I dash over to Quaani and prop him up. He falls limp and I direct two servo-arms on my harness to carry him and his stave. Drawing my hellfire pistol, I fire into the servitor horde followed by a sweep from the flamer integrated into the harness.

“Your own creations, Aldrich? You are so proud of them. It burns you as you burn them. I know Aldrich. Of course I know. I’m in your head!”

There’s, like, no woodwork on this planet, where did this chump even crawl out from?

A nanyte lathe slithers from its compartment and attaches to a port on Quaani’s pressure carapace on his lower back and floods his body with half my healing nanites, stemming a lethal brain haemorrhage and purging a surge of aggressive mutations.

I toss a couple of frag grenades into the burning viscera and stumbling limbs then sprint up the slope at sixty-two kilometres per hour reloading my bolter as I move, grateful for the time I invested in practising my implanted skills.

“Acknowledge me, mortal!”

The voice staggers me and my armour compensates, preventing the slightest hitch in my rapid stride. Two minutes and twenty-six seconds later, I have ascended four loops and barrel out of the entrance right into a blockade of over two hundred servitors. Plasma torches and servo-arms descend upon me, gouging my armour and slowing me down, my flamer unable to destroy the servitors before they can attempt a hit.

I withdraw the nanyte laythe from Quaani and draw the second one. Sheathing them in my power field, I strike out, disarming the servitors before they can get any more hits in. Though they are delicate, the powerfield prevents them from being damaged.

Hurling grenades at my flanks, I aim my hellfire pistol and press on, the burning blasts devastate their swarming ranks. My frequent reloads are covered by my fierce flamer.

“I was going to make you an offer.”

I duck as the thunderhawk screams overhead, chased by a dozen corrupted arvus lighters, wriggling with demon flesh that chokes their smoking engines as muscled tendrils sprout from their interior and hurl vital equipment from their holds to smash on the harsh ice below.

The arvus lighters blast the thunderhawk with multi-lasers, spewing high energy pulses at my only remaining lift off the planet.

“It can wait,” the voice laughs.

I break through the horde and continue my sprint. Eighty-eight servitors follow and fail to keep up with my speed.

The thunderhawk has cleared seven lighters and its armour glows hot and pitted. Its main gun, a turbo-laser destructor, is a crooked shard and its starboard wing turbofan engine is on fire.

There’s only one way I’m getting out of this mess. It’s time to roll the dice.

I power up my long range vox, “This is Magos Explorator Aldrich Isengrund to the Distant Sun. Can you hear me, Aruna?”

“This is the Distant Sun. Machine-spirit Aruna hears you, Magos.”

I take an extra deep breath and direct a servitor on the bridge to the command throne. It pulls back a panel and shunts a heavy switch, “You have control, Aruna. Please rescue us.”

A handful of seconds tick by, at the speed I’m running at, that’s five minutes. For Aruna, it’s days.

“Aruna confirms control. Restrictions lifted. Demonic infestation detected. Purge initiated. Coordinates locked. Orbital bombardment commencing in twenty seconds.”

“Thank you, Aruna.” I switch channels, “Mr Cygnus, give us a low pass, I need to jump on.”

The thunderhawk pulls from its dogfight and dives, skimming the ground at eighty kilometres per hour. I stick my hellfire pistol to my thigh and shift Quaani to my arms, keeping my sprint up the whole time as I align myself to the thunderhawk’s predicted trajectory.

Enemy fire peels away its armour and a blast of witchfire washes over the thunderhawk from the multiplying, demonic mouths on the arvus lighters. The starboard engine explodes.

Eight seconds later, the thunderhawk booms past me and I direct my servo harness to snatch the handles next to the fuselage’s side door. The sudden acceleration as I am hauled away squeezes and rattles me, but fails to shake me loose. Triggering the door, I direct the servo arms and power armour to drive me within the hull. The moment I’m in, the thunderhawk climbs at ninety degrees, spinning and twisting as it avoids the five remaining lighters.

I bring up the thunderhawk’s sensor feeds as I strap Quaani and myself into the jump seats. The sky brightens and, even through my power armour and undersuit, purifying heat scalds my flesh and boils my eyes. E-SIM cuts my senses and pumps me full of drugs; my breath halts and I choke.

“I am Balphomael, the Horned Darkness; I shall remember your slight, mortal.”

My burnt lungs cough up a sorry laugh; the ‘Horned Darkness’, really? What is he, twelve?

A final, outraged shriek makes my gellar field flare over my skin. That guy really hated it when I ignored him.

The thunderhawk spirals out of control and slams into the ice. My flesh fails and my thoughts hitch as I am forced to think with only my machine parts. The sensor feed reboots and, at my command, sends out a high powered ping.

Nothing remains. All structures and corrupted craft are gone.

The glowing skull in my interface displays a proud two hundred and forty-five kills.

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Reduced to a single, broken shuttle, victory feels hollow. Even so, a bloody, full toothed grin blooms upon my face as my twin hearts thunder unbowed.

I pull Quaani and myself from the wreck. My nanites have kept him alive and I command them to keep him unconscious.

Two kilometres distant from the thunderhawk’s tail is an uneven crater over three hundred metres across and five hundred metres deep. Snow and gravel rain upon me.

“I am going to ward absolutely fucking everything I own from cocks to cogitators.”

A swan appears in front of me and struts up and down, then turns and honks at me, rather than words, it sends me images.

I laugh, “Yeah, not a bird strike this time. Seven kills and a rescue all without a crew. Add ace wings to your model, you deserve it, Mr Cygnus.”

The machine-spirit honks again and a medal appears on its chest.

“Can you still reach orbit? Are your fuel and power systems safe?”

The thunderhawk powers up, two out of three engines spin and spray ice out the back then rev up enough I can feel the vibrations through my feet. Mr Cygnus nods and sends more images.

“Good. Yeah, I can get you out of the crater and clean out the control surfaces.”

I consider the problem. While I could spend hours with a shovel, I am injured and need to stay close to Quaani so I can continue to heal him. Instead, I focus on E-SIM and my upgrades.

When I first awoke and used my nanites, I believed they were all-purpose machines, a single tool that could do anything.

I was wrong.

Nanites are hyper specialised. Each nanite does one task and the speed I can construct modules, heal, or manipulate the world around me depends on the fractional percentage of each specific nanite. The only thing they all have in common is they cannot self replicate; a hardware level security feature.

There are two broad categories, external and internal, and three main build types, powerfield, organic construction, and machine assembly as well as three control types, control, compute, and energy distribution.

The default setting is ninety-five percent internal to five external with twenty-five percent dedicated to each build type, five percent to energy distribution, and the remaining twenty percent divided equally between control and compute nanites.

To change the settings I have to purchase an expensive module:

Warp and weft: alter the pattern of reality and weave it to your liking up to five metres in any direction. Speed is dependent on task complexity, nanite quantity and type. Requires significant power. External nanites are vulnerable to corruption and hostile environments.

Digging into the details, I discover the nanties I’ve been using in my nanite sprayer and for other external tasks were slow not only because ninety-five percent of them were non-functional, but because the energy distribution nanites are heavily restricted outside my body to prevent corruption.

The warp and weft module not only adds a superior inductive energy field but also extends my gellar field so I can shape materials without accidentally causing warp phonomena. It specifically warns against using external nanites for anything other than deconstruction in warp heavy environments.

I carry Quaani back inside and lay him against the wall. Next, I pay two hundred golden skulls for the module and E-SIM floods my head with knowledge.

The module is an electoo, a conductive tattoo, and I spend several hours inside the thunderhawk, my nanyte lathes stuffed inside a near vacuum box in a small maintenance bay as I practise printing the electoos on artificial skin. Having ten thought streams and clocking my brain to the point I can count a fly’s wing beats makes learning so much faster than when I tried my first upgrade.

The pattern the electoos take doesn't matter, so, with the aid of the research matrix, I adjust the patterns to arcanotech, or magic technology, wards from Aruna’s database. Most of the time, the wards won’t show up, but when repelling hostile influences or if I run energy through them, they will light up and make my skin glitter with miniscule, angular lights.

My circuit-like electoos, the ones I salvaged from the explorator that gave me the keys the Distant Sun, will have to go, but thanks to Iwazaru, the simian machine-spirit, I now know enough about subverting mechanicus systems I can transfer the authority to my own hardware, rather than be forced to use the original.

Practise complete, E-SIM accepts my offerings and begins construction of my new electoos.

I head over to Quaani and wake him. He jumps up and purple fire rushes over his hands and swirls up his arms.

“It’s over, Quaani,” I step away, wary of his warpfire.

Quaani shakes and turns his head back and forth, then spins in a circle, “Demon!”

“Everything it could influence is vaporised. We are safe. Snuff the warpfire out. Now.”

The fire winks out and Quaani remains stiff and twitchy. His shoulders heave up and down and he walks towards me, his mag-boots keep him from sliding down the harsh angle of the floor.

“Aldrich! What happened?”

“Our servitors were possessed. We lost the spaceport, all our equipment, and I lifted Aruna’s restrictions. I need to dig out and perform a few repairs on the thunderhawk, then we can return to the Distant Sun. It will be some time before we can resume operations and our startup will be significantly slower.”

“Damn it!” He punches the wall. Mr Cygnus appears and pecks Quaani’s knees, though Quaani can’t see that. He does, however, freeze at the multi-tonal hiss that shrieks over his vox.

He hurls himself towards me and presses his head against my chest, “I couldn’t do anything! It didn’t even manifest and I crumbled like sand in its presence.”

“It’s OK, Quaani. You’re eleven and a self-taught psyker, literally the most vulnerable section of humanity to its worst enemy. You survived. That, in itself, is a triumph. The Emperor would be proud of you. I am proud of you.”

Quaani shakes his head violently, scraping his helmet against my scorched armour, “You are kind, Aldrich. If I were to accept your words, I will not survive my next encounter. It is time for me to stop following you around and spend more time learning my family’s arts.”

I wince. He’s right, I just don’t want to admit it. No child should be forced to face the horrors of the warp. No human should. I can’t decide if being bred specifically for the task makes the morals of it better or worse, yet these doubts, these dilemmas, hold no value in the Imperium of Man.

Wrapping my arms around Quaani, I hold him tight to my chest, “We’ll learn together.”

“How can you help? How could you possibly understand? You are no navigator, Aldrich!”

I could be. Ever since I scanned his father’s corpse, the option has mocked me at all times. I do not want to invite the warp into my soul, to twist my flesh with its power and subdue it with my flawed, human mind. E-SIM does it for me. It knows no doubt or fear. It has no weakness to crack or flaw to infiltrate, or soul to corrupt. I have no such protections. So great is my fear I was willing to let a child, with his engineered perfection, to sally forth against the void and guide us back to barbaric civilization, believing he would be an adult before he would tackle the challenge.

The past two years of peace have made me complacent. I knew the galaxy was dangerous. I know E-SIM attracts the worst of it. I believed that out here, at the edge of nowhere, there would be time to grow. For both of us. I thought my preparations were adequate, my progress steady and assured. I’m still breathing. Quaani lives. I have my goals and my dreams.

Yet, no matter my advances, it’s not enough and it never will be.

I pat Quaani’s helmet and let the tears fall.