Luna took them back without comment. The Auric Silence slid into the southern dock, clamps closing with the tired finality of an oft-repeated sentence. The embark bay lights were a cold white that flattened colour and left only function. Armour hissed as seals broke; steam rolled off the Night's Children in sheets that smelled of solvent and old blood.
Kael stepped down to the decking, helm in the crook of his arm, skin pale under the strip-glare. He felt the Black Carapace unhook by degrees, needles withdrawing with the faint itch of a healed memory.
Around him, squads peeled off to inspection lines, weapons surrendered to servitors whose hands were all brush and vacuum line. Malchion gave him a brief nod and vanished toward the gymnasia; Joras drifted to the range with a case of stripped bolts; Silas disappeared entirely, as Techmarines do, into the humming dark where machines keep their truer conversations.
The debrief was short. Var Juren stood on a steel rostrum, hands behind his back, the blue-white of the lumen banks cutting a knife-edge across his scarred cheek.
"Deimos compliant. Minimal waste. Fifteenth—commendation recorded." He let the words fall and did not decorate them. "Acting Captain Varan: with me."
Kael followed him through corridors scrubbed clean enough to reflect the black of his eyes back at him in the walls—two depthless pits set in a face that had learned not to flinch. They passed a rack of Thunder Warrior plate sealed under lacquered glass, broad-chested armour that looked like violence made into furniture. Kael glanced once and kept walking.
In a small, cold room, Var Juren opened a case on a table and turned it so Kael could see. Inside lay an iron signet—VIII cut deep in the face, the Emperor's thunderbolt above it—and a flat, unadorned data-slate bound in black synth-leather.
"Authority," Juren said, indicating the ring.
"Accountability," he said, touching the slate.
"You'll sign your name into them both."
Kael slid the ring onto a finger scarred with training. It bit; the weight was nothing, the meaning not. He placed his thumb to the slate's reader. It warmed briefly, as if taking his measure, and returned to cool indifference.
"You will take the Fifteenth Company," Juren said. "Four line squads, two support, one reconnaissance, attached engineering under Silas. Strength to be grown to one hundred by the month's end. You will not confuse command with indulgence."
"No, Commander."
"You will be watched," Juren added, and his augmetic eye clicked softly as if to underline it. "Success breeds attention. Attention breeds… invitations."
"From whom?"
Juren's mouth thinned. "You'll know when you're inside the room."
He dismissed Kael with a small nod. Outside, the corridor's air felt colder. Kael stood a moment under the strip-lights and listened to his twin hearts find the rhythm they used when decisions had just been made: a little faster, then steady again.
He walked to his company deck. The Fifteenth had a space to itself now—an armourium, a range, a mess, a chapel with no altar and no god, only benches and the Legion's numeral on the far wall in cobalt enamel. Men looked up as he entered, then back to their work.
He heard Malchion's voice carry across the gym floor: "Again," followed by the thud-scrape of sparring boots and the snap of practice blades biting into padded collars. Joras fired slow shots down-range, recording groups without comment, adjusting stance by millimetres that meant meters at distance. Silas knelt in a halo of cable and tools with a power unit open like a patient.
Kael walked through them all, saying little. He watched. He noted who stood without shifting, who fidgeted, who smiled when they thought no one saw. Outwardly, he was the thing they had built: regulation posture, economical stride, voice that never needed to rise. Inwardly, sentences formed with the same neatness as drill ranks—fear is a language, leadership is diction, mercy is punctuation.
A chime rippled the room. Not the Company's line. The station's. A door at the far end opened without hiss or ceremony. A man entered flanked by two robed figures whose faces were half-machine. He wore black that didn't shine and a chain at his throat from which hung a seal etched with nine concentric circles and a key.
Kael knew the sigil from briefing slates and rumours that didn't survive the mess table: Malcador the Sigillite.
The room tightened as if a pressure door had closed. Malchion stopped mid-throw and lowered his blade. Joras safed his weapon by instinct older than caution. Silas stood in a movement that started at his spine and made its way outward, as if to hide grease that wouldn't hide.
Malcador looked at none of them and all of them. His eyes were grey the way dry stone is grey. When he spoke, it was in the manner of a man whose words arrive already measured. "Captain Varan," he said.
"Acting Captain," Kael corrected, because truth mattered.
Malcador's mouth made the shape of a smile and then decided against it. "For the hour's purpose, Captain. Walk with me."
They left the Company deck together, alone save for the robed shadows that paced behind Malcador like footnotes. He said nothing for fifty paces. Kael matched his silence, listening to the whisper of the Sigillite's robe over polished floor and the faint hiss of air through distant lungs.
"You returned a broken rock to function," Malcador said at last. "Minimal damage. Maximal lesson."
Kael kept his eyes forward. "We were instructed to keep the colony intact."
"And if you had not been?" Malcador did not raise a brow. He did not need to.
"Then I would have kept what could be used."
Malcador made a small sound that wasn't agreement and wasn't not. "Your commander says you think before you act. Unusual in your kind. Useful in mine."
"My kind," Kael repeated, not sure whether he liked the category.
"Soldiers," Malcador said. "Weapons that walk. The Emperor needs many. I need a few that can count."
They reached an access door rimmed in brass. An ocular lens irised, studied Malcador's face, and opened. The room beyond was narrow, long, and lit by a light that did not seem to come from anywhere a hand could touch. Racks lined the walls—cases, crates, sabres with the edges treated to a dull, hungry look, data-cores sealed in clear amber like flies.
Malcador gestured to a bench where a single case sat alone. "For your Company," he said. "Prototype void-blankets. Woven filaments embedded with null-thread. They drink luminance and sound. Your armour will not shine in the wrong places. Your steps will not carry as far."
Kael lifted the lid. Inside, folded with the neatness of an argument well-made, lay cloaks the colour of ash at midnight. He ran a gauntleted thumb along a hem; the material failed to reflect the strip-light and preferred, stubbornly, to be itself.
"And this," Malcador added, placing a smaller case beside it. He opened it with two fingers as if it might startle. Within lay a slab of black slate, edges worn to softness by hands that were not sentimental. It was bound by a strap and closed by a simple catch.
"A codex?" Kael asked.
"A key," Malcador said. "Routes and rooms in the places under places. Infrastructure schematics that don't exist for men who were not meant to need them. The Palace grows like an organism. Sometimes the body forgets all the ways it can be entered. We are here to remember."
Kael did not touch it. "Why give this to me?"
"Because your Legion understands what darkness is for, and because you specifically have made a habit of leaving your walls clean. Terror, contained, is a tool. Uncontained, it is a contagion. I am… fond of quarantine." He let the last word sit.
"Consider this a wager."
"You're betting on me."
"I am betting on your restraint." He tilted his head. "Tell me—do you believe in mercy?"
Kael answered without pause. "I believe in outcomes."
"And which are merciful?"
"The ones that do not require repeating."
Malcador looked genuinely pleased, like a mathematician hearing a proof offered without theatrics.
"Good. Your next orders come through me. Officially, you will be seconded for 'urban pacification exercises' in the Jovian shipyards. Unofficially, you will learn the arteries—Terra's, Luna's, any world we consider precious enough to defend without advertisement. You will practice entering places others imagine are safe. You will leave them safer than you found them."
"And when there is a choice between fear and spectacle?" Kael asked, hearing his own voice as if from a distance and noting the steadiness with detached approval.
"You already know the answer," Malcador said. "You've been speaking it since you left the dirt."
They returned to the door. Malcador paused with a hand on the frame. "You will be mistrusted," he said, almost conversationally. "By some in your own number, by many without. Your eyes do not help."
His gaze flicked, quick as a blade, to the black that swallowed Kael's. "Do not try to be loved. Be reliable. It is a rarer virtue."
"I can do that," Kael said.
"I know," Malcador said, and was gone down the corridor before the echo of his steps could decide whether to follow.
Kael stood with the cases under the strange light for the length of a slow breath. He closed the lids and carried both back to the Company deck. When he entered, men looked up again in that not-looking way soldiers have, measuring weight and angle and what it would mean for their next hour.
"New kit," Malchion said, almost hungry.
"Cloaks," Kael said. "And maps."
"Maps?" Joras asked from the range, without looking away from the sight.
"Keys," Kael amended. He set the cases on the table and let the Company gather without jostling. He laid one cloak over his arm; it drank the light happily. He set the codex down and ran the strap through his fingers before he buckled it again.
"We are seconded," he said. "Under the Sigillite's seal. We will learn to take rooms we're not invited into and leave quietly."
Malchion grinned. "Finally—something you enjoy."
"I enjoy results," Kael said. He looked along the benches at faces that were already more iron than boy.
"We will not decorate walls. We will not drag history behind us on hooks. We will make compliance cheaper than defiance and leave them with the dignity to tell the story properly."
A murmur—affirmation without applause. Silas plucked one cloak up between two fingers and held it to a lumen. The light failed to find a place on it to rest.
"Machine-spirits approve," he said, which was as close as he came to enthusiasm.
"Rig them tonight," Kael said. "We train in darkness."
They trained. The gymna turned its lumens to the lowest red that still kept the safety officers from sleeping poorly. The Night's Children learned the weight of the new weave, how it flowed over pauldrons, where it snagged, how to lift a knee without the hem whispering. They timed footfalls to the fan's breath and the tick of the range timers. They mapped the Company deck in their boots until none of them could get lost with their eyes closed.
Kael watched and corrected, counting under his breath. When he closed his own eyes, the room remained—edges, bodies, the swell of breath, the faint harmonic of plate on plate. He stood still in the middle and listened to fear not as a scream but as a pressure decrease when men moved in ways that would bring it to others. He felt no pride. He felt rightness.
Hours later, alone, he sat in the chapel with the numeral VIII looking down at him like a verdict and opened the black codex. Inside were diagrams drawn with the undecorated clarity of a mind that loves order: tunnels under palaces, culverts under rivers that had been bricked and bricked again, maintenance shafts too tight for tanks and too wide for rats, lists of access phrases that would open one door but not the one beside it. He turned pages until they began to repeat in their difference—a lattice of possibility imposed on stone.
He closed the book. His gauntlets left no oil where they touched it; he had taught the armour better manners than that. He looked up at the empty wall and thought of Malcador's eyes and Var Juren's caution and Deimos's yard where ten thousand men had learned to kneel without hating the ground.
"Outcomes," he said aloud, to the nothing that might be listening. "Not applause."
The next day brought orders. Not a war yet—an exercise near the Jovian drydocks, a problem with workers who had decided rules were for other shifts. He signed for munitions with the iron ring and felt nothing mystical in the act, only a system behaving as designed.
He checked the Company's strength: eighty-seven effectives, thirteen in medicae, supply sufficient for two weeks without reshipment. He walked the line and met each man's gaze through lenses that showed him only his own black eyes.
"Make it quiet," he said.
They moved to the embarkation bay in two files. The gunship waited open-jawed. The ramp was streaked with cleaned blood he could still see because cleaning is an argument, not an erasure. He took his place at the head, feeling the armour settle, the ports agree, the twin hearts find each other again.
As the ramp rose, the lights dimmed to red. The flight-servo whined. Someone breathed a little faster and then matched the Company's pace without needing to be told. Kael closed his eyes for the length of a slow count and let the dark sit on his eyelids like a cloak that had learned his name.
Above Luna, the stars were patient. Below them, men would decide to be brave the wrong way. The Night's Children would teach them how to be afraid correctly, and if they did it well, they would not have to visit twice.
Kael opened his eyes when the pilot called ten seconds.
The future did not speak. It did not need to. He could already feel the shape of the room he had not entered and the silence it would leave when they were done.