The Death of Integrity Read Online Free Page B

displaying in a long, colourful ribbon of pictures the story of the Chapter’s founding nearly eight thousand years ago.
    A bright blue sun occupied most of the view. The ship was close enough that the men aboard could see flares ejected from its churning surface, the top and bottom of the star cut off by the window. The light was raw, dangerous despite the windows’ protective dimming, bleaching out the subtle colours of the stained glass. There were no planets around Jorso, it was too violent a star for fatherhood. Its searing light had blasted the dusty stuff of its offspring into interstellar space before they had had chance to coalesce.
    Against the sun, the other ships in Galt’s fleet were silhouettes both small and insignificant. He recognised them all from their shapes, they were as familiar to him as children are to their fathers. Two strike cruisers and four escorts. One caused Galt concern. Corvo’s Hammer sparkled with vented plasma, the price of victory in their last engagement.
    A curling plume of blue flame burst from the sun. Far more than a ball of gas it seemed, but a great, ravening animal. How could something that writhed so not live?
    ‘The hulk will pass between our orbit and the star soon brother-captain,’ said Persimmon.
    ‘In five, four,’ began one of the serfs, ‘three, two, one…’
    ‘I see it.’ Galt breathed the words.
    A vast black shape slid across the boiling blue surface of Jorso.
    ‘Bring detail views up on the main chartdesk. Compensate for stellar luminosity,’ said Persimmon.
    ‘Yes, lord captain,’ said a serf officer. Commands were issued to the relevant servitors and by them relayed to the machine-spirits which inhabited the ship’s systems. The bridge filled with machine noise as affirmations of compliance ground out from uncaring throats.
    The chartdesk shimmered. Bands of light resolved themselves into a holographic image of the space hulk in front of Persimmon’s throne-cradle.
    ‘Corvo’s oath,’ murmured Galt. His hand went to the Chapter pendant that hung about his neck.
    ‘First Captain,’ said Persimmon. ‘I present the space hulk Death of Integrity , our target.’
    Even against the immensity of the growling sun, the hulk designated Death of Integrity appeared huge, an agglomeration of vessels and cosmic flotsam tossed together by the shifting tides of the empyrean. Novum in Honourum was a battle-barge, one of the greatest vessels the Imperium could command, but she was a toy in comparison. The hulk presented itself as a broken ornament the size of a small moon, its surface a bewildering mosaic of protrusions. Ship prows, engine units, nacelles, crumpled cargo barges, the smooth lines of xenos craft, pocked half-mountains of asteroids and the ice spires of comets projected chaotically from its surface. Many of the elements that made up the hulk were forged by thinking creatures, men or otherwise, but its shipwright was the warp, and that had little respect for the physics of real space.
    Servitors growled and chirruped in binaric, half-formed words in standard Gothic slipping drool-slicked from their mouths. Not for the first time, Galt wondered if any awareness remained in their wiped minds.
    One of the serf-officers overseeing the augur arrays spoke. ‘Mass, thirty-seven point nine trillion tonnes, albedo point eight-seven, gravitic displacement…’
    He went on, describing the physical qualities of the hulk. Portions of the holograph representing the vessel winked bright green as another officer identified component parts, a gridded funnel came into being around it, depicting its weak gravity field, other icons and graphical demonstrations of mass and potentially active power sources blinked up one after another, cluttering the air of the bridge with informatics.
    The serf overseeing the augur array had a face half of metal, a slatted round covering one eye. When he spoke, it was with the emotionless burr of a vox-grille.
    ‘Estimated