Amongst the calamitous roaring of the Beast and the gravitic disasters afflicting worlds, these unnatural satellites materialised across the rimward sectors. The heralds of catastrophe, they ripped through reality to take their place among the ornamental orbs of busy Imperial systems. Some were black like coal, eating up the light reflected off nearby stars and planets. The surfaces of others were a collage of wreckage and plating, rusted into an armoured shell. The rock monstrosity above Arx II Antareon bore a colossal clan glyph painted across its ugly face, while the attack moon rising over desert world of Sanveen was a mechanical horror — a patchwork metal skull grinning down on the doomed Imperial citizenry with alien drollery.
Praxedes Prime was one of the first recorded worlds to experience the attack moons’ gargantuan weapons. Gravity beams struck the shrine world’s surface, chewing though the sovereign city states and tearing temples, basilicae and cathedrals violently skywards. Light years away, Port Oberon — a fleet base situated near a busy subsector ether-nexus — was pulverised. Colossal rocks, meteorites and planetary chunks, vomited forth from gaping launch craters in the pock-marked surface of a materialising attack moon, smashed through stationed sentry cruisers and fleeing merchant shipping.
The worst was to come, however. As well as rocketing projectiles and graviton beams, the attack moons unleashed plagues of ramshackle gunships, salvage hulks and rammers that enveloped escaping vessels in a web of grapnels and gunfire. Survivors on victim worlds climbed out from the wreckage of demolished cities, their eyes fixed on the slaughter above and the attack moons glowering down on them. They watched until their skies grew black — black with the swarms of descending rocks, landers and greenskin capsules. Oblivion beckoned.
This was not the first time the Inner Rim had suffered greenskin attacks. In recent memory, the Archfiend of Urswine had led its invasion into Subsector Borodino. The orks poured into the Grange Worlds like a green tide. Their decimation of the agri-world crops and tenders brought the nearby hive-world of Quora Coronis to the brink of starvation. It took the best part of a decade for the Coronida 3rd through 9th Indentured and the Royal Borodino ‘Blues’ to drive the Archfiend and its splintering horde back to its degenerate empire.
The Beast was not the Archfiend of Urswine, however. The Archfiend’s invasion force, while a savage sea of green into which Imperial worlds went to die, were mere runts compared to the Beast’s hulking monsters. Amongst the Beast’s countless number, the Urswine orks would have been trampled under foot. Even the greatest of the Archfiend’s brutes — perhaps even the Archfiend itself — would have been lost in the shadow of the Beast’s invader savages. The puniest of the Beast’s monsters were small mountains of muscle, standing snaggle-jaw and shoulder over other orks. Striding through the mobs and madness were greater beasts stilclass="underline" towers of tusk, green flesh and ferocity. Like gargants or giant effigies of greenskin gods brought to life, these hulks carried colossal weapons that demolished buildings at a single strike and monstrous guns that mangled infantry and tank formations with equal, bloody ease.
This was the gift the Beast brought to each planet on the Inner Rim of the Segmentum Solar: an apocalyptic flood of alien wrath. World by world, the Imperium began to fall, drowning in innocent blood less spilled than splattered. No subsector escaped armageddon. No star cluster survived the Beast. Wherever the black doom of attack moons appeared, life ended: the crowded worlds of the Scinta Stars, the void colonies of Constantin Thule, the Skull Nebula, the Gastornis Marches, planets along the Carcasion Flux, the Quatra Sound and Imperial strongholds on the Neo-Tavius Drift — even the quarantined worlds of the Prohibited Zone and the marauder-haunted reaches of wilderness space were sacrificed to feed the Beast’s apparently insatiable appetite for annihilation.
Billions perished in the fires of the invasion’s ire. Worlds lay smashed. The people prayed for an intervention — but none came. Astra Militarum forces and planetary defences stationed in the path of ruin did what they could, but were swiftly overrun. No reinforcements were sent. No reclamation fleet from Ancient Terra was on its way. Only death worlds and Adeptus Astartes home worlds seemed to have the resilience to slow the invasion’s progress. From individual planets, the Beast’s alien ambitions grew to the destruction of subsectors. From those, the green plague spread — overwhelming entire sectors of Imperial space. From prayer, the people turned to raw hope. Like the Archfiend’s feuding clans, perhaps the Beast’s monstrosities would tire, fragment and fall to fighting between themselves.
But as the months went by in misery and slaughter, it became apparent that this Beast was something else. A new breed of xenos savage. It would not stop. It would never stop. From subsector to sector it would lead its barbarian horde — and from there corewards, until the entirety of Segmentum Solar belonged to the greenskin race and Ancient Terra was clutched in the Beast’s filthy alien claw.
TWO
Lux Allegra could not believe what she was seeing.
The commander had been in the underhive for a number of days. Her mission had been simple: locate the Lord Governor and get him to safety. With the hive-world of Undine going to hell about them — hivers rioting, communities flooding, hundreds of thousands trapped under collapsing accretia and rubble — it seemed ironic that she, a former ganger, should be the one selected to lead the rescue. That Lux Allegra, who had lived so long by the edge of her knives and the whim of the ocean currents, should be chosen to pull the bastard blue-bloods out.
As underhiver and pirate, she had robbed the Lord Governor and his hive of monies and supplies. She had outrun his pirate-hunters, his enforcers and Maritine Guard. That was before she had been caught, press-ganged and promoted, however. Now she wore the hated uniform: the beret and the blue-and-white stripe, the flak plate and pads.
‘Why me, sir?’ Allegra had put to General Phifer. ‘Surely someone with consular experience would be more appropriate. A flag officer…’
‘Stop apologising for what you’re not,’ the general had grizzled back. ‘I don’t need somebody to hold the Governor’s cloak tails.’
Everyone knew where the Beacon Spire was. As both pirate and commander, Allegra had used the rotating lamps of the lantern palace to navigate the shantipelagos and hazards of sunken architecture on the seaward approach to Hive Tyche. Few others among the Undine 41st Maritine would have been able to navigate their way down through the city’s crumbling levels and sub-strata, and Chief Gohlandr and the twenty Maritine Guard under her command had been glad of her knowledge and assurance. With the Beacon Spire landing pad destroyed, along with the mighty plasma lamps themselves, and the lantern palace collapsing about them, Allegra had been forced to take them down.
The seas had quaked. The island hives had shaken. The Lord Governor — aged and infirm — had to be ripped from his pipes, tubes and wheeled throne. Carried between two valets, it would have been difficult enough to get the aristocrat out. Artemus Borghesi refused to leave, however, without the menagerie of extended family and hangers-on who had rushed to the spire palace for safety. With these, the patriarch included the palace servants and pets. While Allegra had been glad of the extra guns in the form of the ceremonial spire guardians, she had Chief Gohlandr shoot the Lord Governor’s retinue of prize flippered marine mammals — just to end the argument. Even then, the emaciated Borghesi forced the rescue party to wait while he had his valets dress him in his old fleet dress uniform, complete with medals and bicorne hat.