Days had passed since the beginning of the Shipyard Project.
Inside one of New Kato's vast industrial megastructures, Grot sat motionless on the factory floor beneath rows of amber lumen-strips. Around him rose an endless hive of alloy struts, suspended gantries, echoing freight lifts, and humming conduit-banks that carried power through the city like blood through metal veins.
Before him, a battered logistics drone lay half-disassembled on a maintenance cradle.
The machine had been crushed during a recent raw-material extraction run. Its outer shell had folded inward like discarded tin, two repulsor nodes had been torn from their housings, and its internal servos leaked iridescent synthetic lubricant through the grated ferrocrete floor.
Another drone hovered beside it in perfect condition, working with silent precision. Segmented arms unfolded from its spherical chassis, each tipped with microtools finer than surgical needles. It removed damaged components, sealed ruptured lines, printed replacement joints, and reassembled the broken machine without hesitation, complaint, or wasted movement.
Grot watched.
His hands rested idly on his coveralls.
He was a maintenance technician now, at least on paper. In practice, the title meant almost nothing.
It was a placeholder. A distraction. A polite fiction dressed up as employment.
It was something to do.
A charity job, though no one called it that aloud. New Kato did not truly need most of its human workers anymore. Drones mined, carried, welded, sorted, repaired, inspected, and manufactured with tireless consistency. Human labor had not vanished, but it had become optional in too many places for men like Grot to ignore.
So the city gave them assignments. Schedules. Identification tags. Work rotations. Something resembling purpose.
Food, shelter, safety, and a reason to get out of bed.
Most of the workers stood around just as he did. Some leaned against tool cabinets. Others pretended to inspect status panels they did not understand. A few stared at the drones with expressions that hovered between awe, resentment, and quiet humiliation.
No one spoke.
No one needed to.
Eventually, the damaged drone's core light flickered from red to blue. Its repulsors hummed. It lifted from the cradle, steadied itself, and drifted away to resume the duties that had nearly destroyed it.
The repair drone closed its tools and glided toward the next damaged unit.
Grot remained where he was.
In that moment, the truth settled on him with the weight of cold metal.
This work did not matter.
He did not matter.
A black spherical drone floated toward a nearby worker. Its matte surface pulsed faintly with data-runes, and its vox-emitter crackled to life in a flat mechanical voice.
["Personnel #488181. Occupation: Worker. You have completed one continuous month of service. You are now permitted to access the chapel for psychological decompression."]
The worker stood at once. He did not look relieved. He did not look confused. He simply obeyed, as people in New Kato often did when machines spoke with Qin Mo's authority behind them.
Then the drone turned to Grot.
["Personnel #4. Designation: Thunderborn. You have not undergone stress relief since the last recorded active conflict. Your psychological profile indicates unresolved trauma. You are granted leave to visit the chapel for decompression."]
Grot stared at the drone for a moment, then smirked. He reached out and gave its smooth plating a light slap.
"I'm not a Thunderborn anymore. You really ought to update your database, buddy."
The drone did not answer. Its surface pulsed once, recording the comment without judgment.
Grot stood, rolled his shoulders, and walked out of the factory.
Although standard work hours were still in effect, stress-relief leave overrode ordinary schedules. Anyone granted permission could leave immediately. In New Kato, emotional collapse was treated like an equipment fault: undesirable, predictable, and best corrected before it damaged something important.
As Grot and the others left their facilities, they merged with workers from neighboring manufactoria, forming a quiet procession through the city's industrial arteries.
New Kato unfolded around them in layers of light, steel, glass, and controlled motion. Skywalks of luminous graphene arched between towers like veins filled with captured dawn. Pneumatic lift-tubes hissed and pulsed along the sides of buildings. Service drones zipped through neon-marked lanes, obedient as bees in a hive that never slept. Along the streets, air recyclers breathed steadily through armored vents, scrubbing away the smoke, rot, and chemical stink that had once defined life in Tyrone's lower levels.
Unlike the rest of Tyrone Hive, New Kato had breathable air.
It had nutrient-rich food that did not taste like punishment.
It had clean water, stable power, functioning sanitation, and streets where a man could walk without expecting a knife in the dark.
It was not just a city. It was a prototype for something beyond the Imperium's rusted habits.
A cybernetic miracle.
A controlled experiment.
A fortress pretending to be a home.
The procession continued toward the cathedral-like heart of the city, a vast structure lit from within by cascading pillars of soft white and neon violet. From a distance, it looked like an inverted sunrise trapped inside glass and steel.
Then a Sentinel-class security drone descended into their path.
Its red and blue warning lights pulsed rhythmically. The locking clamps beneath its chassis disengaged with a sharp, deliberate click, revealing the underslung heavy bolter mounted under its armored body.
The crowd stopped at once.
No one shouted. No one complained.
A bright scanning beam swept over them from left to right, washing faces, ID tags, tools, scars, and old battlefield implants in cold light. Grot felt the beam pass across his chest and throat, then move on.
["Thank you for complying with the mandatory security scan. Have a productive cycle."]
With that monotone confirmation, the drone's weapon locked back into standby. It rose several meters, rotated, and drifted away to patrol another sector.
New Kato was orderly.
It was efficient.
It was safe.
But only because watchful eyes were everywhere.
Grot did not love that.
But he understood it.
This was not paradise. It was too cold for that. Too measured. Too full of machines that knew every citizen by number before they knew them by name. But it was cleaner, quieter, and more merciful than the festering hellscapes most hive worlds called civilization.
And Grot knew Qin Mo had not built New Kato for happiness.
He had built it to survive.
To function.
To prepare for war.
Yet despite its coldness, despite the surveillance, despite the way human hands had become secondary to steel and code, it was still better than what had come before.
That was the part that made it hard to hate.
The group continued onward and entered the chapel.
Above ground, the building was a monument to Imperial faith. Its grand halls rose in bright tiers of polished stone, steel buttresses, and translucent glass. Incense drifted beneath vaulted ceilings. Vox-fed litanies murmured through hidden speakers. Holographic images of the Emperor stood above the central nave, stern and radiant, His gaze cast over every supplicant who entered.
Workers bowed their heads as they passed through. Some did so out of faith. Others did it because the chapel's cameras watched just as closely as the drones outside.
The true function of the chapel lay far below.
Grot stepped into an elevator with several other workers. The doors closed, sealing out the hymns. The lift descended without music, prayer, or conversation. Floor indicators slipped past in cold blue digits as the air grew drier and the scent of incense gave way to sterilized metal.
When the doors opened, Grot entered a long corridor lined with dozens of identical doors. Each door bore a bio-ID scanner, a status light, and subtle red warning glyphs. The walls were smooth, soundproofed, and too clean, giving the place the feeling of a medicae ward that had decided emotions were another form of contamination.
Each door led to a private decompression chamber.
Workers could enter, seal themselves inside, and relieve stress through fully immersive simulations: sanctioned fantasies, controlled violence, memory reconstructions, false beaches, false victories, and other carefully monitored escapes from the endless rhythm of drone-run labor.
Grot chose an unoccupied room and stepped inside.
The door sealed behind him.
For a heartbeat, the chamber remained dark and sterile. Then the walls dissolved into mist. The floor softened beneath his boots. The air changed, carrying a faint salt tang and the humid warmth of an ocean breeze.
Suddenly, Grot stood on a serene beach. White sand stretched beneath a searing sun. Waves rolled gently against the shore, each one glittering under a vibrant azure sky too clean to belong anywhere in Tyrone Hive.
Two bottles of alcohol emerged from the sand beside him, condensation already beading on the glass.
A holographic prompt appeared before his eyes.
["Would you like to continue: Loyalists vs. Traitor Xenos?"]
Grot looked at the prompt for a long moment.
Then he nodded.
"Continue."
The beach shattered.
A lasrifle materialized in his hands. The sand became mud. The ocean wind became smoke. The clean sky vanished behind fire, ash, and the thunder of artillery.
Once again, Grot relived the Great Counteroffensive.
Once again, he fought side by side with fallen brothers.
Once again, he experienced war not as a Thunderborn warrior wrapped in impossible armor, but as a common soldier with a lasrifle, a failing charge pack, and men screaming beside him.
Only this time, no one truly died.
No brother was lost forever. No body had to be left behind because the retreat horn sounded. No blood remained on his hands after the chamber ended.
Only the comfort of a lie wrapped in fire, glory, and familiar voices.
When the simulation ended, Grot stood alone in the dark chamber with the phantom weight of a lasrifle still lingering in his hands. He flexed his fingers until the feeling faded, then exited and took the elevator back up.
As the doors slid open, he froze.
A man in gold-trimmed Thunderborn armor waited outside.
Grey, Commander of New Kato's Thunderborn, stood with his arms crossed, leaning casually against the wall as if he had not just turned every passing worker nervous by existing there. His armor was polished but scarred, its plating bearing the clean maintenance marks of someone who respected equipment without worshiping it.
Passing workers stole quick glances at him. Some looked awed. Others quickly lowered their eyes. A few altered their path entirely rather than walk too close to a Thunderborn commander waiting outside the decompression chambers.
Grot grinned.
"What, even Captain Grey comes here to play Loyalists vs. Traitor Xenos?"
He stepped forward and embraced his old friend with enough force to make the armor's servos complain.
Grey chuckled and returned the embrace.
"I don't like that game," Grey said. "I prefer watching a movie called Super Grey Kills a Million Heretic Scumbags."
Grot barked a laugh.
Then Grey's expression changed. The humor remained on his face for one last second before duty pushed it aside.
"Maya has been found."
For a moment, Grot did not move.
The corridor noise faded. Workers passed them in both directions, but he heard none of them. His hands trembled first. Then his eyes widened. His breath hitched as if his chest had forgotten how to work.
Grey had seen men wounded. He had seen men die. He had seen soldiers break under terror, rage, grief, and relief. Grot did not break loudly. He simply stood there, huge and motionless, while tears and snot streamed down his face like a dam had cracked somewhere behind his eyes.
Grey placed a hand on his shoulder.
"Her new quarters are next to yours," he said gently. "Go home after duty. You'll see her then. You'll also need to teach her the rules of living in New Kato."
Grot wiped his face with the back of his hand, smearing tears across his cheek.
"Rules? Like what?"
Grey's mouth twitched.
"For starters? No unauthorized entertainment feeds. No ignoring evacuation sirens. No resisting Sentinel scans."
He paused, then tapped the side of his own head.
"And most importantly, don't panic when the city already knows where you live, what you eat, how many hours you slept, and whether your left knee joint is developing a limp."
Grot let out a strangled laugh. It was ugly, wet, and honest.
Grey's smirk softened.
"The Lord Commander designed a gene-tracing device just to find her. Imagine if the machine had dragged in some meathead and we had to say, 'Good news, Grot, here's your sister.'"
Grot laughed harder, though the tears kept coming.
For several seconds, he could not speak.
Then Grey's expression shifted again.
"Also... your brother."
Grot's face darkened at once. Joy did not vanish, but it retreated behind something older and heavier. He took a deep breath. "He's dead, isn't he?"
Grey nodded.
"Yes, but—"
Grot cut him off with a raised hand.
"You don't have to explain."
Grey fell silent.
Grot stared past him, toward nothing visible in the corridor. His voice came quieter now, rough with memory rather than tears.
"My brother never yelled at me. Not really. He used violence, yes, but he never relied on it. He was disciplined. Controlled. The sort of man who could break someone's jaw and still make it feel like he'd made a measured decision."
His jaw tightened.
"But back then, something was wrong. It was like he wasn't in control. When I looked into his eyes, it was like staring into a hollow shell. Like he was trapped inside himself, pounding on the walls, begging me to help him, and all I could do was stand there and watch the thing wearing his face."
Grey lowered his head.
He had no answer for that. No clean one. No answer that would make the dead less dead or the memory less poisonous.
So he gave the only thing he could.
"Call me if you ever need anything."
He clasped Grot's shoulder once, firm and brief.
"I've got recruitment duties to handle, but tomorrow night, we drink."
Grot swallowed, wiped his face again, and managed a weak smirk.
"Sounds good."
....
Elsewhere…
"He's got sharp instincts," Qin Mo remarked.
Grot's image faded from the projection screen, leaving the room lit only by the pale glow of tactical displays and the soft pulse of data-runes scrolling across nearby panels.
Grey stood beside the table, helmet tucked beneath one arm. For once, his usual dry humor did not come easily. Watching Grot grieve through a surveillance feed had not sat well with him, even if every psychological profile in New Kato was monitored for practical reasons.
"Yeah..." Grey said slowly. "So, uh... does this mean we give him his armor and title back?"
Qin Mo did not answer immediately.
A knock struck the door.
Grey glanced toward it. Qin Mo's expression remained calm, but unreadable.
"We'll discuss it later," Qin Mo said.
Then he raised his voice.
"Enter."
The door opened.
Duncan, commander of the 87th Regiment, stepped inside and saluted. He had cleaned his uniform before coming, but the habit of war still clung to him: shoulders squared too tightly, eyes checking corners without conscious thought, hands never far from where a weapon should be.
"You summoned me, my Lord?"
Qin Mo nodded.
"I heard you still keep a relic. A piece of your friend's remains."
Duncan's hands clenched before he could stop them.
Albert's ashes.
He had kept them sealed in a small container, wrapped in cloth and tucked away like contraband. Albert's final wish had been simple. Painfully simple.
To see the sky, even in death.
Duncan's throat tightened. He said nothing.
Qin Mo watched him for a moment, then spoke more softly.
"You know, most fallen soldiers had only two dying wishes."
Duncan lifted his eyes.
"One," Qin Mo said, "entrust their families to their comrades."
He paused.
"Two: see the sky one last time."
Duncan nodded nervously, his jaw tightening hard enough to ache.
He had heard those wishes too many times. In trenches. In burning corridors. In medicae stations without enough morphia. In the mouths of men whose lungs were filling with blood while they asked for something no commander could give them.
Qin Mo's gaze shifted toward the ceiling, though above them lay only steel, rock, and the vast machinery of New Kato.
"Now," he said, a faint smile touching his face, "they won't just see the sky."
Duncan went still.
Qin Mo looked back at him.
"They'll watch over us from beyond it."