The Beast Arises

The shuttle deployed its landing struts for its final descent stage onto Daylight Pad Theta, the light void craft wobbling in the crosswinds generated by the perpetual grind of the Palace hive’s colossal cycler fans and the sheer volume of air traffic. Transorbital lighters were picking up and setting down in a near-constant flow, crowding the Palace’s skyline: red and purple and black and gold, a swirling plasteel snow of new conscripts pressed into the Navy’s proudest regiments. To navigate a shuttle through either obstacle, let alone both, was a task closer to reading the Emperor’s Tarot than landing a void craft. To even make the attempt took the superhuman reflexes and unshakable confidence of the Adeptus Astartes.

Koorland, Chapter Master of the Imperial Fists, looked up to watch the shuttle’s approach.

Waves of promethium heat beat down on him, and the roar of the angling turbofans rippled his lips and cheeks, but his eyes stayed open despite the onslaught. The Templar crosses emblazoned on white panels on the shuttle’s nose and underwing appeared to resize as aerofoils made minute adjustments. Jets of air from lateral stabilisation thrusters held it level. Roused from torpor by the approaching lander and flushed of soporific neurosedatives, servitors bonded to caterpillar-tracked motive assemblies moved haltingly forwards against the jetwash. Lengths of bright orange vulcanised hosing played out behind them, the oil-washed outlet valves supplanting superfluous hands and emerging from artificially gaping mouths flanked by mind-wiped stares.

The shuttle touched down within the innermost ring of blinking guidelights, and eased onto its landing struts. The roar of its turbofans became a whine and gases hissed from heat flues and radiator grilles, equalising pressure and temperature across the shuttle’s glowing heat-shields. One of the servitor units sprayed the shuttle with super-cooled carbon dioxide vapour. Another trundled underneath, frozen gases crystallising its slack features, and nozzled its wrist adaptor over the shuttle’s filler pipe. It emitted a guzzling noise, smoking under the white hiss of venting gases.

Either side of Koorland, an honour detail of human (and another of not-quite-human) troopers endeavoured to stand crisply at attention, despite the successive waves of engine heat and coolant that came at them from the middle of the pad.

The men were all tall and hard-faced, in black uniforms with red piping and frogging, armsmen of the Navy’s symbolic flagship, the Royal Barque

. Each wore the Royal Barque’s forbidding ensign on their shoulder in place of the usual regimental insignia, a sheathed cutlass and a pair of ceremonial red gloves. They were the Navy’s elite protection detail, and only the highest-ranking admirals and most influential of visiting dignitaries warranted such bodyguards. In this instance, the subject of their care was Rear-Admiral Pervez Leshento of the Tiamat-class battleship Dies Dominus

. The name was High Gothic for ‘Lord of Daylight’. An extraordinary coincidence, or Lansung was honeying Koorland’s gruel a little thickly.

On the other side were the skitarii of the Basilikon Astra, the exploratory fleets of Mars: visored, cloaked in dark, energy-dense robes worn over a bio-augmented flesh-carapace and an assortment of techno-esoterica. Koorland doubted that the cyborgised warriors suffered the extremes of heat and cold gushing out from the shuttle pad, but the jetwash was certainly fighting them over their heavy cloaks. The commander of the maniple was a magos explorator named Benzeine. He was wrapped up to his throat in deep red robes woven with the machina opus. From the odd, twitching motions that occasionally stirred these robes, they were to protect the sensibilities of those he moved amongst rather than for his own benefit. Hololithic equations hovered about a millimetre in front of his black-chrome facial dish from a miniaturised projector embedded somewhere amidst the array of fluttering sensors.

The Taghmata of Mars had fulfilled their obligations in the Last Wall’s assault on the ork attack moon, limited though they were, and the Fabricator General was not about to relinquish control of that orbiting planetoid of xeno-tech now.

As Koorland waited, a pair of hypersonic Lightning interceptors rocketed overhead, the second surfing on its leader’s contrail. An expanding, rolling boom rattled the ornamental flak turrets of Dawn Spire and the leaded windows of the Walk of Heroes on the other side of the killing ground. The golden vexillum of the Daylight militia that flew from the plasteel-plated turrets of the Cathedral of Saint Clementine the Absolver bent after the passing fighters. Koorland looked up to catch them but even his genhanced eyes were too slow.