Two days later.
Qin Mo stood tall in the central control chamber of the Talon Orbital Shipyard, his expression stoic as his eyes scanned the massive lumen-screens. Each screen displayed real-time construction updates, flickering with the glowing outlines of warships being birthed inside the massive void-facility.
A year earlier, the orbital shipyard had undergone a major expansion. It could now construct five capital-class warships simultaneously, each up to forty kilometers in length. Most Imperial sectors would have treated such a facility as the industrial heart of an empire. Talon treated it as the first mature stage of a larger plan.
One fabrication hall currently housed a 37-kilometer-long warship, whose armored flanks already bore the cog-and-skull sigil of the Adeptus Mechanicus. The vessel's frame was still open in places, exposing reactor tunnels, macro-cannon galleries, and the skeletal cavities where shrine-decks and machine chapels would eventually be installed to satisfy its future owners.
Another hall mirrored the effort. There, a similarly massive vessel was being assembled for the Lamenters Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes. Its outer armor remained incomplete, but the bleeding heart insignia had already been applied to the primary flank plates, as if the ship itself had been branded with the Chapter's history before it even took its first breath in the void.
The remaining three drydocks were even busier. One Talon-pattern battleship, ten cruisers, and twenty escort frigates were being fabricated according to standardized Talon Navy specifications. Their shapes varied by battlefield role, but the design philosophy was consistent: modular systems, redundant power routes, high-density weapon arrays, integrated dimensional engines, and enough automation to reduce the number of human crew needed without making the ship dependent on a single fragile intelligence core.
The current production cycle was projected to complete within three standard years. Once finished, the shipyard would begin another cycle immediately, devoted entirely to expanding the Talon Sector Fleet. There would be no ceremony, no grand pause, no triumphal declaration. One wave of ships would leave the womb, and the next would begin forming behind them.
"Astounding productivity for a single sector," Vanessa murmured behind him.
Her eyes remained fixed on the screens. The forming starships drifted within gravitic assembly fields, their void-armored hulls slowly gaining shape one layer at a time. Even for someone who had seen Imperial mustering grounds, forge-world docks, and the grand machinery of the Emperor's realm, Talon's shipbuilding methods carried an unsettling directness. There were fewer processions, fewer invocations, fewer priests striking bells while adepts waited for permission to tighten a bolt. The work simply happened.
Qin Mo did not turn immediately. He had not seen Vanessa since before the Celestial Engine deployed. Back then, the Departmento Munitorum had sent envoys to deliver his appointment as Lord Governor of the entire Talon Sector, along with the Imperium's formal gratitude for his support of Forge World Agripinaa.
Since then, duty had swallowed him whole. Governance, shipbuilding, military reform, research, intelligence gathering, blackstone studies, Cadia preparations, and the quiet management of a sector that was becoming too important to remain unnoticed. Only now had he found time to summon Vanessa again.
"Have you decided what compensation you want for aiding Agripinaa?" Vanessa asked.
Her tone was calm, but Qin Mo heard the assumption beneath it. She believed that was why he had called her here.
When he had first agreed to aid Agripinaa, he had not demanded an immediate reward. He had only said he would think about it. Many Imperial officials had found that answer more frightening than a demand. A demand could be filed, negotiated, delayed, and buried under counterclaims. An undecided Lord of Talon was a ledger entry waiting to become political weather.
"I still haven't decided," Qin Mo replied, shaking his head.
He watched a sequence of armament choices scroll across the screen. Lance batteries. Missile cells. Boarding assault decks. Drop-pod launch channels. Defensive flak grids. Everything was useful. Everything had cost. Everything created second-order consequences.
After a moment, he asked, "What do you think of the Talon military?"
Vanessa's attention shifted from the starship displays to him.
Qin Mo had been thinking about that question for some time. Talon's armed forces had advanced rapidly, perhaps too rapidly. Their technology, organization, and command structure had leapt forward by decades in a handful of years, but progress had begun to press against a harder problem. Not invention. Not courage. Not battlefield performance.
Scalability.
During the Agripinaa campaign, parts of the Talon Army had field-tested new combat doctrines. With superior information warfare, battlefield surveillance, and target acquisition, aerospace fighters and artillery units had carried out precision strikes against high-value targets. Infantry then advanced in dispersed lines, maximizing battlefield coverage while avoiding the mass casualties common to conventional Imperial assaults.
In another army, the doctrine would have been revolutionary. In Talon, it was merely useful.
The problem was teleportation.
Talon forces had mastered large-scale synchronized teleport assault tactics. Units could deploy from orbit to surface, from fortress to battlefield, or from one tactical node to another with terrifying speed. Supply lines, marching routes, forward staging areas, and many traditional concepts of battlefield positioning became less important when soldiers, armor, ammunition, and evacuation assets could be shifted almost instantly across a planetary theater.
Even units stationed aboard the Celestial Engine could appear on a planet's surface with little delay. In that context, improving teleport doctrine seemed far more logical than imitating conventional armies, no matter how refined the new conventional doctrine might be.
There was also another reason he had summoned Vanessa.
Vanessa sometimes heard the Emperor's voice. Qin Mo did not know how often, how clearly, or under what exact conditions. He did not know whether the Emperor watched Talon directly through her, or only glanced at it when events became too large to ignore. But if Vanessa could serve, even briefly, as a window through which the Master of Mankind observed Talon's development, then her opinion might carry more than her own judgment.
The Emperor had lived through uncounted wars. He had seen humanity rise, collapse, and claw its way through ten thousand years of rot. Qin Mo disliked relying on divine authority, but he was not foolish enough to ignore experience merely because it came wrapped in gold and unbearable psychic pressure.
Vanessa remained silent for several seconds. When she finally spoke, her voice had lost its casual edge.
"Your military is too refined."
Qin Mo turned his head slightly.
Vanessa continued, "I have already heard the Voice's judgment. Your soldiers are too expensive. One basic Talon infantryman consumes matériel equivalent to an entire Astra Militarum company. Your recruitment threshold is not merely physical health, mental stability, or loyalty. It is the ability to memorize and properly use every function of power armor, integrated weapons, battlefield networking, shield systems, emergency procedures, and support equipment. That alone excludes most people who might otherwise be usable soldiers."
She gestured toward the screens.
"Your warships suffer from the same tendency. Each one is powerful. Each one is efficient. Each one is packed with technology that would make a Battlefleet admiral commit several polite crimes to acquire it. But they are over-focused on individual performance. Even if you can print them with terrifying speed, you are still building expensive ships with considerable construction time and high technical demands."
Qin Mo said nothing.
"The Celestial Engine is formidable," Vanessa said. "So formidable that, in a single star system, you do not need to care how many enemies are present. Teleport it in, establish dominance, and the system is effectively yours. But true wars are rarely limited to one system. They consume sectors. They spill across subsectors, segmentae, and entire strategic regions. A single Segmentum may contain hundreds or thousands of inhabited systems, and more uninhabited ones than any commander can comfortably count."
Qin Mo finally turned to face her fully.
"There are fewer than sixty inhabited worlds in the Talon Sector," he said. "Even if I conscripted every man, woman, and child, I would not have enough bodies for a Segmentum-scale war. The Celestial Engine may only dominate one system at a time, but it ensures no enemy can lay siege to the Talon capital. It also means I do not have to personally take the field swinging a chainsword every time the galaxy decides to vomit a crisis at my doorstep."
Vanessa sighed. She did not look offended. If anything, she looked tired in the way only Imperial servants could look tired: not from one burden, but from knowing every burden sat atop a thousand older ones.
"I never said your army was weak," she replied. "It is not. Your strength is quality, not breadth. Once deployed, Talon forces will almost always win their engagements. The danger lies in attrition and dispersion. You should avoid wars where victory requires feeding soldiers into a grinder faster than the enemy can feed theirs. The same applies to your fleet. Do not let the enemy turn your best units into isolated trophies destroyed one at a time."
Qin Mo mulled that over. The answer was not surprising, but hearing it stated plainly helped clarify the shape of the problem.
Talon's forces could evolve along two obvious paths: technological upgrades or expansion in scale. Ideally both. But each path came with risks. More sophisticated equipment raised the training burden. More soldiers required more recruitment, more logistics, more officers, more political management, and more tolerance for mediocrity than Qin Mo naturally possessed.
After a pause, he shifted the subject.
"What is the situation with Cadia?"
Vanessa's face grew more serious.
"All Cadian forces are being recalled," she said. "The Fortress World is preparing for a massive conflict. Everyone on Cadia can feel it coming. Officers. Guardsmen. Civilians. Even those who know nothing of strategy sense that something enormous is moving toward them. The mustering has already begun."
"So," Qin Mo said quietly, "it is finally coming."
He closed his eyes.
He remembered what was supposed to happen. Plagues and unnatural unrest spreading around Cadia's periphery. Chaos raiding fleets testing defenses. The Volscani Cataphracts landing and back stabbing the planet's leadership. Abaddon the Despoiler gathering his legions for a full-scale assault. Cadia becoming the anvil upon which the fate of the Imperium would be struck until the metal cracked.
The Thirteenth Black Crusade had not yet formally begun, but the fires before it were already spreading through multiple subsectors. Agripinaa, now reinforced by the Celestial Engine, was only one vital anchor point in a far larger struggle, like a fortress guarding a chokepoint before the true army arrived.
Talon still had a few years before Abaddon's final assault on Cadia began in earnest.
But Qin Mo's ambitions went beyond defending the Blackstone Pylons on Cadia. He intended to use them. If possible, he wanted to seal the Eye of Terror. If the opportunity presented itself, he wanted Abaddon dead as well.
That thought carried no heroic warmth. Killing Abaddon would not fix the Imperium. It would not erase Chaos. It would not resurrect the dead or turn the galaxy sane. But it would remove a dangerous commander, disrupt a colossal enemy effort, and force the Ruinous Powers to spend more time arguing over who received the next crown of failure. That alone made it worth considering.
In the coming war, Belisarius Cawl would become vital. He would learn how to harness the Blackstone Pylons, and that knowledge could shape the fate of Cadia.
Cawl currently resided in Talon, but Qin Mo knew the version present there was only a replica-body. The original was likely on Eriad VI, hidden behind contingencies, memory partitions, and whatever absurd self-preservation architecture Cawl considered normal.
"I have been preparing for this war for a long time," Qin Mo said slowly. His gaze locked onto Vanessa. "I am happy to strike against Chaos wherever I can, but do not mistake my defense of Cadia for charity."
Vanessa nodded.
She understood. Qin Mo expected compensation if Cadia was secured. More importantly, he expected the Imperium to recognize that Talon's intervention was not merely another tithe of blood thrown into the furnace.
Unlike Agripinaa, the fate of Cadia affected the entire human race.
Talon forces were not just another defensive line. They specialized in concentrated system-scale warfare. If committed properly, they would not merely bolster Cadia's defenses. They could alter the outcome of the war.
"Do you need me to act as liaison on Cadia?" Vanessa asked.
"No." Qin Mo declined without hesitation. "I will send a Freeblade Rogue Trader named Klein. He will use faster-than-light communications. More stable than astropathic relays, and less likely to arrive as a half-mad metaphor about bleeding stars and saintly bones."
Vanessa's mouth twitched, but she did not object.
"The Imperial tithe fleet has arrived," Qin Mo added. "You will handle their reception. Also, try to convince them to upgrade the tithe fleet's engines with dimensional engines before they leave."
"Leave it to me."
Vanessa inclined her head. She had dealt with Imperial officials long enough to understand that persuasion often required equal parts diplomacy, threat assessment, religious phrasing, and making the other party believe the decision had been their own idea all along.
Qin Mo gestured for her to leave.
Vanessa turned and vanished in a flicker of blue light, teleporting silently out of the control chamber.
Two seconds later, she reappeared.
"Back already?" Qin Mo frowned instinctively. Then he noticed something wrong with her aura.
Vanessa smiled. The shape of her body shimmered, light sliding over her like water across polished metal. A moment later, she had become a beautiful silver-haired woman whose expression carried too much amusement to belong to the saint who had just left.
"Looks like you really do find her annoying."
Qin Mo's expression flattened.
"I hate everything about the Immaterium," he replied bluntly.
He turned back to the control consoles and resumed inputting design commands, personally configuring the armament layout of the Lamenters Chapter's future flagship.
"What do you want?" he asked.
The Shapeshifter shrugged. "Nothing."
Qin Mo glanced sideways.
"Fine," she corrected herself. "I came to bug you. No, came to see what you are doing."
"Those are functionally the same thing."
"Only if you lack appreciation for social nuance."
"I do."
The Shapeshifter laughed softly and drifted closer, studying the warship schematic as if she understood every layer of it and was deciding whether to pretend otherwise.
The vessel under construction for the Lamenters would not be a conventional battleship. It was being designed for Space Marine warfare: boarding actions, orbital assault, rapid deployment, armored strike corridors, drop-pod saturation, Thunderhawk support, and enough internal compartmentalization to keep fighting even after whole decks were breached.
Qin Mo adjusted the assault deck configuration. The Lamenters had survived too much misfortune for him to hand them a decorative monument with guns attached. If he was building them a flagship, it would be a tool. A weapon. A mobile fortress capable of delivering Astartes directly into the throat of whatever horror the galaxy placed before them.
The Shapeshifter watched for a while, her earlier playfulness fading into something closer to awkward patience. For once, she seemed unsure whether she was welcome, unwelcome, or merely tolerated because Qin Mo was too busy to remove her.
At last, she stepped back. "Well, since you are busy, I'll just—"
"Wait."
She stopped.
Qin Mo did not look away from the console, but his voice sharpened into command.
"Use your illusion projection to initiate a meeting with every Man of Stone in the sector. Only them. Do not drag those two Inquisitors with mind-control implants into the illusion."
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