The Beast Arises

Mirhen watched the flickering, jumping screen image. The majestic strike cruiser was making a slow, pitching descent into Ardamantua’s gravity field, unable to support its mass. How long? An hour? Two? Four? The crippled drives would probably blow out because of the stress before that.

‘Can we get relief boats out to them?’ he asked.

‘We’re trying now, sir,’ replied Akilios.

‘We must be able to fetch some of them off it.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Mirhen turned to the ranks of the technicians and science adepts.

‘I want this explained,’ he said. ‘I want this accounted for and explained.’

The adepts nodded, but Mirhen felt no confidence in their response. They were as mystified as he was.

He was about to add further encouragement — at least, what he felt was encouragement — when the bank of screens behind him lit up brightly for a moment.

‘What was that?’ he asked, turning. ‘Was that the Amkulon?’

The airwaves were filled with vox-static and ugly distortion.

‘No, sir,’ replied a detection officer. ‘That wasn’t the Amkulon. Sir, the battle-barge Antorax just… just exploded, sir.’

Twelve

Ardamantua

The sky was weeping light.

Slaughter kicked his way through a half-collapsed section of tunnel wall and hauled himself onto the softly curving upper surface of the blisternest.

It was raining some kind of liquid that wasn’t water through an ugly squall that blew sidelong and made every surface slick and sticky. The nest was a huge sprawl, like some mass of offal oozing on a slab, magnified to titanic proportions. There were loops of tunnel that looked like intestinal knots, there were renal lumps and lobed chambers. Some sections of the vast, organic city were patterned coils like the fossil imprint of ancient seashells. Other sections were crushed to pulp by orbital bombardment and airstrikes. Smoke bled up from the blisternest in a thousand places, mixed with the wind, and washed into the squalling storm. Slaughter heard the downpour tick and tap on his helm and armour.

‘Come up,’ he called.

Cutthroat climbed after him, and then reached down to haul the dishevelled magos biologis up out of the tunnel. After them came Stab and Woundmaker. Slaughter had left the rest of Daylight Wall inside the nest under Frenzy’s command. The Chapter Master’s express orders had been to get Laurentis to the contact point. Well, four of them could do that. There was no sense pulling a whole company out. He’d voxed that decision to the Lanxium, but he hadn’t had a reply. Something was chopping vox and pict to hell. Atmospherics. It was like Karodan Monument all over again. They’d been deaf and blind there.

And they’d still won.

The magos biologis was looking around, blinking at the daylight. The rain ran off his face and plastered his robes to his body.

‘What’s that?’ he asked, pointing at the sky.

‘We haven’t got time for sight-seeing,’ snapped Woundmaker. Woundmaker was a sergeant, a good man. In the last stretch of tunnel, they’d come upon one of the automated munition trains sent in to support them. It had been mangled beyond recognition by Chrome warrior-forms, and the servitors slain, but Woundmaker and Stab had managed to drive the enemy off and recover some reloads for their bolters. He was sorting and distributing them.

‘No, look,’ said Laurentis.

Slaughter took the four clips Woundmaker handed him and turned to look where the magos biologis was pointing. There was a light in the sky. It was a broad, diffuse light, weeping out of the ugly cloud cover, but there was a malicious little glowing coal at the heart of it, small and red, like the ember-fragment of a star.

‘That’s a ship death,’ said Cutthroat bluntly.

Slaughter heard Woundmaker curse. He’d been too ready to dismiss the magos biologis’ comment, but he could see that Cutthroat was right. They could all see he was right. They’d all seen a ship die from planetside. It was a heartbreaking thing.

‘When in Throne’s name did these vermin get orbital weapons?’ asked Woundmaker. ‘When did they get ship-to-ship capability?’

‘We still don’t know precisely how the Chromes distribute themselves across space,’ said Laurentis. ‘It is presumed they employ some form of pod or seed dispersal via fluctuations in the warp, but a full scale migration of the magnitude that would explain their population density here has never been witnessed or described. We don’t believe they have what we would consider to be ships or a fleet, no vessels at all, but—’

He fell silent. Four angular visors glared at him, rain beading off their beaked jaws.

‘I… I’m just saying,’ Laurentis managed. ‘I don’t know how the Chromes could have taken out one of our ships. Perhaps it is an unhappy coincidence, or an accident.’

‘There are no coincidences!’ Stab told him.

Cutthroat began to say something about accidents and defaming the ability of the fleet.