Stay back, Word Bearer. I sense your rising wrath. Do not assume I am the only one who is capable of feeling it. Strong emotion will also alert the Anathema.
Argel Tal leaned closer to the pod. His fingertips brushed frost from its surface.
‘Guilliman,’ he whispered.
The child slept on.
Xaphen moved away from the others, coming to the pod etched with XI. Rather than peer into its depths, he looked over his shoulder at Argel Tal.
‘The eleventh primarch sleeps within this pod – still innocent, still pure. I ache to end this now,’ he confessed.
Malnor chuckled from behind the Chaplain. ‘It would save us all a lot of effort, wouldn’t it?’
‘And it would spare Aurelian from heartbreak.’ Xaphen traced his fingertips over the designating numeral. ‘I remember the devastation that wracked him after losing his second and eleventh brothers.’
Argel Tal still hadn’t left Guilliman’s pod. ‘We do not know for certain if our actions here would change the future.’
‘Are some chances not worth taking?’ asked the Chaplain.
‘Some are. This one is not.’
‘But the Eleventh Legion–’
‘Is expunged from Imperial record for good reason. As is the Second. I’m not saying I don’t feel temptation creeping over me, brother. A single sword thrust piercing that pod, and we’d unwrite a shameful future.’
Dagotal cleared his throat. ‘And deny the Ultramarines a significant boost in recruitment numbers.’
Xaphen regarded him with emotionless eyes, seeming to weigh the merit of such a thing.
‘What?’ Dagotal asked the others. ‘You were thinking it, too. It’s no secret.’
‘Those are just rumours,’ Torgal grunted. The assault sergeant didn’t sound particularly certain.
‘Perhaps, perhaps not. The Thirteenth definitely swelled to eclipse all the other Legions around the time the Second and Eleventh were “forgotten” by Imperial archives.’
Enough of this insipid conjecture, came the disembodied voice again.
Argel Tal looked below the platform, where the scientists laboured at their stations. Most were dealing with bloodwork, or working on biopsies of pale flesh. He recognised the extracted organs immediately.
‘Why are these men and women experimenting on Astartes gene-seed?’ he asked. The other Word Bearers followed his gaze.
They are not experimenting on it. They are inventing it.
Argel Tal watched them work, as Ingethel’s voice hissed on. He saw several of the workers nearby slicing open the pale organs with silver scalpels. Each of them bore the numeral I on the back of their environment suits.
Your Emperor has conquered his own world with the proto-Astartes created in far inferior conditions. Now he breeds the primarchs, and in their shadow, he breeds the warriors he needs to lead the Great Crusade.
He watched them work, but the sight of his genetic genesis left his skin crawling.
These are the prototypical organs that will become the gene-seed for the first true Astartes. You know them as–
‘The Dark Angels,’ said Argel Tal. ‘The First Legion.’ Below him, the biotechnicians scalpelled through malformed organs, threaded veins, analysed with microscopes, and took tissue samples for further testing. The progenoid glands implanted in his own throat and chest throbbed with sympathetic ache. He lifted a hand to rub at the sore spot on the side of his neck, where the organ hidden beneath the skin did its silent work – storing his genetic coding until the moment of his death, whereupon it would be harvested and implanted within another child. The boy would, in turn, grow to become a Word Bearer. No longer human. No longer Homo Sapiens, but Homo Astartes.
It will be many Terran years before the organs below are ready for implantation in human youths. This is early in the process. Most of the flaws in gene-seed structure will be written out in the course of the coming decades.
The captain didn’t like the creature’s tone. ‘Most?’
Most. Not all.
‘The Thousand Sons,’ said Xaphen. ‘Their genetic code was misaligned. The Legion was afflicted by mutation and psychic instability.’
They are not alone in their flaws. The unwinding years will bring these biological errors to light. Gene-seed degeneration resulting in organ failure, stealing the ability to salivate venom; intolerance to certain radiation will alter a warrior’s skin and bones.
‘The Imperial Fists,’ said Malnor. ‘And the Salamanders.’
‘But what of us?’ Dagotal asked.
There was a pause as Ingethel whisper-laughed behind their eyes. What of you?
‘Will we suffer from those... impurities?’
‘Answer him,’ said Argel Tal. ‘He asks what we all wish to know.’
The code written into your bodies is purer than most. You will suffer no special degeneration, and endure no unique flaws.
‘But there is something,’ he said. ‘I hear it in your voice.’
No Astartes is as loyal to their primarch as the XVII are to Lorgar. No Imperial warrior believes in their father’s righteousness with as much faith and ardent devotion.
Argel Tal swallowed. It felt cold, and tasted sour. ‘Our loyalty is bred into our blood?’
No. You are sentient creatures with free will. This is no more than a minor divergence in an otherwise flawless code. Your gene-seed enhances the chemicals in your brain tissue. It gives you focus. It grants you unbreakable loyalty to your cause, and to Lorgar Aurelian.
‘I do not like the turn this revelation is taking,’ the captain confessed.
‘Nor I,’ admitted Torgal.
The surprise you feel is false, Argel Tal. You have seen this before, reflected in the eyes of your brother Legions. Think of the compliance of Cassius, when the pale sons of Corax watched you with distaste, arguing against your savage purge of the heathen population. The Thousand Sons at Antiolochus... The Luna Wolves at Davin... The Ultramarines at Syon...
All of your brothers have watched you and hated you for your unquestioning, focused wrath.
He moved back to Guilliman’s pod, examining it rather than paying attention to the technicians below. ‘I will speak of this no further.’
It is not a flaw to believe, Word Bearer. There is nothing purer.
Argel Tal paid the daemon’s words no mind. Something else had caught his attention and wouldn’t let go.
‘Blood of the... Look. Look at this.’ The captain crouched by the lower half of Guilliman’s coffin-womb. A bulky generator box was half-meshed with the main machinery behind the gestation pod. Coolant feeds quivered as they pumped fluid, and the details that could be made out through gaps in the armoured covering showed the generator’s internal compartments were filled with bubbling red liquid.
Dagotal looked over Argel Tal’s shoulder. ‘Is that blood?’
The captain gave Dagotal a withering look.
‘What?’ the sergeant asked.
‘It’s haemolubricant, for a machine-spirit. These secondary generators are fastened behind each pod. And look, they run along the spinal columns of these structures, up the tower.’
Dagotal and the others looked around. ‘So?’
‘So where have you seen power generators of similar design before? What engine requires a machine-spirit of this complexity to function?’