The muster hall smells of old stone and ferrocrete dust and the nothing of a room that exists only to hold people before somewhere worse. I have the files in my hand — the last thirteen, printed and annotated, the paper worn soft at the edges from three weeks of handling. I know their names now without the files. All thirteen. I know them the way you stop needing to look up a man's name — not from thinking, from somewhere below that. I set the files on the nearest bench. The paper is done.
Gamma is against the far wall. Of course he is, unsociable bastard.
The room is large enough for the purpose and nothing else. Iron benches bolted to the floor in rows, built to hold bodies rather than accommodate them. Lumen globes in iron wall-sconces throwing yellow light that loses the corners. An Aquila above the door, stone, worn smooth by decades of hands going in and coming out, which are not always the same hands. I look at it for a moment I didn't plan and then I don't look at it anymore.
The coat is heavy in the way it's always heavy. The Ginunting across my back. The braid tight at the back of my skull from this morning, which I did too carefully for reasons I'm not examining.
The obsidian beads settle on my left wrist as I move — always on before the armour, always pressing against the skin above the ten marks that are permanent. The tenth is the newest. It doesn't catch anymore the way it did for the first few weeks; that absence is its own reminder. I know it the way I know round counts — not from thinking, from somewhere below that.
Gamma's mechadendrites make a small adjustment against the wall. His bionic eye sweeps the room with the patience of something that has already processed everything and is now simply recording. He doesn't look at me. We have been doing this for seventeen years — standing in the last minutes before something begins, not needing to speak.
The room smells of nothing lived-in, and the Aquila is worn smooth, and somewhere ahead in the corridor there are thirteen people who are about to become something that doesn't exist yet.
I check the chrono.
Forty seconds.
***
Vekk comes through first.
He reads the room in one breath — entry, exits, Gamma, me. Then it's finished, and he finds his position — standing rather than bench, the spot with sightlines to both exits and the front — and he is there.
He is not large. He is built like a thing that has been used correctly for a very long time, carrying the density of anything without waste. Clean-shaven. Standard Cadian build, the file said, accurate like a geological survey — it tells you the surface, nothing about what the ground was before the event that shaped it. Expression: neutral at all times. Not cold, not closed — the face of a man who has given nothing away for so long it has stopped costing him anything. I know from the file that what's underneath is still there. That it has been bearing weight for longer than it should.
He does not look at me again. He took my measure in that first second and he is done.
KSK-7741-M36. Records sealed by Cadian High Command. The assessor's note — not in any official file, not confirmed, the assessor's read alone — Slaaneshi vector as the probable mechanism. Whatever that means for what he came through. He tried to return the Triple Skull on behalf of the fallen. The Munitorum made it mandatory. He accepted that too. I set this aside. It will surface when it needs to.
Vekk stands completely still.
Good. I need a steady sergeant.
***
The door opens three minutes later and two people come through it in the middle of something — not an argument, just talking. Two people who found something to say to each other in the corridor and haven't quite stopped. Zeke is talking. Zuzanna is not.
Zuzanna moves to her bench by a geometry that isn't random — exits, Gamma, Vekk's stillness, me at the front. Done in one pass. She sits. The tribal scarification catches the lumen light on both hands, both forearms: precise, patterned, done by someone who knew what they were doing and meant it. The file couldn't establish the purpose — she provides a different account every time the assessor asks, and the assessor stopped asking. The feral world carries in her movements too, something the Guard hasn't fully smoothed over after six years: a loose awareness of someone raised in terrain that could hurt you and learned not to telegraph the watching. She is — and I don't finish the thought, because today is a muster and I am a Commissar and the only thing she is to me is the best shot on this team, and I have the discipline to leave it there. She has dark hair wound back and pinned, the practical version of something the file noted as a stated vanity. Today it's professional.
Zeke takes a bench near hers. Not beside — near. He is still finishing his sentence when he sits. He's lean — hive-world lean — sharp features, the build of someone who grew up in spaces sized to the minimum. He looks younger than his record. The face of someone who presents as less than he is, which has been useful before. His look at the room ends on me and stays there longer than everyone else's.
He grins. The grin of a man who finds active fire tolerable, which makes a muster hall with a Commissar in it approximately restful.
The room is mostly silent. Vekk has been standing rigidly for several minutes. Zeke looks at him. At the rigid perfect stillness. At the bench immediately beside where Vekk is standing.
"You could sit," Zeke says. Military-quiet. Audible.
Vekk does not look at him. Does not acknowledge it. Does not move. The silence of him is not hostile. It is simply total.
Zeke considers this for a moment. He nods, once, with the satisfied air of a man who has learned something useful. He goes back to watching the room.
He is going to be a persistent feature of Vekk's existence. Vekk will not find this difficult — he'll find it present, as men who've been through what Vekk's been through find most things: as weather rather than events. These two aren't going to clash. I don't have a word yet for what they're going to be.
***
Bjorn comes in with Castor. Bjorn has his plasma gun, which is not a surprise — the dossier suggested he would feel its absence the way a man feels a missing tooth. The weapon has a name scratched above the grip in letters that have been gone over more than once — Marta — and he carries her with the unselfconscious ease of a habit so old her weight has become part of the hand's weight. Burn scarring across both forearms and hands — thermal exposure, plasma operation, multiple incidents. He continued firing through all of them. Two Medallions Crimson. He comes from a world where siege is the shape of life, where civilian was never a word that applied to him or to anyone he knew, and you see it in how he holds the room: solid, waiting.
Castor takes the bench beside him with the ease of a man who has stopped thinking of that as a choice. His pace is the same now as it was under fire — unhurried, already slightly ahead of whatever hasn't happened yet. He said it himself, about himself: by the time it gets bad I've usually already done something about it. He is the only person in this room who is effortlessly relaxed. Not performing it. Just comfortable, the way some people are. I find this unreasonably reassuring.
Orryn arrives and he is spotless — in a ferrocrete muster hall at this hour, after transit, he is spotless. The uniform sits exactly right. The medal rack is straight in a way that suggests not merely pinned but placed: each decoration at its correct position, the Winged Skull uppermost, the Scarlet Wing below, the Silver Aquila below that. He finds a bench and sits at parade rest and his eyes begin moving across the room in a count I can see from here. Lumen globes. Occupied benches. Rounds available in whatever he's carrying. Whatever else. He is not doing it for me.
Grace comes in with a lho-stick already burning.
This is a choice she is making in front of her new Commissar without apparent concern. She locates the nearest exit in under two seconds — the door by the far left bench — and takes the bench closest to it. Not fear. Logistics. Knowing your egress is the difference between getting to the next patient and not getting there, and she has spent six years making this calculation in rooms considerably worse than this one. Dark curly hair worn practical rather than to regulation. Sharp features. The eyes that four separate assessors — none of whom had spoken to each other — described with the same word: evaluating. She evaluates me last and briefly, reaches some conclusion she isn't sharing, and her face returns to its working setting.
She is going to be the hardest person in this room to earn anything from.
Holt enters without sound. Not discipline — the feudal world. A man who spent his life moving through terrain that would hear him if it could, and the habit has outlasted the terrain. Lean and rangy, built for sustained movement over difficult ground. Greenskin trophies on his kit — teeth, other things I don't look at directly, small collected evidence of things done and kept. He has been briefed on biosecurity. He acknowledged it. The trophies are present at their current quantity. He sits and reads the room the way he reads ground: patient, thorough, making no assumptions until he's finished. His head tilts slightly. He is listening for something in the room or beyond it.
Aric drifts to the wall — the void-born habit of finding solid material at his back — and nods once and then he is present. His face is at the same pitch it held at hour eleven of a sustained vox operation. He kept talking then. He'll keep talking when it matters. In between, he is this: still, with a resentment toward the Imperium sitting somewhere in him — one he's been carrying long enough that it's become part of the weight rather than an addition to it.
Sev comes in covered in devotional scripture and four years of accumulated purity seals, each one placed because it needed to be there. He survived a daemonic incursion. He was the last man standing. The Ordo Hereticus assessed him clean. He doesn't have faith in the conventional sense. He has evidence. He is the most still person in the room — just settled, the reckoning done and came out right. His eyes are almost closed. The seals catch the lumen light as he breathes.
Adlar sits with his jaw at an angle I have seen in living faces before the file told me to expect it. Drukhari raid. Sole surviving ground combatant — majority of his regiment taken to Commorragh. He fought alone and wounded until the Drukhari withdrew. "They left. I was still standing." His arms are crossed and his jaw is at its angle and his controlled bearing doesn't try to conceal it. He is waiting for something specific and he will wait for it across however long is necessary. The Distinguished Service Medal Against the Dark Eldar sits on his chest. The citation says the decoration doesn't adequately describe what the engagement required of him. The person who wrote that was right. Two seconds. Then away.
Caelum comes through last with the timing of someone who waited until the room was ready. He takes in the doorway, then me, then the room. He sees where Adlar is sitting. He moves to the space beside him — not the bench, just the space — and stands there. No announcement, no gesture. He places himself where he has decided to be, and when he is still he looks at me with the expression the field commander called exceeding his rank and that I understand immediately: whatever made him soft is gone. What remains wants to be here.
In a room where everyone else has found their bench, Caelum is standing. Not at attention — just the space he walked into. He occupies exactly what he occupies. It is complete.
The room is assembled now. Benches occupied, Gamma against the wall, one empty bench. It smells different with all of them in it — kit and metal and old leather and someone's boot polish and something else I can't place but don't need to. Thirteen people breathing the same air. Every one of them the last person standing when the smoke cleared. I have assembled this carefully, across twelve thousand files, and I am aware of how it reads.
One bench is empty.
Then the door opens again, and Drok comes in.
***
The door was not built for Drok. But Drok has been navigating architecture the wrong size for him for a very long time, and he has the complete unthinking ease of it. He comes through it sideways at the shoulder, adjusts, continues. He is here.
The processing centre file reads, verbatim: "This one is very large."
The processing centre was not wrong.
There is a beat — controlled, brief — in which I let my picture of the room catch up to the fact of him. I have stood in a room with five Blood Angels. I have read the file. The file had numbers, and I understood the numbers, and the numbers did not convey this.
Drok is happy.
Not performed-happy, not squared-away-and-presenting — the straightforward, loud, uncomplicated happiness of a man who has been told he gets to go somewhere difficult with people who are good at their jobs, and he is one of those people, and he finds all of this excellent. It's in everything: the way he takes the room in, the frank pleasure of something that has arrived exactly where it wanted to be. He looks at the iron benches and the worn Aquila and the thirteen people already assembled and me at the front with the files set aside, and his expression throughout is the expression of a man for whom this is better than what he was hoping for.
He sees Gamma against the far wall.
The mechadendrites. The servo-arm. The bionic eye. The respirator. The cranial circuitry just visible at the temple. The Mechanicus robes that don't fully conceal what they're covering and aren't trying to. Most people, seeing that much technology assembled in a person's shape, go quiet. Drok grins. It is a very large grin. It is the grin of a man who has been shown something he finds delightful.
Gamma does not react.
Something moves in his shoulders — private amusement, the quality of someone being polite about finding something hilarious. Drok finds this funnier than it has any right to be. The quality of the grin sharpens at the edges. Something in me, without much authorization from the rest of me, decides we are going to be fine. He takes a bench. The sound the bench makes on receiving this information is audible throughout the room.
Drok doesn't notice.
Grace looks up from the dying lho-stick. She looks at Drok. She looks at the bench. Then, flatly, to no one in particular — the first time she has spoken:
"I need to redo my supply estimates."
She takes a long draw. The lho-stick burns toward the filter. She doesn't look at him again.
I look at his armour.
It is clean.
Bullgryn plate, well-maintained, properly fitted to something that exceeds standard Bullgryn measurements. No tallies. No insignia. No personal tokens. No embroidered patches. Both pauldrons are plain metal, the mark of manufacture and nothing else. The dossier said the armour bore decoration — applied over years by the soldiers Drok had served with, accumulated quietly, each addition something someone did because they loved him enough to put their mark on his plate. He knew about all of it. He hadn't removed any of it. That was the record of him: a man who moved through the world collecting the evidence of other people's affection and keeping it without ceremony or comment.
That armour is not this armour.
This is a new posting. The plate is blank. Nothing has been put there yet. The story of it hasn't started.
***
I move through the room.
Not speaking. Taking the temperature — same as before every engagement: who watches me move, who watches the door, who watches each other.
Vekk hasn't moved since he chose his position. The stillness is load-bearing.
Zuzanna is watching me the way I am watching the room. Has been doing it since she sat down. This is not a surprise. It is confirmation.
Zeke has ended up adjacent to Aric along the same stretch of wall. Zeke chose that wall for the casual lean of it. Aric drifted there for the solid stone at his back. Different logic, identical outcome. Neither has acknowledged this. Zeke's smirk has moved two degrees toward Aric, who has not acknowledged it and is not going to, which Zeke has apparently already decided is funny.
Caelum is still standing. He is looking at me directly and holding it. Not challenging. Not asking for anything. The look of someone who has decided to be fully seen.
Drok is watching me. Every other person in this room is managing several things at once — the room, the silence, their own reading of this moment. Drok has given me everything. It arrives in the chest before it reaches the head.
Grace is sardonic, unbothered, lho-stick burning to the filter. She has filed everything about this room and everyone in it, and she's not sharing it, and she might not for a long time.
I stop at the front.
And then I speak.
"You have been assigned to me because you are the best; how unfortunate for you. We will be assigned to the worst hells the Imperium can find. We shall break the enemies of humanity, and you shall love it — for it is your duty. Welcome to Strike Team Thanatos."
Silence.
Vekk: nothing. Which means he approves. I have been reading flat affect long enough to know the difference between nothing that is absence and nothing that is a kind of answer.
Adlar: the jaw unclenches. Two degrees. Just two. The first time since he walked in.
Caelum: meets my eyes at welcome. Holds it for one beat — deliberate, not challenging. Releases.
Drok raises his hand.
Not urgently. Not aggressively. The hand of someone who has been listening with his whole attention and has a genuine question and wants to ask it correctly. He is being careful. He is being polite.
I look at him.
"Commissar." His voice arrives in the room the way his body arrived in the room — simply, completely, at full volume, without effort. "You say worst hells."
"Yes."
"How bad?"
A beat. The room is waiting.
"Very bad," I say. "We will likely be deployed against forces you have not yet been given clearance to know about."
Drok considers this. His expression moves — slowly, with the unhurried quality of everything he does — toward satisfaction. He nods once. The nod of a man who has received precisely the answer he was hoping for.
"Good," Drok says. "Drok like bad place. More Smash."
He shifts his weight on the bench.
The bench makes the same sound it made when he first sat down — the sound that announced him — and this time it isn't announcing anything except that Drok has settled deeper into his satisfaction.
Zeke's shoulders do their thing. He doesn't make a sound. He doesn't need to.
Zuzanna smiles — warm and brief, the smile of someone who got what she came for.
Caelum turns toward Adlar by two degrees and says nothing, which is the whole point.
Vekk's face does nothing. But his gaze moves — off the middle distance he has been holding since he arrived, to Drok. Just for a moment. Then back to the room.
"Dismissed," I say. "Armory. Zero-six-hundred."
The room begins to move.
I watch them go. Zeke saying something to Zuzanna before they've cleared the bench — she's already responding, the corridor conversation picking up where it left off. Bjorn and Castor leaving side by side without either of them seeming to think about it, the way I think they'll always do this, though neither of them has worked that out yet. Holt moving through the ferrocrete room without sound on ferrocrete. Aric pausing at the exit — one second, hand on the frame, the check that the corridor is what it should be — and then through. Grace drops the dead lho-stick on the floor of the Munitorum muster hall without looking at it and walks out. She does not look back. Sev straightens his seals once as he stands, not for ceremony, and then he is through the door. Orryn adjusts his kit — still perfect, has been perfect, adjusts it anyway. Adlar walks out controlled, jaw at its angle, the Distinguished Service Medal on his chest and behind his eyes the weight of Commorragh, and I cannot touch that, only give him the opportunity when it comes. Caelum last among them, unhurried, the same presence going out as came in, pausing briefly in the doorway the way someone does when a thought isn't quite finished.
Drok turns sideways for the door. Barely manages it.
Gamma crosses the room without being asked and stands beside me. His mechadendrites settle. His bionic eye is on the empty doorway.
"Well," he says.
"They'll do," I say.
He leaves.
I stand in the empty muster hall. The lumen globes throw their yellow light toward corners they don't reach. The Aquila above the door looks back at me, worn smooth, indifferent to time in a way that looks like patience from the outside.
My left hand finds the Triple Skull at my coat.
Not the first clasp. The second. The newer one, the brighter one. I hold it between my thumb and forefinger and I don't look at it and I don't think about what it weighs. I just hold it for a moment in the empty room, in the yellow light. I don’t want another one.
Then I let it go, and I follow them out.