Sigismund did not reply, but watched the marker rune until the sensors lost hold of the dead ship’s signal. It had been the Sun Child – a young ship, set to the void in the year before the war had begun. Now it would drift as a tomb. Maybe one day its hull would be reclaimed by the victor of this last battle, but if not it would drift on the solar tides, cold and dark, until the sun claimed it or its iron corpse became a cloud of debris.

They had been losing ships day by day and hour by hour. It was as though the Solar System were claiming a blood price for every step they took towards Terra. Battle damage had claimed some early on, others had succumbed to their wounds over time. They had scuttled some, taking what crew and supplies they could and sending the ships to death pyres that lit the gulf of night. Others, like the Sun Child, they had simply had to let fall back as their damaged reactors failed. There was no choice, and all of the surviving fleet knew it. They could see the battle-light glimmer around Mars, and hear the broken signals from Uranus and Saturn. The jaws of the enemy were biting deep.

There were enemies loose in the gulf between the worlds too, wild fleets and carrion feeder ships looking for easy prey. Some had tried to slow Sigismund’s force. All who had tried had died.

‘We are entering the inner system,’ came the voice of one of the command crew. Sigismund could hear the exhaustion and the control in the officer’s voice. ‘My lords, what is our course?’

Sigismund did not need to look at the display to know the position. There were fleets down around Mars and swarming from the outer system to the inner. A large force was bearing down on Terra and Luna from above the orbital disc. It was not a choice of where they could make a difference. He had brought fewer than a hundred ships to this point – all were damaged and under-strength in contingent and crew. The battles they were riding towards would be the clash of thousands of forces as great as or greater than those they had faced at Pluto. The choice was simply where they would stand in this next passage of war and where their blood would fall.

‘On the ground of the world that bore me. At the heart of the Imperium that made me,’ said Sigismund, hearing the words come to his lips in answer to the thoughts turning in his head. He looked at Rann, and the scarred warrior, who smiled through victory and death just the same, gave a grim nod. ‘I will stand there, at my father’s side.’

‘And I will stand there with you,’ said Rann.

‘Terra,’ said Sigismund, feeling the tug of old prophecy at the edge of his thoughts. ‘Hold course for Terra.’

Sixteen