child's final words. 'A lie,' said Garro aloud, watching the poisonous smoke turn above his head.
THREE
Aeria Gloris A Poisoned Chalice Put to the Question
In the ruins of their enemy, the Death Guard task force regrouped and surveyed the breadth of the destruction they had wrought. The wreckage of the jorgalli picket fleet was a cloud of crystallized breathing gasses, hull fragments and the dead. Some of the teardrop-shaped xenos vessels were still relatively intact. One by one, these were being scuttled with atomic charges, reduced to sun-hot balls of radioactive plasma. In less than a standard Terran day, there would be nothing recognizable left to show the face of an enemy that the Death Guard had obliterated so utterly.
Out there in the shoal of destruction, Stormbirds on funerary details scoured the engagement area for Astartes who had been blown into the dark during boarding operations. Those found would be interred as heroes, once the progenoid glands in their corpses had been harvested. The precious flesh-matter from the dead would serve the Legion in their stead, passing on to strengthen new initiates when the next round of recruitment began. Once in a while, a lucky find would bring the recovery crews a live battle-brother, dormant inside his armour beneath the lulling pressure of his sus-an membranes, but that happened very rarely.
Beyond the zone where the Death Guard fleet gathered like carrion birds around a corpse, the jorgall bottle was executing a slow, wounded turn to sight down into the ecliptic plane of the Iota Horologii system. Drifts of wreckage and broken panels from the construct's vast solar panels floated behind it in a faint cometary tail. The main drives blinked out of sequence as the fusion motors worked the colossal mass of the world-ship about. Dissenting voices from the Mechanicum contingent aboard the warship Spectre of Death had petitioned Mortarion for a few days in which to loot the alien craft of technology. The pri-march, as was his prerogative, refused the request. The letter of Lord Malcador's orders – and therefore, by extension, those of the Emperor himself – was that the jorgall incursion into the sector was to be exterminated. The master of the Death Guard clearly saw no point of confusion in those orders. There was to be nothing left of the aliens.
And yet...
Nathaniel Garro watched the play and turn of the fleet from the gallery above the Endurance's main launch bay, above him a span of thick armoured glass and space beyond it, below, through skeletal brass frames and grid-cut decking, the expanse of the flight platform. Gradually, his gaze dropped.
Down among the sleek Stormbirds and heavy Thunderhawks was a single swan-like shuttlecraft, the spread wings of the ship detailed in gold and black. It stood out among the white and grey Astartes craft, a single bright game fowl nestled in a flock of pale raptors.
Aboard that vessel, a sole tangible remnant of the assault would remain after all the works of the jorgall were erased from this sector of space. He found himself wondering what other orders the Sisters of Silence had, orders that were unbound even in the face of a primarch's countermand. It was not defiance on their part to go against Mortarion's wishes if it was the Emperor's will to do otherwise, surely? This was not disobedience. This was a trivial issue, a small thing of little consequence. Garro had never known of and could barely envisage an instance when the commands of primarch and Emperor would not be in harmony.
An oiled hiss signaled the opening of the gallery's hatch and Garro looked to see who had come to interrupt his customary moment of solitude after the battle. A small smile curled at his lips as two figures entered the echoing, empty colonnade. He gave a shallow bow as Amendera Kendel approached him, a younger woman in a less ornate version of a witch-seeker's robes walking at her heels.
Kendel looked to Garro as he assumed he must
THREE
Aeria Gloris A Poisoned Chalice Put to the Question
In the ruins of their enemy, the Death Guard task force regrouped and surveyed the breadth of the destruction they had wrought. The wreckage of the jorgalli picket fleet was a cloud of crystallized breathing gasses, hull fragments and the dead. Some of the teardrop-shaped xenos vessels were still relatively intact. One by one, these were being scuttled with atomic charges, reduced to sun-hot balls of radioactive plasma. In less than a standard Terran day, there would be nothing recognizable left to show the face of an enemy that the Death Guard had obliterated so utterly.
Out there in the shoal of destruction, Stormbirds on funerary details scoured the engagement area for Astartes who had been blown into the dark during boarding operations. Those found would be interred as heroes, once the progenoid glands in their corpses had been harvested. The precious flesh-matter from the dead would serve the Legion in their stead, passing on to strengthen new initiates when the next round of recruitment began. Once in a while, a lucky find would bring the recovery crews a live battle-brother, dormant inside his armour beneath the lulling pressure of his sus-an membranes, but that happened very rarely.
Beyond the zone where the Death Guard fleet gathered like carrion birds around a corpse, the jorgall bottle was executing a slow, wounded turn to sight down into the ecliptic plane of the Iota Horologii system. Drifts of wreckage and broken panels from the construct's vast solar panels floated behind it in a faint cometary tail. The main drives blinked out of sequence as the fusion motors worked the colossal mass of the world-ship about. Dissenting voices from the Mechanicum contingent aboard the warship Spectre of Death had petitioned Mortarion for a few days in which to loot the alien craft of technology. The pri-march, as was his prerogative, refused the request. The letter of Lord Malcador's orders – and therefore, by extension, those of the Emperor himself – was that the jorgall incursion into the sector was to be exterminated. The master of the Death Guard clearly saw no point of confusion in those orders. There was to be nothing left of the aliens.
And yet...
Nathaniel Garro watched the play and turn of the fleet from the gallery above the Endurance's main launch bay, above him a span of thick armoured glass and space beyond it, below, through skeletal brass frames and grid-cut decking, the expanse of the flight platform. Gradually, his gaze dropped.
Down among the sleek Stormbirds and heavy Thunderhawks was a single swan-like shuttlecraft, the spread wings of the ship detailed in gold and black. It stood out among the white and grey Astartes craft, a single bright game fowl nestled in a flock of pale raptors.
Aboard that vessel, a sole tangible remnant of the assault would remain after all the works of the jorgall were erased from this sector of space. He found himself wondering what other orders the Sisters of Silence had, orders that were unbound even in the face of a primarch's countermand. It was not defiance on their part to go against Mortarion's wishes if it was the Emperor's will to do otherwise, surely? This was not disobedience. This was a trivial issue, a small thing of little consequence. Garro had never known of and could barely envisage an instance when the commands of primarch and Emperor would not be in harmony.
An oiled hiss signaled the opening of the gallery's hatch and Garro looked to see who had come to interrupt his customary moment of solitude after the battle. A small smile curled at his lips as two figures entered the echoing, empty colonnade. He gave a shallow bow as Amendera Kendel approached him, a younger woman in a less ornate version of a witch-seeker's robes walking at her heels.
Kendel looked to Garro as he assumed he must
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