'Iron-Father?'

Gdolkin looked up at the Apothecary's intrusion into his thoughts and followed the glance Caduceus threw towards the chamber's portal. Standing in the doorway was a stooped figure wearing a robe very similar to those worn by the servants of the Machine God, only where the adepts of Mars favoured robes of a deep red hue, the one worn by this man was black, matching the colours of the Iron Hands' Chapter. Also, hanging on a chain about the minion's neck was not the half-skull, half-cyborg symbol of the Opus Machina but the gunmetal grey gauntlet of Ferrus Manus's First Founding Chapter. It had once been a mighty Legion, but ever since the arch-betrayal of the Horus Heresy it had been split into Chapter-strength forces, each no more than a thousand warriors strong. There was the Iron Hands' Chapter itself and its successor Chapters, including the Red Talons and the Brazen Claws, formed when Roboute Guilliman, primarch of the Ultramarines and revered composer of the Codex Astartes, had decreed that so much power could never again rest with one man, and the existing Legions be broken into smaller forces.

The intruder into the peace of the apothecarion was a thrall of the clan, one of those young men who, in ages past, had been forwarded for selection by the scouts of the Sons of Ferrus but who had failed at some level of the induction programme. Whether it was that their bodies had not been able to cope with the bio-genesis of zygote implantation or that their minds could not adapt to the psycho-conditioning that went with it, they had not proved strong enough to be counted among the Iron Hands of the Emperor's elite. And yet, even though the Iron Hands hated weakness in all its forms, their non-brethren still had a role to play within the Chapter, tending to the needs of the noble battle-brothers and maintaining the fabric of the fortress-monasteries, as thralls.

There was no life for the thralls now outside of the clan; the shame of failure prevented them from returning to their tribes, where they would be treated as outcasts. All that was left for them was to serve those whose ranks they had once aspired to join; it was the only duty that gave them any satisfaction in life any more.

In mimicry of the Iron Hands' brotherhood, the skin of the thrall's left hand gleamed with the filigree tracery of electoo circuits. The implanted circuitry marked the thralls out as members in part of the Iron Hands' Chapter but was nothing like as magnificent as the bionics the battle-brothers were granted on translation from neophyte to initiate of the order. It was also a constant reminder of their place within the mighty Chapter - that they were members of the servile underclass, duty-bound to wait upon their overlords' every whim. They could never receive the honour that could have been theirs on the battlefield, only bask in the reflected glory of those who had passed the initiation trials and successfully endured the many surgical procedures that made them Space Marines.