Crew-serfs and Space Marines looked up from rebooting consoles and covered their eyes. The starlight was hard and bright, the guide lights of a monster voidship burning like a meteor shower off the bow. The garish yellow vessel was several times more massive than Dantalion and of eccentric design. Modules stuck out from a long central body, like landing booms on a seaplane but coming out at all angles and in various shapes and sizes. The slender main body widened at the neck to give a bulbous prow and, towards the stern, grew by stepwise tiers towards a garishly hazard-striped housing for the fierce orange cones of the drive exhaust. Sitting atop the drive housing, adding half again to the height of the stern, was a crescent moon, bent and crooked into a vile facsimile of a grinning orkoid face.
‘Thrusters!’ called Shipmaster Marcarian. ‘Hard port. Decompress starboard launch bays and fire macro-batteries. All the push we have.’
The ork ship pulled away slowly, port thrusters burning hard to win some traction over the vacuum. A lumpen module, riveted plates hatched yellow and black, swung out towards Dantalion’s starboard-side viewing ports, close enough for Zerberyn to see the alien pictographs scrawled onto its side. Then, the ship winked out, something darker than space rushing out to envelop it. Torpedoes and other mass-weapons winnowed through the hole left in real space.
‘Another ship inbound,’ called the seated hardline operator reporting from auspectoria. ‘Throne, they’re everywhere. Two thousand kilometres in-system. And another in convoy, the exact same spacing again.’
Zerberyn snarled. ‘As if surrendering ourselves to the Imperial Fists is not betrayal enough, we must contend with Iron Warriors treachery. Charge weapons and prepare to fire.’
‘Wait,’ said Marcarian, looking out of a port-side viewport at the next incoming ship. ‘No torpedo apertures, no flight decks, no weapon batteries that I can see except a handful of flak turrets, no energy spike on our scans to indicate they’re powering them up. I think that ship is unarmed.’
‘When did you ever see an unarmed ork ship?’
‘My point exactly. Helm, move us out of the path of the traffic. Five hundred kilometres to port. Auspectoria, commence scans for our brothers.’
‘Ayes’ acknowledged his instructions. Dantalion swung deeper into her portside yaw. The ork ships held true to their course.
‘Arrogant xenos,’ Zerberyn muttered, watching the unaugmented view through a viewport. The image booster screens around Strategium continued to snow. ‘They lack even the good sense to alter course to avoid our weapons.’
‘We are one ship, lord captain, and a damaged one at that. I would posit that they don’t consider us a threat.’
‘Then I posit that we purge them of that unwise presumption.’
‘Lords.’ Auspectoria again, the operative already swivelling his chair back around to point to the sensorium feed being relayed in précis to his monitor. Zerberyn and Marcarian joined him. The Space Marine towered above the two serfs, looking over the sloping bank of hardline wires into the din and confusion of the recovery work still ongoing around them. ‘Receivers are picking up a lot of vox-chatter. Numerical sequences, auto-broadcasts. Well over ten thousand ships, most of them concentrated here.’ He tapped the screen with his fingernail. ‘The third planet.’
‘Prax,’ said Zerberyn.
It was a guess: the last avenue of retreat for reactionaries and for mortals impelled to wage total war on inscrutable xenos-breeds and demi-gods. But it was an educated one.
‘Prax,’ the operator duly confirmed. ‘Archives list it as an agri-world and subsector governance hub. Limited orbital and dry-dock facilities, but nothing to permit shipping on this scale. Whatever the orks are using to coordinate so many vessels, they brought it in from elsewhere or built it themselves.’
‘Look at the disposition of these ships,’ said Marcarian, leaning over the serf’s shoulder to float his fingertip over the display. He turned to Zerberyn, ear-stud catching the green of the screen, and grinned. ‘Did your duty ever take you along the Eukrist Corridor, galactic east through the Flux with a layover at Angels’ Wake Munitorum star port?’
‘Humour me, shipmaster.’
Marcarian’s nerveless lips hung a smile. ‘It looked like this.’
‘A supply hub? An ork Administratum?’
‘Except orks don’t think that way,’ Marcarian continued. ‘They exploit the worlds they come to and then move on. Like at Ardamantua.’
‘They are building,’ said Zerberyn. A smile, slow and angry, began to spread and he turned it on Marcarian. ‘He must be close. The Beast. If not here, then somewhere near.’
Marcarian stumped again to the viewport and looked out. ‘I wonder what that symbol means. That crescent moon shape on their ships. Some kind of merchant class, do you think?’
A handset in the partially restored vox-turret blinked and chimed. The new duty liaison took the missive standing up and turned to face Zerberyn.
‘Incoming transmission from Palimodes, and from Guilliman. Coming through the hololith grid.’
Zerberyn was surprised to feel disappointed. In turbulent times, it was reassuring to know that the galaxy continued to rotate and the traitors would forever be traitors.
‘Patch them through,’ Marcarian ordered, and turned to face the display.
Power built up within the arcane suspension of coils and valves with a succession of etheric metal bangs, as though the device’s spirit railed against its reactivation so soon after translation. Tech-serfs stroked power distribution sliders and capacitance dials in a bid to soothe its anguish, and coaxed the weary machine to compliance. Two faces took shape within the loop projector. The face to the left of the static divider, cowled within a high grey hood, was familiar, even if the penetrating eyes looked pained and the ancient face drawn. Epistolary Honorius of Guilliman greeted Zerberyn’s image with a nod.
That other face, however…
Unconsciously Zerberyn drew himself to his full, impressive height, resolved to meet the image’s gaze like a Space Marine.
The stranger was dust pale and cadaverously thin, as though the withdrawal of the Emperor’s love had left him withered and bitter. His hollow cheeks made his sharp jawline cruel, and accentuated his high brow to something arch and not quite fully human. His eyes glinted like nails under the unforgiving light of his ship’s hololith projector.
‘It is good to talk face to face at last,’ said Kalkator.
Zerberyn had expected the traitor’s voice to match the forsaken character of his appearance, but it was surprisingly rich and powerful. It was a voice Zerberyn could well imagine sharing a field with the primarchs.
An unworthy flutter of jealousy — no, worse — of curiosity, disturbed the calm beating of his hearts.
‘Indeed, you are as pleasing a sight as the great garrison world of your forsaken brothers.’
‘It has been a long time devoid of our care,’ Kalkator replied. ‘Had this world still been defended by my brothers, then the situation would have been different.’
‘Had these worlds still been loyally defended by Iron Warriors,’ said Epistolary Honorius, eyes far away and long ago, ‘then many things would be different.’
‘It will have to serve, regardless,’ said Kalkator, turning back to Zerberyn. ‘Your ship will not survive another transit through the warp. Not without repairs. And mine will not survive without yours.’
‘We are sending a navigation packet,’ Honorius continued, gesturing to something or someone off-capture.
Marcarian limped to the nearest functioning terminal and activated it, telemetrics and data-icons turning his pale face green. ‘The eighth planet. An Ouranos-class ice giant with a ring system in a near-perpendicular orbit. The coordinates are for a geostationary position above the northern magnetic pole, inside the rings.’ He smiled, impressed. ‘I’m afraid the diffraction index of the magnetosphere and the rings is too much for our auspex.’