Bonar closed the book and looked out at the sunlight.
The Unification Wars were drawing to a close.
The Emperor of Mankind had personally led his forces to crush the last armed resistance on Terra, the Ursh Empire.
Ursh had once been the most powerful faction on the planet, but as its allies were crushed one by one, it now stood completely alone.
Bonar had been left behind in the rear.
He was no longer permitted to take a single step outside the Himalayan Base.
He didn’t particularly mind.
He understood well enough that the force within him — what people called Psychic Power — was far too destructive, and until he learned to control it, even he didn’t dare stray too far from Grandfather Malcador.
But the thing that troubled Bonar most was…
The Thunder Warriors.
A considerable portion of people within the Imperium, including the Thunder Warriors themselves, now knew their fate.
Either they would die with honor on the battlefield, or the Emperor of Mankind would deal with them personally after the war.
Bonar didn’t want these noble warriors to simply vanish.
They had given everything for the Imperium, and yet they were being forced toward an end they hadn’t chosen, because of flaws in their own genetic makeup.
It wasn’t fair.
So every day, after finishing his studies with Grandfather Malcador, he would rush to the library and tear through the records, searching those ancient texts for any thread of hope.
But the more he found, the more hopeless he felt.
He was beginning to understand why Grandfather Malcador hadn’t tried to stop him.
If the Thunder Warriors’ genetic modification was like walking a Labyrinth with no way back, they had already walked themselves into its deepest dead end.
The wall was right in front of them.
The train called the Thunder Warriors was hurtling toward that wall, and it would smash itself to pieces.
Maybe humanity of the Golden Age could have found a solution.
But human civilization had long since been shattered beyond repair.
Bonar stood up and returned the book to the shelf.
Then he stopped.
There was a white-covered book sitting beside it.
Hm?
This book…
had it always been here?
He pulled it down.
It was worn, but solid.
The cover bore a white circle, and inside the circle was a simple Hexagram.
At the center of the Hexagram was an Aquila.
An Imperium book, probably.
Bonar had seen the Emperor of Mankind’s Thunder Eagle emblem before.
He knew his father had a fondness for eagle motifs.
It was probably useless.
He was about to put it back.
Then a slightly yellowed piece of paper slipped out from between the pages and drifted to the floor.
Hm?
He gave it a casual glance — and froze.
There was very little text.
Most of the space had been taken up by a large illustration.
But Bonar could read what was there, and what he read was genetic modification technology.
He’d spent so long searching for exactly this.
He scanned the data between the lines, and his instincts told him: this could be real.
He flipped the paper over.
Nothing on the other side.
He checked the page number.
998.
Bonar looked at the book with the Hexagram on its cover, then carried it back to his seat.
He set it on the desk and turned to page 999.
Sure enough, detailed steps for a genetic modification procedure, laid out with a precision that left him genuinely astonished.
Everything he’d managed to find before had been scattered and fragmented.
Some of it was barely better than the garbled chanting of a witch doctor.
Then he noticed the annotation at the bottom of the page.
99th Genetic Science Research Institute.
That explained it.
A relic of humanity’s Golden Age.
Bonar felt a surge of relief and genuine delight.
He’d take this to Grandfather Malcador.
The Thunder Warriors were going to be saved.
Then, for no clear reason, a small breeze rose.
The pages flipped rapidly on their own, all the way back to page 99.
What was written there stopped him cold.
An Omniscient and Omnipotent God?
Bonar’s brow furrowed.
What kind of superstitious nonsense was this.
The Imperial Truth said nothing about the existence of such things.
How could anything like that possibly exist?
His trust in the book, which had been running quite high a moment ago, dropped sharply.
Still, it also contained the genetic modification data.
He’d bring it along and verify whether the procedures were genuine first.
…
The Warp,
“You brainless brute!
You pig without a single thought in your head!”
The Changer of Ways was genuinely furious, which was a rare thing.
In the distance, Khorne gave a cold snort.
Good thing he knew Tzeentch was the sort who loved pulling underhanded tricks.
He’d made a point of coming to look, and it had nearly worked.
Turbulent.
Khorne had forces rampaging everywhere, burning and killing.
Slaanesh had stopped endlessly snapping at those bean-sprout types.
Nurgle, unusually stern, had gathered all those lively and rambunctious family members together for once.
And Tzeentch had not been idle.
He had woven over a dozen additional threads into the Web of Fate, all of them converging on Terra.
He attempted to contact his surviving followers there, but the Imperial Truth the Emperor of Mankind had spread across Terra had largely wiped out the Chaos Cultists.
Not that anyone was forced to believe in the Imperial Truth, of course.
The only cost of refusing was a Boltgun round to the head.
That damned individual had left a portion of power inside Bonar to guide his Psychic Power, which made Bonar extremely difficult to intrude upon.
…
Bonar returned to his room.
It was a simple place.
A plain bed.
A simple desk.
A chair.
Nothing more.
He normally went to sleep early, but tonight he switched on the desk lamp and opened the book.
He turned to page 99, and found an introduction on agricultural production.
Had he remembered wrong?
Bonar scratched his head.
He’d been reading so much every day.
Mixing things up wasn’t surprising.
Still, the book really was remarkably detailed.
Many of the Golden Age weapons that had turned up on the battlefield were documented inside it.
A wide range of other subjects had entries too.
The content was varied enough to call it an encyclopedia.
If the descriptions were accurate, the problem of the Thunder Warriors might actually be easy to solve.
The Emperor of Mankind’s modification of Gene-warriors had still been experimental, he had been working to find a balance in combat capability.
The Thunder Warriors’ raw power was undeniable.
Their armour was driven entirely by human strength, with no power pack to assist.
Factor in their combat experience, and it was no exaggeration to say that a single Thunder Warrior could defeat several times his number in Astartes.
The most powerful among them could even hold their own against the Adeptus Custodes.
But their genes were tangled together like a knotted mess, engineered purely to push combat power to its absolute limit, with no thought given to stability.
Thunder Warriors forgot things constantly.
Combat techniques, names, faces, all of it slipped away.
The premature collapse of the brain’s neural structures was most likely the real reason Thunder Warriors lost control.
For all that they had superhuman bodies, their neural structure was comparable to that of a hundred-year-old.
➤ Next: The Best Gift