The teleportation device was still charging. A hum filled the cavern. It was gargantuan. It was in the walls, the floor, the air. The entire moon vibrated. A terrible song was coming into being. Soon it would have a voice.
‘A few moments more,’ Gadreel voxed. ‘A few—’
Light.
Light of breaking. Of dissolution. Of shattering, of edges, of fragmentation.
The end of here and the end of there. Death of space. Death of time.
Death.
Light of breaking.
Light of breaking.
All bro
ken.
Koorland gasped. Blood filled his mouth and his lungs. He was standing in the centre of the teleportation platform of the Herald of Night. Haas was on her hands and knees, shaking with enough force to fracture bone. All the squads were present. The other Space Marines seemed as unsteady on their feet.
He had never experienced a teleportation like this. He had been ripped into nothing, then reassembled, and every particle of his being remembered the pain of destruction and rebirth. Between the two lay an infinitesimal portion of a second that was as wide as aeons.
The hum was still growing. He could feel it even this far from the moon, through the hull of the strike cruiser.
He commanded his body to move. It obeyed with reluctance. With limbs of crumbling rockcrete, he walked from the teleportation platform. By the time he and his brothers reached the bridge, he could run again.
In the oculus, the moon was still there. The homers had functioned as Kubik had promised. They had locked on to the sensors in the armour and transported the tiny mass of the Deathwatch kill-teams before they had gathered the full power needed to send the ork base out of the sector.
‘Why has it not gone?’ Haas whispered. Her teeth chattered. She did not yet have control over her body.
‘It will. We are victorious.’ Koorland said this even as he watched the explosions of the void war. Nothing was finished.
But the teleporters worked. They were working. They had triumphed.
Staring at the moon, Simmias said, ‘That is… unexpected…’
The mountains, canyons and plains of the ork base were suffused with a shifting, retina-slashing glow. And they were moving. The mountains rocked back and forth. Peaks collapsed in on themselves. The canyons of iron pulled wide, the crust of the moon tearing like flesh. The plains heaved as if inconceivable leviathans were struggling to the surface.
‘What is happening?’ said Koorland.
Simmias shook his head. ‘The theoreticals of the technology do not account for this. The disassembly of the material body is instantaneous.’
‘It didn’t feel like it,’ said Haas.
‘This geomorphic distortion is abnormal.’
‘Shipmaster,’ Adnachiel said, ‘pull us back.’
Simmias said, ‘There is no distance we can reach. Our fates have already been decided.’
‘The Emperor protects,’ said Vepar.
‘The Emperor protects,’ Koorland repeated. He barely heard his own voice. He watched the vast agony take the moon. He saw dissolution approach.
We have done this to you, he thought. We have ended you. We are victorious.
There had been few triumphs in this war. If this was his last one, he would enjoy it.
The end came first as a brilliance that consumed the spectrum. Koorland’s lens shutters slammed down, but not fast enough. He saw the absolute light still.
The shutters opened again, and let him see the moon’s end. Half the sphere had vanished. What remained looked like a skull cut cleanly along a diagonal line. That form held just long enough for Koorland to understand what he was seeing. Then it erupted.
A swarm of asteroids hurtled through the void. The shattered surface tore through the warring ships.
He had begun coming to the Cerebrium again. Mesring did not let any of the other High Lords know. They did not come because of what they feared to see. They hid from the light of the ork moon under the cracked dome of the Great Chamber.
Mesring came to see the very thing that kept them away. The top of the Widdershins Tower pierced the clouds more often than any other point of the Inner Palace. Mesring was confident of being alone here, and of being able to contemplate the moon.
He saw the flash. Suddenly, there was an impossible shape in the heavens. Then it flew apart.
Mesring gaped. He stared. His mind was blank except for an inchoate horror.
The great light faded. Where the moon had been was a sudden blackness, the return of the void.
Smaller flashes and glints surrounded the absence where the moon had been. Some of the glints grew stronger. They became more consistent. Their number grew.
He understood nothing. He was bearing witness to a transcendent death, and his thought could not encompass it. He stood at the casement, his body numb, all his awareness focused on a point hundreds of thousands of kilometres away.
The points came closer. The glints became shards of white light. Still he did not understand.
He stayed where he was, fear and horror and helpless anger combining in an alchemy of madness.
He was standing there, blank, lost, when the fragments of the moon entered Terra’s atmosphere and the night caught fire.
The bones of the attack base fell on Terra. Flaring molten red from their descent through the atmosphere, they hammered the continental expanse of the Imperial Palace. Where there was night, titanic explosions created day. Where there was day, millions of tonnes of ash and dust blanketed the sky and brought down a reign of night. Sectors the size of hive cities vaporised. Millions looked up in the final seconds of their lives, and saw the mountains of iron and stone come for them. Millions upon millions more knew nothing. They moved through their entombed lives, far from any view of the sky, ignorant until the blow, the fire, the cathedrals turned to ash, the towers’ crushing fall.
Shockwaves annihilated ramparts. Winds of hundreds of kilometres an hour raged outward from the craters. Firestorms were a hundred kilometres wide. The dead at impact were fortunate in their ignorance or their momentary horror before oblivion. The victims of flame and wind and burial knew terror. Death came to them with great fear and pain.
Victory was choking, burning, suffocating, dying.
Victory was the most terrible destruction for a thousand years.
The greater meteor swarm spared the precincts of the Inner Palace. Small fragments fell closer, pulverising roofs. They slashed the night with streaks of fire. One struck the Widdershins Tower a glancing blow, shattering the plex-glass windows of the Cerebrium.
The big strikes fell beyond Mesring’s view of the horizon. The huge fragments vanished, and then he saw the awful sunrises of fireballs. The glow of devastation was the hammer blows of a wrathful god. Then the wind and the dust came for him, reaching into the Cerebrium with a furnace blast. He screamed, then. The hand of the Beast itself had come to claim him. He fell to the chamber floor, abandoned to a monstrous transcendence.
He was not found for two days. Even then, he was still screaming.
Five
They reached the Immitis System, and it was burning.
The Fists Exemplar translated out of the warp shortly after the Iron Warriors. The Palimodes was already in combat. A single ork ship was attacking the base in the system. It was a leviathan, much larger than the Iron Warriors strike cruiser, larger even than the Fists Exemplar battle-barges. It was a hulking shape, wider than the Dantalion and Guilliman combined. A black, snarling, metal beast of war, a thing of shields like tectonic plates and volcanic weaponry, it orbited the industrial moon of the system’s gas giant. The ork ship battered the surface with a barrage of torpedoes. Ranks of immense cannons jutted out beneath its hull, running the entire length of the ship. They fired shells the size of Thunderhawks.