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CHAPTER ONE

VOYAGERS

Klas Brauner saw the contrails first. He and his crew had just moved another stone out of the way of the plough. He arched his back, working out the kinks, feeling every decade as hot coal on his spine. He looked up into the hot steel of the summer sky, and saw them: hundreds of streaks as the ships tore down through the atmosphere. Within seconds, the spreading cloud of the contrails dimmed the sun. The shadow fell over Brauner’s land, and everyone at work in the fields stopped to stare at what was coming.

War was raining down on Squire’s Rest.

Brauner traced the direction of the streaks. There would be no landings on his farm, nor on Elna Stumar’s. But the nearest wouldn’t be many kilometres away. And the rain of ships kept falling. These numbers would make distance meaningless.

‘Get everyone to the house,’ he told his foreman, Stellan Dietrick. ‘Shutters down. Distribute the weapons. Wait for me there.’

‘Yes, colonel.’

Colonel. He hadn’t been one for twenty years. Dietrick hadn’t been a sergeant for just as long. They had fought their last official campaign with their fellow Cadians on Vhun. They had survived to retirement and earned their reward on Squire’s Rest. Brauner no longer held military rank over his employees. The old habits died hard, though. And the wars kept following them. In these last years, there hadn’t been a single month without at least one skirmish.

Today was different, though. Today, he thought, their ranks would be needed again.

He ran over to the battered Tauros. He drove the utility vehicle across his fields towards the Stumar farm, bouncing over the stones and ruts of the tired land. Squire’s Rest was held out to active troops as a promise of paradise. Perhaps it had been so, a few millennia back, but its Arcadian glories had passed. The agri world was still productive, but reluctantly so. Its fertility was being squeezed from it through overwork and the damage caused by the ork raids. Ten years of raids. Growing more aggressive, eroding the accomplishments of a world of veterans.

Bastards.

He drove for twenty minutes, jouncing straight through both farms, jouncing though crops of struggling maize, until he reached the bluff at the western edge of Stumar’s property. He’d guessed right. He saw her, a hard silhouette, watching the streaks of the invasion. He pulled up a few metres back from the cliff edge.

She nodded once as he approached, but didn’t look away from the contrails. ‘Colonel,’ she said.

‘Colonel,’ he replied. He stood beside her. ‘What do you think?’

‘This isn’t a raid.’

‘Not this time,’ he agreed. The contrails now covered the sky. The orks were coming to take the planet. ‘They want it all. Any word from Ascra?’ The regional capital was over five hundred kilometres away. The population of Squire’s Rest was not much more than ten million, sufficiently spread out that the individual homesteads were largely autonomous. But the planet’s agricultural production needed to be shipped, and so there were spaceports and administrative centres. The Administratum gnomes at Ascra had been of little help during the raids. Brauner did not expect military aid now. But he did wonder if there was news about the rest of the Sanctus Reach.

Stumar grimaced. ‘I did a vox scan a few minutes ago. Ascra is just sending out warnings about the obvious.’

‘Any off-world transmissions?’

‘Nothing from Malaghai Morca.’

So the trading post had fallen. ‘And Ghul Jensen?’

‘A lot of screaming.’

The hive world reacting as expected. ‘They’re hitting everywhere then.’

‘Seems like it.’

They watched in silence for a few minutes. In the distance, the first booms of landing echoed.

‘So,’ Brauner said.

‘So,’ Stumar replied.

‘I never was much of a farmer.’

‘Know anyone who is?’

They looked at each other then. Here we are, Brauner thought, two old war dogs who should know better than to be happy about this. They still had some iron in them. It hurt to stand straight, but he could do it. Stumar did too, and didn’t let on if the arthritis was gnawing at her back just as much as it did his. She had it worse with her hands, though, both of them hooked into permanent claws. White hair on both veterans, almost as many scars as wrinkles. Their skin was leather so tough it was almost wood.

‘So,’ Brauner said again.

‘So.’

‘How are we going to fight them?’

Stumar kicked a stone off the top of the bluff. ‘Like we always do.’

‘Las and piss it is, then.’

‘Greenskins won’t know what hit them.’

They grinned at each other, but Brauner felt something clutch in his chest. It wasn’t the coming of war that bothered him. It wasn’t the thought of dying. It was the knowledge that Stumar was going to die too.

They were all going to die.

The orks would make sure of it.

‘We’re ten minutes from the Sanctus Reach Mandeville point, justicar,’ Hadrianna Furia said as she walked into the Chamber of Militant Quiet.

Justicar Styer looked up from the hololith of Squire’s Rest that dominated the projection table in the centre of the room. ‘Thank you, inquisitor.’ The Grey Knight did not resent the arrival of an unannounced presence into the room, intrusive though it was. The space was meditative and tactical, a sanctuary for prayer and war. Situated one level above the bridge of the Tyndaris, it provided a valued retreat for Styer while giving him rapid access to the strike cruiser’s nerve centre when necessary. It was circular. The adornment of its dome was simple. The ribs were carved into the representation of spears, in alternating orientation. Between them was the darkness of obsidian. When he gazed upward, Styer found he could empty his mind of the extraneous and concentrate on the absolute necessity of the moment. What was even more crucial: he could bear down on the problem that faced him and strip it of its inessentials, unearthing the true core of the challenge. On the walls beneath the dome were shelves holding texts that were devotional, military, and arcane. As a librarium, the Chamber of Militant Quiet had a small collection, but it was a powerful one.

Furia looked at the projection of the world. ‘Any luck?’

‘No.’ Styer had been going over everything in the Tyndaris’s data banks about the planet during the strike cruiser’s journey to Sanctus Reach. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘The world is innocuous.’

‘It is in the path of a massive ork force.’

‘And its inhabitants have my sympathy.’

‘Do they?’ Furia asked.

Was she testing him? Styer wondered. For what? Necessary signs of humanity, or extraneous ones? Or was her purpose less well defined, a question of probing him from different angles, looking for the weakness that would explain his scepticism about the mission? He shrugged off the questions. They weren’t useful ones. ‘Yes,’ he told her. ‘I am not unmoved by their plight. But I will not waste time or energy mourning what a single squad cannot prevent. Nor do I find any records,’ he waved his hand at the data-slates fanned across his side of the table, ‘that point to the work of the Ruinous Powers. What purchase would they find in a population composed of retired Imperial Guard who have been rewarded for loyalty and service? If the fall of Squire’s Rest is a concern for the Inquisition, I would think it falls within the purview of the Ordo Xenos, not the Ordo Malleus.’

‘Nevertheless, those are the coordinates the prognosticators gave us. A major daemonic incursion is imminent.’

Styer grunted.

‘You doubt the prognostication?’ Furia sounded surprised. She shouldn’t. He hadn’t made his reservations a secret. But this was the first time they had discussed the matter directly.

‘About its accuracy, yes.’

‘That is a highly unorthodox attitude, justicar.’

‘And a sound one. I have no wish to suffer further pointless losses.’

The last mission had savaged his squad. The prognosticators had forecast an incursion in the Angriff System. Situated in the Finial sector, Angriff was close enough to the Eye of Terror for warp distortions to be expected. Still, all information had pointed to Angriff Primus’s moon as the site of the attack. The planet was a miserable forge world, but it was in the moon’s mining colonies where the Ordo Malleus and the Ecclesiarchy had already been combating a growing cult whose conception of the Emperor was a dangerously extreme deviation from the orthodoxy of the Imperial Creed. The Tyndaris had arrived, preparations had been made, and the cult’s centres of activity assaulted. But the daemons had appeared on Angriff Primus itself. Styer’s squad had had to fly into battle with no time to formulate a proper strategy. They had managed to contain the infection to a single manufactorum. In the end, they had destroyed the plant and every soul, possessed or innocent, inside.

Two battle-brothers had been lost. Erec and Morholt, their centuries of battle deeds brought to an end by the abominations that should never have been given the chance to enter the materium. Styer didn’t know when his squad would be back to full strength. He bore a new set of scars: huge claw slashes, two sets of three parallel gouges that ran down either side of his face from his temples to his chin. The raised flesh of the wounds’ ridges reminded him of how badly they had been blindsided. If the prognosticators had sought deliberately to mislead his squad, he thought, they could not have done better. He kept these musings to himself. He would never accuse another Grey Knight of treason or corruption. Those were impossibilities. But what he saw on the table before him made him question the accuracy of the prognosticators even more.

He was surprised that Furia didn’t share his mistrust. She had been on Angriff Primus too. She had fought, and she had been wounded. Badly. Most of the left side of her body was augmetic. Arm and leg were bionic. Anyone who saw her in profile saw one of two different people. On the right, there was the flesh of a mid-career inquisitor. Juvenat treatments preserved something that could not be said to be youth – her eye was too hard for that – but was the prime of strength. The left side of her face was a bronze mask, just as stern and remorseless as the flesh, the red lens of her eye a piercing judgement, but the time and the expression were frozen. The right side of Furia was capable of expressing kindness. It could laugh. The left was frozen in unending purpose.

‘Our losses on Angriff Primus were not in vain,’ she said.

‘True,’ Styer replied. ‘But neither were they necessary. If we had been looking in the right place from the start, they would not have happened.’ He stabbed a finger at the hololith of Squire’s Rest. ‘And this is the wrong place. Again.’

‘The coordinates were specific. One of the moons, perhaps?’

‘Doubtful. They’re just fragments. Nothing larger than a mountain. No mining operations on any of them. They’re dead rock.’

‘Then there is something that we’re missing. Just as there must have been something we missed on Angriff Primus. We were in error, not the prognostication.’

‘If we go into battle second-guessing our strategy, we deserve defeat.’

‘Then we will make certain we are not in error,’ Furia said, and turned to go. ‘I think we should be on the bridge, Justicar Styer.’

He grunted and extinguished the hololith. He was dissatisfied with his session in the chamber. He had come to no resolution. He left with as many doubts as he had entered. But Furia was right.

The Grey Knights were about to arrive on their field of battle. Time to lead the charge.

As he and Furia stepped outside the chamber, he saw Vohnum waiting for him. ‘I’ll join you in a moment, inquisitor,’ he said.

Furia glanced at Vohnum, nodded to Styer, and walked on.

‘You wanted to see me, brother?’ Styer said.

‘I was wondering whether you had found greater clarity with regards to our mission, brother-justicar.’

Styer didn’t care for the ambiguity of Vohnum’s phrasing. It could be read as a helpful expression of concern. It could also be a veiled criticism. Vohnum might be implying that it was Styer who lacked clarity, not the mission. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I have not.’ He waited for a moment, then said, ‘Why? Do you see something I don’t?’

Vohnum was the most senior of the warriors who served with Styer. It was he who commanded the other combat squad when they split their force into two on the battlefield. They had fought side by side for over a century, and they had done so well. But Angriff Primus had driven a wedge between them. Vohnum didn’t doubt the prognosticators. His faith in every aspect of them was absolute. If something went wrong, the blame fell with the decisions made in combat. Following that logic, Styer knew that his battle-brother was looking at his leadership critically.

‘It is not for me to engage in exegesis,’ Vohnum began.

‘Why not? An interpretation that would make sense of the contradictions before us would be helpful.’

‘I see nothing to interpret. The prognosticators have foreseen a daemonic incursion at these coordinates. So we have come to defeat it.’

‘Indeed we have.’

Vohnum grimaced in frustration. ‘Forgive me, brother-justicar, but that is not the impression you are giving.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘You have not made a secret of your questions about the prognostication.’

‘And?’

‘I believe doing so is detrimental to the spiritual health of our squad.’

Styer bristled, but he made himself calm down before answering. Honest debate was part of the mortar of trust between battle-brothers. But not when disagreement crossed over into dissension. ‘After Angriff Primus, I have questions. The current situation makes them even more urgent. I will not conceal my doubts from the rest of you.’

‘I expressed myself badly,’ Vohnum said. ‘It is not your honesty that troubles me. It is the questions themselves.’

‘Are you questioning my leadership?’

‘I seek reassurance about the soundness of your judgement.’

‘Then be assured,’ Styer said, and the air filled with ice. ‘Any question I ask is for the benefit of our squad, and for the fulfilment of our duty and our oaths.’ He leaned in towards Vohnum. ‘Have no doubt of that.’ He was not reassuring the other Grey Knight. He was giving him a direct order.

‘The landings are still ongoing, inquisitor,’ Lowell Montgelas said.

Malia Orbiana stifled the worst of her impatience. ‘I can see that very well, shipmaster.’ The primary oculus of the Scouring Light displayed the long rain of ork landings. ‘The bulk of the ork fleet is moving on though, is it not?’

‘It is,’ Montgelas admitted.

She looked down at him from where she sat in the command throne. The seat was an isolated one, rising from the end of a platform that projected into the space of the bridge like a spur from the rear wall. Orbiana’s position was four metres above the deck. She had a clear view of the oculus and of the activity below her. She was present before her crew, but far beyond their level. The architecture of the bridge was symbolic, and symbols could have a direct impact, shaping the perception of power and its currents. ‘The greenskins crave violence like a drug,’ Orbiana continued. ‘This is an agri world. It isn’t worth much of their attention.’ She gestured at the oculus. ‘Clearly, they know this. How many ships at anchor do you see?’

‘None,’ Montgelas said after a minute.

‘Precisely. The orks who seek sport here are landing. Their kin won’t tolerate waiting around without a battle coming their way. We’ll have the near space of Squire’s Rest to ourselves. Don’t concern yourself unduly about the greenskins. How close are we to the coordinates I gave you?’

‘We’re nearly there.’ Montgelas was standing at a pulpit in the centre of the bridge, a few metres forward of Orbiana. When she was absent, the station gave him the authority he needed. When she was in the throne, Montgelas’s subordination to her will was reinforced. He was the shipmaster, but the Scouring Light was hers. Every soul aboard served the will of the agent of the Ordo Xenos. ‘Auspex,’ Montgelas said to the woman sitting at the station to his immediate left. ‘Please show us the target.’

Marga Furth tapped some keys, and runes appeared on the oculus, highlighting the goal of Orbiana’s journey. It was very close to a cluster of ork landing sites.

‘That could be better,’ Orbiana muttered. ‘What do we know of the vicinity?’

‘Farmland,’ said Furth. ‘Sparsely inhabited. The specific destination is not immediately adjacent to cultivated areas.’

Orbiana nodded. ‘So the orks will have little reason to venture there.’

‘They will if we’re there,’ Montgelas said.

‘Then we’ll be discreet.’ She mentally ran through the risks. Montgelas was right, of course. If the orks decided her landing party was interesting, then the mission would come to a quick end. She decided that the danger was a manageable one. ‘Get the shuttle ready,’ she said and stood up. She wanted to make her preparations for landing, keep herself busy. She didn’t want to listen to the small, grating voice in the back of her mind, the one whose accusations made her chest pinch.

She didn’t want to listen, but as she walked along the platform and off the bridge, she heard what it said anyway. It complained that she had only pretended to weigh her options, and that she had decided on her course of action before she had even known how close the greenskins would be to the target. That was true. Of course she had. She had decided months before arriving in Sanctus Reach.

The full truth? There was no decision to be made.

She commanded the voice to be silent.

The Scouring Light was Orbiana’s personal vessel. A modified Viper-class sloop – it was not a combat ship, though it had slit the throat of many xenos threats. It was fast, stealthy, its dark plating almost as effective at concealment as that of the Black Ships. It was a shadow that slipped into enemy territory and brought the Emperor’s Light in the form of purifying death.

Orbiana made her way down from the superstructure and headed forward. Midway to bow, she turned off the main corridor. She took maintenance tunnels, dropping three more levels and weaving through multiple intersections before she arrived outside a closed vault door. ‘Is he here?’ she asked the guard stationed before it.

‘No, inquisitor,’ one answered. ‘He said he was going to rest.’

‘Has he been gone long?’

‘About an hour.’

She nodded her thanks. She walked on another hundred metres, and then took a staircase up a level. She stopped before another door. This one was as nondescript as the one below was massive. They both protected objects of great value. She rapped once on the door. After a few seconds it opened.

The man who admitted her to the small sleeping quarters was twice her age and a head shorter. He seemed even smaller thanks to his rounded posture. His hair was lank and grey and his chin sprouted rough, greasy-looking whiskers. His robes bore multi-coloured chemical stains, and there were pinprick burns in the sleeves. His face was sallow, its flesh hanging loose. He looked exhausted.

‘I’m sorry to disturb your sleep,’ Orbiana said to Ertuo Andoval.

‘Not at all, inquisitor,’ the sage answered. ‘You know how much I value our exchanges.’

‘Are you making progress?’

He shrugged, embarrassed and modest. ‘Some, I think. Always forwards, inquisitor, always forwards. I have, I believe, stumbled onto what might be some very promising variants, but of course we can’t know with any certainty. We need more material–’

‘You’ll get it. Plenty of it.’

‘And the other…?’

‘That’s what I’ve come to tell you. We’ve arrived.’

‘Will I be coming down with you?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

Andoval looked crestfallen. ‘But what we’re looking for is so specific…’

‘I know very well what we require. Are you questioning my skills?’

Andoval shook his head quickly and took a step away, head bowed. ‘I would never think to do that.’

‘Good. And this is for your own safety. The orks are here before us. You are too valuable to risk taking you there.’

‘I will continue my research while you are gone, then, inquisitor.’

‘No,’ she snapped. She used her tone as a whip. Andoval recoiled as if struck. Good. ‘You will do no such thing. You will never do that work when I am not on board. Am I clear?’

‘Yes, inquisitor.’

‘Am I clear?’

‘Yes, inquisitor,’ Andoval repeated, hunching lower as if he might kneel.

‘Good. We are close,’ she said more gently. ‘I have strong hopes that we are only a few cycles away from the answer. Such an accomplishment is worth a bit more patience, isn’t it?’

Andoval nodded. ‘It is.’

She gave him a long stare, then said, ‘Thank you, Ertuo,’ and left.

As she walked away, she faced the idea of Andoval disobeying her command. She knew that he would not. He was loyal. He held the authority of the Inquisition in great awe, as he should. He knew the dangers. He would not disobey.

But he had proposed a course of action that should never have crossed his mind. So Orbiana made herself confront the possibility of Andoval’s disobedience. When she did, she felt more than a pinch in her chest.

She felt terror.

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