He reached the flames of the burning ork, and he could move faster. He slipped under the arms of the dead ork. He looked up into the leering face of the remaining giant.
A straight shot. Up through the jaw guard of its helm and into its eyes.
He brought up his bolter.
Too slow. Too slow.
The ork’s power claw closed around Mandek’s head.
Zerberyn fired.
The claw snapped shut.
The ork’s face disappeared. Its skull disintegrated. The hail of shells knocked the remains back in its helm with explosive force. This greenskin did not remain standing after it was dead. It fell backward. The closed power claw dropped away from Mandek’s headless corpse.
The giants were dead. The number of the other orks was dwindling.
Then Kalkator’s voice was on the vox, that double voice of ancient warrior and of something else even older, that voice of an enemy, yet that voice strangely welcome. ‘We have taken the bridge, Zerberyn,’ he said. ‘What is your status?’
‘The starboard guns are silenced, or soon will be,’ Zerberyn said. He took up his position at the head of the formation once more. The Fists Exemplar moved forward, grinding the orks into the deck. ‘The ammunition flow is disrupted. We will be moving to the port side now.’
‘We will join you there. The ship will soon be ours.’
‘Good.’ Zerberyn blinked the channel closed.
He looked forward to his left and to his right as he advanced, shoulder to shoulder with his brothers through the smouldering wreckage of the gallery. They were leaving brothers behind. At the rear of the formation, Apothecary Reoch would be retrieving the progenoid glands of the fallen, preserving their genetic legacy and the continuity of the Fists Exemplar. The brothers had not fallen into oblivion, and they had not fallen in vain. Their deaths gave him sorrow. He found acceptance in the thought of their gift to the future.
It was Mandek’s death that bothered him. Zerberyn had been unable to save him. There was nothing more he could have done. He knew this to be true.
And yet…
I did everything possible. No one could have saved him.
He repeated these truths to himself as if they were weak, and must be reinforced or else they would fracture and turn into lies. He repeated them in the hope they would bury his awareness of the other thing he was feeling.
Relief.
Mandek’s oblique accusations were silenced now. So were the questions he had asked.
And the astropathic message to Thane would not be sent.
He could not be saved, Zerberyn thought. Snarling, he blasted a charging ork’s torso to shreds.
He could not be saved.
He could not be saved.
Every step of the march through the gallery, Zerberyn repeated the words. They began as a refrain. Gradually, they became something more. Something very like a prayer.
He could not be saved.
He could not be saved.
There could be no salvation.
Six
On Daylight Wall, Koorland watched and listened to the night. He had hoped to return to find the silence banished. Instead it was waiting for him, between the sounds of celebration, coiling around the lights in the dark.
This is the victory I have brought you, Koorland thought. Perhaps the citizens of Terra did not feel the silence. Or perhaps they were trying to banish it. Koorland could make no such pretence.
The silence of the dead regarded him from the depths of the night.
There were fires burning out there, but they were the bonfires of celebration and thanksgiving. The flames of destruction caused by the moonfall had been extinguished. Most of them. Towards the equator, one of the firestorms still burned. And the devastation would take centuries to repair.
In orbit above Terra, there was more damage. The void war had ended with the destruction of the moon. Many Imperial Navy vessels had been destroyed. Others barely limped back to port. At least the ork interceptors had been obliterated by the shockwave of the moon’s explosion.
Earlier in the day, in the Great Chamber, Koorland had listened to Tobris Ekharth read the tally of victory. Hundreds of millions dead. Entire regions of the Imperial Palace had vanished. Some of the craters were ten kilometres wide. So much dust had been thrown into an atmosphere already dark with pollutants, day had been banished for years to come. Terra cycled through the heavy gloom of evening to the most profound night. Ash fell across the globe, white and grey and black, an accumulation of dry, gritty snow.
When Ekharth had finished, Koorland looked at Kubik. ‘Why did this happen?’
‘The analysis of this event is ongoing,’ the Fabricator General said. ‘We may be years from a definitive answer.’
‘Then give us a theory.’
Servos hummed. Kubik inclined his head. ‘Our adaptation of ork technology is still imperfect. We postulate that we failed to account sufficiently for the variance between our modifications and the originals. It is possible the teleportation of the moon would have been successful had the devices been powered entirely by our own energy sources. The attempted integration, however, failed.’
‘The xenos and the human cannot coexist,’ Veritus said quietly.
‘Well observed, inquisitor,’ said Kubik. ‘We might hypothesise a technological conflict. One that was resolved with the teleportation of only one half of the moon.’
‘To where?’ Koorland asked.
‘We do not know.’ Kubik waved his mechanical fingers. ‘The destination is unimportant. Given the energy released, we may presume that what vanished met the same fate upon arrival as that which remained.’ The fingers coiled into tight spirals. The gesture looked very like frustration. ‘These reasons for failure remain conjectural. We will need considerably more experimental data to obtain a more complete understanding of where we succeeded and where we failed. It is unfortunate that none of our sensors survived.’ His optics turned to Koorland. The gaze felt accusatory.
‘The equipment on the Herald of Night was destroyed?’ Lansung asked.
‘Scanning and recording devices were,’ said Koorland. ‘All circuits were melted when the kill-teams were teleported back to the ship.’
‘Very unfortunate,’ Kubik said. ‘Very unfortunate.’
Koorland had felt little sympathy for Kubik’s disappointment at that moment. He felt even less now. The crowd noises that reached his ears were the voices of people who had experienced true loss, not the private disappointment of the Mechanicus.
Yet the citizens of Terra were celebrating. Ceremonies were being held in every chapel and cathedral. The dead were mourned, and the Emperor was thanked. The ceremonies began in the false day and continued into the hard night. With the coming of night, the festivals began too. In the courtyards of hab complexes, on roofs of manufactoria, in the streets and in the marketplaces, the crowds gathered. They sang their praise of the Emperor. They celebrated the valour of the warriors who had destroyed the face in the sky, the face that had mocked them, threatened them, and shouted ‘I AM SLAUGHTER!’ at the world for so many days. They celebrated the fall of the face of the Beast. They celebrated as if the war had been won.
Koorland did not begrudge the people their celebration. That they could rejoice at all was cause for hope. But there was a sound he did not like. He had heard it since he had landed, after the Thunderhawks had escaped the meteor storm. He heard it now: two syllables that rose between the prayers to the Emperor. He heard his name.