Abaddon looked at the four kneeling on the cave floor. His hand flexed on the bone hilt of the knife. He took a step forwards, level with his father. The old man’s eyes were dark, their edges arcs of reflected firelight. Abaddon could feel the instant grow taut. He turned his head slowly and looked at his father.

‘I do not want to be a king,’ he said, and rammed the knife up into the old man’s gut.

He opened his eyes.

‘Fire,’ he said.

The War Oath roared as the ash-white ships came to meet it. Prow batteries fired. A pulsing spear of plasma caught a frigate and exploded its hull an instant after its shields collapsed. Blasts of energy chased the other White Scars ships even as they turned and burned back into the night.

‘Why do they do it?’ said Zardu Layak. ‘They are insects trying to eat a leviathan. What foolish hope burns in their hearts that they come again and again?’

Abaddon did not answer, but turned to the tech-adept who governed the ship’s communications. The creature was wired into a column of oil-slicked metal. Cables swathed what remained of its features, and a vox plugged the area of its mouth. It reeked of static and spoiled meat.

‘Signal to the rest of the fleet to maintain course and speed.’

The cable-wrapped creature began a clicking acknowledgement, but Abaddon was already moving towards the doors off the bridge. Behind him, the ship’s guns still chased the White Scars craft across the holo-displays and targeting screens.

He heard the steps of Layak and his bodyguards follow him, and felt anger rise. He stepped from the buzz of the bridge into the gloom and silence of the adjoining atrium. A dome of armourglass and iron capped the open space above – a typical mark of its Imperial Fists makers. The flare of the War Oath’s guns glinted across the starscape beyond.

‘You do not watch the engagement,’ stated Layak, still following. Abaddon did not reply, but strode on. There would be a council before the armada divided, and he would need to be ready for that. Every detail of each ship that was going into each fleet lived in his head. It would be simple to trust that all would happen as it must, but that was not how one made war. For as much as victory lived in the sword swing and the death of enemies, it lived too in the preparation of forces, the harnessing of leaders and the measuring of plans. Chosen from amongst his brothers for this task, Abaddon was neither a butcher nor driven by melancholic fatalism. He was a supreme warlord amongst warlords, and that reputation rested as much on his skill as a general as it did the edge of his sword.