“Don’t look so scared, admiral. You might even enjoy it.”
The servitor twitched briefly and turned its baleful gaze upon Captain Brunt. The bearded man, legs long since atrophied away to nothingness by years of seated command, mentally swivelled his chair cocoon towards the skeletal creature.
“Message, captain,” it clicked, cable bundles swaying as it moved.
“From?”
“Ardias. Space Marine. Very patchy.”
“Play it.”
Ghoulishly, the servitor’s dry lips moved in time with the relayed message, sharp voice suddenly dampened and bullied into Ardias’s gruff tones.
“...hear this, Fleet... an’t wait any longe... tramarines will evacuate in thirty secon... o more delays. No merc... eel no remorse at this, the vesse...onger part of the God-Emperor’s flee... tterly corrupted. It must be destroyed...”
The servitor’s mouth snapped shut with a dry crack and it turned back to its console. Brunt arched an eyebrow. On the viewscreen at the apex of the hot, dry bridge, the Enduring Blade hung enormously in the void. Its ruined generarium vented white hot promethium fuel in a ghostly trail as it lurched slowly, carcass prow splintered and battered, broadside weapons batteries reduced to gaping, toothless maws. More disturbing still, over the past hour an unnatural patina had begun to form across those obsidian faces of the hulk left undamaged; a green/red corrosion that matted every gloss, sullying every bright icon and gargoyle, wrapping threadlike pseudopodia of rust and mould and decay around it: strangling tendrils dragging its prey out of the light.
Brunt was put in mind of a tumour, breaking free of its initial lodging and spreading its cancerous cells throughout every network of fluids and flesh, grasping blindly, twisting and perverting and corrupting. Spatter clouds of sparks and minor detonations marred the crevices striating the broad hull, the corridor viscera within — black and fluid with whatever ruinous sorcery was morphing and infecting the ship — exposed like withered intestines.
He almost spat. The revulsion at seeing a vessel of the Enduring Blade’s ancient calibre — a beacon of purity and strength that had served the Emperor unstintingly for millennia — so corrupted and mired in evil, so defeated and violated, so utterly ruined... it was more than he was prepared to tolerate.
There were innocents still aboard. Hiding in their cabins, lurking in gloom-filled dormitories, shrieking and screaming as the last drop pods fell away without them and the Marines, their last vestige of hope, boarded their strikehawk and deserted them.
Brunt thought: Better off dead.
“Officer Jarreth. Prime the starboard arrays. Bring us into position. Contact the fleet. Tell them...
Tell them the Purgatus claims this lamentable duty as its own. Tell them to get clear.”
Kais slept. Dreamless and black. A sleep of exhaustion and confusion.
Unable to resolve himself, unable to discern his thoughts into some precise mental colloid of reality and absurdity, his brain took the only option open to it.
It shut down. It closed itself off from everything. It threw up walls of weariness, pulled the plug on consciousness and aborted for the time that it took to reset. To start again.
Total. Mental. Expurgation.
His father had spoken of machines. The machine. A machine that, refusing to operate and unable to diagnose its errors, will nonetheless maintain every outward appearance of efficiency after simply closing down and being switched back on again. But the error would remain. Secret and impossible to reach. No matter how many times the machine required restarting, reformatting refreshing it would continue to falter until the problem was tackled at its root.
Outside of his mind a recorded servitor voice announced calmly that the drop pod had just punctured the mesosphere. Crude target seeking arrays, in the absence of any user input coordinates, identified a major population/energy reading within the troposphere, probably surface-based, and adjusted its descent to accommodate. A klaxon trilled once, almost perfunctory in its lacklustre volume, and the servitor voice reminded its occupants to batten down any cargo and ensure that all vehicular freight was adequately secured. Human passengers, it droned, were advised to check the straps of their deployment booths.
Kais rolled over in his sleep, flaccid muscles sprawled liquidly across the deck, and dreamed of cool, dark nothingness.
Kor’vesa 66.G#77 (Orbsat Surveillance) gusted horizontally — in relation to the planet’s terminator — to optimise its view of the gue’la vessel. The two fleets skulked on either side of the crippled hulk, weapons visibly lowered but not unlimbered. The drone drank it all in, recording and surveying, hungry for data.
Drop pods left the gue’la fleet like rain. Sunlight transformed them into pied fish shoals, iridescent flanks sweeping in broad waves of shimmering motion. The planetary exosphere took on a dappled ruby glow as pod after pod sluiced through its boundaries in a riot of superheated matter and coiling gases, the onset of evening marked brutally by the crescent swathe of darkness gobbling up continents below.
Orbsat 66.G could sense the abundance of weapons descending towards the surface. Munitions, artillery, vehicles: all deployed in a succession of different sized pods and shuttles, dipping their armoured bases and plummeting daggerlike, swallowed by perspective within moments.
The tau flotilla, positioned carefully opposite its black-hulled counterparts, efficiently disgorged a growing swarm of dropships. Soaring gulls to the humans’ graceless divehawks, they descended in progressive V-shaped waves, flanked by Barracuda fighters and drone-operated Harpedoes. Orbsat 66.G tracked a Dorsal-class heavy bomber as it rolled into the ionosphere in a gust of blue energy and was gone.
On either side of the tiny drone, waterfalls of death tumbled planetwards, and spinning with morbid ungainliness in the space in between, the mouldering cadaver of the Enduring Blade turned prow over stern and vented oxygen into the void. One of the gue’la vessels moved forwards, a ponderous monstrosity letting the last of its brood eggs tumble away to the spawning ground below. It was sleeker than the Enduring Blade, spire-encrusted plate surfaces more streamlined, arrowhead beak longer and more vicious. The drone’s vast memory banks hurried to identify the vessel, rapidly narrowing its list of candidates as each unique feature of the ebony black facade-hull was checked off against intelligence reports and sightings.
“The Purgatus,” the assessment reported, noting an elaborate array of cannon lances protruding from the vessel’s flanks and an ancient battle scar on the uppermost toroq spires — clearly repaired with more recent metallurgical techniques: telltale identifying marks, like pectoral wounds on an alpha t’pel shark. “Retribution class,” the report said. Impossibly ancient. Impossibly powerful.
Growing energy emissions from the swollen gun ports sent 66.G into a flurry of confirmations and warnings tightbeamed to the Or’es Tash’var. The response was dismissive: “Continue surveillance. No further action. Negligible threat detected.”