The Vigil Before the Breach

The hangar smelled like promethium and wet ceramite. Somebody near the Thunderhawk ramp had been praying for an hour and kept getting stuck on the same verse.

Mathias knelt with his sword planted point-down between his knees and his forehead against the crossguard. He’d been trying to run the vow in his head since they dropped out of the warp, and it kept coming apart on him, like a name he’d been told once and never written down.

“You grip that blade as though it might be taken from you.”

He didn’t look up. Hadrian’s left knee had a particular creak, and Mathias had learned to hear him coming from across a deck.

“Forgive me, brother.”

“There is nothing to forgive. Ease your hand.” Hadrian lowered himself to the deck, which took a while. He was a hundred and sixty-some years old and his armor looked every day of it: mismatched greaves, one pauldron clearly older than the other, a long run of nicks down the right shoulder he’d stopped counting around his first century. “The words will not settle?”

“I know the words. They simply do not feel like anything.”

“Ah.” Hadrian rubbed his jaw. His helm was off, and under the hangar lights his face looked like leather left out in the rain. “That is as it should be, at first.”

“Is it?”

“It took me thirty years.”

Mathias stared at him. Hadrian was watching a servitor drag a crate of krak grenades across the deck, entirely unbothered.

“Thirty.”

“Near enough. I was not keeping a calendar.” He shrugged, and the armor groaned about it. “Some brothers receive it all at once. The light through the window, the great moment. Most of us said the words until the day we noticed we meant them.”

Across the hangar the Marshal stood with the Chaplain, both of them studying a schematic of the manufactorum. The low glow from the data slate suggested that forty thousand workers lived and labored in that complex. Three days ago the cult had taken it. Nobody knew how long it had been rotting from within, only that the vox had gone silent, and when it returned last night it carried chanting instead of voices. Mathias kept thinking about one log in particular, recovered from the hab-blocks: a woman, very calm, reading out a block number and asking if anyone was coming. He’d listened to it several times.

“I do not know what to swear,” he said.

“What does the Chaplain counsel?”

“The purging of the heretics. It is a good vow. But it is not the one I keep returning to.”

Hadrian waited. He was good at that.

“There are still people alive beneath that foundry,” Mathias said at last. “I would have them brought out. All who can be. That is the whole of it. It is not much to set beside the banners.”

“Say it again.”

“I would have all who live in there brought out.”

“Then that is your vow.” Hadrian rose, one knee at a time. “The Chaplain will call it a small thing, and then he will bless it regardless. He always does.”

“You are certain?”

“I am certain you should speak it twice before we drop. Aloud, so that it takes.”

Overhead, the breaching charges began to whine as they armed. The Marshal’s voice cut across the vox, flat and carrying: “Brothers, to your stations.”

Mathias stood. His hands had stopped shaking, though he couldn’t have said when. He spoke the vow once under his breath, then again, louder, and Hadrian was already walking toward the ramp, helm under his arm, not looking back.