The Beast Arises

Still, for those with long memories, there was nothing like a Stormbird to stir the heart. The symbol of the Emperor’s wrath, wings hooked back like an aquila — one only saw them in ceremonial flypasts these days, or in the Hall of Weapons, or as escorts for High Lords, warmasters and sector governors.

Daylight had ordered six of them to be raised from the Fists’ Chapter House hangars and stowed aboard the reinforcement fleet. No one had argued. Heth’s presence on the campaign mission had helped. He was a High Lord, after all.

Firing from the capital ships like missiles, the Stormbirds formed a formation spread and scream-dived into the unholy vortex surrounding the planet. Ardamantua lay beneath them, a vast curve of grey mottled with orange and crackled with veins of fire. Cloud banks and storm patterns of vast magnitude curdled and swirled across the boiling surface. Magnetics, radiation and the pop of gravity blisters rendered the nearspace realm a lethal soup.

‘We have substantial vulcanism around the equatorial belt,’ reported the lead Stormbird’s tech-adept. ‘The crust there is faulting and splitting.’

The Stormbird was shaking. Daylight keyed up the data on his overhead monitor and swung it down on its gimbal arm. On the flickering pict, strung with overlays, the planet seemed to have a burning, white-hot girdle around its waist.

‘Something’s happening to the magnetic poles,’ said the adept. ‘The planet is deforming. I—’

His voice cut out briefly as another noise burst ripped through the vox-links, squalling and deafening. The screech was painful, but Daylight’s ears could endure it. He had a concern for the human component of his taskforce, however. The unmodified, unaugmented humans of the Imperial Guard formed the greatest proportion of his strikeforce. They would suffer, either through mortal injury from the noise bursts, or through lack of coordination if vox-comm proved unviable. What were the implications if he was unable to deploy any of his Guard strength to the surface? Could the wall-brothers complete the mission unassisted? Could they find and rescue the shield-corps?

Rescue was a word he certainly did not like.

The Stormbird began to shake more furiously as they entered the outer radiation bands of the high atmosphere. Plumes of what looked like flame flashed past the small, semi-shuttered cabin ports. The tongues were blue, mauve and green, like noxious gases burning in a lab. For a moment, Daylight wondered if they were some trace of the warp, some daemonic lightning. All along there had been quiet rumours that the silent hand of Chaos, whose actions had been absent from the galactic theatre for a troublingly long time, might be playing a part in the Ardamantuan misadventure.

But it was not false fire or warp-scald. It was a geomagnetic display, auroras of charged particles ripping through the maddened thermosphere.

‘Any indication of vessels in nearspace?’ asked Daylight.

‘Negative,’ replied the tech-adept.

Another hope dashed. There was a fleet here, somewhere, the best part of the entire Imperial Fists battlefleet, unless it had been utterly reduced and annihilated already. Where was it? It could be directly in front of them, but veiled from them by the tumult.

The descent turbulence became progressively worse. The Stormbird was shaking like a sistrum at a fervent ritual. Lines of red alert lights were flashing into life along the pilot’s enclosing consoles, filling entire rows. Deftly, with great calm, the pilot took one black-leather-gloved hand off the helm and muted the alarms.

Daylight began to flick through the meagre and imperfect surface scan readings they were finally obtaining, as they got closer and their auspex systems penetrated the atmosphere a little more deeply. They were on a pre-selected dive towards the location of the blisternest, working on the tactical assumption that the site was the last place their forces had been reported. But there was no clear sign of the structure, and little of the surrounding landmass matched, in relief or topographical schemata form at least, the geography logged by the survey teams that had accompanied the original assault.

‘Is this just bad luck?’ asked Zarathustra.

Daylight turned and looked at the wall-brother strapped in beside him. Zarathustra’s war-spear was mounted like a harpoon on the weapon rack above his grim-helmed head. He was the oldest of all the wall-brothers and had been the most reluctant to abandon the old tradition and leave the walls of the Palace behind.