Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

Pavonis's face had gone so dark it might have dripped.

Lin studied his displeasure with genuine interest — and studied, just as closely, the self-restraint that came after it.

"What does the Fabricator General want from me?"

"Mars has determined that the daemons are about to assault the Olympia Dunes hive city. The Fabricator General hopes you will act as reinforcements in the coming battle — lead the forces you slipped down onto the Martian surface during the confusion, join the fighting from the flank, and help us drive back this threat of Chaos."

"Only the ones already on the surface?" Lin said.

"There are already close to a thousand Astartes here, plus tens of thousands of the PDF you brought with you. As a flanking force that is more than sufficient. Adding further troops would only breed doubts about command on both our sides."

"Your manner doesn't sound much like a request."

An amused smile played across Lin's face. He strolled unhurriedly up to Pavonis and fixed him with a burning stare — this Magos who had once carried himself so high aboard the Attack Moon.

"I'm not the sort of man you can whistle for whenever it suits you. If you want me in the field, show me a little sincerity."

"Mars has turned a blind eye to your occupation of the Moravec Forge Station. Is that not enough?"

"Magos Pavonis, now you've got it wrong. I took the Moravec Forge Station on my own merits. Mars's indulgence is nothing more than making peace with what it can't prevent. Besides — there's still an unsettled account between us."

Pavonis's mechanical eye flickered with a dangerous red light. A Magos of the Martian faction, he could barely stomach the contempt of Lin, this techno-heretic off the Yellow Springs. "So you'd loot the house while it burns?"

"Loot?"

Lin's smile drained away by degrees. "Your Fabricator General wanted me dead not long ago. If I hadn't had a few tricks of my own, I'd be a pile of scrap in the Martian dust right now. That account — how do you suggest we settle it?"

"The Fabricator General was deceived by Archmagos Augustus. We are now certain that Archmagos Augustus is the prime author of this entire upheaval. If it is vengeance you want, then aid Mars against Archmagos Augustus, and put an end with your own hands to this entanglement that has run unbroken from Cath Maximus to this day."

"I only care about tangible profit. If Mars needs my help, then I need payment I can put my hands on."

"What do you want?"

"A void shield production line."

Pavonis hesitated. The price Lin was asking lay far beyond his authority.

Void shields might be used widely across the Imperium, but the schematics explaining the principles behind them had been lost long ago.

With no true understanding of how they were made, production now depended on the STCs that still survived and on the dumbed-down knock-off STCs the Mechanicus's data-smiths had copied from them. Handing over a complete production line outright was something Mars would have to weigh with great care.

"I must consult the Fabricator General."

Pavonis passed Lin's demand up to Kubik. Most of the Forge Council came out against it.

"The void shield production lines on Mars are the precious patrimony of the Omnissiah. Surrendering even one small line would cost Mars a full percentage point of production efficiency — a loss that could not be recovered in thirty years. This is unacceptable!"

But Kubik gave his consent. "Tell Lin there is a void shield production line inside the Olympia Dunes hive city. If he wants it, he can come and take it himself."

The Skitarii vanguard had already picked up traces of the Chaos Knight houses, and with the Fire Wasps Legion unwilling to commit to a full fight, he genuinely needed Lin's help.

One void shield production line was a price worth paying. Kubik judged that it would guarantee Lin spared nothing in defending Mars.

The Fabricator General's agreement reached Lin through Pavonis, and Lin was distinctly unimpressed by the man's talent for buying with an empty purse.

Then a second thought struck him: being told to "collect the goods" himself was, in its own way, a letter of marque.

Or perhaps Mars simply didn't believe he had the strength to plunder a hive city?

"When do you need our support?" Lin asked.

"That depends on when the daemons attack. No more than a week."

A week was long enough for the tardy relief force out of Cath Maximus to reach the battlefield.

It was also long enough for Lin to finish tying off his work at the Moravec Forge Station.

Whether the Attack Moon would use that window to strike at Terra, he had no way of knowing — but Mars came first. Only once that was settled would he have room to think about anything else.

He and the Fabricator General had their agreement, and Pavonis remained behind as Mars's liaison.

Lin ordered Neos to place the Magos under house arrest, then returned to the laboratory to finish the last of the work with Cawl.

The time spent working beside Cawl had done Lin a great deal of good. The Archmagos might not possess a golden finger like his own, but within the Warhammer universe his technical skill stood at the very summit.

Lin had quietly stolen no small number of methods from him. Even after Cawl was gone, he was confident he could carry off projects far harder than anything he'd managed before.

"The chitin carapace research is progressing well. We have provisionally found a way to use it in place of the Black Carapace. Most importantly, chitin carapace can interface directly with the nervous system."

"Once the technique matures, the recipient will be able to adjust it at will, skip the old calibration between Black Carapace and power armour entirely, and simply don the armour."

Cawl gave a brief account of where they stood. So far he was well satisfied with the result.

The improvement would speed up the conversion of Space Marines and give them far better compatibility with power armour.

Having gained so much from that stretch of gene-code, Cawl believed he could raise the twenty-two Space Marine surgeries he had originally envisioned to twenty-three.

Of course, a preliminary result like this needed at least a century of verification before it could be put to practical use — and that was not something achievable inside the Moravec Forge Station.

Lin understood that as well as he did. His collaboration with Cawl had reached its end.

Cawl packaged up the experimental results and handed them to Lin. "I take it I've earned a private laboratory of my own by now?"

"Of course. Once I leave, the entire Moravec Forge Station is yours."

That gave Cawl pause, but understanding came quickly. "So the final battle is about to begin?"

"Mm-hm. The Fabricator General has come begging me for troops, no less. Archmagos — how do you see this war ending?"

"It's merely a question of how heavy the losses are, and whether Mars needs a new Fabricator General. Mars will not lose."

As an Archmagos of Mars, Cawl knew exactly how much Mars was worth. Never mind the doomsday weapons sealed away in the underground Labyrinth, whose purpose not even the cogboys themselves could work out — the Skitarii in the hands of the Magi alone numbered in the tens of millions.

The moment the daemons grew loud enough to threaten everyone's interests, even those selfish Magi would close ranks. Once production recovered, their armies would tear this handful of daemons to shreds.

"So the Fabricator General only needs my help to keep hold of his own seat…"

Lin turned the thought over.

Cawl neither confirmed it nor denied it. The situation on Mars did not concern him in the slightest. Lin himself was another matter.

"Your next move is to support the Fabricator General and attack the daemons?"

"Naturally. I have to go and collect the payment he promised me in person. After that I'll take every production line I need and leave the Moravec Forge Station to you."

"I would rather talk to you about the station itself. About its name."

It was the first time Cawl had shown any real appetite for conversation. Lin looked at him in surprise, wondering what he was scheming.

"Do you know of the Priest Moravec? He was the most gifted of Terra's ancient tech-priests. In time he fled to Mars and became the founder of the Mars we know today."

"Master of the Order of Man-Machine Union, prophet of the Omnissiah, builder of the Labyrinth beneath Olympus Mons, the guide who lit the way for Mars's faith."

This great pioneer, the first to fix Mars's vague reverence for technology into the name "Omnissiah", had once uttered a prophecy: when Phobos and Deimos stood at once at their nearest and their farthest, the Omnissiah would descend upon Mars.

Only a handful ever knew the prophecy's actual wording. When the Emperor later arrived on Mars, he fulfilled it down to the last detail without ever having heard it — and so the Priests of that age took him for the Omnissiah's mortal incarnation.

But that pleasant legend was not what Cawl had come to discuss. As a devout follower of the Emperor, what he wanted to raise was what came after the Emperor reached Mars: the sealing of the Moravec Caverns, where every one of Moravec's creations lay hidden.

"Moravec was a genius. A legend. He was also the founder of the Dark Mechanicum. Beneath the gleam of his role as the Omnissiah's prophet he pursued experiments that could not bear the telling. By the understanding we have today, he created the first daemon engines — and those engines were released by the rebel Fabricator General during the Horus Heresy, endangering the whole of Mars."

Cawl unfolded this secret of Mars slowly, a history few had ever heard — but Lin, who had already worked out exactly why Cawl had raised it, was wearing a very peculiar look by now.

Oh, hell. Cawl had come to lecture him about not crossing the line?

Perhaps he ought to tally up how many heresies he had committed himself first.

With nothing he could safely say, Lin simply let Cawl go on — and his silence persuaded Cawl that his guidance had made the Magos aware of just how "bold" and "over the line" he had been.

He felt a kinship with the man, one talent recognising another, and had no wish to see such a mind die in the turmoil between Mars and Terra. But he had no intention of involving himself too deeply either, so an oblique warning was all he could offer.

"We must work within the rules — on the surface, at least. Your technical experiments are radical enough as they are; in everything else you should keep your head down, or you are simply planting the seeds of ruin. Even if you are certain you'll never repeat Moravec's mistake, there will be men eager to brand you a techno-heretic and a creature of the Dark Mechanicum. Remember: we must dance in chains."

"I'll keep it in mind."

Cawl nodded, satisfied. He paused a while, as though weighing something, then held out a data disc to Lin.

"What's this?"

"A method for reinforcing sinew, and the production data for the Mauler-pattern bolt cannon."

Lin's brows rose. He looked over the data on the disc and realised that this so-called sinew reinforcement was in fact the Sinew Coils of the Primaris Space Marines.

Though at present the technique looked far from mature.

"Is this a new deal?" Lin asked.

"No. I regard it as an investment."

Since Lin had set his own ambitions in the same direction, Cawl did not mind giving him a little extra.

Sinew Coils were only a mechanical implant; they gave nothing away about the secret of the Primal Blood Repository.

If Lin lived through this upheaval, Cawl was certain the audacious Magos would put the technology to work — and then Cawl could come back to collect his experimental data and hasten his own progress toward the Primaris Space Marines.

"If you survive this upheaval, and stay clear of the whirlpool of humanity's internal wars, I will come and find you," he told Lin.

Lin handed over the Lictor's gene-template to Cawl. Neither of them said anything more. Everything that mattered had already passed between them unspoken.

Authority over the forge station transferred to Cawl piece by piece, and Cawl set Servitors to digging — clearly meaning to bury something else underground that could not stand the light of day.

Lin, meanwhile, took the gene-fragments for the chitin carapace and went to the Soul Drinkers. Setting the Second Legion's old guard aside, he singled out a few of the newer recruits who had originally been Soul Drinkers for the trial.

Logash volunteered first. His Black Carapace had been damaged in an earlier battle, and with no spare available it had never been repaired.

At Lin's signal, he swallowed the chitin carapace gene-fragment.

Inside him, the gene-detection gland began to identify and process it at speed.

As the material for synthesising the chitin carapace went down as food, the flesh beneath his skin began to writhe. Lin cut the skin open and found fresh chitin carapace forming rapidly, filling in the places where the Black Carapace had been torn away.

"This feeling…" Logash could hardly believe it.

"More flexible, stronger, and it generates itself without any implantation. Isn't that so?"

"It is," Logash admitted, though the memory of the mutated Soul Drinkers left him uneasy. "Is this what our potential always was? If it were developed to its limit, would it…"

"That is exactly why I'm searching for the right way to use your gifts."

A low stir ran through the Soul Drinkers. When they looked at Lin now, there was more awe in their eyes, and something close to worship.

Perhaps because they lacked the near-miraculous Warp essence that sustained a Primarch, these warriors' gene-detection glands were not, in truth, all that potent.

When they bolted down a xenos whole, the tangled genetics inside the creature expressed themselves in their bodies indiscriminately, good and bad alike, until the warriors themselves became horrors.

But if the gene-fragments were screened out in advance and applied with precision…

Lin was sure he had found the right way to rebuild the Second Legion.

He didn't have to puzzle out how to splice the relevant fragments into the gene-seed the way Cawl did. He only had to give these Astartes a pure gene-fragment and they would evolve themselves.

This chitin carapace fragment alone was already enough to let them grow a Black Carapace inside their own bodies, cutting out no small number of steps in the Astartes conversion process.

Did that count as a beggar's edition of the super Raven Guard?

Discount-store-brand super gene-warriors, currently backed by Archmagos Cawl and the Tyranid Zerg as friendly minority shareholders — and no telling who would turn up to play angel investor next.

The Mauler-pattern bolt cannon Cawl had thrown in at the end was valuable to Lin as well. Handed over this late, though, it left him no time to prepare anything with it.

Once he had confirmed that every Soul Drinker's enhancement was complete and checked over the state of the Tiantu-class Titan, Lin turned his gaze toward the dunes of Olympia.

There, the daemons' first wave against the Skitarii had already lifted the curtain.

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