The holo-projector flickered, before displaying the final moments of the two orks battling on the desecrated platform. As the victor roared, displaying the head of his decapitated foe, the image panned upwards, just as a surge of lightning tore the sky.

‘Freeze image.’

Iwazar obeyed.

‘Is this what you saw?’ I asked, turning to Plient. ‘I have more images from a more recent flight, though I have yet to catalogue them.’

He was quite still, eyes fixed on the emerald light. His arm trembled. He opened his mouth to speak, but all that emerged was a plaintive sob, more akin to a wounded animal than a man.

‘Plient?’

The sob became a cry, then a scream. I barely had time to collapse the image before the chirurgeon appeared, stabbing an injector into the now convulsing Plient’s shoulder. Mercifully, his struggles slowed, his eyes flicking closed.

The chirurgeon turned on me, eyes lit with righteous fury.

‘Get out.’

‘I did not mean–’

‘Get out now, before I violate my oaths,’ he snarled. ‘He is not a plaything for your picts. None of them are. Parasite.’

The final word was spat. I could not think of the last time someone had addressed me so. My cheeks flushed with anger, and with shame. I wanted to berate the man, for I was visiting a comrade, a man to whom I owed my life. But what purpose would it serve? And did it really refute his point?

I turned stiffly, marching away, Iwazar trailing in my wake. As I left the medi-unit and advanced along the corridor, I could not dispel the image of the weeping Plient. He was once unshakable in his conviction, but now was as broken as any of us.

I ascended to the bunker’s entrance, trying to think of something I could do. There should have been a priest attached to the unit to provide words of comfort. But I had seen no sign of one, yet another indication of how thinly the Imperium’s resources were spread. And that was before reinforcements had been cut off.

It had to be coincidence. However much we underestimated the greenskins, surely they could not weaponise a storm, or use it to orchestrate their attacks? Such tactics seemed more in keeping with the treacherous aeldari, or one of the other ancient races. No, the storm gathering beneath Orbital Station Salus had to be a quasi-natural phenomenon, perhaps exacerbated by the space station’s proximity to the planet.

Yet wasn’t that our eternal failing? To dismiss them as dull-witted brutes, ripe for ridicule in our picts and propaganda? To not recognise the threat they posed until its blade was pressed to our throats?