But that memory of Maloghurst had not happened, said a voice in the back of her mind. What she had just remembered had never happened. She had been taken from the training chambers and returned to her quarters at Maloghurst’s orders. It had not happened…

‘Memories of what?’ he asked.

‘You, Sindermann, the Vengeful Spirit, how this all began.’

He looked like he was going to ask a question, when a light blinked in the collar of his armour. She heard a low chime, and the clatter of a vox-link connecting and decrypting. Loken turned his head to listen to words only he could hear.

‘So ordered,’ he said after a second, and began to move towards the door. ‘A major engagement is in progress around Luna. We will have to chart a course to skirt it.’

Mersadie nodded, still trying to grasp the strand of the memory that had risen in her mind. It was fading though, sinking back beneath the surface of the immediate, slipping through her grasp… There was something she had forgotten…

‘Loken,’ she said as he moved away. He stopped and looked over his shoulder. ‘There was a Navigator on the prison ship who escaped with me. I have not seen him since we reached the Caul – was he amongst the refugees that got off the ship?’

Loken gave a small shake of his head.

‘I do not know. I saw no Navigator, but it is possible.’

A laugh came to her lips as a thought struck her.

‘You might have known him, before I mean, during the crusade. He was a Navigator on the Thunder Break, part of the Sixty-Third Expeditionary Fleet – Nilus Yeshar.’

‘I never met a Navigator of that name,’ he said, and shrugged.

‘The universe is smaller than it seems sometimes, isn’t it.’

Loken frowned. ‘Is there a reason he would try to hide from you, and then flee without telling you?’

She thought of Nilus, of how the Imperium had tried to imprison and kill him ever since he had returned to it.

‘Every reason,’ she said.

The Phalanx, Terran orbit

The Phalanx moved by the will of Rogal Dorn. Greater than any ship of the Imperium, it was a moon of gilded armour and stone. Gun-fortresses rose in mountain ranges on its spine, and launch bays dotted its surface. A skin of atmosphere and ash from its engines surrounded it. Sunlight gleamed from the glass set in the cities borne on its back. It was not a ship; that was too small a title for it. It was war and empire given form and set amongst the stars.