The Beast Arises

A miss. Thane eased his grip on the armrests and let out a breath. In their panic, the orks had wasted their shot. That was his first instinct, based neither on evidence nor on past experience, and as such he was unusually loath to relinquish it, even once it became clear that the carrier wasn’t cutting off the beam. In fact, it was intensifying.

Vandis.

At first, the red giant seemed to shrug off the beam boring into its surface, but after a few seconds, a dark sunspot began to form around the drill site. Bubbles of core matter broke the surface as the sunspot began to sink. It became a blister, then a bruise, a black canker that bored deeper into its parent body and pulled more stellar matter in. The bottomless black of its event horizon garnered a halo, brilliant, burning white.

The accretion disc of a black hole.

Thane slowly rose, watching with a very raw, very human awe. The orks had transformed one of the most stable and intransigent forces in the universe into a weapon, and simply to keep Magneric’s information from reaching Terra they were using it to demolish a star.

A star!

What could any man — even an angel of death — do in the face of such reckless power?

The carrier itself, the most massive ship by far, was the first to feel the effects. Already backsliding, it stopped firing as its cannon was yanked out of alignment, and then slowly bent. In its shadow were two more Black Templars cruisers that had been disabled and seized by grapnels rather than destroyed. Drifting and helpless, they began to come apart. Hull plates crunched, compacted down, atmosphere squirting out as hardpoints tore loose and spun away to be devoured by infinity. Chastened, just sliding into tractor range, drove her reverse engines to maximum and just about managed to remain still. She came about in order to bring her main drive to bear. Thane saw what her shipmaster was trying to do, but manoeuvring thrusters couldn’t compete with the black hole’s pull and she was dragged, side-on, until gravity overwhelmed structural integrity and she blew in a hideously compact explosion.

A shuddering groan passed through Alcazar Remembered.

She was more powerful than her frigate escorts, more than the Black Templars cruisers, but she was also larger, more susceptible to the gravity waves lashing at her hull. Each shudder came with a bang, as though the bulkheads were having their rivets pulled and then being physically snapped. A barrage of high-intensity radiation blinded the viewscreen and killed shipboard communications.

‘Full reverse!’ Thane roared, a string of bolts bursting along a seam from the bulkhead behind him on a scream of inrushing air. ‘All hands prepare for emergency translation! Get us out of here now!’

Nine

Terra — the Imperial Palace

Vangorich knew that his rivals on the Senatorum, and even some of his friends, such that he possessed, had his apartments under surveillance. In recent days it had come to the point where there was rarely a moment in which the agents of two or more lords wouldn’t pass each other on the street. The increasingly erratic behaviour of the likes of Mesring and Zeck had exacerbated matters. The staged attempt on Veritus’ life had certainly not helped.

Even at this early hour, the artificial twilight of the Palace was thronged, the sun as removed from the reality of these people’s own small lives as the love of the God-Emperor of Man.

There was the catering shift bound for the Imperial Fleet College of Strategy, extravagant in pressed white shirts and black tails. Talking quietly amongst themselves, they paused just outside the gated compound while one of their number crossed the street to buy a pack of lhos from the kiosk. Then there was the pretty young girl — fifteen, maybe sixteen — selling soap and devotionals from a stand beneath a humming bronze extractor unit. She smiled pleasantly, chatting to the workers gathered with their bowls under the electrical warmth. There was the street confessor, the work detail that had been picketed on top of the deactivated transformer substation for the better part of a week, the two-man unit assigned to the corner by the Adeptus Arbites to pre-empt that particular ‘flashpoint’, the scrivener hawking his services, the servitor detail carting steel barrels of imported water for the Administratum silo in the neighbouring ward. By comparison, the street sweep working around the Navy men’s feet was a little obvious, if only because it was such a classic.

And if nothing else, Vangorich appreciated vintage.

That was not to say there were not times when an out-of-the-way office deep in the labyrinthine quiet of the Inner Wards was appealing, but it generally suited him to be seen where tradition expected the Grand Master of the Officio Assassinorum to be. It kept everybody honest, and prevented misunderstandings.