Kor’vesa 66.G#77 (Orbsat Surveillance) gusted horizontally — in relation to the planet’s terminator — to optimise its view of the gue’la vessel. The two fleets skulked on either side of the crippled hulk, weapons visibly lowered but not unlimbered. The drone drank it all in, recording and surveying, hungry for data.

Drop pods left the gue’la fleet like rain. Sunlight transformed them into pied fish shoals, iridescent flanks sweeping in broad waves of shimmering motion. The planetary exosphere took on a dappled ruby glow as pod after pod sluiced through its boundaries in a riot of superheated matter and coiling gases, the onset of evening marked brutally by the crescent swathe of darkness gobbling up continents below.

Orbsat 66.G could sense the abundance of weapons descending towards the surface. Munitions, artillery, vehicles: all deployed in a succession of different sized pods and shuttles, dipping their armoured bases and plummeting daggerlike, swallowed by perspective within moments.

The tau flotilla, positioned carefully opposite its black-hulled counterparts, efficiently disgorged a growing swarm of dropships. Soaring gulls to the humans’ graceless divehawks, they descended in progressive V-shaped waves, flanked by Barracuda fighters and drone-operated Harpedoes. Orbsat 66.G tracked a Dorsal-class heavy bomber as it rolled into the ionosphere in a gust of blue energy and was gone.

On either side of the tiny drone, waterfalls of death tumbled planetwards, and spinning with morbid ungainliness in the space in between, the mouldering cadaver of the Enduring Blade turned prow over stern and vented oxygen into the void. One of the gue’la vessels moved forwards, a ponderous monstrosity letting the last of its brood eggs tumble away to the spawning ground below. It was sleeker than the Enduring Blade, spire-encrusted plate surfaces more streamlined, arrowhead beak longer and more vicious. The drone’s vast memory banks hurried to identify the vessel, rapidly narrowing its list of candidates as each unique feature of the ebony black facade-hull was checked off against intelligence reports and sightings.

“The Purgatus,” the assessment reported, noting an elaborate array of cannon lances protruding from the vessel’s flanks and an ancient battle scar on the uppermost toroq spires — clearly repaired with more recent metallurgical techniques: telltale identifying marks, like pectoral wounds on an alpha t’pel shark. “Retribution class,” the report said. Impossibly ancient. Impossibly powerful.

Growing energy emissions from the swollen gun ports sent 66.G into a flurry of confirmations and warnings tightbeamed to the Or’es Tash’var. The response was dismissive: “Continue surveillance. No further action. Negligible threat detected.”

The Purgatus adopted a flanking position alongside the tumbling Enduring Blade, engines and stabilisers carefully fired in a succession of small bursts until the ships moved in the same slow pirouette together, a single unit bonded by invisible cords. The lance clusters developed a ruddy glow, faint deck lights surrounding their positions dimming even further as power was brutally redistributed. A corona began to form, a shifting zone of arcing electricity and vacuum-guzzled gases.

Orbsat 66.G sensed the energyspike in a sub-real spectrum moments before the weapons fired. In a flurry of glow-tipped torpedoes deployed from peripheral launch bays, the central cannon belched a solid stream of plasma-energy, secondary and tertiary weapons-fire clustered around its core like tributaries.

The first shot sliced open the Enduring Blade like a warm slab of poi’sell, melting its structure with colossal precision. Explosions and abortive mushroom-cloud gouts of superheated air marred the edges of the incision — dwarfed by the scale of the scene and rendered insignificant; little more than sparks at the tip of a hammer-struck anvil.

A wedge of decking yawned open from the dying vessel, exposing a labyrinth of cross-section corridors and machinery within. The dark aura that clung to the ship — totally escaping the drone’s abilities of analysis but somehow tangible nonetheless — was dragged out into the void to dissipate harmlessly.

The second strike, as the Enduring Blade rolled serenely end over tip, punctured the cavernous wreckage of the engine stacks and punched a mighty bolt hole the length of the carcass — a blazing lance that glowed through the portholes and gaps in the infrastructure and knocked a solid chunk of the wedge prow into razor-shrapnel; an exit wound full of fire and zero-gravity liquid metal, tumbling and accreting.

The ship rolled again, displaying the devastation of the first shot like a proud veteran dragging tight the skin around his flesh wounds to exaggerate his scars of honour. The third shot, accompanied by a precision-targeted swarm of torpedoes, stabbed deep into the wound and, the watching drone surmised, dissected a promethium fuel line.

For a single raik’an there was light: a nova flash bright enough to leave an ugly overexposed mishmash of pixels across 66.G’s conventional-spectrum recording and casting a freeze frame shadow, grotesque and crenellated, across the Purgatus’s hull.

Then, chain reactions dispersing along the length of the vessel in both directions, the Enduring Blade shrugged off its skin, scattered its rotten musculature like chaff, gurgled coils of white-hot fuel nervously, and finally — ghoulishly — vanished behind a domino effect detonation that pulverised every connection, shattered every joist and bulkhead, atomised every datalink and evaporated the aborted screams of anyone unfortunate enough to still be alive.

Orbsat 66.G watched — detached — as the lifesign counter dropped like a stone. The carcass broke up. Cable guts shimmied in the sun and fragmented. Melt-blasted debris formed gunmetal confetti, expanding spherically. And bodies. Bodies and bodies and bodies.

A motion detector set high on the drone’s casing diverted its attention briefly. It oscillated precisely and trained its primary optic on the gue’la fleet, brooding darkly against the planetary eventide, suffering the hail of fragments from their violated brother in some self-flagellating display of sorrow.

On every beaked monster, on every sombre battleship and snarl-prowed frigate, every colossal battlecruiser, a mast was jerkily raised above the bridgecastle. The fleet flew a black flag and the Imperial comm-channels were thick with the tinny report of funereal marches and martial fugues.

Things came back to him in a jumble.

Vision, somewhere. The wince-inducing flare of first light followed quickly by a moment’s confusion: perspective was all wrong — focusing on distant objects didn’t work.

Helmet-HUD, he reminded himself. Focus close.

The drop pod door lay open at an angle, the rich evening sky of Dolumar revealed beyond. Kais wondered abstractly how long he’d been asleep, how long since landing, how long since—

The memories came back to him in a glut of impressions and sounds, making him gag. He’d lost control, he knew. He’d been pushed to the very back of his own consciousness and forced to watch, forced to obey.

That’s an excuse.

Nobody forced you.

You. Did. It. Yourself.

He stamped on that thought quickly and bullied his attention onto less esoteric matters, peering down at his gloves. He was unsurprised to find the familiar black-brown crust of dried blood speckling each digit, and again looked away before the reality could seep into his thoughts. He shifted his concentration to the blinking icons bordering his HUD. Half his helmet’s analysis functions were inoperative, and an experimental grope with his hand revealed a network of dents and scrapes and scratches. Again, he blinked and moved on, exercising the methodical analysis his training had instilled.