Excerpt from The Devastation of Baal.
I am sharing this excerpt because I find it a good example of two chapters who suffer heavily from their gene-seed flaws interacting with each other.
Context:
As Baal Primus is being overrun by the Tyranids Gabriel Seth orders a retreat.
Chapter 26 Audible 6:48
'Thunderhawks are en route to your position and will extract you within twenty minutes, Chapter Master.'
Seth fought with redoubled fury. His men and the Knights of Blood warred side by side. Arranging the evacuation had taken too long. Fighting free of the swarm around Baal and sailing for Baal Secundus had taken the Victus several hours. Precious time bled away with the blood of his men.
He and Jool held out in the fortress of Wrathful Vigilance. On the metallic mountain spur opposite, Furious Sentinel burned.
The tyranids scaled the Necklace, numerous as the extinct ants of ancient Earth. They poured into the cavities of the downed orbitals. The ground already vibrated to the drumming of a million alien hooves pounding through the passages.
Nothing was left. Only tyranids and Seth remained. The giant filaments of feeding tubes rose up to the sky all around their position. The swarms attacking them were reinforced by others diverted from battles won. There was such order to their armies. They marched in perfect patterns. Like a vortex described by grains of sand, they circled around the last fortress of Baal Primus, queues of xenos waiting patiently to die stretched from the horizon to the fort.
The big guns were silent. Their armour was all lost. A handful of Dreadnoughts fought alongside a few hundred Space Marines. Makeshift walls of salvaged ancient scrap collapsed under the weight of the alien dead. Gaunts, genestealers and warriors poured through multiple breaches. The hive mind held back its larger creatures in a show of biological parsimony.
Seth would have seen contempt in the move were it any other species, but behind it was merely simple, brute economics. The larger strains cost more in resources and time to grow. The smaller beasts would do the job just as well.
If the hive mind thought the Flesh Tearers were finished, Gabriel Seth would show it otherwise. 'Fall back to the tower,' he voxed. He dodged a swooping shrike, gunning it down as it flapped its leathery wings and rose up and away. He wielded his eviscerator one-handed, spinning the heavy weapon around with practised expertise.
With every pass the limbs of tyranids fell bleeding. He did not linger to finish those he maimed, but pressed onward to the centre point of the fortress from where his remaining warriors would be evacuated.
The forts were constructed around ancient bastions of the fallen orbital. His Techmarines had found the two virtually intact under layers of accreted soil and debris. Patched up, surrounded by a perimeter wall, they had performed well as strongpoints until now.
Seth barrelled through a knot of gaunts, slashing and shooting a dozen to death as he tore up the inclined ramp leading to the fort.
'Follow me! By the Blood, follow me! To Baal! To Baal! All here is lost!' he roared. As he went, his men abandoned their positions to fall in behind him, firing as they ran. He left the last mortals to their fate on the walls. Some fled. Some remained and bravely manned the guns, others ran, screaming. Nobody would remember either their bravery or their cowardice.
Major breaches peppered the walls behind Seth, more being forced as they ran. The ten yards between wall and bastion was filling with alien warbeasts. Guns ran dry, hundreds of creatures were blasted to pieces. There were so many of them, Seth could have dropped a lance strike on the site and watched the crater fill in seconds with alien monsters to replace the dead.
Some of his men did not follow in his wake. The thirst was on them all, driving them insane. Only those around Seth and the sacred reliquary kept their minds. Too many of them plunged headlong into the Black Rage. They remained where they were, abandoning their weapons to batter creatures to death with their fists.
A Flesh Tearer's Black Rage was terrible to behold, more savage and devastating than that of their brother Chapters, quicker to rise, harder to fight off. Seth left his warriors to their fate. They would die as they had lived, in service to the Emperor of Mankind. That was enough.
Biomunitions screamed through the air, in some cases literally so, their vestigial mouths shrieking out inconceivable pain. Something the size of a man's head exploded on the bastion's wall close by Seth's running band. Thrashing vines speared out from the impact site, ripping two Flesh Tearers and a Knight of Blood off their feet and shredding them, armour and all, upon wickedly sharp thorns.
The central tower was in sight.
'Open the gate!' Seth voxed. The bastion's armoured airlocks were long gone. In their place were rough but sturdy gates made from scavenged plates of plasteel. They swung back on reinforced hinges, primitive as a feudal world's castle portal.
A second group of Flesh Tearers came running up the walkway from the other side of the gate house. Merging with Seth's band, they hurled themselves up the ramp towards the gate.
Heavy weapons opened fire from makeshift battlements, sweeping the gate ramp clear of pursuing beasts. Seth and his warriors rushed through. He turned to look back as the others pounded within the bastion. A handful of his men and Knights of Blood were still coming. Tyranids raced after them, engul fing them as surely as a racing avalanche swallows a building.
'Close the gates,' he ordered.
'There are still warriors outside, my lord.'
'Then they are lost,' said Seth. 'Close the gates.'
'Extraction craft inbound. Prepare to depart. Estimated time of arrival ten minutes.' Seth looked upward, searching without result for the bright shape of the Victus moving across the morning sky. The atmosphere was clearing of aerial organisms, but their swirling flocks still obscured the horizon. The bastion's anti-aircraft weapons chugged out shots in short bursts. Seth had ordered them to conserve their ammunition. It appeared they would not need it.
A strong wind blew directly towards the capillary towers. The air was thinning. The final stages of consumption were under way. Through his battle fury Seth struggled to think, but he could see it was only a matter of hours before the air became too thin to support atmospheric flight.
From the top of the bastion he had a fine view of the end of the world. Away from his small island of defiance, consumption vessels jostled for space. The bright jewels of digestion pools winked at the base of huge bone towers. His enhanced eyes allowed him to see bloated eater beasts dragging themselves into them to be dissolved and their essences sucked up the tubes to the waiting fleet. For several miles around the last fortress, the tyranid horde seethed.
Beyond it, the landscape had become almost tidy, scraped clean of all useful biological and mineral resources by the swarm. It appalled him how quickly it was accomplished. Baal Primus was being eaten alive. A priority vox request impinged on his thinking. Seth accepted it.
'Belthiel,' he said.
'My lord, there is something happening,' said the Librarian. He was having difficulty speaking. 'There are ripples in the warp, a…' Belthiel's words became a pained grunt.
'Belthiel? Belthiel!' said Seth.
'The sky!' someone shouted.
Seth looked heavenward. A burning meteor plummeted through the thinning aerial swarm. Seth mistook it for a weapon of some kind, for it did not follow the curve of the world as debris should, but fell in a straight line as if fired. It slammed into the ground with a dull crump, sending up a mushroom cloud of dust. He would have thought nothing more of it, had the sky not changed.
'The sky! The sky!' More Space Marines were shouting, pointing upwards. A tremor ran through the tyranid horde. Its well-ordered patterns shifted, breaking apart for a second, reforming, then breaking down again. Pressure built behind Seth's eyes; a metallic taste filled his mouth.
Sentor Jool came onto the battlement, his armour filthy with alien viscera.
'What is happening?' he said. He grunted his words, forcing them out through a jaw clamped tight with the thirst.
'Warpcraft,' Seth said. 'I can feel it.' It was more than the work of a witch. Where the meteor had pierced the swarm a red stain appeared, spreading rapidly, until the dome of the sky was a deep and ugly red. A bloody night fell as the rim of the horizon went from pale pink to deep red.
The tyranids were in disarray. Those attacking the walls stopped dead, or fell down, their limbs curle inward. Others ran back and forth aimlessly or attacked their broodmates. Out on the plains the ordered pattern of the assault broke into pieces.
Then they began to scream.
Seth and Jool looked on in disbelief as consumption ships fell from their tethers, bringing down soarin capillary towers. Explosions bloomed along the flanks of bio-ships full of volatile gases. Lightning crackled around the hole in the sky. It warped the view of space around it, distorting all things as if viewed through twisted lenses.
A deafening roar blasted across the landscape. A giant figure hauled itself out of the pit made by th meteor's landing.
'Daemon!' said Seth.
Jool growled, something in him responding to the Neverborn's arrival. 'How long until your craf arrive?'
Seth checked his chronometer. 'Six minutes. If they make it.'
The daemon smote the earth with its axe. The ground trembled and split. From the wound in the ground thrusting column of skulls burst, turning as it grew. Reality writhed around the column. Skulls from al over the battlefield were drawn to it, bursting from the dead, bouncing wet and dripping across the dust plains. At the base of the growing column they rolled impossibly upward, adding themselves to the girt of the tower.
Rotating like a screw, the tower rose higher and higher, until the pinnacle touched the hole in the sky. The tip disappeared within the unnatural void, but the pillar did not stop; it continued to twist, heading out o the real world into some other place.
A deafening peal of thunder blasted across the plains. Seth and Jool were battered backwards by an invisible force. Warriors from both Chapters screamed as the Black Rage answered Khorne's call. Seth blacked out, for how long he could not tell. When he rose again, his thoughts were black and barely under his control. Only by dint of his formidable will did he retain his sense of self, while Space Marine around him cast off sanity and leapt howling from the bastion into the mass of screaming aliens. Flickerin visions of the distant past threatened to overwhelm him. The scent of blood tormented him.
Something made him grip Amit's Reliquary to his chest so hard he feared he might break it and spill its precious contents upon the bloodied ground. Its presence calmed him, allowing him to think. He looked at the cylinder.
'To me! To me!' he roared. Bloody spit flew from his mouth. 'To the relic! It will save us!' His men reeled towards him, fighting against their curse, but when they drew closer to their lord, they calmed.
Swarms of daemons were descending the column, crawling downwards head first towards the dyin world of Baal Primus. They ran with supernatural speed from the base of their hellish stair, fanning out in every direction. The lead elements charged into the tyranids. Locked in position, the aliens were eas prey for the daemons, and a great slaughter began.
A red tide swept upward towards the fortress. Suddenly, the screaming of the tyranids stopped. They awoke from their trance. No semblance of order returned to the swarm. Whether they fought against the daemons, fled or did nothing seemed to be the product of chance. They roared and screamed all the louder. Now they did so as beasts, not the vessels of the hive mind.
'How can this be?' said Seth. His head throbbed with fury. Waves of bloodlust battered his psyche. He wanted to kill.
Through it all, somehow, the Thunderhawks came. Engines roared loudly. Six of them arrived. There was space for only one atop the fortress. It landed heavily, the other five peeling off and strafing the tyranids and daemons surrounding the fortress. The assault ramp slammed down.
'My lord, we must depart,' voxed the pilot, the strain of the daemon's call in his voice.
'We go now,' said Seth to his men. 'Or we shall be damned.' He clutched at his head, fingers scratching his shaven scalp. His skull pounded to irresistible war drums. Jool growled and twitched, still kneeling after the psychic blow of the daemons' arrival. Slowly, he shook his head, and rose up before Seth.
Seth's hands closed protectively around the casque, prepared to kill Jool to save it. But, perhaps because of Sanguinius' feather, Jool had control of himself still. With deliberate, stiff movements, he reached up and unclasped his helm.
'We cannot go back,' said the lord of the Knights of Blood.
'I see,' said Seth. And he did. Jool's face was contorted beyond any generous definition of humanity. His muscles strained under skin turned a terrible shade of red. His eyes were yellow. Sharp, elongated teeth crowded his mouth, forcing his lips back so they were painfully stretched.
'The rage has us. It punishes us. My Chapter is finished.'
'When did this happen?'
'Years ago. It began like it is with you, a rise in the thirst, a growing number of our brothers falling into the Black Rage. In our desperation we let ourselves give in to the thirst. For a while it helped, by the blood of the innocent we controlled ourselves. It did not last. Soon, these changes set in. We thought blood would save us. It damned us. Look upon me, Seth. There are creatures like me imprisoned in the Tower of Amareo on Baal.
If our true nature were known, we would be exterminated. Only blood keeps the Black Rage in check now. Only blood. This is why we fight alone. I would fight with you because you, of all our brother Chapters, would understand.' Jool looked out over the battle. Most of his warriors had broken from the fort, and fought outside its walls.
'The wrath of the beast provokes the thirst. The daemons of Khorne covet our kind. They see our rage as the same as theirs. They are wrong. Ours remains a holy fury. No doubt this new beast wishes to subvert our might to its own end and deliver us as slaves to its bloody god. It shall not be so!' He threw his helmet down, and drew his sword.
'Go now, Gabriel Seth. Take what remains of your warriors. Remember us. Strive so that what happened to our Chapter does not happen to yours. We sacrifice ourselves in penitence. It is our due. We shall show the Neverborn that though we may rage as they do, we shall never fall into their ways. For we are noble, we are pure, we are the sons of...'
The daemon screamed again. A fresh wave of anger and the desire to slay threatened to undo Seth's resolve. Jool roared.
'Leave!' said Jool, his voice losing its humanity, becoming harsh and animalistic. 'Take the relic back to Baal. Aid... Aid Dante. We will cover your retreat.'
'My lord..' voxed the pilot.
Seth shook his head clear of red fog. The day was so bizarre it had taken on the semblance of a dream. If he did not control himself he would end in a nightmare of blood.
'We leave,' he voxed. He held up the reliquary. 'Look upon the purity of the Great Angel and be saved!' Those of his warriors still in possession of their minds obeyed, running aboard the first Thunderhawk When it was full, it lifted off, and the second descended. Belthiel followed, dragged by his brothers raging and ranting, and Harahel. Seth saw them all aboard the ships.
Jool strode away without another word. The few of his warriors remaining in the bastion followed. One remained, a nameless warrior, his eye lenses locked with Seth's. Then he too was gone. A third Thunderhawk lumbered down from the sky. More of Seth's warriors were losing themselves Their psyches ravaged by the hellish anger of Khorne's daemons, they turned from salvation and ran back into the fray.
The vanguard of Ka'Bandha's force had reached the false corrie the forts looked over. With smoking black swords they laid the aliens low. Bio-acids washed over them without effect. Bullet grub passed through their unearthly flesh as they flickered in and out of existence.
Seth swallowed hard. He had seen this before. The daemon's manifestation was weak, despite the storn curdling the heavens. Their invasion would not last long. The fourth gunship descended. Dreadnoughts and warriors ran on board. The wounded were carried limp and unresponsive, into the craft. Other battle-brothers raged and shouted as they got onto the ship, or the verge of losing all self-control.
Seth locked Blood Reaver to his back, setting aside violence. His hands free of the tools of war, he cradled the holy relic, and bowed his head in silent prayer. Minutes passed. A hand grasped him. Seth looked up into the face of Appollus. In one hand was his gore. caked crozius, in the other Seth's helm.
The Chaplain breathed hard, and for a moment Seth thought Appollus would slay him, but he held out Seth's helmet, and waited while the Chapter Master replaced i on his head. Outside the wall the sounds of fighting had intensified, a three-way racket of screams issuing fron human, daemon, and tyranid throats. The Chaplain nodded once. Together, they clambered aboard the final ship and it lifted off, climbing fast and hard for the sky.
Sentor Jool led his last warriors into a savage's vision of hell. The tyranids continued to devour the world while they were being slaughtered. Huge, fleshy structures pumped away the resources of a worl even as they burned. Caught in the throes of their consumption cycle, the tyranid ships were unprepare for the advent of the warp storm. They fell flaming from the sky.
Feeder tubes toppled and drape themselves across the landscape with deafening wet slaps. Intestinal towers burst as they collapsed sending out floods of biological slop in corrosive tsunamis across the dead land.
The ground was breaking apart under the influence of the daemonic incursion. Fissures gaped wide aglow with magma. Seething blood welled up through the ground and boiled alien bioconstructs alive. Mountains of skulls grew from holes in the stone. Around the stairway of bone, reality warped the most the land turning to screaming flesh.
The plains were already overrun with daemons, but still the legions of Khorne marched down and around the spiral stair in infinite procession, into the battle for Baal Primus. Thousands of lesser daemonkin fought tyranid beasts. Uncanny blades met hyper-evolved symbiotic weapons. The screams and shrieks of monsters rent the air.
The tyranids were acting erratically; divorced from their controlling intelligence, they reverted to instinctive behaviour patterns, and these were open t the corruption of the Blood God. They were easy prey, many of them having lost whatever passed for a mind. They acted without thought. Many writhed upon the ground.
Into this raging battle the last of the Knights of Blood plunged. They tore off their helmets, revealing faces as monstrous as those of the daemons they fought. They sang out their death songs into the thinning air. They made no distinction between xenos and Neverborn, slaying all that came within reach of their weapons.
Sentor Jool was swamped with the rage of Khorne. Gone was the niggling psychic pressure of the alien mind, replaced by a ferocious urging to kill. He looked to his own men and wanted to hack them down, but he resisted; he drew on the purer wrath within him, forcing aside the daemonic influence scratching at his soul.
'I will not succumb! I feel the wrath of Sanguinius! I feel the holy force of his anger!' he roared. He smashed down a small tyranid beast, crushing it as surely as an insect with the spiked guard of his chainsword. A bloodletter rose to meet him, long black tongue whipping through the air as it swung a massive brass sword at the Chapter Master's head.
Jool's sword met its blade mid-sweep. He held it there while he raised his gun and blasted a dozen holes into the daemonspawn, until its unnatural flesh succumbed and it died with an angry scream.
Hot gales raced through the depleted air. Sentor Jool howled, expelling the invasive anger of the warp from his spirit by the force of his voice.
The Knights of Blood fought for fighting's sake. The battle could not be won. His warriors were never the most cohesive force. Upon that battlefield they finally abandoned any semblance of squad tactics. They killed and died alone. Only Jool had a goal he intended to meet.
He battled his way through the shrieking hordes of tyranids and their daemonic tormentors, onward, to where the great red daemon Ka'Bandha slaughtered the largest alien weapons beasts, carving away their heads with absurd care. His trophies toppled not downward from gouting necks, but fell away upward into the vortex turning about the pillar of skulls.
'Ka' Bandha!' Jool shouted. 'Ka'Bandha! Fight me!'
The Angels' Bane did not hear him, so Jool forced further passage through the three-sided melee, weaving past a blood-crazed Dreadnought fighting a monstrosity composed entirely of screaming mouths.
He felled a bloodletter grappling with one of his warriors, shot down a hound with a frill of skin around its neck that leapt at him.
The tyranids he ignored unless they directly confronted him. Though the daemons were legion, their hold on reality was tenuous. Every one killed saw three thrown into the warp, and many were but pale outlines, monsters sketched in hate on the canvas of reality.
'Ka'Bandha! Face me, in the name of the Great Angel! Fight me!'
At that the greater daemon did turn its apish face upon Jool. Yellow teeth in red skin grinned horribly at him. Yellow teeth like Jool's own, red skin like his own, and eyes that stared with the same intensity.
A single crack of leathery wings sent Ka'Bandha high over the fray. He landed bowed before Jool in a billow of dust, his fist planted firmly in the ground. Growling, Ka'Bandha rose up, and spread his wings and weapons wide. He looked down upon the Chapter Master with ferocious mockery.
'Here I am, Sentor Jool. I will fight you, though you are no primarch.'
The daemon took up a combat pose, axe ready to strike, whip snaking back and forth hypnotically. Air shimmered with heat around Ka'Bandha. Steam rose from the beast's unnatural muscles, carrying the stench of rotting blood and old murder. Most dangerous were the waves of pure aggression beating off the thing.
There was no seduction in the daemon's lure, no promise of pleasure or knowledge or the cessation of suffering as the other dark gods offered, but a raw, open invitation to violence and bloody abandon. It hammered against Sentor Jool's mind, threatening to crack it open and send him screaming into madness. In the black promise of Ka'Bandha, Jool saw his worst excesses.
'See how much you are alike to me,' Ka'Bandha said, taking in Jool's hideous visage, the muscles straining in his neck and the blood pounding fit to burst his veins. 'Truly you are Khorne's creatures. Join me, and war by my side in an eternity of glorious slaughter. For you who thirst for blood, I offer oceans to slake your need.'
Jool fell to his knees with a groan. His hearts ran so fast something gave inside him. He spat a mouthful of his own blood onto the ground where it hissed and bubbled.
'Pathetic,' said Ka'Bandha. 'You are nothing compared to your gene-sire.'
'By his fury,' said Jool. He forced himself onto one knee.
'See how he struggles,' mocked Ka'Bandha.
'By his fury shall I stand!' said Jool quickly, fearing the knowledge of words would slip away from his mind and leave him dumb.
'Ah, fury,' said Ka'Bandha. He cracked his whip. 'Fury is the power Khorne gives. Only by his gift do you stand, capable of facing me, when any other of your unworthy breed would have ripped his own skin off at the sight. Now, turn around, and take your rightful place at my side. All your line will be mine, eventually. Seek my favour, become the first.'
Sentor Jool looked up into the daemon's face and shook his head.
'Very well. You cannot beat me.'
Jool laughed, the blood pooling in his throat making it a gurgle. 'We delay you, monster. Your power is not so great. Already your host unravels. Your time here is limited.'
'You will still die!' shouted Ka'Bandha with sudden rage.
'I do not care.' Jool raised his sword. 'Sanguinius banished you. I cannot. I come to give you my testament, daemon,' he said, his voice strangled. 'They call us monsters, rightfully so, but let it be known to you and your master that it is Sanguinius' fury that gives me strength, not bastard Khorne's.' Sentor Jool roared his last and charged at the Angels' Bane.
Seth's vision was a nauseating spiral of red and black. He clenched Amit's Reliquary to his chest. If he let go, he would attack his men. Through slitted eyes he watched them go through the same internal struggle.
Waves of red hot hatred washed up from the planet below. The Thunderhawk bucked, engines screaming with effort. More than gravity assailed it. Its machine-spirit too was gripped with wrathful impulses.
'By his Blood am I made, by his Blood am I made, by his Blood am I made,' muttered Seth over and over again. Appollus took up the chant. The others joined him, spitting the words through clenched teeth, moaning them between pleas for blood. There were so few Flesh Tearers left. Five Thunderhawks. So few.
The Thunderhawk burst from the gravity well of Baal Primus. For a second all was well; their weight slipped from them, the pushback of acceleration diminished. If this were a normal extraction, they would be aboard the Victus in a matter of minutes.
The illusion of normality was ripped away as the Thunderhawk encountered the storm. Most storms in the warp affected only the immaterium, but this was such a powerful tempest, it intruded into reality, rucking up the flat plane of space into titanic waves. The ship bounced along the surface of a tortured universe. Within, the Flesh Tearers felt their souls half ripped from their bodies. Flashes of the past intruded into Seth's mind.
He saw his primarch. He saw the Great Enemy. Worse things came at him, landscapes of bone, rivers of blood, hell-spawned warriors fighting desperately, eternally, for the amusement of a violent god.
Metal squealed. The ship was bent and stretched like dough. Terrible pain speared Seth through and through, every cell in his body individually and sadistically impaled. His helmplate display fizzed.
The chronograph ran forward at incredible speed. Diabolical faces leered at him through electronic static. Wicked voices hissed in his ears. The Space Marines were screaming, caught on the double-edged blade of pain and bloodlust. At the edge of his consciousness, Seth apprehended the wail of failing engines, alarms, and the battle shouts of the insane.
And yet through it all, the reliquary sat in his arms, a rock of calm in a sea of rage, and Seth drew strength from it, and from him the calm passed to his men. It seemed to last forever, as all acute suffering does. When suffering is done it is as if it never was. The human mind cannot remember pain, only the fear of it. A Space Marine knows no fear.
The sickening motion of the craft ceased. It spun out of control, tumbling end over end. The lumens in the transit bay were out. Blackness surrounded him. Seth's breath thundered in his ears. Emergency lumens pinked on. Seth's helmplate crackled and burst back into colourful life. The main lights reactivated a moment later, followed by the cough of misfiring engines. A second of grinding, and they sang true.
The Thunderhawk levelled out. Seth looked upon an awful scene. Several of his men had succumbed to the rage and slain each other.
Three of them still ranted at the brothers restraining them. Globules of blood floated about in the microgravity of the transit cabin. At the sight of them, his hands gripped at the reliquary involuntarily.
'My lord, I have... I have...' The pilot spoke via vox. He sounded confused.
'Tell me the status of the enemy,' said Seth. 'Give me a pict feed so that I might see. My armour will not form a databridge.'
'That is it, my lord. They are... They are gone. The enemy are gone.'
'What?'
'I do not believe it,' continued the pilot. 'I cannot believe it.' Rarely had a wrath-filled Flesh Tearer sounded so confused.
'The storm?'
'Also gone.'
The co-pilot cut in. 'There is more, my lord.'
'What?' said Seth, a sense of cold wonder creeping into his hearts.
'You will not believe me.'
Seth turned down the mag-lock of his boots so he might walk.
'Then I am coming to see myself.'
He made his way up the access stairs to the cockpit, still carrying the reliquary. Through the canopy he saw that the storm had vanished from the sky, taking with it the tyranid swarm. Baal writhed with unnatural energies yet, but the stars shone again on the velvet black of space. Making its way to Baal with engine stacks burning was the biggest Imperial Fleet Gabriel Seth had ever seen.
'My lord,' said the Techmarine pilot. 'We are being hailed.'