On the bridge of the Red Tear, Sanguinius eyed the pict screens. Their displays were erratic, streaked with interference. Every few seconds, the effort to present coherent information about the intruder would become too much. The images would vanish for a moment. Sometimes, they would distort instead, and the hololithic representations and data summaries would become something else. A hint of a screaming, inhuman face. A shiver of claws.

The Red Tear’s Geller field was holding, at least. The incursions had been repelled. The rest of the fleet was not as fortunate. Battles still raged on numerous ships, but control had not been lost. The Blood Angels formation was as intact as Sanguinius could expect it to be in the empyrean’s tempest.

‘What ship, though?’ said Sanguinius. Much of the information he saw on the screens was nonsense. It had to be.

‘We don’t know,’ said Carminus. ‘We can’t even get a precise fix on its size, never mind its configuration.’

Huge, the pict screens said. The ship was a colossal black shadow in the warp. The Sable had fought it, and the Sable had gone.

‘How close did the Sable get?’ Sanguinius asked.

‘We can’t tell with any certainty, lord,’ Mautus said, apologetic and frustrated. ‘Closer than we were when it bombarded us, that’s all we can say.’ He paused for a moment. ‘The Sable lasted less than a minute against it.’

So powerful, Sanguinius thought. ‘That implies it did not use its full force against us.’

‘That was my thought, too,’ said Carminus.

‘Unless it was farther away than we thought,’ Mautus suggested.

Sanguinius looked at the screens again. The picture they presented was incomplete, but there were brush strokes to the impression that were clear. The ship was immense, and it carved a clear swath through the warp. Sanguinius seized on the sign of the monster’s passage. It was a direction for the fleet to take, the only one to appear since the Ruinstorm’s warp aspect had taken them. ‘Pursue it,’ Sanguinius said. ‘All ships. Form up, and get into the foe’s wake. Close with it.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Destroy it.’ That command was an illusion. He knew it as he said it. At the same time, he rejected the fatalism. ‘Destroy it,’ he repeated, his voice booming across the bridge, a call to action and to retaliation.

‘So ordered,’ said Carminus, and the fleet master sent out the command to the fleet.