There is something meditative about cleaning a blade.
The power field burns clean — that's its mercy — but clean isn't spotless, and spotless requires attention. I work the cloth along the forward curve in slow strokes, following the line of the Ginunting the way you'd follow a conversation you already know by heart. The rag comes away dark. I fold it to a clean section and keep going.
The sigil catches the light when I tilt the blade.
House Corvus. Already on the guard when the sword came to me — small, precise, the family's mark on a family's weapon. A single amethyst set where the blade meets the guard, no larger than a thumbnail, dark enough to pass for black until the light finds it. I didn't put any of it there. I just carry it.
The first time I saw that symbol I didn't know what it was.
I remember the room. Rich by this world's standards — tapestries, carved stone, the smell of something floral and slightly wrong. My hands were small. Everything was small. I sat up in a bed that was too soft and too large and the first thing I did was look across the room, because some part of me already knew.
Nick was sitting up too. Eyes wide. The face of a child wearing an expression that didn't belong to one.
He went still. Just — still, staring at something above the door. I followed his eyeline.
A carved aquila in the stonework above the door. Wings spread, twin heads looking outward. Gold paint. Imperial style. Unmistakable.
We knew exactly where we were.
I sat with that for a moment. Just sat with it. Then the child's body caught up with what the adult mind was processing and I started laughing — the kind that comes from somewhere you can't control — and then I was crying in the middle of the laughing, both at once, in a body too small for either of them.
Nick had gone to his corner by then. I could hear him. Some things are private, and a child's body has no patience for dignity. It took me a while to pull myself together. By the time I crossed the room he'd already stopped — dried his face with his sleeve, sat up straight, something behind his eyes settling into a particular quality of focus I'd come to know very well over the next seventeen years. Locked in. Completely, utterly locked in.
We didn't speak for a long time after that.
Seventeen years ago. I remember the aquila blurring through the tears.
I set the rag down. The sigil on the blade. The family's mark. I carry it everywhere. It catches the light like it belongs there — and it does, I suppose. Both of us do now.
I test the edge with my thumb. Good enough. I'll do better tomorrow, when my hands have stopped complaining.
-DN-
-DN-
-DN-
The armour goes on smoothly. The sequence is automatic now but I still pay attention to it, the way you pay attention to things that matter even when you don't have to.
Undersuit first. The dark grey of it almost black in the low light. Then the greaves — black, with the dark purple trim and the flat-etched aquila gleaming dull when I move. The vambraces next — same plate, same weight settling onto my forearms like a second skin. The sabatons over my boots, the articulated toe-cap clicking into place, the purple trim running along the edge of the metal like a line drawn by someone who cared about the detail.
The breastplate.
It settles onto my shoulders and I roll them once, feeling the weight distribute across my frame. The aquila sits at the centre in dark purple relief — raised, detailed, the twin heads looking outward with the particular authority of something that has been carved to last. The outline is traced in fine gold inlay, thin as a thread, and the border is scrollwork that took a craftsman three weeks to complete. The black of the plate makes the purple almost luminous. I am, on balance, pleased with it.
The medals go on next, pinned to the breast of the coat before I put it on. The Duelist Honours — modest device, not what you'd expect from a thing earned the way I earned it. The Triple Skull, three grinning faces on a dull grey backing that I have never once cleaned, because cleaning it would feel wrong. The Silver Aquila on its dark ribbon. The Raxar Secundus campaign badge — bronze crossed sword-and-bolt on black with a thin crimson stripe — still new enough that it doesn't have the weight of the others yet. It will.
The purity seals sit above the medals. The chest seal's parchment has darkened and curled at the edges from two years of campaign weather, but the text is still legible: Ferrum et Fide tenetur. By iron and faith he endures. I have not removed it since the Confessor applied it.
The coat goes over everything. The black silk of the undershirt shows at the collar and cuffs, the collar high enough that the purple lining frames it. The coat moves right — better cut than it should be, the kind of quality that comes from a tailor who understood the commission, with the dark purple interior showing when I turn. The crimson sash goes on diagonally, chest to hip, gold rope trim bright against the black. The dark purple belt underneath, the black and gold aquila buckle familiar under my thumb.
The skull epaulettes. The grotesque detail of them — properly grotesque, anatomically detailed, not stylised — sitting on my shoulders with the gold rope and fringe hanging down. I have been told they are unsettling up close. Good.
The obsidian beads are already around my left wrist, wound twice — they go on before the armour, always, so the vambrace sits over them and the only sign of them is the slight irregularity at the edge of the plate where the beads press against the undersuit. My left arm. The arm I fire the pistol with. Nine tiny skulls on the inside of that wrist, small, one for each execution. Nine in two years. Some would say that's restraint.
I pull my hair back and braid it — quick, practiced, something that stopped requiring thought years ago. Tight enough to stay. The loose strands from yesterday's fight — gone.
The hat.
Every commissar in the Imperium wears the same hat. No exceptions, no variations, the same hat. I have made my peace with this. The hat is comforting.
This universe is hell. I enjoy it more than I enjoyed Earth though. I stopped examining that a long time ago.
I pick up the Ginunting and slide it home. The scabbard takes it smoothly, the family sigil centred on the black leather catching the light just for a moment, the gold fittings at throat and chape bright and exact. The Primer goes into the inner pocket, the leather binding worn soft at the corners. The Aquila pendant at my throat, inside the coat, cool against the silk.
Everything in its place.
-DN-
-DN-
-DN-
The mess smells of recaf and whatever they're calling tonight's protein, and the room is half full and running at the specific volume of men who are comfortable. I push the door open and the heads turn — the hat, always the hat — and then the room settles back into itself.
The veterans don't move but something shifts to make room for me anyway. Sergeant Daven lifts his chin from the far end of the table and goes back to his food. I sit where the space appeared and accept the bowl someone puts in front of me and don't make anything of any of it, because making something of it would ruin it.
The newer men are watching without watching. The replacements from after Vorhast. They've heard things and they're deciding what to do with what they've heard, which takes time. I eat and let them decide.
Around me the conversation is already doing what it always does the day after. Someone is explaining in detail what the charge should have been. Someone else disagrees. A third man is taking bets on the next engagement, which is either bravado or necessity and probably both. I listen. I eat. I contribute occasionally, which is enough.
On my way to get more recaf I pass Merck at the end of his bench.
He's sitting with an empty space beside him that nobody's filled. Staring at his bowl. Second squad had taken the worst of it before I got there.
I put my hand on his shoulder as I pass.
"I'm sorry about your brother."
I keep walking. I get the recaf. I sit back down.
The conversation continues.
-DN-
-DN-
-DN-
The workshop door is open, which means Gamma knows I'm coming and has decided that closing it would be useless.
I go in.
He's mid-repair — left arm off entirely, sitting in its cradle on the secondary bench with the connectors exposed, two mechadendrites doing the delicate work from different angles simultaneously. Robes pushed back for clearance. Bionic eye in close-focus mode. He doesn't look up, which is fine because I'm not here for the greeting.
"No," he says.
"You don't know what I'm going to say."
"You're going to ask about the gauntlet."
I pick up a component from the nearest bench. Small, hexagonal, some kind of coupler I don't know the name of. I turn it over.
"I was going to ask how the arm is."
"The arm is being repaired. Put that down."
I put it down slightly to the left of where it was. One of the mechadendrites pauses for exactly one beat and then keeps moving.
"The load-bearing strut?"
"Replaced. Higher-grade alloy." A pause. "It won't happen again."
"I know it won't. You're very good at this." I pick up something else — larger, articulated, with a joint that flexes in an interesting way. "The gauntlet though—"
"No."
"You've been saying that for four months."
"And I have been correct for four months. The materials aren't available. The fabrication requirements—" The mechadendrite turns toward me. Not threateningly. Specifically. "That is a pressure regulator for my secondary coolant loop. If you flex it past forty degrees you will vent coolant across my workbench."
I flex it to forty-one and set it down.
The mechadendrite watches me. Gamma's face doesn't move.
"After this campaign," he says, with the tone of a man who has said this before and knows he will say it again. "When we have access to a proper forge. When I have the materials. When I am not—" a slight pause that might be significant "—currently missing an arm."
"That's practically a yes."
"It is not remotely a yes."
I lean on the bench and watch him work. The mechadendrites move with the precision of something that cares very much about getting things right, which Gamma always has. Laid his tools out in exact order since we were children. Some things survive the crossing.
We stay like that for a while. I don't touch anything else. He doesn't tell me to leave. This is what visiting looks like when you've been doing it for seventeen years and run out of things you need to say before you see each other.
-DN-
-DN-
-DN-
The knock is one of the vox runners — young, new, holding himself with the carefulness of someone who has been told this is important and isn't sure how important.
"Commissar. Enginseer." He looks between us. "Command requests your attendance at oh-six-hundred. Joint coordination briefing." A beat. "A Blood Angels strike force has made planetfall."
"Acknowledged," I say. "Dismissed."
He goes.
Gamma and I look at each other.
His mechadendrites have stopped. The bionic eye is tracking normally. Neither of us says anything for a moment because neither of us needs to — we've been doing the same calculation and we've both arrived at the same place.
A Blood Angels strike force. Not a patrol. Not a ship passing through. A strike force, making planetfall, requesting a coordination briefing.
Something has happened on this planet. Something bad enough that a First Founding Chapter came down personally. Something command hasn't told us about yet — hasn't verified, hasn't briefed, hasn't seen fit to share with the men who've been holding this ground for two years.
We don't know what it is.
We know it isn't good.
"Well," Gamma says.
"...Fuck," I say.
He reaches across the bench and moves the pressure regulator back to exactly where it was. The mechadendrites resume.
I put my hand on the Ginunting's hilt. The sigil is in the scabbard but I know it's there.
Same time tomorrow.