Know no fear. The Battle of Calth

1

‘Who is... Samus?’ asks the Master of Vox. Then he flinches, and pulls his headset away from his ears.

‘Report!’ snaps Gage.

‘Sudden and chronic interrupt, sir,’ says the Master of Vox, working his console deftly to reconnect. ‘Interference patterns. It sounded like huge storm-pattern distortion, as if bad weather had closed in on the Leptius Numinus area.’

‘Have you lost vox?’ asks Gage.

‘Vox-link with Leptius Numinus is suspended,’ the Master of Vox reports.

‘The datalink is still active, however,’ says the magos at the next station. ‘Information is still being processed and relayed by the palace’s data-engine.’

‘Restore that link,’ Gage says to the Master of Vox.

Gage crosses to the strategium where Shipmaster Hommed and his officers are examining the rapidly building tactical plot. It is a three-dimensional hololithic representation of Calth and its nearspace regions.

The story it tells is a bitter one.

Virtually all the orbital yards are gone, or so damaged that they will need to be destroyed and replaced rather than rebuilt. XVII fleet formations are bombarding the southern hemisphere of Calth. The rest of the fleet has established a clear orbital superiority position.

The Ultramar fleet is scattered. It has been reduced to about a fifth of its original strength. Those vessels remaining are either fleeing to the far side of the local star to avoid fleet attack or the inexorable fire of the weapons grid or, like the Macragge’s Honour, they are lying helpless and drifting in the high anchor zone.

There’s virtually nothing left to fight with. They are done. It is over. It is simply a matter of the Word Bearers picking off the last few fighting ships of the XIII fleet.

The weapons grid seems to be having no difficulty doing that. It has destroyed the local forge world, a small moon with offensive capabilities, a starfort near the system’s Mandeville Point, and several capital ships.

‘We have sensors,’ says the shipmaster, ‘and power is coming to yield. I anticipate capacity for weapons or drive in fifteen minutes. Not both.’

‘What about shields?’ asks Gage.

‘It seemed to me that weapons or drive were greater priorities.’

Gage nods. The theoretical is sound. There are three Word Bearers cruisers effectively docked to the flagship. The weapons grid will not fire at the Macragge’s Honour while they are so close. The cruisers will not fire, because they would have done so by now. They have come in close to begin boarding actions.

The enemy wants the flagship intact.

Gage sees the pattern. For a moment, he couldn’t understand why, of the surviving Ultramarines vessels, many were the largest and most powerful capital ships. Surely an adversary with control of the weapons grid would pick off the most serious threats first?

The ships that have been spared are all helpless and drifting, like the Macragge’s Honour. The moment they shake off the effects of the scrapcode or the electromagnetic pulse, and move, or raise shields, the grid destroys them.

The Word Bearers intend to take as many of his Legion’s capital ships intact as they can. They want to bolster their fleet with warships. They want to build their strike power.

They want to turn Ultramarines ships against the Imperium.

What was that nonsense Lorgar was ranting at the end? Horus turning? A civil war? He was demented and, besides, it wasn’t Lorgar. It was some xenos manipulation. It was some empyrean breach effect.

Gage knows he’s lying to himself. Today has changed the shape of the galaxy in a way that the wildest theoretical could not have anticipated. He hopes he will not live to endure the new order.

However long the rest of his life turns out to be, he will not allow ships of Ultramar to be used against the Imperium.

He turns to Empion.

‘Are your squads assembled?’

‘They are,’ says Empion.

‘Mobilise,’ orders Gage. ‘Repel boarders. Find them and drive them off this ship.’

Oll Persson tells them to wait.

Smoke covers the river, covers the wharfs, covers the docks. Two container ships are on fire out in the estuary, making dancing yellow fuzzes in the stagnant fog. It’s as if the whole world is reducing to a vaporous state.

He tells them to wait: Graft, Zybes, the two troopers and the silent girl. They take cover in a pilot’s house overlooking the landing. They’re all armed, except Graft and the girl. She has still to speak a word or look anyone in the eye.

Oll shoulders his rifle sling and finds a quiet spot in one of the packing sheds. Back in the day, he’d often come to Neride Point for the markets. There was always a fresh catch coming in, even though the wharf spaces were primarily industrial. Hundreds of boats would bob along the jetties and landings, in between the bulk containers.

It’s all messed up now. More than one huge sea-surge has swept boats into the streets and smashed them against habs and factory structures. The streets are wet, and covered with an ankle-deep litter of garbage and debris. The water is worse. It’s like brown oil, and there are bodies floating in it, thousands of bodies, all choking the landings and under the pier walks and bridges, gathered up by the prevailing currents like jettisoned trash.

The place smells of death. Waterlogged death.

Oll sits down and opens his old kitbag. He turns out the few items he rescued from his bedroom and sorts through them on the top of an old packing case.

There’s a little tin, a tobacco tin for rough cut lho leaf. He hasn’t smoked in a long time, but several older versions of him did. He pops the tin open, smells the captured scent of lho, and tips the cloth bundle into his palm. He opens it.

They are just as he remembered them. A little silver compass and a jet pendulum. Well, they look like silver and jet, and he’s never corrected anyone who said that’s what they were. The jet stone is suspended on a very fine silver chain. It’s been years since he last used these objects – Oll suspects it might be more than a hundred – but the polished black orb on the end of the chain is warm.

The compass is fashioned in the form of a human skull, a beautiful piece of metalwork no bigger than his thumb. The cranium is slightly elongated, slightly longer than standard human proportions, suggesting that it was not actually a human skull that formed the model for the design. The skull, a box, opens along the jawline on minutely engineered hinges, so that the roof of the mouth is revealed as the dial of the compass. The markings on the compass rim are so small and intricate you’d need a watchmaker’s loup to read them. Oll has one of those too.

The simple gold and black pointer spins fluidly as he moves the tiny instrument.

He sets it down, aligns it north. He watches the pointer twitch.

Oll takes a little clasp notebook out of his kit and opens it to a fresh page. Half the book is filled with old handwriting. He slides out the notebook’s stylus, opens it, and writes down the date and the place.

It takes a few minutes. He suspends the pendulum over the compass on its silver chain and lets it swing. He repeats the process several times, noting down, in a neat column, the angles and directions of the spin and the twitches of the compass needle. He calculates and writes down the azimuth. Then he flips the pages of the notebook to the back, opens out a folded, yellow sheet of paper that has been glued into the back cover, and studies the chart. It was written on Terra, twenty-two thousand years earlier, a copy of a chart that had been drawn twenty-two thousand years before that. His handwriting was rather different in those days. The chart shows a wind rose of cardinal points. It is a piece of sublime mystery recorded in ink. Oll thinks of the two forces clashing on Calth and reflects that they are both right about one thing. It’s the one thing they agree on. Words are power, some of them at least. Information is victory.

‘Thrascias,’ he says to himself. As he suspected, they’re going to need a boat.

He packs his things away as carefully as he unwrapped them, preps his gun, and goes to find the others.

Bale Rane looks dubiously at the skiff.

‘Hurry up and get in,’ says Oll.

The skiff’s a fishing craft, good for a dozen people, with a small covered cabin and a long narrow hull.

‘Where are we going?’ asks Zybes.

‘Away from here,’ says Oll, lifting some of the boxes aboard. ‘Far away. Thrascias.’

‘What?’ asks Zybes.

‘North-north-west,’ Oll corrects himself.

‘Why?’ asks Rane.

‘It’s where we have to go. Help me with the boxes.’

They’ve packed some canned food, some foil-wrapped ration packs, some medical supplies and some other essentials, looted from the pilot house. Krank and Graft have gone back down the landing to fill four big plastek drums with drinking water from the dockside tanks.

‘Are we rowing?’ asks Rane.

‘No, it’s got an engine. A little fusion plant. But it makes a noise, and there are times when we’ll have to be quiet, so we’re taking oars too.’

‘I’m not rowing,’ says Rane.

‘I’m not asking you to, boy. That’s why we brought Graft. He doesn’t get tired.’

The boy, Rane, is getting fidgety. Oll can see it. They’re all nervous. All except Katt, who’s just sitting on a bollard, gazing at the bodies in the water. There’s gunfire in the streets up in the Point, and the sound of tanks. Tanks and dogs.

Except Oll knows they’re not dogs.

‘Go help your friend with the water,’ says Oll. He climbs aboard to check the electrics and tick the engine over.

Rane goes back up the landing towards the tanks. Gusting wind drives black smoke across the wharf, and it makes him cough.

He’s not even thinking about Neve. Not at all.

She’s just there, suddenly. Right there in front of him, as though she stepped out of the smoke.

She smiles. She’s never looked more beautiful to him.

‘I’ve been looking for you, Bale,’ she says. ‘I thought I’d never see you again.’

He can’t speak. He goes to her, his arms wide, eyes wet.

By the tanks, Krank looks up. He sees Rane, down the boardwalk. He sees what he’s doing.

‘Bale!’ Krank screams. ‘Bale, don’t! Don’t!’

He starts to run to help, but there are suddenly men in his way. Men on the jetty. Men looming out of the smoke. They are hard and dirty, dressed in black. They are scrawny, as if they’re underfed. They have guns, rifles. They have knives made of black glass and dirty metal.

Krank’s rifle is leaning against the tank. He backs away. There’s no hope of him reaching it.

The knife brothers laugh at him.

‘Kill him,’ Criol Fowst tells the Ushmetar Kaul.

Suits sealed, kill squad six exits the Port 86 airgate. Thiel has command. Empion has personally given him the responsibility, even though there are several captains among the assembled shipboard survivors who would have seen the duty as an honour.

Forty squads move through the hull of the Macragge’s Honour. Forty kill squads, each of thirty men. They carry bolters and close-combat weapons. Three brothers in each squad lug mag-mines.

Thiel’s squad emerges aft of one of the main port-side attitude thrusters. It’s a giant, solid mass like the tower of a habitat block, mounting exhaust bells on each aspect that could form the domes of decent-sized temples.

Calth rises above the thruster assembly: bright planetrise above a haunted tower. Calth has the look of Old Terra: green landmasses and blue seas, laced in white cloud.

But Thiel can see its terminal injuries, however. A spiral of soot-brown stormcloud caps part of the sphere, and other areas look like bruises on the skin of a fruit. The atmospheric discolorations are immense. Behind the curved shadow of the daylight terminator, sections of the southern continent are suffused with a luminous orange glitter, like the hot coals at the bottom of a furnace grate.

Mag-locks in his boots keep him on the hullskin. Advancing, he extends his view. He can see across Calth nearspace with extraordinary clarity. He can see the orbitals glowing with wildfire energy as they are consumed by conflagration. He can see the closest of the planet’s natural satellites blackened and stippled with fire-spots.

Nearer at hand, there are ships. Thousands of ships. Ships on fire. Ships drifting, spilled and butchered, shredded and ruined; slow swarms of wreckage, silent clouds of glinting metal debris. Beams of energy lick and flicker through the void.

The starfield, the vast unending spread of the galaxy, looks down on it all, unengaged and unimpressed.

The starlight is cold. It is like a sharp, clear evening of tremendous luminosity. There is nothing to interrupt the cool blue-white brilliance of the Veridian sun. All shadows are hard-edged and deep. Around him, it is either painfully bright sunlight or pitch black shadow.

All legionaries are trained for hard-void and zero gravity combat. This is strictly neither. The flagship supplies a limited gravity source, and a skin of thin atmosphere – the atmospheric envelope – clings to the ship’s hull, maintained by the gravitic field generators to facilitate the function of open launch hangars and docking bays.

There is, still, little sense of up or down. The landscape of the ship’s port-side opens before them like a hive’s skyline. It is a dense and complex architecture of pipes and towers, vents and arches, blocks and pylons. The scale is huge. The kill squad advances in giant bounds from one surface to the next, extending down the side of the ship as though they were acrobats moving across an urban sprawl from rooftop to rooftop.

The low gravity amplifies their strength. One firm step becomes a bound of ten metres. The practical takes a second to master, despite the hours of theoretical and drill. It is too easy to overstep, to push too hard, to fly too far. Across the wider gulfs, the ravines of the port-side cooling vents and the immense canyons of the interdeck crenellations, members of the kill squad switch to quick burns of their void-harnesses, clearing the divides of adamantium and steel chasms.

The Word Bearers cruiser Liber Colchis, a vast scarlet beast, has clamped itself to the aft port-side of the Macragge’s Honour like a blood-sucking parasite. The hullspace between the two ships is solid black, all light from the star blocked.

There are, however, lights within the blackness. Advancing with his team, Thiel resolves the spark and glow of cutting tools and clamped floodlights. Evac-ready squads of Word Bearers are surgically opening the flagship’s hull in order to attach bulk airgates and allow their storm forces to cross directly.

Kill squads Four and Eight are supposed to be arriving from other evac points to combine against this invasion, but Thiel sees no sign of them. How long should he give them? In Thiel’s opinion, the threat of boarding has remained unaddressed for far too long.

He glances at Anteros, his second in command.

He makes the signal.

They go in.

They hard-burn with their void-harnesses, following the wide canyon of a brightly lit heat exchange channel, and passing under the stark shadow of a power coupling the size of a suspension bridge. Their tiny black shadows chase them along the hull.

One half of their target group stands on the flagship’s hull itself. The other half stands on the side of a docking tower at ninety degrees to the rest. Melta-tools are being used on the hull plates. Bulk cutting heads are being extended from the open cargo hatches of the clamped cruiser. From Thiel’s orientation, the cruiser is above them, and the extended cutters are hanging down from it, biting into the flagship’s hull. Plumes of white-hot sparks are sheeting off the cutting heads into the darkness.

Thiel fires his boltgun, and the shells burn away ahead of him on trembling blowtorch tails. There is no sound. They explode the chest plate of a Word Bearer who was standing guard on a heat exchange port but looking the wrong way. His torso erupts in a ball of flame, expanding shrapnel and globules of blood. The impact convulses him, and sends him tumbling backwards, end over end. Thiel streaks past the spinning corpse, firing again. His third shot misses, gouging a silent crater in the hull. His fourth takes the face off a Word Bearer, turning him hard in a spray of flame and sparks. Blood balloons out from his ruined skull, wobbling and squirming in the near-void.

The rest of the kill squad fires. They streak across the target area like a strafing pack of Thunderbolts, and Word Bearers die as the bolter fire drums across them and punches through them. Bodies tumble and bounce. Some disintegrate, releasing clouds of blood beads that ripple like mercury. One Word Bearer is hit with such force his body flies away at great speed, dwindling as it leaves the flagship behind. Another is hit by a blast that causes his own void-harness to malfunction, and he lofts on a fork of fire, colliding brutally with the armoured hull of the cruiser above them.

Four Word Bearers die without breaking the magnetic anchor lock of their boots, and they simply remain standing on the hull, arms limp, like statues, or like bodies sunk to a seabed with their feet weighted.

The environment is full of drifting, swirling blood masses. They splash against Thiel, burst into smaller blood beads, slicking across his armour. For one second, his visor is awash and visibility is lost.

He brakes hard, jets back, makes a landing.

He clears his vision in time to see a Word Bearer bounding at him across the hull. They are both on the side of the docking tower, their ‘ground’ at ninety degrees to the level of the ship. The Word Bearer’s motion, assisted by the light gravity, seems exaggerated, almost comical. He fires his weapon. A bolt burns past Thiel. Thiel fires back. Silent, streaming shots blow the enemy’s right leg off and shred both of his shoulder guards. The impacts immediately and violently alter his course, turning his forward leap into a severe backwards tumble and spin. He cannons off a thruster mount and rebounds at a different angle.

Thiel turns. He barely avoids a power axe that slices out of the darkness. He kills the wielder with a single shot that smacks the figure backwards out of shadow into light. But there are two more. Both come at him with cutting tools: a particle torch, fizzing hot, and a power cutter. The Word Bearers bound at him, in big, slow leaps.

Thiel carries his electromagnetic longsword. He draws it from the scabbard, and puts two bolter rounds into the chest of the Word Bearer with the cutter, creating a shoal of dancing blood beads. Then he meets the torch as it flares at him.

It can slice through void hulls. It can certainly slice through him.

Thiel uses the reach and sharpness of the longsword to maximum effect. He cuts through the torch fairing, and the arm holding it. Blood spills out of the severed arm, and energy roasts out of the ruptured torch. Caught in the ball of white fire, the Word Bearer struggles backwards, thrashing, melting, incinerating. Thiel risks one hard kick to the enemy’s chest to launch him clear. Immolating, too bright to look at, the Word Bearer rotates as he falls away. The unleashed energy reaches the torch’s power cell, and ignites it. Blast-shock and light, both silent, surge up the docking tower, channelled by the hull. The fireball hits the skin of the cruiser, and ripples outwards, exhausting its fury.

Thiel is rocked back. His armour sensors white-out for a second, and he gets a burst of static and crackle.

He tries to lock down on the hull, to re-anchor.

The blast light fades. He makes a swift assessment of the combat. He’s lost two men, so far as he can see, but the Word Bearers force has been crippled. There are drifting, broken bodies all around him, surrounded by a sea of quivering, non-symmetrical blood droplets. There is still, however, no sign of the other kill squads.

Thiel jets down to the bulk cutting heads. They are huge instruments, each one bigger than a Rhino, extended on titanic articulated servo arms from the interior of the enemy cruiser. Thiel signals to Bormarus, who is one of the men assigned to carry the mag-mines. They start to clamp them onto the first of the cutting heads. Thiel leaves Bormarus working, and jets up the servo arm to a control platform mounted halfway up. If he can retract the mechanism into the enemy ship...

Like a comet shower, mass-reactive shells blizzard down around him. Some hit the platform and the guard rail, exploding with bright flashes. The deluge of fire is immense. In what is, to him, below, half a dozen of his men die, cut down. Blue-armoured bodies start to drift alongside the red-armoured ones. All the gleaming, trembling blood beads are the same colour.

He looks ‘up’.

His kill squad’s strike has not gone unnoticed. A main force of Word Bearers are making evac from the open cargo hatches of the cruiser. They emerge firing, their own void-harnesses flaring.

Thiel and his men are outnumbered eight to one.

Oll Persson steps off the skiff onto the landing. He’s got his lasrifle.

One flick of his calloused right thumb flips off the safety and arms the gun. Oll’s not even looking at the weapon. He’s looking straight ahead, looking up the length of the landing, looking at the figures gathered there. His face is set grim. It makes the care lines harder. His frown gives him a squint as though the sun is out and it’s too bright.

He doesn’t hesitate. One pace, two, and then he’s jogging, then running, running straight up the landing, bringing the armed rifle up to his shoulder, pushing it into his cheek, taking aim as he runs.

Shot one. A knife brother, in the spine between the shoulder blades, just before he stabs the screaming Krank in the neck. Shots two and three. A knife brother, in the face, the man pinning Krank down. Shot four. A knife brother, in the lower jaw as he turns, knocking him backwards into the water. Shots five, six and seven. Two knife brothers turning with their rifles, the trio grouping punching through both of them.

Two more start firing back down the landing stage.

Shot eight. One of the shooters, wings him. Shot nine. Kills him. Shot ten. The other shooter, top of the head.

Shot eleven. Misfire. Clip’s out. He’s been shooting a lot today. Ejects, still running up the landing, drops the empty cell thump onto the decking. Slams home the fresh one.

He reaches them, he’s in amongst them. Close combat. Oll swings a block, smacks the gun stock into a face. Trench war style, like they were taught all those years ago in the mud outside... Verdun? Oh, for a bayonet! The bare gunsnout will have to do. It cracks a forehead.

A sideways stamp breaks an ankle, another stock-smash fractures a cheek. He blocks a knife-thrust with the rifle like a quarterstaff, turning it aside. He shoots again. Point blank. Through the sternum. Blood sprays out the back.

Las shots rip past him in the dark. He doesn’t flinch. Four knife brothers are scrambling over the jetty-end railings to join the fight, to get at him.

Oll turns, lasrifle at the hip, thumbs to full-auto. One burst, muzzle-flash ripping like a strobe light.

There’s a bone-crack behind him. Oll whips around. A cultist he hadn’t spotted is laid out in a spreading pool of blood. Graft has punched him with one of his hoist limbs.

‘Thank you,’ says Oll.

‘He was going to hurt you, Trooper Persson.’

At times like this, Oll wishes he could have taught the old work servitor to shoot.

At times like this...

How many times has he prayed there would never be any more times like this? The sad truth of the matter, there is only war. There’s always another war to fight. Oll knows this. He knows it better than just about anyone.

Maybe this is it. Maybe Grammaticus was right, for once. Maybe this is the end war. Maybe this will be the last fight.

Krank’s trying to get up. He’s shaken. Oll looks for Rane. He sees the boy being dragged into the shadows by something.

‘It got him, it got him!’ Krank is gabbling.

‘It’s all right,’ Oll tells him, not looking at him, just looking at Rane. ‘Grab the water. Get to the skiff. We’re going.’

The boy might be dead. Might just be passed out. A lasgun won’t do any good now. The thing that’s got him has stepped right out of the warp. Oll doesn’t know what Rane or Krank are seeing. Probably something out of an illuminated bestiary. Oll sees it for what it is. Filthy matter, fused into a humanoid shape, clothed in the trappings of a nightmare. It’s real enough, real enough to kill, but it’s not real all the same. It’s just a reflection in the energy of this world of something out in the Immaterium. Something hungry, and agitated, and impatient to get in.

Call it a daemon, if you like. Too specific a word, really, though maybe that’s all that daemons are.

Oll glances down at the bodies he has killed, the ragged warriors in black. They knew about warp-magick. Not much, but enough to tinker with it. Enough to believe they’d found the unbearable truth. Enough to form a cult, a religion. Enough to lose their minds. Like the idiot Word Bearers. Warp-stuff is pernicious. Once you touch it, it sticks. Hard to ever get it off you again.

The black knives of their brotherhood. Ritual knives. Athames. He picks one up, the nearest, and wedges the pommel of it into his rifle’s barrel. An improvised plug bayonet will do in a pinch. He managed well enough at Austerlitz.

Oll jams it in, then steps forward and rams the black blade into the thing pawing at Rane. Black light spurts in all directions. There is a stink of bad eggs and rotten meat, a cloud of smoke.

The daemon-thing screams like a woman, then dies, and the matter of it collapses into black slime. The stuff is all over Rane, and the boy is out cold. But he’s still got a pulse.

Oll looks around. The girl, Katt, is standing behind him, staring at Rane.

‘Give me a hand carrying him,’ Oll says.

She doesn’t say anything, but she takes hold of Rane’s feet. Zybes appears, fear in his eyes, and helps her with the boy.

Oll yanks what’s left of the knife out of his gun, and tosses it into the soiled water. He touches the symbol at his throat, and murmurs a thanks to his god for deliverance. Adrenaline is spiking in his old limbs. He hates the rush, the burn of it. He thought he was past that nonsense.

He turns back to the skiff. The shooting will have attracted attention, but he reckons they’ve got time to pull clear and head out into the channel.

He sees the knife brother Graft felled. A commander, an officer, the leader of the pack. A majir. Face down. Blood everywhere from that head wound. There’s a knife on the decking beside him, another athame.

But the leader’s is a good one. A crafted one. A special one to mark his authority and significance. It’s a finer thing than the crude ritual spikes the others are wielding, if something so inherently warped and evil can be said to be fine.

It may not be exactly what Oll’s looking for, but it’s the closest he’s seen yet, and he’d be a fool to leave it.

He picks it up, wraps it in a rag, and stuffs it into his thigh pouch.

Three minutes later, the skiff engine rumbles into life, and the boat edges out into the dark water, away from the landing.

Criol Fowst snaps awake. He sits up, pulling his face off the cool, damp decking. There’s blood everywhere, blood all over him. He fingers his scalp, and finds a patch of skull that hurts really badly and shouldn’t be quite so mobile.

He is sick several times.

He knows something’s been taken from him, something very special and precious, something given to him by Arune Xen. Fowst’s future depended on it. He needed it to get all the power and the control he dreamed of possessing.

Someone’s going to die for taking it.

No, worse than die.

Muffled pounding. As if his ears are blocked. As if everything’s foggy. Like blood thumping in his temples.

A noise. A scratchy, reedy noise. It’s a vox. The vox in his helmet. A transmission. What’s it saying?

Ventanus tries to answer. His mouth is numb, slack. He’s upside down. He can smell blood. It’s his.

What is that transmission? What is the message? So tinny, so far away, so muffled.

He struggles to hear. It starts to get louder, louder, sweeping up through the layers that muffle it, like sound coming up through water, until it becomes clear and loud and comprehensible.

‘Samus. That’s the only name you’ll hear. Samus. It means the end and the death. Samus. I am Samus. Samus is all around you. Samus is the man beside you. Samus will gnaw on your bones. Look out! Samus is here.’

‘Who’s talking? Who is this?’ Ventanus stammers. ‘Who’s on this channel? Identify yourself!’

He is lying on the ground, on his back, on a slope of rubble and chewed-up lawn. He’s in the grounds of the palace of Leptius Numinus.

He gets up. Two Ultramarines are dead nearby, one crushed, one torn in half.

Ventanus remembers. He remembers Cxir changing.

He looks around.

The daemon is huge. It’s got immensely long arms, thin and bony, and it walks on them the way a bat uses its furled wings to walk. The twin horns on its head are immense.

It is attacking the palace. It is ripping the front walls down. The collapsing sections spew out in great, dust-thick torrents of stonework and plaster.

Battle-brothers and Army are retreating ahead of it, blasting up at it with everything they have: bolters, las, plasma, hard rounds. The shots pepper and puncture the thing’s grotesque black bulk, but it doesn’t seem to feel the damage inflicted. Ventanus can hear its voice in his ear, gabbling over the vox.

‘Samus. It means the end and the death. Samus. I am Samus. Samus will gnaw on your bones. Look out! Samus is here.’

Ventanus sees Sullus. Sullus has picked up his sword, the sword he used on Cxir. Ventanus knows, he simply knows, that Sullus is trying to make amends for the evil his mistake has unleashed.

Sullus is rushing the daemon, hacking at it.

Ventanus moves forward. He starts to run.

‘Sullus!’ he yells.

Sullus isn’t listening. He is covered in spatters of ichor, hacking at the thing’s rancid flesh.

The daemon finally seems to notice the cobalt-blue figure chopping at the base of its backbone.

It steps on him.

Then it moves on, oblivious to the mass-reactives streaking into its flesh. Another part of the palace frontage crashes down.

Ventanus reaches Sullus. His body is compressed into the lawn in a steaming, scorched depression that oozes slime. He tries to pull him out. Sullus is alive. His armour has protected him, though there are crush injuries. Bones are broken.

Ventanus hears a crash and a trundling sound. One of the Shadowswords ploughs into the palace grounds. It has come over the bridge, and rammed down the gatehouse to get into the compound. It has brought down the gate the Word Bearers lost hundreds trying to destroy.

The superheavy rumbles across the mangled lawns, knocking down some of Sparzi’s emplacements. It lines up its volcano cannon. Ventanus hears the characteristic sigh-moan of the capacitors charging for a shot.

The blast is savage. A light flash. A searing beam. It hits the daemon in the body. The blindingly bright light seems to dislocate against the daemon’s darkness, obscured. Dark vapour wafts from the creature’s body, but it shows no sign of damage.

It turns on the tank.

Ventanus starts to run again, across the shredded lawn, past the bodies of men killed by the daemon, towards the palace wall. He has a theoretical. It isn’t much, but it’s all he has. The daemon is impervious to harm in its body, but its head might be vulnerable. Brain or skull injuries might slow it down or impair its function. Maybe even drive the damn thing away.

It’s got the Shadowsword. The superheavy tries to recharge its cannon, but that famous slow rate of fire...

The daemon seizes the tank by the front of the hull, buckling the armour skirts and tearing the track guards. It shoves the three-hundred-tonne tank backwards, gouging up the turf like a tablecloth. The tank revs, pluming exhaust, trying to drive against the horned thing, tracks slipping and squirming. Mud sprays. Divots fly. The Shadowsword tries to traverse to aim at the daemon point-blank. The daemon slaps at the massive cannon muzzle, ripping the assembly around like a chin turned by a punch. Ventanus hears internal gearing and rotation drivers shred and blow out. The gun mounting falls slack and loose, lolling on the mighty chassis, weapon flopping sideways.

The daemon bends down, snuffling, and takes a bite out of the hull. Then it shoves the tank again, driving it back through an ornamental bed of fruit trees, and smashes it into the terraced wall.

Ventanus runs up a slope of rubble, leaps, arms wide, and lands on the flat roof of a garden colonnade. He runs along it, leaping over a section brought down by the daemon’s attack, and then jumps again, this time onto the marble parapet of the palace roof itself. He runs along it, drawing level with the daemon, almost above it. It is killing the tank, killing it like a hound killing a rabbit.

Ventanus can see the nape of its neck, wrinkled and pale, almost human. He can see the tufts and wisps of foul black hair roped across it. He can see the back of the skull, where mottled skin hangs slack behind the knotted bur of the preposterous horns.

Ventanus accelerates. He reaches for his sword, but the scabbard is empty.

All he has is Cxir’s ritual knife.

He rips it out, holds it in both hands, blade tip down, and runs off the roof, arms raised above his head.

There’s nowhere to go. Word Bearers stream from the cargo spaces, blitzing the area with gunfire.

Thiel ducks and dodges, bolts slicing past him on silent flame trails.

His kill squad is done. Mission over. The odds are too great.

‘Break!’ he voxes, and fires his void-harness on full burn.

The violent acceleration lifts him in a wide turn, up and curling back, streaking clear of the killing field. Four, maybe five of his squad lift clear with him. Zaridus, the last to come, is shot by down-raking fire, and his slack body spins away into the stars, jerking and zagging as the harness jets cough and misfire.

Shots chase them. Banking, Thiel sees flashes of noiseless light burst against the flagship hull below him and spark off the buttresses and struts.

He lands, hoping he has decent cover. He has to reload. He tries to calculate the enemy spread and assess the angles they will be coming from. He shouts marshalling orders to his surviving squad members.

The Word Bearers are on him anyway. Two come over the top of a thermal vent, another two around the side of the plating buffer. He gets off two shots. Something wings him in the shoulder.

No, it’s a hand. A hand dragging him backwards.

Guilliman pushes Thiel aside and propels himself towards the Word Bearers. His armoured feet bite into the hullskin as he gains traction. He seems vast, like a titan. Not an engine of Mars. A titan of myth.

His head is bare. Impossible. His flesh is bleached with cold. His mouth opens in a silent scream as he smashes into them.

He kills one. He crushes the legionary’s head into his chest with the base of his fist. Globules of blood squirt sideways, jiggling and jostling. The body topples back in slow motion.

Guilliman turns, finds another, punches his giant fist through the legionary’s torso, and pulls it out, ripping out his backbone. A third comes, eager for the glory of killing a primarch. Thiel guns him apart with his reloaded boltgun, two-handed brace, feet anchored.

The fourth storms in.

Guilliman twists and punches his head off. Clean off. Head and helm as one, tumbling away like a ball, trailing beads of blood.

Cover fire comes across. Another kill squad finally reaches the hull section. A fierce, silent bolter battle licks back and forth across a heat exchanger canyon. Struck bodies, leaking fluid shapes, rotate away into the freezing darkness.

Thiel triangulates his position. He signals to the bridge to open the Port 88 airgate.

He looks at Guilliman. He gestures to the airgate.

The primarch wants to fight. Thiel knows that look. That need. Guilliman wants to keep fighting. There’s blood around him like red petals, and he wants to add to it.

It’s time to stop this fight, however, and fight the one that matters.

2

Erebus stands, surrounded by daemonkind.

He is still high in the north, on the now-accursed Satric Plateau. The sky is blood red, the colour of his Legion’s armour. The horizon is a ring of fire. The earth is a cinderheap. The black stones marking out the ritual circle, the stones taken from the graveworld of Isstvan V, throb with an incandescent power. A wind howls. In its plangent notes, like voices chanting, is the truth. The Primordial Truth.

The truth of Lorgar.

The truth of the words they bear.

The surviving Tzenvar Kaul have long since retreated to a safe distance some fifteen kilometres away down the valley. Only the Gal Vorbak warriors remain, led by Zote, their obdurate forms proof against the lethal wind and the unnatural fire.

Erebus is tired, but he is also elated. It is almost time for the second sunrise. The second, greater Ushkul Thu.

He signals to Essember Zote.

Around Erebus, on the charred slopes and blackened rocks, the daemons slither and chatter, disturbed by his movement. They are basking in the luciferous glow, glistening, glinting, chirring; some sluggish, others eager to be loosed.

He calms them with soft words. Their forms stretch out around him as far as he can see, like a colony of pinnipeds basking on a blasted shore. They loop around one another, bodies entwined, embraced, conjoined. They writhe and whine, yelp and murmur, raising their heads to utter their unworldly cries into the dying sky. Fat blowflies buzz, blackening the filthy air. Horns and crests sway in ghastly rhythm. Batwings spread and flutter. Segmented legs stir and rattle.

Erebus sings to them. He knows their names. Algolath. Surgotha. Etelelid. Mubonicus. Baalkarah. Uunn. Jarabael. Faedrobael. N’kari. Epidemius. Seth Ash, who aspects change. Ormanus. Tarik reborn, he-who-is-now-Tormaggedon. Laceratus. Protael. Gowlgoth. Azmodeh. A hundred thousand more.

Samus has just returned, dipping into the circle to clothe himself in new flesh. There is still some fight left in the enemy then, for the likes of Samus to be turned back.

It will not be enough. It will not overcome what is descending.

Reality is caving in. Erebus can hear it creaking and ripping as it buckles. Calth can only stand so much stress.

Then ruin will break, like a storm.

Zote carries over the warp-flask.

Erebus tunes it to link with Zetsun Verid Yard, with Kor Phaeron.

Erebus realises he is bleeding from the mouth. He wipes the blood away.

‘Begin,’ he says.

Sorot Tchure watches Kor Phaeron’s face as he receives the message from the surface. There is glee. The time is at hand.

The bulk coordinates are already set. At a simple nod from Kor Phaeron, Tchure instructs the magi at their control consoles. The entire planetary weapons grid is retrained on a single new target.

Kor Phaeron’s eagerness is evident. He has played with the grid, annihilating battleships, orbitals and moons, but quickly wearied of the sport. A pure purpose awaits.

The Word Bearers affect a communion with the stars. The suns of the heavens hold deep meaning for them. The strata of their Legion’s organisation are named after solar symbols. Through superhuman effort, Erebus and Kor Phaeron have transformed the entire planet of Calth into a solar temple, an altar on which to make their final tribute.

Erebus has worn the skin of reality thin, and opened the membrane enclosing the Immaterium. The altar is anointed.

Kor Phaeron steps forward and places his left hand upon the master control.

He presses it.

The weapons grid begins to fire. Concentrated and coherent energy. Shoals of missiles. Destructive beams. Warheads of antimatter sheathed in heavy metals. The rays and beams will take almost eight minutes to reach their target. The hard projectiles will take considerably longer. But they will all hit in turn, and continue to strike again and again and again as the merciless bombardment continues.

The target is the blue-white star of the Veridian system.

Kor Phaeron begins to murder the sun.

‘We feared you had perished,’ says Marius Gage.

Guilliman has just walked onto the auxiliary bridge of the Macragge’s Honour with his battered kill squad escort.

‘What does not kill me,’ replies Guilliman, ‘is not trying hard enough.’

He makes them smile. He’s good at that. But they can all read the change in him. He was never a man you could warm to. He was too hard, too driven, too austere. Now he is wounded. Wounded like an animal might be wounded. Wounded in a way that makes that animal dangerous.

‘Voided without a helm,’ Guilliman says. ‘Primarch biology helped, but the atmospheric envelope was my true saviour.’

‘What...’ Gage begins.

‘What was that thing?’ Guilliman finishes. Everyone is staring, everyone listening.

‘Should this be a conversation we finish in private?’ asks Gage.

Guilliman shakes his head.

‘As I understand it from Thiel,’ he says, gesturing to the sergeant at his side, ‘you have all spent hours fighting your way through this ship against other fiends like it. It has cost you. I can see it has cost you, Marius.’

Gage is suddenly painfully aware of his truncated arm.

‘I can’t see any point in hiding the truth from anybody here,’ says Guilliman. ‘You have all served Ultramar today with more than duty might have reason to expect. And the day is not done. It seems unlikely that we will win anything, or even survive, but I would dearly like to wound our treacherous foe before we die.’

The primarch looks around the room. His armour is sheened and sticky with filth. His face is dirty, and there is blood in his hair.

‘Let us share what we know, and build some strategy. I welcome theoreticals from anybody at this stage. Anything will be considered.’

He walks over to the strategium.

‘We can use the word daemon, I think. A warp entity manifested and destroyed the bridge. You have fought others. Daemon is as good a word as any. It was Lorgar, or at least...’

He pauses, and looks back at them.

‘I don’t know where Lorgar is. I don’t know if my brother was ever in this system in the flesh, but it was his voice and his presence that visited me, and it was him that transformed. It was no trick. Lorgar and his Legion have consorted with the powers of the warp. They have forged an unholy covenant. It has twisted them. It has started a war.’

Guilliman sighs.

‘I don’t know how to fight them. I know how to fight most things. I can even work out how to fight warriors of the Legiones Astartes, though the notion seems heretical. Like Thiel here, I can think the unthinkable, and make theoreticals out of the blasphemous. But daemons? It seems to me, with the Council of Nikaea, that we voluntarily rid ourselves of the one weapon we might have had against the warp. We could dearly use the Librarius now.’

His warriors nod in silent agreement.

‘We should petition for their reinstatement,’ he adds, ‘if we ever get the chance. We cannot do it now. There is no time, no means. But if any of us survive this, know that the edict must be overturned.’

He pauses, thoughtful.

‘It is almost as though,’ he muses, ‘someone knew. Nikaea disarmed us. It is as though our enemy knew what was coming, and orchestrated events so that we would voluntarily cast aside our only practical weapon the moment before it was needed.’

There is a murmur of quiet dismay.

‘We are all being used,’ Guilliman says, lifting his eyes and looking at Gage. ‘All of us. Even Lorgar. When he tried to kill me, to rip me into space, I could feel the pain in him. I have never been close to him, but there is a fraternal link. I could feel his horror. His agony at the way fate had twisted on us all.’

‘He said Horus–’ Gage begins.

‘I know what he said,’ replies Guilliman.

‘He said others were already dead. At Isstvan,’ Gage presses. ‘Manus. Vulkan. Corax.’

‘If that is true,’ says Empion, ‘it is a tragedy beyond belief.’

‘Three sons. Three primarchs, the loss is appalling,’ agrees Guilliman. ‘Four, if you count Lorgar. Five, if what he says of Horus is true. And others, he said, had turned...’

Guilliman takes a deep breath.

‘Corax and Vulkan I will mourn dearly. Manus I will miss most of all.’

Gage knows what his primarch means. In all tactical simulations, Guilliman shows particular favour for certain of his brothers. He refers to them as the dauntless few, the ones he can most truly depend upon to do what they were made to do. Dorn and his Legion are one. Ill-tempered, argumentative Russ is another. Sanguinius is a third. Guilliman admires the Khan greatly, but the White Scars are neither predictable nor trustworthy. Ferrus Manus and the Iron Hands were always the fourth of the dauntless few. With any one of those key four – Dorn, Russ, Manus or Sanguinius – Guilliman always claimed he could win any war. Outright. Against any foe. Even in extremis, the Ultramarines could compact with any one of those four allies and take down any foe. It was primary theoretical. In any doomsday scenario that faced the Imperium, Guilliman could play it out to a practical win provided he could rely on one of those four. And of them, Manus was the key. Implacable. Unshakeable. If he was at your side, he would never break.

Now, it seems, he is gone. Gone. Dead. Brother. Friend. Warrior. Leader. Ultramar’s most stalwart ally.

Guilliman breaks the bleak silence.

‘Show me tactical. The nearspace combat. Someone said there was a vox from the surface finally?’

‘From Leptius Numinus, lord,’ says the Master of Vox.

‘Who was it?’

‘Captain Ventanus,’ says Gage. ‘We had a good signal for a while, and were getting a vital datafeed, but the vox cut off suddenly about an hour ago. A violent interrupt.’

‘I don’t need to ask if you’re trying to re-establish the link?’ says Guilliman.

‘You do not, lord,’ replies the Master of Vox.

Guilliman turns to Empion.

‘Assemble all the strengths we have aboard this ship. Kill squads. Every heavy weapon we can find. Forget Chapter and company lines, just divide and group the men we have into viable fighting parties. Have the squad leaders mark their helms in red.’

‘Red, sir?’ asks Empion.

‘We do not have reliable vox, Klord, so I want firm and simple visual cues for the chain of command.’

Guilliman looks across at Thiel.

‘Besides,’ he says, ‘I think after Thiel’s efforts today, it’s high time that stopped being a mark of censure.’

‘Yes, sir,’ says Empion.

‘My lord!’ Shipmaster Hommed calls out.

‘What is it?’

‘The weapons grid, my lord. It’s firing.’

‘At whom?’

‘At... the sun.’

3

Thunder rolls through the glowering skies above the shattered palace of Leptius Numinus. It starts to rain torrentially. The weather patterns of the abused planet are convulsing again.

Ventanus stands for a moment and lets the streaming rain wash the foul black ichor off his armour. He feels the water hitting his face. He opens his eyes and watches Sparzi’s flamer squads burning the slime, the blubbery black flesh and the noxious inky entrails the daemon left behind when it exploded. The flame jets sizzle and hiss ferociously in the rain.

He walks up to what’s left of the palace atrium. Selaton is waiting for him.

‘You killed it,’ Selaton notes.

‘I don’t agree with your definition.’

‘You sent it away, then. How did you do that?’

‘Luck. Luck of the very worst kind.’

Ventanus glances back at the ruined gardens, the ragged walls, the rubble of the gate.

‘We can’t stay here,’ he says. ‘Cxir said other forces were coming. This place was hard to defend before. It will be impossible again. This was never a fortress.’

‘Agreed, but what about the data-engine?’ asks Selaton.

‘Good question.’

Ventanus notices that his sergeant is holding a sack. He takes it from him and looks inside.

It is full of black daggers. Ritual knives. Some are black metal, some glass, some knapped flint; some handles are wire, some leather, some snakeskin. Selaton has collected them from the brotherhood dead.

‘You used Cxir’s weapon against the daemon,’ says Selaton simply. ‘Theoretical: these blades work. Their own weapons work.’

‘You may be right,’ says Ventanus. He looks into the sack. The blades shine and glint in the shadows of the bag. ‘But I’m afraid these things are as toxic and dangerous as the monsters we want to use them against. Throw them away, Selaton. Drop them into a well. Put a grenade in the sack and hurl it into the ditch. We can’t start using these.’

‘But–’

Ventanus looks at him.

‘Theoretical: that’s how it began with the XVII,’ he says. ‘Expedient use of an exotic weapon to turn back an unexpectedly resistant new foe. Strange daggers found in some xenos tomb or temple? What harm can they do? They cut daemon flesh. It’s worth the risk.’

A look of utter distaste crosses Selaton’s face.

‘I’ll dispose of them, sir,’ he says.

Ventanus walks to the stack room. He passes the chambers where Sydance is watching the magi trying to reconnect the vox.

‘Well fought,’ Sydance says, clasping his hand.

‘I was the thirteenth eldar this time,’ replies Ventanus, ‘but we won’t get that grace again. Is the vox up?’

‘They’re working on it. The datalink is still active. The server wants to see you.’

‘Good. I want to see her.’

Ventanus enters the stack room. Tawren has disconnected herself from the chattering data-engine. One of her magi, Uldort, has taken her place in the MIU link to maintain processing.

‘Captain,’ Tawren says.

‘Server.’

‘This data-engine is not powerful enough to seize control of the grid,’ she says flatly. ‘Moreover, it is not powerful enough to run the grid.’

‘So that’s it?’ asks Ventanus. ‘Our contribution now is... to collate and supply data to the fleet until such time as we are exterminated?’

‘That will be the fate of Leptius Numinus,’ she agrees. ‘However, please place that contribution in context. This is the only loyalist data-engine at work on Calth. It is not just a vital source of data. It is the only source of data.’

She shows him data-slate displays.

‘We have built a picture of resistance across the planet. It is broken and scattered, but it is fierce. Spread across hundreds of locations, as many as thirty thousand of your battle-brothers and two hundred thousand Army and Mechanicum warriors are still active. Coordinated, they can achieve more than if they remain uncoordinated.’

‘This palace can only provide coordination for a short time,’ says Ventanus. ‘The enemy is on its way.’

‘The picture is not totally dark, captain. About fifteen minutes ago, I made one profound discovery.’

The memory of that revelation makes Tawren smile. It is bittersweet, almost painful to think of, and yet uplifting. She found Hesst’s gift. She found what he was working on when he died, what he hid so scrupulously so it would be safe until she uncovered it.

‘My predecessor,’ she says, ‘managed to configure a killcode to combat the enemy scrapcode sequence. He achieved this feat shortly before he died. It was an act of desperation and genius. It is a sublime and intuitive piece of coding, and only Hesst could have done it.’

‘We can use it to purge?’ asks Ventanus.

‘Hesst hid the killcode in a secure data-engine which he then closed off and sealed. The data-engine is the manifest cogitator of the cargo handling guild at the starport. It is in a secure bunker in the industrial zone between Numinus Starport and Lanshear landing grounds. It runs cargo operations for both ports, and thus is more than powerful enough to manage the dataload of the planetary weapons grid. As a civilian engine, it was not a primary military target. Hesst cleaned it with his killcode and then shut it away.’

It was why he kept going until the very last moment, Tawren now realises. It was why he wouldn’t leave his post, even when the scrapcode had maimed his mind. He had to finish. He was determined to finish. He was hanging on as long as he could to get it done.

‘Can you control this engine remotely?’ asks Ventanus.

‘No, captain. I need direct MIU access to launch the killcode. Once I have purged a pathway into the system, I can create a new manifold and assume command of the grid.’

‘Getting to the port zone won’t be easy.’

‘Of course it won’t,’ she agrees. ‘There is an additional issue.’

‘Go on,’ says Ventanus.

‘The enemy is controlling the grid using a captured data-engine on one of the surviving orbital platforms. I can purge the system, but I cannot override that control. We need fleet assistance to target the platform.’

He nods.

‘What about the engine here?’ he asks.

‘It must remain functional for the greatest period possible,’ Tawren replies. ‘Magos Uldort has volunteered to stay with the engine and keep it running as long as she can.’

‘It is a death sentence,’ says Ventanus, looking at the young magos at the MIU link. ‘The Word Bearers are coming.’

‘Calth is a death sentence, captain,’ the server replies. ‘All that matters is how we face it.’

He is silent for a moment.

‘Prepare your staff for travel, server,’ he says. ‘See what you can do via the datalink to coordinate force response to support our assault on the port zone.’

He walks back to the vox chamber. In the doorway, he tells Sydance, Selaton and Greavus to mobilise the forces.

‘We’re evacuating this site,’ he says. ‘We’re going back to the port. Gather as much punch as you can. Fighting vehicles especially. We’re going to have to cut our way into it.’

‘This doesn’t sound good,’ says Sydance.

‘It sounds like it sounds,’ says Ventanus. ‘It’s the only worthwhile practical we have left. I need that link. I need the vox. We’ll be wasting our time without fleet coordination. Tell the magi I need vox.’

They move off, urgent. He waits. He thinks.

Arook appears.

‘I’m staying,’ says the skitarii.

‘I could use you.’

‘My duty is to the Mechanicum, Ventanus. This data-engine needs to stay alive for as long as possible. You understand duty.’

Ventanus nods. He holds out his hand.

Arook looks at it for a moment, baffled by the unfamiliar business of social interaction.

He grips Ventanus’s hand.

‘We march for Macragge,’ says Ventanus.

‘We stand for Mars,’ replies Arook. ‘It means the same thing.’

They turn as Sullus approaches. The captain’s armour is badly scratched and dented. He is limping. It will take a long while for his bones to knit.

‘I will remain here too, Ventanus,’ he says. ‘The skitarii could use a few Legion guns. Right now, I’m not fit to march far. But I can stand and shoot.’

Ventanus looks Sullus in the eyes.

‘Teus, this wasn’t your fault,’ he says. ‘It–’

‘This isn’t atonement, Remus,’ Sullus replies. ‘I don’t feel sorry for myself. This wasn’t anybody’s fault, but we’re all going to end up paying whatever we can. Take the port, win the grid, kill their fleet. Remember my name while you’re doing it.’

‘We have vox!’ Sydance yells.

Ventanus takes the speaker horn the magos offers him.

‘This is Ventanus, commanding Leptius Numinus. Ventanus, Ventanus. Requesting priority encrypt link with the XIII Fleet. Respond.’

‘This is XIII Fleet flagship,’ the vox crackles. ‘Your authority codes are recognised. Stand by.’

A new voice comes onto the link.

‘Remus.’

‘My primarch,’ says Ventanus.

‘You sound surprised.’

‘I thought you had officers to run vox-nets for you, sir.’

‘I do. But just this once. I was worried that your surprise might stem from rumours of my death.’

‘That too, my primarch. It will boost spirits here to know that you are healthy.’

The vox fizzles and whines.

‘I said, you’ve done a good day’s work, captain,’ says the vox. ‘The data you are sending is invaluable. Gage is coordinating our forces.’

‘It’s a bad day, sir.’

‘I can’t remember a worse one, Remus.’

‘This facility may not remain functional for very much longer, sir. Expect to lose the data feed in the next few hours. But we’re going to get the grid, sir. We’re going to retake the grid.’

‘Good news, Remus. It’s killing us. It’s killing the sun, too. I think the XVII want to kill everything that ever lived.’

‘It looks that way down here too, sir. Sir, this is important. We–’

‘The vox washes and crackles again.

‘–say again, Leptius. Say again. Ventanus, do you copy?’

‘Ventanus, sir. I read you. The interrupts are getting worse. Sir, we can’t complete our control of the grid unless the fleet can take out the orbital the enemy is running it from. We can purge their code once we’re in, but we can’t break it. The fleet needs to target and destroy their grid command location as a priority.’

‘Understood, Remus. A priority. Can you identify the target?’

Ventanus looks at Sydance. Sydance hands him a data-slate.

‘I can, sir,’ says Ventanus.

‘Remus? Say again!’ demands Guilliman. ‘Ventanus, respond! Respond! What is the target? What is the target?’

He looks at the Master of Vox.

‘Vox lost, sir,’ says the Master of Vox. Electromagnetic screeches issue from the speakers.

‘Datalink from Leptius also just went down,’ says Gage.

‘Did we lose them?’ asks Guilliman. ‘Damn it, did we just lose Ventanus and his force?’

‘No, sir,’ says the Master of Vox. ‘It’s an interrupt. A severe interrupt.’

‘It’s the sun,’ says Empion.

They all look at the main viewer.

Bombarded by concentrated energy and laced with toxic, reactive heavy metals, the Veridian star is suffering a gross imbalance in its solar metabolism. Its natural, internal chain reactions and energetic processes have been disrupted and agitated. Its radiation levels are rising. Its output is visibly increasing as it starts to burn through its fuel resources at an unnaturally accelerated rate.

Its blue-white wrath is growing more fierce, like a malignant light. A daemonic light. Black sunspot crusts seethe across its tortured surface. Staggering, lethal flares rip away from it in tongues of flame and lashing arcs of energy millions of kilometres across.

It is going nova.

Thunder rolls.

Out in the dismal fog of the channel, Oll steers the skiff through the black water, passing burning water craft that are half sunk, passing pale, ballooned corpses floating in the brown scum.

He thinks there’s a boat behind them, a way behind. Another skiff or a launch. But it might just be the echo of their own engine in the fog.

Krank is sleeping. Zybes sits staring off the bow. Katt and Graft are wherever their minds go to.

Rane twitches, in the clutch of a nightmare. They have bundled him in blankets. He probably won’t recover from his ordeal.

Oll takes out his compass, and checks the bearing as best he can.

Thrascias. It still seems to be Thrascias. That used to be the word for the wind from the north-north-west, before the cardinal points of the compass rose were co-opted for other purposes and given more esoteric meanings. Thrascias. That’s what the Grekans called it. That’s what they called it when he sailed back across the sun-kissed waters to Thessaly in Iason’s crew, with a witch and a sheep-skin to show for their efforts. The Romanii, they called it Circius. Down in the oardecks of the galleys, he hadn’t much cared about the names of the winds they were rowing against. The Franks called it Nordvuestroni.

Oll looks up. A star has suddenly appeared, visible even through the black fog and atmospheric filth. It is harsh, bright, blue-white. It is malevolent. A star of ill omen.

It means the end is coming, and coming fast.

But at least he now has a star to steer by.