For a time, the defensive lines lived beneath a constant rain of weapons, ammunition, armor plates, and replacement parts.
The flow did not come in convoys or by sweating labor gangs. It arrived on the backs of tireless logistics drones, black machines that crossed the ruined approaches in orderly lines, descended at marked drop points, unloaded, then turned back into the battlefield without waiting for thanks or orders.
Duncan and Albert had already received enough power armor to outfit every soldier under their command. Their quartermasters had said so twice. The armory clerks had said so with increasing panic. Still the shipments continued.
The fortress armories groaned beneath the surplus. Racks bent under the weight of bolters, chainswords, modified lasguns, plasma weapons, sealed power packs, spare armor plates, and equipment whose purpose no one wanted to guess aloud. Ammunition crates filled corridors that had once been left clear for retreat. One storage chamber had to be reinforced after the floor began to bow beneath stacked wargear.
It felt less like resupply and more like a forge-world's excess production had been redirected into one underhive fortress by mistake. Except there was no mistake. Every crate arrived labeled, sorted, and positioned with cold precision.
Outside the fortress, Albert sat on a jagged slab of metal wreckage that had once been the hull of a Chimera. Rust flaked beneath him whenever he shifted his weight. The vehicle's old armor plate was scarred by melta burns, shell impacts, and claw marks deep enough to make even a veteran uncomfortable. Now it served as a bench for a commander who had grown tired of standing inside walls that smelled of oil, sweat, and too many men waiting to die.
His gaze remained fixed on the drones scavenging the battlefield.
They moved with unnerving efficiency. Small salvage units crawled through the wreckage, manipulator limbs picking apart corpses of vehicles, broken barricades, abandoned firing nests, and the scattered remains of old engagements. They harvested lasrifles scarred by melta fire, cracked power cells, ceramite plates shattered by krak grenades, lengths of cabling, ruined vox-units, chunks of power armor too damaged for any sane Tech-priest to repair, and weapons whose owners had been reduced to stains long ago.
Above them hovered black spherical constructs, each one smooth, silent, and armed with crimson lenses that pulsed as they scanned the salvage below.
Whenever a recovered object failed whatever judgment governed them, if it was not of Adeptus Mechanicus provenance, if it had not been designed, modified, or approved under Qin Mo's growing technological system, the drones acted at once. Thin energy beams lanced downward. Metal, plastek, cloth, bone, and machine components dissolved into glittering motes, then vanished entirely.
Albert watched a twisted autogun disappear down to the molecular level. One moment it existed. The next, the only proof it had been there was a faint shimmer in the air and a smell like hot dust after lightning.
Where the matter went, he did not know. The drones did not swell. They did not vent waste. They did not load containers. He assumed the material was being absorbed somehow, converted into a reserve that no mortal quartermaster could count. That explanation was insane. Unfortunately, it was also the most reasonable one available.
After enough raw material had been gathered, the drones would congregate over cleared ferrocrete. They arranged themselves in exact geometric grids, spacing so precise that Albert suspected the formation would look perfect even under a surveyor's auspex. Then they projected crackling beams toward the ground.
Within those beams, things took shape.
A breastplate would begin as a shimmer, then become layered metal. A gauntlet would form around nothing, fingers unfolding into position as if remembered by the air. Weapon casings grew around internal assemblies already aligned and complete. Power armor emerged piece by piece, not assembled by hands, but brought into being through a process that made every lesson Albert had ever heard about production, logistics, and scarcity feel like a joke told by a cruel universe.
"Fabrication-printing technology," Albert muttered. His voice barely rose above the distant hum of the drones.
The Mechanicus never spoke of such things, yet here it was, transmutation made manifest.
Albert tried to understand it. He had commanded armor. He understood fuel consumption, track maintenance, ammunition loads, crew fatigue, engine failure, supply bottlenecks, and all the ugly truths that killed men long before the enemy did. He knew how war machines entered the world: through mines, manufactoria, forge contracts, transport schedules, and prayers shouted over malfunctioning engines.
This had none of that.
No schematics visible. No assembly line. No forge shrine. No screaming servitors. No Tech-priest striking a casing with a wrench while insisting it was a ritual implement.
Just drones, beams, salvage, and impossible results.
It felt less like engineering and more like sorcery wearing the mask of engineering.
"You're sitting out here daydreaming again?"
The familiar voice cut through his thoughts with the blunt force of a thrown bolt casing.
Albert turned his head as Duncan strode toward him. The other commander's armored boots crunched over debris-strewn ferrocrete. Dust and rust scraped beneath each step. Duncan's face was set in its usual hard lines, but his eyes flicked across the battlefield before settling on Albert. He had not come merely to talk. He had come because he had noticed a risk and disliked that someone else had chosen to ignore it.
"This position is two hundred meters from the fortress," Duncan said as he reached him. "The heretics could strike at any moment. Sitting out here alone is not contemplation. It is suicide with better posture."
He settled beside Albert anyway.
Albert tilted his head back and stared into the oppressive darkness overhead. The hive's artificial sky, if it deserved the name, was a tangled ceiling of rusted pipes, industrial vents, cable bundles, gantries, and kilometers of decaying infrastructure layered so thick that the true sky might as well have belonged to another planet.
There was no sun. No stars. No horizon. Only black industrial mass broken by malfunctioning lumen-strips, furnace glow, leaking plasma vents, and the occasional flicker of distant weapons fire reflected through the smog.
"If the heretics come," Albert said, "I'll fight until I'm finally freed from this miserable, lightless hell."
Duncan did not answer at once.
He understood Albert's tone too well to mistake it for ordinary bitterness. The campaign had worn him down one death at a time. Comrades had fallen, crews had burned alive in their vehicles, regiments had been scattered, and every victory had revealed another layer of the underhive waiting to devour them. Duty was the only thing still keeping Albert fastened to the world.
The moment that duty ended, truly ended, Duncan suspected Albert would throw himself into the counteroffensive with no expectation of return. Perhaps no desire for return.
Duncan chose not to challenge that directly. Men on the edge often stepped off faster when someone pointed out the drop.
"While you were brooding," he said, "I contacted the 47th Regiment."
Albert's dulled gaze sharpened. The change was immediate. Duty still had hooks in him.
"Has the counterattack begun?"
"No. But the surviving forces are being reorganized."
Duncan kept his voice low, though there were no ears nearby except drones and the dead. "All regiments are to be expanded to a standardized strength of ten thousand troops. Each formation is expected to maintain a full combat roster rather than operate as scattered remnants. More importantly, all Imperial forces in the sector are being consolidated into a single unified war host."
Albert turned fully toward him.
Duncan met his eyes. "A Legion. Under the supreme command of Lord Commander Qin Mo."
The title settled between them with quiet weight.
Duncan continued, more deliberately now. "We should be mindful of how we address him. He is no longer merely the man who built our walls and sent us weapons. He has rank now, and more importantly, he has earned the obedience men are already giving him."
Albert frowned, though not in disbelief. His mind had already moved to numbers. "Weapons and armor can be mass-produced, apparently. Soldiers cannot. Even if we merged both our regiments together, we would not reach ten thousand."
Duncan opened his mouth to reply, but Albert's expression changed before he could speak. The answer arrived in his eyes.
"Kato," Albert said slowly. "The city. There are more than three hundred thousand people there."
Duncan nodded.
Albert looked back toward the drones, but he was no longer seeing them. "That is where the recruits are coming from."
"Exactly," Duncan said. "Kato's reconstruction is underway. From what I was told, it has become more than a settlement now. It is a symbol. The civilians learned what the Lord Commander did for them, what he is building, and what the war still demands. They have volunteered in mass numbers for military service. The first reinforcement groups will be deployed to our lines soon."
Albert absorbed the information in silence.
He had never set foot in Kato. He had not fought in its defense or walked its streets while the heretics were being purged from them. But he knew underhivers. He knew what kind of people survived beneath a hive's official concern for more than a generation.
They were not soldiers by training. That mattered.
But they knew hunger, violence, ambushes, gang discipline, improvised weapons, ration scarcity, tunnel routes, and the ruthless arithmetic of survival. They knew how to fight dirty because the underhive had never rewarded clean hands. Give such people food, weapons, armor, and a reason to believe that loyalty would be repaid rather than exploited, and they could become something far more dangerous than conscripts dragged from hab-blocks under threat of execution.
Earning their loyalty was the difficult part. Qin Mo appeared to have done it.
If that loyalty held, the new Legion would possess something rare in the Imperium's wars: a local force that could replenish itself, arm itself, and believe in the commander who had made both possible.
Albert narrowed his eyes at the ruined distance. "This is it."
Duncan glanced at him.
Albert's voice dropped. "Everything that has happened, the fortresses, the drones, the weapons, Kato, the recruitment orders, it is all preparation for the counteroffensive. After months of holding and waiting, we are finally going to move."
Duncan nodded once. "Yes."
For a while, neither man spoke. They sat on the dead Chimera and looked out over the underhive's ruined expanse while machines gathered the remains of old battles and turned them into the tools of the next one.
Then Albert abruptly gestured toward the drones. "If one of those things disintegrates me, ask the Lord Commander to scatter my ashes outside the hive."
Duncan looked at him sidelong. "We are in the underhive. How exactly do you expect him to do that?"
Albert's mouth twitched into a dry smirk. "He has fabrication sorcery, flying artillery, power armor built from scrap, and black spheres that eat guns. You are telling me he cannot build a slingshot and launch my ashes upward?"
Duncan sighed. "That is the stupidest funeral request I have ever heard."
"You will do it, then?"
"If you die," Duncan said, "I will ask him."
"Good enough."
Duncan stared at him for a moment longer, then looked back toward the battlefield. He did not like the joke. He liked less that it sounded rehearsed.
....
Late Night
Duncan came awake with a hand on his shoulder and another already reaching for the knife beneath his pillow.
Training took hold before thought did. His eyes opened. His body tensed. The dim sleeping chamber resolved around him in fragments: metal walls, low lumen-glow, folded uniform, weapon rack, two armored silhouettes beside his cot.
One was his personal bodyguard. The other belonged to Albert.
Albert's bodyguard spoke first, voice tight enough to cut through Duncan's remaining sleep. "Commander. Do you know where our commander is?"
Duncan blinked once, then pushed himself upright. "Last I saw, Albert was brooding outside the fortress during dinner."
"We checked there."
The answer finished waking him.
Duncan swung his legs off the cot. "And?"
"He wasn't there. We had every available soldier sweep a five-hundred-meter radius from the gate. No sign of him."
The room seemed colder.
Duncan stood at once, dragging on his uniform with sharp, economical movements. "When was he last confirmed?"
"After evening rations," Albert's bodyguard said. "A sentry saw him walking near the outer wreckage line. Alone."
Duncan's jaw tightened. He strode toward the armory before the man finished speaking. Both bodyguards followed. The corridor outside was quiet in the way fortresses became quiet at night: not peaceful, but watchful. Distant generators hummed behind the walls. Somewhere below, a servitor or drone moved with a faint metallic scrape. Men slept in shifts behind sealed doors, close enough to their weapons that panic would not need to travel far.
Albert's bodyguard quickened his pace. "You don't think the heretics captured him, do you?"
"Impossible," Duncan snapped. "Sentries are posted at every vantage point. Auspex sweeps run in overlapping intervals. If an enemy force approached, someone would have seen something."
Relief crossed the bodyguard's face for less than a second. Duncan's next words killed it.
"Albert left on his own."
The man swallowed. "Why would he do that?"
Duncan did not answer immediately. He entered the armory, where rows of power armor hung from suspension racks like silent executioners waiting for bodies. The air smelled of machine oil, charged cells, cold metal, and incense someone had burned out of habit despite the equipment's questionable origin.
"The heretics have psykers," Duncan said at last. "If he wandered beyond the fortress's psychic dampening field, anything could have happened."
He slammed one fist against the armor release rune. The nearest suit unlocked with a hydraulic hiss.
"Damn that fool," Duncan growled. "I warned him not to isolate himself in exposed positions."
Albert's bodyguard stepped forward. "I'll go with you."
Duncan looked at him while the armor cradle opened around him. "Are you trained as a scout?"
The bodyguard hesitated. "No, but—"
"Can you track one man through debris, ash, machine interference, and possible psychic contamination without triggering every warning system in the fortress?"
The man's face tightened. "No."
"Then you will slow me down."
The answer was harsh. It was also true, and both men knew it.
Duncan stepped into the armor. Locking clamps closed around his limbs. The suit sealed in sections: greaves, thighs, chest, gauntlets, collar, helmet. Internal systems woke around him in layers of green and amber. Bio-readouts. Ammunition count. Power reserves. Motion assist. Auspex. Threat detection. Vox channels.
His voice came through the helm grille, lower and harder. "You will remain here. Alert the watch commanders quietly. No general alarm unless I call for one. If Albert returns before I do, you keep him inside the fortress even if you have to sit on him."
Albert's bodyguard managed a grim nod. "Understood."
Fully armored, Duncan marched toward the fortress gates. The corridors opened ahead of him as sentries recognized his command ident. Men turned from their posts, questions in their eyes, but no one was foolish enough to delay him.
The outer gate split open with a deep mechanical groan. Cold underhive air rolled in, carrying the smells of ash, rust, sump-water, old blood, and distant fire.
Duncan stepped outside. The gate began closing behind him before his boots had finished crossing the threshold.
He activated his bio-scanner.
The first sweep painted the inside of the fortress with a dense cluster of red markers: soldiers sleeping, sentries pacing, medicae staff on night rotation, armor crews, clerks, wounded men, all the fragile heat of human life gathered behind reinforced walls.
Outside, the display returned emptiness.
No large contacts. No enemy movement. No obvious body signature. Nothing but cooling wreckage, scattered drone traces, and the cold geometry of the underhive.
Duncan adjusted the scan range and moved forward.
Two hundred meters from the fortress. Then three. Then beyond the point where Albert had joked about ashes and impossible slingshots.
He swept left. Nothing.
He swept right. Nothing.
He changed filters, lowering sensitivity against engine heat and increasing discrimination for human biological residue. The scanner protested with false positives from old corpses, half-buried machinery, and thermal leakage from cracked pipes. Duncan ignored them one by one and kept walking.
Albert was out there.
And Duncan was going to find him.