It was also why Breughal Paine had agreed to undergo Dreadnought symbiosis, to preserve his enormous knowledge.
Simply put, the Dark Hunters did not like to send their brethren to Mars to be trained by the tech-adepts whose kind had once been their bitterest foes. Their Techmarines were few and growing fewer by the year; those who had made the pilgrimage to Mars had found themselves the objects of distrust and dislike when they had returned.
Mortai had a single Techmarine to its name, Brother Heinos. He had missed the last thirty years of campaigning, and had only returned to the Chapter the year before. He was a rare case, one of the few Space Marines in the entire Chapter that Jonah had never seen in battle. Even the recent Haradai replacements had all served in the Gulbec Pirate skirmishes.
Brother Heinos had been a neophyte destined for Ninth Company when Breughal Paine had seconded his own request for Mars.
The Space Marine and the shipmaster passed down endless corridors, some high and wide enough to take a Land Raider, others so low that Kerne had to stoop. They passed hundreds of fleet personnel in Hunters blue, heavy servitors with tracks in place of legs who were towing lowloaders of spares and supplies, and a platoon of the shipguard, the armed infantry of the Ogadai, who almost halted in their ranks at the sight of the Adeptus Astartes captain.
‘How many shipguard on board?’ Kerne asked Massaron. He had looked up the stats for the cruiser before boarding, but they were out of date, and fleet personnel were always in flux. The Master of the Fleet, old Gan Arix, had once told Jonah that keeping the ships crewed was like juggling raisins. You might drop a few, but there was no time to look down and see.
‘Almost two thousand. Most are from Phospherran, the desert moon on the edge of the system. Their fathers are miners and herders. We sign up several hundred every year.’
Jonah knew Phospherran. He had fought there the last time the Punishers had arrived.
‘The population has recovered then?’
‘Yes. The Kharne had whole populations relocated in the wake of the Punisher War, and they have bedded down well. Most of our people are from the border moons. Phorios never recovered, and is still uninhabitable.’
They had bombed the planet from orbit and seared it down to the stone, so deeply embedded had the Great Enemy been on that unfortunate world. Kerne had watched from a drop-ship, launched and then recalled when the extent of the invasion had become apparent. All possible resources had been withdrawn for the defence of Phobian itself, and the populated fringes of the Phobos system had been abandoned. He ground his teeth as he thought on it.
They boarded a massive hydraulic elevator and sank lower into the main body of the ship. The Ogadai was tall as a mountain, and it was said that there were chambers and whole sections within it that had remained sealed and forgotten for generations.
Roadways and ramps within the bowels of the vessel ran as busy with wheeled and tracked traffic as some planetary metropolis, and the footbridges above them were thick with streaming crowds of crew.
Kerne saw a heavy loader pass by on balloon-like wheels, hauling a serried crowd of servitors, their eyesights gleaming red and green, the overhead glims reflecting off the shining servo-arms. These had once been human, all of them, but they could now be plugged into the ship like any other mechanical component.
He could think of no worse fate for a human being – and yet every year there were a few who actually volunteered for the transformation, so harsh was the universe of this millennium. Mankind clung to life in any way it could.
But no Space Marine could ever imagine submitting to such a fate.
The vast spaces within the Ogadai opened up further, until small cyber-organic cherubim were able to flit overhead, the far-off bulkheads almost lost in a haze above them. The cruiser was indeed a self-contained world, teeming with life. It made Jonah somewhat uncomfortable to be constrained by this river of humanity. He had to remind himself more than once as he slowed his pace to match the shipmaster’s that this was a starship, a space-going component of his own Chapter, and not the greatest at that.
The Umbra Mortis, the Dark Hunters battle-barge, was several times the size of the Ogadai, though not at present able to proceed under its own power. The Hunters had long ago lost the technical ability to repair the barge’s immense warp-engines, but Kerne knew that even the Mortis’s skeleton crew was in the tens of thousands.
‘There are – what – a quarter of a million human personnel in the fleet?’ Kerne asked Massaron as they paused to ride another elevator ever deeper into the Ogadai.
‘Closer to three hundred thousand, captain,’ the shipmaster replied. ‘Most live and die on their ships, never setting foot on a planet. But it is a better life than most. It has purpose and honour. The Chapter clothes and feeds us and gives us a useful function in the Imperium. It is more than can be said for most men’s lives.’
Kerne grunted in approval. He found himself liking the square, contained shipmaster and his air of imperturbability. Such a man might have made a Space Marine, had he been discovered young enough.
‘And you, Massaron, how long have you been wearing Hunters blue?’
The shipmaster raised one eyebrow, and went so far as to scratch his jaw.
‘I was born on the Ogadai, captain. This ship and the Chapter it serves are all the home I have ever known, or ever wanted to know. The personnel of the fleet are my family.’ He seemed about to say more, but checked himself.
The elevator, a square of plasteel fifty metres to a side, came to a jostling halt, making Massaron grimace.
‘The ship is four thousand years old, captain. The repairs it requires are a never-ending process, and it consumes raw materials as though it were a living creature of great appetite.’
‘What is the lifespan of a vessel such as this?’
Massaron seemed genuinely taken aback by the question.
‘Given the due and proper maintenance it requires, the Ogadai is immortal. If we look after it, the ship will serve the Chapter for as long as there are men to crew it and space to travel in.’
Kerne suspected he had hit a nerve, and did not pursue the subject. He had noticed that some sections of the cruiser were better maintained than others, and the patina of age coated the ancient plasteel thickly. Cracks and splits had been welded over again and again, and in places the inner cabling had fallen down so that the crew stepped over it as one would over a dormant snake.
But the distant thunder of the engines was reassuringly solid, a background noise that was soon forgotten, and became part of life itself on the ship.
However, it was only a ship.
It was the Chapter that endured – that must endure. This human, however admirable, had a vision that was circumscribed by his surroundings and his lifespan, just like his fellows.
In the Adeptus Astartes the genes of the Emperor Himself were embedded, attenuated by the millennia, but never to be eradicated. In the very flesh of the Dark Hunters, in their blood, was their reason to be. A Space Marine who died in war had his gene-seed recovered from the battlefield no matter what the cost, and it was implanted into another who would carry on his work, his duty to the Emperor and the Imperium.
That was true immortality, not the feverish scrabble to repair an ancient starship, however august its history. The Ogadai was alloy and metal, plate and wiring. A Space Marine carried within himself the very essence of the living God.
It was rare to meet a human being who understood this.
‘This is the starboard drop hangar,’ Massaron was saying. The mismatched pair were now walking inside a space more immense than any yet seen, and there was a new smell in the air. The fug and stink of humanity was still present, but it was overlaid by the unguents and lubricants which attended all the heavy machinery of the Chapter.