Forrix closed his eyes for three seconds and then opened them again to the light of stars and war. Fatigue, long banished by ascension to the Legion, had begun to creep into his being over the years of conflict and the demands of this phase of the operation. He had begun to find that moments like these, when his eyes touched the vastness of reality rather than the coldness of data, were like a rudder holding him true. Here, on a squat tower set high on the spine of the Iron Blood, was one of the few places you could look out at space with the naked eye, and so it had become his haunt.

A ragged fleet poured from the Elysian Gate before his eyes. Craft after craft slid into being, lit their engines and powered away into the dark. Some of them had once been proud ships of war, their old colours lost under battle scars and heraldry that marked them as without lord or mistress. These were the wild swarms of mercenaries, pirates and reavers that had flourished in the age of Horus’ war, and now came hungry for the fruits of Sol. Most were human-led, their captains deserters from one cause or another. Others were fanatics, ships full of converts to the worship of old gods with new faces, come to make bloody pilgrimage on ancient ground. They came in converted haulers festooned with billions of scraps of parchment, others in sleek warships scorched black to remove the marks of their old allegiances.

There were Space Marines amongst the horde, too. Ships commanded by warriors that had taken new colours and new names: The Burnt Word, the Brotherhood of Set, the Twelfth Truth – oath breakers all. Forrix had felt a twinge of instinct tug at him as a battleship in the red and black colours of one of these mongrel bands turned across the Iron Blood’s sensor screens. With a word the craft could have been reduced to broken metal and molten stone, a fate worthy of such creatures.

Beside them were ships that still wore the colours of their Legion, even if those colours were only a mask. Midnight-hulled vessels of the Night Lords, and ships of the III Legion painted like carnival masks, their vox-channels babbling noise. In Forrix’s eyes, these were almost worse than the others, carrion-reavers, and self-appointed warlords, the mockery of their lineage painted with contempt.