‘Then you must remain a prisoner on this ship,’ he said, and nodded to the tall woman. The troopers moved forwards.

‘Please,’ said Mersadie, sudden panic rising as they gripped her arms. ‘I need to reach Terra, I need to reach the Praetorian.’

The officer in blue and gold-braid laughed, and then turned away as the troopers shoved Mersadie down to her knees and bound her hands behind her back.

Bhab Bastion, The Imperial Palace, Terra

Su-Kassen heard the door lock behind her, and closed her eyes. The smell of her chambers grew as she drew her breath. Relief crept into her for a moment as the quiet inside replaced the pulse of the sirens outside the Palace. She remained still, letting the moment stretch as she held the familiar scents in her nose: the tinge of hulkar smoke, cold stone and old fabric.

As senior officer of the Solar Defence command, she rated a mansion complex amongst the Imperial Palace’s tangle of towers and halls. She had avoided having to refuse such an offer by requesting a billet in the Bhab Bastion itself. Rogal Dorn himself had asked her why.

‘I learnt my craft on warships,’ she had replied. ‘I rest where I fight.’

He had nodded but not smiled, but an hour later she had been granted her request.

The Bhab Bastion stuck up from the mass of the Imperial Palace like the stump of a felled tree. Half a kilometre wide at its base, it was a cliff-sided block of undressed stone. It had been built when the land around it was a wasteland. For decades it had sat inviolate as the Palace had grown around it, replacing the desolation it had guarded with colonnades, domes and statue-capped spires. There had been rumours that it had defied multiple attempts to level it with increasingly apocalyptic quantities of explosives, until the Sigillite himself had ordered the mason-armies to leave it standing. Now, with gun nests crowding the Palace roofs, and void shields sparking above the armour-coated towers, the Bhab Bastion’s defiance seemed less of an ugly reminder of the past and more a warning of the future. When Rogal Dorn had begun to fortify the Palace in the wake of Horus’ treachery, he had made the Bhab Bastion the seat of his command. And for half a decade, a cluster of three small rooms set one-third of the way up its northern face had been Su-Kassen’s home.

Sleep. By all of Jupiter’s storms, she needed sleep.

A static crackle ran over her skin, and a smell of burnt dust and storm-charge replaced the taste of smoke. They were test-firing the bastion’s tertiary void shields again.