“The bridge...” he hissed, unbidden. “Get to the bridge.”

Ardias nodded. “Of course. I’ll protect it with my life.”

“Stop the battle.” Not my voice! Not my voice!

“What?”

Delpheus tried swallowing, constricting his throat, biting his tongue— anything! It wouldn’t work. Weak and violated, his mind wasn’t his to control. He’d failed. He’d succumbed in his final moments. The shame overwhelmed him.

“Stop the battle,” his traitorous voice repeated. “The tau will parley. The new threat is more important.”

“They’ll cooperate? Just like that?”

“You must trust me.”

“I do, brother — I do.”

“The teleport arrays. They will take you to the bridge.”

“I understand.”

The shadows came down around his vision, like night drawing in. The controlling presence in his mind retreated stealthily, satisfied at its manipulations. Everything went cold.

The last vestiges of courage and honour inside Delpheus’s soul — a sputtering flame striving against the darkness — ripped forwards into the myriad skeins of possibility, crackling with psychic portent, and imparted one final warning, uncontrolled by whatever puppet master had spoken through him before.

“The... the rogue element. He lives on borrowed time. Seek him out. Find the warrior with the bomb in his head. Trust him.”

“What? Brother, I don’t understand...”

“Trust him...”

More gunfire. More screams. Delpheus gurgled.

The fog closed in, the blackness rolled over him, the Emperor smiled.

The world went away.

Severus smiled to himself, collecting his thoughts quickly.

The captain had looked so trusting — so sure of his dying comrade’s instructions. So much for the formidable defences of an Astartes Librarian! He’d played the fading fool like a rag doll — a brittle mask to be worn when required and cast away when redundant.

Not long now. The Ultramarines would intervene and stop the battle. All the pieces would gather together and he would take them all!

Ensign Kilson was sitting at his console aboard the bridge, unable to forget the hulking grey-green super-warriors he’d escorted through the vessel earlier.

Naturally enough the command deck was in a state of barely restrained anarchy, ranking officers screaming furiously at ensigns and servitors, apparently holding everyone but themselves responsible for the destruction of the main engines. Kilson did his best to allow it to wash over him, too experienced in the field of delegated blame to feel personally put out by the shrieked accusations.

A little part of him was thinking: we’re crippled. We’re under attack. They’re coming for us here and now and soon, without warning or mercy, we’re all going to die. The whole bloody lot of us.

But mostly he was too busy remembering the tremulous impact of the Space Marines’ footsteps, their glowering yellow eyeslits sweeping left and right, their weapons clashing against their breasts. He felt like a child again, back in the uptiers of CaerParav Hive, dreaming of meeting that season’s premier gladius fighter or collecting wafer engrams of the sector’s most renowned commissars.

He’d met them, those graceful grey-green brutes. He’d spoken to them, by the throne! A little part of him, detached from the termite nest madness of the bridge, felt like somehow, in a small way, it had touched divinity.

When the xenogen invader crept into the bridge and liquefied his body in a gust of thermal energy, Ensign Kilson was smiling serenely.

The bridge died.

“Intruder!”

“Get it!”

“Cover the officers! Cover the off—”

“Watch the instruments, damn you! Keep working!”

The meltagun was heavy in Kais’s grip, a blocky cumbersome thing that lacked the lightweight grace of his carbine. When he’d prised it from the mutilated grip of a dead Space Marine in the chapel below, he’d inspected the various coils and switches that clung like scales to its base. Eventually he decided that the trigger was the only control he really needed to understand and, leg wound still aching uncomfortably, had climbed the twisting staircase towards the bridge.

“Ensign! Get down! Get down!”

“Servitors to the front!”

“Mechserv #34 respo—”

“Emperor’s mercy!”

It didn’t shoot so much as dissolve its victims. He stood with legs planted sturdily, arm muscles bunched to support the growling, churning weapon. A splayed column of superheated air roared from its rounded muzzle; a devastating horizontal fountain that blasted flesh and bone apart like ash in a gale. The armsmen, supposedly guarding the bridge, were the first to go, shotguns igniting in their hands before they could even be brought to bear. Brass-mounted consoles slewed away in a waxlike sheen of melted surfaces and burning components, drizzling liquid metals across the room.

“Deck officer! Deck officer! To me!”

“—aaaaaaaaaaa—”

“—sweet mercy my foot’s gone oh Living God—”

“killitkillitkillit!”

A trio of servitors, blade-limbs grasping out for him, slunk away like snow devils in the sun. Their flesh peeled off in a second, leaving asymmetrical frames to twitch and shudder as their lubricants ignited and their strut supports melted to nothingness. The last few gue’la, hair singed and clothes scorched, exchanged terrified glances and sprinted clear. He enveloped them in the fusion stream and watched, heart racing, as they floundered and flapped and became part of the deck.

“—aaa—”

“—gkkhh—”

And then there was silence. He might as well have been the only living being in existence, in that moment. A solitary figure, exhausted and wounded, death clinging to his limbs like a black shroud. The enormity of the command deck wrapped him in a bubble of solitude and silence, even the clicking, whistling gauges and controls faltering away into an aural smog. From the vast viewing dome set above the room, the infinite reaches of the void peered down upon him— transforming him into a solitary bacterium staring in wonder from its perch on the back of a great, dead whale. The meltagun slid from his hands with a clatter that he didn’t even notice.

Somehow he felt... cheated. He hadn’t yet resolved his feelings. Hadn’t passed or failed his Trial by Fire with any certainty either way. He could still feel the Mont’au devil lurking below the surface of his mind, hungry to escape and flex its bloody claws again. He felt prematurely amputated from his rightful resolution — a quest that had neither ended in glory or ignominy, but rather fizzled out before its true conclusion.

He supposed, abstractly, that he should contact El’Lusha. He’d cleared the bridge. The Or’es Tash’var was defeated. The ethereal would want to know. Instead he found himself wishing for more, glancing about in the hopes of finding another enemy to fight.

So, like a light splitting through tormented clouds, like the impossible surreal luminosity of the tau’va, radiant and glorious at the termination of a long, snaking pathway, fate conspired to fulfil his request. An elevator grumbled nearby, rising with frozen slowness.

The doors began to slide open. Kais drew his knife.

Constantine burst from the officers’ lift in a black mood.

He’d wasted at least half an hour on some damn fool meeting requested by Severus, the preening bastard. Evidently the governor was either missing or dead, conspicuous in his absence at the boardroom. As a result of the unnecessary diversion Constantine had been unavailable to command his vessel in its moment of need, its engines had been systematically destroyed and now who knew what xenogen devilry the tau were planning to inflict upon his crippled vessel? Rushing back to the bridge, he was unable to contact his command crew for a status update, and, to top it all, had found himself confronted by a grisly abattoir of ruptured Space Marines in the chapel outside his command deck. The Raptors had failed.