A vessel blasted off from a sanctioned landing site on Terra every millisecond, so they said. Another landed to take its place not long after. They arrived full, they left empty. The Throneworld did not trade with the rest of the Imperium — it consumed it. Goods were sucked in from every corner of every segmentum, dragged out from the holds of the leviathans that carried them, seized by the ravenous populace and devoured, and it was never enough. A million cargo-lifters might touch down in a single hour, and still thousands would starve. Any delay in the endless circular passage, and tens of thousands would die. Like a hopeless opiate addict, the populace could never be satisfied, never given enough. The birthplace of humanity now squatted like some obscene, famished infant at the heart of its web of stellar kingdoms, ingesting the last dregs of energy out of the straggling fringes and gulping them down into greedy oblivion.
Courvain’s voidcraft were housed in their own sector of the tower. Crowl maintained two Spiderwidows in his armoury for orbital transit — void-capable Inquisitorial variants of the Storm Eagle gunships used by the Adeptus Astartes. Like all else in his armoury, the vessels were night-black, armoured and emblazoned with the sigils of the Ordo Hereticus. Their marker-lights were a pale blue, the livery picked out in cold silver. A Spiderwidow carried few heavy armaments, lacking space in the enlarged plasma-housing for anything but engines and assorted sensor-baffling archeotech, but retained wing-mounted lascannons and a pair of heavy bolters at the prow.
It was the deep of the Terran night when the main hangar doors kicked off steam, their pistons activated, and drew back. Warning klaxons blared out, followed by spinning alert-lumens. Powerful searchlights shot up into the night sky, giving a warning understood by all atmospheric craft in the vicinity.
Seconds later, the Spiderwidow’s turbines roared into throaty life, and it lifted off the apron, its fuel lines and stabiliser cords snapping free. Superheated air thrummed over the rockcrete, and the massive craft roared up and out, tilting on exit from Courvain’s dark flanks and boosting into a steep climb.
Crowl sat back, watching the air traffic scurry to make way. The cityscape was ominous in that light — a wall of sheer black, punctured by the meagre scatter of lumen-points — but it soon fell away, exposing a featureless screen of occlusion ahead.
Spinoza, seated beside her master, watched the vastness of Salvator dropping away fast, a web of gold and yellow, broken only by sporadic plume-flame and the dull glow of active forges. For a few moments, she could make out the glittering margins of the Palace itself on the northern horizon, bathed in a blood-gold aura, its immense walls rising above even the tallest of the surrounding spires.
Then they hit the cloud belt, and the Spiderwidow rocked hard with turbulence. Aneela, Crowl’s pilot, grappled with the control columns, her jaw set hard under the visor of her flight-helm.
‘You’re fine with this, Spinoza?’ Crowl asked, calm as ever. ‘You can say if you’re not.’
The question itself was an insult, but she tried not to let it show. ‘Absolutely.’
‘I’ve had the equipment checked.’
‘Do not be concerned. I have no fear.’
‘Like your old friends. So they say.’
From further back in the cramped cockpit, Gorgias hissed something like a laugh. ‘Timor nullius! Oh, good. Homicidium on the way.’
‘There’s always that chance,’ said Crowl.
The last of the cloud cover ripped away, tumbling behind the Spiderwidow’s punishing backdraught. As the air thinned, Aneela switched power to the plasma drives, and the chassis locked itself into transitional judders.
With the toxic rad-zone behind them, the stars at last came out — a dazzling belt of rawlight strewn across the velvet darkness. After so long down in the grime, seeing that purity nearly made Spinoza cry out loud. This was the element she loved, where war could be conducted in the open, in the vaults of the heavens where the fires wheeled.
Except this was not empty space. Over to their left, the vast curve of an orbital plate gently turned, its withered grey armour stretching off into darkness. Defence stations loomed further up, each the size of cities, studded with gape-mawed novacannons and graviton world-enders. A colossal grand cruiser bearing the livery of Battlefleet Solar crawled off into the middle distance, escorted by wings of frigates. Between those giants swam shoals of lesser craft — fleet tenders, guide-tugs, the hundreds of orbital lifters, all of them fat and clumsy, riding on dull red cushions of plasma-glow.
‘Do you have a fix?’ Crowl asked Aneela.
‘Clear,’ Aneela replied, swinging the gunship around and setting course across the planet’s face. ‘You’ll see it soon.’
With the Spiderwidow’s angle steepening, Spinoza could look back down over the seething mass of cloud that swathed the planet’s atmosphere. The world’s arc looked like some eerie desert, underlit by piercing swells of colour leaking from the masked city below. Great circles, continent-spanning circles, glimmered dully, tracing out ancient patterns of conurbation, still intact even after millennia of rampant growth, regrowth and decay.
One zone was more brilliant than any other, overwatched by the most turbulent of storms, circling and boiling like a rad-inferno, as wide as half the hemisphere, unsettled and flecked by spasms of lightning.
He is there. Buried deep, but He is there. Even the elements pay tribute. Even the planet mourns.
They climbed higher, and the horizon fell away, curving at the edges. The sun, for so long weak, became a yellow-white hole in the void, brilliant and dazzling. More defence stations swam into view, antique monsters, floating like castles in the void, their walls still blackened from munitions fired ten thousand years ago. Truly massive voidships lurked on the edge of sensor range, far too huge to enter the patrolled orbital zone and attended to by flocks of scurrying lifters. They were virtually invisible, those giants, hulking out in the frigid wastes, their scale only given away by flickering marker lights in the deep.
‘Coming into augur-margins, now,’ reported Aneela, steering the Spiderwidow under the shadow of a defence cluster and out past the gravity distortion of a second orbital plate. ‘Do you wish me to run silent?’
‘No, not this time,’ Crowl replied, looking a little distracted by the spectacle unfolding around them. There was something irresistibly stately about it, the choreographed interplay of so many archaic edifices, rotating silently, standing eternal vigil over the ravaged globe below. ‘They know we’re coming.’
Spinoza glanced down at her control console, and caught sight of the target on a pict-screen — a mid-size deep-void carrier, no more than four kilometres long, comprising ridged modular sections slung under a hunched command cluster. It was a washed-out earth-brown, its variegated sides both charred from repeated warp entry and bleached from the undiluted glare of too many suns.
‘We have initial hails,’ said Aneela, sliding out from the plate’s pull and into the open void. The Rhadamanthys appeared on the real-viewers, a lump of light little bigger than the stars beyond it, but growing fast. ‘How do you wish me to respond?’
Gorgias began to get excited, and bobbed up and down as if caught in a grav-trap. ‘Hereticus-majoris. In stellam negatoriam, hunt them, hunt them. All will be infernis.’