Primogenitor Isle. Deep underground.
In the brightly lit circular plaza before the Emperor's statue, the warp tore open.
The rift widened slowly, its edges held stable by a Carcharodons Lexicanium named Ukari who was on one knee on the plaza floor, his entire psychic capacity bent toward keeping the aperture from collapsing. The strain was visible in the set of his shoulders and the rigidity of his posture, the effort of a psyker pushing against something that wanted to close.
Then the footsteps came through it.
The first Knight suit put its foot down on the spotless metal floor and the impact rang through the whole underground space. The second followed. Then the rest, one after another, twenty-one ancient suits of Knight armor crossing from the warp into the plaza and taking up positions across the floor with the weight of things that had been built to occupy space and knew it. When the twenty-first had cleared the aperture, Nolan stepped through.
The purple halo of the Ten Rings hung above his power pack, still rotating. He looked around the plaza and stopped.
Something was different about the dimensions of the space. He could feel it before he identified it precisely: the proportions were larger than he remembered, the ceiling higher, the walls further from the center. He had been gone roughly a year. David had apparently not been idle.
"Lexicanium Ukari. You can release it."
Ukari let go.
The rift sealed itself behind Nolan, and the Lexicanium crumpled. The standby servo-automata had anticipated this and were already moving: they caught him before he hit the floor and carried him down the passage toward the medical bay, efficient and silent.
Nolan tilted his head back and breathed. The air of the base was familiar in a way that the recycled atmosphere of void ships and forge worlds was not. Slightly different mineral content, slightly different temperature, the smell of the specific metal alloys that Reditus favored for the base's interior work. He let it settle into him for a moment.
From somewhere in the connecting passage, a cluster of suspension engines began to hum.
The floating throne was large and built to accommodate David's frame, which was itself not small: a platform roughly three meters off the ground, wide, constructed with the particular aesthetic that resulted from a Man of Iron being given resources and the time to apply them. It came through the passage at a measured pace and stopped in front of Nolan.
David sat inside it.
"Welcome back, my lord."
Nolan smiled before he could decide whether to.
He turned to look, and then looked more carefully, because David was not quite the same as he had been. The frame was the same dark metal, the blue eye-sockets the same. But there was something about the totality of the presentation, the throne, the way David occupied it, the unhurried confidence of the posture, that read differently than it had before.
"David, what exactly have you..."
"There is no need for concern, my lord." David's metal head moved slightly, the eye-sockets pulsing. "This is a gift from Reditus, made in celebration of two things: his successful construction of the miniature Knight Titan, and his elevation to the rank of Magos. He felt I had provided some assistance along the way and chose to mark it. I admit the result is somewhat more conspicuous than I would have selected for myself."
Nolan looked at the throne again.
"No," he said. "I think it suits the situation exactly. You look like a senior figure operating from the background who has arranged everything and is simply waiting to confirm that it worked."
"My lord is generous. And judging from the Knight suits behind you, you have clearly been no less productive. Compared to what you bring back, I am the small contribution."
David stood up from the throne in a single movement, descended from the platform, and came to stand in front of Nolan. Then he bowed, fully, without any of the abbreviated acknowledgment that often substitutes for the real gesture.
"Thank you for your continued effort, my lord."
Nolan did not say anything. He raised his vibranium palm and put it on David's shoulder, a firm pressure held for a moment and then released.
When the weight of the homecoming had settled enough to allow ordinary function, he turned to speak briefly with the Knight captains, who were managing the unfamiliar environment with the cautious curiosity of soldiers in an installation they did not yet understand. Then he turned back.
"David. How long was I away, from the base's perspective?"
"Approximately one year, my lord. Our sphere of influence and our internal capacity have both grown considerably in that time. Once you have settled the Knight captains, I will take you through all of it in detail."
David's eyes flickered through a rapid sequence of blue pulses and he turned to lead the way.
The floating throne moved through the wide metal corridor at a pace that allowed conversation.
Nolan sat in it, which was not something he had intended to do but which David had suggested with the specific practicality of someone who had designed the seat to accommodate guests. He found himself studying the construction of the thing with the particular interest that mechanical objects produced in him: the suspension mechanism, the weight distribution, the integration of systems David had mentioned or not yet mentioned.
He had no designs on keeping it. It was David's. He was simply looking.
David's frame came around a corner and into the corridor ahead, moving with the ease of a body that had had time to learn this space completely.
"My lord, all twenty-one Knight captains are arranged and assigned. Stormtroopers familiar with the base's layout and its external dealings are handling the orientation." A brief pause. "Are you examining the throne? According to Reditus, the suspension platform incorporates a refractor field equivalent to what a Terminator suit generates. Defensive performance is considerable. The undercarriage deploys vibranium mechanical tentacles to approximately forty meters when extended. And Reditus also integrated several pieces of Necron technology into the power routing."
"What does the Necron technology do?"
Nolan pressed one of the handles on the armrest experimentally.
Bright green light erupted around him. It moved across the corridor walls and across his armor and surrounded him from every angle, sourceless and vivid, the distinctive cold green of Necron energy in full operation.
Nolan's eyes went slightly wide. He held up his hand. The light played across the vibranium gauntlet.
"David," he said carefully. "What does this do."
"It does nothing, my lord." David spread his metal palms. Something in his tone was adjacent to embarrassment. "Those particular Necron components, when connected to an external power source, emit that light as a secondary effect. The original function has not been preserved. What remains is purely decorative. It was apparently considered an impressive feature."
"I had expectations for what Reditus might become as a Magos," Nolan said. He dismissed the green light with a small motion and it dissipated. "I am recalibrating them."
"My lord is generous to put it in those terms."
The corridor opened ahead of them into the base's main operations hall.
Nolan remembered the hall. He did not recognize it in its current form. The metal walls were covered floor to ceiling in display screens, each one running a continuous feed of data or imagery, the volume of information moving across them simultaneously too great to read and too organized to be noise. The overall effect was less a room in an underground base and more the central intelligence node of a large and active organization.
David stopped in front of the throne and faced him.
"My lord, which aspect of the report would you like to begin with?"
Nolan rested his cheek on his vibranium knuckles.
"Work through it in whatever order makes sense to you, David. I have time to handle internal affairs properly for once."
"Then I will begin with our expanding sphere of influence."
David raised one metal finger and tapped it lightly against his own head. Blue light streamed from his eye-sockets and assembled itself in the air in front of the throne: a complete Earth in miniature, rendered in pale blue, rotating slowly.
Across its surface, scarlet points of light were scattered without obvious pattern, present on every continent, dense in some regions and sparse in others, but absent from nowhere. Each one marked a Guardian of Terra presence.
There were a great many of them.
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