+I apologise for intruding upon your thoughts, brother.+
+No apology is necessary.+ I tuned out of the conversation between Darford and the Khatan. They were arguing about a gambling game with modestly variant rules on both of their home worlds. Each believed their version to be superior, and came armed with a host of reasons why. +Is something wrong, Dumenidon?+
+Not at all. I sensed you cataloguing our duties for when we reach the monastery, and felt it worth mentioning that you’ve forgotten one last thing. We are down to four souls now. Castian will need to accept an initiate before we leave the monastery again.+
Ah. He was right, I’d not considered that. Still, it was rare for him to touch minds with me directly, without using the squad’s shared bond. His powers were almost fully focused along more lethal lines.
+I wished to ensure Malchadiel could not hear,+ he confessed. +The wounds of loss are still fresh for him.+
+Forgive me for saying so, but that is unusually considerate of you, brother.+
+I have my moments.+ Dumenidon’s tone vibrated with amusement before fading away.
A new initiate. A new soul to join with ours, blending his blade and gifts with our own. No two squads operated quite the same way, nor did they channel their powers along the same paths. To be accepted into a squad was to harmonise one’s entire life with those who would be your brothers, learning anew how to focus your powers alongside your kindred. Even after decades of rigorous training, failure to meld with a squad was hardly uncommon. I was in danger of it myself.
‘Approach vector received,’ one of the helmsmen called.
‘All-ahead, standard,’ replied Captain Castor. ‘Prime docking thrusters.’
+Nothing foolish this time, Talwyn,+ Galeo sent, from his place by the command throne.
‘Perish the thought, sire.’ The captain’s burn scars twisted as he suppressed the smile making a race for his lips. Tonight, Castor wore a tricorne hat of beaten red velvet. It was quite the most foolish thing I’d seen him wear, and in the past year he’d given me plenty of examples for comparison.
+I mean it, captain,+ Galeo added. +This is a solemn return.+
‘As you say, sire.’ Castor remained seated on his ornate bronze throne, and made the sign of the aquila across his jacketed breast. The man was bizarrely foppish in his attire, but we were fortunate to have him. Few of our order’s lifebonded servants came willingly. Talwyn Castor, formerly master of the Battlefleet Obscurus warship Evangelica, was one of those rare souls that swore away from a life of traditional service without needing to be mind-scraped into secrecy for the good of mankind.
Still, it was pleasant to know he wouldn’t be irritating the dockmasters this time with his casual disregard for docking instructions. We were returning to bury our dead and bring warning of war, after all.
‘Come about three degrees to these coordinates,’ he called, tapping a code into his throne’s arm-console.
‘Coordinates received. Three degrees, aye.’
Titan filled the viewports, its soft orange gleam the perfect backdrop to show our fleet in orbit above. Huge, battlemented cruisers and interceptor frigates alike glided through the void, stationed in defensive formations, ever vigilant over inbound vessels and forcing them into narrow docking runs.
In all of mankind’s galaxy, only Mars, Terra and distant Cadia could claim such defences. We sailed through the heart of the most advanced fleet in humanity’s arsenal, well aware that ten thousand guns tracked our passage.
The Karabela was far from alone in the ocean of patrolling vessels – dozens of other ships drew close to dock or made ready to leave Titan’s orbit. Our world was an Inquisitorial nexus, receiving a constant stream of the ordos’ Black Ships, their sterile holds packed with children to be tested, trained, and most likely to die on the surface of Titan. By far the largest flow of stellar traffic came in the form of bulk-hulled Adeptus Mechanicus cruisers, laden with supplies. Our own immense forges on Titan were still unable to provide the amount of ammunition and weaponry our crusade required, such was the scale of war we waged. Freighters and cruisers from Deimos, the forge-moon gifted to us by ancient decree, ferried material back and forth in an unceasing convoy.
In the rarest cases, a red-armoured cruiser from Mars herself would arrive within our space, heralding the return or departure of a Techmarine, and the secrets he carried with him.
As we came past one immense grey battleship, its ridged gunports filled the windows. I couldn’t help a small smile as the name Unforsaken passed by, in massive silver script along the dark hull. A grand old vessel; it was good to see her again.
Once we passed her vast, ornamented prow, our true destination finally hove into view. It wasn’t a mere space station, it was the space station, and it played home to thousands of souls, dozens of ships, and the greatest secrets in the Imperium of Man. I could think of no other void-citadel in the Imperium – including the Phalanx of the Imperial Fists – that would match the Apex Cronus Bastion in firepower. The size of a small moon in its own right, our navigational charts tended to refer to it by its more militant title: Broadsword Station.
‘Ahead one-third,’ called Castor. ‘Make for the northern sector, sixteenth umbilicus.’
The engines quieted, but didn’t die. We crawled forwards, heading to our docking port. I could already feel Galeo in communion with our brothers on the surface – his presence was a wavering burr, relaying all we’d learned and the warning we brought.
‘Sir?’ called one of the few uniformed ratings on the command deck.
‘Speak,’ said Captain Castor.
‘The Unforsaken has ordered us to cease all forward momentum immediately.’
‘Delightful.’ Castor faked a smile. ‘Would you mind asking them why?’
‘Proximity warning!’ one of the robed menials called from his console deck at the strategium’s edge.
Castor sat straighter. I felt him grow sharper, more focused, as he shook off the lingering, muffling echoes of a hangover.
‘I see nothing. We’re on course.’
‘Proximity threat: blue,’ intoned another robed figure. I turned to him, one of the Palladium Kataphrakt, seeing him working at his station with four arms – two of which were slender mechadendrites reaching over his shoulders from a ticking power pack surgically attached to his spine. ‘Proximity threat: blue,’ he said again, his voice carrying no more passion than an automaton’s.
I’d never heard that warning before. I had no idea what it meant.
‘Track it, damn you,’ Castor demanded. The captain rose from the throne, straightening his ludicrously archaic hat. At his hips were a brace of slender las-weapons crafted to resemble antique black powder pistols from his home world, Cirasha. He couldn’t take his eyes from the central occulus screen as it exploded with hateful colour.
‘Oh, shit me,’ Darford whispered, seeing the same thing.
‘Warp rift,’ a dozen of the crew called at once. ‘There’s no room to–’
‘Aetheric dissilience,’ came the dead-calm voice of a nearby servitor. ‘Aetheric dissilience, at coordinates–’
‘Crash dive!’ Castor gripped a nearby railing, screaming across the deck. ‘Crash dive!’
III
The deck lurched beneath us as the Karabela’s prow sank. Our surroundings gave another kick as the engines flared into brightest life, leeching power from every other system on the ship. Lights dimmed around us, gravity lessened, and the hull gave a chilling groan along the spinal structure. I heard it echo through the whole ship.
Hardwired servitors automatically declared their console readings, though their mumbling voices went ignored in the aural melee. Although the occulus remained fixed upon the warp rift forming dangerously close by, the windows offered a sickening view of Titan swelling before us.
‘Report,’ Captain Castor demanded.
‘Maximum sustainable negative pitch,’ called the primary helmsman. ‘The fleet is scattering, but… T
here are too many for an orderly break. The manifesting ship may still strike us if it comes through without changing course. Shields, captain?’
‘No shields,’ Castor ordered. ‘They’ll leech from the engines. Run.’
‘Engines at full burn,’ stated one of the Palladium Kataphrakt priests from across the chamber, where his cowled coven of tech-adepts worked at the enginarium console. ‘We will reach Titan’s gravitational hard deck in thirteen seconds. Eleven. Ten.’
‘If we turn, they clip us. If we slow down, they hit us. In the Emperor’s holy name, tell me what ship is coming through that jump point.’
‘Five seconds until gravitational hard deck, captain.’
‘I don’t care. Auspex! Answer me.’
I clutched at the railing, the ship shaking all around me. Annika looked across at me as the strategium lights faded to an ominous red. She’d strapped herself into a restraint throne by the captain’s command seat.
+We’re diving below the gravitational hard deck,+ I answered the look in her eyes. +We’re below the safe altitude for lowest orbit, suffering Titan’s gravity and the resistance of its atmosphere. And we’re still diving.+
‘I know, but… the Karabela’s enhancements…’
Gravity started to exert its inevitable force in that moment. Several of the crew started slipping forwards. A reflexive thought activated my magnetic seals, pinning my boots to the deck. I caught Vasilla’s wrist as her feet went out from under her.
She mouthed ‘thank you’, though the rattling stole her words.
‘Will we crash?’ Annika sent.
+Almost definitely.+ Wind-streaks ripped against the windows as we ploughed through Titan’s upper atmosphere.
‘Sir!’ the mistress of auspex called out as she secured herself in her restraint throne. ‘The ship jumping in-system reads as the Adeptus Astartes destroyer Veregelt.’
Not one of ours. None of our ships bore that title.
‘It’s a Fenrisian ship!’ Annika shouted silently. ‘One of the others Grauvr spoke of… It’s reached Titan.’
The vox rasped into life, as the beleaguered destroyer blared for all to hear: ‘This is the Veregelt, iron-sworn to the Wolves of Fenris. The world Armageddon suffers in the grip of rebellion and heresy, on a scale never before seen. This is the Veregelt, iron-sworn to the Wolves of Fenris. The world Armageddon–’
The recorded voice died in static, as abruptly as it’d been born from it.
+Give me the view from the stern,+ I pulsed into the mind of every human on the command deck. The occulus tuned to the new angle immediately, showing the massive strike cruiser above us, bursting from its warp-rift as it re-emerged into real space.
I watched it through the turbulence taking hold, slashing from the wound in reality with its engines flaring hot, cutting right through the Karabela’s docking path. Even if we’d heeded the Unforsaken’s demand to cut engines, the Veregelt would still have ploughed right through us.
Of course, we’d likely just exchanged one death for another.
‘We’re clear,’ two of the helmsmen said at once. ‘The Veregelt has missed us.’
‘Engines to one-third, fire all cessation thrusters,’ Castor yelled. The captain hadn’t strapped himself down. Instead he gripped the handrail, his whole body slanted as he held fast. ‘Let’s slow this beauty down, if you please.’
‘Engines, one-third, aye.’ One of the enginarium adepts counted down. ‘Cessation thrusters in five, four, three…’
‘Brace!’ Castor called out.
I pulled Vasilla closer, embracing her against me, though it was difficult to gauge how much strength would keep her in my grip without crushing her. I caught a glance of her wide eyes staring up at me. Human fear had a scent like nothing else – a coppery sourness that instinctively repulsed me. It was the smell of duty; of blades raised to defend the innocent; of priceless immortal souls in fragile mortal shells. And yet it stank.
I realised I’d never seen her afraid before. It was so easy to forget she was little more than a child.
When the cessation thrusters fired, the entire ship kicked backwards. Several servitors and crewmen were thrown from their stations, crashing against the deck and walls. Blood burst from most of them, spraying against the walls in angled smears from broken skulls or snapped limbs. Loose debris, data-slates, weapons and tools sliced through the air in a tumbling blizzard.
We were still falling. Castor spat blood onto the deck. He had a gash along his head that I hadn’t seen him earn. ‘Helm, I’m losing my patience. Get us out of this dive. Fire the docking jets, for the Throne’s sake. Every little will help.’
‘Docking jets, aye.’
‘And shut that bloody siren up!’ the captain shouted.
‘At least the crash will dig our graves for us,’ Annika said inside my mind.
In that moment, we burst through the clouds. Titan’s surface in all its frozen and sepia glory spread out beneath us. Lakes of frozen methane reflected the rich cloud cover, while plateaux of orange rock stretched out as far as the eye could see.
Slowly, so painfully slowly, the horizon began to rise. The ship still didn’t stop shaking. The Karabela wasn’t designed for atmospheric flight, and the engines protested each second it was forced upon her.
Castor was an avatar of bemusing calm. He returned to his throne at the eye of the rattling, shaking storm, and steepled his fingers under his chin, looking out of the view windows. Following his gaze showed what captured his attention, but revealed nothing of why he was so tranquil. Despite climbing, we’d only managed to lift the Karabela’s prow enough to be diving right for the base of a mountain range.
I shared a moment of that same calm. Those are the Rachnov Mountains, I thought.
‘Maintain climb,’ Castor ordered, ‘but bleed all starboard engines by forty per cent, and veer hard to port as we rise. I would rather not drill my way through that mountain; it will do no favours to our lady’s paintwork.’
The Karabela groaned from prow to stern, protesting at the sensation of a thick atmosphere against her cold bones.
‘Up, girl.’ Castor was laughing. ‘Up you go, my fat-arsed duchess of the stars.’
‘Sir–’
‘I’m not blind, helmsman. All crew, all crew: Brace for impact.’
We clipped the tallest mountain. The barest clip, yet enough to pound the edge of our hull into the peak and breed a colossal avalanche in our wake. If the cessation thrusters had been a kick, this was a hammer blow that rang my bones like a bell. Deafening thunder broke out around us as the deck gave a monumental heave, and more of the crew went flying – even several who’d been restrained. Darford was one of them. I reached for him with my free hand as he fell from the handrail, but momentum threw him too fast.
He halted in the air as I clenched my teeth. Other crew members crashed against the hull and deck, but Darford remained suspended in the air.
+Got you.+
Bridge debris rained all around him. He covered his head as a data-slate slashed past. Like Annika, he possessed no telepathy himself, but he could ride the psychic link if I left it open.
‘Bloody hell,’ he sent back. Even his psychic voice was breathless. ‘Think I owe you a drink.’
I pulled him back slowly and lowered him as the deck returned to its slightly less violent shuddering. We were climbing now. The Karabela was raising her prow, cutting the sky as she lifted back up.
‘Well now.’ Captain Castor regarded the devastated bridge around him, and deliberately adjusted his hat back to its usual rakish angle. ‘That was a dash of unwanted excitement. Medicae staff to the command deck at once. Someone tell me the orbital status, if you please.’
Crew members picked themselves up and returned to duty. The dead lay where they’d died, while the wounded moaned nearby. The humans still at their stations checked their consoles.
‘Sir,’ the master of vox called. ‘The Veregelt has fired escape pods. She…’ The robed serf pau
sed as he listened to his earpiece. ‘She struck the Unforsaken on the way down, and is burning up in the atmosphere.’
‘On screen.’
The occulus resolved into a new view of the horizon behind us. A burning streak of smoke, flame and dark metal billowed down through the clouds, losing chunks of itself in the poisonous winds.
‘Damage report from the Unforsaken,’ ordered Castor.
‘She’s gone, sir.’ The master of vox shook his head. ‘The Veregelt ended her. Minor collisions are being reported across the fleet, sustained in the rush to scatter.’
‘They should have crash dived, eh? Bloody cowards. It worked for us.’
On the occulus, we watched the massive hulk spear into the orange desert, tearing its way across the ground and forming its own grave canyon. Dust and smoke hid most of the view, but the odds of any survivors walking from the Veregelt weren’t high. I released Vasilla, barely hearing her soft words of gratitude.
I said nothing at all. We reached low orbit less than a minute later. As normality reasserted its grip, our fleet and the stars they guarded drifted back into sight.
+Sacred Throne.+ Galeo’s curse was a whisper.
The Unforsaken was a cleaved hulk, spilling escape pods the way a body in the void spilled drops of crystallised blood. For a grim second, the sight put me in mind of Sothis dying upon the creature’s claws.
Both of the warship’s ruined halves were iron carrion, reduced to wrecks by the amidships ramming she’d taken. Rescue shuttles and cargo haulers were pulling close, launched from the orbital defence platforms. Even so, dozens of lifepods were already streaming down to the planet’s surface. I hoped they landed undamaged and were fitted with on-board respirators, else the crews would be dead long before rescuers from the monastery reached them.
We sailed past the Unforsaken’s wreckage, close enough to read the inscriptions upon her hull.
‘Request docking permission with the Apex Cronus Bastion,’ Captain Castor said quietly.
‘Docking permission received.’
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