…
One day later.
A dimensional rift opened above Iven Secundus without warning.
There was no empyric flare, no astropathic shriek, and no stain of Warp-light for the system's sanctioned psykers to sense. Space simply folded along a controlled seam three hundred thousand kilometers above the agri-world. Pale lines spread through the void, joined into a widening aperture, and held steady while an immense warship crossed into realspace.
The vessel emerged bow first, its progress seeming slow only because anything thirty-seven kilometers long made even a precise translation appear ponderous. This was the new flagship of the Lamenters Chapter.
For three years, the orbital shipyard of the Talon System had built it around a spine of adamantium, gravitic bracing, and power conduits unlike anything found in an Imperial ship of comparable size. Its armored flanks bore the Lamenters' yellow, though the color had been darkened to reduce glare from nearby stars. Upon the prow, a vast black-and-white checkerboard framed the Chapter's weeping-heart sigil, a solemn reminder of their eternal sorrow and blood-soaked history.
Thirty particle-lance batteries occupied recessed firing galleries along the hull. An axial arc projector ran through the forward third of the ship, built to discharge enough controlled energy to break the shields of a capital vessel and carve through the structure beneath. Concentric point-defense rings guarded every approach vector, their targeting nodes linked to a combat cogitator able to track thousands of missiles, attack craft, and boarding pods at once.
The flagship's most valuable system, however, was not a weapon. Its Talon-built state-of-the-art teleportation matrix could place entire companies of Space Marines onto a surveyed battlefield within seconds and retrieve them without exposing their bodies to the Warp. To the Lamenters, who had spent centuries losing warriors because aid arrived too late or extraction never came, that capability mattered more than any gun.
The ship bore the name of the Chapter's former capital vessel: Daughter of Tempests.
No one aboard treated the name as a replacement for what had been lost to the Minotaurs. A name could be inherited. The dead could not.
Deep inside the flagship, the strategium came fully awake. Tiered command stations surrounded a circular hololithic display more than twenty meters across. Chapter serfs worked in disciplined silence beneath pale lumen strips, passing targeting solutions, atmospheric models, and intercepted vox traffic between stations. The air smelled of machine oil, cooled metal, and the faint incense burned by the Chapter's surviving tech-adepts despite Talon's preference for maintenance without ceremony.
Chapter Master Malakim Phoros stood at the edge of the display with three Company Captains. His hands rested behind his back, one gauntlet closed around the other wrist. He had not moved since the first surface scan began.
Below them turned Iven Secundus: a green world divided into immense cultivation zones, irrigation seas, processing cities, and weather-control stations. Its grain exports fed three neighboring systems. That made it economically useful, but it possessed no fortress, relic, shipyard, or command nexus worth a Traitor Astartes raid. The local Planetary Defense Force was organized to suppress food riots and repel pirates, not fight transhuman infantry.
A crimson marker appeared over the western hemisphere. Warning tones sounded once, then ceased as the strategium's systems pushed the relevant information onto the main display.
[THREAT ALERT: THIRTY HOSTILE TRANSHUMAN BIO-SIGNATURES DETECTED]
[PROBABLE DESIGNATION: TRAITOR ASTARTES]
[COORDINATES: X192 / Y33]
[LOCAL PDF CONTACT: CONFIRMED]
[ENEMY VOID SUPPORT: NONE DETECTED]
The hololith magnified a broad plain between grain terraces. Thirty hulking silhouettes moved around three damaged shuttles while hundreds of smaller human contacts closed in around them. Muzzle flashes pulsed in rapid clusters. Every burst removed more of the defenders' blue identification runes.
Captain Lykon leaned closer to the display. A scar pulled at the corner of his mouth when he frowned. "Thirty here, after the incidents at the sector's edge. Are we looking at a coordinated traitor assault?"
"If Talon command knew their objective, the Lord of Talon would not have asked us to capture one alive," Captain Arista replied. His tone was controlled, but one thumb tapped against the pommel of his sheathed blade. "Chapter Master, permit my company to make the descent. I can have a strike force on the matrix in forty seconds."
Phoros studied the tactical projection. The enemy shuttles had descended on emergency drives and landed too close together. There was no supporting ship in orbit, no attempt to seize a weather station, and no visible effort to destroy the grain reserves. The traitors were killing the PDF, but they were not behaving like raiders with an objective.
They were behaving like men waiting to be found.
"Select ten veterans," Phoros said. "I will lead them."
All three Captains turned toward him.
"My lord," Lykon began, "thirty traitors do not justify risking the Chapter Master."
"The number is not the risk." Phoros enlarged one of the distorted images. Beneath soot and field repairs, the enemy plate carried traces of old heraldic placement, marks that had been painted over but not ground away. "They do not behave like warriors whose capital ships have just been destroyed. Making so conspicuous a move when concealment would serve them better is deliberate."
Arista's tapping thumb went still. "A lure."
"Yes." Phoros looked at the dying blue contacts. "And while we debate who should spring it, mortals are buying our caution with their lives."
That ended the objection. It did not end the Captains' concern, but Lamenters had never been skilled at watching others die in their place.
They also understood why Phoros had chosen to lead the mission. The Chapter's survival depended upon the Talon Sector's goodwill and supplies. Its shipyards had given the Lamenters a flagship more powerful than anything they had commanded even before the Badab War. When the Lord of Talon demanded a prisoner, Phoros could neither afford to appear reluctant nor send his sons into a trap he refused to face himself.
He locked his helm into place. The seals engaged with a hard metallic click. "Prepare for combat. We deploy in sixty seconds."
By the time Phoros reached the teleportarium, ten veterans were already waiting upon the dais. Each wore Tactical Dreadnought armor, massive plates enclosing him from gorget to greaves and a storm bolter clamped to one armored fist. Two brothers carried compact plasma weapons, their heat-management vanes folded against the housings. Sergeant Varras bore a thunder hammer and a shield whose face displayed the names of the squad's dead.
Phoros wore master-crafted artificer armor rather than Terminator plate. It sacrificed mass for speed, and its servos had been tuned to his movements. A power spear rested in his right hand. Its blade was narrow, almost plain, until its disruption field activated and a white shimmer ran along the edge.
A serf at the control station raised two fingers. "Surface coordinates fixed. Atmospheric interference within tolerance. Friendly separation confirmed."
Blue-white fields rose around the eleven Astartes, sealing each warrior inside an individual transmission envelope. The deck vanished beneath Phoros's boots. The transition lasted less than two seconds.
Phoros reappeared beneath an open sky the color of burnished steel. His boots sank several centimeters into damp soil. Air cracked outward from the formation, flattening knee-high grain in widening circles and leaving the bitter smell of ozone over the sweeter scent of crushed stalks.
The teleportarium had placed the strike force forty meters behind the PDF line. That distance gave the defenders room to survive the displacement pressure without leaving the Lamenters too far from the enemy.
The plain ahead had once been divided into neat harvesting lanes. Now it was torn by bolt impacts, burning crop haulers, and the furrows left by three crippled shuttles skidding across the ground. PDF troopers crouched behind irrigation berms and overturned machinery. Their lasguns flashed in ragged volleys, but the shots burst harmlessly against ceramite. The traitors' return fire was far more decisive. Mass-reactive shells punched through cover, armor, and bodies before detonating.
The Lamenters' arrival interrupted the slaughter.
A PDF lieutenant turned first. He was young, blood streaking one side of his face from a torn scalp, and for a moment he pointed his laspistol at Phoros. Then he saw the weeping heart on the Chapter Master's pauldron. His arm dropped.
"The Emperor's angels," he breathed.
The words passed through the line. Some soldiers stared as if reinforcements were a miracle they had stopped believing in hours ago. One wounded trooper tried to kneel and nearly collapsed until the woman beside him caught his webbing. Others made the sign of the Aquila with shaking hands.
Across the field, the traitors reacted differently. Weapons swung toward the new arrivals. Several fell back behind the shuttle wrecks. One shouted an order over an amplified vox, and the three scattered groups contracted into a defensive crescent.
Their hesitation told Phoros that they had expected hostile reinforcements. Their sudden caution told him they had not expected ten suits of Terminator armor capable of walking through anything short of an orbital lance strike.
Phoros strode through the PDF line. "Remain in cover. Mark any enemy attempting to withdraw."
The lieutenant found enough of his voice to answer. "Yes, lord."
Phoros raised his spear. "Sons of Sanguinius, let us not disgrace his blood."
The Lamenters advanced.
Storm bolters opened first. The veterans did not fire indiscriminately into the shuttles; their helm systems shared targets, assigned firing lanes, and shifted aim the instant a kill was confirmed. Explosive rounds struck joints, weapon arms, exposed power cables, and damaged sections of plate. A traitor trying to cross between two wrecks took six bolts through the breastplate before the first detonation had finished throwing him backward.
The Red Corsairs answered with disciplined volleys. Bolter shells hammered Phoros's refractor field and burst across the Terminators' plate. Their armor had been designed for shipboard sieges, where there was nowhere to evade incoming fire, and it shrugged off the barrage without slowing them. The veterans maintained formation through the storm, trusting their overlapping fields of fire and relentless advance to end the battle before accumulated damage brought a brother down.
One traitor rose behind an engine block with a missile launcher. Brother Saphan marked him. Brother Telemachus fired before the launcher's targeting tone completed. A plasma bolt crossed the field and struck the exposed weapon. The resulting detonation blew the Corsair apart and rolled the shuttle onto its side in a groan of tortured metal.
"Left wreck, lower hatch," Varras voxed.
Phoros saw the movement. "Suppress. Do not collapse the compartment. We require a prisoner."
Three storm bolters shifted together, chewing a line around the hatch and forcing the warriors behind it away from the opening. Phoros accelerated through the gap in his veterans' formation. His artificer armor let him move faster than the Terminators without breaking their fields of fire; each brother adjusted by a fraction as he passed, keeping his advance covered.
The traitors understood the purpose of the assault. Two attempted to reach their shuttles, perhaps to destroy records or deny capture. PDF marker beams lanced from the irrigation berms and painted both fugitives in red. The Lamenters killed one. The second disappeared behind the central wreck.
"Advance," Phoros ordered. "Close the ring."
Explosions rippled through the shuttles as the veterans dismantled the enemy's cover section by section. Armor panels buckled. Landing struts sheared away. Burning fuel spread through the grain, only to be smothered when Iven's weather-control grid released a localized curtain of rain over the battlefield. Cold water hissed against plasma-scorched metal and turned the soil beneath the warriors into black mud.
Then a voice roared across the open channel.
"PHOROS!"
A lone figure vaulted over the central shuttle's broken fuselage.
Phoros recognized him before his tactical display resolved the face beneath the damaged helm. The stance was enough: shoulders slightly forward, right blade held low, left angled across the chest to draw an opponent into the first cut. Rian had used the same guard when he was a Captain of the Astral Claws. He had once stood beside the Lamenters as a brother-in-arms. Later, when Badab burned and the Astral Claws fled into the Maelstrom, he had chosen to follow the Tyrant into damnation.
Time and corruption had made the choice visible. Rian's armor was a patchwork of red and black laid over remnants of the old Astral Claws blue. Tarnished brass edged plates swollen by mutation. A spiked torque enclosed his throat, each barb sunk through a collar of scar tissue. On his back, an armored canister churned with green fluid and pumped it into ports along his spine. Every pulse made the muscles in his neck and sword arms knot harder.
"Rian," Phoros said. The name felt fouler than an insult.
The former Captain laughed. Twin power swords ignited in his hands. Their fields spat blue sparks into the rain. Rian charged.
The canister drove him beyond even an Astartes' normal speed. He twisted past the first plasma shot, caught a bolt on one sword, and let another explode against his pauldron without slowing. His path was not random. He used the wreckage to block the Terminators' firing lanes and forced Phoros to meet him before the veterans could bring their heavier weapons to bear.
It was a skilled maneuver, and painfully familiar.
Rian opened with the same crossing feint he had favored during the Maelstrom Warders' joint campaigns: the right blade rising to draw a parry, the left turning beneath it for the killing thrust. Phoros had seen him practice the sequence a hundred times before Badab.
He stepped inside it.
The power spear moved once. Its point passed between the plates at Rian's elbow and released a focused disruption pulse. Armor, bone, and flesh came apart in a white flash. The severed forearm struck the mud still clutching its sword.
Rian did not scream. The drug canister dumped another dose into his spine. Mutated blood sprayed across his breastplate and hissed where it touched the blade's field. He swung with his remaining sword, faster now and without any concern for defense.
Phoros turned the cut aside with the spear's haft, seized Rian by the throat, and lifted him clear of the ground. Up close, he could see the ruined Astral Claws badge beneath the red paint. Someone had gouged three deep lines through it but left enough intact to be recognized.
"You kept the old mark," Phoros said.
Rian's exposed mouth pulled into a grin. "So did you."
Phoros drove his helm into Rian's face in a thunderous headbutt. Ceramite shattered. The traitor's head snapped backward, and his sword fell from suddenly slack fingers.
"Target secured," Phoros voxed. "Restrain him."
Two veterans pinned the unconscious traitor while Varras locked gravitic shackles around Rian's limbs and torso. Talon would have its prisoner.
The remaining Red Corsairs did not surrender. Rian's fall stripped their defense of coordination, but not hatred. Some charged, perhaps hoping to kill the captive before he could be questioned. Others tried to reach the shuttles. The Lamenters closed on them from three directions and finished the battle at ranges where every shot could be chosen.
It took four minutes.
When the last traitor fell, Phoros ordered the PDF back another hundred meters. The veterans checked each corpse, recovered gene-seed samples for identification, and scanned the remains for active Warp contamination or concealed devices. Only after the battlefield cogitator confirmed that nothing required preservation did the plasma weapons begin the cleansing.
Bodies burned inside overlapping fields of white heat. Corrupted flesh blackened, collapsed, and became ash. The rain carried the ash into the churned soil but could not remove the smell.
No quarter. No trophies. Nothing left that could poison the agri-world after they departed.
While his warriors established a perimeter, Phoros entered the least damaged shuttle. The interior was narrow and dark, built for armored occupants and stripped of anything not needed for a one-way descent. Emergency lumens flickered over restraint frames, empty weapon brackets, and old blood dried in the deck grating. There were no pilots, wounded, or reserve troops.
There was only a large sealed container secured to the central cargo rail.
Phoros halted outside arm's reach and swept it with his armor's auspex. No explosive. No detectable toxin. No live power source beyond a low-output data cell. The container carried no Red Corsairs insignia. Its surface had been scrubbed clean except for a shallow groove shaped like a tear.
When he stepped closer, a green scanning beam passed over his armor. It lingered on the weeping heart upon his breastplate, then moved across his helm and spear. Internal locks disengaged one after another.
The lid opened.
Boltguns and power spears lay within, arranged in fitted racks. They were not gifts taken from some anonymous Imperial arsenal. Phoros recognized the old yellow beneath the soot. He recognized the checkerboard grips, the hand-cut campaign marks, and the names engraved along several weapon housings. One boltgun had belonged to Captain Saradon. A spear near the center bore the cracked blood-drop pommel of Brother Nicanor, who had died when the Minotaurs broke the Lamenters' fleet during the Badab War.
Weapons stripped from his dead. Trophies kept since Badab, cleaned only well enough to prove that Huron remembered where each had come from. Old blood remained in the recesses where no cloth had reached.
Phoros's hand stopped above Nicanor's spear without touching it. For a moment, the rain ticking from his armor was the only sound inside the shuttle.
Atop them rested a vid-screen. It activated as Phoros looked down. Static cleared, revealing a figure seated in darkness. Half his face was scarred flesh pulled tight over metal. One eye glowed red. The other watched the lens with the patience of a predator certain that distance made him safe.
"If you have found this container," the recording said, "deliver it to the Lamenters Chapter, currently stationed in the Talon Sector. If possible, place it in the hands of Chapter Master Phoros."
Huron Blackheart leaned forward into the light. The Tyrant of Badab had once commanded the Astral Claws and called the Lamenters allies. Now he ruled the Red Corsairs through fear, plunder, and the promise that any grievance could become permission. His remaining human features formed something close to a smile.
"Phoros, my brother. Should the Imperium ever drive you and your sons to desperation…" His claw tapped once against the arm of his throne. "Know that Huron will always welcome you."
Phoros understood the offer for what it was. Huron had not returned the stolen relics out of sentiment. If the Lamenters reclaimed them, suspicious Imperial eyes could call it proof of collusion; if they destroyed them, Huron had forced them to burn the last possessions of their murdered brothers. Either choice amused the Tyrant. The insult was the point.
"Bastard," Phoros said.
He drew his bolt pistol and fired. The screen burst into fragments. Sparks scattered across the weapons of the dead and faded without leaving a mark. Phoros stood over the container for one more second. Then he holstered the pistol and turned toward the open hatch, where his warriors waited in the rain.
"Destroy this vessel," Phoros ordered. His voice was flat enough to conceal everything beneath it. "We are returning to Talon."
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