‘No!’
Hot-shot lashed the command hub with the savagery of truth. Wires were shredded and housings scorched, thousand-year-old cogitator units going up in fountains of sparks. The Chosen stepped past Zerberyn and opened up with a thunderous outpouring of explosive rounds.
‘No!’ Zerberyn yelled again, louder, caged by red spears and noise.
Antille jerked as though electrocuted. A searing lance angled across his back spun him half around and threw him into an interface that exploded underneath him. The veteran flew back on a nimbus of charge, rolled over the outer rail and, a minute later, splashed into the super-cooled heavy water.
‘Mark.’
The announcement was a death knell.
‘No.’
Kalkator pushed his unarmoured palm to the interface and spoke a command in a language that Zerberyn had never heard. The timbre of the deeply submerged atom engine plunged, felt through longwave vibrations in the gut rather than heard. The grinding sound of deep, mechanical reconfigurations reverberated from the walls of the spherical chamber, amplified by its acoustics so that, standing there at its core, it sounded like being inside a mechanical chronometer as it geared up to strike a long-awaited millennial bell.
The gunfire ceased. Even the Iron Warriors held their bolters close and looked around with unease.
The last surviving Scion took advantage of the lull to look down over the companionway handrail to the bubbling water below. Zerberyn felt he recognised him— the vox-officer on Bryce’s command squad during the agri-plex raid.
Horror dawning, the Scion dropped back, raising a hand to the vox-boost selector behind the cheek-guard of his omnishield. ‘Sergeant Jaskólska, Menthis. Evacuate now. Now! Raise the Commissariat and tell them that the Fists Exemplar have—’
A tight burst of bolter fire drowned out the rest.
Kalkator set his bolter down on the terminal as Trooper Menthis’ remains splashed across the curved wall. ‘I have your gunship on auspex,’ he said, as though the past minute had not just consigned billions to execution. ‘On an escape vector.’ He examined the read-out of a scorched sensorium console. ‘And Guilliman inbound.’
‘Has Penitence made contact with the fleet?’
‘I do not know. How much do you think the humans heard?’
‘I do not know.’
‘If word gets out—’
‘I know.’
Avoiding Kalkator’s eye, Zerberyn thumbed the activation switch of what, though arcane in design, looked to be a vox-unit. A garbled overlay of orkoid cant and system noise scratched through. It sounded like voices. Columba. Tarsus. Leonis. Jaskólska. Ghosts, drawn to him through electromagnetic snow.
His brothers would be made to understand that the destruction of Prax had been necessary for the greater good, if they heard it first from him. They shared a singular vision, a rare gift for reason. But Issachar? Quesadra? Bohemond?
The Inquisition?
His hand moved of its own volition, knowing even before he did it what needed to be done. Punching Last Wall protocols into the cryptex key, he hit transmit. Long seconds of alien traffic and accusing voices filled the line.
‘What are you doing?’ said Reoch. The metallic grille that covered his lower jaw made him look like a muzzled beast.
‘What any brother in possession of the same set of facts would have to.’
‘Are you sure, brother?’
Zerberyn did not answer.
He was a descendent of Oriax Dantalion: the answer was obvious.
The comm link hissed open, butchered by static, but the direct voice on the other end was recognisably that of an Eidolican serf.
‘Guilliman receiving. Last Wall codes recognised. Is that truly you, lord captain?’
‘It is, and—’ He silenced the pickup and turned to Kalkator. ‘How long do we have?’
‘Five to six hours before it is done. Thirty minutes before we no longer want to be standing on this planet.’
Zerberyn nodded and reactivated the unit. ‘And requiring immediate extraction. Repeat, immediate.’
‘Understood, lord captain. Thunderhawks are undergoing final flight checks now. I will transmit the pilots your coordinates.’
Eyes locked to Kalkator’s unflinching gaze, Zerberyn spoke again into the receiver.
‘Penitence has been commandeered by local traitor militia. Do not establish contact, and under no circumstances are they to be permitted to board.’
Kalkator nodded. He knew what it meant to betray a brother.
Zerberyn closed his eyes.
‘Shoot them down.’
Twenty-Two
Zerberyn stood at the viewport of Palimodes’ starboard observation gallery, a hand’s width from his own dead-eyed reflection, and forced himself to watch the planet die.
Grey-brown continents and green seas were now wreathed in smoky black. The stratosphere had already burnt off as surface temperatures passed a hundred Celsius and carried on climbing. The thin band of residual atmosphere stuck to the riven crust like tar. A hex-like grid of magmic fractures smouldered through the pall, fault lines, the crust splitting, less a world now than rocky islands floating apart from one another on a molten sea. Bouts of volcanism racked the major continents on which mountains still stood, each an event of epochal destruction rendered into a non-event by the periodic eruptions that ejected billions of tonnes of mantle into orbital space. A glowing cloud shrouded the planet, metals, minerals, voidship fragments, churned by its hundred-thousand-kilometres-per-hour flight and its own increasingly erratic spin. Its nickel-iron core was destabilising. Magnetic distortions caused rocky accretions to blast apart at random, like targets on a practice range, and sent the massive ork container ships caught up in the destruction spiralling between orbits with plasma tails streaming in their wake.
Kalkator had spared no detail of the likely progression. Had he not been as forthcoming, then Zerberyn would have insisted.
The planet-cracker had been fired directly into the planet’s mantle through a kilometres-long shaft sunk a thouand years before for this sole purpose. From there the warhead had slowed, drilling through a further thousand kilometres of semi-molten rock to its long-programmed detonation site at the interstitial layer between core and mantle.
Within that narrow variance of pressure and density, it had detonated.
Zerberyn had never devoted much prior thought to the complete destruction of a planetary body, but he could see that it had been enacted with a ruthlessness and a precision of detail the equal of anything that he could have brought to the task. A detonation within the core itself would only have wrecked the world’s magnetosphere, rendering it uninhabitable for decades, while at a shallower site in the mantle the resultant tectonic recoil would have been a slap on the wrist compared to what was taking place now.
The boundary layer. It had to be there. And it had taken exactly the thirty minutes that Kalkator had said it would.
The core’s greater density reflected the seismic shockwaves back upwards like sunlight hitting an ocean’s waves. The effect on the surface was cataclysmic. Tremors had become quakes and quakes upheavals that tore the world asunder, crust and core between them amplifying the seismic waves and rebounding them until the entire globe rang like a bell and the crust was a shattered ruin.
That was what Zerberyn was watching now: the penultimate phase.
He wondered how many souls had been on Prax. Ten billion? A hundred billion? It was the one variable amongst the specifics of time and forces, and it ate at him.
‘Back from me, abomination,’ he snarled, kicking back with the stump of his leg.