From that encounter, Saul Tarvitz began to understand why Khitas Frome had named the world Murder.

THE GREAT WARSHIP exploded like a breaching whale from the smudge of un-light that was its retranslation point, and returned to the silent, physical cosmos of real space again with a shivering impact. It had translated twelve weeks earlier, by the ship-board clocks, and had made a journey that ought to have taken eighteen weeks. Great powers had been put into play to expedite the transit, powers that only a Warmaster could call upon.

It coasted for about six million kilometres, trailing the last, luminous tendrils of plasmic flare from its immense bulk, like remorae, until strobing flashes of un-light to stern announced the belated arrival of its consorts: ten light cruisers and five mass conveyance troopships. The stragglers lit their real space engines and hurried wearily to join formation with the huge flagship. As they approached, like a school of pups swimming close to their mighty parent, the flagship ignited its own drives and led them in.

Towards One Forty Twenty. Towards Murder.

Forward arrayed detectors pinged as they tasted the magnetic and energetic profiles of other ships at high anchor around the system's fourth planet, eighty million kilometres ahead. The local sun was yellow and hot, and billowed with loud, charged particles.

As it advanced at the head of the trailing flotilla, the flagship broadcast its standard greeting document, in

vox, vox-supplemented pict, War Council code, and astrotelepathic forms.

This is the Vengeful Spirit, of the 63rd Expedition. This vessel approaches with peaceful intent, as an ambassador of the Imperium of Man. House your guns and stand to. Make acknowledgement.'

On the bridge of the Vengeful Spirit, Master Com-nenus sat at his station and waited. Given its great size and number of personnel, the bridge around him was curiously quiet. There was just a murmur of low voices and the whir of instrumentation. The ship itself was protesting loudly. Undignified creaks and seismic moans issued from its immense hull and layered decks as the superstructure relaxed and settled from the horrendous torsion stresses of warp translation.

Boas Comnenus knew most of the sounds like old friends, and could almost anticipate them. He'd been part of the ship for a long time, and knew it as intimately as a lover's body. He waited, braced, for erroneous creaks, for the sudden chime of defect alarms.

So far, all was well. He glanced at the Master Companion of Vox, who shook his head. He switched his gaze to Ing Mae Sing who, though blind, knew full well he was looking at her.

'No response, master.’ she said.

'Repeat.’ he ordered. He wanted that signal response, but more particularly, he was waiting for the fix. It was taking too long. Comnenus drummed his steel fingers on the edge of his master console, and deck officers all around him stiffened. They knew, and feared, that sign of impatience.

Finally, an adjutant hurried over from the navigation pit with the wafer slip. The adjutant might have been about to apologise for the delay, but Comnenus glanced up at him with a whir of augmetic lenses. The whir said,

'I do not expect you to speak.’ The adjutant simply held the wafer out for inspection.

Comnenus read it, nodded, and handed it back.

'Make it known and recorded.’ he said. The adjutant paused long enough for another deck officer to copy the wafer for the principal transit log, then hurried up the rear staircase of the bridge to the strategium deck. There, with a salute, he handed it to the duty master, who took it, turned, and walked twenty paces to the plated glass doors of the sanctum, where he handed it in turn to the master bodyguard. The master bodyguard, a massive Astartes in gold custodes armour, read the wafer quickly, nodded, and opened the doors. He passed the wafer to the solemn, robed figure of Maloghurst, who was waiting just inside.

Maloghurst read the wafer too, nodded in turn, and shut the doors again.

'Location is confirmed and entered into the log.’ Maloghurst announced to the sanctum. 'One Forty Twenty.’

Seated in a high-backed chair that had been drawn up close to the window ports to afford a better view of the starfield outside, the Warmaster took a deep, steady breath. 'Determination of passage so noted.’ he replied. 'Let my acknowledgement be a matter of record.’ The twenty waiting scribes around him scratched the details down in their manifests, bowed and withdrew.

'Maloghurst?' The Warmaster turned his head to look at his equerry. 'Send Boas my compliments, please.’

Yes, lord.’

The Warmaster rose to his feet. He was dressed in full ceremonial wargear, gleaming gold and frost white, with a vast mantle of purple scale-skin draped across his shoulders. The eye of Terra stared from his breastplate. He turned to face the ten Astartes officers gathered in the centre of the room, and each one of them felt that the eye was regarding him with particular, unblinking scrutiny.

'We await your orders, lord.’ said Abaddon. Like the other nine, he was wearing batde plate with a floor length cloak, his crested helm carried in the crook of his left arm.

'And we're where we're supposed to be.’ said Torgad-don, 'and alive, which is always a good start.’

A broad smile crossed the Warmaster's face. 'Indeed it is, Tarik.’ He looked into the eyes of each officer in turn. 'My friends, it seems we have an alien war to contest. This pleases me. Proud as I am of our accomplishments on Sixty-Three Nineteen, that was a painful fight to prosecute. I can't derive satisfaction from a victory over our own kind, no matter how wrong-headed and stubborn their philosophies. It limits the soldier in me, and inhibits my relish of war, and we are all warriors, you and I. Made for combat. Bred, trained and disciplined. Except you pair.’ Horus smirked, nodding at Abaddon and Luc Sedirae. "You kill until I have to tell you to stop.’

'And even then you have to raise your voice.’ added Torgaddon. Most of them laughed.

'So an alien war is a delight to me.’ the Warmaster continued, still smiling. 'A clear and simple foe. An opportunity to wage war without restraint, regret or remorse. Let us go and be warriors for a while, pure and undiluted.’

'Hear, hear!' cried the ancient Iacton Qruze, businesslike and sober, clearly bothered by Torgaddon's constant levity. The other nine were more modest in their assent.

Horus led them out of the sanctum onto the strate-gium deck, the four captains of the Mournival and the company commanders: Sedirae of the Thirteenth, Qruze of the Third, Targost of the Seventh, Marr of the Eighteenth, Moy of the Nineteenth, and Goshen of the Twenty-Fifth.

'Let's have tactical.’ the Warmaster said.

Maloghurst was waiting, ready. As he motioned with his control wand, detailed hololithic images shimmered into place above the dais. They showed a general profile of the system, with orbital paths delineated, and the position and motion of tracked vessels. Horus gazed up at the hololithic graphics and reached out. Actuator sensors built into the fingertips of his gaundets allowed him to rotate the hololithic display and bring certain segments into magnification. Twenty-nine craft.’ he said. 'I thought the 140th was eighteen vessels strong?'

'So we were told, lord.’ Maloghurst replied. As soon as mey had stepped out of the sanctum, they had started conversing in Cthonic, so as to preserve tactical confidence whilst in earshot of the bridge personnel. Though Horus had not been raised on Cthonia - uncommonly, for a primarch, he had not matured on the cradle-world of his Legion - he spoke it fluently. In fact, he spoke it with the particular hard palatal edge and rough vowels of a Western Hemispheric ganger, the commonest and roughest of Cthonia's feral castes. It had always amused Loken to hear that accent. Early on, he had assumed it was because that's how the Warmaster had learned it, from just such a speaker, but he doubted that now. Horus never did anything by accident. Loken believed that the Warmaster's rough Cthonic accent was a deliberate affectation so that he would seem, to the men, as honest and low-born as any of them.