The Beast Arises

‘We give them another five hours,’ said Heth. ‘That’s my word on it. Five hours, then we send in more scouts. The first thing Daylight will do is set up a workable uplink or send some kind of signal.’

Maskar looked at Kiran. There was no love lost between the Navy man and the Guard commander, but they were thinking the same thing. Heth, a High Lord, was painfully out of touch. He clearly thought the Adeptus Astartes immortal. There were certain situations, certain conditions, certain environments, that nothing could survive. They were both working men, fighting men, and they had seen how bad it could actually get, not how bad it could be imagined from a throne in the Palace.

‘Move the picket ships in closer,’ Admiral Kiran told his deck officers. ‘Have them despatch more long-range probes.’

‘Probes will be obliterated, just like the last spread,’ said Maskar.

‘Some may survive,’ replied Kiran curtly. ‘Even if one of them survives to send back a millisecond of data, it will help. Besides, with the picket ships closer to the atmospheric rim, we can try penetrating deeper with auspex and primary sensors.’

Heth nodded. The deck officers hurried to their stations and began to relay instructions.

They watched the strategium display as the reinforcement fleet began to move into its new spread, circling the stricken planet. Indicator lights and icons drifted like sunlight dapples across the topographic grid. In the lower portion of the strategium’s vast hololithic array, columns of data spread, jumbled and reassembled, processing the energetic flux and signature of the planet. Kiran had never seen a planetary body generate so much wild and contradictory data so rapidly.

‘Wait!’ he said, suddenly.

He crossed to one of the observation consoles and shoved two sensor-adepts out of his way. He began to manipulate the controls himself.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Heth.

Kiran didn’t reply immediately. Most of the crew in the huge bridge space were watching him. Kiran irritably yanked off his gloves so he could better manipulate the control surfaces. His fingers wound back the brass dials and adjusted the ivory sliders until he had recaptured the data-stream information from a few moments before.

‘There,’ he said.

‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to be looking at,’ Maskar ventured.

‘Admiral, please elucidate,’ said Heth.

‘I know what I’m seeing,’ said Kiran, ‘and I’m sure my senior officers do too.’ In truth, many of them hadn’t immediately recognised it. Few had Kiran’s years of experience, and few had seen as much cosmological data speed by them as the admiral had, but given a few seconds, with the data-stream artificially suspended and frozen, they could pick it up.

‘A ghost,’ said the primary auspex supervisor.

‘A ghost,’ agreed Kiran with a grin.

‘It could just be an imaging artifact,’ said the gunnery officer.

‘Or the echo of a piece of debris blown out by the surface disruption?’ suggested the oldest of the navigation adepts, running the same data through his own, handheld quantifier.

‘I don’t believe it is,’ said Kiran. ‘I think that’s a ghost, the ghost of a friend.’

Heth and Maskar moved closer to the vast display, trying to work out what everyone seemed to be seeing.

‘This blip?’ asked the Lord Commander Militant. ‘This shadow here against the relative lower hemisphere of the planet?’

‘Yes, my lord,’ said Kiran. ‘Sensorus! Have the advancing picket ships direct their full-gain auspex and detector grids at that shadow. And the fleet too, for what it’s worth. Address all our scanning arrays, passive and active, at what the Lord Commander calls “that blip” and have the data streamed to my console.’

‘But what is it?’ asked Maskar.

‘It’s a ship, my dear general,’ said Kiran. ‘One of ours.’

Twenty

Ardamantua — orbital

The ship emerged from the elemental fury surrounding Ardamantua, rising out of the radioactive soup and lashing ocean of charged particles like a wreck brought up from the seabed. Streams of energy and magnetic backwash, lurid and phosphorescent, spilled back into the pulsing blister of gravitational madness encasing the planet.

The ship rose, powered by its own half-failing engines, summoned by the frantic hails from Kiran’s ships, voices that gave it a direction to head in. It was ailing and damaged, they could see that. Many decks were blown out and the hull was ruptured as though titanic battles had been waged on every level. At least one of its main engines was dead and bleeding clouds of lethal atomic blood into the vacuum.

Two of Kiran’s most powerful cruisers, at the admiral’s direction, moved in closer to the struggling revenant and secured tractor beams, slowly hauling back and assisting its desperate ascent from the cauldron of seething cosmological destruction.

‘Identity?’ asked Lord Commander Militant Heth.