The simulation ended.
Nolan came back to himself sitting on the edge of the metal bed, still wearing the power armour, the weight of the ceramite familiar and present in a way that the simulation's speed-type armour had not been. He sat with the weight of it for a moment.
"Konrad Curze." He said it quietly, to the room, to nothing. The low sound of it helped. "The next time we meet, I will make certain you remember it."
He took a long breath. Let the residue of dying clear from his thoughts the way it always needed to clear, the particular shadow that sixty simulated days of experience left behind when it compressed back down to real-world seconds. Then he brought his attention to the simulator's page.
He read through all three reward descriptions in full, as he always did. The habit had long since stopped feeling like a habit and started feeling like something closer to discipline: the information in those descriptions was frequently more valuable than the reward itself, and he had learned more about the Warhammer universe from the flavour text in these end screens than from most other sources available to him. The Spear of Telesto's history. The irony of Mercy and Forgiveness. The final words of Sanguinius to whoever would inherit what he left behind.
He read the third option twice.
Then he raised one finger and selected it.
The pain arrived without preamble.
It came from inside, from the brain and the spinal cord simultaneously, the neural sheaths taking root in the way that organic material took root when it was designed to, which was to say completely and without asking for permission and all at once. Nolan drove the power armour to one knee before he had consciously decided to move, the ceramite gauntlet coming down hard on the metal floor for support, the impact leaving a dent he registered distantly. His eyes were open. He could see the room. He could not do anything about the pain that was occupying the majority of his processing capacity, the sensation of something threading itself through the architecture of his nervous system from one end to the other.
Then, from behind his shoulder blades, something moved.
The feeling was not a feeling he had a frame of reference for. Something present where nothing had been present before, weight and sensation along the spine where the implantation had settled, and then a pressure building at the shoulder blades specifically, and then the pressure resolving into emergence.
The wings came through the power armour's back plating in a way that should not have been structurally possible and simply was. Blood-red and black, the feathers woven from something that was not quite physical matter and not quite psychic energy but occupied the space where those two things met, enormous, fully formed, spreading to their full width in the confined quarters of his room and brushing both walls simultaneously.
Nolan looked at them.
"What in the Emperor's name."
The desire hit him in the same moment. Deep, instinctive, rising from somewhere below the level of thought: the want for flesh and blood, specific and overwhelming, the Thirst that he had spent sixty simulation days watching destroy and recover and destroy again the sons of Sanguinius. It arrived in him like a tide.
Alongside it, a vision.
A hall, cold, the architecture of it built for glory and now serving as a killing ground. Horus in Terminator armour, the Warmaster's face doing something that faces should not do, driving a blade into Sanguinius. The Angel falling. The specific quality of that dying that had haunted the Blood Angels across ten thousand years of history, the scene so deeply embedded in their genetic inheritance that it triggered the Black Rage in those who saw it with enough clarity, the grief and fury of it reactivating as though it were happening now rather than in a past that the Warp made difficult to call truly past.
Nolan felt the rage begin.
Then both of them, the Thirst and the Rage, subsided.
Not slowly. Cleanly, like a tide being called back by something that had authority over it. The desire for flesh faded. The grief and fury of Sanguinius's death vision settled from overwhelming to present-but-manageable. He sat with it for a moment, breathing, and found that it was bearable. More than bearable. It was still there, it had not been removed, but it was under his hand rather than over it.
He released a long breath and stood up.
The wings folded as he rose, the motion intuitive in the way that the implant had apparently decided things would be intuitive. He turned his head to look at them over his shoulder, the red-and-black spread of them catching the room's light.
"Blood thirst and Black Rage," he said. "That is what Sanguinius left in this gift." He paused. "That is some blessing."
He tested it methodically after that, the way he tested all new capabilities: systematically, alone, noting what the ability did and what it required. The neural network's primary function worked as described: the ability to access memories through consuming blood and flesh, a dark capability he had no immediate intention of advertising. The secondary effect was stranger and would take more time to fully map. The wings could project the Thirst and the Black Rage outward to targets in range, the former as a battlefield amplifier for allies who could handle it, the latter as a curse on enemies who could not. The range was limited. The distinction between ally and enemy was a matter of intent on his part, which was a mechanism he did not entirely trust yet.
He also confirmed, with mild frustration, that the wings were psychic in nature rather than physical. They would not lift him. Sanguinius's flight had come from something else, something integral to the Angel's physiology, and the replica of the gene-seed construct in these neural sheaths produced the wings without producing the underlying biology that had made those wings aerodynamically functional.
He retracted them with a directed thought. They folded inward and were gone.
He did not intend to mention any of this to anyone until he understood it more completely.
The days after the simulation returned to the pattern that real-world days had: numerous, operational, and full of decisions that did not resolve cleanly.
He and David spent time on the question of the Hydra Antarctic base, the facility they had taken over and handed to David's remote management. The fundamental question was how much ongoing investment the facility warranted given its distance and the difficulty of staffing it. They settled on a middle path: a small maintenance rotation drawn from the Intelligent Control Corps, the base operating primarily as a materials depot and secondary research site rather than a full operational installation.
The other question had been waiting since the Space Sharks departed.
Tyberos had made his offer plainly: gene-seed cultivation for candidates from Nolan's people. Nolan had not agreed to it then. He had thought about it since. The concerns had not disappeared but they had reorganised themselves into something workable. The primary risk was Chaos corruption during the process, and Tyberos had been direct about that risk and had offered to manage the consequences himself. That directness was itself a form of trust. You did not offer to clean up your own messes unless you expected to make some.
He selected ten candidates from the Gang Dogs' combat teams.
He did not select based on fighting ability alone, though all ten were exceptional fighters. He selected based on the particular quality that had proven harder to quantify than combat performance: the ability to hold their ground without losing their character, the kind of person who remained recognisably themselves under pressure that changed most people. He had been watching the Gang Dogs long enough to know who those people were.
He called them together and told them the truth about the mission, all of it. The gene-seed process and its risks. The possibility of not returning. The Chaos corruption risk that Tyberos had named plainly and Nolan was naming equally plainly. He told them what they were potentially becoming and what might happen to them before they became it.
No one stepped back.
He asked about last wishes and pension recipients. He listened to each answer and felt the weight of each one: the money left to parents who had never been contacted; the wealth given to friends; the Gang Dogs without family or close connection who, after a short conversation among themselves, chose the orphanages. He noted all of it down himself rather than delegating it.
He led them down to the rotunda and the Emperor's statue.
He taught them to pray. Not the elaborate liturgy of the Ecclesiarchy, which did not yet exist and which he had no interest in replicating, but the direct address to a real presence that he knew from personal experience was actually listening: the simple acknowledgement of the Emperor's reality and the request for protection that the Emperor's blood had demonstrated could be answered. He told them about the Warp, how to recognise Chaos corruption in themselves and in others, how psychic energy announced itself before it became dangerous, what the early signs looked like. He told them what they needed to know to survive. He left out the parts that would only frighten them without helping.
He gave each of them a small bottle of Emperor's blood and a vial of panacea. He checked the seals on each bottle himself.
Then he opened the diplomatic page of the simulator and reached out to Tyberos.
The connection required the Carcharodons' Librarian on the other end to complete the portal formation, the technology not yet refined enough for one-sided initiation. There was a wait. Then the familiar violent sound of a space crack opening filled the rotunda, the edges of the portal shimmering with the particular quality of Warp transit that the Pharos Lighthouse made as stable as it was going to get.
The ten Gang Dogs turned to face him.
They performed the Aquila salute as a group, fists crossed over their chests, the gesture they had learned weeks ago and had made their own in the particular way that the Gang Dogs made everything their own: without ceremony, without flourish, and without any intention of doing it any differently.
Nolan returned it.
They walked into the portal without hesitation, one after another, until the last of them had stepped through and the light of the rotunda was the only light in the space again.
Nolan stood with his hands at his sides and looked at the place where they had been.
"May the Emperor hold you," he said quietly, to the empty air.
He meant it.
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