The Beast Arises

‘Abhumans!’ said Huringer angrily. ‘We’re loyal subjects of the Emperor, same as you, lovey. Ain’t our fault our home’s low-g.’ He turned away from her pointedly.

Haas groggily got to her feet. The room was crammed with longshanks. They had arrayed themselves as best they could around the walls, backs to the metal, long legs drawn up in front of them.

‘Where are you from?’ she asked. Haas was aware there were sanctioned sub-strains of humanity scattered around the galaxy, but that was as far as her knowledge went. On Terra any deviation from the norm was a mutation, and a mutant was a criminal by default.

‘Orin’s Well,’ said Marast. ‘Greenskins overran the planet and took thousands of us up here. Seems we’re good for working on the moon. Most of it ain’t got no gravity generators. Doesn’t bother us as much as it bothers them. You?’

‘You don’t know where you are?’

Marast shook his head. ‘Not a splinter of an idea. Been down here slaving for weeks now. Not many of us left.’

‘Terra! You’re in orbit over Terra!’ She tapped the badge on her shoulder guard, much worn now, that marked her out as an arbitrator of the Imperial Palace, 149th Administrative District, General Oversight Division.

Marast’s mouth opened wide in amazement. ‘Terra?’ He made the sign of the aquila over his chest. Murmurs went up from his freakish compatriots. A few reached out to touch her. She shook their hands off and stepped over their fragile-looking legs to the door.

‘Don’t do that!’ hissed Marast. ‘You’ll have One Tooth in here on us!’

Something grunted outside. Haas threw herself against the wall as a bucket-jawed giant squinted into the room. One fang, a dirty beard. Her captor.

It banged on the door hard, making it shake in its mountings, and roared out a string of gruff alien words.

Marast crept to her side and pulled at her arm. ‘Don’t do that, don’t talk, don’t look them in the eye!’ he said fearfully. ‘If you do, they’ll hurt you bad, might kill you, take you… take you through there!’ He pointed at the wall.

‘What’s through there?’ asked Haas, dreading the answer.

Marast winced. ‘The meat pen.’

Haas could not help but look, her eyes drawn by a force outside of herself to the wall separating their holding pen from the room next door.

‘I can’t stay here. There must be a way out!’ she said.

‘Where to?’ said Marast. ‘Get out of that door and there are a million orks. Even if there weren’t, where would you go? Walk to the surface and toss yourself off into space? Although that’s better than the alternative, I suppose. But you can’t. The only way we’re getting off this moon is if someone comes and rescues us, and let me tell you something sad, lady arbitrator — no one’s coming, not for the likes of us. You keep your head down, work hard, and they mostly leave you alone.’

‘I won’t. I’m going to get out of here,’ whispered Haas.

Marast shook his head sadly. ‘Not once you’ve seen the gate, you won’t. It’s hopeless.’

‘Gate?’

‘The place they come through. A flash of light, and they’re there. As many orks as they need. There’s no army in the galaxy that can stop them.’

In the boundary zone between the Oort cloud and the dwarf planets parading around the edge of the Sol System, space convulsed. Vile lightnings cracked around a puckering in the fabric of real space. With a silent scream, the universe tore.

Hundreds of warships arrowed into reality, diabolical vapours spilling off their glowing Geller fields. Behind them boiled the cauldron of the warp, a pit of madness none should cross. Reality sealed itself in a blinding flash of non-light, shuddered, and was still.

‘High Marshal, my lord Chapter Master, we have arrived in the Sol System, praise be,’ announced Bohemond’s shipmaster. Other reports followed.

‘All decks report unproblematic translation.’

‘Warp engines powering down.’

‘Geller field deactivation in three, two, one. Geller field deactivated. All praise the Emperor, most holy Lord of Man.’

From the corner of his eye, Koorland saw Bohemond’s twisted lips mouth the words silently along with his bondsmen.

The High Marshal of the Black Templars strode along the sweeping command deck of the Abhorrence. Fans of workstations spilled down from the command dais at the centre. A window of armourglass a dozen metres across filled the front of the deck, showing the blackness of space. At this far removed, Sol was merely a bright dot, hard to tell apart from any other star. Koorland stared at it, searching for the dim flicker that would mark out the location of Holy Terra.

‘All Black Templars vessels, state arrival and status,’ commanded Bohemond. ‘Issachar, Quesadra, Thane. How do you fare?’

Cyber-constructs carrying holoprojectors swooped in on Koorland and Bohemond’s position, their projection gems bursting into life. The shoulders and heads of his fellow Chapter Masters assembled themselves in the air from striped pulses of laser light.

‘All my vessels report zero casualties, no damage,’ said Thane.