Chapter 222 The Psyker Gate

The cold spread past Elai's barracks.

Frost whitened the plates of the 112th's flak armor. When a sentry raised his lasgun, flakes of ice fell from his sleeve.

High Command had issued the Astra Telepathica's Psyker Identification Manual before the campaign. Sudden, unnatural cold was one of its warnings; the sharper the drop, the stronger the psyker was likely to be. The officer commanding the 112th had never seen frost spread this fast in the open.

Yet Elai was dead. The men at the barracks had found him with his pistol still in his hand, but a Talon drone had reported the kill. The Coalition's post-battle briefing had explained, under an Administratum seal, what dimensional transit did to a man without a soul ward. The drone had taken Elai's soul.

The officer gave the order to stand to. Vox-operators relayed the alert as Chimeras and Hellhounds rumbled to life. His infantry closed around the barracks with their lasguns up.

"Behind us!"

The officer turned. A blue vortex had opened behind the line, its rim turning slowly above the rockcrete. The air hummed. Through the center, where he should have seen the rest of the camp, he saw a prison yard crowded with shaven-headed men.

"Cadia! They're Cadians!" someone yelled from the yard.

Two prisoners shouldered their way to the front with stolen guns. One shot splintered a supply crate. Another struck the flank of a Chimera. Its turret swung around and the twin-linked heavy bolters fired a short burst through the opening. Both men came apart. A gust carried the blood mist into camp, where it speckled the frost. The other prisoners fled through a passage in the yard wall.

The officer drew his laspistol and approached from the side, clear of the Chimera's guns. A man in scorched carapace lay facedown a few paces beyond the opening. He wore an Arbites badge on his shoulder.

"What in the Throne's name is this?" the officer muttered.

"Sir! Don't go through!"

"Someone has to see what we're dealing with. Keep me covered."

The officer stepped through the threshold.

Broken paving crunched under his boots. The air was dry enough to catch in his throat. Beyond the razor wire he could see bare wasteland stretching to the horizon. Getting past the wire would be the easy part of a prison break.

The blood beneath the warden's face had dried. The officer knelt, checked the warden's pouches, and pulled out an ID chit.

"Adeptus Arbites warden, Laun of St. Josmane," he read aloud. He looked back through the vortex at his men. "This is St. Josmane's Hope, the prison world. Get this to High Command, now!"

He backed into camp with the chit in his fist. The Chimera's guns were still trained on the passage. He ordered the infantry to dig in on either side of the opening and bring up enough guns to keep the yard covered. The cold was still coming from the barracks. He left a squad watching the door.

....

Sergeant Kell replayed the pict-capture in the command office at Kasr Myrak. Creed watched the razor wire tremble in the prison yard. Dust blew through the opening and swept across the frost at Tyrok Fields.

"The 112th has the opening covered," Kell said. "Their commander made it back through. He's got the warden's chit with him."

"And the garrison? I have two full regiments on that world."

"Neither regiment has answered. The prison relay is still giving the all-clear. The 112th called through on the local frequencies as well."

Creed brought up the Cadian's system chart. St. Josmane's Hope, the ninth planet from the sun. The main prison complex covered a continent. The Munitorum sent deserters and mutineers there to break rock, and those who earned their way back into uniform generally did so in a penal battalion.

"Looks like my drone was too late," said Qin Mo.

Something in the Warp might have reached Elai before the drone did. One last surge could have opened the gate. If the drone had arrived two seconds later, the 112th might have found something wearing Elai's face.

He couldn't see why the gate led to St. Josmane's Hope in particular. The same leak that had awakened Elai had reached beyond Cadia. Maybe enough prisoners had awakened to give something a foothold on that world. Even if he could close the opening at Tyrok, he'd still have to take that foothold away.

The purge had left too few unsanctioned psykers on Cadia to sustain a major incursion. On St. Josmane's Hope, Chaos could draw on a fresh population of vulnerable psykers and an attempt to reclaim it would tie down troops while the enemy prepared its next move.

The prison relay issued another all-clear. Kell let it finish and tried the garrison again.

Rogue psykers might explain the garrison's silence. Or someone could have seized the vox-relays first and sent the all-clear themselves.

"Exterminatus," Qin Mo said. "The prison world is lost. We don't have the resources to play along with whatever the Archenemy has planned. Cadia comes first."

Qin Mo wouldn't normally be so quick to condemn an entire world. But he remembered how St. Josmane's Hope had fallen in the beginning of the Black Crusade. Chaos had used a massive prison riot to turn it into a staging ground for the invasion. The Cadians had tried to retake it, suffered a massacre, and destroyed it anyway.

Better to keep those troops and resources for Cadia than waste them trying to save some misguided prisoners.

Creed looked at the two regimental markings on the chart. He waited until Kell set down the receiver.

"We've a cyclonic torpedo on Cadia," Creed said at last, his voice heavy. "An atmospheric incinerator. I'll need one of your ships to deliver it."

"There's an easier way."

The Celestial Engine could take the shot without waiting for a ship to load the torpedo. Qin Mo opened a channel to the Stone Man aboard it.

"Prison world St. Josmane's Hope. Destroy the planet."

He put the next call through to Yoan. "Take the entire Thirteenth Talon Infantry Regiment and teleport them to the gate. Cadian side. Get them close and leave the Chimeras a clear shot."

The Thirteenth was two months old. It had inherited its number from the fallen 13th of the Planetary Defence Force of Talon. There were one hundred and one soldiers on its rolls, all of them Untouchables. Klein had purchased them over the years in underhive markets, out of penal colonies, and through black contracts across the Imperium.

If one needed soldiers to deal with Warp phenomena, there was no better choice.

A hundred Nulls, simply by their presence, would hopefully be enough to make the psyker gate collapse into nothingness.

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