Vangorich kept his feet, but others close at hand fell to their knees or backsides. Pieces of masonry and a cloud of dust showered down onto the Praetorian Way from the spires and towers looming around the road. Veritus toppled backwards, the wooden steps splintering under the weight of his armour as he pitched with flailing arms towards the ground. Lansung held on desperately to the rail of the stage, flapping with his free arm.
In the pit of his stomach, Vangorich felt the next shockwave. It was like nothing he had encountered before. It was, for a brief moment, like being torn inside out, though without any obvious sense of pain.
Dizziness. Dislocation. Disorientation.
Just in front of Vangorich, Mesring was on his hands and knees, vomiting copiously. Others were staggering back and forth, clutching hands to their heads or guts. The Lucifer Blacks and armsmen were scattered across the Praetorian Way like matchwood as the whole road bucked and ripped under their feet.
Dull rumbling reverberated through the ground and walls. Alarms screamed and wailed inside the palaces. Adjutants and aides were squinting and grimacing as they held hands up to the comm-beads in their ears or stooped over vid-receivers.
Vangorich needed no one else to tell him what was happening. He’d read the reports, studying them in excruciating detail while other High Lords had been content to digest the précis. As he felt reality twist again, he stumbled out of the shadow of the massive vaulted Palace gate tower and looked up into the skies. Around him, others were starting to do the same.
He turned, looking from horizon to horizon. The day sky was alight with shooting stars. Streaks of white and silver fell as orbital stations and satellites plunged down Terra’s gravity well and were set afire by the atmosphere. Craning his neck, Vangorich looked directly up, into the patch of blue surrounded by the spires of the Imperial Palace. Something glinted above, bigger than anything else that had been in orbit. The sky had turned purple and green around it.
Many miles above, uncaring of Lansung’s victory, his speeches or any of the petty politics that had allowed its arrival, a monstrous star fortress larger than anything previously recorded extruded itself into orbit.
The Grand Master of the Officio Assassinorum had never known fear. At that moment, as he watched a false moon rip its way into existence above the Imperial capital, he felt a cold trickle of dread.
The screams had merged into a single one. On the Avenue of Martyrs, below the Cathedral of the Saviour Emperor, they surrounded Galatea Haas in an infinite variety. Every pilgrim, man or woman, child or adult, rich or poor, was an individual portrait of panic, a soul giving vent to the most profound terror. The entire rich palette of humanity howled around her; some of the shrieks were of pain, and of these some were caused by Haas as she wielded her shock maul, but in the end, all the fear and death blended together into the single collective scream.
‘Get back!’ Ottmar Kord was yelling, over and over, his voice hoarse with frustration and desperate hate. ‘Get back, get back, get back!’ Haas’ fellow Arbitrator was a few metres to her left, laying into the crowd with the same violence that she was. They were in the midst of a mob turned into a maelstrom. They brought their shock mauls down with such force that they had already killed more than a few pilgrims. The electrical discharge incapacitated nervous systems, but the physical blows cracked open skulls.
‘Get back, get back, get back!’
Get back to where? Haas leaned in to her shield, pushing back against the crush, but she wasn’t herding the crowd. There was no line to hold. The nine Arbitrators were scattered rocks in the foaming rush. Their proctor, in a compounding of bad luck, had been trampled in the first moments of the panic. It should not have happened. Morrow was indestructible. He was a wall. A simple mob could not have overcome him. But the multitude, caught in that scream, had been so strong that it had brought him down. The Arbitrators were not restoring order. They were lashing out at chaos.
‘Get back, get back, get back!’
Kord’s shout was meaningless. The words were just sounds, the raging punctuation of his blows. They were his scream. Haas was yelling, too. She roared at the pilgrims as she struck them down. She hurled her anger at their fear because, like Kord, if she did not, she would become part of the great scream. She understood the fear. They all did.
The universe had betrayed the people. On Holy Terra, where they believed themselves to be most protected by the Emperor’s embrace, they looked up and the sky had become the enemy.
