Nolan had not expected a Dreadnought.
What he had meant, when he mentioned ancient vehicles beyond the Carcharodons' capacity to repair, was something closer to a salvaged chassis or a broken frame: raw material for Raditus to disassemble and learn from, inspiration drawn from designs that had not been manufactured in ten thousand years. A technical gift. Something to seed ideas.
Tyberos had apparently heard a different request.
He stepped forward and acknowledged the Contemptor formally, speaking as the Primarch to a Chapter's venerable dead, expressing gratitude to the ancient warrior inside for the honour of the Carcharodons' gift and for the journey it had made.
The Ancient Itako heard him out. Then the Contemptor's chassis moved, slowly and with the deliberate care of something very old, and one massive claw reached back over its own shoulder to detach a metal container that had been secured to the Dreadnought's back. It was several metres long. Itako set it down on the floor of the rotunda with a gentleness that the size and weight of the claw made surprising, and then stood back.
Nolan looked at the container. He looked at Itako. Then he crouched and opened the lid.
Whatever he had been prepared to see, it was not this.
He stood up slowly, and for a moment he simply looked at the contents without speaking.
"My Lord Primarch," Itako said, the old voice resonant in the metal chamber. "Chapter Master Tyberos sends this to you as a piece of war heritage. A Two-Stage Cyclonic Torpedo. Compared to what you hold in that container, even my own presence here is merely a secondary gift."
He paused.
"Regarding the other matter: I will not leave this Dreadnought. I understand that you possess methods that could sustain my body outside of it. But I have spent a long time in this iron coffin, and I know what I am. If I were to stand again, to walk and eat and rest in peace for any significant span of time, I fear that when I returned to the coffin, my will would not survive the transition. There are things I can endure as long as I do not know what I am missing. I prefer to remain as I am."
Nolan looked at him for a moment, then nodded without argument. He had heard this reasoning before, in different words, from other veterans. It was a form of discipline, choosing the limit rather than fighting it.
He turned and gave David a quiet instruction: the Two-Stage Cyclonic Torpedo was to be moved to a secured location in the deeper sections of the base, access restricted to no one, including Raditus. David received this without visible reaction and departed with the container, moving carefully.
The second instruction was for Raditus: prepare a stasis field for the Contemptor veteran.
Before David had fully cleared the rotunda with the container, something small came through the Contemptor's observation port. Nolan caught it out of reflex, his hand closing around it before he had consciously registered the throw.
He opened his palm. A metal amulet, palm-sized, red, and very old. The surface was worked in a way that suggested it had been handled frequently over a long span of time, the details worn smooth at the edges but the underlying craft still visible.
"Forefather Itako. What is this?"
"An ancient artefact the Chapter Master obtained through circumstance." The Contemptor's voice was measured. "It carries a compulsion function over mechanical creations. Tyberos believes it would have some degree of effect on Man of Iron. He asked me to convey the following: guard against those you do not yet know to guard against. You may choose never to use this. But you should have the means available."
Nolan looked at the amulet for a moment, then closed his fingers around it again.
"Tyberos is more thoughtful than his conversation suggests," he said quietly. "I will remember this."
He pocketed the amulet, then gestured for Itako to follow him toward the Emperor's statue at the centre of the rotunda. The Contemptor moved alongside him, and both of them knelt, and the prayer was brief and sincere, and then they left the circular space together.
The foundry on Second Son Island absorbed the Contemptor Dreadnought with the focused attention of a facility that had not encountered anything quite like it. Servo-robots moved in sequence around Itako, running measurement arrays across the chassis, documenting dimensions and surface condition and structural integrity data in complete detail. The ancient armour was maintained and adjusted where it could be without disturbing the systems keeping the occupant alive.
Connors was pulled from his laboratory for the next stage.
He came with the particular energy of a man interrupted mid-thought, which converted immediately into a different energy when he understood what he was looking at. He worked carefully, under Itako's direction, injecting a heavily diluted panacea solution into the systems that interfaced with the Dreadnought's occupant. The concentration was not enough to regenerate what had been lost. The warrior inside had been confined to this chassis for reasons that diluted medicine could not reverse. But the internal injuries that the Dreadnought's systems had been compensating for, the accumulated damage of decades of maintenance on the edge of adequacy, those would begin to resolve. Slowly, but they would resolve.
Raditus, to its credit, set aside whatever instinct might have produced arrogance in the presence of something so much older than itself, and treated the Ancient with the formal respect the situation required. The stasis field was prepared and calibrated. Itako entered it without protest and with something that, in a being of his age and experience, might have been genuine relief. The field engaged. The ancient Dreadnought went still.
David and a team of servo-robots moved Itako to the deeper secured levels of the base, to rest alongside the Two-Stage Cyclonic Torpedo in a section of the facility that had been built with exactly this purpose in mind: the housing of things too significant or too dangerous for ordinary storage.
Nolan watched the last of the transfer complete, then turned to Connors.
The gene-seed research. He had been meaning to ask.
Connors required no particular prompting. He launched into it with the enthusiasm of a man who had been thinking about almost nothing else for weeks: the structure of gene-seeds, the viral replication mechanism, the remarkable complexity of the growth hormones and how they interacted with the host's developmental stage. The elegance of the system, considered purely as a piece of biological engineering, was something Connors found genuinely compelling, and his excitement in explaining it was evident.
The practical situation was less encouraging.
The gene-seeds recovered from the Astral Knights remains had almost no viable cellular activity remaining. Working from them, Connors could learn the architecture, the shape of what a gene-seed was and how its components fitted together. He could not cultivate from them. For actual cultivation, for producing usable material, he would need fresh gene-seeds and more biological specimens. Without those, the research would plateau where it was: thorough understanding, no output.
Nolan told him to be patient. He would find a way to obtain what was needed. The teleportation experiments with the Carcharodons, if they proved viable with acceptable Chaos exposure risk, might eventually allow personnel to travel to the fleet and work alongside the Chapter's own Apothecaries directly. A proper training arrangement, rather than working from dead samples in isolation.
Connors received this with visible enthusiasm and left for his laboratory with the brisk step of a man who had been handed something new to think about.
Nolan said a brief word to Raditus and walked out of the foundry into the cold air of Second Son Island.
He had a decision already made. In the coming days he would identify a suitable group from the Gang Dogs and begin the teleportation experiments, testing the Chaos corruption risk in controlled increments. If the results were clean, the door would open to sending core personnel through. If they were not, he would continue with the Intelligent Control Corps and the occasional summoned Astartes, and accept the slower rate of progress as the cost of keeping his people intact.
It was a straightforward calculation. He preferred straightforward calculations.
Ten minutes after returning to the base proper, he was in his quarters. The metal amulet sat on the small surface beside the bed. He looked at it for a moment and then set it aside, not discarded, simply waiting.
He sat on the edge of the bed, closed his eyes, and let the prayer form in the quiet.
"May the Emperor bless you."
He meant it.
Then he opened the simulator, reached into the interface, and took a Throne Coin between his fingers. He held it for a moment, and then threw it upward into the air.
The coin caught the light as it rose, and at its apex, the simulator activated.
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