Unconsciously, Stronos dialled through his bionic eye’s spectral bands, the muscles of his cheek clenching and releasing to an ingrained rhythm, matching the acuity of his organic eye to the augmetic as he flicked from wavelength to wavelength. Iron Father Verrox had laughed it off as a tick, one that often manifested under duress or in the build up to a deployment, but to Stronos it was the very definition of physical deficiency. That it arose from a desire to expunge his body’s weaknesses did not repudiate it. Realising what he was doing, he stopped, the final transition from red to infrared leaving his flesh eye behind, staring into a pall of excavated bone as three heat wraiths materialised from the corners of the cell. They were hulking, black, visible only by the dim yellow corona that outlined their armoured frames, patches of fiery white around power packs and partially disengaged armour seals.

They bore witness.

One amongst their number stepped forward. His name was Jalenghaal. Stronos did not know him except by name and honour roll. He stopped half a metre before Stronos’ cot, and there triggered the manual release of a sectional plate from his power armour’s girdle band. For any Iron Hands battle-brother of a certain age, the removal of armour that they had long ago ceased to consider distinct from their own increasingly augmetised frames was a labour of hours, if not days, one that demanded use of a forge and a team of servitors. Jalenghaal and his brothers would have devoted many days prior to Stronos’ arrival in preparation for this ritual. Sabeq’s dendrites flicked expertly around Stronos’ front, swifter than either eye could track, to strip him of the corresponding piece.

‘With this link,’ Jalenghaal intoned, flat and without cadence as he presented the slab of black armour. Corpuscular attachments and tentacled bio-circuitry probed the air for the ligand sites of a Space Marine’s black carapace. ‘I bind you to my clan.’ The emphatic use of ‘my’ sounded an uneven note in the otherwise monotone purr of the Iron Hands brother’s words.

It was instantly forgotten as the armour plate slotted into Stronos’ prepared harness perfectly, his armour’s systems snarling at the influx of foreign data. He gasped, overwhelmed, as command protocols, tactical runes, and much, much more exloaded from the other Iron Hands brother and splayed across Stronos’ bionic eye. They hovered in view, like dripping steel, and in the blink of an eye Stronos knew Brother Jalenghaal.

‘By your iron, am I bound,’ Stronos managed to utter, and remembered to blink-click the ritual confirmation to Jalenghaal’s helm display.