Thane leaned to the edge of his throne, elbows to the thigh plates of his armour, chin to his ceramite-clad knuckles.
Impossible.
‘Traitors of the Fourth.’
The inconceivability of it brought a shiver to Thane’s heart. He felt short of breath, his chest felt tight. The bald fact of what he was witnessing, that which was verifiable, that which was practical, simply could not overcome his disbelief in it.
Thane tightened his hold on the brass grip-studs. Focus on the immediate.
His voice, when it came, was the exemplar of strength.
‘Signal Obsidian Sky.’
‘I can’t, my lord,’ cried Teal, little trace of that invulnerability in her tone now. ‘The interference is too intense.’
‘Forward grids.’ Kale’s voice, coming from somewhere, some universe where Black Templars and Iron Warriors did not fight side-by-side. ‘Keep those fighters off our shoulder.’
‘Reduce magnification,’ said Thane. ‘Can you show me Interdictor and the main Black Templars fleet?’
‘Aye, sir.’
The screen blinked to a broader view.
A dozen Black Templars vessels of various classes came into active view, the swollen chromosphere of Vandis highlighting lance arrays, fins and turrets in bitter red. They moved in an arrowhead formation, the blunted point pushing towards Obsidian Sky and the Iron Warriors cruiser, but were blocked off and encircled by ork ships. Debris clouds filled the gaping holes in their formation. Ork gunships, muscular and tusked, surrounded them, bristling with firepower. A Black Templars destroyer was in the final stages of disintegration, a bite taken out of its belly by the boarding claw of a monstrous ironclad. All inertial control lost, the two ships slowly spun around their conjoined axis as the void fight raged around them. The thump of explosions lit the screen, energy lances and the spent heat of solid rounds filling the display like embers rising off a fire.
And closing in on their position, casting a shadow light-minutes long, was a vessel that dwarfed them all.
‘Hellsteeth.’
Thane was not sure who said it. It seemed to hiss out of the internal communications, out of the unattended speakers and microphones of Vox. He had seen the ork attack moon that had demolished Eidolica, and the even larger war-engine that now loomed over Terra. They had been massive, but they had been moons. The gut accepted that they would be huge, even if the mind knew them to be constructed. They had been planetary bodies. He had processed them on that scale.
This was different. The behemoth hoving into view in pursuit of the Black Templars fleet was a ship. To be precise it was a carrier, fighters and destroyer-sized warships streaming from cavernous flight bays in its underside. It made the Eternal Crusader look like a corvette. Even the Phalanx would have been dwarfed.
Thane had no frame of reference for it.
A contemptuous slice from an axial beam weapon sheared through the aft of the rearmost Black Templars cruiser. Some kind of gravitic conversion beam, it crushed the entire aft section as though it were parchment scrap. The sudden spike of hypergravity flipped the warship nose to stern, torsional stresses cutting through what was left like a gladius through a ration can and spilling its contents into space.
Thane had never seen a weapon like it. Nothing the Imperium could produce came close. A sail-like array of adjusting fins, turning wheels, shivering wires and enormous copper rods rose from the ork carrier’s bloated hull. A wash of strange, green-tinged energy sparked through the array towards its vertex and seemed to radiate into space. Thane’s throat clenched.
Witch.
‘All Black Templars identifiers are in,’ said Auspectoria. He spoke quietly, mournfully, eyes on the on-screen tableau. ‘Nine ships, and debris mass-equivalent to about fifteen more.’
Thane counted quickly.
‘I see ten ships.’
‘Nine ships, my lord. There’s a delay. The feed is being relayed from Excelsior. Our systems can’t penetrate the interference.’
The carrier fired again. A full spread of crude but devastingly effective torpedoes blasted another cruiser to pieces.
Nine.
‘Can she relay a hololith signal? Can she get me Obsidian Sky?’
‘I… I think so.’
‘Then do it!’
Shipmaster Kale moved purposefully towards the strategium board. Another impact to the forward shields almost threw him the final metre, forcing him to steady himself against the metallic rim of the console’s bulk housing. An armsman in grey carapace bodyplate and with a pump-action shotgun hanging from a shoulder strap hurried to help him. Kale thanked him with a curt nod, then gestured him back to his post.
‘Should we also attempt to raise the…’ the shipmaster looked uncomfortable, ‘other ship, lord?’
‘No!’
Thane practically spat the word. The idea alone was abhorrent.
‘When circumstances change, my lord…’ said Kale. His wish to recite his Guilliman vied with awareness of his position relative his superhuman Chapter Master. He restricted himself to just that opening line, and a poignant arch of his eyebrow.
‘Some circumstances don’t change,’ said Thane. ‘Some walls can never come down.’
‘Sir. My lord.’
They both turned. It was Teal.
‘I have the Venerable Dreadnought-Marshal Magneric on vox.’
Six
The image within the wire hoop of the cable-fed, spring-mounted hololith projector was dark. Had it not been for the drizzle of static and the occasional side-to-side flicker of the shadow shapes within it, then Thane might have concluded that Excelsior had lost the signal. The cold blue glow of the frequency-tether bulb confirmed otherwise. Primary power aboard Obsidian Sky was out. Even bridge lighting was down.
Illuminated under periodic fountains of sparks, he could make out Magneric. The hard, angular definition of his armour shone like a faceted work of jet. Silver cuneiform picked out the edgework of black, battle-scarred ceramite plates. But this was not the moulded plate of a battle-brother. It was the immense armour housing of a Dreadnought’s sarcophagus.
‘Do I address the Venerable Magneric?’ spoke Thane, forgetting for a moment, in his reverence, where he was. ‘I studied your actions in the defence of Terra as a neophyte. The sally that silenced the Fourth Legion’s guns is legendary, even if it cost you your life.’
‘The Emperor lights our true path!’ the Dreadnought thundered, shouting Thane down as he still spoke as though he had not heard, or had listened and deemed it irrelevant. His speakers were pitched to a frightening volume, his words stretched and distorted by the interlink as though delivered through a pipe. ‘Not once but twice. Twice!’
The image dissolved into drizzling static and the audio went with it. For a moment, ork gibberish pushed hard onto the line, and then the hololith returned, albeit for several seconds without sound. The Venerable Dreadnought must have been similarly affected by the break in the link but, judging by the flutter of the scriptural parchments that lay over his speakers, he spoke yet.