'Look!' shouted Hakur. 'In the trees! Movement, everywhere!'
Every egg-orb that Garro could see was trembling as the jorgalli things inside thrashed and tore at their confinement, frantic in their need to escape. He flicked a look to Kendel, as the Sister directed her cohorts to gather the dead mutant into a chainmail sack. She glanced up at him and nodded. Perhaps Voyen had been correct, perhaps the cyborg had been some kind of guardian protecting the psyker child, and now it was dead, its siblings were enraged.
Spatters of yolk rained down from the trunks. Kendel flicked out harsh gestures to her Sisters and the women moved off, turning their flamers on the foliage. Garro saw the merit in her action and called into his vox-link. 'Deploy grenades and explosives. Follow the Sisterhood's example. Destroy the trees.'
The fibrous matter of the egg-trees was dry and made excellent tinder. In moments, the alien woodland was burning, the grey sacs popping and boiling. Many of the enhanciles made it to the ground, mad with fury, and they were put down with detached precision.
Garro watched the blue-tinged flames sear and dance as they spread, murdering the world-ship's
dormant and newborn. All across the bottle, the jorgall were perishing beneath the hand of the Death Guard, making a lie of the mutant child's final words. 'A lie,' said Garro aloud, watching the poisonous smoke turn above his head.
THREE
Aeria Gloris A Poisoned Chalice Put to the Question
In the ruins of their enemy, the Death Guard task force regrouped and surveyed the breadth of the destruction they had wrought. The wreckage of the jorgalli picket fleet was a cloud of crystallised breathing gasses, hull fragments and the dead. Some of the teardrop-shaped xenos vessels were still relatively intact. One by one, these were being scuttled with atomic charges, reduced to sun-hot balls of radioactive plasma. In less than a standard Terran day, there would be nothing recognisable left to show the face of an enemy that the Death Guard had obliterated so utterly.
Out there in the shoal of destruction, Stormbirds on funerary details scoured the engagement area for Astartes who had been blown into the dark during boarding operations. Those found would be interred as heroes, once the progenoid glands in their corpses had been harvested. The precious flesh-matter from
the dead would serve the Legion in their stead, passing on to strengthen new initiates when the next round of recruitment began. Once in a while, a lucky find would bring the recovery crews a live battle-brother, dormant inside his armour beneath the lulling pressure of his sus-an membranes, but that happened very rarely.
Beyond the zone where the Death Guard fleet gathered like carrion birds around a corpse, the jorgall bottle was executing a slow, wounded turn to sight down into the ecliptic plane of the Iota Horologii system. Drifts of wreckage and broken panels from the construct's vast solar panels floated behind it in a faint cometary tail. The main drives blinked out of sequence as the fusion motors worked the colossal mass of the world-ship about. Dissenting voices from the Mechanicum contingent aboard the warship Spectre of Death had petitioned Mortarion for a few days in which to loot the alien craft of technology. The pri-march, as was his prerogative, refused the request. The letter of Lord Malcador's orders – and therefore, by extension, those of the Emperor himself – was that the jorgall incursion into the sector was to be exterminated. The master of the Death Guard clearly saw no point of confusion in those orders. There was to be nothing left of the aliens.
And yet…
Nathaniel Garro watched the play and turn of the fleet from the gallery above the Endurance's main launch bay, above him a span of thick armoured glass and space beyond it, below, through skeletal brass frames and grid-cut decking, the expanse of the flight platform. Gradually, his gaze dropped.
Down among the sleek Stormbirds and heavy Thunderhawks was a single swan-like shuttlecraft, the
spread wings of the ship detailed in gold and black. It stood out among the white and grey Astartes craft, a single bright game fowl nestled in a flock of pale raptors.
Aboard that vessel, a sole tangible remnant of the assault would remain after all the works of the jorgall were erased from this sector of space. He found himself wondering what other orders the Sisters of Silence had, orders that were unbound even in the face of a primarch's countermand. It was not defiance on their part to go against Mortarion's wishes if it was the Emperor's will to do otherwise, surely? This was not disobedience. This was a trivial issue, a small thing of little consequence. Garro had never known of and could barely envisage an instance when the commands of primarch and Emperor would not be in harmony.
An oiled hiss signalled the opening of the gallery's hatch and Garro looked to see who had come to interrupt his customary moment of solitude after the battle. A small smile curled at his lips as two figures entered the echoing, empty colonnade. He gave a shallow bow as Amendera Kendel approached him, a younger woman in a less ornate version of a witch-seeker's robes walking at her heels.
Kendel looked to Garro as he assumed he must have looked to her: fresh from the battlefield, fatigued, but content that the fight had gone well. 'Sister,' said Garro, 'I trust the outcome this day was satisfactory to you.'
The woman signed a few words and the girl at her side spoke. 'Battle-Captain Garro, well met. The goals of the Imperium have been ably served.'
Nathaniel raised an eyebrow and looked directly at the girl. He saw her more clearly now, noting that she
had no armour or visible weapons as Kendel did. 'Forgive me, but it was my understanding that the Sisters of Silence are never to speak.'
The girl nodded, her manner changing slightly as she answered. 'That is indeed so, lord. No Sister may utter a word, unto death, once she gives the Oath of Tranquillity. I am a novice, captain. I have yet to take the vow and so I may speak to you. Sisters-in-waiting such as I serve our order when communication is needed with outsiders'
'Indeed,' Garro nodded. 'Then may I ask your mistress what she wishes of me?'
Kendel gestured again, and the novice translated, her voice taking on a formal tone once more. '1 wished to speak with you before we departed the Endurance, on the matters to which you and your men were party aboard the jorgall cylinder. It is the Emperor's wish that they not be spoken of.'
The captain absorbed this. Of course, why else had Kendel killed the alien psyker with a shot to the chest instead of a round through the skull? To preserve whatever secrets it held inside that misshapen head. He nodded to himself. The Lord of Man's great works into the understanding of the ethereal realms were beyond his grasp as a mere captain, and if the Emperor required the corpse of a dead xenos mutant to further that understanding, then Nathaniel Garro had no place to contradict it. 'I shall make it so. The Emperor has his tasks and we have ours. My men would never question that.'
The Silent Sister came a little closer and watched him carefully. She signed something to the novice and the girl hesitated, questioning her mistress in return before relaying the words. 'Sister Amendera asks… She wishes to know if the child spoke to you.'
'It had no mouth/ Garro answered, quicker than he intended to.
Kendel placed a finger on her lips and shook her head. Then she moved the finger to her temple.
Nathaniel looked at his hands. There were still flecks of alien blood on them. 'I am clean of any taint,' he insisted. 'The thing did not contaminate me.'
'Did it speak to you?' repeated the novice.
The moment became long before he spoke. 'It knew what I was. It said it could see tomorrow. It told me all I worship would die.' Garro sneered. 'But I am an Astartes. I worship nothing. I honour no false god, only the reality of Imperial truth.'