'No, we have had no contact with Atharva since he left Calaena,' said Magnus. 'We are here to find him. Do you know where he is?'
Ashkali nodded. 'Yes, he and the others went down into the ship.'
'What ship?'
'The colony ship, the one the storm exposed.'
'Show me,' said Magnus.
Something tore farther back along the Stormbird's hull. Perturabo heard it clatter down the length of the fuselage. He flicked his eyes down onto the control panel, looking for fresh warning signs.
The panel was already rich with warning indicators, so it was hard to tell what damage was new. He'd deactivated a great many of them, the sounds blurring together as if the gunship itself were screaming in pain.
The view through the streaked armourglass canopy was the very vision of the apocalypse. Sky and ocean were impossible to tell apart. Both were all but obscured by the ferocious storms raging all the way to the Karman line. Forks of lightning split the sky in stroboscopic flashes and booming peals of thunder swatted the gunship as though it were an insect in a hurricane.
The first storm hit five kilometres from Calaena, a spiteful cyclonic tempest that came out of nowhere and almost dragged them to the raging swells of dark water before Perturabo fought them back into the sky. Another all but shorted out their guidance system until Obax Zakayo was able to jerry-rig a makeshift insulation cowl. Ferocious lightning battered the hull, the gunship's wings trailing purple-and-blue streamers of electric fire from newly welded conductor rods.
The Stormbird juddered under Morningstar's assaults: hurricane-force winds, typhoon rains and pulsing electromagnetic squalls that made for heart-pounding moments of uncertainty when the engines threatened to cut out.
The Iron Warriors gunship threaded the needle of the worst storms, surviving thanks to a mixture of near real-time data from Magos Tancorix and Perturabo's phenomenal skill as a pilot.
Barban Falk stood behind him in the hatchway to the troop compartment, where the rest of the Iron Warriors sat in stoic silence. Falk held the bulkhead in a white-knuckled grip.
'My lord,' he began, 'the ship is tearing itself apart!'
'I know, Barban,' said Perturabo, wrestling the controls as torsion forces tried to twist the gunship's keel apart. He spun the gunship, feathering the engines and pushing the prow up to ride the spiralling forces. Metal screamed as he pushed the Stormbird far beyond the limits of its performance envelope. Something else tore loose, and another warning light blinked angrily in front of him.
'My lord,' said Falk pushing forwards and hurriedly strapping himself into the co-pilot's seat, 'how can you even navigate this?'
Perturabo grunted and glanced up through the canopy, seeing the swirling madness of the star-maelstrom even through the terrifying power of Morningstar's global tempest.
'This isn't the worst storm I know,' said Perturabo.
'It's not?'
'No, and we are not turning back. Not now. The source is just ahead.'
'That's not what I was going to suggest, my lord.'
'Then what were you going to say?'
'Very well, yes, it was what I was going to suggest,' said Falk, looking deep into the onrushing storms as flickers of pulsing lightning lit up the gunship's interior. 'I just want to know what purpose you think this mission serves.'
Perturabo didn't answer at first.
'I want to destroy whatever is killing this world,' he muttered eventually.
'Magos Tancorix said it was already too late to reverse what is happening to Morningstar,' said Falk. 'Finding and destroying the source of these storms will not change that.'
'I know,' said Perturabo, hauling the controls to pull away from a rapidly developing electromagnetic tornado. The gunship howled in protest, but its pain eased as he levelled out again.
'Then why are we out here, my lord?' asked Falk. 'Why are we risking our lives to do this?'
'Because I will not leave Morningstar without hitting back at our enemies,' snapped Perturabo. 'I will not allow this world to die without exacting a blood price for its ending.'
Falk nodded. 'Well, why didn't you just say so?'
'Because it is a reaction that springs from emotion, and I have a reputation to maintain.'
Falk gripped his seat tighter as the gunship made a gut-loosening lurch downwards. Kilometre-high tsunamis threatened to smash them from the sky.
'Your secret is safe with me,' he said. 'I think I'll be taking it to my grave.'
Perturabo chuckled and pushed the gunship into a shallow dive as the wavering display on the panels indicated they had reached the source of Morningstar's apocalypse.
He guided the gunship towards a looming, cliff-like wall of darkness, beyond which nothing could be seen, and within which only electromagnetic chaos awaited.
'Hold on,' he said. 'We're going in.'
The hatch had been designed for beings of mortal stature, but Magnus ducked down and climbed inside the body of the colony ship. Beyond was a cramped airlock with brushed steel walls inset with ceramic tiles. The floor was canted slightly to the side, telling him the ship had not come down straight.
The door at the far end of the chamber was wide open, and Magnus saw a long corridor of similar design, its ceiling hung with crackling cables that spat pale sparks to provide fitful illumination.
He moved through the airlock and into the corridor, each squad following the line of the walls with their bolters locked hard to their shoulders. Magnus pushed his mind into the lower Enumerations and stretched his senses out before him. He felt no threat and no life from within, but he kept his martial abilities close to the surface. Bitter experience during his years of conquest had taught Magnus that not everything seeking to inflict harm could be detected by psychic means.
Some unseen mechanism detected their presence, and the few remaining glow-globes strung from the ceiling girders flickered to life Stuttering illumination flowed down the corridor, revealing featureless walls with cracked windows and sealed shutter-doors to either side. Rust-coloured stains were smeared on the lower reaches of the wall, and it was impossible to interpret them as anything other than bloodied handprints.
'Of course there would be blood,' said Ahriman, taking position at Magnus' left shoulder.
'Now all we need are bodies,' added Phosis T'kar.
Magnus moved along the corridor towards a circular intersection. He glanced through each window as he passed, but the glass was opaque with age and thick with smoke damage. He could see nothing within, and the stale smell of emptiness hung in the air. He checked each door as he passed.
'Anything?' asked Phosis T'kar on his right, flickering kine energies playing across his fingertips.
'Sealed fast, just like the hatch,' said Magnus, reaching an intersection that split the corridor into four identical passageways. Red-and-gold lettering offered clues to what lay at the end of each. 'Can you read this?' asked Ahriman.
'Given time,' said Magnus. 'It is the language of the fallen Dragon Nations.'
'Atharva was always obsessed by those lands,' said Phosis T'kar. 'Perhaps his fondness for the eastern empires drew him onwards when he ought to have been more cautious,' said Ahriman.
Magnus nodded towards the faded symbol of a winged, serpent-entwined staff on the bulkheads above each corridor.
'This was a medicae deck,' he said.
More flaking blood stained the walls here, arterial by the volume and width of its arc. Magnus paused and placed a palm flat on the walls, feeling a soft but regular pulse of vibration in the steelwork. A lingering sense of dread permeated his senses, a memory of terrible pain, though he could not locate any source for the feeling.
'This way,' said Magnus, crossing the intersection and following the line of glow-globes.
The advancing Thousand Sons found every corridor more or less identical, stripped of identifying markings and redolent of the ancient age of spacefaring. No trace remained of any crew or records, though they found many more bloo
dstains. None of the data terminals they passed had power, but they had not the means to access them even if they had. The only sounds were their echoing footfalls and the crackle of vox static in their helmets.
Magnus' every breath was freighted with a growing sense of the endless pain sealed within. This had been a medicae ship, so such a feeling should not have been unexpected, but he sensed more than just the memory of pain.
He sensed enduring pain.
They followed the trail of glow-globes and ruptured cable-lines, passing derelict rooms filled with empty gurneys, banks of haphazardly stacked machines and stowage bays where ungainly suits of hermetically sealed exo-armour lay in disarray. The deeper into the ship they went, the more it reeked of abandonment, and the more wary Magnus became.
'So many relics,' he said.
'It's junk,' said Phosis T'kar.
'It is history,' said Ahriman.
'Then why has none of it been removed?'
No answer readily presented itself. The interior of this ship was a treasure trove of incredible artefacts from a distant age, a time capsule that could offer invaluable insight to the Golden Age of Man. And yet it had been left hidden beneath the ground.
The trail of glow-globes eventually led to an echoing vaulted chamber filled with towering banks of machinery and glass-fronted coffin-capsules. Each was filled with a stagnant mire, rancid and opaque, fed by coiled hoses that dripped viscous fluids to the deck. Thousands of these cryo-tubes lined the walls, arranged in rows that vanished into the darkness of the chamber. A number were punctured with what looked like gunshots, but many others were still functional, their surfaces limned with frost and venting wisps of condensing air.
The Thousand Sons spread out as Magnus advanced, forming an arrowhead with their primarch at the tip of the barb.
Beneath each gleaming cylinder was a metallic gurney bolted to the floor and fitted with leather straps and a needle-filled cranial restraint. Where the rest of the ship felt abandoned, little more than structure to house the ship's true purpose, this chamber still had function and intent.
Magnus hated it.
His every sense was screaming, telling him to escape while he could. He tensed as his body instinctively readied itself for fight or flight. An animal reaction, one he had thought himself above, but evidently not.
'What is it?' said Ahriman, reading the change in his aura. 'Where is the threat?'
'There is none,' said Magnus, though the words felt like an ashen lie. 'None I can see, at least.'
'What were they doing here?' asked Phosis T'kar, lowering his bolter and standing before one of the gurneys. He knelt and dragged out a footlocker pushed beneath it. He flipped open the lid, finding it filled with rings, necklaces and all manner of jewellery that gleamed like a miser's hoard.
'What is this?' he said, scooping a handful of rings and bracelets and holding it out to Magnus. 'They brought all this from Old Earth?'
A swirling, unfocused nausea swept over Magnus for no easily identifiable reason. He felt sick to his stomach at the idea of touching the jewellery.
'Put it back,' he said. 'Now.'
'Why?'
'Just do it!'
Phosis T'kar shrugged and tossed the items back onto the pile. He rose to his feet as a suffocating fear arose in Magnus, a sensation he had not felt since…
…since he had watched his sons being torn apart by a sickness erupting from within their own flesh…
The image was so distorted and half-formed it felt like it belonged to someone else, a sick recreation of a half-heard rumour, a conjured fiction of suppressed horror.
'What did they do here?' he said. 'Throne of Terra, what did they do…?'
A yammering host of hideously conjoined voices, simmering with potent and enduring rage, answered from the darkness.
Tore us from ourselves…
Cut the silver cord…
Denied us our potential…
Magnus spun to look down the length of the chamber, seeing a coalescing bleed of ferocious psychic energy. The pain and the horror inflicted here did not rest easy. Nor was it forgiving.
Six figures stood in the midst of this bleed.
Legionary bulk, silhouetted in a sick, rippling undersea glow. Magnus knew these warriors; they were his sons, but… changed. 'We have to leave here,' said Ahriman. 'Right now.'
'No,' said Magnus. 'Not yet.'
'…too late to leave,' said one of the figures, stepping from the light.
Sick dread settled in Magnus' stomach as the figure's identity became clear.
'Much too late,' Atharva repeated. 'No one leaves Shai-Tan.'
The darkness was unyielding and absolute.
Perturabo's spatial awareness was instantly overturned as the gunship flipped around. The very forces of creation hurled them into the teeth of the storm, and the Stormbird's hull screeched as chaotic forces sought to crush it. The control column was torn from his grip.
'This madness is going to rip us apart!' cried Falk.
Perturabo shook his head and took the control column in both hands. 'Not while I have my strength it won't.'
The column juddered like a wild beast, resisting him as he fought to level them out. Gravitic and electromagnetic forces wrenched the Stormbird in every direction. The gunship's instruments were useless, the gyroscope or avionics panel flashing with meaningless and contradictory information. They were climbing, diving, spinning, yawing and rolling all at the same time.
Finding what was level was next to impossible.
But Perturabo had a North Star better than any instrumentation. He couldn't see the star-maelstrom that always watched him from afar, but he could sense it. He felt its presence like a solid anchor, a fixed point of reference that he was, for once, glad to have at his back.
Perturabo pushed out the engines, the muscles of his arms bunching and swelling as he held the gunship true to its course. The forces acting on it were titanic and elemental, but he was the Lord of Iron and there was no give in him.
As if sensing he would not yield, the tempest's force dropped away, and the gunship shot into the eye of the storm like a bullet from a gun.
The sudden stillness was shocking after such roiling chaos, and the Stormbird shuddered in release. Perturabo pushed it into a slow, downward curve.
'Mother of Olympia…' said Barban Falk. 'What is that?'
Perturabo had no answer.
The ocean was boiling as far as the eye could see, its surface churned white by plumes of superheated vapour geysering from its surface Directly below them was a sprawling agglomeration of force-shielded steel with foundations plunging deep into the water. In scale it matched the orbital shipyards of Jupiter, a machined metropolis afloat on the ocean.
'Did Morningstar ever have an orbital plate like Vaalbara or Rodina?' asked Falk, still trying to process the scale of what had been built here. 'Perhaps it crashed? Is that what I'm looking at?'
'This is not the remains of a crashed orbital plate,' said Perturabo. This was built!
The gunship circled a series of wave-lashed towers, vast as hive blocks, their flanks pulsing with colossal energies.
Within the circumference of the towers, an area surely hundreds of kilometres in diameter, the ocean poured into a depthless crevasse that made the plunging mountain canyons of Olympia look like tiny cracks.
Perturabo angled the gunship down, drawing their flight towards the thunderous cascade of water. Pulling around, he saw the titanic walls of the crevasse were banded with layers that spoke of the geological ages of the world.
'That rock hasn't shown its face to the sun in millions of years,' said Falk.
Perturabo knew what this was, but couldn't believe it.
He pointed to the splits in the sedimentary layers and the clean breaks between the various aeons of rock.
'This is the edge of a tectonic plate,' he said as he began to understand the extraordinary feat of engineering that had been wrought here.
Pertu
rabo had spent years exploring the mountains of Olympia to learn the strength of stone. He understood the deep time of geology and the millions of years it took to make or unmake a world. Yet this was happening right before his eyes.
'This city-machine is pushing one tectonic plate beneath another,' said Perturabo, his mind of metal and stone working to process the enormity and impossibility of what was happening to Morningstar. The Magos Geologicus have long hypothesised that a continental plate of sufficient magnitude being pushed under another and into the mantle could, over time, disrupt a planet's geomagnetic field. But the rate of subduction is usually only a few centimetres a year, and the effects would be so gradual as to be all but invisible in a mortal lifetime.' 'Well this is certainly visible,' replied Falk.
The towering cliffs within the crevasse plunged hundreds of kilometres into the planet's depths. Avalanches of rock fell into its hellish maw, the farthest depths of which were like ancient representations of the dread underworld where damned souls suffered torment for eternity.
'They built this with one purpose, and one purpose only,' said Perturabo in disbelief. 'To destroy their world.'
'The resources and technological expertise this would have required are immense,' said Falk. 'How could those Sons of Shaitan fanatics build such a thing, let alone keep its construction secret from Imperial command?'
Perturabo had been pondering the same thing and the answer was so glaringly obvious he was angry he hadn't come to it earlier.
'They didn't need to,' he said.
'What do you mean?'
'Because they are one and the same,' said Perturabo.
'Who are you?' demanded Magnus.
'Surely you recognise your own flesh and blood?' said the thing within Atharva's body. The legionary's outline was haloed with light, as if myriad stab-lights were trained upon him, each casting a fuliginous shadow over the other.
'You speak through my son, but you are not him,' said Magnus. 'Dispense with this vile charade. What is your name?'
'My name is legion, for we are many, but you shall know us as Shai-Tan.'
'Shai-Tan? That name has meaning to this world.'
Atharva's body raised its arms like a preacher in a fane, and unchecked psychic energy bled from the fingertips like droplets of mercury. Sourceless winds blew and the dust of millennia spun in maddened vortices on the floor.