The universe had betrayed the people. On Holy Terra, where they believed themselves to be most protected by the Emperor’s embrace, they looked up and the sky had become the enemy.
The ork moon seemed to graze the spires of the Imperial Palace. It was a monster of rock and metal. The misshapen sphere was all the forms of threat. It was the eye of alien judgement, it was the visage of impossible yet imminent defeat, and it was the fist coming to smash all hope. It should not be. It could not be. And by existing, it threw everything else into doubt.
It was the end.
The waves of the gravity storm shook Terra. The ground rocked beneath Haas’ feet. It heaved. Facades crumbled. A hundred metres away, tenements on both sides of the Avenue pancaked, and they and their inhabitants vanished in a cloud of disintegrating rockcrete. The dust engulfed the street in a limbo, then was blown away by the gale winds that had sprung up in the wake of the moon’s arrival.
The people ran blind. They trampled those who fell to the heaving earth. They did not see Haas until she beat them down. Some did not register her presence even then. They were fleeing to nowhere, and the only sight they beheld was the star fortress, whether or not they were gazing at the sky.
Haas felt it too. She felt the weight of its being threatening to crush her spirit. If she faltered in her purpose, she was finished. She understood this at an animal level. There was, deep in the frenzy, little room for the rational. She roared again, rammed forward with the shield, and forced the pilgrims before her to fall back three full steps. A tall, corpulent man in finery, some minor aristocrat on his home world, trampled the man and woman in front of him and crashed against her. She smashed her shock maul against the side of his neck. Electricity coursed through his body. His limbs went rigid, vibrating, and he fell on his back.
Behind him, a tenement wall loomed. It was less than ten metres from her. In the middle of the Avenue the sides of the street had seemed an impossible distance away, but the eddies of the mob had pushed her closer to an anchor point after all. The possibility of directed action gave her some focus.
‘Kord!’ she called. ‘The wall!’
She pushed again, making for the tenement facade. She heard Kord calling out to the next Arbitrator, Baskaline, and so the word spread. Her comrades followed her lead. A line began to form again.
The pilgrims numbered in the hundreds of thousands. They could not be dispersed. But Haas grasped at the nebulous idea of breaking off a sliver of the mob, bringing it to heel, and creating a first island of order.
That was barely a plan. The fact that it existed felt like a victory.
Kord, Baskaline and the others battered their way closer. They locked shields with her. One unforgiving step at a time, they pushed towards the tenement. The scream filled Haas’ ears. She roared still. She could barely hear herself. She could feel her rage, though, in the tearing of her throat. Hard smash of the shield, swing of the maul, a step, and then again, and again. The facade drew nearer.
Sudden, overturning movement to her left, seen in the corner of her eye. She turned her head. The crowd had upended a vendor’s food wagon. Its cooking stove burst, spraying flaming promethium over the pilgrims.
The great scream took on some new notes of pain. The fire spread quickly.
They couldn’t hear the scream in the Great Chamber.
There was an official reason given for why the High Lords were meeting in the Chamber’s vastness for the first time in years. The hour was a grave one, and called for a return to the most sacred tradition. That was a simple truth. It also had nothing to do with the decision to hold a session here. Vangorich knew of other reasons, some whispered, some not uttered at all. The Clanium Library was still filled with the trappings of Admiral Lansung’s vainglory. The Cerebrium, that favoured nest of power plays, was now terrifying. From the top of the Widdershins Tower, the ork moon loomed closer. Even with the casements closed, the presence in the sky pressed upon the room. The Cerebrium was too exposed.
Terror and politics. The Grand Master of the Officio Assassinorum wondered if there was any real difference between the two. The petty wars of the High Lords and their clawing for pre-eminence were the product of fear of each other at least as much as they were of personal greed. Even today, with terror more acute than any of these worthies had ever known in their lives, calculation and manoeuvring did not stop. The orks were on the doorstep of Terra but until they were in the Imperial Palace itself, and perhaps even then, their threat would remain distant. The other Lords were here now. The threats they presented to each other were clear and urgent. The need to neutralise the fraternal enemy never ceased.
And this is why we’re here, Vangorich thought. Its walls reinforced during the reconstruction after the Siege, the Great Chamber was the most secure location in which to hold a session, and the most insulated from the world outside. The terrible moon had come, and the ground had quaked, but these walls stood firm. The scream did not reach through them. The High Lords could concentrate on their agendas. They could reduce the threat of the orks and the collapsing order to abstractions — ones that could be discussed and made into factors in personal narratives, not confronted in all their terrible reality.
The Lords took their seats on the central dais. Around them, the tiers of the Great Chamber rose in echoing emptiness. It had been decades since they had been filled. Vangorich could still remember days when the full Senatorum had sat. Hundreds of thousands of people, debates rippling out from the dais and breaking into multiplicities of contention. The process had been messy, often sluggish and frustrating, and it was astonishing that it had worked at all. But it had worked, and worked well. The memories of that living governance sat in accusing silence on the benches, hovered beneath the distant ceiling and its fresco of the Great Crusade, and gathered in the stern eyes of the massive statue of Rogal Dorn.
‘You are setting a precedent, Lord Commander,’ Vangorich said to Udin Macht Udo after Tobris Ekharth, the Master of the Administratum, had called the session to order. ‘Notice will be taken that we are meeting here. Other voices will demand to be heard.’ He took some pleasure in reminding the High Lords that the scream would find them here in the end. They could not hide from events. If the Great Chamber was used, it would fill.
Udo wasn’t thrown. ‘Quite so, Grand Master. That is as it should be, in this time of crisis. They will be heard, in due course.’
Vangorich nodded, expression neutral. Udo couldn’t be thinking of spreading blame for failure, could he? The Lord Commander did understand that failure meant destruction for everyone, didn’t he? Vangorich’s fear of what was about to befall Terra, already acute, grew worse at the thought that the High Lords were not as afraid as they should be.
‘Admiral,’ Udo said to Lansung, ‘what are your recommendations?’
The question was respectful in its phrasing and its tone. It did not have to sound like an attack in order to be one. The session was being held far from Lansung’s trappings of authority in the Clanium Library. Udo wasn’t soliciting his advice. He was exposing the Lord High Admiral’s weakness, distancing himself from a former ally before he could be damaged by the other man’s fall.
‘Our options are limited,’ Lansung answered. His normally florid face was grey. His generous flesh hung on his frame as if it were pulling him to the ground. He had been brought low at the moment of his triumph. The bluster and calculation had drained from him. Whatever Vangorich thought of him as a politician, he knew Lansung was a brilliant military tactician. Alone among the High Lords, he had fought the orks. He had a true understanding of what had come upon them, and he spoke with a despair born of realism. ‘I’ve ordered the immediate return to Terra of the coreward fleet. But the orks are here now. We have the Autocephalax Eternal and its escort, along with those ships that had remained on local patrol and were not destroyed by the gravity storm. A squadron’s worth. Not much more.’