The best we can hope for, then. With Terra invisible, there was no clear course to take through the warp, but if the coherence of the fleet was holding, the Navigators were managing, for the moment, to cleave to the course he had set them. The grand flotilla had direction. He could only hope it also had a destination.

The Angel moved to the command dais’ hololith plate. ‘I will speak to the fleet,’ he said. While communications still functioned, he would impart what strength he could to his sons.

Carminus pulled a lever on the console next to the throne, and the plate crackled to life. The hololith caster in every bay and hall of every vessel projected his image to the Blood Angels and to their mortal crews.

‘The transmission quality is erratic,’ said Varra Neverrus. The vox-officer barely looked up as she worked the controls at her station. ‘I don’t know how long it can be sustained.’

Sanguinius nodded. He thought he could feel the dissolution of his image as it reached through the warp, the claws of the immaterium tearing apart the transmissions, fracturing the self he was sending to his sons.

He had spoken to the fleet before the jump to Signus. That had been the Blood Angels’ last moment of true hope, and the last moment of delusion. They had been through the fire of ultimate treachery and of destroying revelation. There was no hope to speak of now. No promise of a cure. He would speak instead of strength and faith.

‘My sons,’ he said. ‘Legionaries of the Ninth, our war for Terra has already begun. The storm is our enemy as surely as Horus is. We know the nature of our foes much better than before. We know the truth of the danger they present. We are attacked on fronts far beyond the physical. We have seen how they might destroy us. But they have failed, and we are the stronger for it. Your armour is more than ceramite. You know what is in your blood. You know what you are capable of.’ He chose his words deliberately. Every Blood Angel would hear the two meanings of that sentence. He needed them to. The flaw he had cursed them with had almost destroyed them. ‘You know what you must guard against. Make that defence a sword. Its blade is the forged adamantium of our noble selves. Let us burn our way to Terra with the flames of our loyalty to the Emperor.’

He stopped speaking. He knew the hololith transmission had broken down before Neverrus told him it had.

Furious waves of unreality slammed against the hull of the Red Tear. The hololith plate screamed.

The edges of the Angel’s vision cracked. Filaments of darkness coiled. The endlessly repeated moment of his death stabbed inwards to his consciousness.