‘Suggestive of what?’ said Thane. ‘I trust your conclusions, Brother Abathar.’
‘If this is a chart, it points to nothing at all.’
‘You mean there is no direction?’ said Veritus. ‘Or that it is unreadable?’
‘Neither, inquisitor. I mean as I say — nothing. The crown of the dome is between systems. There truly is nothing there.’
Eight
The Herald of Night came to the nothingness and found hordes. Instead of dark, there was the flare of engines, the flash of launches and guns, the streak of missiles. The orks besieged a point where there should have been emptiness.
There was a single planet in the starless night. It was a rocky mass, so cold its atmosphere was frozen, sullen snow. But the orks had brought heat to the world. Their bombardment melted nitrogen and methane. It pounded the surface to a molten orange, as if the greenskins sought to turn the world into a flowing, liquid hell.
But the world resisted. It remained solid. And the target of the orks’ hatred struck back.
‘Lance fire from the surface,’ said Adnachiel. He pointed to a spike of icons on a pict screen, and looked around the tacticarium table at the Deathwatch and the inquisitors. ‘You were right,’ he said. ‘By the Throne, I don’t think I can credit it even now. But I congratulate you. We have found our myths.’
‘At war,’ said Thane. ‘The orks have found them too. Before us.’
‘They wasted no time,’ said Straton.
‘No,’ said Adnachiel, ‘these are not the orks we saw over Vultus. The ships are different. The fleet is larger.’ He paused, his eye caught by a change on the pict screen to the left of the table. He grunted. ‘Cannon fire from the surface now too. And the orks have just lost an escort vessel. Impressive.’
‘But insufficient,’ Thane said.
Adnachiel nodded. ‘There are heat signatures of landing craft. The greenskins are attacking on the surface as well.’ He frowned. ‘What I do not understand is, if they already knew the location of the Sisters of Silence, what interest did they have in Vultus?’
‘Fear,’ said Veritus. ‘Or something very like it. The orks sense the threat the Sisters of Silence represent. They seek to destroy all trace of them.’ He pointed to the centre of the tacticarium table. The hololithic display of the planet had an illuminated target. Its coordinates marked the focus of the orbital bombardment and the ork landings, and the origin of the surface fire. The Herald of Night was as yet too distant for the auspex array to form an image of the fortress itself. But the citadel was there, its existence confirmed by the conflict. ‘The orks cannot know that this is the one place in the galaxy where the Sisters of Silence may be found. They must attack every trace of them they find.’
Warfist bared his teeth. ‘If this is true, so much the better. The thought of orks feeling threatened cheers me enormously.’
‘It proves the importance of our mission,’ Thane said. He examined the relative positions of the strike cruiser and the ork fleet. ‘What is your evaluation?’ he asked Adnachiel.
‘Worse than Vultus. This ork fleet is not much larger, but that one was already large enough. There are no planets to use as cover for our approach. The orks will see us coming, if they have not already detected our presence. If we fight…’ He stopped for a moment.
‘No one doubts your skill or the strength of your ship,’ said Thane.
‘I hope no one doubts my intelligence, either,’ Adnachiel replied. ‘The numbers and the forces are what they are. We can fight. We cannot win.’
‘We have not come all this way for a pointless sacrifice,’ said Warfist.
Adnachiel gave the Space Wolf a curt nod. ‘Quite,’ he said.
‘Then our attack must be in two stages,’ said Thane. ‘We must neutralise the fleet before we engage with the orks planetside.’
‘Obviously,’ said Wienand. ‘But what is the plan to do that?’
Thane had no illusions about the situation. He could see many ways for it to end in disaster, and knew there were many more he had not imagined. Even so, his lips pressed into a taut smile. ‘I thought it was clear,’ he told Wienand. ‘We are going to destroy an ork fleet.’
‘The Herald of Night?’
‘No. The Deathwatch.’
Five Space Marines in a single boarding torpedo came for the fleet. The launch of the torpedo, from the limit of its range, signalled the opening of a new front for the orks, though they did not know it. Abathar steered at an angle away from the Herald of Night, putting distance between the torpedo and its source. The Deathwatch streaked through the void, a lone missile directed at a fleet, beneath notice as the greenskins poured their wrath on the world below them.
The target was the largest of the battleships at the centre of the ork formation. Thane watched the readout of the vessel grow on the torpedo’s navigation pict screen. The representation began as a single point. It became an outline, then an ever-more detailed schematic in red lines. Icons for possible attack points multiplied.
‘Have you chosen?’ Thane asked.
‘Yes,’ said Abathar. His servo-arm pointed at the screen, to the junction of the immense engine block and the rest of the hull. The vessel narrowed slightly there. The battleship’s construction was a brutal monumentalism, a welding together of the massive. But still there was a junction. The shielding and the hull would be thinner. And the location was close to the goal.
‘Good,’ Thane approved. ‘And the ship’s position?’
‘Within an acceptable risk,’ Abathar said. ‘The defensive fire from the planet is pushing the greenskins back. They are substantially further from the surface than the enemy over Vultus.’
‘Far enough, then.’
‘Within an acceptable risk,’ Abathar said again.
They had no choice, Thane thought. There was no other way of dealing with the ork fleet. What would be an unacceptable risk? he wondered.
Nothing.
The action was necessary. It was the only alternative to assured defeat.
‘Time?’ he asked.
‘One hundred seconds,’ Abathar told him.
Thane voxed Adnachiel. ‘We are about to make our attack,’ he said.
‘Very well. We will delay engagement until your signal if possible. The Emperor protects.’
‘The Emperor protects.’
Behind Thane, Forcas said, ‘We are establishing a precedent.’
Thane turned around. Forcas was looking at the teleport homer on Abathar’s back.
‘The means we are using,’ Forcas went on. ‘The tools. The weapons.’
‘You think we should not employ them to defeat the orks?’
‘The devices are… impure,’ Forcas said. He used the word with the conviction of someone who was given to meditating on its meaning and implications. ‘Using them has a cost. We have seen that already.’
‘They aren’t made by xenos hands,’ Thane reminded him, though images of the cratered Imperial Palace flashed before his mind’s eye. ‘They are still productions of the Mechanicus.’
‘Their derivation is suspect.’
‘Nevertheless,’ Straton put in, ‘they are authorised.’
‘Even under the eyes of the Inquisition,’ said Warfist. He appeared to take sour enjoyment from the irony.
Forcas gave a solemn nod, acknowledging the points. ‘Yet the fact remains the technology originates with the greenskins. The taint cannot be expunged through adaptation. We are conscious of its danger. We are using it in extremity. Would any of you wish this technology to have widespread adoption by Imperial forces? By all the Chapters? By the Astra Militarum?’
The others were silent, their faces grim.
‘No,’ said Thane. Forcas was right. Already they’d had ample reason to distrust the ork-derived technology. Thane imagined the propagation of its use, and realised he was picturing a plague.