The Beast Arises

Koorland focused his gaze on Veritus with effort. By invoking myth, the old man seemed to have moved into its realm. He was less real, and more formidable. There were immense depths here, to be approached with extreme caution.

‘And where will I find him?’ He had no doubt Veritus would have an answer.

‘On Caldera. Fulfilling an ancient oath.’

Four

Across the Imperium, Caldera

The warp convulsed. It shrieked around the Sanguinem Ignis. An agony of non-matter and raging nightmare clawed at the strike cruiser’s Geller field. The immaterium attacked with the fury of a wounded beast and the integrity of the field cracked.

‘Translating!’ Shipmaster Laeca warned. ‘Brace, brace, brace!’

‘This is no Mandeville point,’ said Sergeant Marbas. He steadied himself against the port-side wall of the strategium.

Captain Valefor grasped the command pulpit. ‘The immaterium has had enough of us,’ he said. On the pict screens that surrounded the pulpit, the cascading runes were angry red. To try to understand the warp was to try to reason with madness. But in jagged brushstrokes the image was forming of a wound in the warp, and the Sanguinem Ignis was the target of the immaterium’s vengeance.

The translation was brutal. The vessel passed from the unreal to the material in a single, severing blow. Workstations across the bridge burst into flames. A shriek ran the length of the hull, an intertwined cry of the vessel, the warp and the void together. Another scream joined it, coming from the vox-casters, and Valefor knew it for the cry of the Navigator. He felt the jolt of the transition. The shadow of non-being slashed through him and was gone, as if a monomolecular blade had cut him in half, then healed him on the instant.

Reality settled. The scream faded. The bridge was filled with the cacophony of alarms, but there was deeper silence. The engines had stilled.

‘Damage!’ Valefor demanded.

‘Warp drive integrity intact,’ Laeca answered. ‘But power to the engines—’

She was cut off by the thunder of multiple impacts. They hammered the ship even as the auspex officer reported multiple hostiles.

The oculus snapped open. The pict screens adjusted to the new inputs, and Valefor saw what was coming for them.

The Sanguinem Ignis had translated in the wake of an ork attack moon. The greenskin base had suffered damage in its journey through the warp. A quarter of its southern hemisphere had been sheared away and an explosion like a solar prominence arced out of the wound. Molten fissures spread over the rest of the sphere. But it was still at war. Immense bays were open on all sides, and the ork fleet emerged in a swarm. Three cruisers were closing with the Blood Angels, their forward guns firing. The shells were huge, dense, and solid. Mass and velocity were all they needed to tear a vessel apart. The Sanguinem Ignis’ void shields flared in protest.

A second wave of cruisers was turning to follow the first. With them came a cloud of smaller vessels, insects zeroing in on carrion.

‘The enemy’s injuries are severe,’ said Marbas.

‘But its fleet is intact. Our fight is not here,’ Valefor said. ‘I want a retreat, shipmaster. Engines full. And recharge the warp drive. Gunners, weapons free on the nearest enemy vessel.’

The engines powered up anew. The deck began to vibrate once more as the strike cruiser began its turn. The view in the oculus shifted with majestic slowness. The blunt-prowed, brutal predators closed, their fire crossing paths with that of the Blood Angels. A cross-hatching of destruction lit the void.

‘The greenskins might repair that moon,’ Marbas said.

‘They might,’ Valefor agreed. ‘I know we stand a chance of destroying it, brother-sergeant. I also know the price we would pay.’

Ork shells pounded the starboard hull. A void shield collapsed.

‘Launch bay five destroyed,’ a servitor intoned.

The screen on Valefor’s right began to list casualty reports.

Marbas joined Valefor beside the pulpit. ‘We are paying a price now.’

‘I have no doubt we will pay more. Our duty is to reach Terra. Our sacrifices must be to that purpose. Sanguinius made his ultimate sacrifice there. Our duty and our tribute call us there in turn.’

The Sanguinem Ignis gathered momentum. Valefor eyed the pict screens. He felt the fires racing down the corridors as if his own veins were burning. We do not end here, he thought. Not here, in the void between systems, cut down by a wounded enemy, in an encounter with no strategic meaning.

Sacrifice must have meaning. Hope for more was a luxury the Blood Angels had banished long ago. But they would not accept less.