The Next Day
By dawn, the orbital shipyard was ready.
It waited in the depths of the Underhive like a buried moon, a vast black structure suspended within the hollowed fortress caverns beneath Tyrone Hive. Its hull was not painted, riveted, or plated in any familiar Imperial fashion. It was seamless, dark, and faintly reflective, swallowing the harsh work-lights around it and returning only distorted glints of green-white power.
Within its internal vaults, the ashes of the fallen had already been sealed away. Each stasis urn had been inspected, numbered, and placed inside a cold memorial chamber where gravity held still and dust could not settle. The warriors who had died in the Underhive would not be left in the sump-dark. They would be carried above the world that had tried to bury them.
The shipyard's dimensional engine throbbed at its core, not loudly, but deeply enough that the vibration could be felt through boots, bone, and metal decking.
Coiled energy moved through the structure in slow pulses. Stabilizer vanes adjusted by fractions of a degree. Defensive batteries rotated through silent test arcs. Void shields layered themselves around the hull in invisible shells, each one calibrated to withstand the first hostile scan, missile, or lance strike that might greet it in orbit.
It was not merely being launched.
It was being placed.
In the fortress cavern below, Qin Mo stood before the teleportation array and fed power into the control systems. Streams of pale light crawled from his hands into the machine's interface, branching through conduits, stabilizer towers, and buried anchor pylons that had been driven deep into the hive's foundations.
The Master AI processed the transfer in silence. Its logic-engines burned through trillions of calculations, comparing gravitational drift, atmospheric distortion, orbital debris, hostile scan patterns, sensor blind spots, and the movement of every known object above Talon I.
It calculated safe insertion windows, rejected most of them, recalculated, and finally selected a stable low planetary orbit where the shipyard could appear without immediately colliding with debris, broadcasting its presence to every enemy auspex, or tearing half the atmosphere open with misplaced displacement energy.
Beside Qin Mo stood Creed, arms folded across his chest. The Cadian had slept little since the pact was made the previous night. None of them had. Yet he remained steady, square-shouldered, and unreadable, a man who treated exhaustion as an inconvenience beneath notice.
Qin Mo watched the final numbers scroll across the display, then asked almost absently, "Is it true that on Cadia, if you look up, you can always see the Eye of Terror?"
Creed's jaw tightened by a barely visible degree.
"Yes."
He was quiet for a moment, as if deciding whether the answer should end there. Then he continued.
"Not just the Eye itself. You see the light around it. Colors that don't belong to any sun. Patterns in the sky that your eyes keep trying to follow even after your mind tells you not to. Some people stare too long. They start bleeding from the eyes, the ears, the nose."
Creed looked toward the dark mass of the shipyard. His voice remained flat. That made the words worse.
"On Cadia, children learn early not to look up without reason."
Qin Mo frowned. "If I had to see that warp rift every day, I'd lose my mind."
"Some do," Creed said.
Qin Mo's expression hardened. "I hate the Warp."
A dry chuckle escaped Creed. "Hive cities exist on Cadia too, you know. Not everyone gets the privilege of standing under an open sky and going mad poetically."
Qin Mo glanced at him.
Creed shrugged. "Some of us get to go mad underground like civilized people."
For a brief moment, the tension eased. Not much. Not enough to make the cavern feel warm. But enough for both men to remember that even soldiers from dying worlds could still make jokes about the manner of their suffering.
Then the Master AI spoke.
["Insertion point confirmed. Dimensional engine stable. Defensive systems synchronized. Awaiting final command."]
Before them stood the main transfer construct: a colossal cubic machine set upon a ring of black pylons. Creed had studied it more than once during the night, not because he expected to understand it, but because soldiers studied unfamiliar weapons the same way they studied unfamiliar enemies.
It had given him nothing.
There were no sacred panels, no recognizable cogitator banks, no exposed gears, no engraved Mechanicus litanies, no access hatches, no obvious power conduits. Its surface was smooth until Qin Mo approached, and then portions of it unfolded without seams, revealing interfaces that had not existed a heartbeat earlier.
Creed did not like it.
He respected it. Those were different things.
"It's done," Qin Mo said.
He stepped forward, fingers moving across the awakened interface. Sigils, coordinates, and geometric markers shifted under his touch.
"Have your shipmaster bring the vessel into the shipyard once it appears," he said. "The repair systems are already prepared."
Creed blinked. "That's it?"
Qin Mo looked at him. "That's it."
From Creed's perspective, Qin Mo had stood in front of a machine, made casual conversation about Cadia's cursed sky, touched a panel, and declared an orbital shipyard ready for deployment.
It offended every practical instinct Creed possessed.
A display flickered to life above the control dais. Static cleared. The image resolved into a live orbital feed.
A massive black sphere now hung above Talon I. It had not risen through the atmosphere. It had not burned a path through cloud and smoke. It had simply appeared in orbit, smooth and silent, a void-black moon set against the planet's curve. Around it, surveillance drones unfolded from hidden launch bays and began spreading into a defensive perimeter. Their auspex vanes opened like thin metal wings, scanning for enemy vessels, debris clusters, and anomalous energy signatures.
Creed stared at the feed for several seconds before activating his vox-link.
"Shipmaster. Bring the vessel in. The shipyard is directly ahead of you."
A pause followed. Then a distant voice answered, tight with awe.
"Confirmed. We see it."
Creed's mouth twitched. "Hard to miss."
High above the planet, the damaged merchant vessel adjusted course. Against the shipyard's immense scale, it looked almost fragile, a battered serpent crawling toward the mouth of a cavern. Burn marks scarred its hull. Several armor plates had been peeled open by battle damage. Sections of its outer structure showed emergency patches installed by men who had been more interested in surviving the next hour than satisfying any enginseer's standards.
Qin Mo switched the display to internal shipyard visuals.
The vessel passed through the entry aperture and into a chamber large enough to swallow several Imperial cathedrals. Vaulted support ribs arched overhead, their frames pulsing with restrained green radiance. Docking towers extended from the walls in smooth, silent motion. Repair gantries unfolded like skeletal hands. Drones detached from alcoves and formed inspection swarms around the incoming ship.
Beams of pale light swept over the merchant vessel's hull. They did not merely illuminate it. They measured, tested, and judged. Radiation residue. Stress fractures. Compromised armor. Heat warping. Micro-breaches. Power instability. Every wound appeared on the tactical display in layered red and amber outlines.
Creed watched without speaking.
"Most of the damage is external," Qin Mo said. "Ugly, but repairable."
The repair process began before Creed could ask how long it would take.
Black metallic material flowed from the docking arms and across the damaged hull. It did not pour like molten metal or crawl like a living thing, though it resembled both closely enough to unsettle the eye. It spread in thin layers, filled cracks, sealed breaches, reinforced warped sections, and hardened into smooth armor. Torn plating knitted shut in seconds. Exposed frame members disappeared beneath new alloy. Scorched sections cooled as heat was drawn away and dispersed through the shipyard's systems.
Creed's face remained controlled. His eyes did not.
"That isn't adamantium," he said. "Will it hold?"
"It will hold," Qin Mo replied. "It's an alloy designed for rapid repair and void exposure. Lighter than adamantium, more responsive under stress, and capable of limited self-recovery if the damage is not catastrophic."
"But weaker."
"In some ways," Qin Mo admitted. "Stronger in others. Adamantium is excellent when you need something to endure punishment for ten thousand years while priests argue over whether maintenance is heresy. This is better when you need a dying ship made functional before someone notices you are still alive."
Creed gave him a sideways look.
Qin Mo did not smile. "Different tools. Different purposes."
Creed accepted that with a slow nod. He still looked as though part of his worldview had been cut open and rebuilt by the shipyard's repair gantries.
"Your vessel will be ready shortly," Qin Mo said. "You and your men should teleport aboard and depart before enemy augurs identify the shipyard's energy signature."
Creed reached inside his coat and withdrew a thick bundle of dataslates, handwritten pages, and rough diagrams bound together with fiber cord. The bundle was too heavy to be a courtesy note and too organized to be an afterthought.
"Time was short," Creed said. "This is preliminary. Some of it will need revision once I know more about your manpower, industrial base, officer corps, and political situation."
He held the bundle out.
"But if you follow the principles here, you can raise an army worthy of the name."
Qin Mo took it. The first few pages were enough to tell him Creed had not merely written advice.
He had written doctrine.
There were sections on training shock formations for teleportation assaults, recommendations for small-unit leadership, discipline standards for newly armed civilians, logistical structures for rapid deployment, and methods for integrating drone support without making infantry dependent on it.
Creed had even included suggestions for repurposing waste-processing and cargo drones into field logistics units, casualty evacuation platforms, ammunition carriers, and mobile ration distributors.
Other sections addressed leadership cultivation. How to identify sergeants among civilians. How to prevent charismatic incompetents from rising too quickly. How to pair technically skilled recruits with veterans. How to build command habits before formal ranks hardened into entitlement.
It was practical, blunt, and unsentimental. Very Cadian.
Qin Mo flipped through several more pages and found a rough title written across the top of one slate in Creed's severe handwriting:
A Guide to Raising an Elite Army.
Qin Mo looked up. "You titled it?"
Creed's expression did not change. "A good manual tells the reader what it is for."
"Much appreciated," Qin Mo said.
The words were simple, but his tone carried more than courtesy. Creed heard it and gave a brief nod.
He stepped onto the teleportation marker with the other surviving Cadians. The men around him carried their weapons, their dead, and the hollow-eyed discipline of soldiers who had survived one impossible battlefield only to return to another. None of them offered speeches. None of them asked for promises.
Creed looked at Qin Mo one last time.
"Build quickly."
Qin Mo nodded. "Fight long enough for it to matter."
Creed smiled faintly. "That's the Cadian way."
Qin Mo activated the teleportation field.
Light folded around the Cadians. For an instant their outlines stretched into pale silhouettes. Then Creed and his men vanished from the platform and reappeared aboard the repaired merchant vessel in orbit.
On the display, Qin Mo watched the ship disengage from the dock. Repair drones peeled away. The vessel's engines flared cleanly, no longer coughing unstable exhaust through damaged vents. It drifted out from the shipyard's cavernous interior and turned toward open void.
At a safe distance, near the Mandeville Point of the Talon system, the ship prepared for translation. Its prow shuddered as the warp drive engaged. A wound of violet-black light opened ahead of it, contained only by ancient systems, desperate prayers, and the fragile arrogance of men who crossed hell because realspace was too large to travel any other way.
The merchant vessel entered the Immaterium.
Then it was gone.
Qin Mo stood in silence after the feed cleared.
He knew their journey would not be smooth. Warp travel was never safe. Even routine passages could become disasters if the tides shifted, the Gellar Field faltered, or something hungry noticed the ship's passage. Creed and his men had survived the Underhive, but the galaxy did not reward survival with mercy.
Still, that was no longer Qin Mo's battle to fight.
He turned from the display.
"Initiate the shipbuilding plan."
The Master AI's core brightened in response. Data cascaded across the holo-displays in disciplined streams.
["Order acknowledged. Recording in progress."]
Qin Mo folded Creed's doctrine bundle under one arm. "One cruiser. Two frigates."
["Acknowledged. Estimated completion time: five months under current resource allocation."]
"Begin selecting potential crew candidates immediately."
["Initiating aptitude assessments. Candidate pools will be evaluated according to psychological stability, technical adaptability, spatial reasoning, discipline under stress, and combat readiness."]
Qin Mo's eyes narrowed slightly. He did not know exactly how the Master AI would conduct its selection process among the soldiers, workers, void-capable personnel, and civilians under his command. Its parameters were too broad for any ordinary recruitment board and too precise for any Imperial tithe office. It would notice patterns no human officer had time to see: who panicked quietly, who lied well, who learned fast, who obeyed only when watched, who kept functioning when the lights failed and the deck shook.
That was why he had built it.
"Assign personnel to alloy production," Qin Mo continued. "Dispatch drones to construct dedicated metallurgical foundries. Prioritize neutron-forged steel, void-tolerant composites, radiation shielding, and self-sealing hull material."
["Acknowledged. Fabrication units deploying. Foundry schematics initialized. Resource extraction schedules updating."]
The cavern answered with movement. Hidden doors opened along the fortress walls. Cargo drones rolled out in ordered lines. Fabrication units detached from charging alcoves and began descending toward industrial zones where new foundries would be carved from dead infrastructure. The work had already begun before the echoes of Qin Mo's command faded.
That was good.
There was too much to do.
The cavern settled into a deep mechanical rhythm, the sound of an army and a nation being built beneath a hive city that still did not fully understand what had been born under its feet.
Qin Mo stood alone before the dimming display and considered the future.
From Creed's information, he estimated the current year to be roughly M41.989 by the Imperial calendar. The last years of the 41st Millennium. A time when every date seemed stamped with approaching catastrophe, when the Imperium staggered forward under the weight of wars it had forgotten how to end.
That meant one thing above all others.
In roughly a decade, Ursarkar E. Creed would become Lord Castellan of Cadia.
And more importantly, Abaddon the Despoiler, Warmaster of Chaos, wielder of the daemon sword Drach'nyen, would unleash the Thirteenth Black Crusade.
Ten years until Cadia's final stand.
Ten years until the opening wound of the Great Rift tore across the galaxy.
Ten years until the Imperium entered an age even darker than the one it already endured.
Qin Mo rested one hand on the edge of the control dais. The metal beneath his palm warmed in response to his presence.
If he wanted to prevent Cadia's fall, he had ten years.
Ten years to unite the Sector.
Ten years to build a navy capable of surviving the void.
Ten years to raise an army that could stand against traitors, daemons, xenos, and the grinding stupidity of the Imperium itself.
Ten years to become strong enough that when history reached for Cadia, he could break its fingers.
The campaign to consolidate the sector was inevitable. Talon could not remain divided. A single world, a single hive, a single fortress beneath the ground would not be enough. He needed planets, shipyards, orbital defenses, logistics networks, trained crews, industrial depth, and political control strong enough to endure panic, treachery, and faith in equal measure.
But Qin Mo had no intention of spending those years drowning in a war of attrition.
He was already thinking beyond armies.
Beyond fleets.
Beyond sieges and front lines.
A superweapon.
Not a crude planetary bombardment system. Not an oversized cannon built to impress nobles and terrify clerks. Not some half-mad Mechanicus relic that required a thousand chanting priests to activate and three hundred executions to satisfy its machine spirit.
A weapon based on dimensional technology.
Once Talon II fell under his control, its resources, manufactoria, orbital assets, and research potential would belong to him. Then he could stop improvising from battlefield salvage and underhive scrap. He could build properly. Test properly. Scale properly.
And once he did, the enemies entrenched on Talon III would not need to be worn down trench by trench or fortress by fortress.
They would be removed in one decisive stroke.
No survivors. No resistance.
It would not matter what false gods they worshipped.
It would not matter what banners they raised, what dogmas they screamed, or what bargains they believed had made them untouchable.
They would be erased.
By a weapon even the Star Gods would fear.