‘This is no rout,’ said Kjarvik, indicating with jabs of his power fist’s wolf-claws to where overwhelming numbers still hemmed in the frayed wedge of gold that represented Maximus Thane’s contingent. ‘They have left enough force behind to hold up the Guard.’
‘But why not crush them? Why pull back at all? Why…’ Wienand waved her hand as if to summon the absent thought. The boom of heavy bolters from the other side of the doors was an urgent distraction that she could do without.
A symphony of audially-coded alarm signifiers began to chime from the auspex units. ‘Force fields have just gone up inside the palace, Representative,’ came the report.
‘Inside?’
‘Yes, nothing projected outward that I can detect.’
‘What on the Throne… Can we raise Koorland?’
A shake of the head. ‘Some kind of signal deflection. The force fields, I think. I don’t know.’
‘Then raise Issachar. See what the fleet’s guns can do about it.’
‘No response from Punished!’
‘Try another ship.’
A tense moment later and several rows of shaken heads told Wienand that the answer was the same. The magos held up his digital manipulators in what was either a residually organic gesture of ignorance or an affectation painstakingly developed for maximal functionality as a human liaison. ‘The fleet is in range of this structure’s communications array. Supposition: we are too close to the palace, the electromagnetic output from its force fields is interfering with our equipment.’
‘Contact Thane,’ Wienand scowled, feeling her command of the situation unravelling fast. ‘Do it now. He’ll have no idea what’s going on, and he might at least have the chance to fall back and regroup. No point walking into a slaughter for no good reason.’
The operator looked up from his vox-caster. He looked broken.
‘We can’t reach our ground forces either?’
A solid thump from the other side of the lower access doors interrupted them, and the roar of four heavy bolters abruptly became that of two. Wienand would not have thought that the difference would have been so obvious. Stray slugs tapped on the welded door, almost politely.
The last weapon-servitor would not hold for long, and then Wienand would see close up just how impolite an ork could be.
‘Madame inquisitor,’ called the ranking officer monitoring the auspex staff. ‘More ships entering auspex range.’
‘There shouldn’t be any more ships.’
‘Ork ships. A hundred signatures, at least. They must have been waiting on the planet’s auspex dark side.’
Wienand felt a chill rise up through her and whisper round the base of her skull. The monitoring station had fallen deathly quiet, but for the much diminished thunder of heavy bolters. She swallowed, unable to articulate the cornered-animal sensation that had come over her with the appearance of those ork ships.
‘What should we do?’ asked Raznick.
Dumbly, she looked around the silent chamber, her eyes drawn inevitably, water running downhill, to Kjarvik’s yellow, vertically transected pair. She took a deep breath, felt it steady her nerves, and did not blink. She still had a task to perform, even if the total lack of long- and medium-range vox made that task impossible.
‘Leave everything,’ she said, directed at the two magi, and then to Kjarvik and Raznick: ‘Contact any gunships in range and have them pick up the remaining kill-teams. I’m going to have to direct things in person.’
Ullanor — Gorkogrod
As Koorland had suspected, the pre-teleportation position and facing of his squad members had had little bearing on how they were now deployed. The twelve of them had rematerialised into two half circles, facing outwards, a row of blue-white burners and butchery tools between them. He, Asger, Krule and the ogryn, Olug, had the two semi-circles’ four ends. Commissar Goss was being violently sick. Koorland did not know if it was the teleportation or the stench, but he doubted that either would have been easy on a mortal’s stomach.
‘Where are we?’ said Asger. ‘Why are we not where we are supposed to be?’
With a blink-click over the activation rune jittering yellow in his helm display, Koorland bade his armour’s spirit to summon a tri-d cartolith of the palace complex. It wavered into being a moment later, filling the left side of his display with a slowly rotating image. It took a few minutes to interface his armour’s locator beacon with the cartolith and pin his current location to the display, towards the top of the labyrinthine tangle of corridors.
‘About four hundred metres from the throne room, though the corridors in this section are a mess.’
‘What happened?’
‘Force fields on my auspex,’ said Bohemond. ‘A scatterfield too, perhaps? Our teleport must have been redirected to avoid it.’
Koorland blew out a relieved breath. The teleport systems incorporated safety protocols to prevent incorporation into solid matter or other violent means of rematerialisation, but even First Company veterans did not hold much trust in those. He was glad to see they had functioned now, even if they had moved his squad some way from his target. ‘What of Kavalanera’s team?’
Asger shrugged. Only his exposed head moved. ‘If this is the nearest area to the throne room large enough for twelve men then the Sisters will likely be redirected here.’
‘How long to teleport?’
‘Chronos do not operate during the teleportion cycle,’ said Bohemond. ‘I cannot contact Alcazar Remembered to correct. Outward channels appear to be jammed.’
‘Then we must clear the area,’ said Koorland, sharply. ‘Or else there will be no telling where the others will appear. Krule, can you find your way to the throne room from here?’
The Assassin was subconsciously scouring his surrounds for threats and targets, but responded to the question with a curt nod and pointed to one of two doors. He was a large man, by mortal standards, but moved with a balletic grace. The firelight scattered against his synskin.
‘Sergeant Tyris, escort him and secure the passage. We will follow.’
The Deathwatch Space Marines, ogryns, commissar, Terminator-encased Chapter Masters, and one Assassin exited the chamber. Koorland stopped under the lintel bar and turned ponderously to look back.
He had felt a prickling on the back of his neck.
The air in the orks’ butchery chamber shimmered and folded, a kneading of the warp space liminal that broke the warm, surface-hardened crust of normalcy to which mankind thought it clove and mixed it with darkness. The tear existed for a fraction of a second, and in a splurge of ionisation that left Koorland’s eyes and throat stinging in spite of his protection, it was sealed, and twelve additional figures now stood where there had been none.
Kavalanera and five of her sisters stood in a ring with power blades drawn and charged. Torn pages of ancient scripture fluttered from their armour in the air-cycled breeze of a voidship they no longer occupied. Two were in the same antique carmine as the knight abyssal, designating them, presumably, as belonging to the same sub-order of the Sisters of Silence. The other three wore black plate with golden trim, led by a knight obsidian by the name of Drevina.
The chilling effect on Koorland’s brain of the pariahs’ mere existence in the same room was every bit as profound as the teleportation cycle that had preceded it.
The women surrounded the ork psyker. It was far larger than the Incus Maximal test subject and its muscles swelled against the chains that bound its wrist and throat. Three enormously reconstructed draught-servitors supplied from Verisimilis’ loading decks had the ends of the chains clamped in vice-hands. Another lesson from Incus Maximal. The servitors were more than strong enough to keep the struggling ork restrained, and they would not react to personal danger the way the Inquistorial storm troopers had.