The Beast Arises

Admiral Kiran stepped off the dais to meet him, escorted by General Maskar and a small army of aides, subalterns and autoclerks. Kiran was Lansung’s appointed proxy, a slender and unfriendly-looking man in late middle age with a permanently cunning expression on his face. He wore silver and blue, and a broad bicorn hat. He carried the ship’s command wand in his left hand. The wand was a jewel-encrusted device the size of a sceptre or battle-mace, and it hummed soft songs of deep space and the warpways to itself.

Maskar was Lord Commander Militant Heth’s proxy on the command warship, though Heth travelled with the squadron aboard the grand carrier Dubrovnic. Unlike Lansung, who had seen the Ardamantua crisis in purely political terms and had instructed his officers to conduct it on his behalf, Heth was a more selfless individual. He appreciated the potential scale of the crisis and had elected to join the reinforcements in person. He led sixty-eight brigades of the Astra Militarum, the biggest deployment from the core seen in years, and he was not about to place that in the hands of his juniors. Heth wanted to show that unlike Lansung and, indeed, the other High Lords, he was prepared to get his hands dirty. The Imperial Fists required the assistance of his Astra Militarum, and he intended to deliver that in person.

It had caused a stir when Heth had announced his intention of joining the squadron. There was nothing Lansung could say about it that wouldn’t look petty, but Lansung’s thunder had been stolen a little. Heth was positioning himself as a willing man of the people, a leader who did rather than told. It was clear that Heth saw this moment as an opportunity to show that the Astra Militarum, vast and reliable, was the most important service standing in the Imperium’s defence, the truest and most doughty.

It was also an opportunity for Heth to ease himself out of the shadow cast across the Senatorum High Twelve by Lansung, Mesring and Udo.

As per protocol, not all the squadron’s senior officers travelled on the same vessel. Vox-officers set up a real-time link to Heth so he could coordinate with them.

Maskar was a useful officer, short and bullish, with an excellent track record. He had not long returned from service in a frontier campaign, the ‘blood fresh on his tunic’ as the phrase went. Daylight had read Maskar’s file. He liked the man, liked him for what he could do.

None of that data was pertinent now: not Maskar’s file, not the politics on Terra.

‘Sir,’ said Kiran.

‘Anything?’ asked Daylight. ‘Anything from the surface?’

‘No,’ replied the admiral.

‘Nothing human,’ Maskar added with a growl.

‘I have reviewed the incoming data,’ said Daylight. ‘It’s very noisy down there.’

Kiran nodded to one of his analysis officers, who projected a small hololithic display between his tech-engraved hands as though he was opening a book for them to look at.

‘Since our last data from Ardamantua,’ the analysis officer said, ‘the surface and atmospheric situations have degenerated catastrophically. The planet seems to have been plunged into some kind of stellar crisis. It’s almost primordial down there. We presumed at first that it might have been struck by another body, a large meteor, but there is no trace of that very distinctive damage pattern.’

Daylight watched the man’s shifting display, staying one step ahead of everything he said.

‘Ardamantua has been rendered unstable in the six weeks since we last saw it,’ the analysis officer continued. ‘It is unstable atmospherically, geologically and orbitally. There are gross levels of surface radiation, and significant signs of massive gravitic instability.’

‘There were never any indications of gravitic weaknesses in the early planetary surveys,’ said Admiral Kiran.

‘However,’ said Maskar, ‘some of the last few intercepts we received from the expedition force before we departed spoke of what appeared to be gravitational anomalies.’

‘That data was never substantiated,’ said the analysis officer. ‘We have been attempting to contact Terra astropathically to see what they may have heard from the expedition fleet while we were in transit.’

‘The answer is precious little, it seems,’ said Kiran. He looked directly at the towering Space Marine. ‘All effective contact with your Chapter Master and the expedition fleet was lost over six weeks ago, two days after we entered the warp.’

‘So they are gone?’ asked Daylight. ‘Dead?’

‘There is no sign of the fleet or of any surface deployment,’ said Maskar. ‘But that isn’t to say they aren’t there.’

‘The planet and its orbital environs are a mess of interference patterns and disruption,’ said the analysis officer. ‘It is quite possible that the fleet is there, as well as surface forces, but our scanners can’t detect them and we can’t hear their vox.’

‘So what are we hearing?’ asked Daylight.