Kratos5627
patreon
What Comes Next
🕑 Added 2025-06-22 16:11:21 +0000 UTCThe street was empty. Not dark there were a thousand candles jammed into every gutter, shrine, and brass cage but empty. Cassian kept walking, hands in his coat pockets, boots clicking on wet stone. Pilgrim chants echoed down the alley, slow and mumbled like they were half asleep. Maybe they were.
He wasn’t.
Too much in his head.
The House of Mercy was only a few streets away, but every step felt like it dragged something behind him. Not guilt. Not fatigue. Just… weight. Pressure. The kind you don’t feel when you’re running, but the second you stop moving, it sits right on your chest.
He looked up. The spires of Savavarn gleamed like rusted knives. Everything here was wrapped in incense, prayer, and polite delusion. Pretty world, under the decay. But it stank of something old and stagnant. Like a place that forgot how to change.
Cassian didn’t have that luxury.
He had personal power now. Enough that he didn’t flinch when something big stepped out of the dark. Enough to walk through fire and crawl out of daemon worlds with most of his soul still attached. That used to be enough. Now?
He sighed.
He’d plateaued. His body was as refined as it was going to get through traditional means training, conditioning, experience. Most of the warp enhancements, the nanites, the daemon augmented resilience they had stopped growing. Exercise was meaningless. Combat experience? He had more than enough. His body could only take so much, no matter how many scars or dead monsters he added to the list. He was stagnating.
And you don’t beat gods by stagnating or even maintaining.
Power wasn’t just in the fist. Though personal power is the basis of all. It was in access. Influence. Assets. And the STC was the linchpin. That little core of black iron and hidden code held more leverage than anything else he owned. Maybe more than anything the sector had.
A functioning STC wasn’t just valuable. It was holy. To the Mechanicus, it was sacred tech the kind they’d sell planets for. Trade armies for. Lie, cheat, kill, and rewrite doctrine to get a glimpse of.
Cassian had one. Or, at least, most of one.
He needs to effectively utilize it.
Not just for healing. Not just for personal upgrades. For power. Status. Political safety. Financial leverage. With the right introductions, he could flip that STC into long term independence. Ships. Resources. Backdoors into the Mechanicus’ own black vaults.
But first, he needed a name. Someone big enough to open the door. Someone who could process what the STC offered without screaming heresy and launching an orbital strike. He’d put in the request already, through the Illuminati. Discreet. Just a favor, offered in good faith. He’d return it later. That was the dance.
Still. He hated asking.
He was tired of depending on people who operated in shadows, who always had one hand hidden behind their backs. The Illuminati were useful. That didn’t mean he liked them.
He turned a corner. The House of Mercy loomed ahead now, squat and cracked at the edges, like everything else on this damn planet.
He paused before going in.
His hand flexed.
Fabius Bile.
The thought came to him. It had been coming to him in recent times. But just like before he shook it off immediately.
No. That wasn’t the road he was taking. That was suicide. Worse than suicide. Bile was brilliant maybe the only one in the galaxy who could push human biology to real, post human levels even primarch levels but he was also the kind of person who would dissect you in your sleep just to see how your dreams tasted. Working with him wasn’t even a last resort. It was a line that didn’t get crossed.
Still.
He’d give anything to read his notes. Just a peek. Cassian knew the Imperium’s real biological knowledge was ancient. Locked up. Most of it came from the Emperor. And his genetic code, Space Marines, Primarchs, Custodes… they were relics. Reproductions. Copy pasted blueprints from a man nobody could match. The Mechanicus didn't improve them. They just kept them running.
The thought frustrated him. Farron had done his best. And he was a genius but a mechanical one. Augmentations, machinery, systems. Not flesh. Not true biological design. He could inject STC derived nanites, run genetic protocols, splice bits here and there but real innovation? Beyond that? Beyond Astartes?
No.
If Cassian wanted more if he wanted to stand on par with what was coming he had to go deeper.
He had to understand genetics. Bio enhancement. Not metal limbs and replacement parts. Not bolted on upgrades.
When he met with the Illuminati’s contacts, he wasn't just asking about contacting the Mechanicus high command. He’d ask about their files. The hidden experiments. The classified strains. The stuff buried beneath doctrine and paranoia. He needed access to that work. Afriel Strain. Gland Warriors. Whatever else they'd cooked up in basements under dead moons.
Because he needed to start from somewhere.
To go further, he needed science.
Specifically, the kind that had been buried by centuries of dogma and secrecy. The kind only the Illuminati could even admit existed.
Most of their experiments were failures half the Afriel subjects ended up suicidal or violently unstable. Gland Warriors had promising biochemistry, but limited replication and terrible lifespan issues. Every promising gene strain came with fine print written in blood.
Didn’t matter. The failures told stories. And buried in those stories were patterns. Patterns that could deepen his understanding. Give him a real foundation.
He needed proficiency. Knowledge. Not scraps.
Because if he ever wanted to understand what made the Emperor’s works possible the Custodes, the Primarchs, even the gene seed itself then he had to learn the language first. Biology. Genetic symbology.
The Emperor didn’t make superhumans with prayers and machine oil. He made them with math, blood, and science wrapped in metaphysics. And Cassian wanted in.
Eventually, he’d dissect that legacy. Emperor’s legacy.
But for now, he’d settle for dissecting a few failed side projects.
Baby steps. As they say.
After all he has come to this place, to benefit from the chaos Abbadon's crusade would bring after all.
And he wasn’t going to be caught flat footed when it hit.
Cassian smirked as he stepped through the gate of the House of Mercy.
---
The rain had finally stopped.
Cassian sat in the back room of the House of Mercy, a cup of scalding recaff in his hand. The mug was chipped. The taste was awful. But it was hot, for him that was more than enough.
Farron stood at the window, watching the dripline where the water slid down from the eaves. His augmetic fingers clicked rhythmically, tapping on the old wooden frame. Occasionally, one of his eyes flicked infrared, then back again, scanning the street.
“You think someone’s tailing us?” Cassian asked, taking a sip.
“No. I think I’m bored. And I dislike this planet’s moisture ratio,” Farron replied without turning.
Cassian smirked. “You know, when I first met you, I thought you were incapable of being annoyed.”
Farron finally turned from the window. “I was incapable. You fixed that when you started talking.”
Cassian raised his cup in salute. “Glad I could help you feel again.”
The Magos rolled his shoulder. Something inside his frame gave a soft metallic whirr. “Emotion is a chemical distraction. I miss the purity of irritation free diagnostics.”
“And yet here you are. Living among meatbags. Drinking synth oil tea with half functioning plumbing.” Cassian gestured to the leaky roof and then the walls. “In a house full of dying pilgrims and questionable Sisters.”
Farron crossed the room and sat opposite him, spine clicking softly into place. “Don’t remind me. One of the Sisters tried to bless my cogitator yesterday.”
Cassian laughed. “You let her?”
“I froze the system mid-litany. She thought it was divine stasis. Called for others to witness. I had to fake a reboot just to get her to leave.”
Cassian chuckled again, then went quiet for a second, tracing the rim of his mug.
Farron noticed. “Something’s up.”
“Yeah.” Cassian looked up, eyes steady. “I got the contact.”
Farron blinked once. “Mechanicus?”
Cassian nodded. “High level. Very high. Illuminati pulled through.”
Farron didn’t say anything for a moment. His posture didn’t change, but something in the air did.
“When?”
“Twenty two hours,” Cassian said. “Encrypted channel. One time comm window. Location already set.”
Farron leaned back slightly. “Name?”
“Fabricator Locum Barnum Doscentis. He oversees the Skaros system.”
Farron rubbed his metal jaw with two fingers. “Any risk they leak what we have?”
Cassian shook his head. “No. They’re not stupid. They will know the value of the STC. They’ll want it kept quiet. And they’ll want it channeled through someone they trust. Which unfortunately means us.”
“Trust is a dangerous word.”
Cassian smirked. “That’s why I said unfortunately. Doscentis is known to be honourable though.”
Farron stood and started pacing. “Still, we’ll need redundancy protocols. No data shown on the first contact. Just proof of concept. Maybe a single subroutine. Something functional but non replicable.”
“I was thinking the gene-repair strand,” Cassian said. “The one that fixes degraded alleles in post-irradiated tissue.”
Farron paused, considering. “Minimal but elegant. Enough to show it works without giving them anything long term.”
“And if they get twitchy?”
“We disappear,” Farron said. “Or blow up the channel. I can rig it to detonate if their trace algorithms get too clever.”
Cassian nodded, silent for a moment. Then: “You ever think about what we’re actually doing?”
“Every day.”
“No, I mean it. We’re sitting in a house full of people praying for healing while we hold the cure to a thousand plagues.”
Farron turned. “You want to give it to them?”
Cassian shook his head. “No. Just… feels strange. Having something like that. And choosing when and where it gets used.”
“That’s not strange,” Farron said. “That’s power.”
Cassian exhaled through his nose. “Yeah. Guess it is.”
They went quiet again. Rain ticked faintly against the window.
Farron rubbed the bridge of his nose with two fingers. “Remind me why I’m following you again?”
Cassian shrugged. “Because I’m the only one crazy enough to try. And because you’d be bored otherwise.”
Farron chuckled just a little. “That, I can’t argue with.”
They sat there, listening to the distant rain start up again.
Cassian drained the last of his recaff, stood, and stretched. “I’m gonna get some rest. Twenty two hours isn’t long.”
“You sure you can sleep?” Farron asked.
“No,” Cassian said. “But I’m gonna try anyway.”
He paused in the doorway.
“We pull this off,” he said, not looking back, “we stop surviving. We start building.”
Farron didn’t respond right away.
Then he said: “Just don’t let the building turn into a throne.”
Cassian smirked, just a little. “No plans for a crown, Magos.”
“Good,” Farron muttered, eyes back on the monitor. “They always end up bloody.”
---
Word Count: 1840
Comments
Kratos5628
I am going towards rogue trader route, so more like fleet of ships instead of planet.
Siva Chandan Chakka
I like how you are approaching this transaction. In some stories these parts are rushed, like in one chapter or so. I like this way of writing it adds depth to the world building. Along with a trade chapter will he get a planet as well?
Kratos5628
It was obvious wasn't it?
NaN03
Is Cassian going to potentially get a Warrant of Trade from that STC ?
