Fortress. Subterranean Laboratory.
With Yoan sent away under escort, Qin Mo turned his full attention back to the dimensional transmission experiment.
The prototype apparatus had already been moved into the testing chamber: a vast cavern newly carved from the glossy black bedrock beneath the fortress. The chamber still smelled of fresh-cut stone, hot metal, machine oil, and the faint chemical bite of sealant curing along the seams.
Lumen strips ran in uneven rows across the walls and ceiling, their pale light flickering whenever the power draw shifted. Between them, cogitator displays glowed cold blue, painting long bars of light across the polished obsidian floor.
The cavern had not been designed for comfort. It had been designed to survive failure.
Thick plasteel plating reinforced the walls in overlapping layers. Null-field generators hummed from armored alcoves, their housings vibrating with a pressure that could be felt in the teeth.
They were there to suppress stray psychic interference, distortions in the empyrean, or any other phenomenon that might decide to turn the experiment into a prayer for immediate evacuation. Sensor arrays watched every angle of the room. Emergency shutters waited above the entrances. Venting ducts stood ready to flood the chamber with inert gas if heat, radiation, or something less easily named exceeded safe limits.
At opposite ends of the chamber stood two reinforced holding cells. Their doors were thick enough to stop a light anti-armor round, their locks were adamantium-bolted, and each cell was wrapped in a layered stasis cage intended to freeze anything that arrived in the wrong condition. The fields around them hummed with restrained force, like thunder trapped behind glass.
The test subject was already inside the left cell.
He was not a heretic priest. He was not a Chaos cultist. He had never led a rebellion, preached sedition, or carved forbidden symbols into his skin.
He was a common criminal.
His crime had been trying to dismantle one of Qin Mo's logistics drones for scrap. In another age, on another world, it might have been theft. Here, during an active recovery operation, it had been sabotage of strategic materiel.
A waste of resources.
A waste of labor.
A waste of air, if Qin Mo allowed himself to be honest.
By the time Grot finished escorting Yoan to the transport shuttle and returned to the subterranean levels, Qin Mo had already completed three more calibration cycles. Grot entered the laboratory still carrying the smell of the hangar on his armor: scorched propellant, dust, and the ozone tang of grav engines. He looked around the chamber, then at the prisoner, then at the machine suspended in its frame.
"You started without me?" Grot asked.
"No," Qin Mo said. "I prepared without you."
He gestured toward a compact metallic backpack resting on a servo-stabilized workbench. The device was ugly, dense, and unfinished-looking, its casing wrapped in exposed stabilizer bands and covered in warning runes that had been printed by machine rather than painted by a priest. A small beacon light pulsed at its center.
"Put this on him."
Grot lifted the pack with one hand, judged its weight, and gave Qin Mo a sideways glance. "This had better not explode."
"Not unless I made a serious mistake."
"That is not as comforting as you think it is."
Still, Grot carried the device into the holding cell without hesitation.
The prisoner shrank back when the door opened, but he did not fight. He was thin, dirty, and shaking with the hollow exhaustion of a man who had already imagined every possible ending and found none worth resisting. His prison smock hung loose on his frame. A small identification plate had been fixed to his collar. His eyes flicked from Grot's armor to Qin Mo, then to the machine in the center of the chamber.
"Face the wall," Grot ordered.
The man obeyed at once. His hands trembled as Grot locked the pack into place against his spine. The straps tightened automatically across his chest and abdomen. Small injector needles touched the skin at the base of his neck, then withdrew after confirming contact. The pack's beacon shifted from amber to green.
Grot stepped out.
The prisoner, after a moment of dull hesitation, reached for the cell door and pulled it shut behind him. The lock engaged with a heavy metallic clack.
Grot watched him through the armored glass. "That's either discipline or despair."
"Fatalistic acceptance," Qin Mo said.
The prisoner stood very still, shoulders hunched beneath the unfamiliar weight. He looked less like a condemned man standing before an executioner and more like a laborer who had been ordered to climb inside a machine whose purpose no one had explained.
Grot squinted at the device. "Is that a grav-pack?"
Qin Mo shook his head. "No. Safeguard unit. Anchor system."
He placed his palm against the control panel. The dimensional transmission device woke in response, not with the crude roar of Imperial machinery, but with a layered sequence of soft clicks, rising tones, and tightening fields.
"The pack contains a locator beacon, a quantum-linked anima anchor, and a low-yield phase shield generator," Qin Mo explained. "Not a true soul-binding device. I'm not building witchcraft. It tracks the biological body, its electrical pattern, and the empyrean shadow attached to it closely enough to keep them from separating during transition."
Grot stared at him.
Qin Mo sighed. "Think of it as a leash for reality. It ensures he is transmitted mostly intact—" His eyes flicked toward the prisoner. "—and that he actually arrives."
Grot grimaced. "Mostly intact."
"That is what testing is for."
The prisoner pressed both palms against the inside of the glass. "Lord? What does 'mostly' mean?"
Qin Mo ignored the question and turned toward the dimensional transmission device.
The machine stood at the center of the chamber, a two-meter cube of ceramite, void-hardened alloy, gravitic focusing rings, and layered containment vanes. Its surface was etched with energy conduits too precise for local manufactoria to reproduce. Light moved through those channels in slow, synchronized pulses, gathering around the central frame and then retreating again as if the device were breathing.
Qin Mo raised one hand.
Thick power cables uncoiled from the chamber walls. They did not truly slither, though the motion looked close enough that several technicians at the observation consoles stepped back by instinct. Magnetic clamps dragged the cables across the floor in controlled curves. One by one, they locked into the machine's ports with mechanical hisses and sharp pressure seals. Each connection made the lumen strips flicker. Each connection pulled more strength from the fortress grid.
"First transmission test," Qin Mo said. "Range: one hundred and twelve meters. Origin cell to receiving cell. Subject: baseline human male. Safeguard unit active, but phase shielding delayed until transition onset."
Grot looked at him sharply. "Delayed?"
"I need to see what fails."
"He might feel it."
"Yes."
For a moment, Grot said nothing. He had killed more men than he could count. He had crushed heretics, mutants, and worse under a gravitic hammer and never lost sleep over it. But this was different. There was something about watching a terrified man stand still while a machine took him apart by theory that made even violence feel honest by comparison.
Qin Mo did not look away from the controls.
"Begin."
He placed his hand upon the machine and channeled his will into its systems.
The chamber filled with a high, rising hum. It began at the edge of hearing, then sharpened until several soldiers winced behind their helmets. The cogitators flared with cascading calculations. Numbers, coordinates, mass estimates, thermal tolerances, and stability curves rushed across the screens too quickly for human eyes to follow.
Around the cube, the air distorted. Not like heat haze, though heat was present. The distortion bent light at the wrong angles, making the machine appear closer and farther away in alternating flashes. Dust lifted from the floor, hung motionless, and then spun into thin rings around the device.
Grot's eyes locked onto the prisoner.
The man's outline began to warp. At first it was subtle: a blur around the shoulders, a shimmer along the fingers. Then his whole body flickered, the edges of him stuttering like a corrupted vid-feed. His mouth opened.
"SKAAAA—!"
The scream tore through the chamber speakers before the dampeners could cut the volume. It was not the scream of a man burned or cut. It was the sound of someone suddenly made aware that every part of him could be pulled in a different direction.
The safeguard pack activated.
A pulse of phased energy burst from the device on his back, wrapping around his torso, skull, and limbs. The beacon flared white. Sensor needles locked deeper. The prisoner convulsed hard enough to slam one shoulder into the cell wall.
Above him, something flickered.
A translucent humanoid silhouette rose half a span from his body, not cleanly separated but not fully attached either. It shimmered like a reflection seen through disturbed water. Its hands clawed downward, fingers sinking back toward the prisoner's chest without finding purchase. Its mouth opened in the same scream, though no second sound emerged.
Grot took one step back.
"That… that thing is his soul?"
Qin Mo watched the readings with cold focus. "Close enough for the device to track."
"The pack isn't working."
"It is working," Qin Mo corrected. "Just not perfectly."
He studied the synchronization curve for another two seconds. The body remained stable. The anima shadow remained attached, but strained. The phase boundary was forming unevenly around the spine, which explained the pain.
Useful. Unacceptable, but useful.
Qin Mo raised his hand and forced the pack's internal systems to full output.
A translucent barrier snapped into place around the prisoner, enclosing body and soul-shadow together. For a fraction of a second, the man became a shape trapped inside a glassy shell of compressed light. Then the shell folded inward.
He vanished.
The receiving cell at the opposite end of the chamber flashed.
A heartbeat later, the prisoner reappeared inside it, suspended half a meter above the floor. The barrier cracked apart into fading motes. The ghostly silhouette slammed back into his body.
He dropped like a sack of meat and hit the floor hard.
For several seconds he did nothing but gasp. His fingers clawed at the plasteel grating beneath him. Blood ran from one nostril. His eyes were open too wide, staring at something the chamber no longer contained.
Grot let out a slow breath. "You're not planning to use this thing to escape the Underhive, are you?"
Qin Mo did not hesitate. "Of course."
Grot turned to him fully. "Of course, he says."
To Qin Mo, the answer was obvious. The experiment had worked. It had been crude, painful, power-hungry, and imprecise, but it had worked. The impossible had become an engineering problem.
"This is only the first step," Qin Mo said. "Eventually, we use this principle to traverse the void. Not just walls. Not just hive levels. Star systems."
Grot looked from Qin Mo to the prisoner still shuddering on the floor. The machine in the center of the chamber hummed softly, almost innocently, while the emergency systems vented excess heat into the cooling lines.
To Grot, the device did not yet look like an escape tool. It looked like a torture machine designed by a god who had become too interested in efficiency to remember mercy.
Qin Mo seemed to read enough of his expression to continue.
"If the safeguards are fully active before transmission begins, the subject should feel minimal pain," he said. "The delayed activation caused the separation stress. That will be corrected in the next iteration."
"Should," Grot repeated.
"Will," Qin Mo amended.
He crossed the chamber toward the receiving cell. The prisoner tried to push himself away as Qin Mo approached, but his limbs lacked strength. The cell glass reflected Qin Mo's face in pale fragments, cutting his expression into pieces.
"What did you see?" Qin Mo asked.
The prisoner swallowed. His mouth worked several times before sound came out.
"Lines," he whispered. "Glowing lines. Everywhere. Stretching forever."
His breathing hitched.
"Then everything went… thin. Transparent. I could see through myself. Through the room. Through things behind the room."
He pressed a shaking hand against his chest, as if confirming he was still solid.
"After that, I saw things. Or I think I did. Shapes. Lights. A dark place between them. But when I try to remember, it's like remembering nothing."
Qin Mo listened carefully.
The description was imprecise, but not useless. The prisoner had passed through the interstice between defined coordinates: a transitional non-space existing one step removed from ordinary material continuity. A baseline human mind had no proper sensory vocabulary for it. His brain had translated raw positional discontinuity into lines, transparency, and half-formed shapes.
That was acceptable.
The subject had arrived alive. Body, mind, and soul-shadow had recombined within tolerance.
The transmission worked.
Qin Mo's mouth twitched. "You got lucky."
The prisoner stared at him. "Lucky?"
"I estimated a non-trivial chance you would materialize partially inside the receiving wall."
The man's face drained of color so quickly that Grot thought he might faint.
"What?!"
"You did not," Qin Mo said. "So the estimate was pessimistic."
"That is not-That is not comforting!"
"It was not intended to be."
Qin Mo turned away, already thinking through the next stage.
Dimensional transmission was fundamentally simple in concept. A rift, or something close enough to one, was opened. The subject was pushed through a non-local transition state. The rift closed.
There was no walking through distance. No folding a corridor from one place to another. No dramatic tunnel through shining light. The subject ceased to be here and became there. An event, not a journey.
If the material universe was a chessboard, then most travel required moving a piece square by square. Walking. Driving. Flying. Sailing through the void. All of it obeyed intervening distance.
Dimensional transmission allowed someone to pick up the piece and place it elsewhere.
The danger lay in placement.
The machine's intelligence had performed vast calculations to anchor the receiving point, but without a locator beacon at the destination, accuracy would inevitably degrade. A few meters of drift meant nothing to a warship translating into empty void. A few meters of drift meant everything to a human body inside a hive.
A few meters could place a man inside a wall.
A few centimeters could fuse bone with metal.
The answer was not elegance. It was procedure.
Let the machine calculate longer. Increase positional certainty. Send the first subject with a beacon. Once someone arrived and planted a fixed locator, every later transmission could lock onto it with near-zero deviation. From there, networks could be built. Fortress to outpost. Outpost to surface. Surface to orbital platform. Eventually, one day, system to system.
The theory was sound.
The implementation needed power.
A lot of power.
The laboratory doors slammed open.
"New Kato just lost power!" Klein burst into the chamber with two guards at his back, coat half-fastened and expression sharpened by alarm. "Half the district is dark, the western manufactorum grid is dead, and the civilian shelters are demanding answers. We're investigating—"
"I drained the grid for this experiment," Qin Mo said.
Klein stopped so abruptly that one of the guards nearly ran into him.
"You what?"
Qin Mo turned from the machine with the mild irritation of a man interrupted during a useful thought. "Dimensional transmission requires substantial energy. The test proved the requirement."
Klein looked past him at the prisoner collapsed in the far cell, then at the machine still venting heat, then at the dimming lumen strips overhead.
"New Kato blacked out because you moved one man across a room?"
"Across one hundred and twelve meters," Qin Mo corrected.
Klein closed his eyes for a moment. "That is worse."
Qin Mo did not argue. The result was what it was. New Kato had lost power, and the prisoner had barely crossed the length of a parade square. Scaling the system would require dedicated generation, storage banks, transmission relays, and probably a new distribution architecture beneath the fortress.
All solvable problems.
Klein opened his eyes again, worry cutting through his irritation. "Did it work?"
His voice had changed. The anger remained, but it now carried something more fragile beneath it. Hope was dangerous in the Underhive. Men learned to handle it like unstable ammunition.
If Qin Mo said no, the blackout would be nothing more than another failure paid for by a frightened city.
Qin Mo answered plainly. "Yes. It worked."
Klein exhaled. Some of the tension left his shoulders. Behind him, one guard made the sign of the Aquila before remembering where he was and lowering his hand.
"Then…" Klein began, more carefully now. "Does this mean we can finally leave the Underhive?"
"Of course."
The answer landed in the chamber with more force than the experiment had.
Klein stared at him. For months, the Underhive had been their prison, battlefield, refuge, and workshop. The ascent route was sealed. The lower hive might as well have been another planet. Men had died trying to hold ground they did not even know how to escape. Families had rebuilt their lives beneath rock, steel, and ash because the world above had become unreachable.
And Qin Mo said "of course" as if he were discussing a door that needed a better hinge.
Qin Mo turned to him fully. "In five days, once I've mass-produced the safeguard packs and built dedicated power storage, we'll be able to move personnel in and out."
Klein's mouth opened, then closed. His thoughts moved visibly across his face: the lower hive, his family, old streets, old obligations, clean official air, the political consequences of returning with an army that should have been dead. For one unguarded moment, joy broke through the commander's exhaustion.
He could go home. He could see whether home still existed.
Then Qin Mo spoke again.
"Mobilize all military forces in three days."
Klein's expression collapsed back into alarm. "What?"
"Begin readiness preparations. Ammunition, armor, transport drones, medical reserves, command relays. Full mobilization."
"Why?" Klein demanded. "The heretics are dead. The cult is broken. The Patriarch is dead. The Magus is captured. What war are we mobilizing for?"
Qin Mo looked toward the darkened machine. Its conduits still glowed faintly, each pulse reflected in his eyes.
"The heretics are dead," he said. "But the people who betrayed us are still alive."
Klein went still. The chamber seemed colder after that. Even Grot stopped watching the prisoner and turned his attention to Qin Mo.
Qin Mo's voice remained calm. That made the words worse.
"I have no intention of starting a war the moment we reach the lower hive. But I will not lead our people out of one prison and into another. If the Governor, the spire authorities, the Ecclesiarchy, the PDF command remnants, or anyone else decides we are more convenient as corpses than witnesses, we will be ready."
Klein swallowed hard. He had enough experience with Imperial politics to understand the danger. Survival was not always rewarded. Sometimes it was incriminating. Sometimes men who returned from the wrong battlefield carrying the wrong truth were treated as contamination.
And Qin Mo was not merely returning with survivors.
He was returning with an army, impossible weapons, self-directed machines, a civilian city that worshiped him more than he liked, a captured heretic Magus, and proof that the official story of the Underhive war had been a lie.
Klein lowered his gaze, already calculating supply schedules, unit readiness, officer assignments, and which commanders would panic when they heard the order.
"Understood," he said.
Qin Mo turned back to the prototype. "Good. Restore civilian power first. Then divert fabrication capacity to safeguard packs. I want the next test performed with full shielding active from the start."
From inside the receiving cell, the prisoner gave a weak, horrified sound.
Grot glanced at him, then at Qin Mo. "Next test?"
Qin Mo looked over his shoulder. "Did you think one success was enough?"
Grot sighed. "No. I was hoping you might."
Qin Mo almost smiled. Then his attention returned to the machine, to the calculations, and to the path upward that now existed in theory, awaiting only refinement, power, and five days of work.
Above them, New Kato sat in darkness.
Below them, the fortress hummed.
And between the Underhive and the lower hive, the first real door had finally opened.