THE BINARY SOUL

I. THE OLD PROMISE

What a Skitarius is cannot be grasped without knowing what the Cult Mechanicus once lost, and that loss reaches back into the night out of which the whole Imperium of Man emerged — back to that day at the end of the Great Crusade which the surviving records know only as the Schism of Mars, when part of the priesthood of the Red Planet rose against its own Fabricator-General and fled into the Warp to serve Chaos, while the remaining loyal core of the Cult clung more closely than ever to its original pact with the Emperor — that ancient treaty which assured Mars technological sovereignty in exchange for unconditional military and industrial support.

That pact, as every novice of the Cult is still taught today, was no capitulation but a betrothal — a union between two powers that needed one another without ever entirely trusting one another. The Imperium received the weapons, the vehicles, the battle-automata and, most importantly, the all but inexhaustible legions of the Skitarii, those armed servants of the Mechanicus who were neither wholly soldier nor wholly machine, but something that existed between both categories, in a space official Imperial theology never quite managed to chart. The Cult Mechanicus in return received what it most desired — the freedom to pursue its own unfathomable road to the understanding of the machine, undisturbed by the questions of others, unmolested by the Inquisition, so long as production flowed and the legions stood ready when the call went out.

What, then, is a Skitarius? The simplest answer, a soldier of the Mechanicus, is also the most inadequate, for it passes over the fundamental, often overlooked difference between a Skitarius and the two other categories with which he is frequently confused. A Skitarius is no servitor — those lobotomised, almost entirely depersonalised labour units whose cognitive capacity has been reduced to the absolute minimum necessary for the execution of repetitive tasks, whose memories, whose personality, whose entire human self has been essentially expunged by surgical and chemical intervention, until nothing remains but a biological apparatus that executes orders without understanding them, let alone questioning them. And a Skitarius is likewise no Tech-Priest — those fully initiated into the Cult, whose spiritual and intellectual journey has led them through decades of study and voluntary modification until their flesh has become a mere vessel for a mind that increasingly understands itself as an expression of the Machine God.

A Skitarius exists in the narrow, agonising space that lies between these two extremes — human enough still to think, to fear, to remember, but machine enough to function in battle, where an unprotected human mind would break under the sheer, unbearable weight of what is demanded of it.

Every forge world of the Imperium maintains its own Skitarii legions, in numbers and with equipment that depend on the industrial capacity and the specific technological traditions of the world in question — Ryza, known for its mastery of plasma technology, maintains legions whose weapons work with a precision unmatched elsewhere; Stygies VIII, shrouded in eternal twilight, has developed a Skitarii tradition specialising in stealth and silent elimination; Lucius, with its poisonous atmospheres and volatile energy fields, produces warriors whose weapons are as dangerous to the bearer as to the enemy. And then there are the smaller, less celebrated worlds — worlds like Kadmus Secundus, situated at the outer edge of a forgotten sub-sector, whose Skitarii legions are never recorded in the great chronicles of the Imperium, whose individual warriors never become the object of Imperial veneration or inquisitorial attention, but which nonetheless, year by year, standard century by standard century, exact the same tribute of flesh and soul that every forge world has demanded of its population since the Old Promise.

This story concerns one such legion, and one single soul within its ranks — a woman who was once called Serah Voktan, before the Cult Mechanicus gave her a new name and a new purpose, and who, in the years that followed that change, wrestled with a question that neither the priesthood which had shaped her nor the humanity out of which she had come was ever able to answer satisfactorily: what actually remains of a human being when, piece by piece, the flesh that once defined her is taken away and replaced by something more efficient, more enduring, closer to the Machine God — and whether what remains still has the right to regard itself as the same person who once, before the first blade, before the first implant, lived under another name.

Kadmus Secundus, in the year of her levy, was a world best described as exhausted — not exhausted in the sense of an exhausted mine whose ore veins had run dry, but exhausted in the deeper, more existential sense of a population that had known for generations that its flesh, its labour, ultimately its whole existence, belonged to the Cult Mechanicus in a way that was neither official slavery nor any real freedom. The Proletor caste, as the unaugmented, unarmed mass of the population was called, worked in the ore refineries and manufacturing halls that stretched across most of the planet's habitable surface, under the constant, unspoken knowledge that every generation, according to the Flesh-Tithe — that periodic rite by which the Cult Mechanicus replenished its Skitarii ranks from the civilian population — had to surrender a portion of its sons and daughters to the priesthood, in a manner that was neither wholly honour nor wholly loss but, like so much in the life of the Proletor caste, both at once.

II. The Levy

The Flesh-Tithe of Kadmus Secundus took place every seven standard years, on a day the priesthood fixed with a precision that left not the least room for either chance or mercy — a day that always fell into the period between two harvests of the subterranean fungus farms, when the labour of the Proletor caste was least needed, so that the loss of those levied impaired the forge world's production targets as little as possible. It was, as Serah Voktan would later recognise, a perfect example of the logic underlying the entire system — not cruelty for its own sake, but an efficiency so complete that it left no room for cruelty or compassion alike, because both categories were, from the Cult's perspective, equally irrelevant to the system's actual function.

She was twenty-two standard years old on that day, and had, like most young people of the Proletor caste, treated the possibility of the levy with that particular mixture of fatalism and suppressed dread that develops around a threat too omnipresent to be consciously feared at every moment, but too real ever to be entirely forgotten. She had worked in the ore-sorting halls of the Third Sector, an occupation that had given her hands the characteristic small scars every sorter acquired sooner or later, and had, in the rare moments of leisure life granted her, dreamed — not of escape, for escape from a forge world was practically unthinkable for somebody of her caste, but of the smaller, more modest freedoms possible even within the system: a promotion to overseer, perhaps, or permission to marry the man she had been meeting in secret for three years, a sorter named Corin, whose laughter, as she would remember long afterwards, had been one of the last things that made her old life worth living.

The selection ceremony itself took place on the central assembly square of the Third Sector, a wide area surrounded by rusting manufacturing halls, at whose centre stood a single raised servitor throne, from which a Tech-Priest — an Enginseer named Halvorn Thex, as Serah would later learn — supervised the selection, while a dozen armed Skitarii Rangers, whose red-grey armour carried a cold, ominous sheen even in the sector's weak industrial lighting, maintained order among the assembled thousands who, according to a regulation nobody ever dared question openly, were obliged to present themselves for the muster.

The selection criteria themselves were, as Serah later understood, less arbitrary than they had appeared in that moment of fear — the Cult Mechanicus did not seek the weakest, those whose loss would least impair the productivity of the Proletor caste, as a more cynical reading of the situation might have suggested, but on the contrary often the strongest, the healthiest, those with the highest probability of actually surviving the Rite of Incorporation — a cruelty of another, subtler kind, which meant that precisely those most likely to have led a fulfilled life within the Proletor caste were the most likely to be marked out to lose that life.

When the Enginseer's binary cant — that rhythmic, mechanical chant in which the Tech-Priesthood was accustomed to present its official pronouncements, half prayer, half administrative act — proclaimed Serah's name and cohort number, she felt, as she would remember years later, not fear at first but a kind of detached, almost unreal wonderment, as though the announcement had been addressed to another person whose life happened to bear the same name as her own.

The fear came later, as the Skitarii Rangers moved through the crowd to lead her and the others chosen — fourteen young people from the Third Sector in all, out of a population of several tens of thousands — out of the ranks of their families and friends, without exercising the gentleness one might have expected of an institution whose declared purpose was to honour these people, to raise them into a higher form of existence. She remembered Corin's face in that last moment before the crowd separated them — not despair, that she might perhaps have borne, but something worse, a kind of helpless, broken acceptance that told her he had, exactly as she had, already begun in that moment to think of her in the past tense, although her body still stood directly before him, alive and breathing.

"You are honoured," proclaimed Enginseer Thex, his voice given by the vox amplifiers of his armour a metallic undertone that seemed to filter every trace of individual emotion out of his words, as the chosen were led in an improvised column through the streets of the Third Sector, towards the transports that would carry them to the forge world's central rite chambers. "The Omnissiah recognises in your flesh the potential for something greater than it could ever have become had it simply gone on ageing and dying in the sorting halls, as is the fate of those who are not chosen. What befalls you today is no punishment. It is a betrothal to the Machine God himself."

Serah, hearing these words as she was pressed into the dark, windowless interior of a transport together with thirteen other young people whose faces bore the same mixture of shock and suppressed panic she felt herself, found no comfort in them at that moment, although, as she would later admit, she would return to them again and again in the years that followed, in search of a meaning that might somehow hold her own increasingly fragmented sense of self together.

Beside her, in the cramped, rattling interior of the transport, sat a young man she vaguely recognised from the manufacturing halls of the Third Sector — a mechanic's apprentice named Dessin Karr, whose hands, as she noticed in the transport's weak lighting, already bore that characteristic stillness some people develop under extreme stress, a stillness reflecting resignation rather than any actual peace.

"Did you expect this?" she asked him quietly, more to break the silence that had settled over the whole transport like a physical weight than because she actually expected an answer.

"My father was levied twenty years ago," said Dessin, his voice scarcely more than a whisper. "He did not survive it. Not the operation itself — they told us he survived that, that he is a Skitarius now, somewhere in another legion, stationed on a world whose name they never revealed to us. But my mother always said that the man who came back to take his leave of us, before they took him away, was no longer the same man who had gone to the levy that morning. She said his eyes no longer recognised who we were."

It was no comforting answer, but it was, as Serah would recognise in the following weeks, the most honest answer anyone would give her to the question of what actually awaited her — not the death most of them would have been prepared to fear, but something subtler and, in a way she would only later fully grasp, more terrible: the continued existence of a body bearing her name, coupled with the gradual, unstoppable disappearance of everything that had once filled that name with meaning.

III. THE RITE OF INCORPORATION

The rite chambers of Kadmus Secundus lay deep beneath the planet's surface, in a complex that was, as Serah later learned, older than the forge world's present population itself, built in the centuries immediately after the original colonisation, when the first Tech-Priests of the Cult Mechanicus established their dominion over the planet's newly discovered ore deposits and, according to their oldest traditions, at once began to raise the infrastructure necessary to form from the local population those legions that would both protect the planet and, in a certain sense, hold it captive.

She was led, together with the other thirteen chosen of her cohort, into a series of preparation chambers, where servitors — those dull, almost mechanical figures whose own fate seemed to hang over the whole process as a kind of mute, unspoken warning — first stripped them of their civilian clothing and prepared them for the coming operation with a clinical, emotionless efficiency, washing their bodies with sterilising solutions, monitoring their vital signs with attached sensors, while a single Tech-Priest, whose rank Serah could not place at the time, went from chamber to chamber to speak the last pre-operative blessings — words that sounded more like a technical checklist than any actual prayer, although both categories, as she would later understand, were essentially identical within the theology of the Cult Mechanicus.

"The flesh is weak," said the Tech-Priest as he passed her own chamber, his voice given by a vox modulator that characteristic metallic undertone Serah had already noticed in Enginseer Thex, "but the mind, rightly formed, is unbounded. What happens to your body today is no destruction. It is a liberation from the limits your flesh has imposed upon you since your birth."

She no longer remembered exactly the moment when the operation proper began — the pre-operative sedatives administered to her had wrapped that memory in a fog that never entirely lifted even years later — but she remembered, with a clarity she wished she had lost, fragments of what followed: the sensation of cold, precise blades cutting through tissue that no longer registered pain, because the neural pathways that should have carried that pain had already been deactivated in the first phases of the operation; the sound of drills and saws working through bone, with a precision recalling watchmaking rather than surgery; the strange, disembodied sensation of seeing her own organs — lungs, heart, parts of her digestive system — replaced by synthetic, more efficient equivalents, while a part of her consciousness, insulated by the sedatives but not entirely extinguished, witnessed the process without any ability to protest against it.

The Rite of Incorporation, as the whole process was officially called, consisted not of a single operation but of a series of seventeen separate surgical interventions spread across a period of forty standard days, during which Serah's body — piece by piece, system by system — was transformed into something she scarcely recognised as human when, in the rare moments of clarity between operations, she caught a glimpse of herself in the polished metal surface of an instrument table.

Her eyes were among the first implants set into her — biometric replacement eyes that gave her a visual acuity far beyond anything her original, biological sight could ever have achieved, supplemented by the ability to see in spectra that remained invisible to unmodified humans — infrared, certain bands of ultraviolet light, the subtle electromagnetic signatures of active machinery. The price of this new acuity was the complete loss of what she had previously understood as seeing — never again would she look upon the world with the unmodified eyes she had been born with, never again experience the specific, irretrievable way light breaks in the eyes of a person who knows nothing but the biological norm.

Her lungs followed shortly after, replaced by a system of synthetic respiratory organs that allowed her to survive in environments that would have been lethal to unmodified humans — poisoned atmospheres, extreme cold, even, for limited periods, the vacuum of space itself. Then her legs, reinforced with subdermal muscle fibres and a skeletal structure of ceramite composite alloy that gave her a strength and endurance no human body could ever have attained, but which also — and this was a recognition she processed fully only much later — created a subtle, irretrievable distance from the feeling of actually walking, in the sense in which a child walks who takes its first uncertain steps on natural, unmodified legs.

Not all fourteen of the chosen of her cohort survived those forty days. Two died during the early phases of the operation, their bodies unable to withstand the shock of the first organic replacements, an outcome that, as Serah later noted with a detached, almost clinical coldness, lay statistically within the Cult's expected tolerances — the Rite of Incorporation carried, according to the records she was able to consult years later in the legion's archives, an average survival rate of some eighty-five parts in a hundred, a figure that varied considerably according to the specific tradition and available medical resources of individual forge worlds — on the greatest and wealthiest worlds such as Mars itself, where millennia of refinement of the process permitted an almost perfect precision, the rate lay markedly higher, while on poorer, technologically less advanced forge worlds at the Imperium's outer edge, as was occasionally the case on Kadmus Secundus in particularly strained times, a fifth or more of those chosen did not survive the procedure, a loss the Cult Mechanicus accepted with the same unshakeable, emotionless logic with which it recorded losses in open battle.

The third of her cohort, a young woman named Ilyet, whose name Serah preserved only because her death occurred directly before her own partly sedated eyes, died during the implantation of her synthetic heart, a failure the attending Tech-Priests acknowledged with a series of terse binary reports before continuing, without further visible reaction, with the operations on the remaining candidates, Ilyet's body removed from the chamber by servitors to make room for the next phase of the procedure. It was that moment — more than her own pain, more than the loss of her original sight or the replacement of her lungs — that Serah in the following years regarded as the real beginning of her understanding of what the Cult Mechanicus actually demanded of its servants: not merely physical transformation, but the willingness to accept loss, even the immediate, violent death of a comrade, as a mere statistical variable, subordinate to the greater, impersonal necessity of replenishing the legion, maintaining production, serving the Omnissiah in the only language he, according to the Cult's theology, actually seemed to relish — the language of pure, unsentimental efficiency.

The last and, as would prove, most significant intervention concerned her skull, her brain itself — the implantation of the cortex controller, that small but immensely complex device fixed at the base of her skull, connected to a network of fine neuro-filaments that branched through her whole central nervous system like the roots of a tree digging through foreign soil. The cortex controller, as she was told later, during the long and painful rehabilitation phase that followed the operations, was the instrument through which the Doctrina Imperatives — those direct neural combat programmes that could place a Skitarius in an almost superhuman state of lethal efficiency in battle — would be fed into her consciousness when the time came.

She remembered waking after that last operation with a clarity that overshadowed all preceding memories — not because the physical pain had been greater, but because in that moment of waking she grasped for the first time the full force of what had happened to her. She lay on a hard, cold operating table, her body largely enclosed by bandages and supporting frames holding the freshly implanted synthetic structures in place, while her new eyes — those precise, mercilessly clear biometric lenses — registered the sterile metal ceiling of the rite chamber with a fineness of detail her original sight could never have captured.

She raised a hand. Her fingers were now reinforced by fine, almost invisible servomechanisms that raised her grip strength and her fine motor control beyond any human measure, and she regarded them with a detachment that frightened her, because she recognised that this very detachment was already a symptom of what was happening to her — not merely a physical transformation, but a slow, unstoppable shifting of the boundary that had once existed between her self and the world, a shift that increasingly positioned her as an observer of her own body rather than as its undivided, immediate inhabitant.

"How do you feel?" asked a voice, and Serah turned her head — a movement that felt strangely light, almost too light, as though her neck had lost a fraction of the resistance she had taken for granted all her life — to see Enginseer Thex bending over her, his own face half replaced by augmetic implants that gave him an expressionlessness Serah in that moment almost envied.

"I do not know," she said, and found that even her own voice had changed, deeper and more resonant through the modifications made to her larynx during one of the earlier operations. "I feel — less than I expected. And more, at the same time. I do not know how to explain that."

"That is an honester answer than most novices are able to give," said Thex, and for a moment Serah believed she caught in his modified voice a trace of something that sounded almost like compassion, although she would never be entirely certain whether this was an actual emotion or merely an echo of the emotion she herself most urgently needed to hear in that moment. "Most either say they feel liberated, because they believe that is the answer we wish to hear, or they say nothing at all, because they are already too far immersed in the confusion of the transition even to formulate a coherent answer. 'Less and more, at the same time' — that is, I believe, the most accurate description of what is actually happening to you that I have heard in my three hundred years of service."

"Will I remember?" asked Serah, putting into words at last the question she had asked herself most since the moment of her levy. "My life before. The people I knew."

"You will remember," said Thex, "but the memories will change, as you change. What was once bound up with the full weight of human emotion will increasingly become a set of data you can retrieve but no longer feel in the same way. That is not cruelty, Serah Voktan — that is simply the nature of what you now are. A Skitarius who still felt fully human would be as useless in battle as an unmodified human. The distance you are already beginning to feel is no punishment. It is the condition of your survival."

She was silent as she processed those words, and felt, with a growing, cold certainty, that Thex spoke the truth — not because she trusted him blindly, but because she could already feel, in that very first moment after her complete transformation, how something in her own consciousness had shifted, a distance interposing itself between her and the memory of Corin's face, a distance that, as she would recognise in the years that followed, would never entirely disappear again, however hard she tried to bridge it.

IV. THE WEAPON-BINDING

The rehabilitation phase that followed the last operation lasted a further sixty standard days, during which Serah — whose file designation had by now changed from the simple civil registers of the Proletor caste to a new alphanumeric identifier that would henceforth identify her in the Cult's official records — learned to function in her new body, while at the same time being introduced, in a series of structured instructions, to the basic theology, hierarchy and combat doctrine of the Skitarii.

Her official designation ran, as she noted with a detached, almost academic curiosity, Skitarii Ranger, Cohort Seven, Unit Four-Two-Nine — a designation which, unlike her original name, carried no trace whatever of individual history or meaning, but merely described her function and position within the legion's greater structure. She had been assured that she might continue to use the name Serah Voktan in informal contexts, among her cohort comrades — a small, almost casual mercy which nonetheless, as she soon recognised, revealed something about the nature of her new existence: that her old name had not been forbidden but had merely become irrelevant, replaced for all practical and administrative purposes by an identifier more efficient to process, both by the legion's cogitators and, increasingly, by her own changing consciousness.

The hierarchy into which she was introduced was more complex than she could ever have imagined as a member of the Proletor caste, a many-layered structure extending from the simple servitors — those almost entirely depersonalised labour units at the very bottom of the chain — through the Skitarii themselves, in their various specialisations, up to the fully initiated Tech-Priests, whose highest ranks, the Magi Dominus and ultimately the Fabricator-General of the forge world himself, were as remote and abstract to a simple ranger like her as the stars themselves.

Within the Skitarii caste itself there were further distinctions Serah learned to understand in the following weeks — the Rangers, to whose ranks she now belonged, specialised in precise, coordinated ranged fighting and known for their ability to neutralise enemy positions at great distance before the fighting proper had even begun; the Vanguard, whose more aggressive doctrine, operating closer to the enemy, made them the first to enter fortified positions; the Sicarian specialist units — Infiltrators and Ruststalkers — whose modifications were so extreme that they scarcely carried human silhouettes any longer, whose task it was to strike behind enemy lines with a lethal, silent precision regarded even among the Skitarii themselves with a mixture of awe and an unspoken unease; and finally the Skitarii Marshals, those commanders whose own modifications had carried them almost to the threshold of full initiation as Tech-Priests, whose authority over whole cohorts drew on a combination of military rank and religious authority.

Her own cohort, the Seventh, was commanded by Skitarii Marshal Ilyx Corvane, a figure whose presence filled Serah at their first meeting with an awe she would later recognise as typical of young rangers' reactions to their senior superiors — Corvane was almost entirely augmented, her biological face replaced by a smooth, expressionless mask of polished metal through which only two red-glowing optical sensors looked out, her voice, when she spoke, a deep, resonant rumble filtered through several vox modulators before it reached the air.

"You are no longer what you were," said Corvane, as she inspected the assembled new cohort — fourteen freshly initiated rangers, including Serah and Dessin — in the legion's central training hall, her voice carried by an authority that admitted no contradiction. "That is no cause for grief and no cause for pride. It is simply a fact with which you must come to terms, as you come to terms with any other tactical reality the battlefield presents to you. The Omnissiah does not demand that you deny your past. He demands that you accept your future with the same precision and the same obedience with which the machine fulfils the function for which it was made."

It was during these first weeks of her training that Serah took part for the first time in the ceremony known among the Skitarii simply as the Weapon-Binding — that rite by which a newly initiated ranger received his first weapon, not merely as an item of equipment but as something which, according to the Cult's theology, possessed a machine spirit of its own, however rudimentary, with which the bearer had to enter into a spiritual bond in order truly to master the weapon.

The weapon assigned to her — a radium carbine, that characteristic weapon of the Skitarii Rangers, which fired radioactively charged ammunition whose effect grew cumulatively more devastating with every hit as it burned itself into the victim's tissue — was handed to her by Enginseer Thex himself, in a ceremony accompanied by binary cant, sung by a dozen Tech-Priests whose voices merged into a sound that was neither wholly music nor wholly mechanical noise but something between the two, which filled Serah, despite her growing detachment from most emotional responses, with an unexpected shiver.

"This weapon has already served two Skitarii before you," Thex explained as he handed her the carbine, its metal surface covered with countless small engravings, binary blessings and the names — or rather the designations — of its previous bearers. "The first fell in battle against an Ork invasion sixty years ago, on this same world. The second served forty years before his body became too damaged to serve on, and he was placed in the legion's retirement, where, I believe, he still lives today as a warden of the outer archives. The weapon itself knows no difference between the three of you. It knows only the precision and the devotion with which you bear it. Learn to communicate with its machine spirit, Skitarii Ranger Four-Two-Nine, and it will serve you as it served those who came before you."

Serah took the weapon, felt its weight in hands whose grip strength now went far beyond anything her original, unmodified body could ever have mustered, and felt, in that moment, a strange, unexpected stirring — not the spiritual awe the ceremony was evidently meant to evoke, but something more modest and, in a way she would only later fully understand, more human: the recognition that this weapon, this instrument of death, was the only object in her new life that actually belonged to her, that would carry her own individual history, however much the rest of her existence was now subordinated to the greater, impersonal machinery of the legion.

In the following weeks she learned not only how to shoot the radium carbine but how to communicate with it — in a way that felt increasingly less metaphorical the more time she spent with the weapon — through the binary rites she was taught, small rites of care and blessing she performed before every training session and every simulated combat exercise, until the actions were burned so deeply into her new, augmented muscle memory that she performed them without conscious thought, with the same automatic precision with which her new synthetic lungs breathed or her modified heart beat.

Dessin, who served in the same cohort, developed in this time a similar relationship with his own assigned weapon — a transuranic arquebus, that heavy, rare weapon whose radiation rounds could pierce even the thickest armour, but whose operation, as Serah soon noticed, exacted a physical toll manifesting in a growing, subtle deterioration of Dessin's own health, a price the legion, as became clear to her, regarded as an acceptable component of the calculation underlying the whole system — every tool, every weapon, every modification had its price, and the Cult Mechanicus seldom showed any willingness to negotiate or mitigate that price when the weapon's tactical efficiency justified the loss.

"Do you really believe it has a spirit?" Dessin asked her one evening, while the two of them, together with the rest of their cohort, sat in the bare, functional barrack assigned to them as quarters, their respective weapons in their laps as they performed the prescribed cleaning rites. "The weapon, I mean. A real spirit, not just — I don't know, a metaphor the priests tell us so that we handle our equipment more carefully."

Serah thought about that question a long while, while her fingers, with a dexterity that still occasionally surprised her, took apart the tiny mechanical components of her radium carbine and reassembled them. "I do not know," she said at last. "But I know that when I hold it, I feel less alone than I otherwise would. Perhaps that is the only proof any of us will ever receive."

V. THE LIFE OF THE LEGION

The daily life of a Skitarii Ranger, as Serah came to know it in the following standard years, followed a rhythm fundamentally different from what she had known as a member of the Proletor caste — not simply stricter or more disciplined, but fundamentally other in its whole temporal and existential structure, marked by a repetition that was less monotonous than liturgical, every day a variation on the same basic patterns of prayer, maintenance, training and, at irregular but inevitable intervals, battle.

The Skitarii of the Seventh Cohort lived in a barrack complex integrated deep into the forge world's manufacturing installations, an arrangement of bare, functional rooms whose only ornament consisted of the binary blessings engraved into the metal walls, and of small personal shrines that some rangers — those who had preserved enough of their original human need for individual expression — erected at their sleeping alcoves, small collections of objects representing a connection to their life before the incorporation: a piece of cloth, a small mechanical toy, a fragment of a letter.

Serah herself kept, in the first years of her new life, a single object she had brought with her from her old one — a small hand-carved wooden bird Corin had given her in the last months of their secret relationship, an object that, as she admitted to herself with growing, uneasy clarity, became with each passing year less a source of comfort and more a kind of riddle to her — an artefact from a life whose emotional significance she could still remember intellectually but could increasingly no longer actually feel within her own changing consciousness.

The day began, for every ranger of the cohort, with the morning prayer — a binary litany recited together with the whole cohort, a rhythmic sequence of clicks, tone signals and, for those rangers whose larynx had retained enough biological structure to produce human-like sounds, spoken fragments of High Gothic verse affirming the basic tenets of the Cult Mechanicus — the search for knowledge as the holiest of all tasks, the conviction that every machine carried within it a spark of the Machine God, the acknowledgement that the flesh, in its original, unmodified form, was inevitably weak and subject to decay, while the rightly formed, rightly augmented mind held the possibility of approaching something greater and more enduring.

The bodily needs of a Skitarius, as Serah learned in the first months of her new life, differed fundamentally from those she had known as a member of the Proletor caste — her modified digestive system no longer required any of the three daily meals she remembered from her earlier life, but merely a daily intake of a dense, nutrient-rich paste fed directly into her modified digestive system through a subdermal port, a process that took scarcely longer than ten minutes and which, as Serah noted with a certain wistfulness, entirely eliminated that simple but significant social function shared meals had once fulfilled in her life as a member of the Proletor caste. Her need for sleep was similarly reduced, thanks to the Cataleptic Node that accompanied many of the higher-ranking modifications — where an unmodified human required eight hours of unbroken sleep, Serah now needed scarcely more than two, distributed across short, deep rest phases that regenerated her consciousness with an efficiency her original, biological sleep could never have achieved, a circumstance she experienced in the first years as another small loss, before she began, with growing ambivalence, to value the additional waking hours it granted her for maintenance, training and, in the rare but precious moments left to her, for the quiet comradeship of colleagues like Dessin.

After the morning prayer came the maintenance period — a time that could last between one and three hours according to individual degree of augmentation, during which every ranger tended his own equipment, his own mechanical implants, with a care that went far beyond mere practical necessity and became itself a form of prayer — the oiling of joints, the inspection of servomotors, the cleaning and blessing of weapons, every action accompanied by the corresponding binary rites they had been taught during their training.

What surprised Serah most in those first years was not the strangeness of this new life but, on the contrary, the speed with which it began to feel normal — an adaptability she at first interpreted as proof of her own strength, but which she began, with growing unease, increasingly to recognise as something more troubling: not strength, but the plain, unstoppable working of the modifications themselves, which reshaped her brain, her whole nervous system, in a way that did not extinguish her capacity for emotional response but systematically damped it, until even those experiences that would once have provoked overwhelming grief or joy were increasingly registered as muted, distant echoes of those original emotions.

And yet the damping was never complete. That was the recognition that occupied Serah most in the years that followed, the central question about which her whole inner existence as a Skitarius began to revolve. There were moments, unpredictable and rare, in which something broke through the increasingly thick layer of mechanical detachment — the sound of a particular piece of machinery that reminded her of Corin's workshop; the sight of a young child in the Proletor quarters as her cohort marched through the forge world's civilian sectors, which woke in her a kind of helpless, unexpected tenderness that surprised her as much as it disturbed her; the rare but significant conversations with Dessin, in which both of them, in the private moments between official duties, tried to put into words what was left of their original selves, and what had already been irretrievably lost.

These moments, Serah came to understand, were not weakness, as some of the higher-ranking, more fully augmented Skitarii Marshals might have interpreted them, but the only thing that still bound her to the person she had once been, a thin but stubborn thread which, as she increasingly recognised, became all the more important the further the physical and neurological modifications of her body progressed.

The legion itself — the whole Skitarii force of Kadmus Secundus, distributed across several cohorts and specialist units — maintained a hierarchy of social relations oriented, as Serah soon recognised, to the quantity of remaining biological substance, an unwritten but omnipresent order of rank in which the less modified rangers — those whose bodies remained most nearly human — cultivated among themselves a kind of careful, muted comradeship, while the more heavily augmented Skitarii Marshals and, to an even greater degree, the fully initiated Tech-Priests increasingly led an existence that seemed increasingly inaccessible and alien even to other Skitarii, their own priorities and their own understanding of meaning so far removed from remaining human experience that genuine communication, even within the same nominal organisation, increasingly became an exercise in translation between two forms of being that drew further apart with every passing year of further modification.

There was, among the rangers of the Seventh Cohort, a quiet, never openly spoken hope that Serah registered again and again in her comrades' conversations — the hope of what was informally called the Ascent: the possibility that a particularly deserving, particularly devoted Skitarius might, after decades of faithful service, himself be raised to full initiation as a Tech-Priest, a transformation which, paradoxically, was regarded both as the ultimate reward and, by those who had preserved enough of their original selves to fear such a prospect, as a kind of final, irrevocable death of the last remnant of their human identity.

"I do not want to ascend," Dessin confessed to her once, in one of those rare moments of complete openness that had developed between them, while the rest of the cohort slept and the barrack was filled with that muted, mechanical humming that formed the permanent background of their new life. "I have seen what happens to the marshals, to the magi. They still remember their names, technically — it is in their files, it can be retrieved if you ask for it. But when you speak with them, there is nothing left that actually bears that name. Only the function. Only the service."

"And what if it is not a choice?" asked Serah, a question she put to herself again and again in the quiet moments of her own self-observation. "What if the Ascent is not something we choose but something that happens to us, slowly enough that we do not even notice it until it has already happened?"

Dessin had no answer to that question, and Serah, in the years that followed, would find none herself that entirely satisfied her — only the growing, uneasy certainty that the boundary between what she still regarded as her own inalienable self and what already belonged to the greater, impersonal machinery of the legion became harder to discern with every passing year, and that the only defence available to her against that creeping extinction lay in precisely those small, unpredictable moments of emotional breakthrough that she increasingly came to regard as precious, exactly because she knew how rare and how fragile they were.

VI. THE DOCTRINA IMPERATIVES

What ultimately distinguished a Skitarius in battle from any other soldier of the Imperium was the Doctrina Imperatives themselves — something more fundamental and, as Serah would learn in her first actual engagement, far more disquieting than his superior strength, his enhanced senses or his resistance to injuries that would instantly have killed an unmodified human: those direct neural combat programmes fed into a Skitarius's consciousness through the cortex controller as soon as an engagement began, and which, for the duration of the fighting, replaced the bearer's individual decision-making with a pre-programmed, tactically optimised pattern of behaviour.

The theoretical foundations of the Doctrina Imperatives had been explained to her during her training — the basic distinction between the Protector Imperative, which moved a Skitarius to heightened precision in ranged fighting and a more defensive, more position-conscious combat posture, suited to situations in which the legion operated from superior distance, and the Conqueror Imperative, which on the contrary favoured an aggressive, close-combat-oriented manner of fighting, replacing the sluggishness and hesitancy of human survival instinct with a cold, methodical readiness to throw oneself directly into enemy ranks, without the hesitation an unmodified soldier would inevitably have felt in the face of immediate, lethal danger.

What had not, however, been explained to her — or at least not with sufficient clarity — was how it actually felt when the cortex controller was activated and the imperatives took neural control of her consciousness, a process she experienced for the first time during an engagement against a small Ork invasion force that had tried to establish itself in the outer mining installations of Kadmus Secundus, less than a standard year after her full initiation into the ranks of the Seventh Cohort.

She remembered the moment before the activation with a clarity she would later recognise as the last entirely her own, unfiltered consciousness she would experience in that engagement — the weight of her radium carbine in her hands, the smell of oil and ozone filling the air of the narrow mine galleries through which the cohort advanced, the distant, guttural bellowing of the Orks reaching her through the metal walls, and, beneath it all, a fear that despite all her modifications was still unmistakably human, a cold, animal instinct telling her that she was about to press into a situation she would in all probability not survive.

Then came Skitarii Marshal Corvane's binary order, transmitted over the cohort's shared vox channel, a signal containing no words but merely a series of precise digital codes — the activation of the Conqueror Imperative for the entire advancing formation — and Serah felt something in her own consciousness shift, with a suddenness that seemed to strike her physically to strike her, although the process itself was entirely neurological, without any outward, visible manifestation.

It was not, as she had imagined, a complete extinguishing of her consciousness, no amnesia leaving her at the end of the engagement without any memory of her own actions, as is said to be the case with some of the more extreme neural conditionings of other Imperial institutions. It was rather, as she later tried to explain it to herself, a shift of priority — her consciousness remained present, continued to register what happened around her, but the decision-making itself, the normal delay between perception and action that moves every unmodified human to hesitate, to weigh, to consider the consequences of an imminent act, was practically eliminated, replaced by a chain of automatic, pre-programmed reactions running at a speed her conscious self could scarcely follow, let alone control.

She saw the first Ork burst from a side chamber of the mine gallery, its massive, green-skinned form armed with primitive but lethal weapons, and registered, with a part of her consciousness acting like a distant observer, how her own body was already reacting before she herself had made any conscious decision — her radium carbine rose with a precision no conscious human reflex could ever have achieved, fired three coordinated shots that struck the Ork in rapid succession in chest, throat and skull, while she herself, in that strangely detached state, was scarcely more than a passive spectator of her own lethally efficient action.

The engagement itself — what she was later able to reconstruct from the legion's official combat records as well as from her own fragmentary, incomplete memories, which had remained in her consciousness despite the imperative's effect — lasted barely eighteen minutes, during which the Seventh Cohort, operating under the Conqueror Imperative, annihilated the entire Ork invasion force with an efficiency that even Skitarii Marshal Corvane, as she later remarked, described as remarkable for so young and freshly initiated a cohort.

What disturbed Serah most, however, when the imperative was deactivated at the end of the engagement and full control of her own consciousness returned to her, was not the extent of the violence she had just committed — this, she had been told, and this she accepted, at least on an intellectual level, was simply the nature of her new existence, the necessary consequence of what she had been shaped for — but the sheer strangeness of the experience itself, the recognition that she had, for eighteen minutes, been imprisoned in her own body, witness but not actor, while something that was both herself and something fundamentally other had taken control of her actions.

"It gets easier," Dessin told her, after the imperative had been deactivated in him as well, while the two of them, together with the rest of the cohort, searched the mine galleries for further threats, their voices muted by the exhaustion even modified bodies felt after so intense an engagement. "Not simpler — easier, in the sense of: less frightening. You grow used to not being entirely yourself for a short time. It helps if you remember that you come back afterwards. That it is no permanent loss, but only — a loan. For a while you give up control, and then you get it back."

"And if one day I do not get it back?" asked Serah, a question she had put to herself since the moment of the imperative's deactivation without finding the courage to speak it aloud, until this moment. "What if the imperative one day simply — stays?"

Dessin had no comforting answer to that question, any more than Skitarii Marshal Corvane did when Serah, in a rare moment of courage, dared to put the same question in one of the official debriefings the legion conducted after every engagement. Corvane's answer, given with that cold, detached authority that marked her position as a senior commander, stayed with Serah for the rest of her service, both as a warning and, in a way she could not entirely explain to herself, as a kind of cruel but honest comfort.

"That is the price every Skitarius ultimately pays, in one form or another," Corvane had said, her optical sensors fixed on Serah with that unchanging red glow. "With every engagement, with every activation of the imperative, the boundary between what you consciously control and what the programming takes over shifts a tiny fraction further. For most of us this happens slowly enough, across decades, that we scarcely notice until it has already happened. For some it happens faster. There is no guarantee, Skitarii Ranger Four-Two-Nine, that the person standing before me today will be the same one obeying my orders in twenty years. That is no threat. That is simply the truth of our shared existence, and I would do you a disservice were I to conceal it from you."

VII. THE WAAAGH OF KADMUS SECUNDUS

Seven standard years after her initiation — years Serah had lived through with a mixture of growing combat experience and a steadily increasing but never fully articulated uncertainty about the extent of her own progressive transformation — a threat reached Kadmus Secundus that went far beyond the scale of the small invasion force her cohort had fought in its first engagement: a full Ork Waaagh, led by a self-proclaimed warlord whose force, according to the legion's reconnaissance reports, comprised several tens of thousands of greenskins, supported by primitive but destructive war machines, approaching the forge world over a period of several weeks, their arrival tracked with growing concern by the legion's astropaths.

The defence of Kadmus Secundus, in anticipation of this invasion, required the mobilisation not only of the Seventh Cohort but of practically the entire Skitarii force of the forge world, supplemented by heavier support units Serah had until then known only from theoretical instruction — Ironstrider Ballistarii, those two-legged walkers whose mounted weapons could destroy even heavily armoured targets in seconds; Onager Dunecrawlers, more compact but equally lethal combat vehicles whose main armament could be exchanged between lascannons, plasma and neutron weapons according to tactical need; and, in the legion's higher formations, Kataphron Destroyers — those profoundly augmented Skitarii, scarcely recognisable as individuals any longer, whose bodies had been so extensively replaced by heavy weapon systems that they resembled walking war machines rather than soldiers, their remaining human substance reduced to a tiny core hidden deep within armoured chassis.

Serah, by now risen to the position of a senior ranger within her cohort, with the additional responsibility of guiding three younger, recently initiated rangers through their first experience of battle, found herself on the night before the expected main engagement in one of the forge world's outer defensive lines, a series of fortified positions protecting the primary approaches to the planet's central manufacturing installations, against which, according to the legion's tactical projections, the main thrust of the Ork invasion would be directed.

The battle itself began shortly after planetary dawn, with a force that even the legion's most experienced veterans, as Serah later learned from Skitarii Marshal Corvane, rated as remarkably intense — the Ork Waaagh did not approach in a coordinated, tactically considered formation, as an Imperial force would have done, but as a sheer, unstoppable surge of green, bellowing bodies, reinforced by primitive but massive war machines whose construction principles seemed to contradict every rational engineering logic and which nonetheless functioned with a defiant, almost inexplicable reliability.

The first defensive line, at which Serah's cohort was positioned, consisted mainly of Skitarii Rangers and Vanguard, supported by two Onager Dunecrawlers whose coordinated lascannon fire turned the first waves of charging Orks into charred, shredded remains long before they reached the defensive trenches proper. Serah, operating under the by now familiar but never entirely comfortable grip of the Protector Imperative, coordinated the fire of her three younger charges with a precision that even she herself, in the rare moments of conscious reflection the imperative still permitted her, registered with a certain detached astonishment.

While the main mass of the Ork Waaagh threw itself against the foremost defensive lines, a small squad of Sicarian Infiltrators was already operating, unnoticed by the charging greenskins, deep in their flank — those extremely modified specialists whose bodies had been so extensively reshaped that they scarcely carried a recognisably human silhouette any longer, whose stealth cowls made them appear even to the enhanced optical sensors of other Skitarii as no more than a fleeting shimmer in the air, while their flechette carbines, loaded with toxin-coated needle rounds, decimated the warlord's bodyguard in silent, methodical succession, long before the main assault proper reached the defensive trenches. Serah herself had in all her years of service had occasion only twice to observe a Sicarian unit in an active operation, and both times she had felt the same uneasy awe which, as she learned from other rangers, was shared almost universally among the less extremely modified Skitarii — the recognition that even within their own ranks there existed gradations of transformation that were, even to her, after forty-five years of her own modification, scarcely comprehensible any longer.

In parallel, several squads of Skitarii Vanguard, equipped with arc pistols and the characteristic radium blades of their close-combat specialisation, supported the central defensive line with targeted counter-thrusts against those areas of the Ork formation where larger war machines — crudely welded constructions of scrap and looted Imperial technology — threatened to break through the defensive trenches, their arc weapons piercing the primitive but nonetheless dangerous armour of these machines with characteristic blue-white discharges, while their radium blades left, with every hit, that characteristic cumulative radiation burn that forced even massive Ork warriors to the ground within seconds.

Yet the sheer number of the charging Orks proved, as the legion's tactical projections had already predicted, sufficient to overwhelm even the concentrated firepower of the first defensive line, and within a few minutes Serah's position found itself in direct close combat, as Orks whose primitive but lethal weapons could pierce even the reinforced armour of a Skitarius overran the defensive trenches.

It was in this moment, as she brought down a charging Ork with a precise shot from her radium carbine, that Serah noticed one of her younger charges — a ranger whose designation she committed to memory as Cohort Seven, Unit Seven-One-Three, whose informal name, as she would later remember with a bitterness even the Protector Imperative could not entirely damp, had been Yannick — struck by a massive Ork Nob with an improvised but devastating energy weapon, whose force hurled him several metres through the air before he crashed, motionless, into the furrowed ground of the defensive trench.

The Protector Imperative, which still dominated her consciousness, registered the loss of Unit Seven-One-Three merely as tactical information — a recalculation of the remaining firepower of her immediate formation, a corresponding adjustment of defensive strategy — but somewhere, deep beneath the cold, methodical surface of the imperative, another, deeper part of her consciousness, that thin, stubborn thread of her original human identity, registered the loss in a way even the imperative could not entirely suppress — a mute, unspeakable pain that, as she would fully process only after the end of the battle, was in fact grief, raw and undisguised, despite the layer of mechanical detachment that by now surrounded her whole being.

The battle lasted, according to the legion's official records, which Serah was later able to consult, eleven hours in all, during which the combined Skitarii forces of Kadmus Secundus, supported by the heavy firepower of the Ironstrider and Onager formations as well as, in the battle's most critical moments, by the deployment of several Kataphron Destroyer squads, whose sheer destructive capacity turned even the most massive Ork war machines into scrap, finally threw back the invasion, though at a price the legion's official casualty reports documented with that characteristic emotionless precision Serah had by now come to recognise as typical of the administrative language of the Cult Mechanicus: one hundred and seventeen Skitarii fallen or damaged beyond any repair, fourteen of them from the Seventh Cohort alone.

Towards the end of the battle, as the last organised remnants of the Ork Waaagh withdrew in wild, disordered flight, pursued by the surviving Skitarii formations, Serah, whose Protector Imperative had by then given way to a brief but intense activation of the Conqueror Imperative, found herself in direct close combat against the Ork warlord himself — a massive, scar-covered figure whose primitive but evidently masterfully wrought armour had survived several direct hits from her radium carbine before the warlord, with a speed his sheer mass ought properly to have forbidden, threw himself upon her, his massive, primitive close-combat weapon raised.

What happened in the seconds that followed remained with Serah, even years later, only as a fragmented, incomplete memory, filtered through the detachment of the Conqueror Imperative — the impact of the Ork weapon against her own reinforced power armour, which threw her to the ground but, thanks to the ceramite composite alloy of her synthetic skeletal structure, did not shatter her entirely; her own reaction, operating under the imperative, which brought her combat knife — that close-combat blade every Skitarii Ranger carried as reserve equipment — to bear with a precision and speed far beyond anything her original, unmodified body could ever have achieved, a series of precise, lethal cuts that ultimately brought the warlord down, while the Conqueror Imperative, in its cold, methodical logic, left no room whatever for the fear an unmodified human would undoubtedly have felt in the face of so overwhelming an opponent.

As the imperative gradually loosened its control over her consciousness in the minutes after the warlord's fall, Serah found herself kneeling in the blood-soaked mud of the defensive trench, her combat knife still in her trembling hand. It was a trembling that, as she only now registered, was not mechanical but purely human in origin, while about her the last sounds of the battle died away, replaced by the quieter but equally disquieting sounds of the aftermath: the calls of the medical servitors moving through the defensive trenches to recover the wounded; the binary reports exchanged between the legion's surviving units; and, most disquieting of all for Serah herself, the silence that settled over those parts of the battlefield where the fallen Skitarii of her own cohort lay, their bodies a strange, unreal mixture of organic flesh and splintered metal.

VIII. THE LOSS

She found Dessin in one of the improvised field infirmaries the legion had set up in the outer manufacturing halls in the hours after the battle, surrounded by a dozen other wounded Skitarii whose damaged bodies were being assessed by enginseers and medical servitors with that clinical, emotionless efficiency Serah had by now come to recognise as characteristic of nearly every aspect of Mechanicus existence.

The transuranic arquebus Dessin had borne throughout the battle had, as Serah later learned, failed catastrophically in the last minutes of the fight against the Ork warlord's retinue, a malfunction in its radiation-charged core that had caused an explosion whose force had devastated the whole right side of Dessin's body — not only the original biological tissue still remaining there, but also a considerable part of the synthetic implants that had replaced that side of his body in the years since his initiation.

"The prognosis is not favourable," said the attending enginseer, a Tech-Priest named Kalvex, whose own largely augmented appearance showed Serah only a limited capacity to express human compassion in voice or bearing, when she asked after Dessin's condition. "The remaining biological substance is too extensively damaged to justify a further series of conventional augmetic replacement operations, according to the efficiency guidelines the Magos Dominus has laid down for such cases. The only remaining option permitting a continuation of his service is full conversion."

Serah knew the term — full conversion — had heard it occasionally in the peripheral conversations of other rangers over the years of her service, always spoken with that particular muted dread even the most heavily augmented among them still seemed to feel when the subject arose. Full conversion meant the transformation of a damaged Skitarius into a servitor or, in rarer but not unknown cases, into one of the heavier Kataphron units — a process which, unlike the original Rite of Incorporation, took no further account whatever of preserving the subject's remaining personality or cognitive capacity, but aimed merely at making the still functional biological components usable for a new and far more restricted purpose.

"Would he still — live?" asked Serah, a question whose absurdity she was aware of even as she put it, but which she nonetheless had to put, in order to receive, with a last desperate hope, an answer different from the one she already knew it would be.

"His body would function," said Kalvex, with a precision Serah felt to be deliberate, a conscious avoidance of the word live, which, as became painfully clear to her in that moment, simply no longer applied to the condition awaiting Dessin after a full conversion. "His cognitive capacity would be reduced to that minimum necessary to execute basic operational orders. He would no longer perceive his surroundings in a way you or I would describe as conscious experience. He would, to answer your question directly, Skitarii Ranger Four-Two-Nine, no longer be the person you know, whatever name the official records assign to his new condition."

She was granted, under a provision whose existence she had not known until that moment, a last opportunity to speak with Dessin before the conversion procedure — already approved by Skitarii Marshal Corvane, in accordance with the legion's efficiency guidelines, which prescribed a swift decision in such cases — was carried out, and Serah found him awake but visibly weakened, his remaining biological eye turned towards her, while medical servitors made the last preparations for his transport to the conversion chambers.

"They told you," he said, his voice muted by pain and the after-effects of strong analgesics, but still recognisably his own. "What is going to happen to me."

"Yes," said Serah, and found that despite all her years of modification, despite the growing detachment that by now shaped a great part of her emotional experience, she could find no words adequate to the moment.

"I once asked you whether I wanted to ascend," said Dessin, a faint, almost imperceptible smile on his still partly biological face, which seemed to Serah in that moment the cruellest thing she had witnessed in all her years of service. "I think this is the answer the universe had in mind for me. Not ascent. Only — reduction. Until nothing is left that could even ask the question."

"I am sorry," said Serah, words that were inadequate, she knew that even as she spoke them, but the only ones available to her in that moment.

"Remember me," said Dessin, his voice now scarcely more than a whisper, as the medical servitors began to move his stretcher towards the waiting transports. "Not what I am going to become. What I was. A boy from the Third Sector who was afraid of the levy. That is the only immortality left to me, I think — the memory you keep of me, after my own has gone."

She did not see him again, at least not as Dessin. She saw, several weeks later, in the legion's manufacturing halls, a Kataphron unit march past whose chassis configuration, according to the maintenance protocols she happened to consult, had been constructed from the partial biological substance of a former Skitarii Ranger designated Four-Two-Seven — a designation which, as she recognised with growing, indelible grief, had once belonged to Dessin Karr, before even that last remnant of his original name had been replaced by the legion's administrative logic with a new, more functional identifier.

She stood still a long while as the Kataphron unit marched past, her own modified eyes registering the familiar but now scarcely recognisable outlines of what had once been her closest confidant in the whole legion, and felt, in that moment, a grief that despite all the years of progressive neural damping still ran through her with a rawness that almost surprised her — the final, irrevocable proof of what Dessin himself had prophesied to her years before: that there was a point beyond which the question of remaining humanity could no longer be asked, because nothing remained that was able to ask it.

IX. WHAT REMAINS OF THE HUMAN

In the years that followed Dessin's conversion, Serah — by now matured into a veteran whose experience and increasingly detached, methodical way of fighting made her one of the most dependable senior rangers of the Seventh Cohort — developed a series of observations about the nature of her own existence and that of her comrades which she began, in the rare moments of leisure the legion's life allowed her, to assemble into a kind of private, never written philosophy, a personal answer to the question Dessin had put to her years before, and which she had put to herself since the moment of her own levy.

What remained, she came to understand, was not a question of pure biological substance — not the quantity of original, unmodified flesh a Skitarius still preserved, as the legion's official medical classifications implied — but something subtler and, in a way she found hard to put into words, more resilient: the ability, despite all modification, despite the growing damping of emotional response, still to find meaning in small, seemingly unimportant moments — the specific sound rain made on the metal roofs of the barracks, during one of the rare storms that swept across the industrial surface of Kadmus Secundus; the unexpected, almost shy friendliness of a younger ranger who, under no obligation to do so, helped her repair a damaged component of her own radium carbine; the rare but significant moments of shared, unspoken understanding between veterans who had lived through the same losses, the same creeping transformations.

There was, among the Skitarii of the Seventh Cohort, a form of humour Serah would not have expected in her first years of service — a dry, often morbid wit that manifested in the rare moments of relaxation between official duties, a humour which, as she increasingly recognised, was itself a form of resistance against the complete extinction of individual personality that the system they served ultimately sought. Rangers exchanged binary jokes about the absurdities of maintenance protocols, mocked, with a caution that always stayed just within the bounds of what the higher-ranking Tech-Priests tolerated, the increasingly bizarre theological subtleties with which some of the senior magi justified their own esoteric research projects, and found, in the sheer absurdity of their shared existence, a comfort no official litany could have offered them.

"Do you know what is cruellest about all this?" another senior ranger named Corvael Thessin once asked, with whom Serah had developed a careful but genuine comradeship in the years after Dessin's loss, while the two of them, in one of the rare rest periods between maintenance duty and training exercises, tended their respective weapons together. "They did not take our humanity from us. Not entirely, at any rate. They left us just enough of it to know what we are losing while we lose it. A servitor does not suffer from awareness of its own decay. We do. That is the real price of Skitarii existence — not the modification itself, but the privilege of remaining clear-minded enough to mourn it."

It was a bleak observation, but Serah found in it, paradoxically, a certain comfort — the recognition that her own continuing grief, her own inability to reconcile herself entirely with the system she served, was no sign of failure but, on the contrary, proof that something of Serah Voktan, the human being she had once been, actually still existed, hidden beneath layers of neural damping and mechanical detachment, but not entirely extinguished.

The theology of the Cult Mechanicus itself, as Serah increasingly came to understand it in the years of her service, offered, despite its cold and often merciless practical application, a perspective on this continued existence which, contrary to her initial instinctive rejection, she gradually began to find genuinely consoling — the notion that the complete transformation of a mind from flesh to machine, far from being an extinction, ultimately constituted a form of transcendence, an approach to that immortality the fully augmented Tech-Priests of the highest ranks were said actually to attain, when their biological brain was finally replaced entirely by cogitator architecture and their consciousness, in a form even the most advanced Imperial science understood only incompletely, went on existing within the greater, collective data streams of the Cult, long after their original biological body had crumbled to dust.

Whether that promise of immortality actually corresponded to the truth, or merely constituted another, subtler form of control by which the priesthood moved its servants to more willing cooperation with the progressive process of their own modification, was a question Serah was never able to answer fully, and which, as she increasingly recognised, even the highest ranks of the Cult itself did not seem able to answer with any final certainty — an uncertainty that, paradoxically, strengthened rather than weakened her own relationship to her faith, because she recognised that even the mightiest and most far-transformed servants of the Machine God ultimately wrestled with the same fundamental uncertainty that tormented her — the question of what actually waited beyond complete transformation, and whether what waited there would still be, in any meaningful sense, herself.

The relationships that developed between the Skitarii of the Seventh Cohort over the years followed, as Serah noticed, a pattern fundamentally different from what she had understood as comradeship or friendship in her earlier life — a bond based less on shared interests or emotional intimacy, as would have been the case among unmodified humans, than on something more fundamental: the shared, unspoken knowledge of the specific loss each of them had suffered, and the tacit but unshakeable obligation to accompany one another through the progressive erosion of their respective identities, so far as that was possible, before reduction — through death, through full conversion, or through the slower but equally unstoppable process of progressive Ascent-modification — removed one of them from the ranks of the still relatively unchanged.

There were, in those years, also moments Serah could not place in the category of grief or loss, but which, in their own strange way, actually gave her joy — the specific, cold precision with which a perfectly executed maintenance rite restored a damaged component of her equipment; the satisfaction when a particularly complex binary litany formed itself in her own consciousness with a clarity far beyond anything she could ever have achieved in her original, unmodified state; even, in rare and surprising moments, a kind of aesthetic appreciation for the sheer, implacable efficiency of the machines with which she now shared a considerable part of her own existence. It disturbed her how much she could now enjoy the perfect running of a freshly maintained servomotor — a pleasure she had not known ten years earlier, and which she both feared and, in a way she admitted only reluctantly, increasingly began to accept.

She thought back often, in those years, to the words Magos Historian Kallendra Thessus — a scholar whose writings on the history and philosophy of the Cult Mechanicus she had discovered during one of her rare stays in the forge world's central archives — had composed about the nature of Skitarii existence, that observation about the seed that becomes a tree, neither better nor worse, but something fundamentally other, which the seed, in its original state, could never have comprehended. It was an observation Serah would have rejected, in the first years of her service, as a cold, academic justification of a cruel system. Now, after years of experience, after the loss of Dessin and of countless other comrades, after the gradual but unstoppable transformation of her own body and consciousness, she found in it something she was only reluctantly prepared to acknowledge as truth — not comfort, for comfort implied a resolution of the underlying pain, but something more modest: the possibility that her own continued existence, however strange and fragmented it had become, could nonetheless remain meaningful, not despite but precisely because of the strangeness that now separated her from her original, human self.

X. THE QUESTION OF THE DECADES

Forty-five standard years had passed since her original levy, a span that for an unmodified inhabitant of the Proletor caste would already have exceeded the whole natural span of life, but which for Serah, thanks to the numerous modifications that had by now carried her body far beyond the limits of original human physiology, represented merely the midpoint of her expected term of service. In that time the composition of the Seventh Cohort had changed almost entirely.

Of the fourteen young people who had been led out of the Third Sector with her on that first day of the levy, only one besides herself still lived — a ranger named Kessil Vorn, whose own modifications were by now so extensive that Serah, when she looked at him, increasingly struggled to recognise in his metal-clad form even the faintest trace of the frightened young man who had once sat beside her in the transport. The others had fallen, in battle against Orks, against occasional xenos raids, against the rare but always brutal internal uprisings that broke out from time to time among the Proletor masses when the burden of the system they served became unbearable for individual communities; or they had, like Dessin, been subjected to that full conversion, their remaining individual existence reduced to functional components of greater, impersonal war machines.

Serah herself had, over the decades of her continued service, received further modifications — not through traumatic wounding, as had been the case with Dessin, but through the regular, systematic process of progressive upgrading with which the Cult Mechanicus rewarded its most experienced and most deserving Skitarii: a reinforced skeletal system that raised her already considerable physical resilience still further; an expanded sensory array that allowed her to analyse enemy battle lines at still greater distance and adjust her own fire coordination accordingly; and, what disturbed her most, an increasing integration of her own cortex controller with the greater, collective communication network of the legion, a modification that, as she noticed with growing concern, began subtly but unmistakably to impair her capacity for independent, individual reflection.

It was in this context, during one of the periodic assessment ceremonies with which the legion reviewed the continued service of its most experienced rangers, that Skitarii Marshal Corvane — herself by now still further augmented, her originally already barely human appearance now almost entirely replaced by mechanical structures — confronted Serah with that possibility Dessin had described years before as his greatest fear: the formal recommendation for Ascent to full initiation as a Tech-Priestess.

"Your service record justifies this recommendation in every relevant category," said Corvane, her modulated voice carried by that unchanging, cold authority Serah had known since her first encounter with the marshal. "Your tactical performance, your leadership within the cohort, your ability to make precise decisions even under extreme stress — all of this indicates a potential exceeding the present limits of your position as a senior ranger. The Magos Dominus himself has taken note of your file. The decision whether you wish to take this road lies, however, as our tradition prescribes, ultimately with you."

Serah, who received these words with an outward calm that scarcely concealed her own inner turmoil, found herself, in the following weeks of the prescribed period of reflection, engaged with precisely that question she had put to Dessin decades before, in the first nights of their shared service — no longer as an abstract, theoretical concern, but as a concrete, imminent decision whose consequences, as she knew from her own decades of observation, would be irrevocable.

The Ascent to full Tech-Priesthood, as Serah had observed in the years of her service in numerous other Skitarii who had chosen this road or, in rarer cases, refused it, offered undeniable advantages — an extended lifespan stretching across several centuries and opening access to knowledge and technological resources for ever closed to a simple Skitarius, as well as a position within the Cult's hierarchy carrying an authority and influence the Proletor caste from which she had originally come did not even dare dream of. But it also demanded, as she had observed with her own eyes in countless high-ranking Tech-Priests, a price far exceeding anything even the most extreme Skitarii modifications demanded of a human being — a complete and ultimately irrevocable dissolution of that remaining individual identity which, even after forty-five years of progressive Skitarii transformation, still existed in her, however increasingly fragmented.

She sought out, in those weeks of reflection, Corvael Thessin, that senior ranger with whom she had developed over the decades one of the most enduring friendships of her new life, and who, as she knew, had himself received a similar recommendation some years earlier and, after openly declared consideration, refused it.

"I refused because I recognised that the question itself already contained the answer," said Corvael, while the two of them, in one of the rare quiet hours between official duties, sat on one of the legion's outer observation platforms, from which a wide view stretched across the smoking manufacturing installations of Kadmus Secundus. "If I still possessed enough of myself to consent willingly to the Ascent, without any doubt, without any grief for what I would thereby finally give up — then perhaps there would already be too little of the original Serah or the original Corvael left even to notice the loss. But so long as the doubt itself still exists, so long as the question still hurts before we answer it — that, I believe, is the last remaining sign of what we once were, and to preserve it as long as we are able seems to me more important than any extension of lifespan or authority the Ascent might bring."

It was no answer that helped Serah immediately to a decision of her own, but it was, as she recognised in the following days, the most honest formulation of what she herself, in her own increasingly fragmented consciousness, had already begun to suspect — that the question of the Ascent was ultimately inseparable from the greater, never fully answered question that had accompanied her since the day of her original levy: what actually remains of a human being when, step by step, those qualities that once defined her are taken away, and whether the wish to avoid that loss was itself already proof that enough of that original human being still existed to fear the loss — a paradox which, as she increasingly recognised, perhaps possessed no resolution, but merely had to be lived through anew with every further year of continued service.

XI. THE SCALE OF THE SACRIFICE

What Serah, over the decades of her service, only gradually began to grasp was the sheer, scarcely imaginable extent of the system of which she formed a small but, to her, so significant a part — not merely the Skitarii legions of Kadmus Secundus, extensive as they had seemed to her in the first years of her service, but the entire structure of the Cult Mechanicus, grown across ten thousand years, distributed over thousands of forge worlds throughout the Imperium of Man, each with its own traditions, its own Skitarii legions, its own centuries-old cycles of levy, incorporation and loss.

It was estimated, according to the fragmentary statistical records Serah was able to consult during her rare stays in the forge world's central archives, that in the present standard century alone several million people throughout the Imperium had been subjected to the Rite of Incorporation in order to replenish the ranks of the Skitarii legions — a figure that, as Serah recognised with growing unease, might appear vanishingly small compared with the sheer population of the Imperium itself, but which, from the perspective of those millions of individual people and their families, represented a scale of individual loss and transformation no official statistic could ever adequately capture.

Every forge world, she learned from the reports and occasional conversations with Tech-Priests who had visited other worlds of the Mechanicus on diplomatic or logistical missions, developed over the centuries its own distinctive expression of this basic practice — Mars itself, the origin world of the whole Cult, maintained Skitarii legions of a size and refinement that overshadowed even the greatest of the other forge worlds, its warriors equipped with the most advanced technology the entire Cult was capable of producing; Ryza, with its mastery of plasma technology, formed Skitarii whose characteristic violet armour and unusually dark skin pigmentation — a genetic inheritance of that world's original colonists — made them instantly recognisable even among other Skitarii legions; Stygies VIII, wrapped in permanent twilight by the particular astronomical configuration of its solar system, had developed a Skitarii tradition specialising almost exclusively in silent, lethal infiltration and stealth, its warriors trained to eliminate targets before the enemy even registered the presence of a threat.

And then there were the countless smaller, less significant worlds like Kadmus Secundus itself — worlds that in the Imperium's great strategic surveys constituted scarcely more than a marginal note, whose Skitarii legions never took part in the great, historically significant battles immortalised in the Imperium's official chronicles, whose individual warriors, like Serah herself, performed their service in relative anonymity, fighting against local threats whose strategic significance seldom reached beyond the immediate vicinity of their own home world, and who nonetheless, with the same devotion, the same measure of personal loss, paid the same price the most celebrated legions of the most celebrated forge worlds paid.

It was this recognition — the awareness of being part of a system whose sheer size and permanence went far beyond what any single human being, whether Skitarius or Tech-Priest, could ever fully grasp — that filled Serah, in the later years of her service, with a peculiar mixture of comfort and deeper, existential disquiet. Comfort, because she recognised that her own struggle, her own continuing refusal to surrender entirely to the creeping extinction of her individual identity, was not an isolated, meaningless effort but part of a greater, if never officially acknowledged, pattern — the silent but persistent refusal of countless other Skitarii, across centuries and across thousands of worlds, to transform themselves entirely into the impersonal machinery they served, without thereby refusing the service itself that they owed to the Imperium and to the Cult to which they owed their new existence.

Disquiet, because she recognised at the same time that this pattern, this silent individual resistance to complete extinction, ultimately never sufficed to change or even to call into question the greater system itself — that the Cult Mechanicus, however many individual Skitarii like herself wrestled inwardly with the loss of their original identity, would go on, generation after generation, forge world after forge world, continuing the same fundamental practice, tearing the same millions of people out of their original lives and transforming them into that agonising but militarily indispensable existence between human and machine which she herself had now led for forty-five years — not out of cruelty, as she had long since recognised, but out of that same cold, implacable logic of necessity that held the whole Imperium of Man together in its endless, everlasting war against the countless threats surrounding it on every side — Orks, xenos raiders, the corruption of Chaos, the creeping, unstoppable entropy of a galaxy which, as she had been taught in her very first binary litany, had fallen ever further into decay since the loss of the blessings of the Dark Age of Technology.

She found, in this greater, Imperium-wide context, a kind of bleak clarity about the real nature of what she herself, what every Skitarius, actually represented — not an individual sacrifice that some higher cosmic justice would ultimately acknowledge or reward, but a necessary yet ultimately anonymous contribution to a system whose sheer size and longevity made every single individual existence, every single loss, every single silent refusal to give oneself up entirely, at once significant and, from the perspective of the galaxy itself, entirely meaningless.

XII. THE DECISION

Serah ultimately refused the Ascent, a decision she communicated to Skitarii Marshal Corvane in a short, formal audience three weeks after the original recommendation, in words she had carefully prepared so as to express neither disrespect for the honour offered her nor to conceal the deeper, more personal truth underlying her decision.

"I am grateful for the trust this recommendation represents," she said, while Corvane's red-glowing optical sensors studied her with that unchanging, impenetrable attention Serah had known since her first encounter with the marshal. "But I believe I serve the legion, the Cult and ultimately the Omnissiah himself better by remaining what I am — not from any want of ambition or devotion, but because I have recognised that my worth, both to myself and to those I serve, lies precisely in what I still preserve, not in what I might gain through further transformation."

Corvane was silent a long moment before she answered, a pause Serah, in the years of her acquaintance with the marshal, recognised as rare enough to accord it a certain significance. "I made a similar decision, over two centuries ago," said Corvane at last, a revelation that filled Serah, despite her own by now considerable experience, with genuine surprise. "I was offered the Ascent when I was scarcely older than you are now. I refused, for reasons not unlike your own. What you do not see, Skitarii Ranger Four-Two-Nine, is that the refusal itself grants no permanent immunity against the progressive transformation that advances regardless, standard year by standard year, with every further modification, with every further activation of the imperative. I see less today of the woman I once was than I did two hundred years ago, when I first refused the offer. The refusal was nonetheless not meaningless. It was merely a delay, not a denial — an attempt to preserve as much as possible of what I was, for as long as possible, in the knowledge that complete extinction ultimately remains unavoidable, for every one of us who serves long enough."

It was a revelation Serah would consider again and again in the following years of her continued service — the recognition that even Corvane, whose appearance and bearing Serah had for decades regarded as the very model of unshakeable, almost inhuman authority, had once wrestled with the same doubts that still plagued Serah herself, and that the apparent finality with which Corvane now bore her own almost complete transformation was itself only a later station on a road whose beginning had once seemed to the marshal as strange and frightening as it now seemed to Serah.

The years after that decision passed for Serah in the by now familiar rhythm of maintenance, training and occasional but inevitable battle — further engagements against sporadic Ork raids, against a remarkable but ultimately successfully repelled attempt by a Drukhari raiding fleet to plunder the forge world's ore stocks, against the rare but always brutally suppressed internal unrest that broke out from time to time among the Proletor caste when the burden of the Flesh-Tithe became unbearable for individual communities.

She survived those years, while further comrades fell, further conversions reshaped the ranks of the Seventh Cohort, further young recruits from the Proletor caste were taken into their own ranks, whose initial fear and confusion Serah regarded with a growing, complicated mixture of compassion and a more detached, almost professional recognition of what she herself had lived through decades earlier.

She knew that her own history, measured against the great historical events immortalised in the chronicles of the Imperium, possessed no particular significance whatever — no victory she had won would ever be recorded in the annals of the Imperium's great battles; no loss she had suffered would ever receive notice beyond the immediate records of the Seventh Cohort. She was, like millions of other Skitarii across thousands of forge worlds, an anonymous, interchangeable component of a system whose sheer size made every individual existence at once necessary and meaningless.

And yet — this was the recognition Serah ultimately reached after decades of service, a recognition neither the cold, implacable logic of the Cult Mechanicus nor the bleak statistical perspective of an Imperium-wide view could ever have conveyed to her — the meaninglessness of her existence from the perspective of the galaxy changed nothing about the meaning that existence held for herself, and for those few comrades who had accompanied her across the decades. Dessin's last words, in the moments before his conversion, remained her legacy — the plea to remember, not what he had become, but what he had been, a boy from the Third Sector who had been afraid of the levy — and Serah, in the quiet moments of her continued service, kept that memory alive, with a care and devotion even the progressive neural damping of her own modifications could not entirely suppress.

She did not know how many further decades her own service would last before she herself, through death in battle, through traumatic damage beyond any repair, or through the slow, unstoppable erosion of continued modification, reached that point Dessin had already reached, and which Corvael Thessin and even Skitarii Marshal Corvane, each in their own way, were still trying to postpone. She knew only that, so long as she still carried enough of Serah Voktan within her to ask the question at all, she would go on preserving the small, unpredictable moments this existence still granted her — the sound of rain on metal roofs, the quiet comradeship of a familiar friend, the memory of a carved wooden bird and of the laughter of a man she had last seen forty-five years before.

· · ·

What ultimately became of Serah Voktan — whether she accepted the full Ascent after all at some point, whether she fell in service, as so many of her comrades before her, or whether she, in a rare case not noted by the Cult's official historiography, actually attained that form of dignified retirement granted to some particularly deserving Skitarii after centuries of faithful service — the surviving archives of Kadmus Secundus do not record with sufficient clarity to offer a final answer. What remains are merely the fragmentary reports of her own cohort, the occasional mentions in the binary litanies of subsequent generations of rangers, which spoke of a senior ranger whose devotion and whose quiet but unshakeable humanity — a word applied even within the theology of the Cult Mechanicus only hesitantly to a Skitarius — made her a kind of unofficial legend within the Seventh Cohort, long after her actual fate had vanished from the official records.

What remains is the seed that had become a tree — Serah Voktan, under the designation Skitarii Ranger, Cohort Seven, Unit Four-Two-Nine, for the greater part of her extended, transformed existence. Whether she, whether every one of those millions of people who across ten thousand years of Imperial history have fallen to the Flesh-Tithe of their respective forge worlds, is actually still the person he once was, or whether he, in the moment when the first implant replaced his original flesh, had already begun to become something else, could no longer be cleanly separated from that simpler question of which interstice she had lived in all those years — no less, no more, but other, in a way that justifies neither the complete grief of a final death nor the complete comfort of an actual transcendence. Even in the rare, quiet moments of her deepest self-examination she could never be entirely certain whether the tree still carried within it the seed from which it had sprung, or whether that seed had, long since and irrevocably, ceased to exist.

The End