The Lion ordered an exploratory bombardment. The Invincible ­Reason, the Honoured Deeds and the Intolerant fired nova cannons. It was like shooting through fog. The beams cut through the necrosphere. Vast clouds of debris rose into the void, and a chasm opened, wide enough for the combined fleets and stretching for tens of thousands of miles.

‘What does this barrier mean?’ Holguin wondered.

‘At this moment,’ the Lion said, ‘it signifies only its own weakness. Death falls before us. We will not be stopped.’

The Lion took the Dark Angels into the necrosphere. The other fleets followed, descending into the endless grey.

The physical passage through the necrosphere was easy. The mental one was less so. Guilliman, Prayto and Gorod marked the journey in Guilliman’s chambers. They stood before a floor-to-ceiling window. As the Samothrace journeyed through the shell, the nature of the necrosphere became clearer. Grey remains, broken from their moorings by the blast, floated past the vessels. The boneyard of the infinite contained more than the skeletons of beings that had once been alive; there were the skeletons of dead vessels, of cities and of worlds. The inanimate had turned to bone. Iron and stone, alloy and gas, everything was bone and cold and grey. Planets had ribcages now, and cities had skulls, the better to show that they had died.

Other corpses were harder to identify. Some had the shapes of colossal beings, human and xenos. Others had crystalline forms. Still others were spheres themselves, smooth as the back of skulls.

‘Are those statues?’ Gorod asked.

‘They are still bones,’ Guilliman said. ‘They are something that has died.’

Prayto grunted in psychic pain. ‘Hopes,’ he said. ‘Dreams. Philosophies.’

‘The forces we have been combatting favour symbolism in their attacks,’ Guilliman said. Prayto was speaking from a more visceral knowledge, but Guilliman could see the possible meaning in the copses Gorod had pointed out. If statues represented abstractions, the skeletons were the demises of those ideas. It was as if, in their death, they had been given flesh to rot away, and bones to mark not the promises that their existence had made, but its futility.

‘Contact!’ Lautenix’s voice buzzed from a wall-mounted vox-caster. Then, a moment later, ‘Correction. I was mistaken.’

‘Mistaken in what?’ Guilliman asked. ‘What sort of contact?’

‘I thought there was movement, lord primarch,’ said Lautenix. ‘There is nothing in the scans. Perhaps it was more floating wreckage.’