Chapter 6: Neural Scars
The new quarters weren't a cell. They were a vault.
It was a small, windowless room deep within the Divine Retribution's armored core, all reinforced plasteel and bare functionality. A rack for the Guardian Spear was bolted to one wall. A sleeping pallet, hard and thin, was fixed to another. A single lumen-strip cast a sterile white glow. It was, Rutaba supposed, an upgrade. It had a drainage grate in the floor and a recessed sink that dispensed tepid, recycled water. He was under no illusions. This was a storage locker for a living asset.
He’d just finished running his fingers along the spear’s haft, tracing the unfamiliar battle damage it had sustained on the bio-ship, when the door hissed open without a chime or knock.
Castellan Lurgen filled the doorway, his expression carved from granite. Behind him stood a figure that made the air feel thinner.
It wasn’t a Space Marine. It was a man, tall and gaunt, wrapped in a long coat of dull, weave-laminate that seemed to drink the light. The hood was up, casting his face in deep shadow, but Rutaba could feel the gaze from within, cold and analytical as a surgeon’s laser. A faint smell of ozone and incense clung to him.
“Mortal,” Lurgen intoned, his voice devoid of the rough acknowledgment from the medicae. “You will answer.”
The gaunt man glided into the room. He moved with an unsettling, liquid silence. Lurgen remained at the threshold, a statuesque sentinel, blocking any thought of exit.
“Rutaba of No Provenance,” the hooded man said. His voice was a dry whisper, like pages turning in a sealed tomb. It held no emotion, only a profound, weary curiosity. “Orphan of the warp. Wielder of relics. Slayer of xenos synapse-creatures with a single, statistically aberrant throw.”
Rutaba stood slowly, keeping the bunk between him and the newcomer. “I got lucky. The Castellan doesn’t believe in luck.”
“The Castellan believes in the Emperor’s will. I believe in quantifiable reality.” The man’s head tilted. “Your reality is… smudged.”
Before Rutaba could form a reply, the man’s hand moved. It was blindingly fast. From within his sleeve, a delicate, arachnoid device of brass and black wire unfolded. It whirred softly, a cluster of needle-fine probes surrounding a dark, polished lens.
Rutaba flinched back, but there was nowhere to go. The device pressed against his temple. It was shockingly cold.
“The Black Templars record all combat data,” the whisper continued, the lens focusing with a series of minuscule clicks. “Biometric readouts, pupillary dilation, galvanic skin response. During the engagement on the Valkyria, your heart rate never exceeded one hundred and fifteen beats per minute. Your cortisol levels remained within baseline parameters for a man performing light calibration work. You were, for all measurable purposes, calm.”
The probes pricked his skin. A sharp, digital sting burrowed into his skull.
“This is incompatible with human survival instinct,” the man stated. “Fear is a tool. Its absence is a malfunction. Or a design feature. Let us see which.”
Rutaba’s vision swam. The sterile room dissolved into a fractal storm of light and noise—not memories, but raw sensory feedback: the chittering of genestealers, the smell of rotting biotech, the crushing weight of the spear, the exact sound of the bolt-round hitting Clev’s forehead. The device was pulling them all to the surface, scanning, cataloging.
Gamer’s Peace.
The thought arose, not as a defense, but as a simple identifier. It was the quiet eye of the hurricane he’d cultivated through thousands of hours of virtual combat, the ability to separate the screaming animal part of his brain from the part that could process a minimap, a health bar, a reload timer. Here, there were no interfaces. Only blood and consequence. But the mechanism was the same.Observe.Calculate. Act.
The whirring device stuttered. A sharp, discordant chime rang out from its core. The lens flickered, casting frantic red patterns on the wall.
The hooded man went rigid. His other hand flew to his ear, where a tiny, flesh-colored comm-bead was implanted. His dry whisper sharpened into a blade of urgency. “Pattern recognized. Anomaly confirmed. Not psykana.Not cybernetica. A neural dampening field of unknown etiology. Absolute, localized emotional regulation. It’s… algorithmic.”
He listened for a half-second, his shadowed face turning toward Rutaba. For the first time, Rutaba saw a sliver of his lower face—a thin, bloodless lip pressed into a hard line.
The man spoke again, his voice no longer a whisper but a clear, cold declaration into the vox. “My Lord Inquisitor. The signal is a match. The warp-echo we tracked. It’s not a what. It’s a who.”
He released the neural scanner from Rutaba’s temple. The connection broke with a final, painful zap. Rutaba stumbled back against the spear rack, his head pounding.
Lurgen’s brow furrowed. “Interrogator Felquin. Explain.”
The hooded man, Felquin, retracted the device into his sleeve. He ignored the Castellan, his hidden gaze locked on Rutaba. “You were not on the Valkyria by accident. Your arrival in this sector was not random. Something punctured the veil. A tear, clean and sharp, like a needle.It left a signature. A perfect, blank silhouette amidst the chaos of the empyrean. We’ve been hunting that silhouette for six standard months.”
Rutaba’s mouth was dry. “I don’t understand.”
“You are the understanding,” Felquin said. He finally lowered his hood.
His face was severe, carved with lines of deep focus. His eyes were pale grey, the color of forgotten data-slates. His head was shaved, and a complex circuit of silver inlay traced from his temple around to the back of his skull. “My master, Inquisitor Valerian of the Ordo Hereticus, investigates unnatural phenomena. Breaches in reality. You, Rutaba of No Provenance, are a breach. A soul displaced. Your… mental architecture proves it. It is not of this world.”
The word hung in the air.Inquisitor. It carried a weight that dwarfed even the Space Marines. A weight of absolute, unforgiving authority.
Lurgen’s hand rested on the pommel of his sword. “You claim this man is a warp-spawn?”
“I claim he is a question,” Felquin corrected, his tone chillingly clinical. “One that requires an answer. The weapon he carries is a relic of the Ten Thousand. His mind is a fortress against fear. He appeared, unannounced and unrecorded, at the site of a xenos contamination. These are not coincidences. They are data points. My Lord Inquisitor wishes to connect them.”
He took a step closer. The smell of ozone grew stronger. “You will come with me. Now.”
Rutaba looked past him to Lurgen. The Castellan’s face was an unreadable mask of stone and scar tissue. His duty was to the Crusade. The Inquisitorial mandate superseded all.
“The asset…” Lurgen began, his voice a low rumble.
“Is no longer yours to deploy, Castellan,” Felquin finished. “He is now a subject of an Imperial investigation. His usefulness to your crusade is secondary to his usefulness to the Imperium’s understanding of a threat we cannot yet name. You will be commended for your diligence in preserving him.”
It was a dismissal. A polite, irrevocable confiscation.
Rutaba felt a cold that had nothing to do with the room’s temperature seep into his bones. He was a shipment again. A package being rerouted. From a battlefield to a locker. From a locker to an Inquisitor’s lab.
He thought of Lieutenant Clev, giving a bad report one last time.
“Do I have a choice?” Rutaba asked, his own voice sounding strangely calm in his pounding head.
Felquin’s bloodless lips twitched. It wasn’t a smile. “Everyone has a choice. Compliance offers the possibility of continued existence. Resistance offers a definitive, if accelerated, conclusion.”
The Interrogator turned and walked out of the vault. He did not look back.
Lurgen remained for a moment longer. His eyes, ancient and flint-hard, met Rutaba’s. There was no apology there. No camaraderie. Only a faint, grim acknowledgment. The look a warrior gives a tool that is being taken away.
“Serve the Emperor,” Lurgen said, the words a formal, final benediction.
Then he too was gone, his massive frame disappearing into the corridor. Two men in unmarked, grey carapace armor appeared in the doorway. Their faces were obscured by smooth, featureless helmets. They carried sleek, brutal-looking shotguns. They didn’t speak.They simply waited.
Rutaba looked at the spear on its rack. He thought about grabbing it. He thought about the two shotguns, the maze of the ship, the impossible authority he was now facing.
He took a deep breath. The neural sting from the scanner was fading. The cool, detached logic of Gamer’s Peace reasserted itself, wrapping around the panic like insulation. He was being transferred.New destination. New handlers.Unknown objectives.
He walked towards the door, past the silent guards. He did not look back at the spear.
As he stepped into the corridor, Felquin was waiting, already consulting a data-slate. He fell into step beside Rutaba, the grey guards falling in behind.
“The question is not what you are,” Felquin murmured, as much to himself as to Rutaba, his fingers tapping on the slate. “The question is why you are here. And what else might have come through with you.”
The hallway seemed to stretch forever, leading away from the familiar, brutal simplicity of the Black Templars’ world, and into a deeper, more intricate darkness.
The hallway seemed to stretch forever, leading away from the familiar, brutal simplicity of the Black Templars’ world, and into a deeper, more intricate darkness.
They marched in silence, their footsteps echoing off the polished deck plates. The air grew colder, smelling less of oil and sanctified metal and more of sterile filtration and a weird, ozonic tang. The grey guards were a silent, pressurized presence at his back. Felquin glided ahead, a data-slate now casting a pale blue glow across his severe features.
They reached a bulkhead unlike any other on the battle-barge. It was a smooth, featureless oval of dark metal, etched with looping, cryptographic seals that seemed to move if you stared too long. Felquin pressed his palm against it. A panel slid aside with a whisper, revealing a retinal scanner. A thin red beam scanned his eye.
The bulkhead irised open, not with the grinding shudder of Imperial doors, but with a seamless, silent contraction.
Beyond was a docking umbilical, a transparent tube stretching across a gulf of stars to a ship unlike the Divine Retribution. This vessel was sleek, dagger-like, and utterly black, a shape that seemed to swallow the starlight around it. No proud Imperial aquila marked its hull. Only a single, stark symbol was etched near its prow: a stylized “I” inscribed within a crimson skull.
“The Oculus Ignis,” Felquin said, noting Rutaba’s gaze. “My Lord’s personal shuttle. Do not touch anything.”
The walk through the umbilical felt like crossing a bridge over an abyss. Through the transparent alloy, Rutaba could see the immense, cathedral-like architecture of the Black Templars battle-barge receding. It was the only thing in this universe that had even approached familiar. Now it looked like a distant, gothic mountain.
The shuttle’s interior was a study in muted, efficient luxury. The walls were paneled in dark wood, the seating was upholstered in deep, blood-red leather, and the light came from recessed glow-globes set at precise intervals. It felt like the boardroom of a terrifyingly successful corporation.
A servitor, its lower half fused with the deck, awaited them. Its human face was a placid mask, one eye replaced by a multifaceted lens. It offered no greeting.
“Sit,” Felquin instructed, gesturing to a seat that faced a large, blank viewscreen. Rutaba sat. The leather sighed under his weight. Felquin took a seat opposite, his pale eyes conducting a slow, thorough inventory. The scanner had taken mental readings. Now, the Interrogator was taking a physical one.
Rutaba was still wearing the lightweight, off-white tunic and trousers he’d been given in the medicae bay after his armor was removed. They were clean, simple, utilitarian. The fabric was thin.
Felquin’s analytical gaze traveled from Rutaba’s face, down his short frame, and paused for a fraction of a second on his chest. The fabric, under the precise cabin lighting, did little to obscure anatomy. The slight, firm curve there was unmistakable.
Rutaba felt the scrutiny, a physical sensation like a draft. Gamer’s Peace kept his breathing even, his face neutral. This wasn’t the first time someone had looked, confused.
Felquin’s eyes flicked back up to meet his. There was no surprise, only a quiet recalibration. “Your documented identification from the Templars is incomplete. ‘Rutaba.’ No family designation. No world of origin. No listed gender.”
He stated it flatly. It wasn’t a question.
“It’s just Rutaba,” Rutaba said, his voice steady. “Where I’m from, that’s enough.”
“It is not enough here. The Administratum requires classification. For the record, prior to meeting my Lord Inquisitor,” Felquin leaned forward slightly, his voice dropping to that dry, tomb-paper whisper. “What is your corporate biological designation? Male?Female? Other? The medicae scan was… inconclusive, noting atypical hormonal and chromosomal markers. A further data point in your anomaly.”
The question hung in the ozonic air. The servitor stared blankly. The grey guards were statues.
Rutaba held the pale grey gaze. Back home, in his old life, the answer had been fluid, a quiet truth he shared only when it felt safe. Here, in this leather-lined coffin of a shuttle, with a man who dissected fear itself, it felt like disclosing a vulnerability. But omission felt more dangerous.
“My body,” Rutaba said, choosing each word with the care of a logistics coordinator routing a fragile shipment, “doesn’t fit your boxes neatly. I was assigned male at birth. That’s… mostly true. But ‘male’ feels like a suit that doesn’t quite button. ‘Female’ isn’t right either. I’m just me. I use ‘he.’ Usually. ‘They’ is also fine.”
He braced for a reaction—disgust, confusion, theological fury.
Felquin simply nodded once, a sharp, economical motion. He tapped a note into his data-slate. “Noted. ‘He’ will be used for procedural simplicity. The anomaly stands.”
There was no condemnation.Only cataloging. To the Interrogator, Rutaba’s gender was just another irregular data set, like his calm heart rate or his sudden appearance. It was, in its own way, more dehumanizing than hatred.
A low hum vibrated through the deck. The stars outside the viewport began to slide. The Oculus Ignis had detached, moving with a silent, predatory grace.Felquin stood. “My Lord Inquisitor will have further questions. Different tools. Prepare yourself.”
The viewscreen flickered to life. It did not show the starfield ahead. Instead, it displayed a symbol: the same crimson-skulled “I.” It pulsed once, slowly, like a heartbeat.
Then, a voice filled the cabin. It was not loud, but it penetrated the quiet completely, textured with age, authority, and a profound, chilling patience. It was the voice of a man used to being answered.
“Interrogator Felquin. Report on the asset.”
Felquin straightened, facing the screen. “The asset, designated Rutaba, is secured. Initial neural scan confirms the presence of a non-psyker, non-mechanicus dampening field. Emotional regulation is absolute, artificial in nature. It matches the warp-signature echo. Physical biometrics are within human parameters, though sexually dimorphic characteristics are ambiguous and hormonally atypical.”
“Interesting.” The voice considered this. “And the relic?”
“Remained with the Black Templars per your prior instruction, my lord. Its presence appears coincidental, though the asset demonstrated improbable proficiency.”
A pause. Rutaba could feel the weight of the Inquisitor’s focus through the screen, a pressure on his skin.
“Bring him to the interrogation chamber. I will examine this ‘peace’ for myself.”
The screen went dark.Felquin turned. The shuttle’s engines pitched deeper, carving a path through the void toward a destination Rutaba couldn’t see. The momentum was absolute.
The momentum was absolute.
The Oculus Ignis slid into its berth with a final, cushioned thud that resonated through Rutaba’s bones. The doors opened not onto another corridor, but into a vaulted antechamber of polished black stone. The air here was dead silent and tasted of static and myrrh. Two more faceless guards stood sentry before a pair of immense doors carved from what looked like fossilized wood, the grain twisted into agonized faces.
Felquin didn’t pause. The doors swung inward without a sound.
The chamber beyond was a paradox. It was part laboratory, part reliquary, and part torture cell. One wall was a solid sheet of armorglass, looking out into the infinite black and swirling colours of the warp itself. Data-servitors, their limbs replaced with mechadendrites, stood motionless in alcoves like disturbing statues. The central space was dominated by a large, circular table of dark metal, its surface a mess of scattered parchments, data-slates, and bizarre artifacts—a twisted piece of silvery metal, a shard of crystal that pulsed with a sickly light, a preserved eyeball floating in a jar.
And behind the table, silhouetted against the warp-lit viewport, stood Inquisitor Valerian.
He was taller than Felquin, and where the Interrogator was gaunt, Valerian was built with the dense, enduring strength of a glacier. He wore a long, dark coat over functional body armour, no ornamentation save for the burnished "I" upon his breast. His hair was steel-grey, cropped short, and his face was a landscape of severe intelligence and unspoken violence. He was studying a slate, his eyes flicking across the data.
“Leave us,” Valerian said, without looking up. His voice was the one from the shuttle, but in person it had a physical texture, like gravel under a boot.
Felquin bowed his head and retreated, the doors sealing behind him. The guards remained outside. Rutaba was alone with the Inquisitor.
The silence stretched, filled only by the almost subliminal hum of the ship’s systems and the faint, maddening whisper from the warp beyond the glass. Valerian finished reading, placed the slate down with a precise click, and finally looked at Rutaba.
His eyes were the coldest thing Rutaba had ever seen. They weren’t cruel, not exactly. They were analytical, the way a scalpel is analytical.
“Rutaba,” Valerian said. He didn’t move from behind the table. “You are a puzzle. A statistical impossibility that physically exists. This frustrates some of my colleagues. It interests me.”
He picked up the twisted piece of silvery metal from the table, turning it over in his fingers. “This is an Eldar splinter rifle casing, recovered from a world where no Eldar presence was ever recorded. An anomaly.” He set it down, tapped the jar with the eyeball. “This is from a heretic psyker who could, allegedly, see five seconds into the future. He failed to see my bolt pistol. Another anomaly.”
He finally moved, walking around the table with a slow, measured pace. His boots echoed on the stone floor. “You are a fresher one. You appear from nowhere, clad in absurd fabrics, possessing a mind that does not panic, and you wield a weapon of legend like you’ve practiced with it for a decade. You do not fit. The universe hates things that do not fit.”
Rutaba kept his mouth shut. Gamer’s Peace held the primal fear at bay, letting him watch, assess. This was a boss room. This was the final dialogue before the fight. Except there was no health bar here, no obvious attack pattern to learn.
“Felquin’s scans indicate your mental state is not natural. It is engineered. A imposed calm.” Valerian stopped a few feet away. The ozone smell was stronger here, mixed with the scent of old parchment and something metallic, like blood. “Who engineered it?”
“I don’t know,” Rutaba said. His voice sounded smaller here.
“A lie of omission,” Valerian stated, no anger in it. “You understand its function. You rely on it. You call it something, in your head. What is the word?”
Rutaba hesitated. The silence pressed in. Valerian’s gaze didn’t waver.
“Gamer’s Peace,” Rutaba muttered, feeling absurd.
Valerian’s head tilted a fraction. “Define it.”
“It’s… it’s the focus you get when you’re in a hard match. Everything else falls away. The fear, the noise. You just see the systems.The timing. You process.” He was explaining a video game tactic to a man who probably thought computers were witchcraft. “It’s not that I don’t feel it. I just… put it in a box. To deal with later.”
“A box,” Valerian repeated. He seemed to chew on the concept. “You compartmentalize existential terror. You treat the reality of xenos claws and boltgun fire as a ‘system’ to be ‘processed.’” He leaned back against the table, folding his arms. “Where did you learn to do this?”
“At home. On my… console.” The words died in the sterile air.
“Console.” Valerian pushed off the table and walked to the armorglass. The chaotic light played across his face. “A world that does not exist in any Imperial record. A technology that does not align with Mechanicus doctrine. A mental discipline that does not originate in the Scholastia Psykana. You are a collection of negatives. A silhouette.”
He turned back, his expression hardening. “The warp is not a sea. It is a mirror. It reflects. It rarely creates. Your arrival was a reflection of something. A thought given form. A desire. What were you doing, Rutaba of No Provenance, in the moment before you arrived on that derelict ship?”
The question was a trapdoor. Rutaba’s mind flashed back. The darkness of his apartment. The glow of the TV. The weight of the controller in his hands. The sheer, mundane exhaustion of it all. The longing for something to matter.
“I was… waiting,” Rutaba said, the truth pulled from him. “I was tired. Of my life. Of the… the smallness of it all. I wanted it to mean something.”
Valerian nodded slowly, as if a piece of a grim puzzle had slotted into place. “There it is.The catalyst. Not a summoning, but an echo. A passive psychic projection amplified by a random warp current. The universe has a cruel sense of irony. It grants a wish by damning you.”
He strode to the wall, pressed a hidden panel. A section slid aside, revealing a rack of instruments. Not tools of torture, but of measurement: scalpels, synaptic needles, neural clamps, all gleaming under the light. “Your ‘Gamer’s Peace’ is a psychic echo of your desire to escape your reality.A crutch. But it is a part of you now. A part I need to understand.”
He selected a long, slender needle attached to a clear tube. “I am going to trigger your fear response, Rutaba. The real, animal fear your mind has been boxing away. We will measure what is in the box.”
Rutaba’s calm wavered. A crack appeared. “Why?”
“Because if you are a reflection, I need to see the original image. And because,” Valerian said, his cold eyes utterly focused, “the things you have boxed away are a weapon. One I may need to use.”
He advanced, the needle glinting. The momentum was absolute, and it was carrying Rutaba towards a pain he could not strategize against.