The Beast Arises

Kalkator set his bolter down on the terminal as Trooper Menthis’ remains splashed across the curved wall. ‘I have your gunship on auspex,’ he said, as though the past minute had not just consigned billions to execution. ‘On an escape vector.’ He examined the read-out of a scorched sensorium console. ‘And Guilliman inbound.’

‘Has Penitence made contact with the fleet?’

‘I do not know. How much do you think the humans heard?’

‘I do not know.’

‘If word gets out—’

‘I know.’

Avoiding Kalkator’s eye, Zerberyn thumbed the activation switch of what, though arcane in design, looked to be a vox-unit. A garbled overlay of orkoid cant and system noise scratched through. It sounded like voices. Columba. Tarsus. Leonis. Jaskólska. Ghosts, drawn to him through electromagnetic snow.

His brothers would be made to understand that the destruction of Prax had been necessary for the greater good, if they heard it first from him. They shared a singular vision, a rare gift for reason. But Issachar? Quesadra? Bohemond?

The Inquisition?

His hand moved of its own volition, knowing even before he did it what needed to be done. Punching Last Wall protocols into the cryptex key, he hit transmit. Long seconds of alien traffic and accusing voices filled the line.

‘What are you doing?’ said Reoch. The metallic grille that covered his lower jaw made him look like a muzzled beast.

‘What any brother in possession of the same set of facts would have to.’

‘Are you sure, brother?’

Zerberyn did not answer.

He was a descendent of Oriax Dantalion: the answer was obvious.

The comm link hissed open, butchered by static, but the direct voice on the other end was recognisably that of an Eidolican serf.

‘Guilliman receiving. Last Wall codes recognised. Is that truly you, lord captain?’

‘It is, and—’ He silenced the pickup and turned to Kalkator. ‘How long do we have?’

‘Five to six hours before it is done. Thirty minutes before we no longer want to be standing on this planet.’

Zerberyn nodded and reactivated the unit. ‘And requiring immediate extraction. Repeat, immediate.’

‘Understood, lord captain. Thunderhawks are undergoing final flight checks now. I will transmit the pilots your coordinates.’

Eyes locked to Kalkator’s unflinching gaze, Zerberyn spoke again into the receiver.

‘Penitence has been commandeered by local traitor militia. Do not establish contact, and under no circumstances are they to be permitted to board.’

Kalkator nodded. He knew what it meant to betray a brother.

Zerberyn closed his eyes.

‘Shoot them down.’

Twenty-Two

Prax — orbital

Zerberyn stood at the viewport of Palimodes’ starboard observation gallery, a hand’s width from his own dead-eyed reflection, and forced himself to watch the planet die.

Grey-brown continents and green seas were now wreathed in smoky black. The stratosphere had already burnt off as surface temperatures passed a hundred Celsius and carried on climbing. The thin band of residual atmosphere stuck to the riven crust like tar. A hex-like grid of magmic fractures smouldered through the pall, fault lines, the crust splitting, less a world now than rocky islands floating apart from one another on a molten sea. Bouts of volcanism racked the major continents on which mountains still stood, each an event of epochal destruction rendered into a non-event by the periodic eruptions that ejected billions of tonnes of mantle into orbital space. A glowing cloud shrouded the planet, metals, minerals, voidship fragments, churned by its hundred-thousand-kilometres-per-hour flight and its own increasingly erratic spin. Its nickel-iron core was destabilising. Magnetic distortions caused rocky accretions to blast apart at random, like targets on a practice range, and sent the massive ork container ships caught up in the destruction spiralling between orbits with plasma tails streaming in their wake.

Kalkator had spared no detail of the likely progression. Had he not been as forthcoming, then Zerberyn would have insisted.

The planet-cracker had been fired directly into the planet’s mantle through a kilometres-long shaft sunk a thouand years before for this sole purpose. From there the warhead had slowed, drilling through a further thousand kilometres of semi-molten rock to its long-programmed detonation site at the interstitial layer between core and mantle.

Within that narrow variance of pressure and density, it had detonated.

Zerberyn had never devoted much prior thought to the complete destruction of a planetary body, but he could see that it had been enacted with a ruthlessness and a precision of detail the equal of anything that he could have brought to the task. A detonation within the core itself would only have wrecked the world’s magnetosphere, rendering it uninhabitable for decades, while at a shallower site in the mantle the resultant tectonic recoil would have been a slap on the wrist compared to what was taking place now.