The Beast Arises

‘Find me that distress beacon, shipmaster.’

‘Come and look at this, lord captain.’

Marcarian was standing by the chart desk that dominated the strategium turret. The base unit was an illuminated table, above which a wavering hololithic grid chart was displayed. A golden aquila dead-centre represented Dantalion. She was surrounded by a cloud of unidentified blips, trailing back towards the bloated, crimson wire-frame that represented the Vandis star. The intervening grids filled fast with ship markers, like a spreading infection reviewed on rapid playback. The banks of time-lapse and repeater screens that surrounded the desk were walled with static.

‘Disregard the orks for now,’ Marcarian commanded the strategium liaison. ‘Authorise removal of the necessary coding wafers and route the spared cogitation capacity to parse Last Wall identifiers.’

‘Do you not want targets?’ asked Zerberyn.

‘Scanning for Last Wall signals will identify both the source of the distress beacon, and our own fleet if they are here. That should be our first priority.’

Zerberyn offered his silence by way of agreement. Before a void fight with a Death Guard flotilla had wasted his right side and earned him his command, Marcarian had been Augur Master aboard the Grey Ranger. He knew his system.

‘I’d also recommend mobilising the First. The orks have shown themselves to favour long-range teleport actions.’

It was then that Zerberyn realised that at some point during the translation cycle he had drawn his pistol.

‘We are ready for them.’

All Adeptus Astartes fleets employed the same classes of ship, but the modular design allowed for variations on the basic STC. Fists Exemplar warships differed from those of their cousins in many ways, but principal among these was the manifold layers of dedicated psychic shielding they employed. They were built for void-war, purposed to patrol the storm-wracked region of wilderness space afflicted by the Rubicante Flux. In addition to the cherub-serfs that filled every inhabited section with song, choristers from the Chapter Librarius psychically conducted the chorus from chambers specifically designed for their warp-soothing acoustics. Every one of Dantalion

’s millions of consoles was worked with monomolecular silver wires. Her ballast chambers were filled with the scent of candlewood and samphyr, silvic oil and rose cedar. Even the very halls of the ship were arranged into the schematised form of potent protective runes and a good portion of her orbit-to-ground firepower had been retrofitted with psychic null generators.

She had been designed to fight the enemies of Man and triumph in regions of space where other ships could not enter, and only deep-survey barges of the Inquisition sailed with greater protection against warp-borne assault.

‘But again, granted. Have them deploy at your discretion.’

‘Bright skies…’ someone exclaimed.

Zerberyn followed the staring faces to the main viewscreen. Someone amongst the veteran crew zoomed the screen’s visual feed and placed a bracket around a patched-up old colossus. Almost three times the mass of Dantalion, it looked like an Imperial Navy battleship. It was heavily damaged and, so it appeared, either partially or carelessly rebuilt. Its aft section was almost completely crumpled, and had been fitted with a monstrous engine housing almost as large as the rest of the ship that filled the void behind it with cones of chemical fire. Construction scaffolds spread from the hull like a beetle’s wings. Fires burned on several decks.

‘Oberon-class,’ Marcarian confirmed. ‘Or she was.’

The big vessel yawed into the lower quadrant of the main viewer, drifting across the plane of the solar system with a trail of gnat-like ork fighters in pursuit. ‘Approaching on an intercept vector.’

Whatever their current naval supremacy, the orks would always make use of what they found. Zerberyn could almost respect them for that.

‘No serial codes, no auto-transmissions, no response to hails.’ Marcarian limped through the strategium desks, looking over shoulders at the read-outs. ‘I’d say it’s an ork ship.’

‘Of course it is an ork ship. That much is clear.’

‘Still no sign of Last Wall transponders on our scans, lord captain,’ said Marcarian, stiffly. ‘All hands ready for emergency translation at your order.’

Zerberyn brought the barrel of his pistol to his gorget ring and tapped it as he thought, watching the zipping ork fighters wind about the nearing battleship like surgical thread through a wound.

‘Lord captain, I think that—’

‘I commend you your unfettered thought, it improves us all,’ Zerberyn spat, quoting from the Oriax Variorum. The ship slid into full view, Dantalion gunning for it amidships. Zerberyn aimed his bolt pistol at the viewer.

‘Kill that ship.’

Two

Terra — the Imperial Palace