Chapter 16: The Blessed Bolt
January 10, 3242, 1457 hours
The Fair Lady, Armory
The Warp
EUS-1840

The journey down to the armory was not as glamorous as the one leading to the bridge. Departeu's selected individuals were escorted by a duo of Armsmen, shipboard security armed with shotguns and facial expressions that could cause as much damage. One man was placed in front of the group and a second behind, slowly driving the UNSC personnel forward as they made their way through the twisting and turning side corridors of the Fair Lady. The main hallways were lavish, wide, and adorned with frescoes and carvings. Here in the lower decks no such beauty existed. Pipes hang low from the ceiling, bursts of relieved steam frequently issued from pipes, and servitors commonly waddled past the group, frequently frightening some of the Marines who were still quite uncomfortable with the grey-skinned cyborgs. The constructs however paid them no attention, attending to whatever task had been given to it.

Likewise, servo-skulls were common; some of them had speakers fastened to just under the teeth. Judging from the translations, the skull was broadcasting prayers and thoughts of the day for the ratings to hear and pay heed to. Every now and again, cogitator monitors would indicate status updates and daily schedules for the deck, complete with the hundreds upon hundreds of ratings that called these cramped corridors home.

Miles noted that there were an incredible amount of said deckhands in these corridors. He didn't know that the vessel could hold this many if this was only one of the decks. He understood why there were Armsmen with them now as they could easily brush against the passing Humans as they went to and from their duty stations. Judging from the red eyes and twitchy behavior, Tails guessed that it wouldn't take much to start a fight, and wouldn't take much more for someone to lay in a crumpled heap on the floor.

He regarded the passing throng. It mostly consisted of men, though he recognized a few women in there. Here he was taken by surprise. He noted that in the mix there were indeed Humans, though they weren't quite the same. Some were tall and lanky things, with thin builds and bony looking limbs, pasty white groups with jet black hair and eyes to match, and more than once he saw Humans only half the size of the others around them. He was a fuzzy thing, with mutton chops reaching nearly to his chin, and arms that appeared made out of hair. Curiously, he noted that the Human wore no shoes, massive feet, as with the arms, swathed in curly brown threads. He didn't stare for too long as the short Human started to turn towards him. However, he strayed from group just a bit, and his arm made contact with another Human-like man who was taller than the hairy thing but was shorter than he was.

"Watch yer arse before I kick it off!" the fat bearded man said, the voice rendered as a thick Scottish accent in his ear. "Did ye nae hear me? Bloody hell ye have more hair than me wife!"

Jolee came over a yanked Miles back into the formation. The Mobian seemed to have a slackened tongue because he started to say, "You look just like a dw-" before he was forced back into the huddle of Humans and Mobians, the rotund man regarding the fox with confusion and anger before continuing his walk.

"The hell are you doing?" Jolee asked, glancing at the Armsmen to see if they had reacted. "Now you're talking to them?"

"Sorry." Tails said. "It just came out."

"Were you about to call him a dwarf?"

"No!"

"Well it sounded like it!" Jolee growled, with a ghost of a laugh in the back of his throat.

"He looks like one though!" Tails said. "He even had the braided beard! How do you even know about dwarves anyway?"

"I read the Hobbit. Now can you shut up before someone shoots us?"

"Those are Squats." the rear Armsman said suddenly. "We don't talk about them much."

"Why?" Tails asked.

"Because we don't."

Well, fair enough, Miles thought shrugging.

The closer they got to the armory, the thicker the stench of cordite, wax, and sweat became. They had entered several sections of the craft lined with brick and stonework that seemed to contrast other areas that were all metal and grids. Every now and again, they would pass a computer station where a servitor was working on a report, slowly speaking into a microphone. It was shocking to see some of these things speaking as nearly all on the bridge were silent.

Miles wondered to himself how sentient these things were. He had heard the justifications about artificial intelligence, but the alternative seemed quite horrifying. He wondered what a Mobian would look like and was quickly brought to mind the site of a roboticized man, metal from ears to tail.

It was a traumatic experience as he was only a child when things like these were common. He thought again, and found the closest thing to one of these things was Bunnie, and she was lively as a summer day. These things, in these corridors, seemed like a world sucked of all its life.

On the walls were printed reports and reminders. Printed text was one of the things that the Interpreters could not translate as they only worked on sound. If Miles had a VISR or an eyepiece attachment then he could understand it. A few of the letters seemed vaguely Roman; he spotted the letter A, E, and T, though there seemed to be mixes from nearly all languages on Earth, especially Chinese and Russian, though nearly forty thousand years of isolation had warped them from their original forms.

The High Gothic though did use Roman lettering, though in ways that made no sense to his Fourth Millennium eyes. The syntax was off, the grammar was strange, and if he pronounced it, he believed that there was a certain inflection he needed to have. These were clearly more 'holy' than the Low Gothic as these messages were covered with wax seals with draping parchment. Some of these letters were nearly covered with seals; a few scant letters were visible between the gaps in the red wax. Every so often a draping of binary could be seen, the mechanical and organic skull logo of the Adeptus Mechanicus heading it all. Creepy guys.

Three more turns in the corridors brought them to the door to the armory. Black and yellow hazard lines rounded the perimeter of the door. Various warning signs lined the hallway leading to the portal. The Armsman at the front entered a code on the door and it slowly slid open, gears visibly turning as the slab of marked and faded metal retracted into the floor and ceiling. It seemed to only raise anticipation in the group, like a castle portcullis retracting.

They were greeted by a room, perhaps several hundred feet in length, lined on every surface, barring the ceiling, with weapons of various makes, models and states of integrity. The scent of gunpowder was much stronger here to the point where the Mobians found it quite incredible. To their noses, these smells were overpowering. To the Humans however, these were fairly strong aromas and nothing more. There were other scents in here as well - lubricants, cleaners, and more incense, though this one smelling closer to jade and was thus not as offensive.

The Marines gazed at the weapons, many of them painted green. It was surmised that this was where the Cadians stored their firearms. Miles got close to one of the racks and looked it over. The weapon that caught his eye first appeared to be a rifle of some sort. It was long, boxy, and painted in a bright shade of green. Adorning the front of its barrel shroud was a golden skull, wings streaked back towards the trigger. It appeared to be in immaculate condition, though he could easily detect a sense that this rifle was ancient, as if it had served in a thousand wars. Knowing all that he had seen thus far, it probably had.

A voice barked into his ear. He straightened at once, muscles locking up and eyes forward. He half expected Helstrom to walk around the corner, thinking that he had shirked his duty in joining the Cadians and instead came back to harass Miles instead. The man who came around the corner though was not Helstrom, but a tall and well-muscled man that wore a tightly fit garment similar to a T-shirt, though had lacing that brought to mind an older style of clothes from the history books.

His dark olive skin was studded with cybernetics, the most notable being his entire left leg from the knee. It had been replaced by a complicated looking cybernetic limb that had pumps and pistons on it to simulate movement, but all it appeared to be in Miles' eyes was a fancy peg leg. He averted his eyes from the limb and instead made eye-contact. It was literal eye-contact as the man only had one eye technically speaking. A bright blue disk was accompanied by a large and invasive-looking skull plate. Within the plate was an orbital depression like in an organic skull, but instead of an eye, a bright red dot winked from the shadow beneath the brow. It made Miles quite nervous to look at him for longer than necessary.

"Don't touch!" He barked at Tails, who flinched at the sudden outburst.

Johnson reached out and grabbed the Mobian by the shoulder, yanking him back into formation.

The man gazed at Miles, and then to the weapons rack, pulling out the rifle and glancing at it. His breathing quickened as he looked the gun from stock to barrel. He removed a lug from the stock and removed it, glancing at it as well before reassembling the gun. He grabbed a case of something on his belt and gently used a brush to dab at the weapon, all the while humming something to himself.

"What's he doing?" Johnson asked Tails, who was surprised that question wasn't flipped around.

The fox gently breathed and let his mind feel around. He felt the man's rather lightly guarded conscience and felt emotion stream off him like steam from a hot stove. There was a wall of anger, mostly directed at Prower himself, though beneath it, he could sense the air of reverence for what he was doing, and the care that he took in his ritual. "I think he's praying." he gently concluded.

That didn't surprise either of them at this point. Prayer was ubiquitous in every activity aboard this ship. He had learned about this from an off-duty Cadian he had been able to speak to. The Guardsman in question had told Miles that weapons had something called a 'machine spirit', something that the Mobian assumed was a computer algorithm or personality of some kind. If that was true though, then every single firearm on the ship had some sort of AI associated with it, which would make the whole argument against artificial intelligence bunk. Part of him believed that this was the case and the Imperium, or at least the Cadians, were arguing semantics.

The man reverently placed the rifle on the table in the middle of their section of the room. In the far back, servitors slid back and forth on rails, gently grabbing weapons with long spidery fingers and visually inspecting them before moving them to and from other areas of storage. Miles struggled to avert his eyes from their faces, grotesquely combined with mechanical appendages, like unhinged artificial jaws that opened far too wide for his liking. He unwittingly attempted to survey the thoughts of the flesh drones, but fell into horror as he discovered that there was not a single emotion in their minds; that it was only his imagination that he saw something approaching glee in its features as it continued its work. He felt faint.

Johnson on the other hand ignored them and walked straight towards the man who was still wiping the rifle down.

"Sergeant Major Johnson, UNSC Marine Corps." he said, nodding in greeting. "We're here to get outfitted?"

The man's mechanical eye blinked in conjunction with the one he was born with. They looked Johnson over, and without warning, the mechanical eye scanned the sergeant major. Johnson jumped back, startled by the gesture. The other Marines came forward with Wilcox leading them, placing an arm over Johnson and the other forming a loose fist, teeth bared.

The man smiled, several golden teeth flashed in the artificial light, and then he laughed hard. It was one full of mirth and amusement. He shook his head, slammed one hand on the table and said, "There's many days I'd never thought I'd live to see. A beastman stands up for a Human!"

"I'm full of surprises." Wilcox growled. "What are you doing?"

"Scanning for weapons you may have smuggled in. You can relax now." he added in a falsely soothing tone.

Miles realized that this man also had an interpreter. How was that even possible? Did the techpriests that raided the three ships take every single one of them? Did they even have that many translators aboard their ships?

Wilcox however didn't seem to relax. She was being talked down to.

"Maybe if you put those teeth away I wouldn't feel like I have to use this, beastwoman." he said, placing his hand close to the trigger of the weapon.

"Wilcox, stand down." Avery said in a low but stern voice.

"I rate the same as you, Johnson." she replied. "You don't get to order me around."

"So I'll ask very nicely then. Let the nice man give us those guns."

She realized her temper was getting the better of her and she backed off. "Goddamn racist."

"I shall refrain from being 'racist' when xenos like the Greenskins stop butchering us by the billions and the Dark Eldar free our people from whatever they call slavery. Perhaps the creatures of Chaos will finally deign to leave us alone." the man said. "Now, if we are done, I am to issue you your arms for this assignment. The Lord Captain values you highly. I am to present you with only the finest of personal armaments."

"I'm down with fine." Reyes said.

The man called over a Servitor that held a sealed container. It appeared old and worn. On its top was the seal of the Imperium of Man, the double-headed eagle staring into the past as well as the future. It held a code lock on it which the pan reached down and punched in a code of at least ten digits, yet his fingers moved so quickly it was hard to determine exactly. The container hissed and slid open, revealing even larger versions of Departeu's bolt pistol.

The guns left everyone in awe looking at them. They were gorgeous, containing brushed steel exteriors with carvings on them that indicated that perhaps they were once held by the hands of nobility. Walnut grips of the trigger and handguard were faded but still gorgeous. The body of the bolt gun itself was long and narrow, though the bore of the weapon was still massive in comparison to the frame. How this thing could hold itself together while firing was something that nobody was quick to explain.

There were dozens of the bolt guns inside the case, each fitted into a foam-like protective lining with magazines lined beside them. Each was fitted with a folding stock which locked on the side facing away from the viewers.

"What are those?"

"Torres-Pattern Boltgun. Bolters. It wasn't easy getting a hold of these ones. Fifty caliber dual stage cartridge, ten round magazine in the box."

The weapons master reached into another box and pulled out one of the said cartridges. Miles saw one of the full rounds outside of a magazine for the first time. He had half a mind to reach for it, but once again, his quick sensing of the man's thoughts told him it wasn't a good idea.

"I've seen your own stubbers. Decent. Not bad if you want to mow down hive gangers or PDF rebellion. Hell, you could maybe take down a few traitor Guardsmen with those. What do those rifles take?"

".308 caliber." Johnson answered. "Sometimes bigger if you want a battle rifle. .450 for those."

"This is a seventy-five caliber shot. Now, unlike your projectiles, you may find that these pack a bit more punch." he set the shot down on the table. The UNSC forces leaned in to look at the round, some of them baffled at the size. It wasn't a hell of a lot bigger than a fifty-seven caliber cartridge regularly seen in sniper rifles, but the way that it looked commanded respect. It was an ornate thing as well, with Gothic script covering parts of the casing, an Aquila stamped on the body, and serial numbers on both the bullet and the case itself, both of them exact matches. The tip of the bullet gleamed.

"Two staged round." the weapons master explained.

"What does that mean?" Tails asked.

The man smiled. "This isn't a regular old stubber round. This is a rocket. Pull the trigger, and the kicker knocks the round out of the barrel. Once clear, solid rocket fuel ignites and blows the round downrange. Diamantine tip to get it through even the toughest armor. Once this little bugger burrows into something, then bang!"

Miles remembered now how he heard what sounded like a small explosion when Helstrom's round had sailed by his ear and punctured the deck plating.

"It explodes?" Reyes asked.

"Violently I might add." the weapons master nodded. "Well, it's an excuse to bring these old bastards out of vacuum storage."

"How old are they?" Wilcox asked.

"At least a good thousand years old."

Miles drew his hand back in sudden reverence and confusion. "A thousand years old? Why are you using them?"

"Because they work." The man said, giving a small laugh. "Why does anyone use anything in this damn Imperium? Because it just works! Good design, proper maintenance, good prayers, and a happy machine spirit, hell, these beauties maybe got two or three thousand more years in them. This here ship's at least a good six, maybe seven thousand years old!"

Again and again and again, the strangers to this world were punched in the gut hard enough to make them dizzy. This ship was older than the pyramids of Giza if their timelines could be relatively examined.

Miles in particular wondered at everything, and the thought entered his mind again on whether the Imperium of Man was a far evolution of the UEG, or if it was another world altogether. Could humanity become this? Technologically stagnant and wary of outsiders to the point where they thought themselves above all else? His mind flew to the Covenant, and how even today they thought themselves better than anyone else, Humanity included despite being kicked in the ass seven hundred years prior. The prospect made him dizzy and he grasped onto the table for support. So long. Everything in this world lasted for so long and on a scale that he could not comprehend.

True, Mobius was a version of Earth twelve thousand years into the relative future, but in spite of that, there was very little to no recorded history of the events before the Lost Million's arrival. Before Miles' ancestors there was nothing. A mist of time on their paradise world. Here, he had learned much, and much of that he wished he hadn't.

"We keep them stored in vacuum though, just in case." the weapons master said. "Can't take any chances. What's that you're smoking? Lho-stub?"

Johnson realized he was the one being asked. He took it out of his mouth and looked at it, and then to the man. "We just call them cigars where I come from."

"Got another?"

Avery's eyebrows raised. "A couple."

He reached into a side pocket and rummaged around the half dozen he had in there and pulled a Sweet William.

"Give me one of those and I'll get you a Stalker."

Johnson had no idea what the man was talking about, and was not really willing to part with his precious sources of tobacco, which was now in limited quantity for him, but the prospect of being given something, no matter how oddly named, was appealing to him. He passed the Sweet William over.

The cigar could not be grabbed faster. The man turned it over in his hands and held it under his nose. "Oh by Terra what is that smell?"

"I know, it turns some people off."

"I fecking love it, mate!" the weapons master cried out, grabbing an incredible large hunting knife seemingly from nowhere. He sliced the end off in one quick slash, and from another table grabbed a canister with painted skulls on it. He ignited what turned out to be a blowtorch, and with cigar now placed in his mouth, lit the cut end. He greedily puffed on it until it was steadily lit. Off went the blowtorch, and on went the look of pure ecstasy as he took a long pull.

"Oh throne. By the Sororitas' breastplates it's been too long." he said, almost as if he pleasure would overwhelm him.

"Want us to come back later?" Wilcox asked, hands on her hips, eyebrows raised.

"Lord Captain never lets me smoke anymore. Not a whiff of lho for months. You'd think on a tub this big someone would give me a slip."

"Why doesn't he let you smoke?" Johnson asked.

"Apparently I get angry when I smoke. May have killed a few ratings when I blew through my last pack." he shrugged, eyes drooping as he pulled in the vapors from the cigar. "You know what would go well with this..." he reached under the table and pulled out a bottle. The man first took a deep pull on the cigar, and then took an equally deep pull on the bottle, his Adam's apple oscillating on his unshaven neck.

"Jesus Christ." Wilcox said.

He released his lips, gasping in satisfaction. "Feckin' hell that's good! Hey, Lemmy!" he called back to one of the servitors. One in particular, a robotic arm with a slim male torso on top leaned over to just behind the smoking man. The speed at which it approached was shocking.

"Get the good man here something from the back. The long range stuff."

"Designate?" the servitor intoned; the voice coming from a box installed on its neck rather than from its lolling jaw.

Miles twitched. He didn't know they could talk.

"Stalker pattern."

"Affirmative." the servitor droned, disappearing down the aisle, returning twenty seconds later carrying a smaller box. It placed the cargo just behind the box holding the bolt guns. The servitor released its grip and retreated.

Once again, the weapons master punched in a code as he rolled the cigar around in his mouth. The box popped open revealing a longer version of the rifles the rest of the Marines had been gifted. It had a longer barrel, shorter magazine, and clearly looked like it had been machined relatively recently judging from the scratches on the body of the gun.

"Hello there." Johnson said absentmindedly, eyes focused on the thing in the box.

"Stalker-pattern bolt gun, sized for us mere mortals. According to legend, Imperial Army units used to carry a few of these to back up the Legions during the Crusades. Not a whole lot of these left. Maybe a million in the galaxy left, rough guess."

"Only a million?"

"In the span of a galaxy, yeah, that seems like a fecking small number I should think."

Johnson glared at the guns, taking in the smaller magazines and the scope that lay alongside the main weapon.

"Noise reducing muzzle to help mask your presence. Unless you're using Stalker rounds, that's not going to help much."

"You mean you have rockets that can be silenced?" Miles asked, eyebrows raising.

"You sound surprised." the man said, taking the gun out of its protective foam casing.

"I am." the Mobian said.

The scope was slapped onto a rail and the Stalker bolter was passed over to Johnson, who took it with fingers that trembled ever so slightly. A seventy five caliber long range rocket launcher the fired bullets that exploded. And it could be suppressed.

"Where have you been all my life?" he said, marveling at the amazing weight the weapon had, Even at this size it appeared almost too large for him. The stock appeared to be an afterthought as it seemed to have less engineering than the receiver."

"Everyone happy?" The man said. "If there's nothing else, relocate your arses out of my armory. As I understand it you people need to be somewhere, so get."

Johnson stayed a second longer. "I've got to shake your hand. Avery Johnson." he said, taking the armory master's hands. "You've made me very happy."

The man shook vigorously, slightly shortened cigar bobbing in his mouth as he spoke, "Caraticus Fuller, Arch-Militant at large. Just don't do anything I wouldn't do with that Stalker, Johnson. It is a two thousand year old family heirloom after all. Treat it to a dinner and a show first. Thanks for the smoke, eh?"