Two minutes later, the Thirteenth Talon Infantry Regiment teleported into the 112th's encampment at Tyrok Fields. The flash of the jump lit the frost on the rockcrete, and the nearest Cadians turned with their hands on their lasguns.
An officer stepped forward to greet them.
"You're—"
He gagged, dropped to his hands and knees, and vomited.
The men nearest the landing ground stumbled away, choking back bile. A few lost control of their bowels. Others clung to weapons and vehicle hulls, trying to master a revulsion that had arrived before they could even identify its cause.
"Throne," a Cadian said. "They're soulless."
"We're here to help, you bastards!" one of the Thirteenth's company commanders shouted.
"Leave it," Yoan told him. "Everyone, with me."
Qin Mo had kept him in reserve for exactly this. He wasn't going to waste the deployment arguing about the welcome.
Besides, the Cadian gun crews hadn't abandoned their positions. One man was retching down the side of a Chimera, but its turret remained trained on the gate.
Yoan led the hundred and one Untouchables toward the opening, dividing them between its flanks. The Cadian officer dragged himself upright and waved his infantry farther out, clearing space without uncovering the prison yard beyond.
"Keep the middle clear," Yoan ordered. "Those Chimeras need a shot."
At twenty meters, the gate's hum faltered. Part of the prison yard slipped out of sight as the blue rim drew in. The cold that had spread from Elai's barracks began to lift. Across the camp, the temperature rose six degrees.
The null auras were working. Yoan watched the opening contract, then slow. There was still plenty of room for a man to come through.
The Thirteenth stowed their adamantium spears in the catches on their standard Praetorian Pattern power armor. The front ranks knelt, bracing adamantium shields in their right hands and leveling their left vambrace weapons beside them. Shoulder mounts swung into line above the shields.
"Until it closes, nothing gets through," Yoan ordered.
A status update reached his visor as the last squad took position. The Celestial Engine had completed its jump into orbit over St. Josmane's Hope. The Stone Man was checking for Talon or allied personnel before carrying out the destruction order.
The scan found both Cadian regiments dead at their posts, their bodies unmarked. The pattern pointed to a psychic attack. The prison relay continued to transmit the all-clear.
With nobody left to extract, the Stone Man began charging the particle lances on both weapon-moons. The Engine maintained its suppression field around the condemned world.
The Engine's shadow crossed the prison complex. In one yard, inmates paused over the bodies of the Arbites wardens they had been beating. A few looked up. Then a man raised his club again and screamed.
The paving had split beneath him. He saw fire through the crack, felt himself falling into it and found himself on his knees on solid ground, his club lying beside him.
Across St. Josmane's Hope, other newly awakened psykers were seeing the same end. Their cries spread through the cellblocks. Men who had seized keys and weapons began fighting for places at the exits.
Beyond the prison wire lay wasteland. Beyond that lay more wasteland, all of it on the same doomed world. But in the blocks near the gate, a different cry went up.
"Cadia! You can walk through to Cadia!"
The passage into the yard filled with desperate men.
Through the shrinking opening, Yoan saw the first prisoners hesitate. They could see the shields, the leveled weapons, the Chimeras waiting behind them. Those farther back could only see a way out. The pressure of the crowd drove the front ranks into the open.
"Open fire," Yoan ordered over the vox.
The Thirteenth's beams swept the prison side at full power. Men fell across the paving. The next ranks climbed over them, firing stolen weapons as they came. Bullets rang against the adamantium shields; the soldiers behind them barely shifted.
Blue fire gathered around one prisoner's hands, then guttered as he neared the opening. He thrust them toward the Talon line anyway. Nothing answered before the next volley struck him.
Some prisoners dragged other men ahead of them as cover. Others dropped flat and crawled beneath the beams.
"Left squad. Along the ground."
The firing angle changed. Nobody reached the threshold.
An engine roared inside the passage. Prisoners scrambled aside as a stolen tank ground over the fallen, a second vehicle following close behind. Among the deserters and mutineers sent to St. Josmane's Hope, there were men who knew their way around a tank.
The gate was already too narrow for either tank. A shell would fit easily enough. The lead turret began to turn.
"Lead tank," Yoan said.
A Chimera fired down the lane he had left clear. Heavy bolter rounds shattered the tank's vision blocks. Talon beams burned through the gun mounting, leaving the cannon sagging, then cut a track. The hull slewed into the yard wall. The second tank tried to force its way past and struck the first at an angle, wedging both vehicles across the passage.
Prisoners clambered over the hulls or squeezed between them and the wall. The Cadians caught them as they dropped into the yard. Their volleys remained steady despite the sickness, lasbolts threading past the Talon shields.
Yoan checked both flanks. The Thirteenth held its formation. The gate continued to shrink.
Then the Celestial Engine's weapon-moons fired.
The prison sky turned red. A column of white light struck the wasteland beyond the razor wire, so bright that Yoan's visor dimmed almost to black. Even through the darkened display, he could see the ground opening beneath it.
Fire rose from the impact and spread toward the prison. The distant hills vanished. Men at the back of the yard turned to look; those nearer the gate threw themselves forward with their arms over their heads.
The fire was almost at the wire when the gate narrowed to a red point. Yoan called cease-fire, and the light went out.
His visor cleared. Where the prison yard had been, he could see the rest of the Cadian camp.
The Chimera's barrels ticked as they cooled. Its gunner kept them trained on the empty air.
Yoan never saw the world break apart. The two lances had set the surface ablaze on their way in. They reached the core, and the crust began to split. For a moment the planet still held its outline, with fire shining through the widening cracks.
St. Josmane's Hope shattered.
Within the Celestial Engine's suppressive field, swarms of logistics machines streamed into the expanding debris. They anchored themselves to two large fragments on opposite sides of the debris cloud and began constructing Nexus Firmament Pylons. Once raised, the pylons would keep the reconstruction site warded against the Warp while Talon gathered the scattered mass and rebuilt the world.
In time, the Cadian System would have every one of its planets again. It would just be missing a great many prisoners and psykers.
Yoan turned to the Thirteenth. "Prepare for teleportation. We're heading back."
The officer who had tried to greet them was standing beside a Chimera, one hand resting against its hull. He wiped his mouth, checked the empty space where the gate had been, and gave Yoan a curt nod. Yoan returned it.
The 112th had kept its guns on the gate with more than a hundred Untouchables beside them. Yoan could hardly blame the men for how quickly they made room for the jump.
….
In the Warp, a rank of Khorne's Bloodletters charged down a straight passage and came out facing its own reinforcements.
The two formations collided. Hellblades scraped crystal as the daemons turned, searching for the enemy they had been pursuing. The passage behind them now led upward, though none had climbed a step.
Deeper in the Crystal Labyrinth stood the Impossible Fortress, Tzeentch's palace. Its approaches rearranged themselves around the invaders. At the edges of the realm, however, crystal had hardened into brass. Khorne's armies had taken that ground, and rivers of blood flowed between their new fortifications. More Bloodletters waded through them toward the fighting.
Kairos Fateweaver stood behind a line of Horrors defending one of the breached passages. His attention lay elsewhere.
His left head watched a guardsman reach out to a radiant figure on the Golden Throne.
Elai had resisted accusations and threats, even the use of his own cherished hopes against him. He had been willing to die rather than betray his comrades. So Kairos had offered him the one reassurance he still wanted to believe: that the Emperor had heard him. The guardsman had welcomed his destroyer.
Kairos savored that moment even as his other head examined a far less pleasing future. The Cadian System lay at peace. On every inhabited world, people looked up at skies free of the Eye of Terror's glow. There were soldiers in those visions who had grown old without seeing another war. He had no intention of letting it happen.
Elai's last flicker of power had opened the gate as intended. It needed to endure only long enough for the prison world's psykers to reach Cadia. They would have scattered among the defenders, carrying what waited inside them into barracks, shelters, and bastions. Each could have become another doorway. Closing the first would have achieved very little by then.
The gate had closed with every prisoner still on the far side. Kairos considered it a minor complication.
"They think closing the gate ends it," Kairos said. "Just as I foresaw."
His right head saw a hellblade pass through its neck. Crystal rushed up to meet its severed face.
His left saw the Bloodletter that had hacked through the Horrors a heartbeat earlier.
Between the two visions lay the moment neither head could see. Kairos thrust his staff toward the place the attacker would occupy and spat a word. He heard a shriek. In the next glimpse of the past, ash scattered across the crystal.
He drew his staff back with an irritated hiss. More Bloodletters were pressing into the passage, cutting their way through the defenders. Every stretch they seized became another claim for Khorne.
Fools. A strange being in the material universe was interfering with the Changer of Ways' great design, and still the other gods poured their strength into these wars. They fought over corridors while a future without the Eye of Terror remained possible.
The din of the assault seemed to recede.
Kairos bowed before he had a word for what he felt. His master's attention rested upon the battlefield. Both necks bent, feathers trembling, until his beaks nearly touched the crystal.
The gaze passed over him. It reached beyond the Labyrinth, searching the Warp until it found the flickering reflection of a soul.
"My master…"
Kairos shook violently. His master's influence touched that reflection, and the future changed.
A psyker would suddenly appear on Cadia.
Through that psyker, the daemons would have their way in.
As Kairos studied that future, he felt his master's attention withdraw, turning once more to the struggle against the other gods in the Great Game.
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