This had been his dream since he had won the status. Going back to war had been his dream.
Yes, the significance was not lost on him. It was a day full of significance. It was the first time ever that wall-brethren had been allowed to leave Terra and the Phalanx and go to war in support of their kind, the first time that the entire Chapter had been committed at one stroke since the days of the Siege, when they had been a Legion still. The first time since then that a capital threat had come inside fifty warp-weeks of the Terran Core.
Though he was a creature bred for war, Daylight was not blind to the political significance either. Attending the Palace as he had done for so many years, he had watched the activities of the Senatorum and knew power play and counter-agendas when he saw them. Daylight’s glorious return to war, and the wielding of the Imperial Fists as one unified weapon at this time of crisis, were merely by-products of Lord High Admiral Lansung’s ascension. He had made himself look quite imperial by moving his forces in support of the Fists, and even more imperial by magnanimously suggesting that the Fists support and preserve their reputation. He had, in effect, facilitated everything that was happening. The fact that he had effectively sent an entire Chapter of Adeptus Astartes to war left a great deal more unsaid about his power.
Attendants swept up on either side of Daylight and attached a long cloak to his shoulders, a cloak of blue silk that trailed out behind him. Armed footmen fell in step around him, an honour guard supplied by Heth. Just like politics, the cloak was an encumbrance that Daylight would dispense with in combat.
They moved up the quarterdeck, and under the valveway arches. The burnished deck throbbed beneath them as the warship bled out power. The warp had just spat out the Azimuth after six and a half weeks of travel, and now, translated into the realm of real space, they and the rest of the reinforcement squadron were slicing in across the outer banks and belts of the Ardamantua System into the compliance zone.
As he walked, Daylight processed. Data-feeds were inflowing to his visor mount, and had been since the trip began. He processed the latest intercepts and battle reports from the line formation, archived data on the planet and the blisternest site, force composition and a rolling track of action-by-action detail from the very first moment of deployment onwards. From the outside, Daylight looked like a ceremonial figure walking in a grand state parade. On the inside, he was a strategium in war mode.
Most of the data he could process was archived, however. It came from the early part of the compliance, and from intercepts received before the reinforcement squadron had left the Terran Core. They had spent weeks in the empyrean, and nothing viable or reliable had entered the data-streams of astropathic communication links during the voyage.
Now they were back in real space, the vast leap of their extra-universal transit achieved, communication could resume.
Except, Daylight could see from the feeds, nothing was coming from the world called Ardamantua.
Nothing human.
He entered the warship’s state bridge. Navy officers turned to acknowledge him with formal stiffness, but a gesture sent them back to their vast consoles, set in tiers up the mountainside flanks of the chamber. On high platforms with gilded handrails, strategy officers plotted courses and operated the vast hololithic displays of the central strategium. Lines of Navy armsmen in formal uniforms, in ranks forty long and seven wide, stood facing each other on the central, mirror-polished steel floorspace of the bridge, forming an avenue down which Daylight could proceed to the command dais. They came to attention, their silver lascarbines raised.
Daylight walked the line, still processing.
Nothing human, nothing human…
Admiral Kiran stepped off the dais to meet him, escorted by General Maskar and a small army of aides, subalterns and autoclerks. Kiran was Lansung’s appointed proxy, a slender and unfriendly-looking man in late middle age with a permanently cunning expression on his face. He wore silver and blue, and a broad bicorn hat. He carried the ship’s command wand in his left hand. The wand was a jewel-encrusted device the size of a sceptre or battle-mace, and it hummed soft songs of deep space and the warpways to itself.
Maskar was Lord Commander Militant Heth’s proxy on the command warship, though Heth travelled with the squadron aboard the grand carrier Dubrovnic. Unlike Lansung, who had seen the Ardamantua crisis in purely political terms and had instructed his officers to conduct it on his behalf, Heth was a more selfless individual. He appreciated the potential scale of the crisis and had elected to join the reinforcements in person. He led sixty-eight brigades of the Astra Militarum, the biggest deployment from the core seen in years, and he was not about to place that in the hands of his juniors. Heth wanted to show that unlike Lansung and, indeed, the other High Lords, he was prepared to get his hands dirty. The Imperial Fists required the assistance of his Astra Militarum, and he intended to deliver that in person.
It had caused a stir when Heth had announced his intention of joining the squadron. There was nothing Lansung could say about it that wouldn’t look petty, but Lansung’s thunder had been stolen a little. Heth was positioning himself as a willing man of the people, a leader who did rather than told. It was clear that Heth saw this moment as an opportunity to show that the Astra Militarum, vast and reliable, was the most important service standing in the Imperium’s defence, the truest and most doughty.
It was also an opportunity for Heth to ease himself out of the shadow cast across the Senatorum High Twelve by Lansung, Mesring and Udo.
As per protocol, not all the squadron’s senior officers travelled on the same vessel. Vox-officers set up a real-time link to Heth so he could coordinate with them.
Maskar was a useful officer, short and bullish, with an excellent track record. He had not long returned from service in a frontier campaign, the ‘blood fresh on his tunic’ as the phrase went. Daylight had read Maskar’s file. He liked the man, liked him for what he could do.
None of that data was pertinent now: not Maskar’s file, not the politics on Terra.
‘Sir,’ said Kiran.
‘Anything?’ asked Daylight. ‘Anything from the surface?’
‘No,’ replied the admiral.
‘Nothing human,’ Maskar added with a growl.
‘I have reviewed the incoming data,’ said Daylight. ‘It’s very noisy down there.’
Kiran nodded to one of his analysis officers, who projected a small hololithic display between his tech-engraved hands as though he was opening a book for them to look at.
‘Since our last data from Ardamantua,’ the analysis officer said, ‘the surface and atmospheric situations have degenerated catastrophically. The planet seems to have been plunged into some kind of stellar crisis. It’s almost primordial down there. We presumed at first that it might have been struck by another body, a large meteor, but there is no trace of that very distinctive damage pattern.’
Daylight watched the man’s shifting display, staying one step ahead of everything he said.
‘Ardamantua has been rendered unstable in the six weeks since we last saw it,’ the analysis officer continued. ‘It is unstable atmospherically, geologically and orbitally. There are gross levels of surface radiation, and significant signs of massive gravitic instability.’
‘There were never any indications of gravitic weaknesses in the early planetary surveys,’ said Admiral Kiran.
‘However,’ said Maskar, ‘some of the last few intercepts we received from the expedition force before we departed spoke of what appeared to be gravitational anomalies.’