The dropcraft moved through the void without engines or wake. Its hull glowed faintly where micro-thrusters corrected drift, nothing more. Inside, the Night's Children were statues in ash-grey armour, helmets locked, cloaks drawn. The void-blankets Malcador had gifted them drank light and heat, turning each Astartes into an absence rather than a shape.
Kael stood at the fore, boots mag-locked to the deck. Through the cockpit glass, the Jovian shipyards drifted closer — miles of scaffolds, fuel lines, and orbital docks tangled together like a spider's skeleton. The place was half-shadow, half-sunlight, alternating bands of gold and black that moved as Jupiter's reflection rolled across the hulls.
The vox crackled once in his ear, barely a whisper from Malchion behind him. "Shipyard control's gone dark. No active beacons, no heat bloom."
"Expected," Kael said. His voice through the vox was steady, a quiet current under the silence. "They've been warned we're coming. Expect traps."
There was a soft click as the weapons safeties disengaged, one by one. The sound carried like raindrops on steel. The dropcraft drifted in alongside Dock-Alpha's outer spire. Magnetic clamps engaged with a dull thunk. The ramp opened to nothing — a hard black void, no air, no sound. The shipyard's surface loomed just beyond, anchored in the thin light of a dying sun.
Kael stepped first, the mag-boots catching on the pitted hull. The gravity here was barely measurable. He felt the tug of inertia more than any pull downward. The others followed, silent in their descent across the metal plain.
The corridors were cold and empty. Tools floated where they had been left. A single human glove drifted past Kael's helm, stiff, the fingertips stained brown. He didn't stop it.
"Malchion," Kael voxed quietly. "Channel Two."
"Here."
"Section off by pairs. No lights. Move on thermal sweep only."
Acknowledgements clicked through the comm-line. The Company split, vanishing into the arteries of the station like a disease moving through veins.
Kael advanced toward the central bay, Joras at his side. The world was a skeleton of metal and quiet. The occasional glimmer of light came from old welding torches or the reflection of distant Jovian storms through glass plating.
"Too quiet", Joras voxed.
"Quiet means we're close," Kael replied.
He reached a junction where the power grid's veins intersected. The airlock to the reactor core had been welded shut from the inside. Plasma scarring marked where someone had tried to cut through — recently.
He studied the weld pattern. Too clean. Not the work of panicked labourers. Someone professional had sealed it.
Kael's gauntlet hovered just above the surface, fingers brushing the cooling line. The world around him dimmed slightly. The faint glow of his suit lamps guttered — not off, just swallowed.
He didn't command it; it simply happened. The darkness bent inward, pooling around his hand like ink. The surface beneath seemed to dissolve. A heat shimmer in reverse.
The seal split with a sigh, as though something had waited for permission to yield.
Joras stiffened. "What was that?"
Kael kept his eyes forward. "The weld failed."
"Did it?"
"Yes."
They stepped through. Neither spoke again about the darkness.
The core chamber was a cathedral of heat exchangers and broken light. The generator heart still pulsed, weak but alive, like an exhausted lung. And around it — bodies.
Not Astartes. Not Mechanicum. Human.
Workers in grey overalls, their faces pale and swollen from vacuum exposure. They floated in slow circles, the air currents too weak to move them properly. Their tools drifted near them like relics left for mourning.
Joras scanned. "No bullet wounds. No heat marks. They asphyxiated."
Kael's optics zoomed in. Their throats were bruised. "No, strangled."
"By who?"
"By each other."
A sound crackled through the comms — faint static, almost like breathing. Kael raised his weapon, scanning the dark.
The first shot came from above. A slug round, mass-reactive. It shattered against his pauldron, showering sparks into the low gravity.
"Contact!" Joras barked.
Kael turned, saw shapes moving along the upper gantries — human-sized, void-armoured, too quick for unaugmented men. The first wave fell on them like shadows dropped from the ceiling.
Kael's bolter roared once. The recoil carried him backward against the wall. The round took one of the shapes through the chest; the man spun and burst in vacuum, his blood freezing mid-air into a cloud of rubies.
Another came in low, blade drawn. Kael caught the wrist mid-swing, turned, and snapped it backward. The sound didn't carry — but he felt the pop through the armour, the texture of bone giving way. He crushed the man's throat, pushed him away, and fired again. The body drifted upward, tumbling slowly until it caught on a pipe and hung there like a broken ornament.
Joras fought beside him, precise and silent, each shot placed through a visor or under a rib. The attackers — a mix of mercenaries and rogue mechanics — fell one after another, their weapons spinning off into the dark.
When the last one floated still, Kael lowered his weapon. The blood crystals drifted around them in slow orbit, catching the faint reactor glow.
"Who were they?" Joras asked.
Kael knelt by one of the corpses, pried open the chest plate, and found a data-sigil burned into the armor's inner lining — a nine-pointed star within a ring.
"Not rebels," he said quietly. "Spies."
"Whose?"
"Does it matter?" Kael replied. "Someone wanted the Emperor blind here."
He took the data-sigil and slipped it into a compartment at his belt. The metal felt warm, like something alive.
Hours later, the fighting was over. The shipyard was reclaimed. The dead — both loyal and traitor — were sealed in airlocks and ejected into orbit. The void outside shimmered faintly as the bodies drifted away toward Jupiter's storms.
Kael stood alone in the observation deck, helm removed. His breath fogged the glass, then faded.
He looked down at his gauntlet, flexed his fingers. The darkness responded again — just a whisper of it, but there. The light on his hand dulled; the air thickened. He could feel it now, like muscle memory — the shadow answering him as if it were a limb he'd forgotten he had.
He thought of fear. Not as a weapon, but as a substance. Something with weight and texture. Something he could shape.
The vox chimed. A private channel, no origin code. He answered.
Malcador's voice came through the static, soft and measured. "The shipyards are secure."
"Yes."
"You found something."
Kael looked at the sigil on the table, the nine-pointed mark. "Spies. Not ours."
"Few things are entirely ours," Malcador said. "You handled it cleanly. The Emperor is pleased."
Kael almost smiled. "The Emperor hasn't spoken to me."
"Not directly," Malcador said, amusement faint beneath his calm. "But He sees what He needs to."
Kael looked again at his hand, still wrapped in the quiet pulse of shadow. "If He truly sees everything," he murmured, "He sees too much."
Malcador didn't answer. The channel cut.
Kael stood in the silence a moment longer, staring at the planet below — a vast, endless storm, red and gold and hungry. He whispered to the void, his voice too soft for the vox to catch.
"Fear is easy. Understanding is harder."
The lights around him flickered once. The darkness pulsed in answer.