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.
RUIN // STORM
‘Everything is an enemy.’
1
Above ground, it is raining. It has been raining for about seven hours without a break. The evaporated southern oceans, thrust into the upper atmosphere as steam, have returned, first as poison fog, and then as an apocalyptic deluge.
The burning population centres steam and sizzle, their fires inextinguishable. The molten cores of city-graves glow in sinkholes hundreds of kilometres across. Craters and impact scars fill with water, from the most massive hive sinkhole to the smallest bullet pock-mark. Plains turn to mud, an ooze as dark as blood. River basins flood. The forested sweeps of Calth’s highlands and valley systems crackle and roar as they combust, fire-fronts a thousand kilometres broad.
The rain forms a curtain as thick as the fog that preceded it.
There is a plague of rainbows. The downpour combines with the swelling blue-white radiance of the terminal star to decorate every prospect, every ruined street, every burning hab-block, every fire-blackened forest, with a scintillating rainbow.
4th Company moves underground.
The fighting group built around the elements of 4th Company retraces Ventanus’s steps through the sub-branch of the arcology, along the safe route built in colonial times by the early governors.
Despite subsidence from shock-damaged earth, which has split or slumped the tunnels in places, the passageways are intact and commodious. They offer an arterial that can take even the largest fighting vehicles.
Long stretches of the tunnel system are partially flooded, with still more water sluicing down through broken pipes and drains, and running through clefts and cracks in the roof. The rain is getting in wherever it can. Men wade, up to their waists. Tanks and carriers glide, pressing through the silty black water like reptiles, their slow-moving hulls stirring up little, flowing wakes.
Ventanus moves along at the front, with Vattian and the scouts. He leads the way, standard in hand.
Two hours after they leave the palace, the data and vox links are finally restored, thanks to Magos Uldort’s unstinting efforts. From the datalink, Ventanus learns that several strikeforces are closing to conjunct with him at the port zone, including a major taskforce punching down from Sharud Province, the assembled remains of the 111th and 112th under the command of a sergeant called Anchise. On another day, in another history, Anchise’s efforts to rally, compose, turn, and redirect his forces would become the stuff of instruction text and legend.
Today, on Calth, it is just another story of a man’s last hours alive.
Ventanus hopes that Anchise’s force arrives in time to render support. He doubts it will. The 4th is moving fast, and it cannot afford to wait or hesitate. Even if Anchise, or any of the other projected support units, make it through, there are still no guarantees. The port zone is in enemy hands. Numinus Port is a burning ruin, and Lanshear and the foundries have been overrun by the predatory hosts of Hol Beloth.