‘What is the verdict, magos?’
The adept took his time in answering. Imperial time was an arcane measure. It was fractal, ever changeable. The unimaginable distances between worlds and the time-bending effects of warp travel rendered linearity subjective at best.
But not so for the Beast. His greatest strength, the orks’ subspace propulsion technology, was also mankind’s most glaring, stone-age strategic weakness. He could move from system to system at speeds greater than the warp’s. His lines of communication were instantaneous. Koorland had but one chance to catch the orks unprepared. The Deathwatch assault on the Terran attack moon had required to-the-second timing. Accomplishing the same over interstellar distances was an exponential order of magnitude more difficult.
Fail, and he would never find them unprepared again.
After a few seconds in which hundreds of timepieces ticked out their own relativistic versions of time, the chrono-magos turned. His face was hooded, but clicked with moving parts. ‘There is a reasonable degree of probability that our times are now in synchrony.’
Koorland clenched one gauntleted fist and glanced over his shoulder.
Maximus Thane stood in front of the clock-lined wall with arms crossed, garbed in a long surplice that was as severe as a statue’s and grey as the genetic character of his eyes. He nodded once, and Koorland made a smile, some of the tension he felt disappearing in it. Some, but not all.
Everything rested on this.
‘The Lords will be waiting. Call them into the Library, brother.’
Valhalla — Kalinin trench
Check 3, 00:00:00
Officers of the CCCIII sounded out long blasts on their whistles and Valhallan soldiers fixed bayonets, pushed wobbling trench ladders to the walls and yelled, screams as formless as the steam that burst from their mouths. They began to climb. Squadrons of patched-up Leman Russ tanks rattled forward in support on cleated tracks. Marauder fighter-bombers, invisible in the blizzard, rumbled overhead.
Tulwei gunned his engine and allowed the attack bike to crunch slowly forward. He fingered his chainsword’s activation stud impatiently, waiting for the signal, and watched as it began.
Eidolica — atmospheric entry
Check 7, 00:00:00
It began.
A splutter of thrust arrested Tyris’ descent. The thrill of afterburners shivered through his armour. Then nothing. He opened his arms and glided, no sound in his helmet but his own breath, the hiss of stabilisers. Solar radiation had killed unit vox, but every warrior knew his role. The atmosphere flared with short promethium burns as the others made use of their jump packs to correct their angles.
The sun was ferocious, his visor seared to grey opacity. He could barely see the landing zone at all, the listing fortress of the Fists Exemplar, but the greenskins would have had to shut down auspex grids and seal their shutters in preparation for the dawn. What was he — a charcoal speck in the daylight furnace, a mote, invisible in the light, a streak on the white-glare armaplas sky. He was the net, the knife.
He was the Raven.
And the orks would rue the day the Lord Commander had called his brothers to the war.
Plaeos — Mundus Trench
Check 2, 00:00:00
Kjarvik’s pack lights pierced the gloom of the oceanic trench to a distance of about ten metres. Rust flakes and bits of debris, from fingernail-size down, danced from the darkness of the water column in a reflective swirl for the passing of the beams. Depth indicator runes pulsed in his helm display, bleeding redly into the hyper-pressurised backdrop on the opposite side of the armourglass.
Running across his path at roughly man-height was a ridge of dirt: pipes, buried in sediment and planktonic xenoforms. Polyps and tendrils and silvery, segmented creatures retreated from Kjarvik’s light as though the sea floor were a living thing that recoiled from his touch. He clumped around.
One of the Sisters of Silence lumbered towards him. Dozens of tiny indicator lights lit up her form and the shoal of escaping bubbles that rippled around her. Unlike the superb homeostatic systems of Kjarvik’s power armour, her suit lost most of her exhaled gases with every breath. He could function at this depth for days, without food or rest if need be, but it had already taken them half an hour just to reach the bottom of the ocean trench. She probably had the same again at best.
Her hands moved in front of her. Slowly. As though chained to great weights buried deep beneath the sea floor.
‘There is time,’ she gestured, using Adeptus Astartes battle-sign. She raised a sluggish gauntlet to point right along the run of pipes. Kjarvik blinked up a tri-dimensional gridmap of the ocean bottom, overlaid with the runes of Umbra and flowing datascreed. His eyes roved over it, absorbing it metaconsciously. Hive Mundus’ foundation levels were about five hundred metres that way. It would be a hard half-kilometre in power armour.
‘Very well,’ he voxed, and then on Umbra’s shared frequency, ‘Kjarvik. Moving to target.’ He started right, following the line of piping.
The rest of the squad called in: Bohr, Zarrael, Phareous, Baldarich, a vox-click from the second Sister of Silence. The tracker runes in his helm display confirmed their convergence on the target. The Sister followed cumbersomely behind him, breathing heavily into the vox as she struggled to keep to his pace.
Pillows of dust rose languidly from the sea bed with the stomp of his boots, his visibility dropping to eight metres, then six, then three, a shoal of glittering particulates surrounding him like carnivores around a piece of meat. He continued on augur readings, the pipes always on his left. He glanced down for a moment to check the helmet-sized dish of ceramite casing that was maglocked to his hip. It was a melta mine. Its systems responded to his armour’s auto-interrogator with a squirt of reassuringly passive signals.
A double click on his vox-channel pulled his attention back up.
His pack beams slashed the dark with silver as he looked around. He snarled in frustration. The signal came again, click click, as urgent as a non-vocal responder could be. A Vow of Tranquility was all to the good in your cloister. He disengaged his bolt pistol’s holster seals, and the weapon came away in his gauntlet in a rush of air bubbles.
He half turned, head moving a fraction ahead of his weighted body, and saw it. A black shape, smooth, shiny like oil, cut his light beam in half. He stomped back and it flashed by him, barely two metres from his face, more of it sweeping past as he pulled up his bolt pistol. His light flashed over the leviathan’s blubbery underbelly. Fins. Webbed claws. Weird, oily camouflage.
His pistol fired with a thunderous boom. A compression wave rippled out ahead of the bolt, propellant burn frothing up the water in its wake. The second explosion came a split-second later with a sudden blossom of red. The pressure held it together rather than allow it to disperse and the ragged, heavier-than-water spill slowly sank.
There was no cry of pain, no ultrasonic squeal of panic or alarm. Kjarvik watched it swim past, separating the billowing blood sac into smaller droplets with a parting swipe of its gargantuan tailfin. He had barely scratched it.