There was no time for grief. No time for the crippling shock to set in. The universe had been reduced to the burning confines of the hangar bay, and survival was a frantic, brutal calculus.
Thaddeus's roar cut through the stunned silence, a lightning rod for the shattered remnants of the 4th Company. "MOVE!"
Instinct and training took over. Lycomedes, his face a mask of cold fury, rallied his warriors. "Second bay!" he bellowed, his voice pure command. "Sub-sector Epsilon! The Adamantium Will! It's a mass-conveyor, armored for hostile transit!"
They became a single, desperate organism. A wedge of blue and crimson formed at the front, with Thaddeus and Lycomedes at its tip. Vorn, a one-man rearguard, unleashed hell with his plasma pistol to cover their movement. The remaining Ultramarines formed a moving cage around the huddle of mortals—Colonel Voss, his last dozen Ironbacks, and the silent, clutching form of Magos Varnus.
Their charge across the hangar was a living nightmare. The falcon-headed grav-tank pivoted, its main cannon glowing as it recharged. The xenos infantry flowed toward them, a river of pale, flowing shapes. The fight became a series of desperate, brutal moments. An Ultramarine fell, his chest armor cored out by an energy lance. Two Ironbacks screamed as a cloud of shuriken discs flayed them to the bone.
They reached the blast doors to the secondary bay, only to find them sealed. Vorn, roaring in defiance, leveled his plasma pistol. A single, super-heated blast of incandescent energy melted the control panel. With a groan of tortured metal, the doors shuddered halfway open, leaving a gap just wide enough for an Astartes to squeeze through.
Beyond lay another, smaller hangar. In its center sat the Adamantium Will. It was an ugly, brutalist brick of a ship, all thick armor plates and oversized engines, designed not for elegance but for smashing its way through asteroid fields and pirate blockades. On its ramp, a handful of Ultramarine serfs and a single Techmarine fought a desperate, doomed last stand, their lasguns and autoguns spitting defiance at the spectral forms pouring through the breach.
"With us!" Lycomedes roared as their forces merged. The Techmarine, seeing Varnus, uttered a binary prayer of relief before a shuriken cut him down.
They scrambled up the ramp, a frantic tide of armored demigods and terrified men. Colonel Voss physically dragged the catatonic Magos aboard while his Guardsmen laid down a surprisingly effective field of suppressive las-fire.
The grav-tank glided to the breach, its cannon glowing. Thaddeus knew they had seconds. He saw Vorn on the ramp, reloading, saw Lycomedes trying to get the main hatch sealed.
"Vorn! Cover me!" he roared. He turned to the two nearest Ultramarines. "Give me your krak grenades!"
Without question, they handed them over. Thaddeus charged back down the ramp, toward the tank. He was a singular point of crimson fury against an avatar of alien technology. He sprinted, his speed inhuman, zig-zagging through the enemy fire. He leaped onto a pile of debris, using it to vault himself onto the grav-tank's sleek hull. He slammed both krak grenades into the joint where the turret met the chassis and, with a final push, vaulted backward off the tank just as Vorn unleashed a searing plasma blast that forced the enemy infantry to scatter.
Thaddeus landed on the deck and scrambled back up the ramp as the grenades detonated. The explosion wasn't enough to destroy the tank, but it was enough to shatter the turret ring. The great cannon sagged, useless, sparking wildly.
"GO!" Thaddeus bellowed as he stumbled into the ship. "GET US OUT OF HERE!"
The ramp hissed shut, cutting off the sounds of battle, replacing it with the groaning strain of the conveyor's engines powering up. The ship lurched violently, its inertial dampeners failing. Through a viewport, Thaddeus saw the battle beyond their walls end. The graceful xenos warriors did not try to stop them. They simply stopped fighting, their forms melting back into the shadows as the ship began to move.
They were being allowed to leave.
The Adamantium Will tore free from its mooring clamps, its brutish engines roaring to life. It punched through the outer hangar doors, which were already warped and buckling, and into the void. On the viewscreen of the ship's crude bridge, the spectacle of their defeat was laid bare.
The Honour of Calth, once a mile-long symbol of Imperial might, was a crippled, burning wreck. And around it, the xenos fleet had formed a silent, respectful circle. They were not firing. They were simply… watching. As the survivors watched, a light began to coalesce between the alien ships, a vortex of swirling, non-Euclidean colour. It wasn't a weapon; it was a phenomenon, an unmaking.
The great warship did not explode. It dissolved. Pulled into the vortex, its proud spine buckled, its armor peeling away into ribbons of light and dust. Its lumen-windows died, one by one. The ship screamed, a final, unheard cry over the vox, and then it was gone. Erased from existence as if it had never been.
In its place, there was only empty space, and the swirling portal, which then folded in on itself and vanished, taking the xenos fleet with it. Silence.
Aboard the bridge of the Adamantium Will, no one spoke. The roaring engines, the klaxons, the sounds of battle—all were gone. The silence was absolute, heavier and more profound than any noise. It was the sound of total loss.
Vorn slammed his fist into a bulkhead, the metal groaning in protest. Lycomedes simply stared at the empty patch of space where his home had been, his one good eye wide, his bionic one whirring uselessly, unable to process data that had no logic. Colonel Voss slumped into a crash-seat, his face buried in his hands.
Scattered across the tactical display, Thaddeus saw a handful of other green icons, all moving away from the coordinates of their home's demise. Small transports, shuttles, life-pods. The diaspora. They had not been the only ones to escape.
He stood apart, his grief a cold, solid thing in his chest. His fury was the only thing keeping him standing. "They let us go," he said, his voice quiet, yet it cut through the shocked silence like a razor.
All heads turned to him.
"They took the scepter, and they let us go," he continued, walking to the tactical plot. "They did not hunt down every survivor. They did not deem us a threat." He pointed a gauntleted finger at the scattered green icons. "Look. Where are they all going?"
Lycomedes looked up, his warrior mind slowly reasserting itself over his shock. "Their last orders," he rasped. "The rendezvous. Xyphon."
"Exactly," Thaddeus said, a dangerous fire in his eyes. "They are broken. Leaderless. Following the last command they were given, flying into the darkness where another traitor ambush may await them." He looked from face to face—the shattered Ultramarines, the traumatized mortals, his furious brother.
"We have lost our ship. We have lost our Captain. But we are not broken." His voice grew stronger, pulling them all from the depths of their despair. "Our duty remains. That intelligence Magos Varnus carries is the most important weapon we have. The survivors are our army."
A fragile, grim resolve began to knit the survivors together. Thaddeus's words, a burning brand of purpose, cauterized the wound of their despair. They had a mission. They had a destination.
But as Thaddeus stared at the blinking green icons moving inexorably toward Xyphon, another set of coordinates burned in his mind's eye. A ghost of a warning, paid for in blood and sanity. Isstvan. The Salamanders.
Lycomedes saw the conflict in his commander's stance. He stepped forward, his boots ringing on the deck plate, his posture regaining the iron certainty of an Ultramarine NCO. He was a man clinging to the last spar of logic in a sea of chaos.
"Warden," he said, his voice a low growl of pure, by-the-book duty. "The fleet remnants are heading to Xyphon. Our last directive from Captain Cassius was to answer the Iron Hands' distress call. We must regroup with our brothers. We must follow our last orders."
Thaddeus turned to him, the fire in his eyes clashing with the cold logic in the Sergeant's. "And if that call is another lie? If our brothers of the XVIII Legion are walking into a slaughter while we chase ghosts?"
The question hung between them, a chasm of doctrine and instinct.
"And what if it is not a trap, Warden?" Lycomedes countered, his voice rising, raw with grief and frustration. He took a step closer, jabbing a finger toward Thaddeus. "What if the Iron Hands are truly dying, and we abandon them for a vision? A premonition? What if your mind, after seven years in hell and exposure to forces we cannot comprehend, is no longer clear? What if the warp has tainted your reason?" He drew a ragged breath, his one good eye boring into Thaddeus's impassive helmet. "I have been judged clean by the Chaplains. My logic is sound. Answer me, Sergeant! Are you?"
The accusation was a thunderbolt, striking at the very heart of Thaddeus's deepest fear. The whispers in his head stirred, a faint, mocking chorus. Was he clean? After what he had done to the Night Lord? After staring into the maw of a daemon and the dead-light eyes of the Silent King? He did not know. He only knew what he had seen.
He was silent for a long moment, the hum of the ship's crude engines the only sound. The weight of command, of life and death for two legions, settled on his shoulders. The cold, safe logic of the Ultramarines called to him. Go to Xyphon. Regroup. Follow the last order. It was the correct, tactical choice.
Then he thought of Cassian, dying in a blaze of alien energy. He thought of Serek, unmade by the scepter. He tought of Kael... He thought of his vow, sworn over the ashes of his fallen brothers.
He raised his head, and his voice, when he spoke, was not a roar, but a quiet, unbreakable blade of pure conviction.
"We go to the Isstvan system."
Lycomedes clenched his jaw so hard a muscle bulged in his cheek. A murmur of disbelief and dissent ran through the other Ultramarines on the bridge. Their world had been unmade, their captain sacrificed, and now this outsider was ordering them to defy his final command.
"So we forsake our Captain's last order, Warden?" Lycomedes ground out, his voice thick with disbelief and barely contained insubordination. "We turn our backs on the very man who gave you this chance?"
Thaddeus turned from him, his gaze fixed on the tactical display. "No," he said calmly. "We are following his orders. All of them." He pointed a gauntleted finger at the display, tracing a line. "His last command to me was this: 'Take forty warriors. Go to Isstvan. Ascertain the situation.' The Honour of Calth may be gone, but the men who swore to follow me on that mission are not. We are that strike force. That order stands."
The breathtaking, audacious simplicity of his logic struck the Ultramarines dumb. He had taken their own unbending adherence to the letter of command and turned it back on them like a weapon. He wasn't defying Cassius; he was honoring his last, specific command, even in the face of their home's destruction.
Lycomedes stood frozen, caught in a paradox of duty. To obey the last fleet-wide command meant defying a direct order from the same captain. To obey the Warden's direct order meant abandoning the main fleet. But the Blood Angel was right. The order to go to Isstvan had never been rescinded.
Thaddeus did not wait for his assent. He strode to the pilot's console, where a terrified-looking serf was gripping the controls.
"Pilot," Thaddeus commanded, his voice leaving no room for argument. He pointed to the star chart, indicating a swirling nebula in a forgotten corner of the galaxy. "Set a course. To these coordinates. Now."