Kilometre-long cones of fire stretched in its wake as its engines began to pull it up the incline of Terra’s gravity well. Its court of ships came with it: the Regis Astra, the Eagle of Inwit and the Noon Star, warships all, and around them the attendant destroyers and strike cruisers that held the honour of being heralds to the empress of war.

Su-Kassen fancied she could feel a tremble as the great ship began to move. She and half of the command staff had relocated with Rogal Dorn to the Phalanx’s command bastion. It was a fortress grown from a greater fortress; a third of a kilometre long, the command bastion rose in two towers of black stone linked by bridges of plasteel and marble. The bridge, command-seat of the ship was the aftward tower; the forward and broader of the two was the strategium. From the bridge, the chosen captain of the vessel commanded the Phalanx’s movement. From the strategium, the master of a Legion commanded crusades and conquests. At this moment, Rogal Dorn stood in the strategium, linked by vox and hololith with Shipmaster Sora on the bridge.

The strategium itself hung in tiers from a domed roof above a plane of crystal, over a hololithic pit thirty metres deep at its midpoint. Blue light flooded the space, rising and rippling from the tactical projections emanating from the pit. Command staff, tech-priests and Legion warriors looked down into the bowl of light, focusing on portions of the displays through lenses and screens. Dorn, Su-Kassen, Archamus and a clutch of senior command staff stood on a platform directly above the holo-pit’s centre. Huscarls in Indominatus Terminator plate stood amongst the tiered galleries, immobile and watchful. Most of the staff in the strategium had been here when Dorn and his retinue arrived. A mirror of those in the Bhab Bastion’s Grand Borealis Strategium, they had assumed their duties seamlessly.

‘Signal the fleet elements in Terran orbit,’ said Dorn as data-lenses rose around the platform edge. ‘All forces to integrate to our command. All are to stand by for engagement order.’

He had given the order to move his command to the Phalanx two hours before, and the transports had been in the air and reaching for the heavens minutes later. He had not given his reasons, but Su-Kassen had seen half of the catalyst and guessed the rest in his words.

She had wondered if it was now, after the weeks of feeling the darkness and the threat of fire rolling closer, that he needed to take up the sword, not in principle but in fact. The fires of war could be seen as Luna rose in the night sky above the Palace. And so now, Rogal Dorn would throw the traitors back into the dark with his own hand.