‘That is gone,’ said the Lion. ‘Let us bring an end to this, too.’

Seconds later, the monster guns of the fortress opened fire.

Nine

Nine

The Harrowing of Pyrrhan

The daemon flames reached out for the fleet. Eruptions of warp energy lashed at the void. They burned and slashed, a storm and a web. The Blood Angels battle-barge Lineage of Virtue was the first caught in the nexus of the crossfire. Its void shields collapsed in seconds. Writhing beams of warp fire cut through the centre of the hull. Conflagrations raced across all decks. The starboard engine exploded, blowing out a fifth of the hull’s length, venting thousands of crew and scores of legionaries into space. Captain Athaniel’s last vox-transmission was a vow to his brothers and to the Angel.

‘Our pyre shall be your shield,’ he said, and the Lineage of Virtue began its turn, exposing more and more of its port flank to the fortress, taking on the barrage, blocking at least some of it from the vessels in its lee. It kept turning, becoming a torch, and as the rest of the fleet pulled further away, racing for the shelter of the southern hemisphere of the planet, one last burst from the Virtue’s port engine sent the ship plummeting towards the gate.

By will or chance or fate, the Virtue held together until it crashed into the gate. The plasma sun of its explosion destroyed hundreds of square miles of daemonic turrets. The effect was a pinprick, yet the pinprick was enough to save at least the Blood’s Son and the ­Encarnadine, which had been closest to the battle-barge.

Four more vessels from the combined fleets died before the expeditionary force put the planet between it and the turret fire. They died too suddenly even to vox a farewell.

‘We have identified the planet,’ Khalybus voxed the primarchs. ‘Enough of the topography of the southern hemisphere is unchanged. It is the forge world Pyrrhan. We had refugees from it on Thrinos. It was visited by the Pilgrim.’