Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

Lin studied Belisarius Cawl.

By 40K this Archmagos would have barely a scrap of flesh left on him, yet he had not become the iron behemoth of later ages. A believer in the superiority of human flesh, he still kept as much of his own body intact as he could rather than surrendering it to machinery.

If Neos hadn't insisted that this was Cawl, Lin might not have recognized him at all.

Cawl's brilliance as a scholar, though, did impress him. To date he was the only man who had come anywhere close to the true nature of Lin's creations.

"My apologies, Magos Cawl. I didn't recognize you just now."

Lin stepped forward and shook his hand. "You seem interested in these Knights?"

"A little. But it isn't the direction of my research."

Cawl steered carefully clear of the subject. From these "innovations" and Lin's eager manner, he gathered that the Magos in front of him was not someone to be trifled with — and carrying the secrets he carried, he had no wish to invite complications here.

"My main efforts remain in the biological field. I came precisely to find a good site on war-torn Mars, somewhere I can continue my experiments undisturbed."

"Then you should be seeking the Fabricator General's help."

"Compared to Mars, I judge the word of the Imperial Fists to be worth rather more."

Lin narrowed his eyes. Cawl was certainly already running the sort of experiments Mars was never meant to see.

In the ages to come, everyone would know Cawl's catalogue of offences — from the Primaris Space Marines that rewrote the Emperor's sacred creation, all the way to the "Degraded Cawl" who boasted to Guilliman that if he were only made Fabricator General he could conquer the entire galaxy on his behalf.

But this was 32K. The Lord Commander of the Imperium, invincible in single combat, had only recently been laid in the ground on Macragge, and had yet to become the famous attraction propping up Macragge's tourist trade.

Cawl had probably not so much as begun the Armour of Fate, which meant there was no chance of him hauling Guilliman upright to vouch for him.

Even as an Archmagos of Mars, if his secrets ever surfaced they would turn all of Mars — and the Imperium with it — upside down.

That, presumably, was why Cawl wanted to stay out of sight. It was only the Beast War, though, and Lin had no idea how far those experiments had actually progressed.

Perhaps he should probe a little.

"If all you want is a laboratory at the Moravec Forge Station, I'd be glad to provide one. But if you're asking for the protection of a First Founding Chapter, that's an entirely different proposition."

His mind made up, Lin put on a troubled look. "With no basis for judgment, it's difficult for me to decide whether that's worth doing."

"I have of course brought suitable payment."

Cawl's gaze swept across the production lines and the Deathless around them. It took him no effort at all to deduce what Lin currently lacked; he cut a portion of forge-data out of the archive in his own skull, copied it onto a data-disk, and handed it over.

"I guarantee this is exactly what you need most right now."

Lin skimmed the template and found a Mauler-pattern bolt cannon inside.

This heavy bolt cannon, mounted on Battle-Automata, was the most advanced bolt weapon the Imperium currently fielded. It was cumbersome, but its calibre paired with a high rate of fire gave it savage firepower — enough to serve as an area support weapon.

It was not difficult to manufacture. The Mechanicus simply treasured it and guarded the pattern jealously, letting it spread only in small numbers among factions on good terms with them.

For Cawl to hand over the complete manufacturing technique made the payment more than sufficient to buy the Imperial Fists' help.

It was worth all the more given that Lin had been chewing over what to mount on his own modified Dunecrawlers.

Compared to the tangle of complex ion and phosphor weapons the Dunecrawler carried as standard, a bolt cannon — easy to build, easy to maintain and easy to supply — was the obvious better choice.

And yet Lin didn't take the technology.

He pushed Cawl's hand back and asked instead, "Archmagos Cawl, as I recall, you started out as a Magos Biologis, didn't you?"

Alarms went off inside Cawl's head.

Denying something the whole galaxy knew was pointless, but he buried the Primal Blood Repository a little deeper all the same. "I did indeed begin as a Magos Biologis, Magos Lin. Why do you need that confirmed?"

"Because I think your knowledge of biology will be of far more use to me. I need an assistant to help me analyse a rather special gene-bank — to isolate a directed hereditary expression inside an encrypted genome."

"Regrettably, I am no expert in genetics."

"But Sandeni was, wasn't he?"

Lin felt Cawl's body go taut for an instant.

The mechadendrites on his servo-harness began to writhe, and the Omnissian Axe in his fist glinted with cold light. But Lin had come prepared, and his Plasma Pistol was already out and levelled at Cawl's head.

The Deathless on patrol came running at the sight and trained their weapons on Cawl. Even the Priests off to one side, who had been busy tightening bolts, rolled up their sleeves, ready to defend to the death the Magos who treated them so generously.

"I'd advise you to mind your words and your actions, Archmagos Cawl. This happens to be my ground."

Cawl knew he'd acted on impulse. He could only power down his armaments to prove he meant no harm — and begin wondering whether coming to the Imperial Fists for shelter had been a mistake at all.

Azekar Sandeni: second director of the Department of Technobiologis during the Great Crusade, the man responsible for creating and refining the Black Carapace of the Astartes Legions.

By the time of the Great Heresy, age had brought him to the edge of death, and so he attempted to achieve immortality by transferring his digitized consciousness into Cawl's body.

In the tug-of-war between the two personalities, the Emperor appeared without warning inside Cawl's mind and commanded him to defeat Sandeni and carry on the work He had left unfinished.

With the Emperor's aid, Cawl won in the end, and took everything the man possessed. Sandeni's knowledge of genetics became the foundation of his attempts to improve upon the Astartes.

He had kept that secret buried deepest of all; not a soul on Mars knew the whole of it any longer. And today, of all days, this Magos from Forge World Huangquan VIII had doxxed him.

"Where did you learn about Sandeni?" Cawl wanted certainty.

"Water leaves a trace wherever it passes, Archmagos Cawl."

Lin shrugged, and lowered his own weapon in turn to signal goodwill.

Doraemon-Cawl was a walking treasure trove from head to foot; Lin had no intention of falling out with an Archmagos who would be steering the Imperium's fate ten thousand years from now. Fleecing him thoroughly before he grew into that power, though — that was a rather appealing option.

"Don't trouble yourself over where I picked up that little secret, Archmagos Cawl. Beyond having you assist my experiment, I have no intention of doing anything with it."

Cawl said nothing for a moment, weighing it all up.

He hardly enjoyed having his secret in another man's hands, but with his experiments in urgent need of progress, he had no other options.

If he simply walked out, he was confident that at some cost they couldn't stop him. Yet this genome Lin claimed only he could crack…

Curiosity and coercion together crushed his misgivings, and in the end he nodded.

"I will assist your experiment. Take me to this genome."

Lin snapped his fingers. "A wise decision."

Cawl refused to give up his weapons, and Lin, well aware of how little security the man felt just then, didn't press the point. He led Cawl to the laboratory and had Admidel bring over the Lictor gene-sample.

He had already tried having the Second Legion simply devour the material, but as with devouring greenskins, their gene-detection nerves got nowhere against sequences that had been encrypted.

All Lin could determine was that the encryption fell short of the Old Ones' work; his own technical grounding wasn't enough to break it. Hence borrowing outside strength like Cawl's — and stealing a trick or two while watching the man do it.

Cawl accepted the sample Admidel handed him, but his attention stayed entirely on Admidel.

The warrior of the Second Legion held his eyes fast. He looked the Astartes over again and again, as though trying to confirm something.

Lin waved Admidel out of the room. "Archmagos Cawl, I think we'd best concentrate on the business at hand."

Cawl had to abandon his inquiry and turn to the sample in his hands. One glance was all it took — and it seized him even harder than the Astartes had.

Even his long-since heavily modified vocal cords let a very human shock slip through. "The economy of this sequence… it's unbelievable. The encoding is so efficient there's virtually no redundancy at all. Every base pair looks like the perfect product of countless rounds of optimization."

Cawl had never seen a gene-sequence of such efficiency. The Primal Blood Repository in his keeping was potent enough, but its mystery lay more in its uncanny, Warp-touched nature.

Mass-produced Astartes gene-seed was pure, certainly — yet set against this, even that looked convoluted and clumsy.

His head snapped up, eyes fixed on Lin.

"Natural evolution could never give rise to a genome like this — every segment serving survival and slaughter, with no consideration whatsoever for inheritance. Where did you obtain these samples?"

Faced with the demand, Lin only shrugged. "Archmagos Cawl, everyone has their secrets, don't they? Just as I won't dig into yours. We each take what we need."

Cawl understood that he was being reminded. Their cooperation rested on a delicate balance, and given who he was, pressing further really wasn't advisable.

"Very well. I won't ask again where this sequence came from. But you must understand that its encryption far exceeds my expectations. Even I cannot fully decrypt it in any short span of time."

"I don't need it fully decrypted, Archmagos Cawl. I only need you to parse out the directed expression governing the generation of a chitin shell."

Unable to decrypt the sequence, yet somehow he knew what was inside it?

Cawl held his silence. The wrongness of it only grew — but that damnable curiosity of his drove him on to finish the work. Being a Magos with no great respect for the rules himself, he bent over the bench in the end and began the extraction.

The task went smoothly. In a matter of days Cawl had isolated the chitin-generating segment with perfect precision.

The chitin shell it produced could be adjusted at the user's will, and its strength surpassed most metals. Cultured at scale, it would make a suitable material in any number of applications.

Curious as he was about what Lin intended to do with it, Cawl had lost the appetite to dig further. Having quietly copied the gene-data for himself, all he wanted now was somewhere safer to continue his own plans. "Our transaction is concluded, Magos Lin."

"It falls outside the transaction, but there is one more thing I need."

"And what would that be?"

"I need the data on the Black Carapace as well."

Cawl went still. He set the self-generating chitin shell alongside the Black Carapace — which had to be cultured outside the body and then implanted — and drew his conclusion about what Lin was actually trying to do.

He looked at Lin again, with an entirely new appreciation of the man's audacity.

The Magos standing before him with that harmless smile was reaching for a forbidden key. Cawl had crossed that line long ago himself, and still Lin's nerve chilled him.

"You dare to alter the Emperor's sacred creation?!"

"Only the most minute of adjustments." The accusation left Lin unmoved.

For a moment Cawl had no idea what attitude to take toward him.

He did the same thing in secret, yes — but at least his improvements to the Astartes were built on the primarch templates within the Primal Blood Repository.

This Magos meant to refine the Astartes using some alien gene-sequence out of who knew where?

It was absurd!

He didn't believe Lin would succeed. Without the Primal Blood Repository, the likeliest yield was one of those unspeakable, twisted things.

And if someone later traced those abominations back and discovered that he had taken part, his own hidden plans risked exposure along with them.

Yet for reasons he couldn't name, a certain warmth toward this Magos stirred in him.

The feeling of one of a kind recognizing another.

Cawl would not let sentiment cloud his judgment. He moved to refuse the deal. "This will lead to dangerous results."

"Rather than sneaking away with copied experimental data, I could simply give you a gene-template of your own."

Cawl changed tack on the spot. "But then again…"

The new breed of Space Marines he envisioned needed enhancement across the board. Set beside the Sinew Coils and the Belisarian Furnace, both of which he already had leads on, the possibility Lin had raised for the Black Carapace was genuinely appealing.

He still didn't think Lin would succeed — but with a gene-template in hand he could attempt it himself. As an absolute genius, Cawl had every confidence in his own success.

The risk was admittedly on the large side, but a gene-template even he had never heard of was worth an enormous amount!

So he handed over part of the Black Carapace data, and even began helping Lin look for ways to replace or reinforce the Black Carapace with the chitin shell.

Just as the two of them were working to fix the chitin shell's phenotypic expression and to find a way of wiring it into a Space Marine's nervous system so the warrior could regulate the shell at will, a visitor interrupted them.

Cawl had passed well into obsession by then, so Lin left him to it and went out to receive the unexpected guest.

Or perhaps not so unexpected.

Lin came to the gate of the Moravec Forge Station and found an old acquaintance held back outside by the Deathless. The Magos who had once lorded it so magnificently over him was now negotiating anxiously with Neos.

"I come to the Moravec Forge Station in the name of the Fabricator General. I must see Magos Lin — now!"

Neos, discharging his duty at the gate, watched the Magos Pavonis with a blank face and not the slightest regard. Pavonis lost his temper and moved to force the issue, only for Lin to arrive and stop him.

"If it isn't our old acquaintance Pavonis. Looks like things haven't been terribly glorious for you since we parted ways on the Attack Moon."

Lin looked the bedraggled Pavonis up and down and needled him. "Well? Has Mars finally adjusted its attitude toward me?"

[Author's Note: PS1: "Magos Lin, if you are willing to submit to the authority of Mars… perhaps Mars can make allowances for your heresy and adjust its attitude toward you." — Chapter 153, "What Mars Schemes For"]

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