Justinian kept his eyes on the planet. Flashes of light burst further along its curve, drawing closer as the ship raced towards the battle site. Ground combat from orbit looked deceptively celebratory, a display of multi-hued explosions and storms of light that appeared too artful to be destructive. Shock waves burst clouds apart, and he spied Titans lumbering away from their coffin ships. Beneath the sheath of air, the giant war machines were like aquatic insects that had never learnt how to swim, doomed to laboriously plod along the pond floor.

‘Battleground two hundred and fifty kilometres and closing!’ said Sarkis, his excitement revealing itself as a slight rise in his voice. ‘Prepare for drop! Emperor preserve us in our flight and grant might to our fists!’

‘Four seconds. Mark,’ said the machine voice. ‘Three, two, one. Drop. Unit 10-5011/32A away.’

The drop arm disengaged from Sarkis’ back. The claw that held him dang­ling over the planet’s sky opened silently. A disposable thruster burned on top of his drop pack, shooting him towards the target zone, and the black-clad son of Ferrus Manus fell away. The booster exhausted its fuel supply quickly and detached. Sarkis fell without a word, plummeting towards the world as surely as a cogitator-guided munition. There was a flaring burst of jets as he corrected his course, and he was gone. Half a second later, the machine intoned Bjarni’s Primaris number. The wolf’s son fell with a whoop, a grey streak, his squad going one, two after him, swift as heartbeats, their impeller jets burning and detaching.

Then it was Justinian’s turn.

‘Unit 13-10889/189E away,’ said the machine, and let him fall.

The claw’s release was gentle as a kiss, the firing of the impeller hard as a punch. It ceased after a second’s burn. Justinian felt it come away from his jump pack, a bump in his otherwise smooth flight.

Justinian plummeted. The long, slender shape of the Rudense vanished overhead, becoming a blade of light in the sky surrounded by the starbursts of orbital combat. The ship drew away, trailing a wake of false lightning through the world’s magnetosphere and chased by the stabbing beams of enemy lances. Enemy fighters sped after it, drawing their own lines in the sky. Naval interceptors approached obliquely. They made marvellous patterns about the cruiser.

Justinian fixed the sight in his memory, and ordered his armour to capture a series of images at fifty millisecond intervals. Maybe if he survived this, he would paint the war in space. Justinian liked to paint.

The pelorus’ nested reticles shifted slightly, and he looked down. The circles tilted within one another, providing him with a false horizon and a vertical gauge to set his descent by. Cordus and Aldred were bright orange teardrops drifting across the circles, the members of the other squads yellow dots spread above and below.