Jackrum sat quietly in a seat he had never expected to have taken in ten thousand years; The captain's chair of the Beacon of Knowledge. In the decades since he had returned from his studies on Mars it had been made rather clear to him by his battle brothers that while he was of vital importance to the day to day running of the Legion, they didn't trust him with anything other then tech; His ties to the Mechnicum were worn clearly on his armor and they had their doubts about his loyalty to Magus and the rest of the Legion because of it.
It was with a strange irony that proved that they had been right to be concerned, through not for the reasons that they had believed.
When the message reporting their loyalties to Warmaster Horus had arrived he had reasoned and tried to argue that they had needed to gather more information, work out what was actually happening before they through in their allegiance one way or another... but most of his brothers had been all to quick to believe their primarch, all to willing to abandon an Emperor that had largely abandoned them years prior when he judged their powers illegal.
Now he was the last battle brother left alive on the Nova Class frigate Beacon of Knowledge and was thus by default its captain. Pressing a button on the chair, he opened a vox line to engineering and sent a blast of what a normal human would have considered whiteness that was in fact compressed information sent in a single burst about the situation on the bridge. Getting updated on the situation in Engineering by Rupert, he frowned a little to himself.
There wasn't enough crew left to crew the ship. The Beacon of Knowledge had been running the official bare minimum crew to man it before the schism and the resulting loses had taken him well below the numbers required to get the ship moving at all. They were stuck in the void until further notice.
With a small prayer to the Omnissiah, Jackrum performed the rites to activate a distress beacon. He was careful to ensure that it was a Mechnicum beacon he sent out rather then the ship's own Thousand Sons one; Anyone who came looking might be less inclined to shoot on sight for the Mechnicum then his own Legion.
All he could do now was wait.
DX3214
Not a Sayan
SkyeOfStars
Veilsight