The stinging hiss of flechettes as they whizzed overhead mingled with the binary chatter of the tech-priestess as she knelt before the hulking Astartes. Her once-crimson robe was darker now, caked with congealed mud mixed from the soil of Ophelia and alien blood. “The Xenos projectile has severed the tertiary brachial communications bundle, Brother Captain,” she explained. A segmented tendril pushed aside the hem of her robe, barely revealing the glittering silver darkness within. Yellow-black-banded jaws snapped shut on the needle-tipped dart, tugging it free and holding it up for him to see. “Such a small thing,” she remarked. “Yet does not the very fate of the galaxy turn on such seemingly-insignificant cogs?”
“Spare me your Martian poetry,” the Space Marine snarled. “Can it be repaired?"
The tech-priestess did not look up as an articulated servo-limb reached over her shoulder and grasped the pus-yellow pauldron, lifting it away as she unscrewed the magnabolts holding it in place. “The armor's machine-spirit is aggrieved, Brother Captain,” she chided. “The anointings are two, three days old at best and the sacred unguents are smirched with foreign matter. Furthermore, I . . .”
“A warrior fights where he is sent.” The Captain interrupted her, angrily shifting his arm. It moved awkwardly, not merely because of the damage but also because another of her servo-limbs was clamped tight around his wrist. “The filth we clean from this world is the xenos who infest it, not dust and grit. And no Imperial Fist would shirk . . .”
Now she looked up. She smiled, humor crinkling around her organic eye and – somehow – gleaming in the crimson depths of her ocular implant. “Liar,” she said without malice and bent once again to her work.
The Marine stiffened. “If I have,” he said – it was a careful non-admission. “If I have neglected the ceremonies of the Mechanicum, it is only because there is no time for them. We are at war . . .”
“Liar,” she said again. She paused to consider. “Well, the last part is true. But it is not merely haste that makes you scorn offerings to the machine-spirit, Captain. You reject them because you do not believe they are necessary, do you not?”
“The Imperial Truth . . .”
“Is no such thing. Believe me, Captain,” she assured him, “I know truth.”
There was silence for a second, broken only by the whiz of flechettes, explosions as ammunition cooked off, and the screams of the dying. The Captain glowered angrily. “Can you repair it?” he asked.
“No spare parts,” she explained.
He nodded. “So you cannot,” he snorted dismissively. He made to stand. “You should have . . .”
The strength in her servo-limbs surprised him and he was pulled back down unceremoniously. “That is definitely not true,” she said. She lifted an incongruously beautiful and fully-human hand. Elegant and slender, the nails printed with a circuit board design, its only augmentation was thin silver-green lines of electroos like strange cartography on her palm. She reached into the shadows of her hood, to the nest of cables plunging into her skull behind her left ear, and delicately disconnected one. The bundle of hair-thin wires inside writhed like swallowing cicla as she spliced it into place. "There," she said. "Good as new. Of course," she added, "that's not praise on Mars."
The yellow-armored Marine grunted as she screwed his pauldron back in place, standing once the final magnabolt was driven home with a squeal of compressed air. "Thank you, Magos," said Sigismund of the Imperial Fists, hefting his sword and marching into battle.
"You're welcome, Brother Captain," Verity replied to his departing back. "And he actually meant it," she added in wonder.
