At that moment, Laun still had no idea what was coming.
He strode through the blasted ruins of the Underhive with the stiff confidence of a man accustomed to having danger held at arm's length by other people. Around him stretched a desolate maze of collapsed catwalks, twisted girders, ruptured hab-walls, and ashen alleys where smoke clung to every surface and turned the lumen-glow into a sickly haze.
Grey marched silently at his side, assigned as his "escort," each step of his power armor landing with the dull, heavy clunk of servo-assisted weight. The sound followed Laun through the ruins like a clock counting down.
"I thought I was done for."
Laun exhaled, shaking his head as if he could scatter the memory of the fighting behind them. His coat was torn at one sleeve, his boots were filthy with ash, and his face still carried the strained pallor of a man who had survived too closely to death and was already trying to turn that survival into a story about his own importance.
"But to think someone actually managed to consolidate the defensive line… Emperor's blessings, indeed."
Grey gave a single nod. The servos beneath his armor whined softly as they answered the small movement.
"Yes."
Laun glanced sideways at the massive plates of ceramite and metal encasing his escort. Curiosity, envy, and calculation flickered across his face.
"You must have fought for a long time to hold this forsaken place. That power armor you wear—was it unearthed from some ancient ruin?"
Grey's reply came without delay, without warmth, and without explanation.
"Yes."
Laun chuckled under his breath, mistaking restraint for simplicity.
"Hah. You lot are remarkably lucky."
Grey's helmet did not turn.
"Yes."
Laun continued walking, satisfied that he had reestablished the proper rhythm of superior and subordinate. Grey walked beside him in silence.
Listening.
....
They trudged through the claustrophobic warrens of the hive for far longer than Laun considered acceptable. The passageways narrowed, bent, opened into shattered loading bays, then vanished again into maintenance corridors slick with sump moisture. Twice, Laun had to step over bodies too ruined to identify. Once, he stopped to scrape something from the edge of his boot and muttered a curse that sounded more offended than afraid.
At last, his impatience boiled over.
He halted abruptly and turned on Grey.
"Why haven't you called for a transport?"
He thrust one gloved hand toward the endless, winding tunnel ahead.
"How long do you reckon we must trudge through these corridors? A year?"
"Yes."
Laun's face hardened. The single word had sounded exactly like all the others, but now his frayed nerves found insult in it.
"Watch your tone, soldier."
His voice sharpened into the practiced blade of command, the tone of a man used to punishing hesitation before it became disobedience.
Grey lowered his head by the smallest degree.
"Yes."
Then, with mechanical precision, he raised his arm and activated the vox-net. A short coded burst left his armor, summoning a transport drone from the nearest available relay path.
For several moments nothing answered but distant gunfire and the groaning of damaged metal. Then, far off in the gloom, thrusters roared to life. The transport drone cut through the smoke-choked air, its arrival announced by a flickering wash of firelight against the broken walls.
Laun grunted, reclaiming his sense of control now that machinery had obeyed.
"Hmph. Took you long enough."
....
As they waited beneath a cracked transit arch, oppressive silence settled over them. Ash drifted from above in slow gray threads. Somewhere deeper in the ruins, loose metal banged rhythmically against a support strut, moved by air currents from unseen fires.
Grey broke the quiet first.
"Did you know?"
His tone was even and measured, but something low beneath it made Laun's skin prickle: not quite anger, not quite accusation, but the controlled pressure of both.
Laun arched a brow.
"Know what?"
Grey turned his helmet toward him. The black visor reflected Laun's own pale face back at him.
"Qin Mo is a prisoner. An unsanctioned psyker prisoner."
For a heartbeat, Laun only stared. The words reached him before their meaning did. Then they sank in, cold and sharp. He nodded once, reflexively, as if accepting routine information. Then he froze.
"…What?"
Grey pressed on, each word delivered with unnerving calm.
"He isn't even a soldier. He was assigned to the 44th Regiment as a convict."
Laun's face drained of color. His thoughts lurched, trying to reconcile the impossible shape of the revelation.
A psyker. A prisoner. A condemned man at the head of an army. It defied every chain of authority the Imperium taught its servants to worship.
Grey's voice remained steady.
"This war has nothing to do with him. He was arrested because he refused to be hunted down like a feral mutant. He was collared, numbered, and thrown into a penal work gang. So tell me, Commander Laun, why should he fight for this wretched world? Why should he bleed for this crumbling hive? Why should he fight for us? Why should anyone assume he won't turn around and side with the rebels instead?"
Dread crept into Laun's bones.
For the first time, Qin Mo's presence became something larger than battlefield rumor, larger than miraculous technology, larger than the convenient fiction of a mysterious sanctioned commander.
A man with no formal right to command, yet soldiers followed him.
A man with no official sanction to fight, yet he had rebuilt a war front from wreckage.
A man whose power and inventions made rank, birth, and regulations feel suddenly fragile.
Laun could not fathom why Grey was telling him this. That ignorance frightened him more than the revelation.
"Qin Mo protected us," Grey said, more quietly now. The words were no longer for Laun alone. "He led us in battle. Even when Grot cursed him for 'not lifting a damn finger to help build the fortifications,' Qin Mo held no grudge. Even after the 44th Regiment was wiped out, Grot still received power armor. There was no exclusion. No revenge. No petty punishment dressed up as discipline."
He paused. The armor's vox grille flattened the tremor in his voice, but did not hide it completely.
"He sent reinforcements to every outpost he could reach. He resupplied men teetering on the edge of collapse. He fought everywhere, for everyone. Without recognition. Without rank. Without reason that would satisfy any tribunal."
The transport drone descended through the smoke. Its thrusters whipped ash, dust, and scraps of burnt paper into a violent spiral around them. Harsh light washed over Grey's armor and turned the edges of him into a silhouette of steel.
Grey activated his jump pack. With a controlled burst, he rose onto the drone's loading platform and landed with a heavy metallic thud.
Then he turned back.
The locks of his helmet hissed open. He removed it, revealing a face marked by sleeplessness, old scars, fresh soot, and the hard set of a man who had made his decision long before this conversation began. His silvered hair lashed wildly in the downdraft. His eyes fixed on Laun with cold, unyielding certainty.
Laun understood then. Not fully, but enough. The drone began to ascend.
Grey looked down at him as the distance widened.
"Remember my face. Remember that it was I who executed you."
"Wait! Stop! We can discuss this!"
Laun's arms flew upward in surrender. Panic stripped the polish from his voice.
"There's no need to be hasty! We can negotiate—"
A beam of searing light erupted from Grey's shoulder cannon.
It cut through the gloom with surgical violence. Laun vanished inside the blast before his final word could become a scream. His body dissolved into incandescent fragments, then into nothing recognizable at all. The ferrocrete beneath him melted, sagged, and glowed crimson around a fresh crater.
Grey did not stop.
His shoulder cannon whined as the first thermal charge dissipated. Then he fired again.
And again.
Salvo after salvo struck the same place, burning away ash, residue, bone dust, blood trace, cloth fiber, and every fragment from which an investigator might one day reconstruct the truth. By the time the cannon fell silent, there was no corpse, no wound pattern, no evidence of execution—only a scorched crater and ruin indistinguishable from a dozen other places in the Underhive where death had passed with artillery-grade force.
Then Grey raised his grav-hammer.
He looked at his own armored arm.
One blow.
The impact rang through the drone's hull like a tolling bell. Ceramite cracked. Internal bracing buckled. Bone broke inside the suit with a wet, grinding snap. Pain tore a harsh breath from his throat, but he did not cry out.
He sealed his helmet, forced his ruined arm against his side, and ordered the drone to return.
....
Back at the Fortress
The briefing chamber of the Fortress was dim, narrow, and heavy with recycled air. Tactical hololiths flickered on the walls, casting weak blue light across ammunition crates repurposed as tables and benches. Somewhere beyond the sealed door, fabrication machinery thudded through the floor in a steady industrial heartbeat.
Klein sat across from Grey with his arms folded and his expression unreadable.
A medic knelt beside Grey, methodically cutting away damaged armor seals and wrapping the ruined arm beneath with field bandages, splints, and restraint straps. Each adjustment made Grey's jaw tighten inside his open helmet, but he continued his report without complaint.
"Laun and I engaged an enemy patrol. I failed to activate my grav-shield in time. A renegade psyker seized control of my senses, and a feral mutant shattered my gauntlet. If I hadn't triggered the built-in psyker suppressor, I'd be dead."
Klein leaned back. His eyes focused on Grey's face. His voice, when it came, was quiet and cold.
"Be honest with me... Did you kill him?"
Grey offered no reply.
Klein had seen this shape of silence before.
When a tight-knit unit was forced to accept an unworthy leader, that leader sometimes disappeared into the comforting fog of battlefield reports. A careless step. A wrong turn. A grenade too close. A heroic death no one had witnessed clearly enough to contradict.
Years ago, one of Klein's academy friends had been assigned command of a regiment. He had lasted scarcely two weeks before the Emperor, apparently, had willed him away.
The official report had read: Killed in Action.
The unofficial barracks joke had been uglier.
Grey's helmet projector flickered. A holo-recording appeared over the table, unstable at first, then sharpening into a ghostly image. It showed his clandestine meeting with Laun.
The wine. The formal gestures. Laun's cautious questions. Grey volunteering to escort him. The beginning of the walk. Then the recording cut off.
Conveniently, it ended before the execution. Klein watched the last frame fade. A dark chuckle escaped him, without humor.
"Traitor." He shook his head, more weary than surprised. "If Laun had lived, would you have allied with him?"
Grey remained silent. Klein sighed heavily and rose from his seat. Anger would have been easier. Disappointment had more weight.
"Qin Mo is interrogating the Arbites officer in the next chamber." He crossed toward the door, then stopped with one hand on the frame. "I'll relay everything to him. You had better steel yourself for his wrath."
Grey lowered his head. Pain throbbed through his shattered arm, but that was not what held him still.
....
The Interrogation Room
In the adjacent chamber, Qin Mo faced Riley with disarming calm.
The room had been built for utility, not intimidation, though it performed both functions well enough. The walls were newly reinforced metal grown into old ferrocrete. The lumen above the table burned too white. The air smelled of antiseptic, heated circuitry, and old dust.
Riley was secured to a reinforced chair by restraint clamps at her wrists and ankles. She had not been beaten. Her uniform was dusty, one sleeve torn, but her posture remained straight and her eyes were sharp. Officially, her detention was justified under suspicion of being an enemy agent.
In reality, she knew too much.
Qin Mo smiled faintly.
"You know I was a prisoner, don't you?" His tone was almost playful, a deliberate mismatch for the sealed room and the armed guard outside. "I remember you. You were there when they hauled me in, and your… clumsiness left quite the impression."
Riley's expression hardened.
"So that's why you retrieved both me and Laun?"
"Of course."
Qin Mo casually picked up her data-slate. Its cracked screen flickered beneath his thumb, locked behind Arbites encryption and layered access seals. He turned it over once, studying the casing more than the interface.
He intended to purge his criminal record directly from the Arbites archives. Not because he believed the Imperium would forget him, but because every erased entry was one less rope around his neck.
Before he could proceed, the door opened.
Klein entered, crossed the room with measured urgency, and leaned close to Qin Mo. His voice dropped to a whisper as he conveyed every damning detail of Grey's confession, the recording, the false report, and the inconvenient absence of Laun. Qin Mo listened without interrupting.
Then he nodded slowly. His eyes revealed nothing.
Psyker suppressors were designed to trigger automatically upon detecting Warp disturbance, and Qin Mo's own battlefield systems had been integrated with grav-shield responses as a failsafe against sudden psychic assault. If a psyker had truly seized Grey's senses, the suppressor should have activated instantly. If a feral mutant had been close enough to tear his arm apart, the shield should have responded before contact.
So how could a mutant have "ripped Grey's arm off" without triggering those defenses?
The answer was simple. It never happened.
But Qin Mo did not waste emotion on the conclusion. Laun had been a problem. Grey had solved it. The method was reckless, personal, and impossible to officially bless. It was also finished.
"...I see."
Riley saw the opening and took it. She leaned forward against the restraints, eyes flashing, and shouted at Klein before he could leave the room.
"He's a criminal! A psyker! You can't trust him!"
Klein blinked, then turned toward Qin Mo with an expression of exaggerated surprise.
"You're a prisoner and a psyker?" He placed a hand over his chest, as if recovering from shock. "For a moment, I thought she had declared him your long-lost father."
Qin Mo sighed dryly.
"At this rate, she might as well claim she is the Emperor Himself."
Both men laughed. The laughter was brief, controlled, and cruel in the way only exhausted soldiers could manage. It was not amusement so much as a refusal to let Riley dictate the room's reality.
Klein stepped back toward the door. Before leaving, he gave Qin Mo one last look. It carried a question, a warning, and a measure of trust all at once. Then he exited.
The heavy door clanged shut behind him.
Riley swallowed.
She was alone with the enigmatic prisoner.