as the world it circled. Just then, though, it was dazzling, a disc of reflected sunlight that made my eyes water.
‘By the Throne…’ Jek murmured, her gaze moving over the newly scoured heavens. There was a terrible beauty to it – a stark, cold vista that briefly made it possible to forget all the long-ingrained filth and turbulence.
‘Do not look,’ I said, dragging her back from the window.
The lights danced harder, ripping away great sheets of bloody cloud, but I no longer liked the way they shimmered. The shifting colours became painful, and more tears trickled down my cheeks. The full face of Luna was too bright, too lurid, as if its core had been conjured into detonating. I could hear shrieking, too, out on the night’s wind, and the voices did not sound even vaguely human. I pulled the shutters closed and hurried from the chamber, Jek at my side.
‘What is it?’ she asked, her own eyes bloodshot and blinking.
‘Surely you can hear that,’ I muttered, heading as swiftly as I could towards my command nexus. ‘Something bad.’
By the time I reached the hall, our incoming data-feeds were almost jammed with priority signals. My staff were running between cogitator stands with long sheaves of parchment in sweaty hands. The high armourglass windows were swimming with the same iridescent beams of light, cast from a firmament that was no longer obeying natural laws.
‘Get shutters down over those!’ I ordered, hurrying for the strategium platform. By the time I made it there, Jek had recovered her habitual poise and was filtering the wheat from the comm-chaff.
‘Multiple launches from Terra,’ she murmured, scrolling down long rune-lists. ‘The Adeptus Astartes have been activated. Valoris has issued his own troops.’
I had orders from Haemotalion clogging my own feed – to free up Militarum assets for immediate rerouting to Luna, to shut down all non-essential comms outside the Palace perimeter, to liaise with Valoris’ command to enact immediate lock-down.
‘What’s happening up there?’ I asked, unable to gain any sense from the increasingly panicked series of missives.
‘Unnatural activity,’ Jek confirmed, studying our clandestine channel into Arx’s hierarchy. ‘Massive. They’ve got Geller readings off the scale.’
I leaned on the table heavily. ‘I have to see it,’ I said.
Jek looked at me with some amusement. ‘I don’t think we’ll be of much use up there, lord.’
Lord. She hadn’t called me that in days, and it felt wildly inappropriate now.
‘I’m sick of this,’ I said. ‘I’ve watched them all go to war, and pulled the strings in safety. Enough. I have to see it.’
I started to move, and Jek pulled me back. ‘You’re an old, fat man,’ she said crossly. ‘You’ve got no business there. It’ll kill you quickly and do them no good.’
I was too tired to argue. It was probably madness, but then we were all going mad anyway, just as Arx had said. The shutters were coming down too slowly, and the vivid lights skipped across the interior of my sanctum like a mockery.
‘I’ve lived too long anyway,’ I growled, pulling my sleeve free of her grip. ‘Give the order for my lifter.’
She glared at me for a moment, disbelief on her face. Then she laughed. There was something crazed in all of us, back then – our moods seemed to sway and fracture like the storm-light above us.
‘One more piece of insanity,’ she said. ‘So be it. I’ll come too.’
We boosted clear two hours later. It took that long to reach the landing pads and prep the lifter – a big, old and cumbersome RE-45 based on a long-obsolete Militarum design. We went with a minimal entourage, just twenty guards from my own retinue, plus a Naval liaison officer and some of my signals officers. The wait for lift-off was tortuous, though we received precious little information of any substance from Luna during that time. All we could clearly ascertain was that an enemy force had somehow broken through our impeccably organised cordon and made a landing on the satellite, and that our defences had immediately responded and that all hell had been unleashed.
Anything more than that was lost in the general confusion or clamped down on by the military authorities. At times of crisis like this my office was not included in the first tier of communication, and I guessed the Adeptus Custodes themselves, or perhaps even the Imperial Fists, had reserved detailed information for their own use.
So by the time we finally trooped into the crew hold of the lifter we still knew