Then the main lights crashed back on, the drives roared into action, and gravity tore hungrily at the ship as though angry at being denied its prize. Everyone slumped to the deck, flattened by the deceleration. Chetta gasped as her body tried to crush itself, and Kennevario bellowed as her weight crushed him. Hanging from the ceiling, Ngiri let out a moan of pain as her blood flooded to her head. And through the aft hatchway, there was an electronic-tinged scream of agony that lasted one, two, three seconds…

The lights died again, there was another brief moment of weightlessness as the gun-cutter fell the remaining few feet, and then it hit the ground with a tremendous and quite terminal-sounding crash. Its forward momentum carried the craft onwards for a short way with a grinding, tearing roar of metal on rock, before it slewed to a final halt.

‘Throne of Terra!’ Chetta groaned, rolling off Kennevario’s lap and onto her feet. Her right leg threatened to give out beneath her and she grabbed at the arm of Xudine’s chair to steady herself. She’d lost her cane somewhere in the preceding chaos. She raised her voice. ‘Who still lives?’

There was a muddled, pained chorus of acknowledgements, mainly from one corner of the hold where a pile of carapace-armoured bodies had been gathered together by the ship’s tumbles before Carmine had managed to flatten it out. The psyker himself was collapsed in a sitting position, his arms still tangled in crash webbing and his chest heaving after the exertion of levelling the entire craft.

‘Wha…?’

The form of Zaretta Ngiri jerked suddenly, and Chetta belatedly became aware that the inquisitor had been hanging limp, arms straight downwards. Kennevario turned his chair, with Chetta limping around after it, and the beams of his lights picked Ngiri out. The inquisitor blinked furiously. ‘I… must have passed out. Are we down?’

‘Oh, we’re down,’ Chetta told her dryly. She looked around again, and puffed her cheeks out. ‘I’ll say this for your team, Ngiri – they know how to cheat death.’

There was a clattering of footsteps from fore, and Jekri appeared. The former skitarius didn’t pause but simply ran straight through the hold, disappearing through the aft hatch. Chetta frowned, turning her head to follow them. ‘Is there a problem? Beyond the obvious, I mean.’