“How dare you?” Ardias almost roared. “Countless lives lost and you think ‘it doesn’t matter’?”

The sergeants exchanged glances, uncomfortable with their captain’s palpable fury.

“No, brother-captain,” Delpheus maintained, closing his eyes, it doesn’t. “I told you before: we are needed elsewhere. Something is coming.”

Ardias almost snarled. “Brother Delpheus, my faith in the scrying of psykers — even those that I count among my brothers — extends only so far.” He took a breath, controlling his temper. “Thanks to this episode my faith is waning.”

“But—”

“Codex Article 4256, sub-section 4, third lesson. ‘In the face of an overt and exposed foe, the pursuit of intangible threats is a waste of resource.’”

“I know the text, brother-captain. You need not remi—”

“The Ultramarine is a realist and a pragmatist, Delpheus, who is careful not to divide his attention. I was a fool to accept your counsel.”

“It was not ‘counsel’, brother. It was truth. You will see, yet—”

“My patience is spent. Assemble the company, we go to battl—”

“Please!” Delpheus found himself begging, desperate to vindicate his prophecy. “In the Emperor’s name! I can’t explain what’s coming, but whatever happens, whatever we do, we’re needed here and now. I know it!”

“And where is ‘here’? Some forgotten techbay? Why bring us here?”

“I... I don’t know.”

Ardias turned away, muttering furiously. Delpheus rubbed his temples, wondering vaguely whether the clawing, chittering pain in his mind would ever be gone.

His eyes fell upon the wall. The light fitting that had fallen open sparked lamely, coils of ruptured cabling hanging out. He frowned. There was something...

Oh, Emperor-God no...

He looked up. A series of looped ducts hung overhead, arcing flaccidly with the weight of years. A dribble of water parted from a cracked, rust smeared pipe with a quiet plip.

No no no no no...

He looked back at the light fitting. The filament, exposed metal smoking and fizzing, lay half-concealed behind a tangle of wires. Overloaded and crippled by the force of the engines’ destruction, it blinked spasmodically:

Flash. Flash. Pause. Flash. Pause. Flash-Flash. Pause.

“Brother-captain?” Delpheus said, staring at it. Ardias turned to him with a weary grunt.

“What now?”

“I’m about to die.”

The wall yawned open like a hungry mouth, wet edges slurping and sucking obscenely, malefic light blazing around its edges.

Something came out and stabbed him through the heart.

Kais hurried across arterial bridges.

They sprouted chaotically from high tiered walls, plush tapestries and red velvet walkways branching and intersecting tapering cords of steel and rock. They arched out across abyssal spaces, smoke-fogged and bat-haunted. This high within the vessel’s infrastructure, bulbous viewing galleries and veinlike corridors opened up onto glass-fronted panoramas of the void beyond. The distant flickering of lights and tumbling shadows announced majestically that the fleet battle continued to rage. Every now and then a shuddering, grinding roar — like steel skies being torn open by celestial blades — heralded another tau-fired salvo of munitions gouging into the crippled vessel’s flanks. He lowered his vision and limped onwards, hoping the blood trail was dwindling.

The explosion that had ripped the engines from the gue’la vessel had shaken him. He thought he’d given himself enough time to get clear, setting the charges for five raik’ors then scampering, rat-like, along hallways and gantries; scuttling up ladders and diving into lifts. He’d broadcast several all-frequency alerts to the other shas’las aboard, urging them to get clear of the engine decks as soon as possible. There were no replies.

When it came, the detonation had been like the laughter of a thunder god, consuming every other noise and blasting great waves of destruction along the vessel. Kais had lurched headlong to the ground, momentarily astounded by the force of his handiwork. The deck split open beneath him and he scrabbled, crying out, for sturdier ground. Chain reactions rumbled for long raik’ans, shaking loose bolts from the ceiling and killing the lights in a surge of crimson standbys. Ripples of deflected force surged through the bulkheads, eliciting a great grinding, gnashing sound that hurt his ears and left him shaking his head in confusion.

And then it was all quiet.

All quiet, for the first time since he came aboard this ugly mausoleum ship. No more distant semiconscious reportage of the sonorous engines, rumbling throatily He’d wondered, skulking in the devastation, how many people, how many hundreds — maybe thousands — had perished. He could see them in his mind, pale lips gaping fishlike, as their lungs collapsed and their blood turned solid, tumbling out into the vastness of space.

He thought back to the decompressing chamber in the promenade aboard the Or’es Tash’var. All those tau and gue’la slipping into nothingness in a rush of blasted air and silent screams. He’d been horrified at the raw power of the vacuum, a destructive force above and beyond his tiny, mortal rages and flaws. It had humbled him.

And what now, now that he’d shredded a city-in-space and vented its chittering, maggotlike occupants into that same vacuum? Shouldn’t he feel godlike? Shouldn’t that single act of genocide obliterate whatever bitterness he might have in his soul, eclipsing utterly the numbness, outshining the relentless glare of his father’s eyes? Shouldn’t it be significant?

No. He didn’t feel a thing.

Dazed, appalled at his own detachment, he’d stumbled upwards through the ship’s layers until he could go no further and there, seeing all around him the dislodged wreckage and shorted circuitry of his handiwork, he’d moved onto the great buttresses and masonry causeways overarching the service spaces. Impossible pits yawned on either side of every path.

He was wandering blindly, trying to hail the Or’es Tash’var, a lone figure picking its way towards the distant monolith of the vessel’s bridge, when he was shot in the leg.

He’d run, of course. He couldn’t even see the sniper, let alone return fire with any accuracy. Warm dampness oozed across his hoof copiously, and he fired some random — useless — shots into the cavernous underhull and sprinted for cover, groaning and seeing stars with every step. Ensconced within a low-roofed bridge intersection, he shakily eased himself to the ground to examine the wound. The projectile had punctured the muscle of his lower leg, gashing an ugly hole and singeing the flesh around it. He fished for his last medipack and applied it heavily, pushing down until he almost blacked out, then tying it off. The pressure was appalling, like liquid metal cooling and expanding around the flesh, but it allowed him to walk, at least. In a perverse way the pain was invigorating, a constant reminder of his vitality (and mortality) that cut through the numbness more completely than wholesale slaughter ever could.

So now he hurried across the bridgeways, keeping low, grunting quietly every time the ragged wound flexed inside its healing binding. He wanted to laugh, somehow, some morbid sense of absurdity bubbling up inside him. He’d killed hundreds today, thousands even. He’d waded through the blood of his enemies and relished every moment, he’d overcome exhaustion and adversity with an almost supernatural aptitude, defeating the finest warriors these pale-faced gue’la could throw at him.

To be outdone now, to be maimed so suddenly by some distant, unseen foe— beyond control or retaliation: it was ridiculous. It was like a cruel joke, like a clonebeast outrunning its pursuers and earning the admiration of the crowd— only to be slaughtered for meat in the fio’toros’tai abattoir districts.