Warhammer: Echoes of Divinity

"How can that be possible?"

Grey pointed at the hololithic display. The surviving Blackstone Fortress was accelerating toward the warp rift at a rate that should have torn apart anything of comparable mass. Its acceleration had already matched that of an escort-class warship under full burn and continued to climb.

No corresponding drive output appeared on Talon's sensors. The ancient fortress's thrusters flared only intermittently, nowhere near powerful enough to account for its acceleration. Instead, the distance between the fortress and the rift seemed to be collapsing around it. Thousands of kilometers vanished from the displayed range, then thousands more, faster than the Men of Stone could stabilize the readings.

Everyone on the Celestial Engine's command bridge stared at the display. Grey made no attempt to hide his disbelief. Phoros remained rigid inside his battle-scarred Terminator plate, while several nearby officers exchanged looks they would never have allowed themselves during the fighting.

Only Saal appeared unsurprised.

The Aeldari's attention remained fixed on the rift. Its ragged circumference had contracted rapidly after the fortress reached it, shrinking from a wound large enough to admit an armada to a turbulent opening barely two kilometers across. The Blackstone Fortress's final sensor return had stretched into a line, broken into dozens of overlapping echoes, and disappeared.

No debris emerged. No explosion could be confirmed. Talon's instruments could not determine whether the fortress had translated successfully or been destroyed at the boundary.

"The Sea of Souls," Saal murmured. His fingers tightened around the damaged wraithbone wayfinder he still carried. "The fortress did not accelerate through realspace. Either the Immaterium drew it inward, or the fortress used the rift to shorten its path."

Grey looked from him to the diminishing rupture. "Can it do that whenever it wishes?"

Grey's fists closed at his sides. Fresh scoring covered his gauntlets from the boarding action, and dried blood remained trapped in the joints of his armor.

"We should have teleported aboard the moment it broke away."

"And what would that have accomplished?" Qin Mo asked.

Grey turned toward him. Qin Mo's living-metal avatar stood motionless beside the central command station, crimson light from the tactical display moving across its silver face.

"We could have disabled its propulsion," Grey said. "Or held it long enough for the fleet to destroy it."

"Its propulsion was already malfunctioning, and then it crossed half the engagement zone without using any propulsion we could detect." Qin Mo indicated the remaining rift. "You would have materialized inside an ancient weapon already touching the Warp. If you failed to stop it within seconds, it would have carried all of you into the Immaterium."

His gaze shifted toward Phoros. The Chapter Master's armor still bore the black dust of the fortress's interior, and the Lamenters' bleeding-heart emblem had been scored by bolter fire.

More than a hundred Lamenters had participated in the boarding action, almost all of them wearing Terminator armor. Phoros had led the force, with Grey and Saal attached to it. Losing such a force inside the Warp would have been disastrous. Having even a handful return as servants of Chaos would have been worse.

Phoros understood the unspoken calculation. His jaw tightened, but he gave a short nod.

"My brothers would have fought until death," he said.

"I know," Qin Mo replied. "That is why I refused to spend their lives on a pursuit with no workable objective. Courage does not become more valuable when it is used without a plan."

Grey looked back at the rift. Its edge continued to fold inward under the Celestial Engine's suppressive field. Nothing larger than a gunship could have entered it now, and even that would have been an act of desperation.

"Then it escaped," he said.

"Perhaps." Qin Mo studied the broken sensor record one final time. "Or perhaps it died somewhere our instruments cannot observe. Until we have evidence, record it as missing."

The command bridge settled into uneasy silence. Beyond the armor-glass viewports, the Cadian System was filled with wreckage. Burning Chaos vessels drifted among dead defense platforms and fragments of orbital infrastructure. Talon warships moved through the debris in organized search patterns, destroying crippled enemies that refused surrender and dispatching rescue craft toward any Imperial transponder still transmitting.

The battle had ended. Its consequences had not.

"In any case, we won," Qin Mo said. "Order the fleet to maintain the suppression perimeter and begin recovery operations. No vessel is to pursue anything into that rift."

Acknowledgments flashed across the command network. Tactical icons shifted from attack formations to security, salvage, and casualty-recovery assignments.

Qin Mo turned his attention toward Cadia.

The fortress world remained intact, but survival had not left it unscarred. Great sections of its orbital defense network had been reduced to drifting metal. Fires burned across several continents, visible even from the Celestial Engine, and the remnants of the planetary shield flickered over isolated bastions like failing blue lamps.

Fewer than ten hours had passed since Talon's arrival. In that time, its forces had deployed across the system, broken the Chaos battle line, destroyed one Blackstone Fortress, driven off the other, and reduced Abaddon's armada to a retreating mass of damaged capital ships and sacrificed escorts.

Abaddon would not accept the defeat as final. His Black Crusade still possessed armies, fleets, allies, and ritual sites scattered across Segmentum Obscurus. Cadia had survived the immediate assault, but the wider war remained unfinished.

That was enough for the moment.

A living Cadia could be reinforced, repaired, supplied, and defended. A shattered planet could only be avenged. Qin Mo preferred problems that could still be solved.

"Open a secure link to Klein," he ordered.

One of the Men of Stone acknowledged the command through the bridge network. A hololithic display unfolded in front of Qin Mo, its surface filling first with static and authentication runes. Several relay nodes had been damaged during the superweapon exchange, forcing the system to build a route through three surviving beacons before the image stabilized.

Klein appeared in the command center of Kasr Myrak. His coat was dusty, one sleeve had been torn, and dried blood marked the skin beneath his nose where the Warp pressure had ruptured small vessels. Behind him, officers and signal personnel hurried through a chamber hazed by smoke, dust, and the lingering heat of overloaded cogitators.

Creed stood at his shoulder.

"Lord Governor—" Klein began, straightening for a salute.

Creed placed one broad hand against Klein's shoulder and moved him aside with the implacable ease of a man repositioning an inconvenient piece of furniture. Klein stumbled half a step, glared at him, and wisely decided that reclaiming the center of the transmission could wait.

"What is the situation in the system?" Creed asked.

A cigar smoldered between his fingers. His expression barely changed when he saw the smooth living-metal face of Qin Mo's avatar, although his eyes narrowed for a fraction of a second. The Qin Mo he remembered had possessed skin, hair, and a much less unsettling smile.

"The main enemy force has withdrawn," Qin Mo answered. "One Blackstone Fortress was destroyed. The other reached the warp rift and disappeared before we could confirm its fate. The rift is collapsing, and our suppression field is preventing further capital-ship traffic."

Creed's gaze remained fixed on him. "Is Cadia secure?"

"Secure enough to begin recovery operations. Not secure enough to become careless."

Creed exhaled slowly. Some of the tension left his shoulders, though not enough for anyone who did not know him to notice.

From the surface, Cadia's defenders had only fragments from which to reconstruct the void battle. Communications had failed repeatedly. Auspex stations had been destroyed or blinded, and the planetary command network had received little more than warning signals, broken fleet reports, and the light of weapons powerful enough to turn night into a sequence of red and white flashes.

Soldiers in trenches had watched the sky burn without knowing whether the next moment would bring a planet-killing beam, an orbital bombardment, or the first wave of assault craft. Artillery crews had remained beside loaded guns while the ground shook beneath them. Medicae personnel had treated casualties under the assumption that their hospitals might cease to exist before the next stretcher arrived.

Now the defenders could perform the less dramatic work of survival. They could replenish ammunition, retrieve the wounded, reinforce damaged positions, and allow exhausted gun crews to sleep in shifts. No Cadian regiment would stand down while an enemy remained within reach, but they no longer had to wait for the planet to die beneath their feet.

Creed was silent for several seconds. Then he said, simply, "Thank you."

"The war is not over," Qin Mo replied. "Save your gratitude until it is."

"I am aware of that." Creed brought the cigar to his mouth, discovered it had gone out, and continued speaking without relighting it. "But this was never your war. The Talon Sector lies thousands of light-years from the Cadian Gate. You had no territory here and no fleet obligation. You came because Cadia asked."

His gaze hardened with the sincerity of someone who disliked wasting words on sentiment and therefore meant every one he used.

"So I will thank you now, while both of us are alive to hear it."

Qin Mo paused.

Creed did not know how severely Talon's interventions had altered the enemy's timetable. He did not know how many choices made years earlier had contributed to the ritual, the sudden assault, or the miniature Eye of Terror that had nearly killed Cadia. Qin Mo could not prove that every deviation was his responsibility, but he knew enough to find unqualified gratitude uncomfortable.

There was no value in explaining that over a command link.

"Do you remember the agreement we made in Tyrone Hive?" Qin Mo asked instead. "You helped reorganize my forces. I promised that if you ever encountered a war you could not manage alone, I would come."

Creed's stern expression finally shifted. He looked past the hololith for a moment, toward something only memory could supply.

"Emperor's throne," he muttered. "I was still a whiteshield officer then."

"A particularly opinionated whiteshield officer," Klein said from the side of the transmission.

Creed ignored him. "Tyrone feels like another lifetime."

"That is because you were even uglier in those days," another voice called from behind him.

An elderly man forced his way into the vid-feed before a signal officer could stop him. Age had narrowed his shoulders and silvered what remained of his hair, but it had not softened the mischievous expression Qin Mo remembered. Old scar tissue pulled at one side of his mouth when he grinned.

"Well, if it isn't the illustrious Lord Commander of the Talon Planetary Defense Force!" Jarran Kell announced. "It has been a while."

Qin Mo stared at him.

He remembered Kell as one of Creed's soldiers during their accidental detour into the Talon System. Kell had already been much older than Creed then: an experienced soldier saddled with a young officer, a bad situation, and the increasingly obvious realization that Qin Mo's improvised army obeyed few recognizable Imperial conventions.

The man in the hololith was unmistakably the same Kell. Time had simply finished the work it had begun decades earlier. His cheeks had hollowed. His hands trembled faintly when he rested them against a console. The uniform beneath his flak vest had been altered to accommodate a body that no longer stood as straight as it once had.

The old title struck Qin Mo harder than he expected.

Lord Commander of the Talon Planetary Defense Force.

No one had addressed him that way in years. The title belonged to an age of scavenged weapons, half-trained regiments, improvised command posts, and plans drawn for a single hive because anything beyond it had seemed impossibly distant.

Now he commanded worlds, fleets, and weapons that could lay waste to star systems. Somewhere along the way, the title had vanished beneath larger ones.

Qin Mo had not noticed.

His body had not aged. His mind had changed, but not in ways a mirror could measure. Most of those closest to him were equally poor reminders of passing time. The Shapeshifter treated centuries as tolerable delays. The Thunderborn had been engineered to resist the decay of age. Even Astartes aged so slowly that a few decades left little mark upon them.

Phoros had changed less since Qin Mo recovered him from a dead world than Kell appeared to have changed in a single campaign season. Looking at the Lamenters had never forced Qin Mo to count the years.

Looking at Kell did.

Time had not stopped around Qin Mo. It had continued moving through everyone else while asking nothing visible of him. Immortality, he realized, was very poor at keeping calendars.

"Kell," Qin Mo said at last. "You are still alive."

"Disappointed?" Kell asked.

"Surprised."

"Good. At my age, surprising people is one of the few forms of recreation the medicae still permit."

Creed gave the old soldier a sidelong look. Kell grinned more broadly and retreated just far enough to remain visible in the transmission.

A cluster of new reports arrived at Creed's station. The brief moment of reminiscence ended as cleanly as a command bell. Creed glanced over the data, then enlarged a map of the systems surrounding Cadia. Enemy withdrawal routes, damaged Imperial positions, and probable targets filled the display.

"I need infantry," he said. "The next phase of this campaign may not be fought on Cadia. Several neighboring systems have lost contact, and the enemy formations that escaped us will need somewhere to repair and reorganize. Cadia's regiments are tied to their bastions until we know the Gate is stable."

His finger moved between three projected systems.

"Give me one Talon regiment with its engineers, armor, medicae support, and dimensional transport. I can use it to investigate these systems without stripping Cadia's defenses."

The request pulled Qin Mo completely out of his thoughts. He examined Creed's map, the force-readiness reports, and the retreat vectors already gathered by Talon reconnaissance.

"You may have operational command of every Talon infantry regiment assigned to this front," Qin Mo said. "Not merely one."

For once, Creed failed to conceal his reaction. His eyebrows rose, and a rare smile appeared beneath the exhaustion on his face.

"All of them?"

"All of them. Naval deployment and strategic objectives remain under Talon command, but every infantry formation committed to this campaign will answer to you on the ground. Their armor, artillery, engineers, logistics units, and battlefield fabrication assets go with them."

Klein stared at Qin Mo. Kell gave a low whistle. Several Cadian staff officers stopped pretending not to listen.

"That is…" Creed searched for a suitably restrained response and failed. "That is considerably more than I requested."

"You are better at commanding large ground campaigns than anyone else available to me," Qin Mo said. "I have no reason to withhold forces merely to preserve the appearance of authority."

The decision was not an impulsive reward. Qin Mo had intended to place Talon's field armies under Creed's operational control from the moment the Cadian commander survived the opening assault.

Every briefing Creed received, every order he issued, every correction he made, and every after-action assessment he produced would be recorded. The Men of Stone would compare his decisions against terrain, supply constraints, casualty rates, enemy reactions, and campaign results. That body of data would train a command intelligence capable of reproducing Creed's reasoning under different conditions.

A Stone Creed.

The name was terrible. The idea was not.

Creed knew none of that. He studied Qin Mo for another moment, then nodded. The surprise left his expression as he began considering the practical consequences of the transfer.

"Then come to Kasr Myrak," he said. "If the enemy intends to continue this crusade, Cadia will remain the best position from which to coordinate the next phase. You will probably be stationed here for some time."

Qin Mo looked once more at Kell, at the deeper lines in Creed's face, and at the battered command center behind them.

"Agreed," he said. "I will come down as soon as the fleet command transfer is complete."

....

Meanwhile, within the Immaterium...

The Vengeful Spirit was no longer capable of fighting.

Its main drive operated only in brief, carefully controlled pulses. Entire sections of the port flank remained open to vacuum, and the lance wound through its gun decks continued to ignite fires in compartments damage-control crews had already declared secure. Every few minutes, another secondary blast erupted somewhere within the hull, rattling bulkheads and showering the surviving crew with dust from the overhead vaults.

The Gloriana-class battleship remained inside the Warp only because surviving cruisers had formed around it, matching its crippled speed and locking their tow fields onto its hull. Its restored Gellar field flickered under the uneven power supply. Repair crews and replacement servitors were transferred from other vessels through warded docking tubes or short-range teleportation jumps, each crossing timed between fluctuations in the field.

No one agreed on how long the retreat had lasted. The bridge chronometers differed by seventeen minutes. A repair cohort transferred from a nearby cruiser insisted that more than two hours had passed since the battle. One gun-deck crew swore the last secondary explosion had occurred before the lance strike that caused it.

Abaddon had no patience for the Warp's abuse of sequence. He had more immediate failures to address.

He sat upon the command throne surrounded by his surviving lieutenants. Typhus stood apart from the others, corroded armor leaking damp heat and the smell of spoiled meat into the chamber. The Red Corsairs were represented by a captain who had inherited the position after the previous envoy vanished during the retreat, a promotion the man wore with visible resentment.

The remaining commanders crowded around damaged tactical hololiths and argued over the future of the crusade.

One demanded an immediate return to realspace so the fleet could establish a defensible repair anchorage. Another insisted they remain within the Warp until Talon's pursuit ended. Typhus wanted the Plague Fleet released from Abaddon's command before more of his ships were sacrificed. The Red Corsair representative demanded compensation for lost vessels and spoke repeatedly of the surviving Blackstone Fortress as though Huron's ownership of it could still be confirmed.

Abaddon heard none of them clearly.

His gaze rested on the blackened deck at the foot of the throne. Something troubled him more deeply than the ruined fleet, yet he could not identify it.

He remembered having another lieutenant.

Not merely another warrior among the Black Legion's thousands, but a dangerous, capable, and intelligent lieutenant trusted with tasks Abaddon would never entrust to an ordinary commander. He thought he had sent this lieutenant on an important mission. The conviction remained firm even though every supporting detail had disappeared.

He could not recall a name, a mission, a face, or the place that person should have occupied among the Ezekarion.

Abaddon's memory had endured ten thousand years of war. He remembered the faces of enemies killed during the Great Crusade, the layout of command decks destroyed before the Imperium began counting its current calendar, and insults spoken by dead primarchs. He knew the scars of the Vengeful Spirit better than most captains knew the ships beneath their feet.

This was not ordinary forgetfulness.

It felt like reaching for a weapon that had always hung at his side and finding not an empty sheath, but no evidence that a sheath had ever existed.

The argument around the hololith continued until Abaddon raised one claw of the Talon of Horus. Every voice stopped.

"Are all my lieutenants present?" he asked.

The commanders exchanged uncertain glances. One of the Black Legion officers consulted the council roster, then checked it against the surviving members of Abaddon's inner circle.

"Every lieutenant summoned to this council is accounted for, Warmaster," he reported. "There are no absentees."

Abaddon looked around the chamber again. He recognized every face. No position stood empty. No name appeared to be missing from the roster.

Yet the conviction remained: once, there had been someone else.

"…Ah." Abaddon nodded absently. "Then… I must be mistaken."

.....

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