The Horus Heresy: Vengeful Spirit

Rassuah let Cayne’s device and the motion of Tarnhelm guide her, allowing the ship to feel its way through the maze of destroyers, frigates, system monitors and orbital patrol boats. Cayne’s device was plugged into the ship’s avionics panel and was plotting a constantly-updating route.

The traitor fleet was enormous, many hundreds of vessels moored at high anchor. The bigger ships kept themselves geostationary, but didn’t otherwise move. The light cruisers and destroyers were the ones Rassuah needed to worry about. They patrolled the void above Molech, vigilant hunters and guard dogs all in one. Threat auspex lashed orbital space in search of prey. Even if a search sweep passed right over the Tarnhelm, Rassuah didn’t think they’d sniff out the stealthy infiltrator.

But in case they enemy got lucky, she ghosted the Tarnhelm between scads of orbital junk, keeping as many drifting wrecks between her and the hunters as possible.

Just the kind of delicate, hyper-intricate flying only one schooled and augmented by the surgeons of the clade masters could achieve. Even so, a fine sheen of perspiration beaded her brow.

‘You let me know the instant any of those destroyers so much as changes a micron of its course,’ she said.

Cayne nodded, but gave her a look of patronising indulgence.

She didn’t know exactly what his device was, but Cayne asserted it could pick a path through even the most densely layered defences, and so far it hadn’t let them down. Retroactively-emplaced mines, electromagnetic pulsars and passive auspex had been seeded through high orbit, but the device had sniffed every one of them out and provided course corrections to avoid them.

When she’d asked him where it had come from, all he had said was that it was a confection designed by the Lord of Iron in one of his more introspective moments. She’d laughed at that, telling him she hadn’t figured his primarch being one prone to introspection.

He had looked at her strangely and said, ‘The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards solitude.’

Leaving her with an assurance that the device would function perfectly well without him, Cayne returned to the crew spaces and Ares Voitek had taken his place. While Rassuah would pilot the ship, Voitek would crew its weapons. Any significant weapons’ fire would likely announce their presence as surely as a vox-hail, but better to be prepared. Voitek had plugged into the console, his senses meshed with the passive auspex.

‘Servitor-crewed one-shot,’ he said picking up the active surveyors of a torpedo with an implanted servitor to fire it upon detection of a target. ‘Nine hundred kilometres high on your ten.’

‘I see it,’ said Rassuah, angling their course to avoid its arc of coverage.

‘Overlapping sentinel array dead ahead,’ said Voitek.

‘Can you burn out its auspex with a tight-focus volkite beam?’

‘I can. Generating micro-burst solution.’

‘Ares, wait,’ said Rubio, appearing at the hatch behind them, his face lined with effort. ‘Don’t shoot it.’

‘Why not?’ asked Voitek. ‘I have a perfect firing solution.’

‘Destroy it and you will alert our enemies.’

‘I don’t intend to destroy it, simply blind its main auspex.’

‘It’s not the auspex you need to worry about.’

‘We take this one down and we open the largest gap,’ explained Voitek. ‘The only time these things register with the command ship is when they detect something. Its going dark won’t be noticed.’

‘Open fire and you’ll find out just how wrong it’s possible to be,’ said Rubio. ‘There is a corrupt Mechanicum sentience onboard, something analogous to a Thallax, but tasked only with maintaining a link in an auspex chain. Break that chain and the enemy will know of our presence.’