Moments later.
Teleportation light flared through a corridor outside the Blackstone Fortress's command sanctum. Abaddon materialized at its center, his boots striking the deck as his retinue spread around him. Behind them, successive squads of Black Legion warriors arrived in overlapping bursts of light.
The pre-installed teleport beacons had remained active despite the silence on every command frequency. They had delivered his company precisely where intended. Nothing else looked as it should.
Abaddon recognized the fortress. A Red Corsairs emblem remained visible on an interface housing, half-buried beneath newly laid cables. He remembered inspecting this approach before handing the ancient weapon over to Huron Blackheart.
This was not the Will of Eternity.
He kept that conclusion to himself and advanced.
Cables covered the walls in tightly packed layers, passing over doorframes and descending into openings cut through the deck. Some wore ordinary insulation. Others were sheathed in translucent tissue through which dark fluid moved in regular pulses. Wherever the bundles crossed, metal clamps and strips of sutured muscle held them together.
The air smelled of heated lubricant and chemical preservatives. Warm droplets fell from an overhead junction and hissed against a warrior's pauldron. He glanced upward without breaking formation.
Along the corridor, mechanisms had been mounted over the fortress's older control stations. Servo-skulls protruded from their housings, their jaws wired shut around bundles of connectors. Other units contained faces behind curved glass. Their eyes followed the passing warriors, but none attempted to speak.
Battle damage remained visible beneath the alterations. A ruptured bulkhead had been braced with overlapping plates, and fresh welds glowed along a passage sealed against vacuum. Spider-like daemon engines worked across the damaged surfaces, anchoring themselves with hooked limbs while their mechadendrites cut, stitched, and joined.
One dragged a severed length of conduit toward an open panel. A human head hung beneath its armored body, the mouth held open by iron staples. Its throat worked soundlessly as the engine fed the conduit into place.
There were noises enough: cutters biting into metal, pumps cycling, claws scraping across blackstone. What Abaddon could not hear was a functioning garrison. No overseers shouted at repair gangs. No sentries challenged his warriors. His vox carried the reports of his own company and nothing from the fortress's crew.
"Weapons ready."
The order came from the warrior leading the advance. Bolters rose along the corridor. A plasma weapon hummed as its bearer brought it to readiness, keeping the muzzle clear of the cables overhead.
"Hold your fire until I give the word," Abaddon said. "Secure the arrival point. Keep the return beacon active."
Squads peeled away to cover the approaches. His retinue continued with him.
He had seen more elaborate horrors in the Eye of Terror. What concerned him was the extent of the work and the fact that someone had performed it aboard a weapon essential to his campaign without seeking his permission.
Huron had neither the resources nor the mastery to remake the fortress like this during a retreat. An ordinary boarding force would have occupied its control stations. Whoever had arrived here had rebuilt them.
They reached the command doors. A Legionnaire stepped toward the access mechanism, then stopped.
The familiar control panel had disappeared beneath a metallic skull. Its lower jaw was fixed directly into the locking assembly, and thin tubes entered the sockets around its eyes. As the warrior approached, the lenses brightened red.
A narrow beam passed over his armor, shifted beyond him, and settled on Abaddon.
Something clicked wetly inside the skull. Abaddon's armor registered a demand for identification, followed by recognition of his command cipher and gene-signature.
The locks disengaged. Muscular bands contracted around the door's rim, drawing its metal segments apart in one smooth movement.
Abaddon crossed the threshold and stopped.
His raised claw halted the warriors behind him.
The command sanctum's open floor had vanished beneath machinery. Thick cables descended from the upper walls and spread between banks of iron cabinets, nutrient vessels, and housings assembled from the remains of the old consoles. Severed heads occupied many of them. Some were enclosed in glass; others had been bolted directly into the equipment, their eyes exposed above plates that covered their mouths.
A row of faces turned toward Abaddon together.
At the center of the chamber, the former commanding magos rose from a throne of fused circuitry and buckled ceramite. What remained of the priest was embedded within a construct nearly ten meters tall. Braced limbs supported its weight on either side of the dais, while cables tethered its spine to the machinery behind it.
Abaddon recognized the split bronze mask and the arrangement of ocular lenses. The rest of the priest had become difficult to distinguish from his station. His original arms hung inside a larger framework of manipulators, the fingers still working at controls that no longer existed.
"What… is this madness?" Abaddon muttered.
The magos's lenses focused on him. A strip of human skin tightened beneath the mask, but no answer came.
The crew had not simply abandoned their stations. Abaddon could see fragments of their robes caught beneath mounting brackets, identification plates fixed to nutrient housings, and familiar Mechanicum rank insignia among the machinery.
They were still here. Someone had found new uses for them.
"These are my gifts to you."
The voice sounded from behind the central dais. Every surviving speaker in the chamber repeated it without the slightest delay.
"A more obedient Blackstone Fortress."
Abaddon's retinue turned toward the sound. Weapons tracked the gap between two interface pylons. The Warmaster held his claw steady, maintaining the order not to fire.
A horned figure emerged from the shadows. Its forge hammer hung loosely in one hand; the long metal claws of the other brushed a cable aside with surprising care. Exposed muscle tightened around an iron frame, moving in concert with the pistons beneath it. Folded mechanical wings shifted behind its shoulders.
As it cleared the dais, its feet lifted from the floor. A low vibration passed through the nearest equipment, and loose scraps of metal trembled beneath it. Orange light burned in its eyes.
The chamber vanished from Abaddon's sight.
A black world beneath furnace smoke. Foundries extending across continents, their loading galleries crowded with chained creatures and unfinished engines. Rivers of molten slag shone through breaks in the crust.
The vision narrowed to a forge. A daemon strained against restraints while machines closed an armored chassis around it. Its limbs were broken, repositioned, and fastened into the mechanism. When the restraints opened, a war engine dragged itself from the assembly cradle.
Beyond that forge stood thousands more. Each supplied weapons to wars that would furnish the souls and material for the next production cycle.
The impressions arrived too quickly to examine, yet their meaning was unmistakable. Abaddon recognized the power announcing itself through them. A name came with it.
Vashtorr the Arkifane.
Master of the Soul Forges. A demigod of Chaos whose industry supplied the wars of powers greater than himself and whose ambitions extended well beyond supplying them.
Abaddon forced his attention back to the chamber. He had clenched the Talon without realizing it. He opened his hand slowly.
Another impression followed: this command sanctum, its priests kneeling before their rescuer. Their implants locked them in place as the work began. Flesh was separated from augmetics; brains and nerve tissue were incorporated into new assemblies. The killing followed a deliberate order, each death feeding the machinery taking shape around the next victim.
Vashtorr had murdered the crew and put their remains back to work. The devices sustained whatever awareness remained in the heads and spinal remnants before him. Fragments of their minds had been bound into the command network, stripped of the ability to refuse its demands.
The vision ended. One of the heads beside the dais blinked.
Abaddon stepped farther into the room. His warriors adjusted around him, keeping the daemon in their firing arcs.
"You silenced the fortress."
"Its command network required reconstruction," Vashtorr replied. "The previous arrangement was inadequate."
He extended one claw toward the magos. The towering construct straightened, and a hololithic representation of the fortress appeared above the dais. Damage still scarred its radial arms. Entire stretches of secondary armament remained dark. Beneath those losses, however, propulsion and control indicators held steady.
Abaddon studied the display.
"Have you mastered its systems?"
"Not all of them." Vashtorr's answer came without embarrassment. "Enough to make it useful to you."
A series of command pathways brightened across the projection, linking the new machinery to the ancient structure beneath it. The additions regulated systems the former crew had spent the battle trying to restart. Where commands had previously stalled or contradicted one another, a single instruction now passed through.
"Its older mechanisms retain much that interests me," Vashtorr continued. "You require reliable propulsion, working weapons, and an answer when you issue an order. Those matters have been addressed."
Abaddon looked from the projection to the ruined priest.
"Obedient to whom?"
"You."
The answer was immediate. Vashtorr regarded him with the patient attention of an artificer waiting for a customer to examine the work.
Abaddon had no intention of mistaking the demonstration for generosity. Typhus wanted fleets committed to his wars. Huron wanted prizes and technology. This creature had intervened at the precise moment the crusade depended upon recovering a weapon. Its purpose might be less obvious, but it would have one.
"What is it you want?" Abaddon growled.
Vashtorr lowered his hand.
"For this? Nothing. This is no bargain. I have asked for neither payment nor an oath."
Abaddon didn't believe that for a second. Vashtorr was playing a deeper game, one not of barter but of conceptual ambition, much like the Dark Gods themselves. War, bloodshed, scheming, decay these were the currencies of the warp.
Vashtorr had his own domain, his own ambitions.
He looked again at the new command network. Vashtorr had displayed his capabilities, preserved the campaign, and ensured that Abaddon would remember who had done so. Perhaps that was sufficient return for the moment.
"You have gone to considerable trouble," Abaddon said.
"The work was worthwhile."
Vashtorr's gaze passed over the damage projection with something approaching professional satisfaction. He seemed less interested in Abaddon's approval than in the fact that the mechanisms now performed as intended.
Then his attention returned to the Warmaster.
"The Vengeful Spirit would require a separate arrangement."
Abaddon went still.
"Your flagship is being towed," Vashtorr continued. "Two of her main drive units have been destroyed. Her surviving systems are carrying loads they cannot safely sustain in their present condition. She limps now. I would see her fly."
He spoke without relish, identifying damaged components as another commander might name positions on a map.
"I could restore them. Quickly. For a small price," Vashtorr added.
Abaddon's gaze moved to the magos embedded in the command throne. The priest's hands were still operating absent controls.
He imagined the bridge of the Vengeful Spirit rebuilt around such obedience: its command interfaces transformed, its crew incorporated into mechanisms whose workings only their maker understood.
His grip tightened around the hilt of Drach'nyen.
"I will not allow the Vengeful Spirit to be defiled."
The daemon followed his glance toward the magos.
"You have not heard my terms."
For several seconds, neither moved. Behind Abaddon, a Legionnaire shifted his stance to keep the forge hammer in view past the central pylon.
Vashtorr inclined his horned head. Joints hissed in his neck. He offered no protest, no wounded pride, and no threat to withdraw what he had already provided.
His wings folded closer to his frame as he drifted back between the pylons. The orange light of his eyes diminished. A moment later, the shadows held only machinery.
Vashtorr had left without naming his price or securing an agreement. Abaddon turned to the magos.
"Restore communications with the Vengeful Spirit. Command traffic is to pass through my fleet cipher."
The construct answered with a burst of binharic speech, followed by a flat human voice.
"Command acknowledged."
A transmission indicator appeared above the dais. The flagship returned an authentication challenge; the fortress answered it. For the first time since its arrival, a continuous link connected the two vessels.
Abaddon waited until the exchange completed.
"Reduce our relative motion. Match the flagship's course."
The propulsion indicators changed together. Through the deck, he felt a sustained vibration as the fortress's drives adjusted. The hololith showed its path bending clear of the nearest damaged cruiser. Every drive cluster remained on the network and responded to the correction.
He watched through the next correction before speaking again.
"This fortress is now the New Will of Eternity. Move it to the rear of the fleet. Await further command."
The magos bowed as far as its tethers permitted.
"Designation entered. Formation order accepted."
A recognition signal passed into the fleet net under the new name. On the tactical projection, the fortress moved toward its assigned station with measured, uninterrupted thrust. Its main weapon remained available, though damaged secondary batteries still marked the outline of its hull.
Abaddon studied the course until the surrounding ships had cleared it. Then he ordered the company to prepare for extraction.
The fortress had finally obeyed him. Whatever Vashtorr intended, Abaddon now had a functioning weapon instead of an uncontrolled threat.
For the first time since boarding, satisfaction eased his expression.
The war could continue.
…
Aboard the bridge of the Vengeful Spirit.
"Contact reestablished," the communications officer reported. "The fortress has accepted its formation orders. Command authentication is valid."
He checked the exchange a second time. Each request had received a complete response, without delay, commentary, or the usual disputes between the garrison officers and their Mechanicum overseers. Even the damage report had arrived without an explanation of who ought to be blamed for it.
The officer opened a voice channel.
"Confirm readiness to receive the Warmaster's next orders."
"Readiness confirmed."
The words came in the same voice that had answered the last three requests, with precisely the same volume and cadence. He marked the channel operational and kept listening.
When Abaddon returned to the bridge, Typhus and the acting commander of the Red Corsair contingent were waiting beside the tactical display. Neither had taken a seat.
Repair crews worked beneath an opened section of the command deck, passing replacement conductor assemblies through a narrow gap between stations. The damaged forward console had been covered with a sheet of metal. Beyond the warded viewport, the towing cruisers held their positions against the shifting light of the Immaterium.
Abaddon walked past the repairs toward his throne. The Corsair captain's attention remained fixed on the recovered fortress's identification rune. Typhus watched the Warmaster instead.
"Only one Blackstone Fortress made it back?" Typhus asked, his voice a rasp through decaying vox filters.
"Perhaps the other was destroyed," Abaddon replied as he lowered himself onto the command throne.
There was still no confirmed report from the missing construct. He had no reason to offer his allies a more hopeful assessment.
Typhus turned toward the display. One fortress had become the basis of a campaign that had depended upon two only hours before. His silence made his opinion plain enough.
The Corsair captain stepped closer.
"Was that the one you gave us?"
Abaddon rested the Talon of Horus upon the throne's armrest.
"No. This is the Will of Eternity."
The lie came without hesitation.
"I will find something else for you. Something better than a Blackstone Fortress."
The captain's gaze flicked from Abaddon to the freshly registered designation. His jaw worked once. He had arrived at the council determined to preserve Huron's claim, and now the Warmaster was disposing of it in front of the entire bridge.
Abaddon allowed him time to understand the position.
The surviving fortress acknowledged Black Legion commands. Its old crew could no longer testify to its ownership, and the warriors who had boarded it had returned with Abaddon. Challenging the claim would require considerably more than pointing at an identification rune.
The captain drew breath. Typhus spoke first.
"There is always the Planet Killer," he said. "You still possess that, do you not? Give him the super-heavy warship. A generous replacement."
A low rasp escaped his vox-grille. Whether it was amusement or the movement of diseased lungs was difficult to tell.
The Corsair captain looked toward him sharply. The suggestion had made Abaddon's vague promise of compensation uncomfortably specific.
Abaddon ignored it. His gaze settled on the recovered fortress's position behind the fleet..
"The fortress is back. We proceed with the plan."
The captain at the navigation station straightened. Scribes and signal officers reached for their instruments. Around the command pit, conversations stopped as officers turned toward the throne.
"Set course for the Anuari system," Abaddon said. "Burn every celestial body in it. Then we move on. Repeat the cycle until the rift grows wide enough to engulf entire worlds."
The target designation passed across the command stations. Officers began translating the order into arrival dispositions, firing positions, and withdrawal routes.
Abaddon indicated the fortress.
"The Blackstone takes priority on the approach. Our remaining cruisers will cover its firing position. No vessel breaks away to raid or collect prisoners."
His gaze moved briefly to the Corsair commander before returning to the chart.
"Record the empyric conditions before the first discharge and after every target is destroyed. I want measurements of what changes."
Typhus's helm tilted toward him. They would test the ritual's promised reach, still unproven at the council, while they had a fleet capable of exploiting the result.
The Corsair captain looked once more at the fortress's designation. He made no acknowledgment of the promised replacement. Instead, he turned and left the bridge, his boots striking hard against the deck.
Typhus lingered long enough to read the proposed approach to Anuari. Then he followed, the flies around his armor gathering into a dark cloud as he passed through the bulkhead.
They had made no further threats to leave and offered no allegiance beyond the next operation. For the moment, both were returning to prepare their ships.
Abaddon leaned back into the throne.
Across the tactical display, Black Legion vessels acknowledged the movement order. The towing cruisers adjusted their fields, easing the wounded Vengeful Spirit onto the new course without placing additional strain upon its ruined stern. Surviving squadrons shifted around it, leaving space for ships whose damaged drives responded slowly.
At the rear, the Blackstone Fortress matched the formation without hesitation.
The Plague Fleet followed. Then the Red Corsairs began taking their assigned positions.
Beyond the viewport, running lights moved through the Warp's uncertain glow. Abaddon watched until the last allied formation committed to the course.
"Let them bare their necks and wait…" he whispered. "This war is far from over."
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