And here comes another chapter. Hope I didn't keep you waiting too long, but I was reading the newly published novel of the Horus Heresy, The Damnation of Pythos. Good book, though those who have read Pandorax already know how it ends.

Before the story begins, here are a few points I would like to rise :

Firstly, the rating of this story. Until now, I have rated it at T, but the amount of violence within (eh, it is a story about psychopaths worshipping gods that are literally made of hate) makes me wonder if I should give it a M rating instead. Please give me your advice about this, because I just can't decide.

Secondly, I have used the neutral pronoun 'it' to refer to space ships. But it occurs to me ( a bit late, I admit) that ships are normally classified as feminine beings in English. Should I keep using the neutral pronoun as I have done until now, or change it to the correct way ? As before, I await your advice.

With this taken out of the way, there are, as usual, a few people whose reviews I want to answer :

Khorne : Mercy, oh Great One ! It was either that, or let the mad demon rampage on the Hand of Ruin !

garmon z evil : thank for your praise. The reason they put the Oracle where it is now (for reminders, inside a prisoner Ultramarine psyker) instead of inside a weapon is simple : Arken doesn't trust a daemon any further than he can throw it. Having to deal with Serexithar when he is in its chamber is difficult enough, but having a Daemon Prince of Tzeentch inside your weapon (is that even possible ?) would be suicide. For the psykers, they are too valuable for Arken to have deployed them until now, but their turn will come soon and I will think about your suggestion then. As for Fabius Bile ... well, to be honest, while he is a fascinating character, the only way I see of introducing him into that series would be first to wait a bit, as he is still in the Eye of Terror (and, as I have said before, I would rather stick to canon) and then to make it so that SPOILER ALERT it is one of the clones that he uses, to make sure I can kill him if needed END SPOILERS. So ... I will need to think about it.

The Fezatron & High Chance of Rain : thank you very much. I hope you like this new chapter as well.

I do not own the Warhammer 40000 universe or any of its official characters. They belong to Games Workshop.

And now, let us return to the grim darkness of the thirty-first millenium, where there is only war, pain, and the rotting corpse of hope ! Joy !

They weren't dead.

That, thought Merchurion, was good. He had given them a 17,16487% chance of being vaporised by the explosion, which wouldn't have done at all. He had too many experiments going on to allow himself the setback of being reduced to cosmic dust.

Reports flooded his inner cogitators, sent to him by the servants he had left in charge of the Hand of Ruin's engines while he attended to more important duties. The last gambit of the Imperials had failed to destroy them, but the explosion had still inflicted quite considerable damage.

The dying blast of the Maleficence's Reward had torn large portions of the Hand of Ruin's hull apart, exposing the softer parts beneath the armor. The Geller Field of these portions had been lost, and something that had bitterly reminded all aboard of the Exodus had occurred. Daemons had stalked the ship once more, wild and uncontrolled, inflicting terrible damage upon the confines of the vessel. Entire cargo bays filled with mortal cultists and zealots that had been trained in the weeks of the journey from the Mulor system had been lost to the warp-born. Several Astartes had been wounded in the battle for retaking them, and if the severity of their wounds was any indicator, the fight had been fiercest than it should have been considering that all Marines of the Forsaken Sons had extensive experience in fighting off daemon breaches. In addition, they had only managed to capture three of the eight enemy ships, had lost more than three dozens Astartes in the boarding, with still more in critical condition, and to top it all, two ships had escaped.

Needless to say, the Awakened One was not pleased with this outcome. While it wasn't a defeat, it certainly wasn't a victory. They had met the bare requirements of success that the next part of the campaign would require, yes, but the damage done to the Hand of Ruin hadn't been in the Astartes lord's calculations.

If Merchurion had been involved in the whole thing, he would probably have been uncertain of his probability of imminent survival. In hindsight, it was indeed fortunate that the teleportarium that he had rebuilt according to the revelations of the Eightfold Omnissiah hadn't been used for the operation. According to the Awakened One, it lacked the flexibility required for the multiple teleportations aboard the enemy ships, and Merchurion had been forced to admit that his invention was indeed lacking compared to the psychic powers of the Coven. It hadn't been a pleasant thing to accept, but facing one's shortcomings was an indispensable part of the way to mechanical perfection.

Consequently, he had spent the entire time since the Hand of Ruini's emergence from the Immaterium proper into the more conventional space that engulfed the Parecxis system here, caring for the experiments that, if they succeeded, would propel the warband of the Forsaken Sons to new heights of power.

He wasn't the only one doing so, of course. All of the Fleshmasters, as the Apothecaries amidst the Legionaries that the Awakened One had rescued from the disaster at Terra had come to calling themselves, were here as well.

What had once been the medical bay of the Hand of Ruin, a place dedicated to healing,had changed much since they had fled from Terra. Firstly, it was now much bigger, several walls collapsed to allow its extension. Secondly, where the Apothecarion had been uniquely used to heal warriors before sending them back to battle – or, at worse, recovering gene-seed from those with wounds that made extraction impossible on the battlefield – this was now a place of science and discovery, of unveiling of secrets and of creation of wonders. All around him laid the products of the combined minds of the Fleshmasters, most of them kept contained in sarcophagus filled with warm liquid and being fed all manners of nutrients by intravenous injections. A few medical beds were still intact, and wounded warriors from the failed assaults on the loyalist ships were being cared for by the Fleshmasters – it wouldn't do, after all, if they died before the Awakened One could decide the punishment for their failure. However, the former Apothecaries had taken upon themselves to inflict a measure of chastisement : they weren't using any analgesic to ease the pain as they worked on knitting the flesh back together. Things had become a lot less … restrained by protocol, weakness of spirit and ignorance on what was now known as the Hall of Asclepios – a name proposed by one of the former Iron Warriors as some kind of blasphemous joke against the beliefs of his dead homeworld.

Of course, the medical bay wasn't the only thing that had changed. All of those who now called the ship … if not home – such foolish emotional attachments were not for those who had the fortitude of will required to see the lies of the False Emperor and cast away the yoke of His tyranny – then at least a place to stay, and prepare for the continuation of the war, had done so.

Merchurion's own changes had been especially extensive. While outwardly, he had remained the same, his inner systems had been very heavily modified. The new, wonderful secrets that he and the Fleshmasters had shared and discovered had become part of his very body. The blood he now used as lubricant also enhanced the capabilities of his inner cogitators, and the sigils engraved upon his engines with crystal cutters forged from the ashes of the mortals who had been killed in the Mulor system enabled him to channel the energy of the Empyrean within his own body. New organs of purpose yet unknown had formed within him, growing from the remaining flesh, and his auspex were now able to see through the mere facade of reality and into the realms of possibility that laid beyond.

He had known that the False Emperor had limited their field of research criminally, but hadn't truly understood the scope of the usurping Omnissiah's deceit. There was so much that had been waiting to be discovered just outside of their grasp ! Genetic manipulations on scale previously believed to be impossible, catalysing the raw energies of the Warp into devices forged of flesh, the use of blood to oil mechanisms … The possibilities he had glimpsed after one conversation with the Fleshmasters formerly of the Legions were enough to have made him spent several hours lost in contemplation of the ramifications.

It had taken a direct command from the once Commander of the Sons of Horus to bring the Apothecaries to share their secrets with Merchurion, and even then the Awakened One had had to promise that the Adept would also share his own … but it had been worth it. In fact, the Apothecaries had proved that they could be a very valuable help to his research. There had been a few … clashes at the beginning, when the teachings of the Omnissiah merged with his very core had yet to be suitably adapted to the revelations of the Chaotic Ordering. But after he had purged himself from the last chains of the False Emperor, during their sojourn in the Mulor system, they had quickly started to consider Merchurion a member of their little brotherhood.

A total of thirty-four Apothecaries had survived the Exodus – a higher survival ratio than the rest of the Astartes aboard when the ship had fled Terra that was explained by the fact that they had spent the Exodus patching up warriors that had faced the warp-born instead of going on the 'frontlines' themselves. Not that they hadn't fought : the medical bay had been targeted several times, and on one occasion a wounded psyker of the Sons of Horus had been possessed right as the Apothecaries were preparing to operate him.

Despite the losses they had endured in those events, by the time they had emerged from the Warp, all of the eight Legions that had been loyal to the Warmaster were represented – in some twist of probability or by the will of the Architect of the Machine, Merchurion couldn't say.

Those of the Third knew more about the Astartes' physiology than anyone he could think of safe the False Emperor and His own gene-forgers. They had experienced on their own battle-brothers for years, reshaping their flesh by intensive surgeries and genetic alterations. Most of those had resulted in hideous demise, but the Emperor's Children's constant thirst for new sensations – something that Merchurion couldn't understand, and felt as if it was better that way – and the prisoners they had made during the battles of the rebellion had provided them with a steady supply of subjects, volunteer or not. Though none of those present aboard the Hand of Ruin equaled the nearly mythical Fabius Bile, whose legend had spread across the Warmaster's hosts long before the Siege, the three sons of Fulgrim still had much to share, and had been eager to reach new heights of formerly forbidden knowledge.

The six former Iron Warriors knew a lot about augmentics and the inner mechanisms of the Dreadnoughts' sarcophagus. The Fourth Legion had rarely bothered with waiting for a Legionary's body to heal naturally when replacing the damaged part was quicker. With the casualty rates they suffered due to their traditional sites of deployment – tranchee and siege warfare – it made perfect sense from Merchurion's own logical point of view. While most of the other Legions would have looked down on the sons of Perturabo that had joined the craft of mending flesh, their knowledge of the machine had been essential to their arguably most important project. Convincing them to work with some of the most innovative aspects of the Chaotic Ordering had been difficult, and preventing them from attacking the Emperor's Children even more so, though that had been resolved in time just as the rest of the tension between Legions aboard the Hand of Ruin. There was an animosity between the Third and the Fourth Legion … no, it wasn't animosity. The Iron Warriors simply despised the sons of Fulgrim with a passion that Merchurion wouldn't have expected from such experts of the Machine. It apparently came from the events of Iydris, the world where the Primarch of the Emperor's Children had left flesh behind entirely to become an pure being of the Empyrean. But once their initial reluctance had been overcome, they had dedicated their quite considerable logical and analytic abilities to the task at hand.

The Night Lords … now that had been quite a conundrum. The two sons of Konrad Curze were a quiet lot, keeping to themselves. The Eighth Legion had not changed much since they had thrown their lot with Horus Lupercal, and Merchurion had expected little from members of a Legion of killers who were taken from the slumps of defunct Nostramo. They knew a lot about the human and Astartes mind, though. While most of the Night Lords induced terror into their enemies with incomprehensible things like skullmarks and predatory aspects incorporated to their armor in combination to their unconventional tactics, the two Apothecaries approached the problem with an unique perspective. Besides, the low quality of the aspirants that the Night Lords had been forced to use to replenish their ranks had forced their Apothecaries to up their skills concerning the implantation of their Primarch's gene-seed. It had been difficult to make the two Nostramans talk, but apparently, the descent of the Night Haunter's homeworld back into anarchy had had far more consequences than what those outside the Eighth Legion had suspected.

Only one former World Eater's Apothecary, called Tenoch, was part of the Fleshmasters, though he had been the only one aboard the Hand of Ruin in the first place. His implants were … fascinating. Merchurion had heard about the archeotech that had been used on the Primarch of the Twelth Legion, and how they had been replicated for his sons when he had taken control of the Legion forged from his gene-template. They interacted with the brain to force the subject to violence, which they rewarded with pleasure, while suppressing all other emotions through a slow erosion of the mind by the application of constant pain. It wasn't subtle, nor was it delicate, but it had obviously worked. The simplicity of the design was belied by the fact that it was absolutely impossible to remove without killing the host – as Merchurion himself had checked on a son of Angron who had been too heavily wounded to be saved during the battles on Mulor Prime. The Apothecary himself had more experience on 'patchwork healing' than any other, and he had found out ways to use the loot of the Mulor system that had made Merchurion wonder if he wasn't a latent psyker using his power to trick reality into accepting his inventions. That, or he had ork blood, had joked the other Fleshmasters when he couldn't hear them.

Four Death Guards had made their way to the medical bay when the Hand of Ruin had started to run. They had nearly been shot at the moment of their arrival – all knew what had become of their Legion – but they had managed to prevent the others from opening fire long enough to make it clear that they weren't contagious. Sigils were engraved upon their armor, coaxing the power of the Warp into containing the pestilence within their hermetically sealed armor. The Fourteenth Legion had little need for Apothecaries since the terrible choice their Primarch had made, but those who had survived the plague had also been those who had spent the most time desperately trying to cure it. Their knowledge of the ways viruses and pathogens could bypass a Legionary's natural resistance was unmatched, for they had gained it by fighting a doomed battle against the one they now called their god : the Lord of Pestilence, one of the Great Powers that presided over the Chaotic Ordering. Master of decay and ruin, the Prince of Corruption had to be appeased so that both the flesh and the machine used in the experiments stayed as pure as possible, and the former Death Guards knew how to appeal to Him.

There was one Thousand Son amongst the Fleshmasters, but his was an honorary position at best. He was much more useful as a member of the Coven, and shared his time between the assembly of Sorcerers and the Hall. Parennefer, as the Astartes was called, had long been dedicated to the efforts of the Legion to stop the flesh-change that had afflicted the sons of Magnus. He had spent an untold amount of time trying to discover its secrets on the Planet of Sorcerers after the Cyclops had brought his remaining warriors to relative safety at the destruction of Prospero. Merchurion suspected that while the psyker may have at first been attempting to find a cure to the flesh-change, his interests had soon shifted into discovering how exactly it was that the Great Mutator modified the flesh of the sons of Magnus. Parennefer had knowledge of the Astartes' physiology that rivaled that of the Emperor's Children, and in some domains even surpassed it. His observations and experiments extended beyond the realm of mere flesh and into the nature of the 'soul', as inferior minds called the reflection of one's existence into the Empyrean. When the mutations had stopped, he had appeared both pleased, intrigued, and, according to Merchurion's anaylsers of transhuman behavior, disappointed.

Of the ten Apothecaries that had been amongst the Sons of Horus that Captain Damarion had gathered on the killing fields of Terra before their escape, only five had survived the Exodus. While the members of the Sixteenth Legion were undoubtedly the greatest of the Space Marines, they also lacked the specialisation that the other Legions had gained during their centuries of existence. Thus, in the image of their Primarch during the war, they had become the unifying factor of the Fleshmasters, bringing their ability to combine and use different tactics to the experiments taking place in the Hall of Asclepios. They had learned the secrets of the other Legions with avidity, and their loss of their Primarch had driven them to find ways to enhance themselves so that they wouldn't fail as he had. They were quite possibly the most reckless of them all, which was no small feat considering what the sons of the Third Legion were willing to do. Their pursuit of power, while laudable in Merchurion's opinion, was a bit too extreme, and they had to be watched to ensure that they didn't take too great risks.

Seven Apothecaries of the Word Bearers had survived the Exodus. The sons of Lorgar had been the ones who had first turned their back on the False Emperor, though they had kept their new allegiance secret for decades, and in that time they had learned much. While most of what they shared was clouded in mysticism and superstition, Merchurion had discovered that the secrets of the Warp they possessed were quite effective. They knew how to appeal to the entities that dwelled within the Empyrean, to bind them to flesh and metal. They had studied the physiology of the warriors of the Gal Vorbak and the effects of the Warp on Legionaries bodies long before Warmaster Horus had been illuminated. They had had more time than any other Legion to look into the infinite ways the powers of the Immaterium may be channeled into the material plane, and that made it well worth their tiring proselytism and obsession with rituals and offerings. Besides, while they didn't possess the psychic abilities required to perform it themselves, they knew the ritual that could transform a warrior of the Legions into one of the terrible Gal Vorbak. None of the Legionaries had volunteered for that transformation so far. And, given that only less than half ever survived, even after all the enhancements brought to the original ritual – which had consisted in tossing a Legionary into the Warp and pray for the best – there was little chance that the Awakened One would allow for the warriors under his command to risk their lives like that. Still, they had planned several experiments that used that concept.

Last of the Legions aboard the Hand of Ruin, the former members of the Alpha Legion were as much a mystery as ever. Six of them had presented themselves to the Apothecarion when the first casualties of the Exodus had arrived, ready to help and share what they knew. One of them had died when his patient had suddenly burst apart under the effect of a delayed daemonic spell, but the five remaining had taught much to the rest of the Fleshmasters. The Twentieth Legion had always used unorthodox tactics when waging war, and this was reflected by its Apothecaries. Their surgery could reshape the face of an Astartes until he didn't resemble his former aspect at all, and alter his very body until he could pass for a mortal, though a very tall and muscular one. They also knew how to enhance the omophagea so as to extract more information from the flesh of a fallen foe, and could concoct an elixir from Legionary blood that gave humans the same strength and resilience as one of the Astartes for a short period of time. While the latest technique still required testing to ensure that this wasn't a particularity of Alpharius' bloodline, it could still be a potentially tremendous asset to the Awakened One if they could replicate it without the specialised equipment of their own ships' Apothecarion.

'Honored Adept, a word, if you please.'

Merchurion stopped attending to one of the sarcophagus – one containing a man who, according to the data displayed on the casket's control screen, had once been a soldier on Mulor Prime before succumbing to the Warp's fury, being recovered by the Forsaken Sons, and chosen for testing the effects of scraps of gene-seed when injected into full-grown males – and turned to face the one who had addressed him.

He saw a warrior of the Legiones Astartes clad in green, scaled armor. With his new vision, he could also see that the armor pulsed with unnatural energies that made the former tech-priest want to tear the device apart do study its mechanisms. He knew that the armor sustained its wearer entirely, in a perfect union of flesh, metal, and the power of the Empyrean. Unlike most of the Fleshmasters, he still wore his helmet even in the artificial atmosphere of the ship, perhaps to hide the changes that had come upon his body.

Former Apothecary Jikaerus of the Alpha Legion was one of the most esteemed members of the Fleshmasters, his success on Mulor Secundus having earned him the respect of all. Merchurion had read his notes, brought back from the planet where he had performed what was possibly the greatest eugenic experiment to ever take place in the galaxy – which was no small feat, considering what some of the tyrants of Terra had done during the Age of Strife. To have manipulated evolution to such a degree without causing the extinction of his subjects and succeeded in his original goal with only what little material he had brought with him in his drop-pod was something to be proud of … but the Legionary didn't seem to consider it worth the praise his brethren had lavished upon him. If anything, since his return aboard the ship, he had dedicated even more energy to the experiments of the Fleshmasters, reveling the heated discussions with his colleagues and the debates that opposed them. Merchurion suspected this had to do with the utter solitude the Astartes had endured in his Warp-twisted time on Mulor Secundus.

'Apothecary Jikaerus. What is it ?' asked Merchurion.

'There is something strange with the Steel-Wrought,' answered the Astartes. 'Nothing urgent, but I think you should have a look.'

'Then let us go,' concluded Mercurion. He knew he was a poor conversationnalist, but had never understood the need of the outsiders to the Mechanicus to drape their meaning and intent in more words that was needed. It seemed a waste of time and energy to him, and one of his few beliefs that hadn't changed was that waste had to be avoided at all occasion.

The Techno-Adept and the Fleshmaster crossed the Hall together, walking toward its center, where laid the one experiment upon which Merchurion had spent the most time since the conquest of the Mulor system. Each step, a new wonder of science was exposed to the eye, forming a tapestry of forbidden experiments and blasphemous devices that stretched for hundred of meters. Sarcophagus containing mortals at different states of alteration, glass containers filled with liquid into which floated mutated organs harvested from the wretches of Mulor Secundus, cultures of viruses and living tissues injected with the energies of the Empyrean … all of them either to discover new secrets, or to bring another advantage to the Forsaken Sons in their war against the Imperium.

They passed before men with too many limbs to test the connection of their nerves, skulls with alien eyes in their sockets to check their compatibility with human genome, vat-grown clones in the process of being tested for the next step of their modification. They saw human beings of both sexes being cut open and others being filled with pathogens that were still in their testing phases. They nodded in salute to a Fleshmaster whose armor still bore the sigil of the Emperor's Children and who was trying to clone the gene-seed of the fallen in an attempt to create hybrids of humanity and Astartes. The products of his previous attempt laid on a dissection table before him : a monstrosity whose basic shape was not unlike the ogryns that some regiments of the Imperial Guard used as auxiliaries, but hideously twisted by tumors and exceeding organs that had formed under the influence of the flawed gene-altering retrovirus employed. Merchurion made a note to tell the former Emperor's Children to communicate more with the Fleshmasters of the Twentieth Legion. They could help them on that.

They saw all this and a dozen more visions that would have broken the mind of most mortals, like a gallery full with the flesh and bone sculptures of brilliant but demented artists.

Then they arrived at their destination.

'I must admit,' said Jikaerus while looking at what Merchurion had created with the spoils of Mulor Prime, his voice made even more of a low growl by the vox-grill of his armor, 'that this still amazes me as much as it repulses me.'

Before the two renegades stood a container of reinforced plasti-glass, filled with a greenish liquid with conservative properties. Hundred of cables emanated from the thing, connected to a dozen control panels with screens keeping tacks of thousand of variables at once. Quiet warning sounds emanated from the controllers, signalling for a change in their charge.

'So … ' asked Merchurion, connecting one of his mecha-dendrites to a port in the machines and sending his query through it as well as speaking out loud, 'what is wrong with you, esteemed Lord Governor ?'

For an eternity, all he had known was agony.

His jailor had cut him up, removing one bit of flesh at a time, connecting him to more and more machines in order to keep him alive. He had lost his left eye first, then his earing, then his sense of taste when it removed his tongue. With his right eye, his bionic eye, he had seen the monster peel off the skin of his skull and crack open the bones of his head, exposing the soft grey matter beneath. His entire digestive system had been the next thing to go, replaced by needles that forced nutrients into his veins. Then he had lost his heart, replaced by a pump. Then his lungs, replaced by filters that purged the carbon dioxide from his bloodstream. Piece by piece, every organ had been removed and another machine introduced to keep hims alive.

After that, the true horror had begun. The daemon-faced abomination had removed his left arm and leg, and he had been reduced to a brain plugged into machines that kept him alive despite his burning desire for death. For he had come to realize that, contrary to what he had believed when he had woken up, he wasn't dead. He was alive … for a twisted, tortured, evil definition of 'alive'.

Nerves that should have ended in the parts of his body he no longer had were instead connected to wires that went out of his cage of glass. Sometimes, the wires would send electrical pulses along his nerves, tricking his brain into feeling things that weren't here with limbs that were gone.

All that remained of him was his right arm and leg, that were locked in place by restraints of adamantium. He had spent untold hours trying to break free, to shatter the boundaries of his prison so that he may finally die, but to no avail. He knew that his metallic limbs didn't possess the strength required to shatter their bounds, but he couldn't help but try anyway. The pain was simply too strong, he had to do something, anything to escape, even if that was in vain.

The heretic had tried to cut apart his mechanical side, but he hadn't succeeded. The limbs were strong where his flesh was weak. Almost half of his body was made of it, and though the monster had profaned the work of his captive's saviors with his experiments, breaking them open and filling them with analytic devices, they still refused to yield their secrets. That gave the prisoner strength. He struggled to emulate the fortitude of the iron that now made all of his true body, to not give in to the insanity that lurked at the borders of his consciousness. He had held on as the traitor ripped him open, resisting the forces bent on breaking him with a stubbornness that he had not known he possessed.

Then the cables grafted to his mind had started transmitting other things than pain. Sensations from his left hand. Images seen only with his left eye that had been replaced with a series of wires in an empty socket. Pleasure, felt with all of his body. And even emotions, forced upon his tortured mind by the probes planted in his the exposed half of his brain. Joy, sorrow, anguish, anger, yearning, ecstasy … he had felt myriad of emotions at the press of a button. But always, he had clung to the one emotion that he knew was truly is. He had forgotten much through this endless hell. Entire parts of his life had vanished from his memory as his nerves were burned by electrical currents, and his every waking moment between nightmarish deliriums was filled with yet another torture, but that one thing remained his.

Hatred. Pure, unaltered hatred. No matter what he was forced to feel, no matter how much of his body his monstrous jailor took from him, that emotion was always present. It gave him strength, and direction. It gave him purpose.

And now, for the first time since the daemon-faced beast had taken his tongue, Lord Governor Valens Tarsis could give it voice. The tremor that had shaken the entire ship had moved something within the complex gears of his metallic side, unlocked something hidden within the mechanisms the Iron Hands had grafted upon his dying form so long ago.

A never-ending shriek came from the apparel's speakers, tearing at Jikaerus' ears like the sonic weapons of the Emperor's Children. It didn't sound like anything that could have come out of a human mouth, merely a storm of static and parasites, yet the raw hatred it carried was unmistakable. The former Apothecary didn't understand how he knew it, but the truth of it was obvious nonetheless. This was the scream of hatred and impotent rage of a tortured soul at his tormentors, promising unspeakable agonies should it ever escape its bounds.

And Merchurion was directly connected to the source of this hatred. The Techno-Adept jerked as if he had just been hit by a Terminator's fist, and fell on the ground, writhing like an addict in the throes of an overdose. Jikaerus rushed at the fallen adept's side, and plugged out the mecha-dendrite he had just plunged into the console out in a shower of sparks before hitting a button that shut off the relentless screaming.

'Adept !' he shouted, looking back and forth between the fallen form of Merchurion and the floating half-living shape of the Steel-Wrought within the container. The renegade tech-priest slowly began to rise, his moves erratic and trembling in the shock of whatever it was had happened. Other Fleshmasters came close, some of them aiming the weapons they always carried in the Hall – experiments had a tendency to go wrong in the worst of way – straight at the Steel-Wrought's prison, ready to shoot the moment they perceived any threat.

'Th-this is most unexpected,' stuttered the adept as he came on his feet, using the mecha-dendrites that were still intact to secure his balance.

'What in the name of Alpharius happened ?!' asked Jikaerus to himself, now looking at the console, assured that whatever had just occurred hadn't deprived the Forsaken Sons of their most important expert when it came to technological matters.

The numbers on the screens didn't make any sense. Reports came over and over, the machine receiving data inputs that it didn't have any protocols to deal with. It was as if the computing apparatus had been attacked by an hostile program that had somehow caused the hideous scream and the Techno-Adept's violent rejection, except that this attack was a pure maelstrom of chaotic code, the rambling of a madman with a keyboard that somehow managed to make sense if you only looked at a specific part of it.

Jikaerus knew much about the ways of bringing a cogitator to your will despite the opposition of its machine-spirit. However heretical the notion may have been to the Adeptus Mechanicus, the Alpha Legion had never ignored such a powerful tool for gathering information. But this … this actually impressed him as much as it troubled him.

'The Steel-Wrought,' he whispered, finally understanding what had happened.

Merchurion walked toward him, gesturing for the rest of the Fleshmasters to return to their own activities. They couldn't let their own experiments go too long without being checked, and their bolters couldn't do anything about that situation. It wasn't as if the subject was going to suddenly break open his restraints and attack them with his barely functioning limbs.

'What did you find out ?' asked the Techno-Adept, his robotic voice utterly robbed of the inflexions it had previously possessed by the onslaught his inner systems had just endured.

'Our dear Governor somehow found a way to send commands and actual signals through the systems monitoring his vitals and the circuits of his implants,' answered Jikaerus, shaking his head. That wasn't supposed to be possible, secret technology of the Tenth Legion or not.

'That was sooner than I expected,' said Merchurion.

The former Alpha Legionary turned toward the renegade tech-priest, stupor clear in his tone :

'What ?!'

'I knew that this would happen sooner or later. The human mind, for its many weaknesses, can be surprisingly adaptable. Given only one way to express itself, it was certain that at some point in time the subject would find a way to manipulate the only way he had of interacting with the rest of the material plane. Now, the true purpose of the experiment can begin.'

Jikaerus shook his head in amazement. He had thought the Steel-Wrought was being studied by Merchurion so that the tech-priest could obtain the secrets of the half-living body's augmentics, but it seemed there was more to the former Governor's fate.

'What is the «true purpose», then ?'

'To use the subject's great connection to the Machine in order to use a human mind as a component of one of the Omnissiah's avatars. Now, please help me repair these cogitators, Apothecary. There is one more thing we need to do before moving to actual field testing ...'

He could see. He could feel. He could move. Things he had given up long ago, though he couldn't remember when and how that had happened, had been given back to him. It filled his heart with savage joy, but that joy was but a drop compared to the ocean of his never-ending rage.

Why was he so furious ? He couldn't remember. All he knew was that someone had hurt him, and had to pay for it. That was all he needed. Revenge was his purpose, destruction his goal.

His body was taller than it had once been, a construct of metal and death-delivering weapons. His left arm ended in a chainfist combined with a twin-linked bolter, while the right one ended in a plasma launcher. Both could be moved by his thoughts, and he scanned his surroundings for enemies, eager to use this new body to crush and destroy those responsible for his torment. If only he could remember what had happened, how he had ended up in this new form … it seemed to him that this was strange, that he shouldn't be wearing that colossal armor, but his mind felt foggy and unfocused, as if something were preventing him from reaching clarity. Was this the consequence of whatever had been done to him ? Then the enemy would pay for that, too.

He could see them, hiding behind the walls of their bunkers, thinking themselves protected from his wrath. A banner floated above the structures, marked with an eye surrounded by an eight-pointed stars. He couldn't remember what the symbol meant, but its sight infuriated him, and he started to walk toward the enemy positions.

His speed increased as he gathered momentum, and the enemies opened fire. Their pitiful weapons failed to penetrate the bulk of his metallic body, and he impacted the first bunker like a meteor, crashing through its walls and exposing the fragile flesh hiding within. He brought his weapons to bear, and unleashed the fury of the Emperor upon them, relishing the extinction of their lights on his tactical display.

He detected another presence behind him, approaching the line of bunkers at marching speed. His carnage complete, he turned to look at the newcomers, and saw that they bore the armor of the Astartes, and the colors of Maccrage. His tired, wounded mind recognised them as allies, and he returned his attention toward the rest of the bunkers ...

Merchurion ended the simulation, and the Steel-Wrought returned to his slumber as the drugs injected through what little remained of his flesh started to take effect. The Techno-Adept nodded to himself, and Jikaerus could tell that he was satisfied with how his program had managed to deceive the senses of the Steel-Wrought after breaking his mind with one last concentrate of hallucinogens and electric shocks. He sent a command to the machine before him, and an image appeared on the screen. It was the image of a Dreadnought with several modifications from the standard pattern, built together from the salvaged pieces of different machines. The image rotated slowly, runes appearing to indicate each of the updates that would be needed according to the analysis of the simulation's data.

'How long have you been working of that thing ?' asked Jikaerus, with a trace of awe in his voice.

'From the moment the Awakened One brought me this specimen, I knew this was a possibility. And since no Legionary aboard the Hand of Ruin has expressed his will of being placed within a Dreadnought-unit should he ever become unable to wage war in a conventional manner – though I cannot understand why your kin would refuse such glorious transformation – I deduced it the most logical course of action.'

Jikaerus shivered, an action that had nothing to do with his armor heat-draining properties – the Hall of Asclepios was cold, but he had refilled his armor's energy pack before returning to its refrigerated confines. No, the shiver had been caused by the prospect of such a fate.

Being entombed in a Dreadnought had once been considered an honor in most of the Legions that had sided with the Warmaster. It was, after all, the opportunity to continue fighting even in death, to lay waste upon the Emperor's foes in the form of a titan of legend, clad in metal and death. But things had changed after Horus had declared rebellion. Jikaerus wasn't exactly certain of what had caused the general … fear, that was the only word, that now filled the Legionaries at the idea of becoming one with such a machine. Perhaps it was due to the fact that they no longer had the ideal and dream to which they would have once clung, having seen them as the lies they were ? Perhaps it was the fact that war was all the Astartes were, and to have it become a remote thing, felt only through the data-feed of an engine, was anathema to those who had embraced that purpose ? Perhaps it was a cruel joke played on them by the Dark Gods, who now held their fates in their hands ?

Perhaps it was because of all of these reasons, and none of them. It didn't matter. No one amongst the Forsaken Sons would be interred willingly into a Dreadnought's coffin. They would rather die than endure an eternity of battle as an undead machine.

'You were probably right,' he finally answered. 'So ? How do you think to use this ? He may have attacked these soldiers, but only because you made them wear the Warmaster's insigna. The moment we let the Steel-Wrought in control of a Dreadnought on the battlefield, he is going to turn against us.'

'I am working on a system that will twist the subject's perception of reality,' explained Merchurion. 'The machine-spirit will receive the information about its surroundings, and transmit it to its host only after it had been suitably revised.'

'Revised ?'

Servitors approached and began to disassemble the apparatus that was connected to the Steel-Wrought. With a blur of binary from Merchurion, they hastened their work, as if working under a strict time limit. Jikaerus understood : the servitors were preparing the floating brain to be transported to the Techno-Adept's private laboratory, where he would implant it into the modified Dreadnought that was waiting for its pilot. And since the former Governor depended on the machines to survive for any length of time superior to the short autonomy of his prison's independent systems, time was of the essence to ensure that the experiment wasn't lost at the final stage. The Fleshmaster could understand the feeling : he had felt the same during the last phases of his work on Mulor Secundus.

Secure in his knowledge that the Steel-Wrought was being taken care of with all due haste, Merchurion turned from his console to look directly at Jikaerus, and the Fleshmaster felt a thrill of excitement mingled with horror when the tech-priest answered his previous question :

'He will see loyalists as enemy target, his vision twisted so that they appear to carry the emblem of the Warmaster. And the units under the banner of the Forsaken Sons will be identified as loyalists troops from the Legions that have failed to see the truth of the Eightfold Omnissiah.'

For a moment, Jikaerus could only stare at Merchurion. He was glad he was still wearing his helmet : he didn't think he could have hidden his shock and horror if he had been bare-headed. The Alpha Legion was familiar with deception. They had used disguise to infiltrate loyalist positions during the war, and a squad had even managed to approach Guilliman himself, though the assassination attempt had failed. But this … this was downright cruel. Oh, the Astartes was aware of the hypocrisy of such an opinion : his own actions were more than enough to warrant his damnation a thousand times over. But though he had shaped the lives of tens of thousand with his work on Mulor Secundus, he had still accounted for a measure of free will in his experiment, the possibility of choice that could destroy even the best laid plans. The young taken aboard the ship would have to choose whether or not to become Legionaries – no amount of conditioning could give a man the force to endure the implantation procedure if he did not possess the will to do so. To force a loyal servant of the Emperor to fight other, to make him appear a traitor in the eyes of his victims …

'Fleshmaster Jikaerus ?' asked the Techno-Adept. 'Is there something wrong ?'

The Legionary shook his head. It was foolish to judge the other renegade's actions. They were all traitors now, and had already broken their most sacred vow, turned from the most important oath. They had done so in the name of many things, different for all those who had kneeled before the Warmaster's banner, but that they had all deemed important enough to deserve such a sacrifice. And if these reasons were worthy such an ultimate act, then what were the destruction of ethics and the surrender of morality in comparison ? They were traitors, renegades …

Heretics.

The word hung heavy within Jikaerus' mind. It had been spat at him by the loyalists at Terra, as a way for the defenders of a doomed Imperium to set themselves up at the righteous in a war that had no right side. It was an old word, one that had been abandoned at the dawn of the Great Crusade alongside the superstitions of the past. It meant, the Legionary remembered, «anyone who does not conform to an established attitude, doctrine, or principle».

Then yes, they were heretics. They had turned from the lies of the Emperor, His so-called 'Imperial Truth' that was nothing but a blanket of ignorance and denial of the universe's dangers. The Alpha Legion had known the falsehood of that 'Truth' long before the Warmaster had risen his rebellion, but the commanders of the Legion had thought that it made the defence of Mankind easier, and that the Emperor had to have a plan that would make the Imperium secure from the threat of the Warp.

They had been wrong. There was no plan. Only the delusion of godhood of a false prophet that was ready to send humanity to its doom rather than make the necessary sacrifices. And thus, Alpharius Omegon had made his choice : to side with the Warmaster, and bring Horus Lupercal upon the Throne of Terra as the True Emperor, so that he would do what was needed for Mankind's ultimate victory.

In comparison to such a thing, to such a betrayal, no matter the reason behind it, what was the torture of one soul ? What did the fate of Valens Tarsis matter ? The answer was clear, and Jikaerus felt a great weight that he hadn't known was there lift from his shoulders as he realised that.

'It is nothing,' he answered.

...

...

See what I meant about the ratings ?

On another subject, now. The Roboutian Heresy is still in progress. I repeat my offer : if you have an idea, share it with me. I intend to do something that will at least not shame the wonderful work of Aurelius Rex, creator of the Dornian Heresy. Not that he will ever read this (and if he does, hey ! Where have you been ?), but it is matter of principle. And to do that, I need advice from fans of Warhammer 40000, capable of pointing the smallest details that can be turned into ironic dark jokes in a reverse universe.

The next chapter should be done in a week or two, as usual. If you liked this one, have constructive critics to give, or an idea to share, review ! Your commentaries are a great help to me.

Until next time,

Zahariel out.