'They are blinded, Lord of Winter. They do not see us in the Verse, the Oververse or in the Underverse.'

Russ grinned. His sharp teeth showed pink in the turbulent glow of the stars.

'I trust you, my kaerls and my warriors, to keep it that way,' said Russ. 'Take us between the binary towards the primary sun. Full speed. I want as much energy committed to the engines as they will take. Where fleets of lesser men match the speed of the slowest today we strive to sail at the speed of the fastest, my sons. Aegis to maximum. Charge weapons batteries - as soon as we are past this binary, Horus will see us and he will come for us. We must strike swiftly to decapitate the serpent.'

Adepts of the new Adeptus Mechanicus began their hymns to the machines. Russ observed them ruefully. Dorn called him a hypocrite; if that were so, so was their father, who had decried all religions as false save when it suited Him. Everything came down to expediency in the end. Russ took after Him in that way.

The Hrafnkel juddered. The multiple machine voices of its systems raised in a plaintive whine. The chanting took on a soothing tone. Grumbling at the imposition, the reactor of the Hrafnkel burned hotter, a caged star more potent than the feeble twins the ship approached. The press of acceleration weighed on the bodies of the crew, and the stars swelled with increasing rapidity. With the certainty of an avalanche, the Vlka Fenryka's void ships moved towards the gulf between the subsidiary suns of Trisolian.

The binaries were small and red, reckoned cool for stars. Such stellar objects were common, and though prone to fitful effusions of radiation, they were largely benign. Many habitable worlds orbited their sort in short years, close in, where seasons passed in the space of weeks and the sky was always ruddy.

Not so the Trisolian twins. At a mere fifty million kilometres apart they were greatly perturbed by one another's gravity wells, and the primary star's influence exacerbated that. Plumes of incandescent gases arced out from them towards their opposites, like the arms of lovers who could not quite touch. The space between was a boiling cauldron of natural plasmas and energetic particles. Already, at fifty million kilometres away, the shields of the Vlka Fenryka's void craft sparkled with particular interference. Russ glanced at a display in an augur pit, his post-human eyes able to pick out the detail. His route took the fleet directly between.

Plotting a course through the gulf was fraught with risk. Gravity eddies and coronal mass ejections as deadly as any starship's weapon could rip the ships apart, but not one member of the Legion raised their voice in concern. They strained at the leash, eager to hunt. The perils of the strait meant nothing. From the dangers of the warp to the no-less-deadly breath of stars, the Hrafnkel eagerly flew.