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The battlefield stank of cordite and char, thick enough to turn your stomach.
Katerina Greyfax hauled herself halfway out of a blackened blast crater.
She watched the sickly green beam erupt from the Blackstone Spire, blindingly bright, a pillar of light that punched straight through Cadia's radiation-choked sky.
It swept across the positions in a single pass. The Khorne daemons that had been rampaging through the lines a second before didn't even get to scream. They just ca apart, dissolving into drifting curtains of ash.
The Chaos Space Marines stopped firing. One after another, they went silent.
The Despoiler's mandatory retreat order had co through on the comms. Transport ships dropped like rain, lifting the traitors out.
They were pulling back.
Greyfax pulled off her wide-brimd Inquisitor's hat, caked in mud and grey with ash, and shook it hard.
She looked around.
Bodies. As far as she could see, nothing but bodies.
One hour ago, she and her Stormtroopers, a full-strength company of 100 Space Marines, and several regints of Astra Militarum infantry had been dumped onto this battlefield by a Necron with a skeleton of living tal, shaken out of a glowing cube like soone emptying a bin.
Trazyn the Infinite. The collector who had kept her as a display piece for however many centuries, now calling it "releasing reinforcents to defend the spire."
The result?
These Imperial elites, fresh out of stasis, hadn't even worked out what millennium they'd woken into before they ran headlong into daemon engines, Heldrakes, Chaos Astartes, and Dreadnoughts.
Those 100 Space Marine veterans in their ancient power armor had lived up to their gene-sire. They ford ranks and drove counter-charges straight into the Skull Cannon's fire.
It didn't matter. Against that tide, a hundred n was nothing. A handful of stones thrown into a flood.
They held for less than 45 minutes.
All 100 of them, veterans from ten thousand years ago, died to the last. Their armor was torn apart by heretics. The Astra Militarum regints went with them.
Now, of everything Trazyn had released onto this position, only Greyfax and three or four gasping Stormtroopers were left standing.
"My lady." A Stormtrooper's voice ca out unsteady. He was pointing at the sky. "Look."
Greyfax looked up.
So did every Imperial defender still alive on that field, Astra Militarum, Astartes, Sisters of Battle, all of them.
The green light had briefly cleared Cadia's orbital space. What filled it now was worse.
Abaddon hadn't surrendered. He'd never been retreating.
The Black Legion's fleet had torn a hole straight through the Imperial Navy's defensive line. Through that gap ca a warship of grotesque, brutal design, its main cannon muzzle wide enough to swallow a hive city whole. The Planet Killer. Alongside it, another Blackstone Fortress, intact and undamaged, both of them moving under the escort of a Gloriana-class battleship, the Vengeful Spirit, pressing slowly down into Cadia's low orbit.
The cannon muzzles began to glow. A deep, ruinous red.
The surface defenders had no ti to react.
Two energy beams, each thick enough to bore through the planetary crust, crossed in an X and hamred into the void shield above Kasr Kraf.
BOOM.
The earth lurched. Air raid sirens scread at a pitch that felt like it would split your skull open.
Cadia's translucent planetary void shield, the barrier that had held through everything, began to crack. Dense, honeycomb fractures spread across its surface under the sustained bombardnt, multiplying faster than the eye could track.
Then CRACK, the sound of it breaking carried through every bunker on the array broadcast. Clean. Final.
The void shield generators overloaded and blew.
Cadia's sky was open. Completely, utterly open to the Chaos fleet.
CLANG.
The underground bunker's heavy lift platform smashed through the damaged surface isolation door.
Lord Castellan Creed stepped out of the lift car, surrounded by guards, moving fast.
Behind him ca the Living Saint Celestine, her wings dusted with ash and streaked with blood, her bearing untouched by any of it.
Behind her: Kaelen, lasgun in hand, and two tall figures wrapped in canvas cloaks, faces hidden, Horus and Cullen.
"Full-army channel broadcast!" Creed was already talking before he'd fully cleared the door. A comms officer thrust a wide-area pickup mic toward him and Creed took it without breaking stride.
He tilted his head back and stared at the sky. At the Chaos fleet. At the Blackstone Fortress wreckage being pushed, slowly and deliberately, toward Cadia.
Kaelen's warning from the underground facility had been right.
Abaddon had taken a beating in close combat. His pride had been ground into the dirt. And now the madman had stopped caring about any of it.
The Planet Killer and the new Blackstone Fortress had overloaded Cadia's void shield for one purpose: to use the wreckage of the previous Blackstone Fortress, the Will of Eternity, as a teor. A hamr. Sothing to drop on Cadia from orbit and crack it open.
Abaddon was going to smash the planet to pieces.
Creed bit through his lower lip. He tasted iron.
"I am the Lord Castellan of Cadia. Ursarkar E. Creed."
His voice rolled out across every burning position, every trench, every bunker still standing.
"All formation sequences — cease holding in place. Abandon all fortress bunkers."
"Converge imdiately on the spaceports and the nearest landing zones."
"All flight-capable vehicles, Valkyries, transports, anything that flies — ignite engines and get airborne now."
The hardest order of his life.
"Board ships. Evacuate Cadia."
The Astra Militarum soldiers heard it and went still.
Cadia stands.
It was carved into them. Into their bones, their blood, the way they'd been raised to fight and die. And now their Lord Castellan was ordering them to walk away from the positions they'd held with their own hands.
"Move it! All of you, run!" Creed's roar tore across the line. The corners of his eyes had split open, blood running down with the tears. "Staying here is death! As long as you're alive, Cadia is not dead!"
The line broke, not in rout but in motion. The instinct to survive swallowed the obsession to hold. The evacuation erupted across the field, frantic and massive, racing against the countdown burning in the sky above them.
---
"Can we truly not save this place? Just let Cadia fall?" Horus's voice was low, tight. "Had I known, I should not have hesitated. I should have killed Ezekyle when I had the chance."
Beneath his cloak, his eyes churned with sothing he couldn't contain. Unwillingness. Raw and bitter.
Aside from the giant spiders of Murder, he had never once in his life let a victory slip through his fingers when it was already in his grasp.
He had defeated Abaddon.
And Abaddon was still about to win this war.
"Try not to interfere with certain things." Kaelen was quiet for a mont. "I said it before, the Emperor doesn't want Abaddon dead. Not yet."
He paused.
"Maybe he's also willing to let Cadia fall."
"The Emperor." Cullen's voice was flat. "Why would he do this?"
"He must have his own grand illness driving him to it." Kaelen's delivery was dry, a bad joke. Cullen's frown made that clear. Kaelen moved on before the old knight could say anything. "The Great Rift from the Eye of Terror cuts across the entire galaxy. Chaos and the Emperor both draw from the sa empowernt when it tears open."
"It also makes it easier for the Emperor to reach into the material world directly. Don't forget, he's a powerful psyker. You two know better than I do what a psyker at that level can actually do."
Kaelen looked at them both.
"Let's move. The Battle for Cadia is over. Next stop — Macragge."
"My Wolf Lord." There was sothing light in Kaelen's tone now, almost curious. "What do you think Guilliman's reaction will be when he sees you? The awakened lord of the Ultramarines, face to face with his dead brother?"
A soft laugh ca from beneath Horus's hood. He was quiet for a mont, turning it over. Horror? Fury? Or sothing else entirely?
"I hope," Horus said, "that the first thing he does when he sees is not kill ."
➤ Next: Evacuation of Cadia
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