Munitions fill the void like seed pods, like blizzards. Columns of scorching plasma and las, hundreds of kilometres long, stripe afterimages on the retinas of those who witness them. Main lance batteries vomit bright energy and spit light in beams, in gobs, in splinters, in twitching withies of lightning.
Ships burst in the darkness. The Gladius, a four-kilometre-long escort from the Saramanth Wing, serially detonates as it draws clear of its slipway, its armoured hull sectioned and chewed apart by internal explosions. The barge Hope of Narmenia is caught by a missile spread that strikes it like a storm of needles, puncturing its upper hull and stern in a hundred places, peppering it, engulfing its interior in white-hot fire. The support carriers Valediction and Vospherus are wrecked by sustained broadside fire from a battle-barge of the XVII. The Valediction breaks up first, its hullplates unwrapping around a core explosion like a time-lapse feed of a flower’s petals opening, blooming and dying. Hastily deployed lifeboats are swept away by the superheat wash. The Vospherus, shielded by the fate of its sister ship, turns away to run, but the enemy guns reach it and pulp its drive section. Drive vents and engine bells explode, and the inward pressure forces a drive plant event, a series of star-hot overblasts in the engineering spaces that burst the stern of the carrier like a pipe bomb. The force of the blasts throws the ruined carrier forward on a pressure wave and slams the ship into the troop transport Antropheles, cutting it in two. Eighty thousand lives lost in five seconds.
The Infernus-class battleship Flame of Purity, one of the true monsters of the XVII fleet, runs into the Asertis Orbital Yard, firing cannonades to maximise collateral damage. Its prow is armoured: a vast, burnished ramming blade, a giant’s chisel gilded with seraphs, narwhals and eagles. It ploughs through the smaller, berthed ships in its path, bisecting some, ripping others open, shattering hulls. Its main spinal lance mount, a primary magnitude exo-las weapon, wakes and screams, uttering a shaft of matter-annihilating light that sends the picket cruiser Stations of Ultramar reeling from a hammering concussion as it attempts to defend the yard space. The cruiser tries to rally, trailing debris from a blackened and molten port side. It turns about, dazed, clumsily glancing against support stations and yard gantries. Clouds of pink flame belch from its stricken engines. It raises its shields. The Flame of Purity fires its recharged exo-laser again. The shields surrounding the Stations of Ultramar do not even retard the beam. They pop like soap bubbles. The beam vaporises the cruiser’s central mass, until it’s merely a toroid of hull metal around a glowing white-hot hole. The Flame of Purity powers on, bumping the drifting ruin of the Stations of Ultramar aside on its magnetic bow-wave.
In the dark pits of drive rooms and engineering chambers, hosts of stokers and allworks slave away with furious effort. The chambers are infernal, soot-caked and lit by the ruddy glare of the vast engines and reactor furnaces. Armies of stokers, sweat-sheened and roaring, eyes like white stones in blackened faces, shovel fuel ores and promethium pellets into the iron chutes. Servitor crews, their metal skins colour-bruised like old kettles by the constant heat, lever and haul on the throbbing activator rods that quicken the drive plants. Coal-black chains swing. Bellows wheeze and flush dragon-breath balls of roiling fire up flues and vent pipes. Abhuman labourers, troll-like and grunting, swelter as they drag in monolithic payload carts of raw fuel from the silo decks.
There is frenzy here, panic that is barely kept at bay by the lashes and orders of the engine room masters. There are no windows, no way of appreciating the outer universe or the threats it may contain.
In truth, the envied bridge crews in their glass and gilt towers far above have no better understanding of the calamity than the blind stokers down in the dark below. Knowledge of this irony may not have enhanced the stokers’ confidence.
Many will never know the light again. Some of the ships slain during the Calth Atrocity will continue to circle the tortured star for a hundred thousand years as frozen wrecks, as tomb ships for the silent dead, mummified and preserved in the act of screaming their final screams.
Ventanus and Selaton hit the ground. The drop is severe. Their strength and their armour absorb the impact, and they come up, bolters ready. Dust and ash films their armour plate.
They move.
The module reaches the ground behind them, shredding open as it lands. The noise is huge, a splintering of metal. Behind the module comes the best part of one of the pylons. They can hear steel hawsers parting like bolter shots. Broken fastener pins, released by the extreme tension, whistle through the air like micro-missiles.
Selaton and his captain outrun the falling pylon. It collapses like a tranquillised animal, buckling at the knees, and then falling from loose hips, then from a slack neck that turns back against the direction of the fall. Dust erupts in a rolling wall, as if driven by the sound of tearing steel. Ventanus and Selaton bound out of the dust wall.
The landing platforms ahead of them are covered with debris and corpses. Ventanus blanches as he sees fallen Ultramarines. Bolter fire has reamed and split their beautiful cobalt-and-gold armour. He sees one man who died carrying a regimental standard. It is a golden symbol of the Legion surmounting a double eagle. The banner pole is clenched so tightly in his armoured fists that his grip has marked the haft.
This was an honour guard. A ceremonial squad cut down as it prepared to board. Nearby, the bodies of city dignitaries, of trade officials, of seneschals, of aides and cargo foremen. They are bloody ruins: split sacks of meat and torn clothing. They were cut down by weapons designed for post-human war, weapons that could slay and have now slain the Legiones Astartes.
Weapons whose effects on unmodified, un-enhanced, unarmoured humans amount to overkill.
Selaton slows to a halt. He regards the litter of dead.
‘Move!’ Ventanus orders.
‘They were waiting to board,’ says Selaton, as if this matters.
Ventanus stops and looks at his sergeant.
It is so obvious, and yet, he missed it. It has taken Selaton’s less experienced mind to see the simple truth.
They were waiting to board. They died waiting to board, banners and standards raised. But it is, perhaps, fifteen or twenty minutes since the disaster struck, fifteen or twenty minutes since the orbital detonation that began the deluge of fire.
Did they stand there all that time, still waiting to board as the world caught light around them?
‘They were already dead,’ says Ventanus. ‘Dead, or dying.’
This murder predated the disaster. At best, it was simultaneous. The disaster was no accident.
Gunfire shrieks across the platforms. Las-fire spanks off the blast walls behind them. Bolter shells corkscrew the smoke they cut through. Impacts occur all around.
Ventanus sees Word Bearers advancing out of the filthy air. Troops move up with them, Army cohorts with lasrifles and halberds.
They’re shooting at any target they can see.
Selaton, still confined by the ethical parameters of the universe he used to understand, asks the obvious question.
‘What do we do?’ he says. ‘What do we do?’