Chapter 3: Judgment of the Faithful
The world dissolved into a roar of thrusters and the gut-wrenching pull of a teleport beam. One moment, Rutaba was pressed against cold, fleshy corridor plating, the next he was atomized and reconstituted in a blaze of light and a scream of tortured physics.
He stumbled onto a hard, polished floor, the air now starkly different. Gone was the wet, organic stench of the dying ship. It was replaced by a layered aroma of ozone, sacred oils, cold metal, and something underneath it all—a faint, coppery smell that could only be old, scrubbed blood. The light was harsh, devotional, coming from lumoglobes housed in wrought-iron frames shaped like clutching eagles.
He was on a gallery overlooking a vast, vaulted chamber. Below, serfs in simple robes moved with silent efficiency between humming banks of machinery. Above, vaulted ceilings disappeared into shadow, draped with colossal banners depicting a stylized black cross on a white field.
The Black Templar who had spoken stood before him, having teleported with them. His two brothers were absent, likely still purging the corridor. The warrior removed his helm with a hiss of releasing pressure seals.
The face beneath was a monument to severity. Pale skin, scarred like marble, stretched over a skull that seemed all bone and sinew. His hair was cropped to black bristle, his eyes the colour of a winter sky, utterly devoid of warmth. He looked at Rutaba and Elara not with curiosity, but with the focused scrutiny of a surgeon identifying a cancer.
“I am Castellan lurgen,” he said. His voice, unfiltered, was quieter but no less heavy. “You will explain.”
Elara found her voice first, falling to one knee, head bowed.“My lord Castellan. Crewman Elara Voss, gunnery tertiary, Valhalla’s Wrath. We were caught in the… the transformation. We sought escape.”
lurgen’s gaze didn’t waver. “You were in the company of a Heretek. Your flight drew the Traitor to us. Your actions are either cowardice or complicity.”
“The adept, Zynth, was trying to stop it,” Rutaba said. The words came out flat, automatic. His mind was cataloguing the room: the exits (none visible), the serfs (unarmed, ignoring them), the Castellan’s weapons (many). “He called it a bio-form. A xenos organism merging with the ship’s systems. He died pointing us to a secondary shuttle bay.”
“He died,” lurgen repeated, “and you lived. A low-rate survival for a baseline human in such company.” Those cold eyes pinned Rutaba. “You did not kneel. You do not bear the pallor of terror. Explain this.”
Gamer’s Peace presented the options. Feign panic?Too late. Grovel?Ineffective. Truth?Impossible.
“I’m in shock,” Rutaba said, which wasn’t entirely a lie. “And I’m not from here. Not from… this.” He gestured vaguely, encompassing the battle barge, the universe.
lurgen’s expression did not change.“A drifter. A void-born beggar. Your dialect is unfamiliar, your bearing soft. This is irrelevant. You have been contaminated by the xenos presence. You have witnessed the corruption of an Imperial vessel. Your utility is at an end.”
He made a slight gesture with his hand. Two more Templars, their armour still bearing fresh scorch marks, emerged from the gloom.
Elara looked up, desperation breaking through her discipline. “My lord, we can help! We know the ship’s layout near the secondary bay. We saw the bio-form’s core! It’s near the old reactor!”
“The Chapter does not require the testimony of mutants and potential heretics to enact purgation,” lurgen said, turning away. “Take them to the Reclusiam. Let the Chaplain scour their minds. Then, disposal.”
The hands that seized them were not cruel, but utterly immovable. They were marched through the arterial hallways of the battle barge, a procession of grim, silent giants flanking two stumbling mortals. The scale was disorienting. Everything was built for the Astartes: towering doorways, high railings, steps with risers twice the normal height. The atmosphere was one of silent, relentless industry, punctuated by distant, rhythmic chanting and the deep thrum of the ship’s engines, which felt like a steady, warlike heartbeat.
The Reclusiam was a chapel of war. It was less a place of peace than an armory of faith. Frosted glass windows depicted scenes of martyrdom and annihilation. Racks held not books, but ritual weapons—flails, mauls, and blades, each etched with litanies of hatred. The air was cold and smelled of incense and ferric stone.
At the far end, before a massive altar upon which a crackling power sword was laid, stood Chaplain Dorden. He was a silhouette of black ceramite and bone, his skull-faced helm regarding them as they were forced to their knees. A crozius arcanum, a powered mace symbolizing his office, was clutched in one hand.
“Castellan lurgen speaks of a curious calm,” Dorden’s voice boomed from his helm’s vox-grille, resonant and layered with threat. “A mind untouched by the horrors that cleanse the weak. This is an anomaly. Anomalies are of the Warp, or of treachery.”
He stepped down from the dais, the heavy tread of his boots final. “You will be examined. You will resist. Your resistance will confirm your guilt. If you are pure, you will feel nothing but the Emperor’s light.”
He reached up and removed his helm.
Chaplain Dorden’s face was a roadmap of devotion carved in flesh. Old, knotted scars formed devotional sigils across his bald scalp and severe features. His eyes were dark pits, but within them glowed a fierce, uncompromising intelligence. He placed a massive, armoured hand on Elara’s head.
She stiffened, a gasp choking in her throat. Her eyes rolled back, showing white. She trembled violently, a low whimper escaping her lips. Rutaba watched, his calm a cold lake within him. He saw her memories flash across her face—the terror of the sinking gundeck, the screams of her crewmates, the dripping walls, the whispering flesh. Dorden was walking through her trauma like a man touring a charnel house.
After a minute, he released her. She slumped, breathing in ragged sobs, drool dripping from her mouth. “Cleansed of major taint.Weak-willed. Typical,” Dorden pronounced, his tone dismissive.
Then he turned to Rutaba.The hand descended.
It was not a touch. It was an invasion.
A psychic pressure, vast and hot as a forge, slammed into Rutaba’s mind. It was not seeking memories. It was seeking shape—the shape of his soul, the contours of his belief, the shadow of chaos. It sought terror, guilt, heresy.
It found Gamer’s Peace.
The calm was not a wall. It was a featureless plain, a still lake with no bottom. Dorden’s psychic scrutiny, accustomed to the jagged peaks of fear and the festering swamps of corruption, found nothing to grasp. The pressure increased, became a scalpel trying to find a seam in nothingness. It flashed through sense-impressions: the blinding light of his arrival on the Wrath, the visceral shock of Zynth’s death, the gut-churning sight of the bio-form’s victims.
But the emotional resonance—the terror, the despair—was… filed.Analyzed. Present, but quarantined.
Dorden’s eyes widened a fraction. The psychic pressure vanished. He stared at Rutaba, his expression one of profound, unsettling confusion.
“What are you?” he whispered, the vox-muffled boom gone from his voice.
“I told the Castellan. I’m not from here,” Rutaba said, his own voice sounding terribly small. “I was a Logistics Coordinator. I managed shipments. Container weights, fuel efficiency, route optimization.”
Dorden’s gaze was piercing. “Your mind is… ordered. In a way not born of training. It is innate. A void.” He leaned closer. “You speak of logistics. Of a forgotten time. The Heretek. What did he say to you? Precisely.”
Rutaba replayed the memory, the audio file crisp in his mental archive. “He said the bio-form was using the ship’s own maintenance systems as a circulatory network. That its core logic was vulnerable at the junction of primary plasma conduits and the Geller field emergency capacitors. He said it was ‘bad code replicating through the hardware.’ He was trying to isolate it.”
Dorden recoiled as if struck. He stepped back, looking from Rutaba to the trembling Elara, then to the stone-faced Castellan lurgen who observed from the doorway.
“These terms… ‘code’, ‘hardware’… they are archaic. Techno-arcana. From before the schism of Mars.” Dorden’s scarred face tightened. “The Heretek may have been corrupted, but its knowledge was ancient. And this one,” he pointed at Rutaba, “relates it with the clarity of a savant, untouched by the horror that bore it. He does not flinch from the memory. He reports it.”
lurgen’s hand went to the hilt of his sword. “A daemon’s trick. A shell meant to deceive.”
“Perhaps,” Dorden said, his eyes never leaving Rutaba. “Or perhaps it is something else. A blank? No, he has a soul, I felt its… shape. Or lack thereof.” He made a decision. “The Crusade seeks weapons against the alien and the traitor. It seeks knowledge lost in the dark ages. This… anomaly… and the intelligence he carries, may be such a weapon.”
“It is a risk,” lurgen stated.
“All faith is risk. We will contain the risk.” Dorden looked down at Rutaba. “You will be taken to the Apothecarion. You will be examined, physically and historically. Your companion will be mind-scrubbed and sent to the menial decks. She has served her purpose.”
Elara, still dazed, heard her fate and said nothing, her spirit broken.
Rutaba felt a cold spike that wasn’t fear. It was ethical calculus. “She stays with me,” he said.
The two Astartes fell silent. A mortal making a demand was so absurd it momentarily stalled them.
“You are in no position–” lurgen began.
“You need what’s in my head,” Rutaba interrupted, his tone the same one he used to explain a missed shipment to a frustrated client. Calm, factual, immovable. “The layouts, the bio-form’s growth patterns, Zynth’s last calculations. I have it all. But it’s… indexed alongside her. Her experiences provide context. Erase her, and you might corrupt the data. You might lose the key piece without knowing it.”
He was bluffing. Gamer’s Peace allowed it, smoothing the lie into a plausible pattern. He just couldn’t leave her to be turned into a blank-eyed servitor.
Dorden and lurgen exchanged a look, a silent conversation passing between them in microseconds. The Chaplain gave a curt nod.
“Very well. She remains, un-scrubbed, under guard. You will both be taken to the Apothecarion.” Dorden leaned in, his breath smelling of incense and metal.“Understand, mortal. You are not an ally. You are a relic we are assessing for usefulness. The moment you cease to be useful, or show the slightest taint, you will be ended. There will be no discussion.”
Rutaba met the Chaplain’s dark eyes.“Understood. Now, about the bio-form on the Wrath. While you’re assessing me, it’s still growing. Zynth estimated exponential propagation. Every cycle you delay, its root system expands by approximately 12.7 percent. Your bombing raid or lance strike might kill the heart, but if the neural network has spread into the secondary and tertiary hull capillaries, you’ll just be pruning a branch. The disease remains.”
He delivered the analysis in a clean, report-ready monotone.
The silence in the Reclusiam was absolute, broken only by the low hum of the power sword on the altar. Dorden and lurgen stared at him, their certainty replaced by a wary, calculating tension. They were warriors, bred for glorious, straightforward destruction. He was talking about systemic infection, about root causes and containment protocols.
He was talking logistics.
And for the first time, in the depths of their fervent eyes, Rutaba saw not just suspicion, but the faintest glimmer of something else.
The terrifying consideration that he might be right.
The silence stretched, thin and sharp as a monomolecular blade. Chaplain Dorden broke it, his scarred face unreadable. “You cite percentages. You speak of capillaries.” He leaned closer, his voice dropping to a whisper that scraped the stone. “Are you a magos in a meat-suit, little man? Some escaped construct?”
“I’m just good at seeing systems,” Rutaba said, holding that winter-gaze. “And that ship is a system failing in real-time. You can either fix it or scrap it. But half-measures just waste resources.” He nodded toward Elara, who was shaking slightly on her knees. “She’s part of the data. Wipe her, and you lose the ground-level perspective. The human factor.”
Castellan lurgen remained by the door, a statue of judgement. “The human factor is weakness. It is variable. It fails.”
“It’s the only factor that’s still breathing on that hulk besides us,” Rutaba countered. “She knows the crew rotations, the blind spots in the gun decks, which officers turned quickly and which fought. That’s not weakness. That’s intelligence on the infection vector.” He was parsing them now, these giants. Their language was absolutes, crusades, purity. His was efficiency, metrics, survival. He had to translate. “Think of her memory as a corrupted data-slate. You don’t destroy the slate. You isolate the corrupt files and read the rest.”
Dorden’s eyes narrowed. For a terrifying second, Rutaba thought he’d gone too far, made the analogy too cold. Then the Chaplain grunted, a sound like grinding stone. “A pragmatic heresy. But this is not a forum for debate.” He straightened. “The Apothecary will discern the truth of your composition. The woman remains, for now. Her memories will be archived before purification.”
It was the best he would get. A stay of execution.Not a pardon.
They were marched through more labyrinthine halls, deeper into the bowels of the battle barge. The character of the ship changed. The devotional grimness gave way to a sterile, fearsome practicality. The air grew cooler, smelling of harsh antiseptics, ozone, and a faint, sweet-metallic undertone that Rutaba couldn’t place but that made his skin crawl.
The Apothecarion was a cathedral of visceral science. It was all polished white adamantium and gleaming silver, lit by the cold blue light of medicae scanners. Tables equipped with heavy restraints sat beside racks of gleaming, terrifying tools—bone saws, neural drills, injectors the size of his forearm. In the center of the room, suspended in a transparent cylindrical tank, was a monstrous, multi-limbed creature, its flesh pulsing gently in a nutrient bath. A gene-stealer, Rutaba’s mind supplied, the term surfacing from a half-remembered game lore deep dive.
A new giant awaited them. This one wore white armour over black, his helm crowned with a red crest. He worked at a stainless-steel bench, his movements precise and economical. He did not look up as they entered. “The curiosities, Chaplain?” His voice was a dry, synthesized rasp from his helm’s vox.
“This one,” Dorden said, pushing Rutaba forward. “His mind is… ordered. Untouched. He speaks of the xenos infestation with the calm of a servo-skull reciting a shipping manifest. Examine him. Determine if he is a weapon, a witch, or waste.”
The Apothecary finally turned. The lens of his helm glinted, focusing on Rutaba with a hum. “Strip him.”
It wasn’t a request. The two Templars who had escorted them stepped forward. Rutaba’s calm flagged for a heartbeat, a spike of raw vulnerability. He shrugged off his torn, filthy jacket, kicked off his ruined shoes. He stood shivering in the frigid air, a small, pale figure amidst the giants and their machinery of war and medicine.
The Apothecary approached. A needle-tipped probe extended from his gauntlet. “You will feel a prick.”
It was more than a prick. It was a fire in his vein. The substance raced up his arm, and his vision kaleidoscoped. The world dissolved into overlapping layers of reality. He saw the cold, hard lines of the Apothecarion, but overlaid upon it was a shimmering grid of golden light, and pulsing through that, like corrupted code, were twisting, vibrant strands of impossible colours that tasted of laughter and screaming. The gene-stealer in the tank blazed with a fierce, predatory green psychic signature. Elara beside him flickered with a dim, bruised violet light of fear and trauma.
The Black Templars were voids. Not empty, but surrounded by a blinding, furious aura of pure white fire that burned away the shimmering strands where they came near. They were anti-psykers. Blanks, but aggressive, weaponized ones.
The Apothecary grunted. “Trace bio-signatures consistent with teleportation residue. Unknown origin. No sign of genestealer cult imprint or chaotic grafting.” The needle retracted. The multi-layered vision snapped off, leaving Rutaba gasping on the cold floor. “Psychic null?No. He has a presence. It is simply… non-reactive. Inert.”
“Can he be of use?” Castellan lurgen demanded, impatience in his tone.
“His nervous system shows unique synaptic damping. Trauma response, perhaps, but pathologically consistent. He could be injected with battle-stimms that would kill three men and likely just… analyze the experience.” The Apothecary sounded almost bored. “A fascinating specimen. Useless in combat. Potentially useful as a tactical interface if his claimed knowledge is verified.”
Dorden nodded. “Verify it.”
The Apothecary produced a different device, a sinister-looking headset of wires and needles. “This will extract situational memory. Visual, auditory. It will be… disorienting.”
Rutaba looked at Elara. Her eyes were wide, locked on the headset. He understood now. This was how they would “archive” her. This was the prelude to the mind-wipe. He had bought her time, but not salvation.
“Do me first,” Rutaba said, his voice rough.
The Apothecary paused. “Irrelevant. The subject’s stability is secondary to data integrity.”
“You want the clearest picture of the bio-form’s core nexus, right?” Rutaba pressed, pushing himself up. His mind was racing, assembling a argument from the fragments of what he’d seen and heard. “My memory is the map. Hers is the… the terrain report. The weather. If you jack into her first and her mind fractures from the procedure, you lose the context. You get corrupted data. Scan me. Use my memory as the stable framework. Then overlay her sensory data onto it. It’s a cleaner merge.”
He was talking pure nonsense, tech he couldn’t possibly understand. But he sold it with the flat, confident tone of a project manager explaining a workflow. He was banking on their literal-mindedness, their need for ordered processes.
The Apothecary and Chaplain exchanged a glance. A silent negotiation occurred. “A logical sequencing,” the Apothecary conceded, his rasp thoughtful. “Proceed.”
The headset was cold and heavy as it was fitted to Rutaba’s skull. He felt the needles pierce his scalp, a series of sharp, precise bites. There was no pain, but a terrifying sense of violation, like a door being forced open in a silent house.
“Recall the xenos structure. From the adept’s death to your escape,” the Apothecary commanded.
Gamer’s Peace engaged fully. It was no longer just calming him; it was curating the memories. It presented them in clean, sequential files. Zynth’s death. The crawl through the ducts. The pulsing wall of flesh. The suspended crew. The whispering.Elara finding him. The fight through the digestion chamber. It played out in his mind’s eye with terrifying clarity, but it was like watching a high-definition documentary of his own trauma. The emotion was noted, catalogued, and separated.
The Apothecary’s equipment whirred. A hololithic projector flickered to life above the bench, painting a three-dimensional, ghostly blueprint of the Valhalla’s Wrath’s aft sections. As Rutaba remembered, the model populated. Corridors glowed into existence. The bio-form’s spread manifested as a creeping, phosphorescent red stain, crawling through the schematic like a fungal bloom. It was accurate, clinically precise.
Lurgen stepped forward, examining the growing map. “The core nexus is here,” he rumbled, pointing to a junction near the old reactor, exactly as Rutaba had said. “It has spread through the secondary capillary networks. A lance strike would be insufficient.”
“A boarding action,” Dorden stated. “A teleport assault on the core, with cyclonic torpedoes as a final purge once the heart is excised.” He looked at Rutaba, the projection’s red light reflecting in his eyes. “Your map is… acceptable.”
The Apothecary removed the headset from Rutaba. A thin trickle of blood wormed its way down his temple. “Minimal cognitive degradation.Stable. Now the female.”
They turned to Elara. She backed up a step, hitting the leg of a surgical table. “No. You said… you said I’d stay with him.”
“Your service to the Emperor continues,” Dorden said, no malice in his voice, just absolute certainty. “Your memories will serve His purpose. Your soul will be unburdened.”
The Templars moved to hold her. She fought, a brief, frantic struggle, her kicks and punches useless against their immovable bulk. “Rutaba!” she screamed, her voice raw.
He met her eyes. The terror there was real, absolute. He had given her these extra minutes, this scrap of borrowed time. He had given her a witness to her final, coherent self. It was the coldest mercy imaginable.
“It doesn’t hurt,” he said, the lie feeling like ash in his mouth. “It’s just like going to sleep.”
She stared at him, betrayal and understanding warring in her wet eyes. Then the headset was placed upon her. She stiffened, a shudder running through her whole body. Her eyes flew open, seeing nothing in the room, everything in her mind. The hololith flickered, new details layering over Rutaba’s clean map: the smell of burning promethium from a ruptured line, the exact pitch of a crewmate’s scream from a lower deck, the feeling of the grimy, sweating hand of a man she’d loved as he was pulled into a wall of meat.
The data was richer, more textured. And more agonizing.
The procedure took minutes. When the Apothecary removed the device, Elara did not collapse. She simply stood, her body slack, her face smooth and empty. The vibrant, bruised violet light Rutaba had sensed around her was gone, extinguished. Her eyes, once sharp with survivor’s cunning, were now calm, docile pools.
“The archive is complete,” the Apothecary announced. “Neural scrubbing successful. Residual personality matrix neutralized. She is ready for menial reassignment.”
A serf was summoned, a meek man in a grey robe. He took Elara by the arm. She went without a sound, without a backward glance, her steps perfectly even.
Rutaba watched her go. His calm did not break. It hardened, into something crystalline and cold. He had used her. He had saved her from one fate for another, because it served the mission’s efficiency. The math of this place was brutal, and he was learning to calculate it.
Dorden was watching him again, studying his reaction. Rutaba gave him nothing.
“The map is viable,” the Chaplain said, turning back to the glowing, red-stained hololith. “We will burn the cancer from the ship. You will guide the strike team.”
Rutaba looked at the schematic, at the pulsing red core. He thought of Zynth’s final sacrifice. He thought of Elara’s hollow eyes.He nodded.
“Just tell me the objective,” he said, his voice perfectly level. “And the acceptable casualty rate.”