Water Droplet

Across Chainscythe, the Rangdan looked up at a beam of light spanning the heavens. Its brilliance seared their eyes and blinded them for a moment. The bubbles covering a Rangdan seer's body flashed in terror as he stared into the distant void. At last he understood the message the vanguard fleets had sent: run. Run now.

That dazzling light was a death sentence. Every warship in its path was destroyed in an instant. Shields shattered within the first second of contact. Hulls broke apart under the terrible force, then were ground down to their most basic particles. The beam even distorted the connection between realspace and the Warp. Rangdan attempting to flee into the Warp discovered, to their horror, that all contact with it had been severed. They could only watch the light descend. One ten-thousandth of a second later, they were vaporized.

Beyond the Chainhammer system, Azrael watched the star expand, swallow the entire system, and burst apart. Reverence filled his face. Everyone aboard felt the same. Some silently repeated the names of Guilliman and the Emperor. Even those who had witnessed it several times could not help being awed.

This was humanity's power: the power to command and destroy. Under the great Regent's leadership, they had gained the means to lay waste to worlds and reshape everything.

“Throughout our history, humanity has struggled to understand its own creation. But thanks to the Emperor's son, Guilliman, I am now certain that we will rise and hold dominion over all things.” A poet spoke as he watched the astonishing sight. He was one of the chroniclers accompanying the expeditionary fleet.

Every fleet carried historians and scribes alongside its troops and administrators. They served a single purpose: to record the Imperium's history. War and deliberate erasure had destroyed so much of the past that no complete history of the Imperium remained. After Guilliman vowed to reconstruct it and established a department for the task, chroniclers began traveling with every fleet. They recorded the fleets' activities and sought lost texts, recovering the deeds of humanity's ancestors and the ordinary heroes who had sacrificed themselves for their species.

A soldier who died fighting for humanity deserved remembrance. Anything less betrayed the blood of heroes. Even if only a number or a nameplate survived, that life had to be recorded. These soldiers had fought for their entire species, not themselves. Their deaths had bought humanity its continued existence.

With that conviction, the historical department sent out vast numbers of chroniclers. They would document every war, every fallen soldier, and everything else they could. Perhaps their records would gather dust in some library and never be read. Even so, they would be the only evidence that those soldiers had ever lived.

With the Round Table's help, scholars and artists devoted to the work boarded vast transports and joined the fleets crossing the stars. Preliminary estimates put their number in the millions. They traveled from world to world with the crusade, most of them naive, inexperienced, and full of eager ambition. Fleet personnel often gave them a cold reception. They were a nuisance. But Guilliman's orders required cooperation, and so the fleets had to assist them.

Azrael had no affection for this delicate, refined poet, whom he considered as frail as a woman. This time, however, he agreed with the man's words.

“We have spent ten thousand years groping in the dark. Against the long history of our species, that is scarcely worth mentioning. Against the future that may yet lie before us, it is just as insignificant.

“But those years have shown us how helpless we are without guidance. A little over a decade, not even twenty years, would once have been too short to fight a single campaign. On Terra, a military report was lucky to be processed within thirty years of its arrival. An administrative report might wait at least a century for a reply.

“Yet in that brief span, the Regent has given us a new social order, equal rights and treatment, education reaching ever more people, worlds made fit to live on, and mighty human fleets. Every measure he takes shows us how glorious the age ahead can be.

“Every morning, I have to pinch myself. I am afraid I am living in a beautiful dream. When I realize that all this is real, I give thanks to the Emperor and the Regent. I hope to walk beside him into that golden future.”

The poet's words moved everyone who heard them. They felt their trust in Guilliman grow, along with the happiness of living in his light.

A few quiet claps broke the silence, then more joined them. Even Azrael began to applaud. The sound swelled until it rolled through the hall like thunder.

“May the Emperor endure forever! May the Regent endure forever!”

“May the Emperor endure forever! May the Regent endure forever!”

No one knew who had first called out, but more and more voices took up the cry. Some of the women wept, caught up in the emotion sweeping the crowd.

Human beings were often like this. Give them a courageous leader, and they found courage. Give them a wise leader, and they found wisdom. Without a leader, they stumbled from one foolish decision to another, trapped by their narrow experience and the pressures of daily life.

The feeling spread from the Colossus's hall to the rest of the ship, then throughout the fleet. The combined force of so much human emotion stirred turbulence in the Warp, making its raging storms still more violent.

That did not trouble the expedition's passage. Beacon-guided jumps were not ordinary Warp travel. They drew on fundamental laws of the universe, using cosmic strings to achieve instantaneous movement. Mastered fully, the technology would let humanity move objects from place to place like the gods of myth, without traversing the space between. A pebble, a star, an entire star system: with enough energy, even a galaxy could be moved. Humanity could manipulate it all like a true god.

The cosmic-string phase device Cawl was developing was the fullest application of that principle. Faced with the possibility that he might not be able to defeat the Four Gods, Guilliman had abandoned his restraints. He had set Cawl to work on one terrifying technology after another, including the cosmic-string phase device.

If conventional means could not destroy the Four, he would kill every living thing in the material universe and cut off the Warp's supply of emotion. If this universe truly was a playground the Four had made for themselves, he would blow the whole thing apart. Then he would take a pocket universe aboard a cosmic-membrane ship and get the hell out.

He had told no one about that insane plan. Who knew whether another righteous soul like Horus might decide to intervene?

In truth, Guilliman was not certain how powerful the Four really were. Some accounts described them as masses of emotion, each embodying one or more feelings experienced by living beings. Others claimed that the Four had created the entire universe to relieve their boredom. Whatever the truth, they stood at the very top. Guilliman had to prepare for both possibilities: escape, or a final act of mutual destruction.

Even Cawl knew nothing of his real intentions. The Archmagos was busy researching cosmic phase technology. To provide enough energy, Guilliman had ordered not only the construction of dark-matter reactors on a vast scale, but Dyson spheres around stars in the middle of their lives. Special methods would stimulate their fusion and increase their output, supplying the cosmic-string phase device.

Once the device was complete, every star, planet, and piece of matter in the galaxy would obey humanity's commands. They could be moved to a chosen destination in an instant. If the Necrons' Silent King launched an all-out war against humanity, Guilliman would simply drop a few hundred stars on him. If there was so much as a trace of ash left afterward, Guilliman would concede defeat.

The cosmic-string phase device was not ready yet. In the meantime, however, Cawl had developed something else. Another senior Tech-Priest who shared his ideas, Qile, had recently come to Ultramar.

For men like Cawl and Qile, whose bodies were ninety-nine percent machinery, other desires had long since faded. Food, women, and similar pleasures held no interest. All they wanted was knowledge: the truth of the universe. These grease-soaked fanatics would search world after world without rest, digging for lost lore.

Tell the Adeptus Mechanicus that a planet had rebelled, and you might wait a century for reinforcements. Tell them you had found an intact Standard Template Construct, or some heretical technology the Imperium had never possessed, and they would arrive the day after your astropathic message. They would bring an entire army, too, ready to seize or protect their discovery.

The galaxy held countless tombs. The Mechanicus had robbed half of them. The other half simply had not been found yet.

When Qile learned how many new technologies Cawl possessed, he gave it some thought, packed his belongings, and came to join him. He arrived just as Cawl finished a new creation.

“Come and see my latest invention, you country bumpkin.”

“Go to hell, you hack.”

Cawl and Qile had been rivals since their youth. They had started bickering while they were still flesh and blood. Back then, an argument could turn into a fight, with high-explosive rockets and energy beams hurled as though they meant to kill each other. Once they became Tech-Priests, the fights grew less frequent. As archmagi, they mostly confined themselves to insults. Sometimes they did not even exchange those; centuries, even a thousand years, might pass between meetings.

“I'm not going to argue with you. Come and look.”

Cawl led Qile into a secluded area. Blackstone obelisks reinforced the barrier between realspace and the Warp to keep daemons from interfering. Blood Angels and warriors from their successor Chapters patrolled among the structures, guarding humanity's newest research against corruption.

Qile was stunned the moment he saw Cawl's creation. He had never imagined that a machine could possess such overwhelming beauty. It resembled a drop of mercury, simple and silver-bright. Every point on its exquisite curved surface was precisely where it belonged. The shape seemed to move even while still, as though it were falling endlessly through the universe's night.

It gave the impression that human artists could work through every possible closed surface and still never discover this shape. It lay beyond all those possibilities. Even the Omnissiah's ideal realm could hold no form so perfect. It was a line straighter than a straight line, a circle rounder than a perfect circle, a mirrored pufferfish leaping from a sea of dreams.

“Beautiful. A god's own handiwork,” Qile murmured. Even he had to bow before such a creation. There was not a single flaw. Could machinery truly produce something like this?

“If I hadn't known you since we were young,” Qile said, “I'd take you for the Omnissiah.”

“No need to let our history stop you. You can still take me for the Omnissiah,” Cawl said with a nod.

Qile had no answer.

“What do you call it?” he asked at last.

“Lord Regent Guilliman calls it the Water Droplet,” Cawl said.