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A Safe and Shadowed Place

Guy Haley

Gendor Skraivok, the Painted Count, Claw-Master of the 45th Company, stood motionlessly on the command deck of the Umber Prince. He ignored the bustle of the ship’s bridge crew and stared out through the last armourglass portal still intact. Ramrod straight, as if inspecting a flypast, he looked not upon a Legion fleet, but upon the remains of one – a filigreed junkyard of broken vessels drifting purposelessly against the raw, polychromatic fury of the aetheric storm shrouding Ultramar, framing it in twists of superstructure as delicate as ice patterns on glass.

It was a wholly depressing sight. Beautiful in its own way, he supposed, but Skraivok had never been one for beauty. Though the opacity of the window was turned almost to maximum, the light of the warp-born disturbance pained his sensitive eyes. Without moving, he shifted his gaze to look out past the twisting tendrils of the storm, into the deep night beyond the borders of Roboute Guilliman’s pompous little kingdom.

What few healthy ships had made it to this place had long since departed. He did not blame them. There was an anomaly at the edge of the Sothan System, a midnight blind spot out past the Mandeville point, framed against the corona of the distant Saphir Cluster. It had long been a favoured rendezvous for the Night Lords, who took delight in plotting their murderous business under the nose of the Ultramarines. That odd, shadowy blackness remained.

But Sotha had changed.

No longer a backwater, it practically swarmed with Guilliman’s miserable sons. As soon as the more functional VIII Legion vessels coming into the shadow caught sight of the streams of ships making their way to and from the planet – and the new orbital platform, and the babble of noospheric traffic – they had turned tail and fled back into the empyrean. The rest had departed one by one, limping away as soon as sufficient repairs had been made to their ravaged hulls.

Those that remained were the hopeless cases. The Umber Prince, Skraivok reluctantly supposed, was one of them.

He had spent many sleepless nights anticipating the wail of proximity alarms, but the XIII had not come. He had become as bored of waiting for them as he had of everything else here. But Gendor Skraivok reckoned he had a good idea, now, what the cause of all this increased activity was – and that it had something to do with the regular energy pulses coming from Sotha. Luckily for him, these emanations had made the Ultramarines, if anything, more blind to the enemy lurking beyond the reach of their sensors.

For now at least, this remained a safe and shadowed place.

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First published in Death and Defiance in 2014.
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