Months Later,
Savavarn, Docking Platform Nine
The pilgrim world of Savavarn smelled like melted wax and boiled piss. The incense burners never stopped, and neither did the sick. Everywhere, the moaning of half dead pilgrims echoed in the cathedral halls, and the stars outside bled red from the smogged up atmosphere.
Cassian hated visiting this place again. Not because it was ugly or loud or desperate, though it was all three but because it felt like waiting in line at a funeral that never ended.
Their ship sat crippled behind them, hooked up to archaic refueling ports and patched with dull gray Mechanicus repair foam. The outer hull bore scars from the Chaos, transition and atmospheric re entry. Even with recent retrofits, it was still was a miracle that it hadn't come apart in the void.
Cassian stood on the cracked ferrocrete platform, arms folded, hood up. Faevelith paced nearby, silent, unreadable as always. Farron leaned against a grimy bulkhead, fiddling with a cogitator strip. None of them had said much since the ship landed for refueling.
Then the clank of boots. Servo-skulls buzzed overhead.
Barnum Doscentis arrived like a walking malfunction. His robes were stained with coolant, his augmetics twitching slightly with every step. One of his bionic eyes was flickering. He looked thinner than last time skeletal beneath red silk and brass.
"Magos," Cassian said with a nod. Acknowledging the magos.
Doscentis didn't bother with formalities either. His vox grills crackled before he even stopped walking. "You kept me waiting. Twice."
Cassian shrugged. "We've been busy surviving."
Doscentis stopped in front of them and surveyed the ship. "Looks like hell chewed it up and spat it out. Chaos didn't treat you kindly?"
"No," Farron said. "Neither did reality."
Doscentis snorted. "Nothing treats anyone kindly anymore. Welcome to the Gothic Sector."
He waved a servo skull away. "You asked for answers. And you're going to get them. I'll keep it simple because I'm tired, and this world gives me migraines."
He turned fully to Cassian now.
"Your request for a trade warrant? The one from the 30th millennium, signed in the Emperor's own blood? Backed by fleet-level authority?"
Cassian said nothing.
"You'll get it," Doscentis said.
Faevelith stopped pacing. Farron straightened.
"You're serious?" Cassian asked.
Doscentis nodded once, curt. "The Imperium will honor it. They'll give you the trade authorization, resource guarantees, a fleet assuming the paperwork isn't lost in a void war or eaten by hereteks. Which, granted, is not a small assumption."
Farron crossed his arms. "And the catch?"
Doscentis pointed up, vaguely, like gesturing at the stars. "There's a war on. It isn't just coming it's already here now. Chaos fleets are bleeding the sector. We've overdrafted half our Magi to fill battlefield losses. Half the forges in the subsector are running dry. There's no one left to handle this kind of trade not safely. Not now."
Faevelith raised a brow. "Then why tell us it's possible?"
"Because it is. Just not today." Doscentis looked more tired by the second. "The offer stands. It's valid. You've got your ticket. But the train's not coming till the tracks are clear."
Cassian's eyes narrowed. "And what about my third request, regarding Belisarius Cawl."
Doscentis snorted. "Cawl doesn't care. Not yet. He's busy stitching his experiments together and fighting half a galaxy. You think he's going to drop everything because three weirdos show up with a tech fragment no one's confirmed yet?"
"It's confirmed," Farron muttered.
Doscentis held up a hand. "To you yes, to the rest of mechanicus in this sector, also yes. But to the rest of the galaxy? You're unknown quantities, a story that smells of lies and heresy. I'm vouching for you because I owe favors, and Spire's name still carries weight. And also because you have a genuinely powerful STC."
He took a breath or maybe a processing pause and looked at all three in turn.
"Listen. You've done the impossible. You got something, that STC could change the field. But right now, the Imperium's barely holding onto its own intestines. There's no room for miracles. Not yet."
Silence.
Cassian broke it. "So what do you expect us to do? Sit here? Wait until someone with more rank decides we're worth the paperwork?"
Doscentis rubbed the side of his head like it hurt. "I expect you to not get yourselves killed or robbed in the next few months. I expect you to hold on to what you have until someone who matters is ready to move. That's all I can promise."
"And if someone else hears about it?" Farron said. "What if another Forge World comes sniffing?"
"They will," Doscentis said flatly. "News like this leaks. Slowly, then all at once. You'll get offers. Threats. Maybe even assassins. You'll have to hold your line. You've got no allies. Just me. And I'm running out of political oxygen."
Cassian exhaled through his nose. Quiet. Then: "Fine."
Doscentis nodded. "Good. You keep the STC sealed. Keep your heads down. I'll send what data I can. Coded. Nothing traceable."
He turned to leave, but stopped after a few steps.
"Oh. One more thing."
They looked up.
"If you die before the warrant's activated," he said over his shoulder, "someone else gets the prize. Probably someone worse. And our deal is void."
Then he left.
Cassian didn't say anything for a while. Neither did Farron or Faevelith.
Finally, Cassian looked at the ship, then down the platform toward the dim cathedral halls and the ocean of pilgrims beyond.
"So," he said. "Now what?"
Faevelith looked up at the smoggy sky. "Now we wait."
"Yeah," Farron muttered. "Waiting. On a planet full of holy piss."
---
Cassian in fact didn't wait in a planet full of holy piss. He just started researching in the makeshift lab he had made with Spire's permission on to the ship.
He stood over the central hololith, arms folded, eyes locked onto the projected genetic scaffold. A man's face rotated slowly above the table. Pale and Stern.
Subjects- 08.
The last time someone tried to make a demigod out of a corpse, half the galaxy burned for ten thousand years. And yet… here it was again.
Afriel Strain.
Cassian rubbed his eyes. He hadn't slept in a day and a half. Not because he was tired his body didn't feel fatigue the way it used to. But his thoughts hadn't stopped clawing at his brain since Spire handed over the package.
Payment. That's what Spire called it. A reward. Clearance of all prior debts, plus a clean slate and unrestricted access to every scrap of Afriel data still left in the Segmentum Obscurus archives through illuminati.
"Go make something useful out of it," Spire had said, tired and probably caffeinated. "Or make yourself do something useful, it is your deserved reward."
Cassian had chosen both.
He keyed a sequence. The hololith split into three streams genetic architecture, incident logs, and behavioral trial outcomes. Each one a different color. Each one stacked with failure.
Strain AF-Subject- 08-0078: Decapitated by allied Ogryn during trench engagement.
Strain AF-Subject 08-0141: Led entire regiment into a minefield. Claimed 'visions.'
Strain AF-Subject- 08-0339: Survived seven executions. Shot self in the head. Bullet ricocheted. Killed Commissar. Suicide successful on second attempt.
Cassian stared at the last one a long time.
It was funny, in a way. You take the genes of the Imperium's most brilliant Men. You optimize them. Accelerate development. Splice in redundancy. Trim the fat. You get… this.
Perfection engineered by bureaucrats and desperate men. A perfect soldier nobody trusted. A curse disguised as a miracle.
But the bodies were superior.
He pulled up the cross reference: reaction time, regeneration rate, neuroplasticity. It was all off the charts. Higher than Astartes baselines in some regions. Latent warp sensitivity low, but present. The baseline was off charts.
That last part interested him.
Cassian leaned back in the chair, glancing down at his own hands. Still marked with faint scars. Old burns from the binding ritual. He flexed his fingers. Felt the tightness of the skin. Not discomfort. Just… memory.
His nanites swirled beneath the dermis, drawn toward active thought. They responded to biological shifts now. They were part of him now. And they could eat, digest, and assimilate foreign biomatter with the enhancement of his perks from Stat page and some warp power from his side or Faevilith. That was the point.
So what if they were fed this?
He tapped another sequence, bringing up nanite interaction simulations. Immune rejection: low. Structural compatibility: moderate to high. Neural cohesion: unstable but not unsalvageable. Warp resonance: potentially volatile.
The room dimmed slightly as the ship shifted into orbital drift. Somewhere below them was Savavarn, burning at the edges. Cassian didn't care. He'd already decided.
He wasn't going to waste this gift. He had the warp and ideas after all. He had to now deeply delve into different school of warp discipline for this.
Biomancy.
That psychic discipline wasn't that straightforward. It wasn't like throwing a fireball or lifting a rock with your mind. It was messier. Closer. More invasive. It meant sinking your will into living matter bones, nerves, blood and changing it. Not commanding, not reshaping in the abstract. Altering it, cell by cell, from the inside. It required a great deal of knowledge, and very fine control over the warp. Which is harder said than done, especially considering how warp works in this universe.
In theory, it was one of the sanctioned psychic disciplines. The kind taught by the Scholastica Psykana, monitored and restrained and approved. In practice? It was fleshcraft through sheer force of will. It was terrifying.
Cassian had no formal training in it. Just instinct and pressure and a few near death situations that had forced something loose in him. He could do it, barely. Nudge tissue to heal faster. Keep infection at bay. Push his strength for a few heartbeats past normal limits. But it never felt like a controlled thing. It felt like cracking open a door you weren't supposed to touch, and praying nothing else came through.
And the worst part was… it worked. Sometimes. Enough to make him try again. Enough to justify the risk.
Faevelith understood it far better than he did. She could twist skin and bone with her power, make blood vessels rupture or seal themselves with a flick of her fingers. It looked effortless when she did it. Elegant. But he knew that wasn't the truth. Nothing about the warp was effortless. It always cost something. The trick was deciding what you were willing to lose.
But it is a potential path for him.
Cassian shook his head as he got back to the topic he was thinking and hypothesizing about.
The Afriel genome offered one way to enhance his baseline potential before he started researching emperor's genome and gene seed.
No, offered many.
The problem was the curse. Every batch, every iteration always the same: phenomenal soldiers, mysteriously doomed. Regiments that imploded. Units that sabotaged themselves. And nobody ever figured out why. Bad luck? Psychosocial rejection? Warp taint?
Cassian didn't believe in bad luck.
He believed in patterns.
And he had Faevelith. She could see things even he couldn't. Warp echoes. Emotional threads. Curses woven in the fabric of thought. If there was something fundamentally wrong with the Afriel genome, they could find it. Root it out. Burn it clean.
Maybe.
Just more uncertainty.
Was chasing this strain just another dead end? Another perfect failure waiting to happen?
Cassian exhaled and closed the files. For now, he had data. Nothing more. No answers. No guarantees.
Just the slow grind of research and the hope that someday, maybe, something would break through.
---
Word Count: 1988
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