Land got things done.
‘You’ve known they were alive for weeks,’ he said. ‘You’ve known since they reached the edge of the subsector and the deep-range auspices started heralding their arrival. What difference does it make now they’re actually here?’
Even the Angel’s pained wince was weighted with a sense of infinite patience. ‘I do not know how to phrase my emotions and my relief in words you will relate to, Arkhan.’
Land resisted the urge to roll his eyes. ‘If you’re done being melodramatic – not that you ever seem to be done with it – my offer still stands.’ He flicked a finger towards the aerial display that would still be taking place days from now. Bringing a Legion to the earth was no swift feat. ‘If you wish to fight with your brothers again, come to me. I will make it happen.’
Land was not a cyberneticist, nor was he a bioengineer specialising in osseous restructuring or false muscle microsurgery. At least, they weren’t his areas of expertise. He’d studied them, of course. One had to keep the mind busy, after all.
He had peers also stranded on Terra (though in no way did he consider them equals; they were, at best, colleagues) and several of them enquired as to why he was devoting himself to a discipline so far out of his usual sphere of interest. To these questions he would always respond with the same explanation:
‘Because there’s nothing else worthwhile to occupy my time.’
That wasn’t entirely true, of course. He could hardly pursue his passion – his vocation – of exploring techno-ruins while confined to the Imperial Palace, but there were always weapons to repair and toys to tinker with. The war effort forever demanded his attention, and if the Imperium was ever to retake Sacred Mars, Land would do all he could to speed them towards that eventuality.
Still, shutting down stupid queries served the purpose of getting people to leave him alone, and in the pursuit of a life away from idiotic questions, the ends always justified the means. In that light, he didn’t see his bluntness as rudeness, just practicality.
Depending on who was asking, Land might also slide in a pointed reference to the Legiones Astartes failing thus far to recapture Sacred Mars, or interject with a delicately bladed suggestion that Lord Rogal Dorn could be making more effort to retake the Mechanicum’s home world.
Land wasn’t shy with this opinion. On the day of Zephon’s surgical procedure, Land made one of these comments to the Imperial Army officer acting as liaison for his hab-section of the Palace. The woman wasn’t impressed by this conversational gambit. Few people were.
‘I should report you for sedition,’ she said.
‘Oh, really?’ Land sneered. ‘Is that what you should do? Go ahead. Perhaps a healthy sense of guilt will get Lord Dorn off his golden posterior and back into the skies of Sacred Mars. He might enjoy the chance to do his job right this time.’
The soldier was visibly shaken by Land’s riposte. The technoarchaeologist capitalised on her silence by driving his point home with a dismissive wave of his hand.
‘I’ve met the Emperor Himself, woman. We’ve conversed! A significant number of the Imperium’s machines function – they exist! – because of my STC rediscovery efforts. Don’t threaten me with nonsense. Away with you.’
In the wake of her departure, Zephon gave one of his pained smiles. He alone seemed sensitive to the fact that the subject of Mars always put Land in a foul mood, even when the Martian was the one bringing it up.
‘Arkhan, my friend, has it not occurred to you that she was jesting?’
‘Yes, yes,’ the scholar snapped back. ‘Now be quiet and let me examine you before we begin.’
Fifteen long hours into the surgery, Land stood by the operating slab, with his companion surgically flayed open, in some places to the bone. Sweat painted his face, cleaning away streaks of Zephon’s blood. His back was a bent, twinging column from standing hunched over for hours on end. And he was far from done, yet.
Zephon’s original bionics were degraded from years of semi-functionality. Inefficient fusion to nerve and muscle and bone meant their connector feeds and input-output locks were diminished. This wasn’t the result of improper implantation or maintenance, but simple biological rejection. Zephon was one of the very, very few Legiones Astartes warriors whose body refused to bond with cybernetic implants. The organic places where the bionics met his body were similarly eroded: muscle tissue had worn away through poor use and poorer connectivity; sinews and bones were likewise degenerated.
But Land had expected all of it. None of this was the problem.
The problem was that he’d made it worse.
For their journey into the Imperial Dungeon and the War in the Webway, Zephon had needed to fight again, failing bionics be damned. Lacking any other recourse (and, truthfully, just to see if he could succeed where Legiones Astartes bioengineering had failed) Land had jury-rigged a solution to render the Blood Angel capable of holding his bolter and blade again. He looked at the aftermath of that solution now. The burned-out remnants of it, unimplanted and unstrung from Zephon’s unconscious form.
Spread across several steel surgical trays was a bloodstained web of synaptic enhancement nodes, nerve stimulators, muscle injectors and osseous junctions. Some of the materials were for use in vehicular maintenance, while the primary interface was the pain-management cortex of a slain war-cyborg. Some of the web’s nodes had been repurposed from dead servitors. Some of it was the kind of simplistic technology seen in children’s automated playthings. Still more of it was medical scrap reengineered for use in these bleakest of circumstances. All of it had been variously retrofitted, upscaled and grafted into the Blood Angel’s crippled form to simulate the range of motion the natural body would allow.
It wasn’t just one solution; it had been several thrown together for the sake of functionality. Now he was looking at the singed nerve endings, the corrupted blood vessels, the worn-away muscles… Well, the list of injuries wasn’t short. At the time, all that’d mattered was getting Zephon back into battle. Land never expected he would need to undo the additional damage he’d done.
He looked at the Angel’s serene features as Zephon was held in a synthetically induced coma, triggered by a cocktail of chemicals and the activation of the warrior’s sus-an membrane.
‘You were supposed to die down there.’
The Angel slept on. Sapien watched this exchange from atop a nearby table. The psyber-monkey wore a size-appropriate surgical mask in mimicry of its master’s own. Let it never be said that Arkhan Land wasn’t meticulous when it came to the details.
Land ran his goggled gaze over the connections of tendons and nerves where Zephon’s right stump had met the previous bionic arm. The degradation here told the same tale as in the other limbs: Zephon must have been in considerable pain over the last few months, as the temporary web of jury-rigged implants and enhancers burned through his biology.
The Angel hadn’t complained once. He’d not even mentioned it. Such was the value of being able to move properly again that he’d endured what was likely constant, searing pain, in silence, in order to stand and fight for the Emperor once more.
Land wasn’t sure if he admired that. It was the kind of stubborn zealotry that had led the Legiones Astartes to setting half of the galaxy aflame. They were a proud and dangerous subspecies, make no mistake.
But Zephon was Zephon.
So Land went back to work.
Towards the end of the thirty-second hour of surgery, with the new bionic arms and legs in place, each of the connection nodes fused to bone, nerve, tendon, vein and muscle with exacting perfection, Land reached the final difficulty. All of this cybernetic surgery, even done to a standard beyond what the Angel had been granted before, didn’t address the chief concern: rejection. The beautifully-wrought replacement limbs, sculpted in silvery reflection of the Angel’s long-lost true flesh, would fail and twitch and misfire just as all of the other bionics had done. It was the ultimate and repeated failures of his bionics that had doomed Zephon to a place on Terra in the first place, garrisoned away from his Legion, away from the front lines of the Great Crusade: an overseer of empty barracks, commanding no one, earning no glory. The respected, decorated warrior that had been known by the deed-name Bringer of Sorrow had been reduced to a near-mute witness of unfolding history, stripped of his place in life.