almost nothing about what we were heading into. We pulled clear of the Senatorum Imperialis’ forest of towers and parapets and were soon powering steadily up into the high atmosphere. I felt the thrusters boom just metres below where we were sitting in our restraint harnesses, and began to curse my reckless decision. I was not a natural voidfarer and almost instantly I felt nausea well up within my strapped-tight environment suit.
‘Try using the real-viewers,’ Jek suggested, knowing my weakness.
It didn’t help. All I could see through the heavily fortified slats was a wildly spinning disc, marked by great streaks of fire. I did note just how different the face of Terra looked to how it had done before, its uniform pall of sludgy grey now wracked with the flames raging in its upper atmosphere. I tried – foolishly – to glimpse something of the Fortress of the Astronomican, hoping against hope that it would ignite again and banish the swaths of destruction that now ceaselessly circled the globe.
Soon, though, even those details disappeared as my home world shrank back, blurring from the lifter’s heavy progress into the void. The howl of the atmosphere ripped away, leaving only the internal roar of our engines. We began to be assailed by challenge-bursts from the hundreds of Naval installations on our route, all of them now watching the approaches to Luna like psy-hawks. I could see approaching void-fighter wings, and guessed just how jumpy those pilots would be.
‘Boost broadcasts of our exempted status,’ I voxed to the pilot. ‘Any trouble, route them direct to my audex and I’ll explain precisely how fast I can have a kill-team locate their families.’
The RE-45 was a blunt instrument, but a fast one once it got going. The dense network of defence stations swam past us, turning slowly under the flickering lights of Luna’s distorted reflective face. Space itself seemed to be alive, lit with ghostly strands of witch-light that scampered across the void.
‘There it is,’ murmured Jek, peering into one of the vid-feeds linked to the forward augur banks.
I had seen Luna many times, and had always been somewhat impressed by its faded grandeur. Unlike Terra it was a quiet, dark realm, dominated by the vast docks that jutted out from its equator. It was a colder place, and had always felt somehow purer to me too, if you ignored the huge volume of contraband passing through it every hour.
Looking at it now, much of it was the same as it had always been, save for a sector high up over our prow. The light came from there, winking like sunlight from a lens. The effect looked less violent than it had been, though it was still incredible that something so powerful could have been generated so quickly.
‘Take us down as close as you can,’ I told the pilot, swallowing the bile that clogged my throat. ‘Immediate visual range, unless we come under fire.’
By then I could already see other voidcraft looming up ahead – twelve Naval monitors with their guns ranged on the terrain below, a strike cruiser in the faded yellow of the Imperial Fists, two larger craft in silver-grey livery, even a grand gold-and-black cruiser bearing the eagle’s-head device of the Adeptus Custodes. Luna was not short of its own defences, but the response from Terra had nonetheless been significant.
We powered on through the perimeter, our status and credentials enough to run the gauntlet of challenges from the bigger vessels. Luna’s eerie dark grey landscape filled the forward viewers, swelling first into a great curve of spires and manufactoria, then racing towards us in a new horizon of ancient grime-streaked towers.
We touched down in a cloud of kicked-up dust. Fearful that my nausea might overwhelm me completely, I pulled the restraints from my chest and staggered down the lowering ramp first.
The pilot had done well, taking us close to the edge of a huge crater set out in the wastelands of Luna’s ship graveyards. We were down among the carcasses of ancient voidcraft, beached long ago and still pored over for scrap. The hulls were titanic, swelling hundreds of metres into the crystal-clear air, their blackened spars skeletal against a screen of clear stars. Above them all, far away from us on a dark horizon, rose the colossal plates of the docks themselves, huge black bars drawn vertically across the firmament.
The air was thick with grit, the product of venerable Mechanicus terraformers burning away at the world’s core. Gravity had never been