The system's blockade was a shoal of rotting ships, launched from Stratix's dockyards and cannibalised from merchant and outpost fleets throughout the system, or brought in from the fleets of worlds conquered in Teturact's name.
Squadrons of escorts were fitted to function as fire-ships, rigged to burst like seed pods in huge clouds of space-borne spores that would eat their way through portholes and bulkheads and infect enemy crews. Larger cruisers teemed with crew who needed neither heat nor air to work, making for ships that could only be disabled by complete obliteration, while other near-derelict cruisers had massive armour plates welded to their prows so they could act as suicidal ram-ships like giant hypodermics loaded with disease. Monitoring stations and orbital defence platforms turned weaponry outwards, cyclonic torpedoes and magnalasers now hard-wired into crewmen whose minds were the only parts of them left alive.
Stratix itself was a giant gnarled ball of charred blackness, studded with glowing spots like embers where hive-forges still burned. The hives covered almost the entire surface of the planet and were charred with exhaust fumes, and whole swathes of city were obscured by thick streaks of toxic cloud. Here and there low-orbit docks broke the atmosphere like tarnished metal thorns.
The other worlds were just as touched by Teturact. The whole system had warped according to his will. Locanis, closest to the system's star, had a thick greenhouse of an atmosphere that had turned from pale grey to rotten black overnight. Callicrates was rich in the ores that Stratix used in its industries, but the silvery metallic surface was now pockmarked with patches of rust hundreds of kilometres across. St Phal was a graveyard world now, so thick with walking skeletal dead that from space its surface seemed to squirm as if covered with maggots.
Stratix Luminae was even colder and whiter than ever. The gas giant of Majoris Crien was covered in swirling storms of sickly browns and purples where once it had been vibrant green, and its many moons were drifting away in erratic orbits as though the giant world was too weak to hold onto them any more. The Three Sisters, the tiny, far-orbit ice worlds of Cygnan, Terrin and Olatinne, were pulling further and further from the distant sun as if trying to escape from the infection spreading across the system.
Teturact's tombship dropped back into realspace; it was like a home-coming. The comforting glow of disease surrounded the planets with haloes of pestilence. Somehow, space smelt different here. It was redolent with life. Even through the many layers of armour between the void and the bridge of the tombship, the stench was there: the stench of home.
The crew of servitors and menials who had been jacked into the bridge had degenerated to the point where only fragments of their minds still worked. So the crew had brought more in, plugging their minds into the consoles and heaping more and more bodies against the banks of readouts and controls until the bridge was a single charnel pit, three deep in writhing corpses like a carpet of skin and muscle.
It was the ultimate slavery, for these near-dead to surrender their very humanity to Teturact. No one else was allowed on the bridge aside from Teturact and his bearers, because it was a place where anyone in control would be worshipped and that honour was only permissible for Teturact himself.
The front of the bridge gave way to a massive viewscreen through which Teturact could see the beauty of the Stratix system stretching in front of him. Stratix represented more than just another world, it was the first, the heart of his corruption and the first proof that he truly had the power to rule worlds. He had done much good work on Eumenix and the place would be as solid a bastion as any in his empire, but the Stratix system was home.
Wordlessly, he urged the bridge crew to turn the ship towards Stratix. The bodies writhed beneath his feet and moaned as their minds were connected through the bridge cogitators to signal the main engines and thrusters.
Teturact let his mind sweep out. With every new world he became stronger, and his consciousness was no longer bound to his wizened body. He let it flow through the tombship, washing over the bright, roiling pits of corruption that were the minds of his wizards. He felt the fractured pride of the Navigator above the prow, still trying to hold on to the idea of the old naval aristocracy even as his flesh melted off his bones.
He could see beyond the ship, past die ripples it left in realspace as it passed out into the void. It was warm and welcoming, tinted with disease, and he could hear, like the echoes of a distant choir, the voices clamouring for him to come and save them all over again. He could drink that feeling, their desperation and their gratitude, and the pleading that followed as they came to realise they would always need him to keep their slow deaths at bay. It was what fuelled him. It was why he had built a war machine out of his empire and engaged Imperial forces in grinding campaigns of attrition that only he could win.
He felt the desperate dimming of Strata's star and the warping of the gravitational web between the worlds - so powerful was the concept of Teturact as a god that it deformed the universe around it. He could taste the dark, rich taste of corruption so pure it could bleed across the void in a stain that would eventually cover his whole empire.
Strata itself was a glorious beating heart of suffering, St Phal a suppurating wound in reality, Strata Luminae a hard white pearl of dead ice, Majoris Crien a bloated spectre. Teturact could feel them distorting space around them, so powerful was the taint he had left on them. Spacecraft like swarms of locusts or huge lumbering monsters patrolled the system, and Teturact could hear them calling his name.
The beauty of it all still had the power to astound him. Teturact had seen extraordinary things and become immune to all of them but this - these billions of souls in pain and rapture, pleading for his touch and singing praises in gratitude, all forming a psychic tide that flowed into Teturact's mind.
But there was something else here, something that wasn't here before. Something pure and untouched by Teturact. Different, yes, shifted sideways from reality - but not diseased.
Teturact focused his will on the intrusion. Tiny and metallic, they were like needles sewing a wound back together, piercing the gauze of suffering and driving deep into system space. There were several tiny craft, faster than any Imperial ships of comparable size.
Teturact felt a cold, affronted anger. These were his worlds. The Imperial spearheads that had tried to punch into the Strata system at the start of the rebellion had paid for their boldness with madness followed by servitude in Teturact's armies. No one had dared poison this cauldron of disease with their cleanliness since then.
Teturact could smell a hot, bright bolt of psychic intelligence in one of the ships, something subtly different than a normal human psyker. It was taut, focused, and very, very powerful.
Teturact pulled back from the shoal of bright slivers and let the whole system fill his mind. He could see the trails of near-normality that the ships left behind them and estimated the course they were taking, straight as an arrow into the heart of the system.
Their route would take them to Stratix Luminae.
Teturact's consciousness snapped back into the confines of the bridge. The bodies piled up around him shuddered as even they felt the resonance of their lord's anger. He spat out an order with his mind to switch the tombship's course towards the frozen planet and intercept the intruders.
Stratix Luminae - no, thought Teturact, that could not be allowed.
KORVAX SLAMMED a new magazine into his bolter and heard half his squad doing the same. He glanced at Sergeant Veiyal - the sergeant's helmet had been damaged and he was bare-headed, his breath coiling white in the cold.