The Beast Arises

‘And they shall receive one. Instruct all ships, forward on us.’ Thane clenched both gauntlets on his throne’s armoured rests and rose. ‘Ahead full, shipmaster, weapons free.’

Alcazar Remembered was a dominant beast. Her deck plates trembled with the power output required to sustain her formidable array of weapons systems and shields. She did not purr; she growled. It was difficult to stand aboard her as her engine stacks were fired to capacity and not share something of that invulnerability.

Her killing spirit vibrated through Thane’s boots, into the core of his being like the might and will of the primarch himself.

‘Sir.’ The call came from the liaison working at auspectoria. ‘We have visual on Obsidian Sky.’

‘On screen.’

The images currently cycling through the main viewer cut out. The panoramic shot that replaced them was badly pixellated, as though translated from an image intended for a much smaller display. Blizzards of static swept across the screens at intervals. But there was no mistaking what they were seeing. A hush descended. Hazard and proximity alerts continued to bleep. Consoles chirruped for attention. Crew serfs pulled headsets from their ears and stared up at the screen in horror. Thane realised his hand had moved across his mouth.

It was the Obsidian Sky. They were watching her final moments.

In the cold silence of full magnification, a sequence of explosions blossomed from her port stern. Shields were gone. Bits of enamelled black outer hull glittered around her, held to her mass like a miniature ring system around a gas giant. The image shook slightly and fuzzed, as if the force of the blasts had somehow carried over the feed. The static bomb faded slowly. Tracers spat back and forth over the display. Sitting above Obsidian Sky and, relative to Alcazar Remembered, behind it, was another Adeptus Astartes cruiser. Their hulls were as close together as though conducting a last stand: two old warriors, back-to-back and beset by foes. A torpedo hit blasted a chunk from its dorsal spire. A tortured flare of combusting atmosphere raged into the airless void, spraying Obsidian Sky

with metal fragments.

Thane leaned to the edge of his throne, elbows to the thigh plates of his armour, chin to his ceramite-clad knuckles.

Impossible.

‘Traitors of the Fourth.’

The inconceivability of it brought a shiver to Thane’s heart. He felt short of breath, his chest felt tight. The bald fact of what he was witnessing, that which was verifiable, that which was practical, simply could not overcome his disbelief in it.

Thane tightened his hold on the brass grip-studs. Focus on the immediate.

His voice, when it came, was the exemplar of strength.

‘Signal Obsidian Sky.’

‘I can’t, my lord,’ cried Teal, little trace of that invulnerability in her tone now. ‘The interference is too intense.’

‘Forward grids.’ Kale’s voice, coming from somewhere, some universe where Black Templars and Iron Warriors did not fight side-by-side. ‘Keep those fighters off our shoulder.’

‘Reduce magnification,’ said Thane. ‘Can you show me Interdictor

and the main Black Templars fleet?’

‘Aye, sir.’

The screen blinked to a broader view.

A dozen Black Templars vessels of various classes came into active view, the swollen chromosphere of Vandis highlighting lance arrays, fins and turrets in bitter red. They moved in an arrowhead formation, the blunted point pushing towards Obsidian Sky and the Iron Warriors cruiser, but were blocked off and encircled by ork ships. Debris clouds filled the gaping holes in their formation. Ork gunships, muscular and tusked, surrounded them, bristling with firepower. A Black Templars destroyer was in the final stages of disintegration, a bite taken out of its belly by the boarding claw of a monstrous ironclad. All inertial control lost, the two ships slowly spun around their conjoined axis as the void fight raged around them. The thump of explosions lit the screen, energy lances and the spent heat of solid rounds filling the display like embers rising off a fire.

And closing in on their position, casting a shadow light-minutes long, was a vessel that dwarfed them all.

‘Hellsteeth.’

Thane was not sure who said it. It seemed to hiss out of the internal communications, out of the unattended speakers and microphones of Vox. He had seen the ork attack moon that had demolished Eidolica, and the even larger war-engine that now loomed over Terra. They had been massive, but they had been moons. The gut accepted that they would be huge, even if the mind knew them to be constructed. They had been planetary bodies. He had processed them on that scale.