The Lion listened to the noise flooding from the vox-speaker. There was static, the distant sounds of battle, screams human and inhuman, a rising clamour of voices shouting a language that formed a chorus with the resonance.

‘Close the link,’ the Lion said. Farewell, colonel, he thought. He wished her the good fortune of hearing the torpedoes arrive.

The first two torpedoes hit the besieged hives. The final bastions of Episimos III disappeared in a blaze of light thousands of miles across. The guttering eyes shone with a flare of vengeance. The intensity of the blast faded, then, but its spread kept growing. The atmosphere caught fire. The flame clouds reached around the globe like the peeling back of flesh to reveal the burning blood beneath. The second stage of the bombardment hit a planet that was already dying.

The Invincible Reason was close enough that its auspex array was able to filter most of the distortion caused by the resonance and register the process of the planetary crematorium. The initial ­torpedoes had split the crust. The wounds went deep, convulsing the mantle, triggering seismic upheavals that tore continents to shreds. In the southern hemisphere, the land screamed with the voice of a living thing. The second wave plunged through the wounds and hit the planet’s core. The pressure wave of the blasts pushed outwards in every direction. It could not be contained. The surface of the planet was invisible under the flaming atmosphere, but the upheavals were so violent, it vibrated before the Lion’s eyes. Arcs of magma rose thousands of miles. For a few seconds, the planet resembled a star. But the image was a lie. It was unsustainable. The pressure wave reached the surface, and Episimos III exploded. The raging heat of its annihilation caught the fragments of crust as they were propelled into the void. They melted, collided, disintegrated. Before the shockwave of the planet’s explosion buffeted the Dark Angels fleet, the Lion’s command had been executed. Nothing but dust remained.

The mind-scraping whine scaled new, acute, peaks in the moments of the world’s final agony. The Lion winced, and blood started flowing from his ears again. But when the planet shattered, the sound stopped at once. The silence was startling. For the space of a heartbeat, the Lion thought he was deaf.

He stood up from the throne.

‘My lord,’ the vox-officer called, ‘hails from the Red Tear and the Samothrace.’

I’m sure there are, he thought. ‘I will tell you when I am ready to answer.’ He strode from the bridge. There was something he had to do first. Someone else he had to speak with first.