The Beast Arises

+For one who chooses not to speak, you are as lyrical as any scion of Sanguinius. I asked you to listen, now listen. There is a system less than three hours from you — Prax. It was a garrison world of the Iron Warriors at the height of the Great Crusade and if there is a single world within ten light years that the orks’ advance into Segmentum Solar has not already destroyed, then it will be that upon which sit Perturabo’s walls. If we can muster our assets over Prax, then we might all have a chance of going our separate ways.+

This time, Zerberyn managed to pull the headset off.

His chest felt tight, but hollow, as if his armour plate was wrapped like a mummy’s bindings around an over-inflated skin. He smothered the headset pickup in his gauntlet, and turned to Marcarian.

The cruiser Paladin of Rubicae transported the Fifth and the Ninth, while the mighty Guilliman held the bulk of the Second as well as elements of the Third, Fourth, Tenth and most of what

Dantalion didn’t carry of the First. Three, maybe three hundred and fifty brothers. Add the firepower of the aegis frigates, Paragon, Intrepid and Vindicator, and the support frigate Excelsior, and it was clear that one run-down traitor cruiser presented little by way of a tangible material threat.

And of the other kind, that less physical peril?

He licked dry lips, mentally crunching variables he had never before now had cause to quantify or weigh relative to others. He attacked his scheme of action from every angle, however improbable, assessing with force the firmness of every assumption on which it was founded until what remained was a bastion of solid calculation and impregnable logic.

He was an Exemplar.

Infallible.

He returned the headset to his ear and uncovered the pickup.

‘Send me the coordinates.’

Eleven

Prax — approach

Dantalion slid out of warp space into the dust-banded outer reaches of the Prax System like a jammed magazine ejected from an overheating boltgun. Proximity alert tocsins added a deep basso two-tone to the symphonic chorus of alarms. The auspex was still powering up, but proximity detection was a passive system, its workings founded upon the innate sense that certain metals possessed for metal. At the same time, triggered automatically by the completion of the translation cycle, the command deck’s blast shutters were rolling back.

Crew-serfs and Space Marines looked up from rebooting consoles and covered their eyes. The starlight was hard and bright, the guide lights of a monster voidship burning like a meteor shower off the bow. The garish yellow vessel was several times more massive than Dantalion and of eccentric design. Modules stuck out from a long central body, like landing booms on a seaplane but coming out at all angles and in various shapes and sizes. The slender main body widened at the neck to give a bulbous prow and, towards the stern, grew by stepwise tiers towards a garishly hazard-striped housing for the fierce orange cones of the drive exhaust. Sitting atop the drive housing, adding half again to the height of the stern, was a crescent moon, bent and crooked into a vile facsimile of a grinning orkoid face.

‘Thrusters!’ called Shipmaster Marcarian. ‘Hard port. Decompress starboard launch bays and fire macro-batteries. All the push we have.’

The ork ship pulled away slowly, port thrusters burning hard to win some traction over the vacuum. A lumpen module, riveted plates hatched yellow and black, swung out towards Dantalion’s starboard-side viewing ports, close enough for Zerberyn to see the alien pictographs scrawled onto its side. Then, the ship winked out, something darker than space rushing out to envelop it. Torpedoes and other mass-weapons winnowed through the hole left in real space.

‘Another ship inbound,’ called the seated hardline operator reporting from auspectoria. ‘Throne, they’re everywhere. Two thousand kilometres in-system. And another in convoy, the exact same spacing again.’

Zerberyn snarled. ‘As if surrendering ourselves to the Imperial Fists is not betrayal enough, we must contend with Iron Warriors treachery. Charge weapons and prepare to fire.’

‘Wait,’ said Marcarian, looking out of a port-side viewport at the next incoming ship. ‘No torpedo apertures, no flight decks, no weapon batteries that I can see except a handful of flak turrets, no energy spike on our scans to indicate they’re powering them up. I think that ship is unarmed.’

‘When did you ever see an unarmed ork ship?’

‘My point exactly. Helm, move us out of the path of the traffic. Five hundred kilometres to port. Auspectoria, commence scans for our brothers.’

‘Ayes’ acknowledged his instructions. Dantalion swung deeper into her portside yaw. The ork ships held true to their course.