The Beast Arises

‘Go ahead,’ Marcarian breathed. ‘Please.’

‘It’s definitely Last Wall.’

It would have taken one even more attuned to Space Marine physiology than the two mortal crew members to note the tightening muscles of Zerberyn’s neck. The Last Wall was an abhorrence to him. The mere conception of it would have been affront enough to Guilliman’s legacy, and that it was his own primarch that had done so sickened him. It had been Oriax Dantalion himself, the visionary who would later found the Fists Exemplar, who had persuaded Dorn of the wisdom in Guilliman’s solution. And now the Fists Exemplar had discovered that the primarch was not persuaded after all.

Zerberyn had argued the case with Thane at Phall, as he knew Dantalion himself would have done had he still lived, and had done so again on Terra. Another might have viewed his subsequent elevation in spite of all that had gone before as evidence of Thane’s magnanimity, but Zerberyn knew him better. It was an insult. The First had already been culled of its finest to reform Koorland’s shield corps. He was captain of the First, but the First was a company of new recruits and stubborn ideologues like Columba, who would rather lay down their arms and let destruction find them than don the black fist of Dorn once more.

‘What does it say?’

‘I wouldn’t advise listening to it. There’s a verbal component but it’s been heavily corrupted by the transition to the empyreal phase. But I do have coordinates.’

‘Is it Phall? I told Thane that Koorland was premature to depart while the Soul Drinkers and the bulk of the Black Templars were still to be contacted.’

The vox-liaison shook her head. ‘No. The latest navigation estimate puts us at least several weeks from the rendezvous coordinates. It’s not Terra either.’ She pivoted her chair and called up a screed of data to her terminal. Gloved fingers dancing over the keys, she transformed it into what Zerberyn recognised as a four-dimensional coordinate plot. ‘It’s close by, originating from an orphan star in the Sycrax Cluster. A red giant called Vandis.’

‘Is Thane or anyone else receiving this beacon?’

The officer sucked in her teeth, frustrated as much with herself as with the difficulties imposed on her by warp physics. ‘I don’t know.’

Zerberyn looked up to where the main viewscreen hung suspended from a plasteel gantry, reassuringly blank save for a purity seal on a fuzzy grey background. It was blustery with static, interpretive in its not-quite-random swirls of the buffeting energies of the warp.

With superhuman speed of thought, he collated the available variables, assembling them into a plan of action that he then challenged with every conceivable scenario. He took the additional half-second required to satisfy himself that any ship in the Fists Exemplar fleet in possession of the same information would reach an identical conclusion.

He had no love for his distant gene-brothers, but like it or not they were the Last Wall. The Imperium stood only while they held firm, and as the Arch-Heretic himself had annihilated the last great ork empire at its root, so too would Zerberyn burn the Beast from the very ground on which he lived.

This, he promised to himself.

‘Contact the Alcazar Remembered

or any other ship you can raise, and transmit a data-burst containing the beacon coordinates and our course of action.’

‘Which is?’ said Marcarian.

‘Prepare for immediate real space translation onto the origin of that beacon. All stations to battle readiness. All weapons systems and shield arrays to be engaged the second we emerge.’

The shipmaster nodded stiffly and began to relay orders to the relevant stations, which in turn disseminated them through the ship down their hardlines. The murmur of voices became a clamour.

‘To run blind into a battle is folly,’ Marcarian murmured, for Zerberyn’s ear alone.

‘I know well the lessons of the Codex Astartes

, shipmaster.’

Marcarian bowed his head. ‘Let me at least recommend that Excelsior be sent in ahead. She’s Rubicante-class, designed to operate through the worst distortions of the Flux. Her vox-array should be more than powerful enough to reach us, even here.’

Zerberyn duly considered the shipmaster’s counter-proposal. Coordinating the actions of a fleet the size of the Fists Exemplar’s through the immaterium would be fraught at best. Who could say what was listening? Or worse, what truly answered. He could not even say with certainty where Excelsior or the Alcazar Remembered were, or that they had not already emerged into the materium at Phall.

It was possible that Dantalion would return to Phall in a month’s time and find that Excelsior and the rest of the fleet had never left.