At last he appeared to be satisfied with the arrangements and his finger hovered over a chunky black dial in the centre of the transformer.
'Colonel Kain?' asked Imerian. 'We are ready.'
Kain shot Uriel a bitter look of resignation and nodded curtly, saying, 'Proceed.'
The enginseer waved his hand at a crewman who sat upon the upper hull of one of the Leman Russ tanks and its engine roared to life with a thumping bass note that shook the dust from the roof of the hangar.
A crackling, electric sensation danced on the air and a rising hum, like the throbbing beat that filled the heart of a starship built from the box carried by the servitor.
Imerian furiously worked the dials as needles jumped, snapping into the red sections on the far right of the displays.
Arcs of lightning sparked from the transformer and Imerian flinched. The hum from the box became a whine and Uriel felt a moment's fear as he wondered if something had gone horribly wrong with the process.
He looked around the edge of the sandbag barrier, seeing the red lenses of the helmet glowing brightly with power.
'It's working!' he cried.
A subtle vibration was passing through the armour, a miraculous sense of reawakening that made Uriel's heart sing. He stepped from behind the sandbags and marched across the hangar over the warning shouts of Imerian.
Uriel knew he had nothing to fear from this armour's rebirth, for it mirrored his own.
In the time he had spent away from the Ultramarines, he had been less than whole, a shadow of his former self, but as the armour was reborn to its sacred purpose, so too was he.
Uriel smiled, and the glow in the helmet's lenses was mirrored in his own.
Daron Nisato followed Pascal Blaise up a set of metal stairs towards the bar's upper rooms. His footsteps echoed loudly on the metal and he found himself wondering at the strangeness of fate that found him breathing the same air as Pascal Blaise and not hauling him back to the enforcer's precinct house.
If Blaise was serious about opening a dialogue between the Sons of Salinas and the Imperial authorities, it could signal an end to the bloodshed that plagued the streets of Barbadus and a new beginning for Salinas.
Blaise pushed open a rusting iron door and beckoned Nisato into a long room with a handful of beds along one wall and a desk on the other. A single window looked out over the city of Barbadus. Mesira Bardhyl was sitting on one of the beds, her knees drawn up to her chest and her arms hugged around her shins. She wore a shapeless, white robe and her arms were bound with bandages.
Nisato took a seat next to Mesira on the bed and lifted her chin, seeing that her eyes were glassy and far away.
'Emperor's blood, what happened to her?' he asked.
'That's pretty much how we found her,' said Pascal Blaise, 'except that she was naked.'
'Naked?'
'Like I said, I think her mind's gone.'
Nisato had seen the same blank look in many a soldier's face, the shattered mind behind the eyes no longer capable of dealing with whatever trauma had broken it open, and was forced to agree.
'Mesira?' he said. 'Can you hear me? It's Daron Nisato. I'm here to take you home.'
She rocked back and forth, shaking her head. 'No,' she said. 'Can't go home. No home to go back to. We burned it. We burned it all. He's coming for us. Won't let us go. Must punish us for what we did.'
'Mesira, what are you talking about?'
'The Mourner… He's coming for us,' sobbed Mesira, tears spilling down her cheeks, 'for all of us who were there.'
Nisato looked helplessly at Pascal Blaise. The man was pale and his eyes were wide.
'Do you know what she's talking about?' demanded Nisato. 'Who's this Mourner?'
'The Mourner,' said Mesira. 'I see him all the time… He's burnt, black and dead. His eyes though… His eyes are fire and he burns. No! Not with fire, no, not with fire, but with rage.'
'Damn you, Blaise,' snapped Nisato, rising from the bed and moving towards the leader of the Sons of Salinas. 'Tell me what you know. Who is the Mourner?'
Pascal Blaise swallowed heavily, looking over at Cawlen Hurq who stood at the doorway.
'It's what we used to call the old man,' said Blaise, 'Sylvanus Thayer.'
'The leader of the Sons of Salinas before you?'
'Yes,' said Blaise, nodding.
'But he's dead isn't he?' said Nisato. 'He was killed after the Khaturian massacre.'
Blaise didn't answer immediately and Nisato said, 'Wasn't he?'
'No,' said Pascal, 'he wasn't.'
Sergeant Tremain paced the walls of the Screaming Eagles' compound, nodding and passing a word with the sentries as he went. His rifle hung loosely over his shoulder and his falcata was a reassuring presence at his hip, the sheath slapping against his thigh with every long stride he took. It felt good to be armed like an ordinary soldier, the familiar weight of the weapon he had first been issued with back on the old home world of Achaman. The old home world…
Tremain could barely remember the world of his birth, save that it was more temperate, more beautiful and more interesting than this ugly rock. His memories were rose-tinted, he knew. Every soldier's memory of home was, but even allowing for that, he still missed the spiced hint in the air and the golden sunsets in the russet skies.
He smiled at his unusually poetic turn of thought and paused beside a corner turret, a boxy construction of reinforced concrete, further protected by a layer of steel mesh to defeat shaped warheads. The turret scanned across the dead ground before the compound, twin autocannon protruding from the firing slit to cover the roadway that led from the urban sprawl of Barbadus.
The night was quiet, although the rumble of engines and a teeth-numbing hum of electrics coming from one of the vehicle hangars against the far wall was an unaccustomed disturbance. The two Space Marines they had found, Tremain didn't like to use the word detained, were in there with Colonel Kain. There was something about recharging a suit of armour, although he didn't really understand what was going on.
All he knew was that he didn't like it. Sergeant Tremain didn't like anything that upset the status quo-and he'd suspected those two warriors were trouble the moment he laid eyes on them within the fenced off area of the Killing Ground.
He'd known for certain when Uriel Ventris lied to him in the back of the Chimera.
Tremain shifted the rifle's weight on his shoulder and leaned out over the parapet to look at the smoky outline of Barbadus, squatting like a diseased tumour on the landscape. Of all the worlds they had been given to conquer, why did it have to be this one?
It was foolish to expose himself like this, but it enhanced his reputation amongst the men as a man who didn't care overmuch for the threat posed by the Sons of Salinas.
'Better watch out, sergeant,' said one of the wall sentries. 'You don't want to get your head shot off by a sniper.'
Tremain shook his head. 'Don't you worry about me, lad,' he said. 'The Sons of Salinas might be hard fighters, but they're not soldiers and they don't have a marksman worthy of the name to worry about.'
The sentry smiled and continued on his rounds, and once Tremain was satisfied that he had waited long enough, he leaned back. It was all very well being blase about the Sons of Salinas, but fate had a strange sense of humour when it came to hubris, and it would be just his luck to make a crack like that and have a sniper blow his head off.
Tremain continued his rounds, finding that his gaze was continually drawn to the mountains that were little more than a jagged dark line on the horizon. He remembered the same mountains lit by the flames of Khaturian and shivered. He hadn't thought of the Killing Ground in many years. He tried to keep his thoughts away from that day as far as possible, but there was a strange sense of unease in the air tonight, an unease that made him think of past shames and which had driven him from the warmth of the barracks to wander the walls of the compound.