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Cargo - Chris Wraight

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About the Author

An Extract from ‘The Helwinter Gate’

A Black Library Publication

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Cargo

Chris Wraight

It was called Ninth Crossing, and the nondescript name gave away most of what you ever needed to know about the place.

Suza Kaijek had certainly never heard of it before, and she had lived in the sub-prefecture all her life. Then again, for most of that life she'd never had a reason to travel to the lowlands, where the Namuva wound its way east-west from the high range towards the distant sea. It had always been a dreary part of the world - wide, parched plains that reluctantly coughed up a meagre crop of wheat only after the industrial mech-fertilisers had done their work.

All had changed now, of course. Nothing grew on Cadia any more. Not since the opening bombardments, which had been so severe that the weather had been the first casualty. The skies had turned dark grey, underhung with clouds that never seemed to break. It had got cold - very cold - as the sunlight struggled to get through. And then there was the dust. The endless, endless dust, blown up by troop movements, stirred into atmosphere-tall storms by the unnatural winds, sent spinning across the entire war-wracked globe.

Suza had never been a soldier. Not exactly, anyway - she'd worked in the records office of a textile mill. But then, on this world, everyone had something of the soldier in them. She'd had the training that every child undertook, and had attended every refresher session demanded by the sub-prefecture's military administrators. So when the call had come, six months back, she'd checked out her lasgun and pulled on her fatigues and clipped her helmet into place and had thought nothing much more about it.

The war had always been coming. They'd said it to one another, almost as a form of greeting - 'When the war gets here.' Now it had got here, and no one had ever voiced much surprise about it. They just kept their heads down, took their orders, and went where they had to go.

Which was why Suza and her battalion - the 523rd of the Interior Guard - had been uprooted halfway across the sub-prefecture, away from the big kasr-complexes, out across fields that were now arid wastes of blackened stumps, and down to the greasy swathe of the Namuva to the crossings. Ninth Crossing was the last bridge held by region command. More people hunkered down among its bombed-out structures now than had ever lived there when it had been a nondescript stop-over for industrial transports.

They wouldn't be there much longer, Suza guessed. The place had already taken a pounding, and their arrival as part of a patchwork relief operation wouldn't do much to reverse its fortunes. If you really wanted to hold a strategic point, you'd send a regiment of shock troopers, or regular Militarum divisions. Not people who'd worked in the records office of a textile mill.

The night she got there, part of the lead detachment of Chimeras that pulled into a receiving yard surrounded by razor wire and gun-points, she found herself and the unit she commanded - twelve private soldiers, with her as sergeant - pulled aside. Ao Junas, her battalion commander, was in earnest conversation with a group of regular Cadian troopers.

'Kaijek,' Junas said, as Suza saluted, 'this is the post's medicae supervisor, Cataka Nast. You'll be attached to her while we're here.'

The woman she indicated was weary-looking, with dirty fatigues and an ill-fitting flak jacket. Old bloodstains still mottled her forearm sleeves.

Suza nodded smartly, and said, 'Aye, commander.'

Junas left then, heading back to corral the rest of the column and start finding them things to do. As she marched out of the yard, the sky to the south, over across the river, lit up with flashes of munitions going off. A second later, and the sound waves caught up, kicking the dust underfoot.

Nast didn't seem to even register the disturbance. She looked Suza up and down, then glanced at her squad. Whether or not she was satisfied with what she saw was unclear.

'Come with me, then,' she said, and set off in the opposite direction to Junas.

They followed her, out of the yard and into a tangle of narrow streets. The buildings on either side were vacant, the windows blown and the render cracked. Most were of concrete construction, but the foundations were all compromised and several had fallen in. It was very dark - most lumens had been killed, and the cloud cover made the sky near pitch-black.

'They've tried to cross the river five times,' Nast said as they walked. 'Five times.'

Suza said nothing. The air smelled of fuel and burning. Walking briskly was good - she'd begun to freeze in the Chimera's hold as they'd rattled over the unsealed roads.

'We were meant to be getting relief. That's what Borsch said, anyway. Proper relief. When I saw that Titan walking down the river, I thought that was it. Then it kept on going. But now we've got you.' Nast shot a died look at her again. 'That's something, I suppose.'

The southern horizon kept erupting. Every few moments, something would go off, followed by a crump or a crack that shook the broken glass-slivers in the dust. It felt very close. Despite her training, Suza felt sweat prickle on the inside of her gloves.

'Not that it'll delay things for long,' Nast went on. 'We know that. You probably know it. So I need to show you this. And you need to listen.'

They reached a single-storey block made of thick prefab units. Unlike the others around, it was still largely intact, its windows blocked up and its doorway piled up on either side with sandbags. Two armed Cadian troopers saluted as they approached. Through an open doorway, weak sodium-orange light spilled out.

Nast paused on the threshold. 'This is the most important thing you will ever do, sergeant. The most important thing any of us, more as likely, will ever do. Nothing else matters, you got that? Any order you get that conflicts with this, you disregard it. Anything that endangers this, you fight like an animal for it. You understand?'

Suza nodded. Now she was more intrigued than nervous. 'I understand.'

But she didn't. Not yet. It was only when they all went inside, through the improvised medicae station's cramped corridors and into the chamber where they'd put it. And even then, she'd thought it was just a transit crate of some sort, waiting under lumens, heavily guarded for some reason, maybe supplies, or some kind of weapon.

It wasn't a transit crate. You didn't put that much armour-shielding on a transit crate, nor coolant loops, nor bio-seals. It was enormous, something that would need a grapple-arm to lift.

It was only when she was given the data-slate with the orders on it that she finally understood. And then, reading the details on the General Command, she felt her skin go clammy again.

'Throne willing, you'll be relieved before dawn,' Nast told her. 'Borsch is putting a proper detail together to take it north. Until then, it needs to be guarded, and so you need to know why.'

'I see,' Suza said, her voice small. She couldn't take her eyes off the cargo. 'It will be done.'

Trooper Slaf Ivar didn't think much of his squad sergeant. She was older than he was, sure, but age was a bad way to decide who got to lead and who got to follow. That was the problem with the Interior Guard - they didn't have the standards of the regular regiments. Kaijek certainly knew all the procedures, all the ways to get ahead with command, but when the bullets started flying, well, that was when you got the measure of someone.

Ivar would have liked to have served in the 34th Cadian Regiment, the one both his father and grandmother had been members of. If he hadn't had his condition, the eye problem, the one that only showed up in the lasgun trials and kept him in that dead-slot job in the canneries, he'd have been there on the rolls. As it was, he was here, in a squad full of no-hopers and also-rans and never-trieds.

It wasn't all bad. The war had finally come to Cadia - praise the Emperor! - and so he'd have a chance to demonstrate what he could do. Maybe, if it all went well, he'd get the call-up to the decent units.

They'd need people like him when the going got harder. They'd all seen how many ships had come this time, and watched the vid-reels of the assaults on the coastal kasr-lines. If Morale Central was screening stuff like that, then you knew that things were, in reality, much, much worse.

For now, though, he was stuck at Ninth Crossing with the rest of the grunts. And just when he'd thought that would at least lead to some real fighting down at the river, that officer had pulled them all over and dragged them back up through the ruins. Now they were kicking their heels, huddled around a single-tube warmer as the sleet started to fall, stuck outside the medicae building waiting for Kaijek to get back out and give them some actual orders.

A big ground-hauler had pulled up about an hour after they got there, now idling. Its tyres looked flabby and its flanks were streaked with dust. They'd loaded a big crate onto it a while back, but then it had all gone quiet again.

Morten, the squad's other half-decent fighter, had pulled out a protein-stick and started chewing. He looked southwards, across the gap-toothed profile of the hab-ruins and towards the river. The lights in the sky were building in frequency, a pounding rhythm that made it hard to think, let alone talk.

'Won't be long now,' he muttered.

'We should be down there,' Ivar offered. 'At the front.'

Slache, who had never liked him, chuckled. 'Right. At the front. You have no idea.'

Ivar was about to reply, his cheeks flushing, but the words never came. Instead, the sky suddenly blazed white-orange, and then everything went to the hells.

Buildings blew to pieces around them, what was left of their roofs exploding in clouds of dust and tile-fragments. Hard rounds smacked into the dirt of the yard, pinging from the walls. A roaring sound swelled up, like massed engines gunning, from somewhere to the south-east.

They all scrambled to grab their lasguns, clamp their helms into place, try to get a sense of what had happened.

'To the hauler!' came a shout from the facility's entrance. It was Kaijek, running out into the open, carrying a data-slate, followed by two guards in body armour, then the officer who had dragged them here in the first place.

A huge explosion made the walls shake, knocking cinderblocks off the yard's nearside perimeter wall. The roaring got louder. Ivar was running by then, but thought he caught shadows overhead, flitting like crows against the night sky. Buildings seemed to be blowing apart from all directions now, as if missiles or mortars were lancing down from somewhere. He felt a cold vice grip him, locking his jaw, making it hard to breathe.

The hauler's engines juddered up to full pitch, and gouts of oily smoke spurted from its stacks. It was a big military unit, with semi-covered positions perched along the trailer section for gunners, and an armoured cab.

'Slache, Lakha, Morten, Matz - take those guns,' Kaijek ordered. 'Ivar and Fyte, with me up front.'

She sounded scared. Ivar, for once, couldn't blame her - he was jumpy, too. He clambered up the ladder into the cab. The windows were open, and he shoved his lasgun out of it, trying to see where the fire was coming from. He heard Kaijek shouting a question to the medicae officer - something about the official relief squads. The woman just shouted back at her, 'Go, go, go!'

Then they were moving, Fyte driving, Kaijek shouting directions at him, Ivar trying to find something to return fire at. The rain of destruction seemed to be coming at them from all angles, hammering down, smashing and blasting. A tidal wave of dust rolled over them, smearing the forward viewscreen. They bumped and slammed their way out of the compound and down the narrow streets; Ivar still hadn't fired once - he braced himself against the shake and slam of the hauler, but the dust and movement and noise made it impossible to see anything.

'What's going on?' Fyte demanded, wrestling with the wheel.

'They got across!' Kaijek shouted back over the engine noise. 'Positions overrun! The crossing's taken!'

'So where are we—'

'North! Keep us moving! North!'

Fyte went as fast as he could. The hauler was a big, clumsy thing. It should have had escorts, or gone in a convoy - out on the exposed transitways it would be an easy target. But orders were orders, so Ivar said nothing.

Kaijek started muttering to herself. 'Promised support, shouldn't be doing this. Damn it.' She was on edge, fidgeting, hadn't even reached for her laspistol. Ivar still couldn't get a shot at anything. He fired a few times, jumping at shadows in the dust clouds.

Fyte drove the rig hard. The entire place seemed to be coming apart around them. The hauler was so big that they couldn't swing around into the smaller accessways, but had to burn right up the old main route, exposed as it was. At one point the entire vehicle slewed sideways, giving Ivar a brief glimpse of the way back south towards the riverbank. Everything was on fire back there, masked by rolling palls of smoke. He caught snatches of huge things moving within the fire-curtains - shadow-giants, bellowing like animals, glorying in the destruction they were causing.

He swallowed. Perhaps it wouldn't have been so good to have been posted there. Perhaps this was as good as it was ever going to get.

'Keep going,' said Kaijek. She seemed to be getting in control of things, and reached for a scanner to plot a route. 'There should be a convoy prepped at the checkpoint north of here. That's what they told me, anyway.'

Fyte grunted. He didn't talk much at the best of times. Sleet smeared across the forward viewscreen, making it hard to avoid crunching into the wreckage that littered the mortar-pocked transitway. Impacts continued to hammer in from behind them - huge booms that made the ground shake.

'So what are we doing, here, sergeant?' Ivar asked, finally giving up on trying to find targets to shoot.

'Getting the cargo to someone who can look after it,' Kaijek told him, concentrating furiously on the scanner. The data-slate she'd brought with her lay on the dashboard, but he couldn't see what was on it.

'So what's in it?'

Kaijek said nothing. Fyte just kept on driving. Ivar sighed, and leaned back out of the open cab window, finger still on the trigger.

The hauler sped through the ruins of the settlements outskirts, leaving the worst of the devastation behind, before breaking into the open again. Dawn was still far off, and the open plains skirled and skipped with sleet. The road was sealed, but frequent bombardments had left the surface pitted and cracked. The further they travelled, the darker it got. The line of the Namuva became an ambient glow in the rear mirrors. Ahead and on either side stretched nothingness - empty landscapes of spoiled crops and brush.

'Checkpoint coming up,' said Kaijek. 'Just need to—'

Before she could finish, the gunners in the trailer section opened up - a drum-rattle of hard rounds that made the entire structure vibrate. Seconds later, and the hauler was hit, then again. Fyte struggled to keep them on track.

'Outriders!' yelled Slache over the comm from his gun turret. 'Closing fast.'

Kaijek swore, reaching at last for her pistol. 'Keep going,' she told Fyte.

Ivar swung his lasgun back, trying to twist the muzzle along the hauler's length and catch sight of what was coming for them. He glimpsed one of the attackers - a gun-car, bouncing across the uneven ground towards them. It sounded like there were a few of them, swerving and darting and loosing wild sprays of bullets down the hauler's chassis.

He opened fire, not sure if he hit anything. They were very fast, those things, and it was hard to get a good view in the dark.

'Keep going,' said Kaijek, checking the charge on her pistol. That was all she ever seemed to say. 'It's just up—'

The spray of blood took Ivar's breath away. It was savage, hot, totally unexpected. The projectile must have speared through the left-hand window, punching through Fyte before burying itself inside Kaijek's head. He didn't have time to wonder how it had shot through not one but two helmets, or where it had come from - all he felt was shock, followed by a hot wave of panic.

Kaijek slumped over. So did Fyte. The hauler began to veer off the road, still barrelling onwards. Maybe Fyte's foot was locked on the accelerator.

Ivar lurched across Kaijek's body, grabbing the wheel and pulling the hauler back on course. Dimly, he was aware of the gunners still blazing away in the back. He unclipped his restraints, and somehow wormed his way past Kaijek. Fyte was a big man, though, and blocked access to the controls. Ivar thumped the door-release, used his knife to sever the man's restraints, and shoved the body out. Even before it had thudded to the earth, Ivar had usurped his seat, taken up the controls, and got the hauler roaring down the road again.

No sign of the checkpoint. The gun-cars kept screaming in at them - wheeling like birds, loosing gunfire before darting back into the darkness.

Ivar felt his heart hammering. He felt his palms and his jerkin slick with sweat. The more the initial shock wore off, the more that sweat felt painful. With a second lurch of panic, he realised the truth - he'd been shot too.

Almost immediately, he felt himself begin to lose consciousness. The pain began to get very bad. He could hear shouts in his earpiece, but they were already muffled and hard to make out.

Somehow, he had to keep going. That was what Kaijek had said.

Keep going.

The wheel slipped in his hands. Everything seemed to be covered in blood. And then, up ahead, he saw lumens. For a moment he thought it was the gun-cars, racing straight for him, but then he saw that the lights were static, and on towers, and there was a gate and a comms-antenna, and more las-fire was scything into the darkness from fixed positions on prefab wall-units.

All he had to do was make it. All he had to do was keep focusing on those lights, stay between them, get the hauler over the line.

But he was going to pass out. He could feel the wash of cold running from his hands, up his arms, blurring it all. Everything started to slide around - the road ahead, the lights, the empty fields.

'Just keep going,' he mumbled. 'Just… keep going…'

Lieutenant Aliot ran across the compound, reaching for a spare power pack and slamming it into his rifle. They'd been expecting the offensive to begin at some stage over the next few days - comms traffic from down at the river crossing had made it clear the end was coming - but things had obviously deteriorated fast and now everything was collapsing. Twelve of his unit Chimeras were already away, trundling north-east to join up with Colonel Morgast's column. That wouldn't make much difference to anything - more than thirty such transports should have been coming up out of Ninth Crossing, including one with a reserved cargo detail, but all they'd got was a single hauler being driven by a shot-to-pieces trooper, running ahead of a bunch of enemy outriders.

He reached the dispatch yard where the battered hauler was parked. A tracked mech-lifter, piloted by a hardwired servitor, was teetering back to its holding shed, while an armoured transporter gunship was being final-prepped for departure. The flight crew were already on board, save for Jaret, the senior pilot, who was waiting for Aliot out in the open. Noises of combat ramped up from outside the walls - the first wave of outriders had already been replaced with sturdier attack vehicles driving up from the river's edge. Soon enough the infantry would get here, too.

'Cargo installed, as ordered,' Jaret reported. There was just a faint element of reproach in his voice.

'I know this is unusual,' said Aliot, unwilling to reprimand him. He stowed his rifle and reached for a flight helmet. 'You should be gone already. But that hauler driver had an order-slate, and I read it.'

'So what's the cargo?'

'Something we need to get to region command. And that's the end of it.'

He clambered into the cockpit. Jaret paused for a moment, then shook his head and did the same. A few moments later, the gunship's engines were growling and the compound's hard-pounded dirt was being blown around.

Jaret took off, angling steeply, just as the first weak rays of sun filtered through the cloud cover. Aliot peered down through the narrow viewscreen as the gunship tilted, seeing the checkpoint - his command - spread out below. It wasn't much - a fortified compound out on the plains where two roads crossed. Its service yards were emptying now, the troop carriers racing north and east. Those troops remaining on the walls were doing what they could to keep the perimeter intact, but it wouldn't be long before they had to fall back too, hoping that there was something left to carry them. One of the gun-towers had already started to burn.

Aliot should have been down there too, fighting to keep the walls secure for as long as possible. If it hadn't been for this damned cargo, his course would have been clear. It wasn't that he had a death wish, but he took his duties seriously, and it sat poorly to leave good soldiers facing an enemy alone.

Still, there was plenty of danger to be faced in the air. The entire battlefront was crumbling now, and the air-defence guns at Ninth Crossing had been silenced. The transport would be lucky to get far without attracting attention.

'Full speed,' he ordered. 'Make for command post six-seventy-R.'

Jaret complied, feeding the details to the machine-spirit. 'They'll spot us,' he warned. 'Once the sun's fully up.'

'I know.'

The regional command post was situated well above the plains, on the knees of the Altava range, before the peaks really took off and became virtually impassable. Imperial forces had held the entire length of the mountain-chain for a long time, but now there was no telling what remained there. Maybe the post was gone. Maybe it was under siege. Ranged comms had given out a long time ago or were jammed - you had to go there, to be sure.

The transporter thundered onwards. It was a big ship, ungainly, powered by four colossal turbines. It was poorly armed, though - standard doctrine dictated it shouldn't be used in a contested zone without a proper escort. All the escorts were gone, of course. Sent east hours earlier, to the same place he'd expected to be evacuating to - the muster stations at Kasr Mortu. He wondered if he'd ever see it, and if that, too, was now under assault.

An alert pinged on the console in front of him. Jaret started to jink the transport around.

'Something's locked on,' he reported grimly.

Aliot checked the augur-lenses. 'Must be moving fast. I can't see a thing.'

Ahead of them, grey in the dawn light, the first Altava foothills were coming into view. The slopes were screened with curling mists, and looked strangely peaceful given the devastation in all directions around them. Aliot started to broadcast on every frequency the transporter could handle - nothing fancy or subject to garbling, just the order-sequence he'd taken from the data-slate in the dead driver's hand, the one that had got everybody scrambling to find something big enough to take the accompanying crate on board. 'Targets picked up,' Jaret said, sounding more alarmed. 'Five of them. Fighters, I think, coming for us hard.' He turned to Aliot. 'I can put us down. Somewhere beyond the hill-line, out of sight. We might be able to get up to the command post on foot from there.'

Aliot smiled grimly. 'And carry the cargo with us?'

'Then we leave it. What's in it? Just leave it.'

'Fly on. We make the station.'

'We'll never get there.'

Jaret was probably right.

'Fly on.' Aliot looked at him directly as he spoke, giving him the kind of stare he'd give to a new recruit fresh off the streets who thought she'd try it on. It was the kind of stare that told Jaret that this was an order, not a request, and that his lasrifle was only a single movement away if he felt the need to challenge it.

Jaret glared back for a split second, looking both exasperated and scared, before his training kicked in. 'Maintaining course,' he muttered, accessing the scanners.

They flew as fast as they could. It didn't take long for the pursuers to find them - a scatter of light gunships, reeling across the sky like drunkards, already firing in wild bursts. They were moving far faster than the transport, even if their flight paths were erratic. Throne only knew where they had come from or where they were trying to get to - maybe they were just lost.

Jaret brought them lower down, angling towards the crumpled earthfolds below, trying to do something to make them less of an easy target. Tall pine woods cloaked the rising terrain, thick across the rocks despite evidence of widespread burning. Aliot looked down at the trees grimly as the first close shots scythed wide. They were spiky-looking things, densely branched and dark. Coming down among them would be painful.

The transporter swung hard-left, listing over across a high outcrop before levelling out along a steep-sided gorge. The true peaks rose up ahead now, flanks boiling with mist, their heads masked with cloud. Aliot could see few signs of combat here - it looked almost untouched. Maybe the station was still functional. Maybe they'd make it.

Then they were hit - a raking volley that crumped and cracked across the rear armour. Jaret tried his best to make his flight path unpredictable, but it was a hard task. He started to lift the nose, aiming for loft, but a second volley struck home, spearing across the upper shielding and blowing a stabiliser clean from its fixings.

Alerts started to bleep. A heavier impact rocked the transporter, nearly sending them careering headlong into a looming cliff-edge. One of the turbines stuttered, then flames sprouted along its length.

Jaret swore, shutting off the fuel line, 'That's it, then.'

More hits came in. Aliot reached for his weapon. There was nowhere to put down, now - the gorge was sheer in all directions, a jumble of pine stands and knife-sharp rocks. He checked the augur, and saw how far they had to go.

'Get as close as you can,' he ordered, strapping his restraints tighter.

'There's nowhere to land!' Jaret shouted, beginning to panic.

'Like I said. Close as you can.'

He did well, in the circumstances. More shots connected, chipping the armour away, burrowing into the internals. The controls began to fail, more stabilisers were blown free, the armaglass smashed across the cockpit rear, showering them in splinters and letting the wind howl in.

Aliot briefly thought back to the preparations they'd made - the strapping and extra bracing-beams they'd welded across the crate to keep it in place and secure. The holds on these things were incredibly robust, and would likely survive most impacts. Perhaps that wasn't a good thing. Perhaps it would be better to let it all burn than fall into enemy hands.

Too late now. Jaret fought to the end, re-routing power to try to get them over the final crag, but as they hurtled towards the ridge Aliot saw that it wouldn't be enough.

He never looked away, even as the bare rock streaked towards them. He wondered if he should have done more. If he could have done more.

'Throne take our souls,' he murmured, just before everything turned to flame.

Lieutenant Elita was running at the head of her platoon when she saw the explosion. The site itself was screened by the huge pines all around her, but she heard the boom loudly enough, and then witnessed the billowing smoke as it tumbled down from the high crag.

'That's our target,' she voxed, picking up speed and veering through die undergrowth. 'Stay sharp - those flyers are still out there.'

By rights, she should have been long gone. The command post had started to empty four days ago, stripped of all but essential personnel, ready for evacuation beyond the range and out towards the interior. It was a strange place, now - a desolate set of bunkers buried inside solid rock, echoing and mostly empty. The comms equipment was still largely intact - too bulky to move, a lot of it - but the operators had been shipped away on the final set of transporters. For some time now Elita's main duty had been to link the explosives together and rig the entire place to blow, ready for the first enemy troops to stumble inside and trigger the chain reaction.

But then the message had come through, broadcast on a reserved channel, using codes that shunted straight through to Brother-Sergeant Hirasha's terminal. Hirasha was still up there, probably. Dealing with the thousands of demands made on him, all with that preternatural calmness, the kind of studied unflappability that could make you hate him, on a bad day. Or maybe he too was gone now, called off to some other firefight that couldn't wait. He'd not said much, but it was enough to make her heart sink.

'Respond to that hail, lieutenant. I am required elsewhere.'

So they'd all kitted up, putting their armour back on, reloading guns that had been stowed ready for transport. Then they'd rushed out of the bunker's open doors, running across landing stages that had recently been bustling but were now empty, then down the slope and into the forests, following a single blip on a handheld augur.

She didn't know exactly what they were running for. That transport had come down hard - save for a rare intervention from the Emperor, there wouldn't be survivors. Hirasha had been terse about what had been on the comm-burst, just telling them to make sure the cargo was secured and brought back up to the bunker.

Elita drew closer to the site, climbing steeply now, flitting from trunk to trunk. She could smell fuel oil burning - an acrid stench that masked out the sharp tang of the pines. The last of the morning's mist still clung to the glossy bark, curling in the hollows and making it seem as if an army of ghosts were waiting around every corner. Then she saw the crash-site - just below the crest of a granite-topped ridge, raining still with thrown debris and kicking out heat from at least two burning fuel sources. She dropped low, motioning for her troops to do the same, and activated the zoom-lenses on her helmet. After a shaky swoop up through tangled branches, she focused on the wreckage. Most of the structure seemed to be intact, but the fires had already raced through the cockpit. There was no sign of movement.

She scanned further out, across the crash-site, searching for either survivors or threats, and found neither. The transporter's hold looked intact enough to be worth investigating, though, so she signalled for the platoon to advance. Six soldiers fanned out to the right, bringing up the fire-suppressors they'd hauled all the way from the command post. Another eight came with her directly to the cargo hold, dragging big lascutters between them. The rest spread through the trees, going carefully, watching for enemy troops.

Elita reached the transporter as the fire-suppression teams got to work, dousing the turbines with chem-treatments and making the air smell even worse. The armour-panels around the main hatch were still intact, though charred. She ordered the cutters deployed, and the team jogged forward, training squat muzzles on the door-joints and starting to work. Thick las-beams sliced through the outer casing, throwing sparks across the still-hot earth.

While they worked, Elita checked her augur. The flyers that had downed the transporter were nowhere to be seen. That meant one of two things: they'd returned to base, or had set down somewhere close by to land troops. She had a feeling she knew which one was more likely.

'Work faster,' she told the cutter-teams, watching impatiently as the casing-locks went red, then white.

Finally, the outer seals broke, and Elita heard the hiss of escaping air. The main hatch cracked open, and four pairs of gauntlets reached out to haul the circular door open.

It took a while to extract the cargo. It was heavy, needing ten of them to get it out, making use of the grapples they'd taken from the stores. Elita looked at it wearily, already wondering how they were ever going to get it back up the mountainside and into safety.

'What do you think it is?' asked Norv, her sergeant, gazing bleakly at it.

Elita shook her head. It was extravagantly protected, with bio-seals and its own cooling system. Medicae supplies, perhaps? 'No idea. Let's see about—'

'Signals!' came a comm-burst from fifty yards off, followed immediately by the familiar hiss of las-fire.

Elita and her troop fell back into the shadow of the transporter, hunkering down against the soil and searching for targets. Flashes of light from both north and west gave away the typically careless advance of enemy soldiers, driving up the slope towards their position. Elita fired back, joining the barrage sent out by the rest of the platoon.

'How many, d'you think?' she asked, glancing at her augur before loosing another volley.

'More than us,' replied Norv.

The volume of las-fire picked up, angling crazily through the trunks, fizzing from branches and driving long trenches into the undergrowth. Elita spied her first targets, and started to aim carefully, picking off two. Norv matched her rate of fire, but soon she heard stifled cries as the incoming las-beams began to bite.

She swore, shuffling down further, trying to gauge where most of the enemy were coming from. 'Pin them down there,' she ordered, gesturing to a low rise, thick with thorn bushes.

Her platoon responded, laying down disciplined fire. For a moment it looked like they might drive them back, before wild cries broke out from the opposite direction, further up the incline, sweeping along the same tracks they'd just run down themselves.

Elita's troops scrambled to react, falling back towards the smouldering transporter carcass. She saw two of her platoon cut down as they shuffled for cover, and then the las-bolts started to ping and skip closer to her.

'Any way out of here?' Norv asked grimly, quick to return fire.

'Negative. Orders were to secure it.'

Norv laughed. 'I see.'

They fought on. It soon became apparent that they were heavily outnumbered - they killed a few attackers, but more of Elita's command were hit, winnowing them down further. She edged back towards the transporter's blackened hull, trying to pick out a leader among the advancing figures. As she did so, a las-beam flew out of the murk, striking her on the shoulder and throwing her back against the metal. She hit it sharply, her helmet clanging from the hull-plate. Norv hauled himself over to her.

'How bad?' he asked.

She winced. 'I'm fine,' she said, angling her lasgun for a return shot. Her vision became blurry, but more figures were emerging all the time, filtering towards them through the trees, increasingly confident. 'Hold fast.'

Norv did as commanded, staying close, swivelling to spray las-fire at the advancing troops. This would all be over soon. All that remained was to keep fighting for as long as possible. Elita found herself tensing for the shot that would kill her. She fired, and fired again, determined not to pass out, to stay active and resisting to the end.

Then she was shaken from her crouch, thrown to the pine needles, not by incoming fire, but by an enormous downblast that shot through the trees, twenty yards off, cracking branches and blowing the earth below into powder. That was followed by a rapidly growing roar, one that kept on gathering momentum until the shadow of a greater gunship fell across them all, a huge vehicle with blocky lines and ludicrously powerful underslung guns.

Access hatches swung open, and four figures leapt from the gunship and crashed to the ground. All four were far bigger than a baseline human, clad in ceramite armour and bearing bolters. Two of them immediately charged off into the trees, opening fire and causing screams of panic to echo through the pines. A third, wearing bone-white armour, hurried to the cargo-crate, taking out esoteric-looking equipment as he did so.

The fourth was Hirasha. He lumbered over to Elita's position, nodding towards her as she scrambled uneasily back up to her feet.

'Are you injured, lieutenant?' he asked.

The pain was agonising. 'Nothing serious, lord,' she said, jawline tight.

'I required the services of another member of my Chapter,' he said, gesturing over to the white-armoured Space Marine. 'In the interim, you did well.'

Elita swallowed, and nodded. Hirasha had always been terse, but this was extreme, even for him. She felt like asking him whether he'd ever intended to tell her his plans to show up, and if he'd been at all worried that they might have failed, had he not appeared in time. As so often in the past, she thought better of it.

'By His will, lord,' she replied. Then she looked at the crate again. 'If I may, though—'

'No, you may not.' Hirasha drew his bolter and made to go after the remaining enemy troops. 'It is in our possession. That is all you need to know.'

The Chapter destroyer Greyblade remained at high void anchor. The crew had finished preparations for orbital exit hours ago, and were clearly itching to leave. No reason to stay, now - the world they had come to defend was cracked apart, its continents covered in a thick layer of magma, its atmosphere turning into a soup of electrical storms.

Wolf Priest Aj Olved gazed down at the ruin of Cadia from his vantage in the ship's apothecarion. The weight of fatigue lay heavily on his old limbs - he had been fighting for a long time in the kasrs, just as they all had. To see it all come to nothing, that was hard. They would need to depart very soon - the enemy fleet had not gone away, and there would be fighting yet before they made it to the exit coordinates.

Some things, though, were important. The Thunderhawk from the Cerulean Guard had battled hard to make it to them, something that had earned them both respect and gratitude. It, too, was gone now, haring back to the last of its void-fleet before they made for the deeps. Only the cargo remained, now transported to the apothecarion's inner sanctum, attended to by a team of orderlies and servitors.

A rune blinked on his armour-collar, letting him know that all was ready. Olved stirred himself, turned around and moved through into the inner chambers. All of them were thronged with medicae staff. Many of the cots were occupied with warriors of the Chapter, some fighting hard for life. His services would be needed again soon, he knew.

He reached the chamber, entering through a reinforced slide door. Inside, the body of a warrior lay flat on a slab, armour removed. Tubes ran into his lifeless arms, and runes had been painted over the flesh. The place was a strange mix of the medical and the ritual - robed figures moved in the shadows, their faces covered with animal-masks, their hands carrying censers.

Anika Engirsborn, the senior medicae, looked up at him as he entered.

'All is ready, lord,' she said.

'You have a name?' Olved asked.

'Jorundur, of Ragnar's Great Company.'

'Do you know how he met his end?'

'No, lord.'

Olved nodded, drawing out his Fang of Morkai. The progenoids were intact. So many had been destroyed during the fighting, or taken by the enemy, that every small victory was precious.

He looked at the warrior's face. It bore a sour expression even in death, as if the warrior had found the whole experience unworthy of his attention. As he often did, Olved wondered how this warrior had lived, what his deeds had been, how his thread had come to be cut. By the wounds he'd taken, at least he appeared to have died well, in combat against a worthy enemy.

'Tell me,' he asked, bringing the long narthecium up to the first incision-site. 'How was the body recovered?'

'Unknown, lord,' said Engirsborn. 'The Cerulean Guard could only tell us it was transported up from the lowlands of the Namuva. It seems likely many were involved. All mortals.'

Olved paused before making the first cut. A price had been paid, then. Perhaps a heavy one. That was always the way of things - every gain demanding sacrifice, every victory coming at cost.

'Then they were valiant,' he said firmly. 'Mark what we know into the annals, and see that they are sent on to the Mountain when the time comes.'

He got to work, and the Fang's blades started to whirr.

'When this warrior-spirit stirs again,' he said, 'the tale will be remembered.'

AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION

The Helwinter Gate Limited Edition

Writing sequels is always hard. Writing sequels after a gap of several years (six, no less!) is even harder.

The long interval between books was certainly not intentional. I was more or less at the start of my career as a writer when I wrote Blood of Asaheim - I had a couple of 40K novels under my belt, but had otherwise only written for the Warhammer Fantasy range. I had a lot to learn, both about writing in general, and also about writing Space Marines. I got plenty wrong, in both areas. Despite that, the second book in the series, Stormcaller, picked up where the first one left off, with the clear intention to complete the trilogy fairly soon afterwards.

From that point on, however, my schedule started to fill up. I was invited to write for the Horus Heresy series, and the White Scars books followed. I got the chance to write an inquisitor trilogy (the Vaults of Terra books), and then some stories starring Custodians and Sisters of Silence (the Watchers of the Throne series), and then the Death Guard. All of these were fantastic opportunities, and ones that often had to fit into a broader schedule. It was never the intention to neglect poor old Jarnhamar pack, but finding time to finish what had been started proved increasingly tricky.

Finally, though, an opportunity came up. That's when the really hard work began - I had to go back a long way in order to remember all the things I'd originally planned. My memory for names and places is terrible at the best of times, but trying to keep several series all together, each with their own cast of characters and themes, is remarkably difficult.

I took a lot of notes. I did a lot of thinking.

There was some temptation to go off in a different direction for this novel. I've changed a bit as a writer over the years - hopefully in a good way - and some of the choices that I made in 2013 I probably wouldn't make now. The more I immersed myself back into the world of the original stories though, the more that felt like the wrong choice. I wanted to finish the series in the spirit of the original books, adopting the same feel if possible, and trying to honour the various arcs I set up back then. The first two Space Wolves books were primarily action-orientated, with plenty of set-piece combat, and so I've tried to keep a fair slice of that in the finale.

The passage of time in the real world wasn't the only continuity problem. In between Stormcaller appearing and the start of this book, the fictional universe changed too. Cadia fell, the Great Rift opened, Fenris was attacked by Magnus… again, and Primaris Marines were activated on Terra. None of those things were foreseen in the first two books, and it was hard to know how, or indeed whether, to include any of them in the third one.

In any event, I stuck pretty closely to what I'd always intended. There are some nods towards 'recent' universe changes, but otherwise the story ends at the point in the lore where everything else used to end too - the assault on Cadia and the 13th Black Crusade. That felt right to me. I've written a fair bit in the 'new' 40K universe, and love doing it, but this story had always had its roots in a pre-Rift galaxy, one where primarchs were distant figures of myth and the Eye of Terror was the heart of darkness within a sprawling, but basically intact, Imperium.

In addition, amid all the changes, and recognising some of the missteps I made along the way, my view of the Space Wolves hasn't changed that much over the years. I still find their mix of fatalism and bravado absolutely captivating. I like the way they can be berserk warriors one moment, and reflective, soulful bards the next. I love their imagery, their deep culture, the fact that they've held on to their unique personality while much of the Imperium has gone stale.

One of the things I enjoy most about them is their very complex relationship with the warp. The Wolves are routinely criticised for being hypocrites, given their condemnation of sorcery alongside their cultivation of Rune Priests. In its most literal sense, this charge is simply false - a hypocrite is someone who says one thing while believing another. The Wolves may be wrong, or deluded, or horribly arrogant, but they clearly genuinely believe that what a Rune Priest does in battle is different in kind to what, say, a Thousand Sons sorcerer does.

And given that so much in the 40K universe depends, in a fairly profound way, on the stories that individuals tell themselves, then I've always liked the idea that there might be something to their strange boastfulness. I don't mean to suggest that they're tapping something other than the warp, not at all, just that 'magic' in 40K is almost as much about the way you do something, and your intentions for it, as what you do.

Which brings us to the character of Baldr, whose story, I suppose, this really is. That's not completely by design. When I wrote Blood of Asaheim, I think I intended the main focus of the ongoing story to be Gunnlaugur and Ingvar's rivalry, and Baldr's affliction to be a side plot. As things went on though, I found I was more and more drawn to the pack coming together as a unit, with Baldr being (by necessity) on the outside. By The Helwinter Gate, the previously fractious and disjointed pack is working well, its various members united by a single goal. Only Baldr is excluded, and that's a problem that can't be fixed. Either he dies, or he becomes something new - something the Chapter could never accept. He's both the victim and the subject of the whole trilogy. While the other surviving members mostly achieve what they want to, in terms of a return to the status quo, Baldr has the chance to herald something truly unique and transformative - the first steps, possibly, on the road to species evolution.

Who knows what's next for him? Or for the rest of the pack? We're in rapidly changing times in 40K these days, and the idea of a psychic 'awakening', which was just a vague concept in the first book, has now become a major campaign series for the entire galaxy. Maybe there will be more from Jarnhamar, as that all develops. Or maybe this is the end of their tale.

Either way, I hope - for anyone who's been patiently hanging on for more since the cliffhanger at the end of Stormcaller - that its been worth the very long wait.

Chris Wraight

Bristol

July 2020

About the Author

Chris Wraight is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Warhawk, Scars and The Path of Heaven, the Primarchs novels Leman Russ: The Great Wolf and Jaghatai Khan: Warhawk of Chogoris, the novellas Brotherhood of the Storm, Wolf King and Valdor: Birth of the Imperium, and the audio drama The Sigillite. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written The Helwinter Gate, The Lords of Silence, Vaults of Terra: The Carrion Throne, Vaults of Terra: The Hollow Mountain, Watchers of the Throne: The Emperor’s Legion, Watchers of the Throne: The Regent’s Shadow and many more. Additionally, he has many Warhammer novels to his name, and the Warhammer Crime novel Bloodlines. Chris lives and works in Bradford-on-Avon, in south-west England.

An extract from The Helwinter Gate.

The Blade of Naxian ran hard through the void. It was a good ship, one of the best Hera Soteqa had ever served on, and that was something to cling on to in such times. Everything else seemed to be falling apart, lost in the confusion of contradictory astropathic screaming. She could almost see the break-up in the chain of command unfolding before her eyes. It was hellish, unusual, something to keep you awake in the hot night. She’d spoken to the priest about it. ‘It will pass,’ he’d told her. She didn’t believe him. He didn’t seem overly sure, either.

Finally, though, some solid orders had come in. Someone, somewhere, had got a grip, and assets were being mobilised. The Blade of Naxian was one of them, and now it was racing towards the Klaat System’s Mandeville horizon, ready for translation out towards Admiral Freer’s muster at Coronis Agathon. The Defender-class light cruiser would be a small but useful part of what looked like a serious conglomeration – cruisers, battle cruisers, even a few line battleships, they said – that had been plucked and swiped from every Navy rotation in the subsector.

Something was up. No one said what it was. Probably no one, not even the Blade’s bridge-captain, Avilo, knew. Orders would be given at Coronis Agathon, they said, and then at least a few of them would know a little more.

Soteqa hurried down the long corridor, her boot heels clacking on newly cleaned panels. As comms officer senioris, her place was on the command bridge, but too many things needed attending to in the hours before they attempted the warp crossing, and most of those she preferred to oversee in person. She’d already spent too long down in the depths of the augur-coils, trying to get some sense out of lexmechanics, making sure that by the time the frenzy of incoming data started up the machine-spirits would be primed and ready. Mno-8, the tech-priest, had detained her for a frustratingly long time over some anomalies on the ranged scans, something the priest thought pointed to a sensor malfunction, but which looked to her like typical Martian fussiness.

Still, she’d raised a report and sent it up to the bridge augur-monitors. Then she’d headed back along the vessel’s central core transit route, taking a mag-train sternwards and disembarking at the fourth cargo hold. That still left a long walk down a series of high-vaulted corridors, all of them utilitarian, gleaming, scoured every rotation by hard-driven menial crews and servitor gangs. The entire ship was tightly run, but this section was given special attention. Soteqa passed three separate checkpoints before reaching her final destination, every one manned by squads of armsmen bearing lascarbines and siege-shields. As she went through each point, the atmosphere became colder by a few degrees. By the time she reached the last set of blast-doors, pocked with ancient scour-marks, she felt the cold sink into her bones.

A different breed of guard waited for her at the threshold – four sour-looking characters in nightshade robes carrying electro-staves. They had the eye-within-an-I icon of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica inked onto their foreheads, and their skin was the shade of translucent grey that told of lives spent within sealed cells without natural light.

‘By His grace, lieutenant-commander,’ the foremost of them said, speaking in that dry whisper that they all seemed to use. The speaker was a woman, stick-thin under her robes, with thin lips and dark shadows around her eyes. ‘You wish to consult him before we make the transition.’

‘That would be appreciated,’ Soteqa said.

The woman inclined her head, stepped aside and keyed in a code on the lock-panel. The heavy doors juddered open, letting strangely scented air waft out – something charred, or maybe spoiled.

The chamber on the far side had once been a storage area, capable of taking standard trade-modules or tethered vehicles on loading claws. The main deck was more than six hundred yards across, the roof ninety feet up. In normal times, it would have rung to the echoing clang of lifters on tracks, underpinned by the smells of engine oil and the glare of arc-lumens. Now it felt like another world – a mist-wreathed, fabric-enclosed echo of a fine Terran princeling’s apartments. Elaborate ironwork partitions had been raised, each of them decorated with glyphs in hard-to-discern patterns. The deck itself hummed, not from the buried thunder of the plasma drives, but from subtler harmonics, rhythms that few mortals found easy to endure. The cold became oppressive.

Soteqa picked her way through a tangle of cables, some as thick as her body, all of them rimed with frost. A maze of doorways led off in many directions, all bleeding a fine mist. Attendants in uniform black livery padded to and fro bearing scrolls, datatubes, brass siphons. A faint sound made the air throb – a murmuring, as if a thousand sleepers were mouthing something unintelligible as they dreamed.

The complex had been constructed four years ago, while the Blade of Naxian underwent a scheduled refit in the Naval dockyards of Mholo. It had since been refined, then further extended, until it had become as integral a part of the ship’s body as the engines, power plants or gun decks. Truth be told, the facility was now the principal reason anyone, Admiral Freer included, cared about the Blade of Naxian.

Soteqa pushed further in, reaching a basalt-clad chamber with a steep roofline and High Gothic inscriptions carved on the walls. The deck was hidden under stone flags, and candles flickered on metal sconces. They liked their little touches of home, did the choir.

Talek was waiting for her there, tethered to his throne, his dried-up face peering at her from under a heavy dark cowl. He wore the same black robes as his staff, though translucent tubes ran out from under his cuffs and squirmed their way into banks of instrumentation arranged in a wide arc around him. Lenses glowed in the murk, bleeding out a pale green light. Auto-quills scratched away on thick bundles of vellum, fed by slow, clunking machinery. He sat amongst it all, tethered by it, nourishing it.

‘Lieutenant-commander,’ said Lervio Talek, master of the ship’s astropathic relay node. ‘Welcome.’

‘Apologies for the disruption,’ Soteqa replied. ‘I know you’re busy.’

‘No need. You wish to check on our progress before we cross the veil.’

‘It’s been difficult.’

Talek let slip a sour chuckle. ‘That is one word for it.’ He shuffled in his throne, and the web of tubes jangled. ‘We lost another one, four hours ago. A promising astropath, one with a long future of service ahead of her. Burned out, burned up. Such a waste. I finalised her training myself.’

Soteqa could have told him similar stories from her own crew – ratings going insensible from fatigue, officers opening void-hatches and walking calmly out into the airlocks. Perhaps, though, those working in this strange place did suffer more than the rest. She could hardly imagine what they witnessed with their empty eye-sockets, lined up in their tight rows, bound with iron fetters, forced to dream the raw stuff of madness for hour after hour.

‘There have been storms before,’ she said. ‘But I need to know–’

‘If this is truly worse. If it is a different order. Yes, I believe so. I believe it is.’ He sniffed, and for a moment Soteqa caught a glimpse of a pale grey cheek under the cowl’s shadow. ‘We get fragments, only fragments, and they all tell me the same thing. It is like a tapestry, the warp. If it is calm, you see the pattern on its surface. If it is disturbed, the pattern is rumpled. If it becomes too disturbed, the only pattern is the disturbance.’

‘And now?’

‘I see things never taught me by my instructors on Terra. Maybe they never existed before. So, it is true, I think some great event is coming. Maybe just in this sector. Maybe in all sectors. That is the problem, of course – we cannot see far ahead of ourselves. We send our messages, and only get back faint echoes. I sometimes wonder if we are the only ship left. The only people left alive in all creation. Alone in the dark.’

Soteqa had little time for such talk. ‘With respect, that’s–’

‘Nonsense. I know. But I am an old man. My imagination runs away with me.’

‘So what are we heading into?’

‘A wall of fire. On the far side of it, I see nothing. On this side of it, I see hosts gathering, like crows flying ahead of the storm. I wonder that they can follow their orders, or that they can even hear them. Many will not make it. The structure of the warp will become more violent. Massed hull-translations will be extremely perilous.’

‘You know, then, what lies beyond the muster.’

‘I do not.’

‘But what is the gossip?’

He laughed – an amphibian croak. ‘Gossip? We are not schola students, commander. We are the soul-bound, the ether-scryers. When we confer, it is because we have something to–’

He suddenly broke off. He inclined his head to one side, as if listening.

Just as he did so, an alert throbbed at Soteqa’s collar. It was red – she would have to attend it.

‘We will speak again,’ she said. ‘But, for now, I emphasise the importance of this. The relay – your relay – was placed on this ship precisely because fixed planetary nodes were becoming unreliable. We cannot know for sure that the messages in your archive have been received by anyone else at all, and that makes me worried. They might be more valuable than we understand.’

He looked at her. Or, at least, she thought he looked at her – you could never tell just what was going on under that heavy fabric hood.

‘I understand perfectly, commander,’ he said. ‘But you are needed elsewhere. The danger has, I think, caught up with us.’

Mno-8 was angry. Few things made him angry. Much of his emotional life had been burned away when they had first delved into his skull and started to replace the folds of fleshy matter with more reliable wafer banks. After that, he’d learned to adjust to the muffled existence of a senior tech-priest, one close to the Omnissiah, a being of logic and cold calculation.

But it hadn’t all gone. Being disregarded, being talked down to – that still made him angry. Few people dared to do it. He knew, on some level, that Soteqa hadn’t meant it, either. She was stressed, her mind racing down a whole gamut of alleys, and she hadn’t wanted to spend her valuable time with him among the flickering augur banks. Still, she’d been curt. And, for some reason, whereas he could ignore or overlook a whole host of other human failings, that spiked his emotion-injectors.

So he clattered down the corridor, his mechadendrites flailing, his red cloak snagging on the metal grilles. The entire ship was racing, creaking, banging, flying along as if caught in a blast of real-world wind. Captain Avilo was clearly desperate to get into the warp, and yet – and yet – no one was listening to the real threat-indicators. On another day, there would be much less haste, but then this kind of madness was contagious, and the un-fixed humans suffered from it worse than his people. The armsmen needed to be dragged out of their garrison-units and training halls and sent to the deck intersections. It needed to happen now.

He burst into the chamber, squeezing his overextended bulk through the access hatch before emerging on the far side like an arachnid splaying out from its burrow.

The crew looked up, startled. Twenty of them, all in dark-blue Navy trim, half-buried among the analogue lenses of cogitator nodes. One of them got up from her station – the senior operator here, Calja Yui, just a level or two below Soteqa in the arcane hierarchy of the upper decks.

‘My lord tech-priest,’ she started. ‘Can I help–’

Mno-8 held up a warning dendrite, then slotted three of his power claws into input jacks lodged in a rack over the line of augur stations. One of his cortex-bundles negotiated with the gaggle of machine-spirits who squatted within the chamber network, while another took over the hololith projection unit.

‘Listen,’ he croaked, using the vox-emitter stuck just under his clavicle, since his jaw was long gone. ‘Observe.’

A schematic whirled into ghostly life, glowing eerily amid the gloom of the comms-chamber. Yui did as she was bid, and looked at it. A big blob of light traced a slender arc between two points. One was the hive world of Klaat, the nondescript anchorage they’d just spent three months at, pressing new crew, filling the cavernous promethium bunkers, dealing with a never-ending procession of dignitaries and officials trying to find out what was going on with their protection details and trade-route escorts. The second was the Mandeville limiter, a specific horizon marked with very old runes indeed – humans had given those phenomena the same basic names since their discovery, long before the dawn of the Imperial Age. The arc traced from one to the other, speeding away from Klaat and almost intersecting with the first rune.

‘Yes?’ asked Yui. ‘You show me only what every other lens in this place shows me.’

‘Observe,’ said Mno-8 again, rattling a serpentine dendrite with a turbo-hammer at its terminus. ‘The plasma-wake correction at 25-6-4. Observe.’

Realspace augurs used a number of techniques to give signals staff the data they required. Much of the actual knowledge behind their construction was buried in STCs so old that few truly comprehended them, but some use-factors were still well understood – that plasma drives operating at full burn created distortion fields that required compensation, lest the input retinas overload and blow into static. The hololith suspended between the two of them displayed all the telltale indicators of such compensation – lines of blocky image correction, flickering like faulty lumens in a storm.

To her credit, Yui did her best. She looked in the right places. ‘I see noth–’

‘At 25-6-4. This is chronomark minus four. We are accelerating into the present. Observe.’

She narrowed her eyes. Soteqa had done the same, though not for long enough. Her deputy lingered a little longer.

‘Just a sensor artefact,’ she said, eventually.

‘Negative.’

‘We see them all the time. It’s tracking our velocity and course exactly.’

Mno-8 swept up to her, elevating to his full height, which placed his gold skullcap near the iron-plate chamber roof.

‘Until chronomark minus two,’ he growled. ‘When it disappears.’

‘Which you’d expect. We are at preliminary translation approach – the shutdown cascade has started.’

‘Standard Naval procedure. Only, this is well known. A hostile, one with advanced scanner tech and extreme speed, could use that knowledge. They could use it to get in close.’

‘Anything coming in on that path would have to be tiny. And anyway, no pilot could fly the course.’

‘No human pilot.’ Mno-8’s cloak shuddered as his many limbs rearranged themselves under it. ‘The Archenemy is everywhere. We know this. We have seen the signs in every subsector. Why do you not see the danger? One of my fallen brothers, using some devious archeotech, could conceivably–’

He broke off. Yui looked up. The hull had just boomed, as if it had hit something solid, something unyielding. No alarms went off. The Blade of Naxian just kept running, bolting, haring along.

‘What was that?’ Yui asked, suddenly looking worried.

‘Maybe nothing,’ said Mno-8 grimly. ‘Or maybe, just maybe, your sensor artefact has now become strangely solid.’

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First published in The Helwinter Gate in Great Britain in 2020.
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o 3.4 you attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.

* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.