Garro stepped around an injured officer whose only inhalations came from a mechanical breather machine, and stopped at the glass pod of the isolation chamber. With care, Garro took his helmet – the repairs upon it were still visible, unfinished spots where paint had yet to be applied – and sealed it to the neck ring of his armour. Then, after checking the seals
on every joint and vent, he locked down the battle suit, preventing any possibility of outside contagions entering his wargear. Garro passed through the chamber's airlock array and entered the sealed room. A medicae servitor tended to Decius with slow, deliberate care. The captain noted that the fleshy components of the machine-helot were already grey with infection. Voyen's reports noted that two servitors had died already from slow exposure to whatever poison Grul-gor had poured into the youth's wound. It was a testament to the potency of the Astartes biology that Decius was not dead a dozen times over.
Inside the armour Garro would be safe, and the stringent purification systems of the isolation chamber would stop any contamination following him out. He had no doubts that the chance of infection still existed, but he would risk it. He had to look the lad in the eye.
There on the recovery cradle, Solun Decius lay stripped of his power armour and swaddled in a mesh-like covering of metallic probes and narthecia injectors. The wound where Grulgor's plague knife had cut him was a mess of pustules and livid flesh on the verge between bilious life and necrotic death. It refused to knit closed, bleeding into a catch-bowl beneath the cradle. Portions of Decius's skin were missing where the medicae had plugged feed ducts and mechadendrites directly into the raw nerves. A forest of thin steel needles colonised the thick hide of the black carapace across his torso. Thin, white drool looped from Decius's lips and a pipe forced air into his nostrils with rhythmic mechanical clicks.
The Astartes was an ashen rendition of himself, the colour of a week-old corpse. Had Garro seen such a body on the battlefield, he would have cast it on to the pyre and let it burn. For a moment, Nathaniel
found his hand near the hilt of Libertas and Voyen's words echoed in his thoughts. You should consider granting him release.
'That would make a lie of what I said to Qruze/ he said aloud. 'The fight is all that we have now. The struggle is what defines us, brother.'
'Brother…'
The voice was so faint that at first Garro thought he had imagined it, but then he looked down and saw a flicker of motion as Decius's eyes opened into slits. 'Solun? Can you hear me, boy?'
'I can… hear you.' His voice was thick with mucus. 'I hear it, captain… inside me… the thunder in my blood.'
Suddenly, Garro's sword seemed to be ten times its weight. 'Solun, what do you want?'
Decius blinked, even this smallest of motions appearing to pain him terribly. 'Answers, lord.' He gasped in a breath of air. 'Why have you saved us?'
Garro pulled back in surprise. 'I had to,' he blurted. 'You are my battle-brothers! I could not let you perish.'
'Is that… the better path?' the wounded warrior whispered. 'Unending war between brothers… We saw it, captain. If that… if that is the future, then perhaps…'
'You would have us embrace death?' Garro shook his head. 'I know your pain is great, brother, but you cannot submit to it! We cannot admit defeat!' He placed his hand on Decius's chest. 'Only in death does duty end, Solun, and only the Emperor can grant us that.'
'Emperor…' The word was a dim echo. 'Forsaken… We have been forsaken, my lord, lost and forgotten. The beast Grulgor did not lie… We are alone.'
'I refuse to accept that!' Garro's words became a shout. *We will find salvation, brother, we will! You must have faith!'
Decius coughed and the pipes in his mouth gurgled, red-green fluid siphoning away into a disposal tank. 'All I have is pain, pain and loss…' His bloodshot eyes found Garro and bored into him. 'We are lost, my captain. We know not where or when we are… The warp has made sport with us, cast us into the void.'
'We will be found.' Garro's words seemed hollow.
'By what, lord? What if… if the time we were lost in the empyrean was not hours… but millennia? The warning… worthless!' He coughed again, his body tensing. We may be ten thousand years too late… and our galaxy burns with chaos…' The effort of speaking drained the Astattes and he sank back into the cradle, the shambling servitor creaking to his side with a fan of outstretched fingers made of syringes and blades.
Garro watched Decius's eyelids flutter closed and the youth's consciousness slipped away once more. After a long moment, the battle-captain turned back to the airlocks and began the arduous process of cleansing his wargear of any lingering taint.
When he stepped out of the isolation chamber's outer hatch, he saw Sendek charging towards him across the infirmary, his face tight with tension.
'Captain! When I could not reach you, I feared something had happened!'
Garro jerked a thumb at the chamber's thick walls. 'The protective field baffles in there are electromag-netically charged. Vox signals won't penetrate inside.' He frowned at the alarm in Sendek's voice. What is it that requires my attention so urgently?'
'Sir, the Eisenstein's sensor grids were badly damaged in the shock from the warp flare and the engagement with Typhon, and we have only partial function-'
'Spit it out/ snapped Garro.
Sendek took a breath. There are ships, captain. We have detected multiple warp gate reactions less than four light-minutes distant. They appear to be moving to an interception heading.'
He should have felt elation. He should have been thinking of rescue, but instead, Garro's black mood brought him only imagined terrors and predictions of the worst. 'How many craft? Mass and tonnage?'
The sensors gave me only the vaguest of estimates, but it is a fleet, sir, a large one.'
'Horus?' Garro breathed. 'Could he have followed us?'
'Unknown. The ship's external vox transceiver is inoperable, so we cannot search for any identifier beacons' Sendek paused. They could be anything, anyone, perhaps an ally, perhaps ships on their way to join the Warmaster's insurrection, or even xenos.'
And here we sit, blind and toothless before them.' Garro fell silent, weighing his options. 'If we cannot know the face of these new arrivals, then we must encourage them to show it to us. They must have been drawn by the flare. Any commander worth the rank will send a boarding party to investigate. We will allow it, and from there take the measure of them.'
At their rate of closure, there is little time to prepare,' Sendek noted.
Agreed/ Garro said with a nod. 'These are my orders. Issue weapons to all the crew who know how to use them and get everyone else into the core tiers. Find somewhere they can be protected. I want
Astartes at every entry point, ready to repel boarders, but no one is to engage in hostilities unless it is by my word of command.'
The armoury chambers would be best,' mused Sendek, 'they are heavily shielded. Many of the crew are there already, with the… the woman.'
Garro's lip curled. 'Sanctuary in the new church. It seems fitting.' He gathered up his bolter. 'Quickly, then. We must be ready to meet our saviours or our assassins with equal vigour.'
They crowded about the frigate in the manner of wolves circling a wounded prey animal, observing and considering the condition of the Eisenstein. Sensor dishes and listening gear turned to face the drifting warship, and learned minds attempted to discern the chain of events that had led to its circumstances.
Vessels that dwarfed the Imperial frigate placed hordes of armed lance cannons upon the ship's target silhouette, computing firing solutions and warming their guns in preparation for her destruction. Only one volley, and even then not one at full capacity, would be enough to obliterate the Eisenstein forever. It would only be a matter of a single word of command, a button pushed, a trigger pulled.
The fleet moved slowly. Some of its number had counselled for the immediate destruction of the derelict, concerned that the flare it had generated to bring them here might only have been a lure. Even a ship the size of a mere frigate, when correctly armed and altered, could become a flying bomb big enough to destroy a battle cruiser. Others were more curious. How had a human vessel come to find itself out here, so far from the rim of known space? What lengths
had driven those aboard it to give up their engines in the vain hope of rescue? And what enemies had wrought the damage that scarred the armoured hull?
Finally, the predator ships of the war fleet parted to allow the largest of their number to face the Eisenstein. If the frigate was a fox to the wolves of the battleships, then against this craft it became no more than an insect before a colossus. There were moons that massed less than the giant. It was the clenched hand of a god carved from dark asteroid stone, a nickel-iron behemoth pocked with craters and spiked with broad towers that jutted from its surface.
At a great distance, the vessel would have resembled the head of a mace, filigreed with gold and black iron. At close range, a city's worth of spires and gantries reached out, many of them glowing with the light of thousands of windows, others concealing nests of weapons capable of killing a continent. Ships like the Eisenstein were carried in fanged docks around the circumference of the colossus, and as it drifted closer the sheer mass of its gravity gently tugged at the frigate, altering her course. Autonomous weapons drones deployed in hornet swarms, staging around the drifting craft. As one, they turned powerful searchlights on the ruined hull and pinned the frigate to the black of the void, drenching her in blinding white beams.
Eisenstein's name, still clearly visible atop the emerald sweep of her bow planes, shone brightly with the reflected glow. Inside, a handful of souls waited for their fate to be decided.
Hakur stepped in from the corridor, a loaded and cocked combi-bolter looped over his shoulder on a thick strap. 'Outermost decks are all but empty now, captain,' he told Garro, Vought has re-routed the
atmosphere to storage tanks or down here. Less than a third of the ship has life-support, but we won't lack for breathing.'
'Good.' He accepted the sergeant's report. 'The men on the promenade decks, they have been withdrawn?'
The veteran nodded. 'Aye, lord. I left them there as long as I thought I could, but I've pulled them all back now. I had them spying out through the ports. What with the scrying being out of action and all, I thought that eyeballs were better than no watch at all.'
'Quick thinking. What did they see?'