All weapon batteries cycled to ready. Vox signals flickered between each gun platform. The servitors looked deeper, focusing all their systems on the approaching ship. None of them noticed the frost forming on their skin and wiring.

Fingers of thought brushed their lobotomised minds, pulling them deeper into their focus, drawing their sight away from everything that was not that distant glimmer of a ship getting nearer. They did not see the gunships sliding towards them out of the dark. Unmarked by engine heat, the small craft had begun their flight beyond the limit of the platform’s sight. Minds inside the gunships reached out, focusing down and down into the root meat of the servitors’ minds.

The gunships’ engines fired. The servitor-governed systems saw nothing. They were still seeing nothing as missiles blew holes in the skin of each platform. Now alarms did begin to sound. Weapon servitors jerked to life, but too late. Crimson-armoured warriors were already inside the corridors. Waves of telekinesis blew in bulkheads, and bolter fire shredded servitors and systems. The gun platforms were silent as the lone ship closing on the comet became twelve.

Ahriman did not watch any of the last stages of the assault play out. In the dark of his gunship, as it burned towards its target, he focused his mind on the growing pattern surrounding it in the ether. He had been preparing, body, mind and spirit, for days, locking patterns of thought and symbolism into his subconscious. The roots of the Colchisian symbol sets and the Word Bearers’ pseudo-occult rites had required a great deal of refinement and integration into the Prosperine system. It was like trying to mix oil and water, or gold and iron slag. He had done it, though. Few others could have, he fancied.

+There is a failsafe in the comet shrine itself,+ came Ignis’ thought voice, cutting into Ahriman’s reflections. +A detection system slaved to a series of kill charges.+

+Disable it,+ replied Ahriman.

+That is in progress, but the detection system also has an etheric monitor grafted to its core. Our remote viewing of the outer halls almost triggered it. I have sent in Credence to remove the detection system’s core.+

Ahriman thought of the automaton that now followed the Master of Ruin like a looming shadow.

+It is a machine, brother. To give it a name is to try to call a soul into something that has neither the spirit nor the will to make choices.+

Silence fell between their minds.