The Beast Arises

Vangorich watched her lips. He read their motions; the way they formed about words for which she had clear distaste. The pair studied him, little knowing that he was studying them right back. He watched Wienand’s agent give the briefest of reports.

‘Unfortunate,’ he read from the light catching Wienand’s lips.

‘For you, my lady,’ Vangorich said to himself, ‘if you don’t heed my warning.’

As Wienand and her bodyguard melted into the crowd, Vangorich gave the servitor-servant back the empty chalice. The withered thing replaced it on the silver tray and walked off, its service done. Passing the politics and double-dealing of the vestablutae fonts, Vangorich entered his reserved ablutory. Even the restrooms of the Imperial Palace had a grandness about their architecture and ornate fittings.

‘Wait outside,’ Vangorich commanded upon entrance, prompting a brass-masked servitor who performed the function of attendant to leave the small chamber. His privacy thus assured, the Assassin produced a vox-bead from his robes and slotted it into his ear.

‘Beast…’

‘Sir?’

‘Mesring’s found a way to screw us without screwing us,’ Vangorich said.

‘He told the Lord High Admiral.’

‘The border fleets are being recalled but not redeployed,’ the Grand Master spat. ‘He’s forming an armada.’

‘A grand gesture,’ Esad Wire voxed back. ‘He can play galactic hero without risking a single vessel.’

‘Or his influence in the Senatorum,’ Vangorich said.

‘Do you want me to withhold the antidote?’ Esad Wire put to the Grand Master. Vangorich considered.

‘He delivered half a solution,’ he voxed to Beast. ‘Issue him with the same. Have the antidote solution delivered at half concentration. Something to keep his Grace alive but still useful to us.’

‘Consider it done.’

‘Beast.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Meet me at Mount Vengeance.’

‘Yes, my lord.’

‘It’s time we got to work.’

TWELVE

Aspiria System — Mandeville point

The void, usually so black and empty, was crowded with cataclysm. Colossal fragments of planetary rock tumbled through the darkness, smashing into and through one another. Shard storms of hull-punching regolith blossomed from such collisions, showering the tightening spaces between the gargantuan chunks of shattered planetoids with death. This was the edge of the Aspiria System, for Aspiria was no more.

An astrotelepathic distress call had drawn Marshal Bohemond’s small crusader fleet to Aspira from the Vulpius region. The Black Templars’ Vulpius Crusade had been in the Weald Worlds as part of a purgation action against the Noulia. The Adeptus Astartes had been the punch needed to break the xenos and had acted in support of a flotilla of Imperial Navy vessels under Commodore DePrasse, whose orbital bombardments had failed to obliterate the Noulia from the surface of the wooded, backwater moons.

Aspiria had been a large Imperial mining world that dominated the system. Now, in its place, sat the ugly attack moon of which the astrotelepathic distress call had warned. The abominable thing bristled with gargantuan weaponry and fluxed with field shielding that routinely seemed to short and crackle away before returning with a blinding flash. Part of the monstrous moon was missing — perhaps the victim of a former planetary collision or malfunctioning weapon. In its place was a ramshackle framework of rusted girders and scaffolding, revealing the horrors of the planetoid interior: fleet bays and an internal anchorage for a barbarian armada of greenskin cruisers, attack ships and scrap-clads. Tearing the mine-riddled Aspiria to rubble with its great gravitic weaponry, the attack moon — like a spider’s nest disgorging its young — streamed gunships, capsules and rocks at the surviving worlds of the system. What the bombardment of planetary debris didn’t destroy, the swarms of delivered greenskins swiftly decimated. By the time the combination Black Templar and Imperial Navy fleet arrived, there was nothing but the enemy left.