Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

A brief silence fell over the laboratory.

An invisible pressure filled the air, yet the Dreadnought made no hostile move. Lin's gaze stayed locked on the sarcophagi plating, as though he could stare straight through that cold metal at the soul hidden within.

After a moment, a low sigh came from the Dreadnought's vox-amplifiers.

The voice was no longer the cold, flat tone the Dreadnought produced through its vox-array system. This one carried the weight of long years and a weathered, hard-earned authority.

"I am Rogal Dorn."

Lin realized his gamble had paid off.

"When did you work it out?" Rogal Dorn asked.

"You never really tried to hide it. Your knowledge of the Shanzheng, the way you commune with its machine-spirit, your attitude toward the Soul Drinkers — and the fact that once you saw Admidel holding the Soulspear, you dropped the matter of my breaking into the cold storage vault entirely."

Lin spread his hands. "It's fifteen hundred years after the Great Heresy. Apart from a colonel of the Imperial Fists, who else could know those old affairs that well?"

"None of that is solid proof."

"Of course not. Which is why the important part was you admitting it yourself."

Rogal Dorn's fate had been a mystery ever since the Battle of the Iron Cage.

The traitor Primarch Perturabo had come within a hair of shattering the Imperial Fists in that engagement, but Dorn and his Legion had endured it.

Everyone assumed that a Legion which had survived such an ordeal would go on standing tall over Terra. Instead, Dorn vanished during an utterly unremarkable boarding action afterward, leaving his sons nothing but a severed arm.

No one knew how that Primarch's story truly ended. But the notion from Lin's past life — that one of the Centurion Warsuits standing in the Imperial Palace on Terra was Rogal Dorn — had given him the idea.

Centurion Warsuit technology had only been rediscovered in the Age of Apostasy. If Dorn had been entombed in a suit of armor long before that, then what could that armor possibly be?

The answer was obvious. It was this custom-built Dreadnought standing in front of him.

The voice within the sarcophagi spoke again. "You are perceptive, Lin. And rather unlike the other Priests."

Dorn's tone carried no judgment at all, as though he were simply stating a fact. Facing a Primarch for the first time, Lin felt none of the crushing presence such an encounter was supposed to bring — and Dorn's admission only sharpened his curiosity.

Why was he entombed in a Dreadnought? Why hide his identity within the Imperial Fists? Why stand by and watch the Imperial Fists be broken? Why refuse to step forward now, with the Imperium in crisis?

And why… had he manufactured an excuse to get Lin alone earlier?

The other questions were too pointed. Lin considered for a moment and decided to probe with the last one. "So, Lord Dorn, why conceal your identity and your strength in order to approach me? To keep watch on me, or to get something from me?"

"That is your misunderstanding. I have never concealed my strength."

"…What?"

Lin looked the Dreadnought over again from top to bottom.

Vast combat experience. Battlefield efficiency pushed to its absolute limit. The Dreadnought's performance in the fighting had been peerless — but only by the standards of a Dreadnought.

Ten thousand years later, a freshly awakened Guilliman could annihilate an invading force of the Black Legion with a single raised hand, moving faster than anyone could follow. A Primarch, a being with a Warp essence at his core, ought to perform far beyond anything a Dreadnought could manage.

And yet Dorn claimed he was holding nothing back?

For an instant Lin wondered whether this Dreadnought was an impostor, but he dismissed the thought almost at once. If Dorn spoke the truth, then Lin could think of only one explanation — the Battle of the Iron Cage, where the Imperial Fists had been ground into the dust.

He did not voice the thought, but Dorn had already read it in him. The Primarch offered no explanation, only a flat statement.

"Do not place any expectations on me. I am nothing more than a Dreadnought now."

"Nothing more than a Dreadnought…"

Lin turned the words over.

He had always thought vanishing while joyriding through the webway or being murdered by the Officio Assassinorum were bizarre enough ends. It had never occurred to him that a gene-forged Primarch could be reduced to this.

"Would you mind if I examined your condition, Lord Dorn?" Lin asked carefully.

Dorn didn't answer, but he opened the Contemptor Dreadnought's interface port of his own accord. Lin plugged in, accessed the sarcophagus self-diagnostic routine, and read Dorn's state without difficulty.

Beneath the sarcophagi lay a withered body.

Against the four-to-five-meter average height of a Primarch, Dorn now stood barely half that, his frame like a dead and shriveled tree. The rest of his organs had rotted just as badly, clinging to the faintest signs of life only through the nutrient fluids that bathed them.

If not for the missing left arm, Lin couldn't have identified him as Dorn from the sarcophagi readings at all.

Set aside their nature as lesser gods of the Warp — even the Primarchs' physical bodies, as vessels, were feats of gene-craft far beyond human comprehension.

Even Lorgar, mocked as the weakest Primarch, Primarch of the Word Bearers Legion, would not have fallen to a concerted assault by Astartes.

What in the Throne's name had happened after the Battle of the Iron Cage?

Lin was curious, but he could hardly pry outright. He settled for something oblique. "Lord Dorn, your condition… honestly exceeds my understanding."

"I do not expect you to solve it. Do not concern yourself. I came here only to discuss the matter of those Second Legion warriors."

The revelation of his identity had been incidental. Lin understood the conversation was now turning toward its real subject.

"You need not worry about their lineage, nor tamper with anything in the gene-bank. I chose to take them in a thousand years ago, and I choose the same now. Here, they are my true sons. That is my guarantee regarding the Second Legion."

"You recognized them?"

"Identifying a bloodline is no difficult thing. I heard that before the Second Legion was purged, it exiled a body of warriors led by its Terran-born. I sent men to search for them at the time, and found nothing. I never expected to meet them here — nor that they would have grown so far removed from what the Second Legion once was."

"Then the Second Legion's Primarch…?"

"That is a secret that should not be spoken of."

Dorn's tone hardened abruptly. Only after a pause did he add, "And it is something I do not understand either."

So the records and memories of the Second Primarch and the Eleventh had indeed been deliberately erased. That much was beyond doubt now.

Dorn moved to the dissection table and used his mechanical arm to spread out the dissected specimens of the creatures.

"You may not believe me, but this is the first time I have seen these organisms. Most of their structures are as precisely engineered, as flawless, as any defensive line I have ever built. I believe these creatures were deliberately designed — and that they are certainly entangled with the Second Legion's Primarch."

Given how those Soul Drinkers had behaved, the strange thing would be if there were no connection. What Lin wanted was something further along. "No deeper theory than that?"

"None. I do not even know whether the Second Primarch is alive or dead."

From any other Primarch, Lin might have doubted the statement. Coming out of Dorn's mouth, it carried real weight.

On the question of how deeply these things were tied to the Second Primarch, Dorn — a Primarch himself — knew no more than Lin did.

It seemed there was nothing more to be squeezed out of this Lictor. From here on, the only remaining consideration was its usefulness in unlocking new technologies.

That wasn't urgent. Lin's attention returned to Dorn's Dreadnought chassis.

The pressing issue now was Dorn himself, and the Imperial Fists.

"Lord Dorn, do you intend to keep operating as a Dreadnought, or to lead the Ultimate Wall again as a Primarch?"

The Ultimate Wall was Dorn's own contingency, laid down long ago. In an age where Guilliman lay on Macragge like some sleeping beauty, nothing could be more reasonable than Dorn stepping forward to lead the Legion under his own name.

Dorn might not trust Lin the way Kurande did, but this was a Primarch who had willingly stood up and vouched for those Second Legion veterans.

If Lin could latch onto a patron like that, would there be any shortage of benefits coming his way?

But Dorn rejected the idea. "My identity being exposed was an accident. I never intended to reveal myself this way — least of all at a time like this."

"Even with the Imperium in this much peril? Even now?" Lin pressed.

"What you see is not my choice. It is my reality. The Imperium needs the power of a Primarch, not the title of one. Were I to reveal myself now, I could not prove who I am — and the situation would only grow worse."

"Why couldn't you prove it? You'd only need to find the Custodes—"

"That was never the problem, Priest. What the Imperium needs has never been my identity. It is my strength. As I am now, I am nothing but a hollow symbol to them. They do not need a Primarch. They need a leader capable of taking them to victory."

Lin understood then that Dorn might genuinely be trapped inside that cold sarcophagi.

The transcendent flesh the Emperor's gene-craft had granted him was gone. His Warp essence had never once manifested. The Rogal Dorn standing before him seemed to have been stripped of everything that made a Primarch glorious.

That did explain how Lin had managed, in the earlier fighting, to hold his own alongside the Expunged Warband against a Primarch — this Primarch in name only was now bound entirely by the limits of the machine he piloted.

And if that was truly the case, then Rogal Dorn's existence really would introduce nothing but dangerous instability.

Power struggles, doctrinal schisms, enemies without and rot within. The Imperium's crisis might be less immediately dire than during the Great Heresy, but the situation was several times more tangled.

A gene-forged Primarch without power would, upon revealing himself, become nothing more than a game piece for every faction to fight over — or be quietly disposed of by someone's schemes.

This wasn't idle talk either. In this Imperium, even if the Emperor stood up off His toilet in person, there'd be men bold enough to plot how to shove Him back down and keep Him sitting on it. A powerless Primarch simply couldn't make waves in an Imperium where fists did the talking.

He had finally met a Primarch, and it did nothing whatsoever for his situation. Lin rapped his knuckles against his own skull, trying to sort out his thoughts. Dorn spoke first.

"Magos Lin, you are a clever man. Perhaps sharper than most Priests. But cleverness does not earn trust. I do not fully trust you — not yet, at least."

Lin wasn't surprised to hear it. He had, after all, been caught red-handed inside another man's gene-bank with blades drawn between them, and the only reason they could sit here talking calmly now was thanks to the Soul Drinkers.

"But I have seen what you can do. Your assistance to those Second Legion loyalists and to the Imperial Fists speaks to your intentions well enough. I will not dig into your secrets, because the Imperial Fists as they stand now need your help."

That caught Lin off guard. He looked at Dorn. "Isn't that trust, then?"

"No. I merely trust my sons' trust in you. And the state of things has decayed past the point where my suspicions matter."

The Primarch of the Seventh Legion was as blunt as advertised.

After the entire mess that had followed his arrival aboard the Shanzheng, Lin realized he had wandered in a wide circle right back to where he'd started the day he boarded. Minus the Soul Drinkers as a Chapter, the main thread was still the same: help the Ultimate Wall defeat the orks' Battle Moon.

Though the Soul Drinkers wouldn't be entirely absent from it.

Lin laid out his own terms just as directly. "I'll certainly keep providing assistance to the Ultimate Wall. But I need payment."

"Is the friendship and influence you have built within the Ultimate Wall not payment enough?"

"That's part of it, certainly… but I want the captured Soul Drinkers. Bringing them in would be an enormous help with what's coming."

The Soul Drinkers' fate would still have to wait on Kurande's return and a council of the Legion's senior officers, but Lin already knew how that would go.

Having taken part in an insurrection, they would almost certainly be imprisoned until the end of the Beast War. After that, the best outcome available to them would be a Penitent Crusade.

In which case, why not put those four hundred surrendered Soul Drinkers to use?

It wasn't a complicated request. Dorn need only voice an opinion as a Venerable Dreadnought when the Soul Drinkers' fate was decided, and most would respect his judgment.

Lin had expected an immediate yes. Instead, Dorn shook his head.

"I can vouch for your people. But those Soul Drinkers — they are dangerous."

"Dangerous?"

"You should be aware of the Second Legion's peculiarity. Every Second Legion warrior folded into my command had their special organ excised at the genetic level. The next generation produced from their gene-seed should have lost the gene-absorption function entirely. And yet those mutated Soul Drinkers prove the organ has returned to them. That is absolutely not natural recovery."

Lin played dumb. "I don't see how that affects the fact that these warriors were simply duped by their Chapter Master, and now need a chance to atone."

Dorn was silent for a moment. "You should understand — the Second Legion absolutely must not continue to exist."

"Understood. But most of them won't survive this war anyway."

[Author's Note 1: I said Astartes can't beat a Primarch, and stressed "not even Lorgar." But here's a fun fact — under the 30K tabletop rules, Sigismund wielding the Black Sword in a one-on-one against Lorgar actually has a chance of rolling him dead. The odds are very low, but compared to every other Primarch, who simply cannot lose that fight, it's embarrassing enough.]

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