Correct, Wienand thought. On this point, the High Lords were right to be worried. If the kill-teams were successful, there was no way such a weapon would be put away.
If they were successful, she thought. Then what?
The great potential refused to come into focus. The force had to be a reality first. She had to witness what it could do. Then she would know what else it might accomplish, and perhaps how it might be controlled.
‘Vote, then,’ Koorland snapped. ‘Vote and be damned.’
The High Lords voted. Vangorich supported the plan. Kubik and Veritus abstained. The others voted against it.
Koorland did not hide his disgust. ‘You’re fools,’ he said.
‘We would be to fall into your trap,’ Ekharth said, smug in victory.
Wienand waited for Koorland to punch the little man’s head from his shoulders. The act would have confirmed the High Lords’ worst suspicions, but it would have been warranted. Instead, Koorland strode from the dais.
‘What do you plan to do?’ Zeck called.
Koorland stopped. He faced the Council. His stillness became dangerous. Wienand was acutely conscious of what he could do to the High Lords if he were not holding himself back.
‘I will do what must be done,’ Koorland said. And as he turned once more to go, he added, ‘So will you.’
‘I understand your frustration,’ Alexis Mandrell said, speaking into the vox-unit on his desk. ‘I share it. But unless and until Admiral Lansung issues new orders, here we are.’ The captain of the cruiser Sybota, commanding the blockade of the attack moon, was in his private quarters. He leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on his desk. Another twenty-four-hour cycle had been completed, and it had been another cycle of routine exercises. The endless broadcast of I AM SLAUGHTER from the moon was unchanging. Mandrell had ordered the transmission blocked from all ships for the sake of morale, instituting an hourly verification that there had been no change in the message.
There was none.
‘The task is dull,’ he said. ‘It’s still necessary.’
‘I’m not questioning that,’ replied Captain Makayla Ochoa, of the frigate Cyzicus. ‘It’s the decisions that have made this necessary I don’t understand. Such a large concentration of forces in this vicinity when reinforcements are desperately needed elsewhere…’
‘You aren’t the first to notice this, captain.’
‘You don’t say.’ Ochoa had two decades more experience in the field than Mandrell, but her family was a far more minor noble house than his. They had served together in the Navy long enough that they acknowledged the political realities of the differences in their advancement with amused cynicism. Ochoa took the liberty of being as insubordinate as she pleased with Mandrell in private. He accepted this liberty as her due.
‘I do say,’ he answered.
‘You have family connections to Lansung…’ Ochoa began.
‘Stop!’ Mandrell held up a hand as if Ochoa could see him. ‘No. No. There’s no point, and I’m not using what capital I might hypothetically have to push for something that will go nowhere at best and result in embarrassment at worst.’
‘Yours?’
‘That I could survive. I mean the Lord High Admiral’s. Do you think it’s by his choice that we don’t destroy that xenos hulk? The Mechanicus wants it. If the Lord High Admiral has not ordered us to destroy it, it’s because he can’t. I’m not going to put him in the position of having to admit that. I like my command. If it were possible to send us elsewhere, he would have done so.’
‘Really.’ Ochoa did not sound convinced.
‘Really.’ Mandrell did his best to be emphatic. In truth, he wasn’t sure. The Imperial Navy’s dispositions had been erring on the side of caution since the start of the war.
‘So keeping a massive fleet presence in the vicinity of Terra, where it is unlikely to suffer any losses, has nothing to do with shoring up his position on the Council?’
‘No. Captain, you will cease this line of questioning.’ Their vox-communication was encrypted, but Mandrell did not trust it that much.
Ochoa snorted. ‘My apologies,’ she said. Dryly.
‘We’ll see all the combat we could hope for,’ Mandrell said. He was telling the truth, though he suspected Ochoa would interpret his words differently than how he thought of them. He was not displeased to be assigned to a pointless blockade. The Sybota had been on no more than the edges of the engagements with the orks, and that had been enough. He did not think he was a coward. He simply did not see the value in plunging into battles where the only likely outcome was annihilation. Let the Adeptus Astartes take the lead in suicidal missions. That was their strength. Let the Imperial Navy consolidate gains and hold reclaimed systems. There was no dishonour in that service.
He couldn’t dispute Ochoa’s contention that resources were misallocated, but he had seen enough campaigns to know there was nothing new there. If poor deployment decisions were to continue, he would prefer them to work in his favour.
‘So we’re here indefinitely,’ Ochoa said. ‘How are we—’ She stopped. ‘What was that?’
‘What did you…’ Mandrell began. Then he heard and felt something that began as a deep, rattling vibration. It ran through the deck and wall of the Sybota. The data-slates on his desk drummed against the surface. The vibration ran up through the frame of his chair and through his spine. It grew stronger. A sweeping vertigo shook him, and he almost slid to the ground. He switched the vox to the bridge channel. ‘What is happening?’ he bellowed.
He couldn’t hear his own voice. The rattle had built to a piercing metallic scream. The entire ship howled in agony. Blood burst from Mandrell’s nose and ears. The vertigo grew worse. He clutched the desk, disoriented as his sense of up and down spiralled. He forced himself upright and staggered towards the door of his quarters, weaving with every step. As he reached the door, a colossal boom cut through the Sybota’s shriek. The sound was so vast it sucked the air from his lungs. He fell to his knees. The deck heaved. He dragged himself forward, clutched at the doorway and hauled himself up.
He stumbled into the corridor. The echoes of the boom faded, swallowed by the grinding scream of metal and the thunder of cracking stone. The walls, deck and ceiling of the corridor buckled. Pulverised marble filled the air. Mandrell coughed, inhaling dust and smoke. The lumen orbs flickered off and on. Ruptured conduits spewed steam and flame. He made his way forward, unable to see more than a few metres ahead. He saw the shapes of crew moving through the haze, trying to run. They flailed as the deck rose and fell like an ocean in a storm. The agony of the vessel was deafening. Mandrell could hear no voices or warning klaxons. The silhouettes of his crew were pantomimes of crisis.
The weight was sudden, terrible, crushing. It came upon Mandrell like the fall of a huge wave. It smashed him to the deck. His ribs cracked. His nose and teeth shattered. He was immovable, held fast to the deck by his own impossible mass. Struggling against the prison of gravity, he raised his head just enough to look ahead. He could do no more, but even this victory was enough. It meant he saw what happened next.
The scream of the Sybota was transcendent. The cracking was the sound of a world coming apart. Power failed. The lumen orbs flickered out. The corridor went dark, lit only by the flicker of spreading flame. Then, summoned by the cracking and the grinding, a new light burst into brief, monstrous life. Mandrell stared into a blinding flare of fire and energy discharges. And then there was the wind, blowing past him with a hurricane’s roar. And then there was the cold.