‘There is also a personal communication for you, lord, from the Anokrono.’
Leaving Heroth to his duties with a nod, Thane withdrew to a stack of munitions crates beneath a little-used catwalk where it was marginally quieter than the rest of the deck.
‘Put it through.’
There was a click as the shipmaster switched channels and then a garbled hiss, the signal no longer a wired ship line but a ship-to-ship transmission through an intensely busy orbital space. There were vox-protocols, but they were poorly enforced and civilian transports rarely adhered to them.
‘Forgive the indulgence, Brother Thane,’ spoke the uncommonly cultured tones of Euclydeas, Chapter Master of the Soul Drinkers. ‘But after our last meeting I felt a “good luck” was in order.’
‘It is welcome.’ Thane and Euclydeas had fought side-by-side on Ullanor, two of seven Chapter Masters that had formed Vulkan’s vanguard into the Great Beast’s temple-gargant. A day that would live on in future histories, if the Imperium endured to retell it.
He sighed. Quesadra was not the only one to fall. Odaenathus of the Ultramarines had also been slain, a mantle that was still to be taken up.
‘We will both need plenty of it,’ Thane said, ‘I have no doubt.’
‘Agreed, and I intend to buy my share with ork blood.’
‘I hope to fight beside you again come the end, brother.’
‘Likewise. I have already spoken with Issachar. My fleet will follow you out. For Dorn. For the Emperor. For freedom.’
There was a click, and then silence as the Chapter Master severed the line.
‘To the war then,’ said Asger.
‘To test Koorland’s new weapon.’
‘I have heard of it. And if it does not work as he hopes?’
Thane gestured to the row of towering launch bay doors and their view of Terra, as though this alone explained everything. ‘Then nothing changes.’
Eight
‘The Emperor protects. Kill every last one.’
It always took a ship’s real space systems a few minutes to recover but, despite his own post-Geller-collapse nausea, Urquidex had been sufficiently drilled in the procedure to get himself aboard the Thunderhawk and strapped in when it had occured. The skitarii ranger, Alpha 13-Jzzal, had checked his harness, then slotted in alongside.
The post-event syndromes made Urquidex’s mind squirm as though his skull had been opened for an augmentation procedure that he had not submitted to, memories of his time on the lobotomisation slab, implanted electrodes making his skin tingle and his limbs jerk. He could taste vomit in his mouth and thought he could smell it on his robes. There had barely been time to realign his senses to the restored reality before the Blood Angel, Gadreel, had guided the gunship from its hangar.
But then, Space Marine physiology tolerated translation better.
‘Are you all right, magos?’ asked the Inquisitorial storm trooper, a colonel named Rothi, in the opposite harness, holding on to the vertical bars.
Urquidex nodded, trying hard not to be sick again as the Thunderhawk passed through her parent ship’s void shields with a bump. Thrust rippled through his flesh organics as the gravitational forces pushed him hard against the restrictor bar.
Seeking something fixed to settle his churning stomach, his telescoping eyestalks sought out the nearest viewing block. Behind them, more troop ships streaming from its launch bays, the castellated bulk of the Inquisitorial flagship, Verisimilis, was a bulwark of darkness against the steady light of the stars. More heavily armed than the standard Black Ship template, and several times more massive than the spartan menace of Alcazar Remembered, the Inquisitorial flagship had been born black. Enveloped by an aegis of literal and metaphysical wards, and with a standard crew complement now supplemented with Deathwatch Space Marines, it was as formidable a foe as any, at arm’s length or in close.
The gunship altered course and the view swung. Inquisition and Excoriator ships crowded the orbital anchorages of a pearly hyper-industrial ice world. Drop pods smoked a small slice of the upper atmosphere in blacks, greens, and reds. A few other vessels were mixed up with them. Though no expert in Adeptus Astartes vexillology, Urquidex recognised warships of the Blood Angels, Aurora Chapter, and the Brazen Claws. They had been hastily, in some instances partially, reworked in black. The realisation of just how much manpower and materiel it would require to convert a million square metres of just one void-scarred warship to Deathwatch black had clearly come too late for some.
A vast manufactorum tender of the Basilikon Astra hove to alongside an Aurora Chapter cruiser with a spitting contusion from a gravitic lash in her port quarter. Manipulator claws and laser sculptors were setting to work, cutting and cauterising, even as the Space Marine vessel disgorged drop pods. The visible Navy and Mechanicus ships he could count on his one hand. They hung back from the planet.
The planet was one he had visited before, though he had never yet personally set foot on it. He had been part of the sample-retrieval mission dispatched after its fall. The memory did not settle his stomach at all.
An alien growl and a clank of chain drew his attention from the viewing block.
The Veridi mysticus was bolted to the wall, chains running through thick iron hoops that had been welded to the deck. Even tranquillised, it was terrifyingly strong. The storm troopers shifted in their seats. In slots designed for the transport of superhuman warriors they looked like nervous children at an adult’s table.
‘Be calm,’ said Tyris and the outward display of nerves diminished. Huge and fully sealed in his black armour, the Raven Guard surveyed the mortal soldiers. Under the infernal red of his lenses they found another object for their fear.
‘Yes, lord,’ said Rothi.
Urquidex glanced to the warriors either side of Tyris that made up the reformed Kill-Team Stalker. He was not yet adept at telling armoured Space Marines apart, and recognised them from their training exercises by Chapter marking — or lack thereof — more than any other feature. Hakon Icegrip of the Space Wolves. Vega of the Doom Eagles. Gadreel of the Blood Angels. Numines of the Fists Exemplar.
Unlike the others, the Fist Exemplar’s wargear carried no markings.
Urquidex could speak at length on the nature and variation of biological hierarchies. He could explain how the Leo of ancient Terra asserted their dominance over a breeding pool, or the socio-genetics of Veridi giganticus’ rigidly absolutist dominance structure. The ancient eldar too, from the few fragmentary treatises he had seen, held to a model of subservience and command that, for all its inherent alien-ness, was more remarkable for its similarities to human norms than its differences. Even amongst the adherents to the Cog Mechanicus, the exact same structure could be seen in the makeup of the Synod, the diagnostiad, and the alpha station of the Fabricator General himself. The instinct to dominate was as fundamental to biological life as the nucleotidal structure that underlay it. This man was quite plainly a leader.
A discussion of the flaws inherent to Oriax Dantalion’s philosophy would have made a fascinating diversion just then.
With a sullen growl, the ork psyker lunged for him.
Chains rattled and pulled taut and the huge beast clattered to the deck. The storm troopers swore. Alpha 13-Jzzal struck it across the jaw with the butt of his plasma caliver. Drugged as it was, ork as it was, the psyker almost certainly didn’t feel the blow, but there was force enough in his cyborgised guardian’s arm to put it back on the deck. It drooled where it lay. One poorly-focused eye rolled drunkenly around Urquidex.