The Beast Arises

‘Shut up!’ Kiran said, flapping a hand at him and peering at the display.

‘How dare you speak to the Lord Commander Militant in that—’ Maskar exclaimed.

‘You shut up too!’ Kiran bellowed, his eyes never leaving the strategium display. ‘Look! Look at the damned display!’

In the hololith, the orb of Ardamantua was buckling and shuddering, surrounded by a vast halo of sickly, bright radiance. Overlay schematics told Kiran that two of his vessels closest to the planet had already been overwhelmed and immolated by the outrushing energies ripping from the planetary sphere. He waited, braced, knowing that he was about to see the planet blow apart.

But it did not.

A second planet had appeared beside it instead, smaller, like a conjoined twin, so closely nestled against the larger globe of Ardamantua that it looked like a swollen, cancerous growth extending from the target world.

It was the phantom, the auspex phantom, the so-called imaging artifact.

It was the ghost moon. And it had finally manifested, solid and real.

‘I don’t understand what I’m seeing,’ murmured Lord Commander Militant Heth.

‘I do,’ said Kiran. Alert overlays, bright red, zoomed in on the display to triangulate and identify hundreds of tiny shapes that rushed from the new moon like missiles.

He didn’t need the overlays. He had already seen them.

They were ships. They were warships.

They powered out of the gravity storm of nearspace towards his fleet in attack formation.

‘Gunnery! Gunnery!’ he bellowed. ‘Weapons to bear! Now!’

Twenty-Eight

Ardamantua

A blast of stunning sound and pressure swept across the stockade.

The force shredded parts of the fabricated structure and spilled over many of the stone blocks and boulders that Algerin’s survivors had expertly stacked into protective walls. It was an overpressure burst, the sort of concussion that might have accompanied a multi-megaton detonation on a neighbouring landmass. The wall of the blast travelled through the anguished atmosphere of Ardamantua like a sonic tidal wave, crossing continents, swirling seas, lifting soil, stripping vegetation and levelling forests.

It was accompanied by the longest, loudest noise burst of all, a burst that every living thing on Ardamantua could feel in its guts and in its diaphragm. It shook internal organs, even those encased in the transhumanly reinforced and plate-armoured bodies of the Adeptus Astartes. It made eardrums burst and noses bleed. It burrowed into brains like iron spikes.

In the blisternest chamber, the tech-adept had risen triumphantly to his feet, the jack cables straining at his sockets, his arms outstretched as he howled the words aloud.

‘I am Slaughter! I am Slaughter!’

The magos biologis’ makeshift apparatus was beginning to malfunction. Connections were shorting out and monitor screens were rolling, blanking or dissolving into squares of hissing white noise.

Laurentis and Nyman had fallen, clutching their ears in agony. The ground shook. The walls reverberated and cracked at the huge atmospheric disturbance passing over the stockade. Fragments of the blisternest material, translucent and grey, dropped out of the deforming walls and the curve of the fracturing ceiling. Daylight and Slaughter began to move up the tunnel to the surface to learn the nature of the crisis, but the rushing, concussive force of the wind drove them back.

Then the wind and the noise were gone, abruptly gone, and the vibration began to ease. The tech-adept stopped speaking forever and collapsed, snapping out the last of his plugs with the slack motion of his body.

Daylight and Slaughter rushed to the surface, their steel-cased boots thundering along the xenos-woven flooring.

Threads of vapour hung in a twilight world. The stockade was ruined. The brothers on the surface had been more grievously mauled by the overpressure than those, like Daylight and Slaughter, who had benefited from the comparative shelter of the nest tunnels.

The sky was a sickly, blotchy colour, like bruised flesh. All cloud cover seemed to have disappeared, and the wind had dropped. It was hard to think where all the clouds could have gone to. There was an odd, loud buzzing sound in the air, and a thin, pitiless rain fell straight down, hard and cold.

The moon hung above them, filling the sky. It was vast and black. It seemed so close that it must be resting on the rim of Ardamantua, propped up on the planet’s mountain peaks. That was just an illusion, of course, but no heavenly body could ever be so close to another without some form of technical suspension or energetic holding field far beyond the capabilities of Imperial humanity.

Daylight and Slaughter could see the surface of the moon, gnarled and interwoven, a vast pattern of fused wreckage and interconnected metal plates. It looked like a giant clockwork mechanism, half-rusted, or some intricate toy planet whose brightly painted cover had been removed to expose the inner workings.