‘Pah, relax,’ said Sar Af. ‘I am not going to cut anything off. Not literally.’
Merrt tried to answer, but he only managed to make a deep and inhuman rumbling in his throat. His entire jaw and cheek was numbed and immobile. The lower half of his face was inert and paralysed.
‘The jaw,’ said Sar Af, gesturing towards Merrt. ‘That jaw of yours. It is the root of your inability.’
The Space Marine went over and picked up the old rifle. ‘You are being defeated by your own concentration,’ he said as he came back, as though he were repeating some litany lesson that needed to be repeated so that an unwilling student might eventually learn it.
‘Your focus is so intense that as you fire the gun, you twitch. So we need to remove the jaw from the equation. It cannot twitch if it cannot twitch.’
Merrt felt ill. The paralysis was so unpleasant that he felt he might be sick, except he couldn’t guarantee that his mouth would open to allow it. Visions of choking on his own vomit filled his head and made things worse.
‘Take the shot,’ said Sar Af, handing him the rifle.
Merrt glared back at him, hoping his toxic stare might communicate what his voice could not.
‘Take the shot,’ Sar Af repeated.
Merrt took a deep breath. He pulled back the bolt, took a round from his pocket, slipped it into the breach, locked the bolt back into place, then turned and lined up on the row of pots. A standing stance, unbraced apart from his own posture. No rest, no sand-sock, no tripod, no back brace: neither a recommended nor reliable position. He didn’t care.
‘Go on,’ said Sar Af. ‘Take the shot.’
Merrt settled his shoulders. He felt spittle on his lip, the dull throb of numbness under his ear. He took aim along the iron sights.
He breathed out.
He fired.
EIGHT
Conjunction
Dead space. The visible universe was a weathered brown blackness, as if the void was somehow filled with a fog of dirty starlight. Nebulous beige streamers of some exotic matter streaked the depths. More than anything else, there was distance, the unfathomable distance of gazing out from the bounds of a harsh and inhospitable solar system, a few lonely rocks tumbling around a dull, grinding, electromagnetic light source into the humiliating immensity of the interstellar gulf.
Then lightning struck.
The lightning was a spear one thousand kilometres long. At the heart of its blinding shock-light was a twisting vein of toxic yellow, like scorched ceramic. At its origin point, an interspatial bubble of rupturing subatomics, the root of the lightning was brighter than any star, and shot through with threads of sour green and galvanic blue.
The lightning flashed and died, then another spear flashed, and then a third that was twice as long as the first two. It scored a line of light across the dark firmament, and left a fading afterimage like a jagged fault line.
A fourth flash followed, this one finally puncturing realspace and eating a hole through it, like a hungry flame burning through a sheet of paper. Suffixed by a halo of aftershock lighting, the Highness Ser Armaduke translated through the puncture, leaving the warp behind and coasting slowly out into the materium. Aetheric energies coursed off its flanks like thawing ice, shredding away in its wake and disintegrating.
The translation point behind it popped and crackled as it healed and faded, puffing and cracking like a membrane under pulses of thumping pressure. The Armaduke stabilised and adjusted its realspace passage. Its auspex and detector grids began to pattern-search and composite the visible starfields to verify the navigation plot. Vox systems were enabled.
Six minutes after achieving translation, a deck officer brought a data-slate to Shipmaster Spika.
Spika adjusted his silver-plated voice-horn on its stalk.
‘Translation complete,’ he announced, his voice ringing through the ship. ‘Tavis Sun. Tavis Sun. Approach now factoring for fleet conjunction.’
He turned off the speaker and looked at his deck officer.
‘Have we detected the elements?’
‘Not yet, sir,’ said the officer. ‘If they have made the schedule, we expect to track them in the next twenty minutes.’
‘Has engineering come back on that consultation I requested?’ Spika asked. Since that first anomalous tremble hours before, he had been attempting to trace the aberration.
‘I understand a full field-and-rate diagnostic is on its way up,’ said the officer.
‘Hurry them, please,’ said Spika.
A klaxon sounded.
‘Battlefleet elements detected,’ another officer called out. ‘Holding position around the local star. Close, and preparing for vox-hail.’
They were back in realspace. Cohran could feel it. He had attempted to slip up-deck towards the main voxcaster assembly, but it was proving too difficult. There was too much activity, too many people who would see him and question his business in a crew section. He wouldn’t be able to stay in the vox room long enough to achieve his goals.
Instead, ever pragmatic, he headed back down towards the old munitions magazine that was serving as a cell. From his observations, the guard detail would be approaching a shift change. The men would be tired.
And there were only two of them at the hatch.
A full interdiction flotilla was waiting for the Armaduke. It was a patrol group from Battlefleet Khulan: four frigates and two cruisers supported the Aggressor Libertus, an Exorcist-class grand cruiser, and the Sepiterna, an Oberon-class battleship. In their train was a family of bulk transports and fleet tenders. As soon as they identified the Armaduke making its long curve approach in from the system rim along the invariable plane a barrage of vox-hails went up. Several squadrons of fighters were launched from the flight decks of the capital ships, and one of the escort frigates, the Benedicamus Domino, impelled forwards, void shields up, to meet the approaching vessel while its identity was confirmed.
Tavis Sun glowered behind the fleet spread, a malevolent red coal. The immense ships were just blowfly dots against its hot, dark mass. It was an old star, rheumy and frail, bloated and throbbing with wheezing electromagnetic gasps, like a feast-day fire dying in its grate at the end of the night. Its rasping, radiostatic voice blurred and chopped the vox transmissions, sandpapering the communication links. The star was bleeding cold gas and hot radiation into its lifeless system as it used up the last few millennia of its fuel mass. Dark spots like tumours appeared in its flushed coronasphere. Occasional septic pulses of energy and flame flared out into its stellar shadow. The planetary bodies that orbited it were scorched dead rocks or rings of debris, the residue of the ferocious burn the star had suffered a million years earlier at the start of its terminal decline.
The Highness Ser Armaduke gunned in, riding the gravitic slope, twenty million kilometres out and closing. Its flight decks and excursion bays began to prepare for open cycle. Tender boats and suppliers scooted forwards from the fleet line and fell in behind the Benedicamus Domino.
At the master station, Spika took the report from his deck officer.
‘Incoming hail from Cragoe, Master of the Fleet,’ said a vox herald.
‘One moment,’ said Spika, reading, speeding his way through the data-slate.
‘What is it, sir?’ asked the deck officer.
‘Fleetmaster Cragoe is hailing again,’ called the herald.
‘Look, look at this,’ said Spika. The deck officer peered at the hololithic displays Spika was consulting. They were field effect summaries from the immaterium leg. The deck officer had seen similar profile reports a thousand times.