Orders fell like weather—unsigned clouds that already knew where they would rain. Kael signed the manifests with the iron ring, felt nothing ceremonial in the act, only mass moving along a planned gradient: pallets of bolt shells, repair studs, field ration bricks, null-thread cloaks folded with the neatness of arguments.
The Fifteenth Company lifted from Luna under a sky that had never been blue and turned toward Ghorval, a manufactorum world whose governor had decided the Emperor's tithe was a discussion.
Ghorval wore its work like a disease: smoke-bands, furnace glare, cities built on ribs of ore. The brief was lean. Objective: restore flow. Constraint: preserve infrastructure. Method: instruction, not annihilation.
They dropped in predawn, when the smog lay heavy and the air held its heat like a grudge. Gunships skimmed cable forests and vent stacks, slid between rusting spines where birds had once lived and now only dust nested. Skids kissed concrete on a factorum roof; the ramp fell; the Night's Children stepped into wind that tasted of iron filings and burnt sugar.
Sirens mourned a district away. Somewhere closer, voices had the raw edge of men who had shouted themselves hoarse and found it changed nothing.
"Two squads left, two with me," Kael voxed.
"Silas, take the grid. I want eyes before I want kills."
"Mapping," Silas answered. His auspex sang softly, a tapped glass tone.
The first contact came where a tramway punched a throat through stacked habs. A clot of militia jammed the passage—rebreathers scabbed together with cloth, breastplates stolen from old armories, rifles held like talismans.
They fired too soon, rounds smacking Kael's thigh plate hard enough to bruise meat under synth-muscle, ricochets squealing along ferrocrete. He registered pain as a datum and moved forward into it.
The bolter answered. Recoil thudded his shoulder like agreement. A face became a hole with hair. Another became red mist that hung in the hot air like breath in winter. Joras's shots cored throats and visor seams, low sound and neat violence. Malchion advanced like a butcher on a full morning: one round per body, economy first, art never. Boots sucked at pooled fluids; shell casings chimed as they sprang and settled.
The line broke in under twenty seconds. Five men dropped their rifles, hands up. A boy no older than Terra had been to Kael tried to run, tripped over a corpse, and curled around himself on instinct older than language. Kael stepped around him, not callous—deliberate. Mercy was only useful when it taught.
"Down," Kael said to the survivors. "Face to ground. Hands behind heads."
He sighted on the first to disobey and waited. No one tested him. He let them live.
Silas's voice came low. "Heat mass north. Armoured signatures around pump stations. Old pre-Imperial hulls. Loudspeakers on loop."
"Water buys obedience," Kael said. "We'll buy it back."
They moved through the plant like black commas correcting a run-on sentence. Pipes throbbed. Leaks hissed rainbows where light found oil. At the pump complex, they found the armour: three riveted beasts with slab sides and turrets like clenched fists—the sort of machine that insists the world has one problem it can solve by driving forward forever. Shield lines wrapped the yard; razorwire fenced it into certainty. Speakers brayed: Workers of Ghorval, defend your—
"Joras," Kael said.
Speaker cones popped in tidy order. Silence fell with weight; men heard themselves breathing and did not like it.
"Cut tracks," Kael ordered. "No overpenetration."
Malchion kissed a melta's muzzle to the rear idler of the first beast. Steel bloomed orange, ran, surrendered. The tank sagged onto softened bones, screaming like metal does when you make it admit the lie of invulnerability. The second and third followed into orderly misery. Militia fired everywhere but at anything; two rushed the wire, tangled, died; the four behind them recoiled as if their courage had been tethered.
Kael went through the cut fence. The ground was slick with oil and a thin skim of old blood turned to glue by heat. A shotgun coughed from a bunker slit; pellets rattled his pauldron and helm like thrown gravel. He felt the shot before it left the barrel—the telegraph of shoulders, breath dragged too deep.
He took half a step; the blast passed where his visor had been. He put a round through the mouth that had opened to shout afterward. Teeth and bone decorated the slit behind; the body chose to be a rope and sagged.
He reached the control bank. A woman crouched there in an oil-stained jumpsuit, jaw set the way pride sets it just before someone dies for it. Her pistol trembled.
"Don't," Kael said. Not command. Counsel.
She stared into black eyes that gave her nothing. Her hand shook once and steadied. She set the pistol down. Kael took it and put it on the console where it looked very civilian.
"Open the valves," he said.
"They'll kill me," she whispered. Her voice carried the ruin of a long night.
"I won't."
She studied him like a bad omen and found no edges to hold. Her fingers moved. Deep metal turned. Water went where water ought to go. The noise of it filled the station with a softness that made the killing sound like interruption rather than theme.
"Hide," Kael told her. "When we leave, you'll be the one who opened the gates. Tell them it was you."
She vanished into pipes. He didn't watch her go. "Broadcast," he voxed. "All bands. Water at dawn for those who stand down."
Joras read the words in monotone. The message outran fear, which was the work.
They pressed toward the governor's keep through streets that had taught themselves new geometry around barricades. The day warmed; the smog thinned; shutters cracked to slits.
Twice more the militia attempted courage and unmade it when first rank went down clean. A man with medals and a bullhorn voice tried to glue the line; Kael shot him in the gut at forty meters and watched gravity finish what the bolt began. He did not enjoy the sight. He memorised how the ranks forgot their shape.
At the keep, Governor Varxis waited in a hall tiled in stolen history. He wore furs that had never known cold and a beard that had never laboured. Guards behind him lifted rifles; their eyes were already looking for someone else's orders.
Kael walked until muzzle discipline mattered more than distance. "Governor Varxis," he said, and did not amplify. "You will abdicate to an administrative council. You will remain quartermaster."
Varxis bared his teeth. "A provincial's nightmare with black eyes. I am not frightened."
"You misunderstand your part," Kael said, raising the boltgun until it was a small sun in Varxis's world. "You don't need to be frightened. You need to be useful."
Something passed over the governor's face—pride debating arithmetic and losing. He spoke into the keep's vox. His voice shook on drink; tremor carried. Gates opened across Ghorval. People flowed. Sometimes order is only a line of buckets passed faster than fire can think.
On the steps, an Imperial Fists detachment arrived late and indignant—yellow armour like cut stone, a centurion whose jaw looked chiseled for vows. He took in unopened artillery, unbroken pumps, stacks of rifles, neat rows of kneeling prisoners flanked by uninjured marines with clean kit and blood only on boots.
"You left the walls… undecorated," he said, as if testing a dialect.
"They'll remember without reading," Kael said.
The centurion's gaze snagged on the iron ring and the codex case at Kael's belt, on cloaks that refused to return light. "You operate under special seal."
"Under orders," Kael answered. Both true and refusal.
The Fist swallowed something salt and nodded. "Result is sound."
"Result is the only sound that matters."
By dusk, the city's noise had changed key. Blood lay under tarps that stuck to what they hid. Medicae worked their quiet math. A child clung to a pipe and drank until he coughed. A woman scrubbed a step hard as if absolution were friction. The air was still thick; the heat made the dead sweet.
Kael walked the pump yard alone. The woman from the controls emerged from the maze, hair slicked by steam to her skull. She looked from giant to giant and then stopped at him.
"What do I call you?" she asked.
"Captain," he said. "Or nothing."
"You didn't kill us."
"Not killing is not the same as saving." He thought of Deimos's yard, of governors with shaking hands and men learning to kneel without hating the ground, of Malcador's maps and doors, of a darkness that bent when he asked.
"You opened the valves," he added. "Tell them that when they ask."
"Who are you?" she pressed. "They whisper Night's Children and eyes like pits—but you don't… enjoy this."
"Enjoyment is beside the point."
"And the point is?"
"Work," he said. "Order. The right story told once."
She nodded as if that was the most human thing he had said and left with her head high.
Reports went up in neat columns: munitions spent; casualties (enemy and ours); critical systems preserved; prisoner tallies; names—so many names it would have been easy to let them smear into a noise that licensed indifference. Kael didn't.
He read every one. In the margin of his copy he wrote a smaller list: Aneus—throat torn by a lucky round at a seam; Bren—bled inside when a fall cracked sealant; Torvil—heart failed after a sprint he forced past reason; eight civilians the medicae swore could not have been saved by any known technique. He hated the neatness of that sentence and kept their names anyway. When he slept, he put them where his unused fear used to live.
A message burned down from orbit, seal pressed into the corner like an eye that didn't blink.
Result noted. Restraint observed. Authority extended.
There are worlds that do not know how to be afraid properly. Teach them quietly.
— M.
He closed the slate and looked at the city. Sirens had gone to bed. Water sounded like relief. In a high window, a match flared; for a second the tiny theatre took his eye. Sparks never own much time before oxygen and need and physics make decisions for them.
"Captain," Malchion said behind him, voice pitched low out of the habit of men who have learned noise is a wound. "The men ask what to call us."
"Fifteenth Company," Kael said.
"They mean the name the others use," Malchion persisted, almost smiling. "They've started saying Veiled Fifteenth. The ones who make rooms smaller."
Across the yard, an Imperial Fists sergeant spoke to his men in stone-sober tones. He glanced toward Kael once, measured the clean kit and the blood only where it had to be, and tapped two fingers against his helm—a gesture halfway between salute and the acknowledgment craftsmen give clean lines.
Kael looked down at his gauntlets. Dried gore sat in the knuckle seams like rust. He took a brush from his belt and worked it out with patient strokes until the metal showed as it should. The cloak on his shoulders drank the yard's light and kept him smaller than he was.
"Let them call us what helps them work," he said. "We've more rooms to make smaller."
They lifted at first light. Ghorval turned to brass under a low sun, the haze momentarily beautiful because distance forgives. In the bay, the Company slept where they could; armour ticked as it cooled; the ship sang its thin, mechanical songs. Kael stood at the forward bulkhead and watched stars return.
Outwardly, he was stone—unblinking, without triumph. Inwardly, a thought turned like a wheel that would not stop: If fear is a language, we are learning to conjugate it into mercy. He did not say it aloud. The darkness at the bay's edges tightened a fraction around him, as if it had heard and approved, then loosened when he did not ask for more.
He checked strengths—eighty-one effectives, six injured, three dead—wrote the names again in a hand that refused to blur. When he closed the slate, the weight of them settled where it would not shake loose.
The next orders would come like weather; he would meet them with the same umbrella: clean walls, open valves, the right story told once.