164. Patchwork

While Tiberius brought Dankwart and Arrick up to the ‘Primarch’s Bride’, Aegis joined the fight on the surface.
All of them were hot on battle but especially Ferone burned with the hunger for violence. Crushing the hated Eldar had appeased a pain in his soul and being teamed up with Corven, now that the grey wolf had lost his partner, fuelled the passion in his hearts.
While their warriors were let loose into the fray, Vox and Titus contented themselves with overseeing the proceedings.
The battle plans had already borne fruit when they arrived. The warboss was dead but fallen alongside him was Chapter Mistress Hierouba. Bereft of her saint’s briefing, she had personally taken up the fight against the boss and been too close when weird machinery on it had exploded. The blast had killed Hierouba even in her terminator armour. 
Luckily, the dreaded Eldar helmet had been retrieved and destroyed by Celeste’s old honour guard, which would hopefully ensure that the Orks remained leaderless long enough to be beaten. Indeed, the tides of battle were flowing only one way today and this undertaking turned into the glorious victory the Wings of War had earned.
After only two further days of fighting, the rest of the matter could be handed over to the local forces and they could move on. Corred was an established confederate of the Wings of War and provided them with supplies of all kinds, including new troops and ships. After Vox had talked to the governor in person, the amount of supplies increased drastically.
The struggle to restore Arrick’s mangled body, meanwhile, yielded less definite successes.
It had taken almost a day of surgery to get all the monofilament fibres out of his mutilated flesh. Only after this, could Gerneya and Dankwart give a reliable diagnosis. The white wolf had lost both arms and a lot of the supporting structure of his shoulders. With this he was firmly beyond their abilities. Both of the sanguinary priests were good surgeons but the specialised art of implanting mechanical parts did not count among their skills.
All they could do was to keep him nominally alive until Vox and Titus were able to leave Corred.
Leaving the withdrawal of their troops to the captains, they started negotiations with the tech priests from the Fleet of Destiny. The bionic surgeon who had fitted Tiberius with his leg had left months ago but there were a number of priests who at least proclaimed to be up to the task. Not as many after they had seen the patient but still a few.
Vox and Titus were far out of their depth in this territory and thus they relied on their experts to counsel them. The price negotiations were undertaken with both their apothecaries and techmarines present.
To this committee each priest presented their plans with Arrick and named their price.
One of them demanded the ‘Sabre of Destiny’ in return for his services, the others all came a little cheaper. They wanted places of worship built in their honour, plenty of resources and people at their disposal, their own ships or all of the above.
The last tech priest they interviewed in this matter was a young woman. For a worshipper of the Omnissiah, she was almost sparsely equipped with bionic implants. Tiberius told them afterwards that she showed the exact minimum of implants a fully ordained priestess needed before she was allowed to leave Mars. Apart from one bionic eye, she had a largely organic face left, which bore a permanent expression of interested amusement. She stood out from the crowd of her competitors by asking for the post of the highest human tech priest on the ‘Primarch’s Bride’. The flagship had no human branch of the Omnissiahn cult yet and thus, this was an easy request to be met. 
When asked for her plan for the surgery, it turned out that she had none to offer yet. She had learned of their search very late and had not been present when the others had visited the patient. The Space Marines did her the courtesy to lead her to the patient. Gerneya and Dankwart had decided to leave him in hibernation until his surgery had happened. An Astartes’ nervous system could compensate a lot more than that of a human but trauma as severe as this could still leave long lasting consequences.
Vox and Titus retreated into the background and watched the five priests of different means begin a lengthy and clearly fruitful discussion about what could be done and what to watch out for. They smiled to themselves.
The young priestess was called Susannah Arbinder and she took her task very seriously. Lacking the extensive experience of her colleagues, she threw all her other qualities on the table. These included a knack for mechanisms, a willingness to learn from everyone around her and a surprisingly extensive knowledge of the Astartes’ anatomy. It turned out that she had spent two years with the chapter of the Emperor’s Warbringers before setting out on her pilgrimage. Her grasp on the special capabilities and limitations of an Astartes’ body was exemplary.
Arbinder requested the assistance of Luriel and Tiberius along with the attendance and support of Jebilla, the mistress of the forge. They worked for a whole week, designing and building the new prosthetics that would hopefully bring a fallen man back to the fight.
In the bath, the two techmarines spoke highly of her but warned Dankwart and Gerneya that they had to attend the surgery and not let her work alone. Arbinder had a brilliant mind that fizzed with ingenious ideas but she really was inexperienced and apparently a little scatter brained from time to time. The sanguinary priests promised that they would count their surgical instruments before closing any major incisions into Arrick’s body and left it at that.
Two days later, the implants had progressed far enough that the worshippers of the Omnissiah agreed that further improvements might as well happen after the surgery.
Arbinder had explored beforehand which of Arrick’s muscles had been damaged to an extent that they would have to be removed and thus, the prepared prosthetics covered the function of these muscles as well as the structural recreation of his arms. The surgery for them took more than forty hours and had to be undertaken in five intervals because the still human tech priestess could not stay awake and focussed this long.
When it was finally done, they gave Arbinder another day to adapt the hypno-conditioning techniques at their disposal to this new form of prosthetic before they woke the white wolf from his suspended animation.
Other than the slow emergence from Vox’s coma, retrieving a Space Marine from sus-an was more like punching someone in the brain. Dankwart administered him with the chemicals and seconds later the white wolf opened his eye.
It was after the even-prayer and all of Aegis were present for this. They greeted him but were soon forced to give him room. Arrick was disoriented and confused to find himself alive. Instead, the comrades stayed in the room for a while and talked among themselves while Vox sat next to him.
Listening to his friends with the angel close to him was the comfort he needed now. Healing took a lot out of a body, awoken from sus-an or not. For the severity of his injuries, their sanguinary priests had estimated that it would take several weeks before Arrick could even hope to partake in training again. Vox meanwhile had gotten very little sleep lately and rivalled him in exhaustion. 
So, the two of them just absorbed the joy of the moment, drank in the company of their friends and left it at that. When it was time to go to bed, Vox bent down to her friend and placed a gentle kiss on his forehead.
“Thank you, Arrick”, she whispered and then followed the others out. Titus accompanied her to the door. They had left the warp today and he had already asked Vox to be allowed to stay with Arrick during the night. She had been glad about this request because the guilt that she would be unable to keep the friend company had nagged at her. Titus kissed her hand for one last time before she departed and went back into the room.
The white wolf smiled tiredly at him.
“Not who I was hoping for”, he said peaceably.
“What? You’re not glad to have me?”, Titus asked easily and pulled a chair up to sit down beside him.
“Nah”, the white wolf said, still smiling. “I’m heavily drugged and totally irrational. I wanted to blabber at Vox. She’s good at making me feel secure about the stupid things I say.”
“I’m hurt, Arrick”, Titus said severely. “I thought we were great friends from the start!”
Arrick laughed.
“Yeah, great friends we were”, he growled and shifted on his slab. “Just be glad I didn’t shoot you from this start for endangering the mission.”
“Why didn’t you?”, Titus inquired, leaning back comfortably.
The captain shot him a calculating look.
“’Cause my little brother didn’t want me to”, he conceded then.
“How could you tell?”
“She never got angry with you”, Arrick said quietly, turning disconcertingly serious all of a sudden. “Only despaired. I liked the gay jokes by the way”, he added, trying to steer away from the grave topic again. “Rogan and I could kick them around for hours.” Hitting a reef.
He stared unseeingly at the memory of the dead friend until Titus laid a hand on his shoulder. There was almost no flesh left on this side of him. Titus mostly patted shiny, blue-black metal.
“See? Stupid things”, Arrick said with a sluggish look around the room. “My fingers itch”, he mumbled.
Titus shot the mechanical digits a surprised glance. The prosthetic recreated only three of them.
“So”, Arrick said before Titus found anything sensible to say. “You robbed me of the opportunity of her falling asleep at my side again?”, he teased him but stopped in face of the sudden severity in Titus’ expression.
“I think you did that yourself, didn’t you?”, the right hand asked quietly.
Arrick frowned until his commander’s meaning dawned on him.
“What’s this, Titus?”, he asked softly. “Checking where I stand? I saved you because I considered it my duty and because I rather like you. That I got hit wasn’t exactly plan A. Just the usual professional hazard, right?” Then he cocked his head and grinned. “Have you been worried about me?”
 “You know how it is…”, Titus gave back with an amused smirk.
“Oh, I do!”, Arrick confirmed and grinned at the ceiling. “Now”, he said then. “You’re staying?”
“If you let me”, Titus confirmed.
Arrick gave him a thoughtful look.
“May I blabber private shit at you?”, he asked.
“I would be honoured! Any specific private shit you’re thinking about?”
“I have a private question for you if you don’t mind.”
“Ask and I’ll tell you if I mind.”
Arrick gave a harrumph.
“Right. What was going on between you and her when I met you?”
Titus had to laugh uneasily.
“I had just found out that she was a woman.”
“And that bothered you?”, Arrick asked in surprise.
“It made me uncertain”, Titus admitted. “I thought I knew my best friend and then he suddenly turned out to be the opposite of what I had expected in a very major aspect. That was a crazy day. She had vanished with her sisters for a while and then unearthed you with key and everything. How come you never doubted her?”
Arrick looked away and smiled at the ceiling again.
“Can’t”, he said curtly.
“Why?”
“I stick to my healers…”, he grumbled comfortably.
“You had more than one?”, Titus asked.
Arrick seemed to count in his head for a moment.
“A few”, he conceded.
“How did you meet your current one?”, Titus inquired and Arrick burst out laughing.
“Oh, no!”, he said. “The last time I told that story… No. Simply, no, Titus”, he underlined. “But if you want, I can tell you how I got to know her.”
“There’s a difference?”
“Oh, yes”, Arrick said with a soft smile.