line layout in a timeframe that left no room for the usual period of foundry politics to resolve itself naturally. The vehicle itself was sound. The production design was more than sound. Her basic technical foundation and her practical field experience had given her instincts that laboratory-trained Mechanicus personnel often spent decades trying to develop.
This irritated Reditus considerably.
What irritated it more was Doom.
Doom had never been Reditus's subordinate in any meaningful sense. He was frequently the target of correction, occasionally the source of spectacular accidental results, and consistently the kind of collaborator who produced outcomes that nobody had planned for. He had also, from the beginning, treated the foundry as a space for learning rather than a space for hierarchy, which meant that Sage Neil's isolation held no particular interest for him. He visited her casting platform. He asked questions. He listened to the answers.
The repulsion grid technology came out of that exchange.
Doom had studied the Kastellan mech's internal configuration carefully enough to identify a shield field system within it that nobody had formally catalogued or discussed. The extraction process was imperfect, as these things tended to be when moved from one context to another. But the basic function was present and the system was usable. Before reporting it to David, Doom listed Reditus as a co-developer, which was a generosity that Reditus received with conflicted feelings.
The foundry reached a state that Doom described, with the dry precision of someone who had designed competitive systems before, as a good competitive mechanism. The Reditus faction and the Sage Neil faction maintained a low-level operational friction with each other. Doom moved between them as an independent variable, occasionally balancing the weaker side, occasionally choosing neither. The production lines continued to function. No catastrophic accidents occurred.
Nolan, receiving David's summaries of the foundry situation, made the judgment that no intervention was required. As long as the lines ran, the internal politics were the foundry's problem to work out.
His real attention was elsewhere.
The Lamenters needed to be ready before the first of the Chaos blessings arrived. The Chaos Gods' countdown timers had been sitting in his peripheral awareness for long enough that he had stopped consciously noting them, but the numbers had not stopped moving. The first blessing was coming. He could feel it in the shape of the days.
One hundred and fifty Astartes needed to be fully equipped and operational in Terminator plate before that window closed.
He trained them himself. He ran formation drills. He sat in planning sessions with David until the tactical picture for a Terminator-equipped company operating in multiple environments was clear enough to execute without his direct presence.
Between sessions, he settled one additional matter that had been sitting unresolved.
The dark yellow paintwork of the Lamenters had to go.
He had thought about the reasoning carefully enough to be confident in it. Dark yellow was not simply the color of a Chapter with hard luck. Yellow power armor, year after year, had an observable pattern attached to it. The Imperial Fists, called by some the Earth Fists, were the most prominent example: a Chapter whose history was defined as much by siege and suffering as by glory. There were others. The pattern was not a superstition. It was a data point.
He kept the Lamenters' teardrop and bleeding heart symbol. That was theirs and it was not his to remove. But the outer shell of the armor was repainted: half black, half white, split clean down the centerline.
He asked the Lamenters what they thought.
The answer, delivered through several battle brothers who had clearly conferred briefly before speaking, was that if the Primarch wished to change the Chapter's colors, they had no objection. The Primarch had provided the Terminator armor. The Primarch had extracted them from Slaughterhouse. If the Primarch wanted them painted in alternating squares, they would stand inspection without complaint.
Nolan appreciated the pragmatism.
He divided the hundred and fifty into two formations: the Lamenters First Company and the Lamenters Second Company, both understrength by design. The remaining positions in each company would be filled by rotating Stormtroopers on a set schedule. Veterans leading new blood. A pipeline that would, if the right conditions developed later, give Stormtroopers who became Astartes candidates a direct path into a unit they already knew.
It was a reasonable structure. It gave him flexibility. He was satisfied with it.
Then David's voice came through his internal channel, carrying the particular quality it reserved for news that required immediate attention.
The message was brief. The news was bad.
What came next was going to disrupt the timeline for everything they had just planned.