Chapter 223: Iron Bones
"Well, my lord Baron — ready to embrace the Omnissiah? To shed the weakness of flesh and take up something permanent?"
Antonius's tone carried the particular quality of a salesman who has identified genuine interest in a prospective customer.
Kian was genuinely interested — that much was true. In a universe built around violence at every scale, personal capability was the only reliable currency. He'd watched enough Warhammer lore play out around him to understand that the really decisive moments — campaigns involving hundreds of billions of soldiers, civilisations burning across star systems — still tended to come down to individuals at the critical juncture.
He also wanted to live. Not just survive the current year, but actually live — for a very long time.
In the 41st Millennium, the options for extended lifespan were limited and each had significant attached costs.
Becoming an Astartes was theoretically the most powerful route — enhanced organs, three metres of genetically optimised combat capability, documented cases of individual warriors persisting for ten thousand years. But the selection happened in adolescence. Kian was approaching thirty. That door was closed. And even if it weren't — the Chapter structure was a total institution. In the Astartes life, the calendar consisted of training, prayer, and the occasional campaign that represented something close to recreation. No autonomy, no independent operations, no private interests. That wasn't a life Kian was willing to live.
Extensive cybernetic conversion was the second path. Forge Masters, Archmagi, senior Enginseers — some of them were thousands of years old and still functioning. The longevity was real.
But Kian found himself genuinely uncomfortable with where that path led.
The moment you replace one biological component and experience its mechanical equivalent's superior performance, the next replacement becomes easier to justify. The one after that easier still. Progressive, incremental, each step rational in isolation — until you arrive at Belisarius Cawl, who occupied approximately two storeys of space and retained perhaps two ounces of original biological brain matter. Was that still a person? Was the continuity of self maintained through ten thousand years of gradual replacement, or had the original Cawl ceased to exist decades into the process, replaced by something that merely remembered being him?
There was also a practical problem specific to Kian's situation.
He had the Sanctum. Death wasn't permanent for him — the resurrection mechanism restored him to a baseline state. Which meant spending billions of Agri-Scrips on augmetic enhancements, dying in the field, and waking up with a body full of biological originals and a significant financial loss. He'd experimented with what the Sanctum's restoration preserved. The principle appeared to be: things that had become genuinely part of his essential self persisted. Things that hadn't, didn't.
The Pious Crusader brand had come back. He'd tested it — it was his in a way that went beyond the physical inscription. The ring Lady Nightingale had given him, bound with her house's intention, had fused to something essential and persisted.
Could he genuinely believe that a titanium-reinforced femur or a mechanical kidney was part of his essential self? He doubted it.
He put the question to Antonius directly.
"If I replace everything biological in my body — every organ, eventually most of the brain — am I still the same person at the end of that process?"
Antonius scanned his face with the optical units, processed the anxiety beneath the question, and gave what was, for an Enginseer, a thoughtful response.
The Mechanicus had a methodology for this, developed across millennia of converting biological humans into something else.
They didn't do it all at once.
Year one: an external optical implant, connected to the brain via neural link. The patient lives with it, adapts, begins to think of it as part of themselves.
Year two: the biological eye is removed and the optical augmetic moved to an internal installation.
Decade three: the lungs have degraded from industrial atmospheric exposure. Replace them with mechanical equivalents. The patient has already accepted one augmetic as self — the second follows more easily.
Decade seven: the hands are inefficient. Remove them. Install mechanical arms.
Over centuries, the conversion progresses. When Belisarius Cawl began modifying his brain, he didn't hollow it out at once — he excised ten percent, installed a mechanical processing unit in the gap, and spent years thinking with both simultaneously. Brain and machine, neither clearly primary. Then another increment. Then another. Over perhaps thousands of years, the balance shifted until the machine was nearly everything and the biological remainder was a seed maintaining continuity of identity.
The self persisted not because nothing changed, but because everything changed slowly enough that the thread of identity was never severed — it simply extended through each modification, carrying the accumulated experience of all the previous versions forward.
Antonius concluded his explanation and then said something that caught Kian's attention:
"I have a specific procedure you may find more suitable. It doesn't involve removing your biological components and replacing them with mechanical ones. It works with your existing flesh."
Kian looked at him.
"I open the skin, extract the bones, and inject a specialised metal alloy directly into the bone structure — increasing density throughout. The bones are then reinserted.
When the full skeleton has been treated, your physical strength will increase by several multiples. The bones become substantially harder to break, and the muscles anchored to them can express significantly more force."
[End of Chapter 223]
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