Neoth read the casualty report and set it on the desk beside eleven others.
The desk was carved from a single block of Terran granite that Dorn had shaped before his departure. The reports were printed on thin sheets of recycled fibre, and they covered the stone in overlapping layers that mapped the week's losses across seven sectors and four segmentum boundaries. Three hundred and twelve thousand, nine hundred and forty-one. He already knew the number.
He sat back in his chair and looked at the wall opposite. The wall was living wood, one of Hashirama's additions to the administrative chambers, and a network of thin vines had crept across its surface in the months since it was grown, their leaves turning slowly in a breeze that came from nowhere. A single flower had opened near the ceiling, pale yellow with five petals.
Three hundred and twelve thousand dead in transit. Convoy LX-7714 had been hit by a warband operating out of the Ghoul Stars, and the escort frigate assigned to it had been a refitted mining vessel whose void shields failed on the second salvo. The transports had scattered, which was the correct response, and nine of twelve had reached Terra's orbital cordon, which was a reasonable survival rate given the escort's limitations. The other three had been boarded, and the warband took what they wanted and vented the rest.
He picked up the twelfth report and read it again.
The warband's composition was familiar. Former World Eaters, stripped of their legion markings and operating in a pack of six vessels cobbled together from salvage and captured hulls. Their tactics were consistent with dozens of similar actions across the northern transit corridors over the past eighteen months. Strike fast, strip the convoy of materiel and captives, withdraw before reinforcement could arrive. They didn't hold territory and they didn't build. They just consumed and moved and consumed again.
Neoth set the report down and pressed his thumb against the bridge of his nose.
The door opened and Malcador entered, his staff clicking its familiar rhythm against the stone floor. The Sigillite crossed the room and lowered himself into the chair opposite the desk, slowly and carefully. His staff leaned against the desk's edge, and he folded his hands in his lap and looked at the reports.
"Convoy LX-7714," Malcador said.
"You've read it."
"I read them all before they reach you. Habit."
"A useful one." Neoth gestured at the stack. "Seven sector reports, four corridor assessments, and a summary from the Armada logistics division stating that escort availability is at sixty-one percent of projected requirements. Sixty-one. We can't protect them all."
Malcador's fingers laced tighter. "We never could. The math was clear before the Scouring began. Half the Legiones Astartes turned traitor and took their fleets with them. The shipyards at Mars are rubble with the planet not existing anymore. Voss and Lucius are producing at a fraction of their former output, and Stygies is producing for itself rather than the Imperium because their Fabricator-General believes independence is a viable strategy in a galaxy where daemonic incursions have gone up forty percent during Warp transit."
"Forty-three percent," Neoth said.
Malcador tilted his head. "The latest figure?"
"As of this morning's astropathic relay. Three more incursions during transit in the Segmentum Pacificus. Two were contained by the ship's complement. The third was not."
"Which ship?"
"The Blessed Deliverance. Bulk transport, nine thousand civilians from Espandor. The incursion manifested in the lower cargo holds and worked its way up through four decks before the shipmaster ordered those sections sealed and vented to void. The daemons were purged, but seventeen hundred people went with them."
Malcador closed his eyes. "The Gellar fields should have held at that range from the Eye."
"The Gellar fields held. The incursion didn't breach them from outside. It manifested from within; a cultist cell had embedded itself among the refugees before embarkation. They opened a ritual breach in the lower holds and the daemons poured through before the field generators could compensate for an internal origin point." Neoth stood. "The Four have adapted. They can't break Gellar fields from the Warp side through brute force, and the Astronomican keeps transit times short enough that sustained pressure on a vessel's field rarely builds to critical threshold. I intend to keep the beacon at full strength for as long as the Choir and I can sustain it. But Gellar fields were designed to repel external pressure. An internal ritual breach bypasses them entirely. The Four seed their agents among the convoys and crack the ships open from the inside. Every transport is a potential breach point, and we can't screen nine thousand civilians for devotion to gods whose worship leaves no mark until the ritual begins."
He walked to the wall of living wood and placed his palm against the bark. The vines shifted at his touch, and leaves curled toward his fingers. Through the wood he felt the faint pulse of Hashirama's chakra network running through the Webway's infrastructure, a secondary circulation that reinforced the wards and fed the growing city beyond these walls. And it was always steady.
"Tell me about the Cadian corridor," Neoth said.
Malcador pulled a data-slate from inside his robe and consulted it. "Two attacks in the last month. Both small-scale. The first was a flotilla of former Emperor's Children vessels, three escorts and a light cruiser, operating without coordination. They hit a supply convoy bound for Cadia's orbital stations, destroyed two transports, and withdrew when the Phalanx's picket squadron responded. The second was a single vessel, unidentified, that dropped out of the Warp inside Cadia's inner system and launched boarding torpedoes at a civilian station before the defence monitors engaged and crippled it. The crew scuttled rather than be captured."
"Identification on the crew?"
"Word Bearers. The scuttle charges destroyed most of the evidence, but the defence monitors recovered debris from the hull. Colchisian script in the structural framing."
Neoth turned from the wall.
"Word Bearers operating near Cadia," he said. "That's the fourth confirmed action involving Lorgar's sons within the Eye's periphery this quarter."
"Fifth," Malcador said. "There was an incident on Nemesis Tessera that the local garrison initially attributed to a cult uprising. The after-action review found ritual scarring on the cultists consistent with Colchisian devotional practice. Someone is organizing them."
Neoth walked back to the desk and sat down. He looked at the reports again, at the numbers and the locations and the patterns they formed when you laid them over a star chart. And the pattern was clear enough.
The heresy had failed. Horus was dead, killed in the crater by the combined strike that Hashirama had built and Neoth had fired, and the four gods had lost their primary instrument in a single moment. The traitor legions had scattered. Without a Warmaster, the coalition of ambition and corruption and coerced loyalty that Horus had assembled fractured along every fault line the Siege had papered over. The Sons of Horus had broken the fastest. Their father's death had left sixteen thousand Astartes with a name that was now a curse, and they'd turned on each other within weeks of the retreat from Terra.
The last intelligence reports placed them in a dozen fractured warbands scattered across the northern reaches, each one led by a captain or champion who claimed to carry on the Warmaster's legacy and murdered anyone who disputed the claim. Abaddon, the First Captain, had vanished with a core of veterans and several capital ships.
The World Eaters had devolved into roving packs led by a Daemon Prince too consumed by rage to command anything beyond the killing radius of his own axes. The Emperor's Children had splintered into warbands obsessed with sensation and spectacle. The Iron Warriors, leaderless after Perturabo's death, had fragmented into mercenary bands that sold their siege craft to whoever offered the most interesting fortification to crack. The Death Guard who had refused Mortarion's call retreated into plague-worlds of their own making and sat in the filth and waited for a signal that didn't come. The Night Lords hunted in the dark, as they always had, Curze among them somewhere, though their Primarch had never organized his Legion into anything more than a weapon of terror aimed at whatever caught his attention. And the Lion was closing around them. The Alpha Legion had just... dissolved, operating in cells that may or may not have still answered to a unified command and pursuing objectives that no one on the outside could reliably tell apart from sabotage or espionage.
They were broken and bleeding and running.
And still they killed.
Three hundred and twelve thousand in a single week, and that number counted only the transit losses. Add the planetary raids, the orbital strikes on lightly defended colony worlds, the slave-taking runs where warbands dropped on agricultural settlements and carried off populations that would never be seen again, and the weekly toll climbed past half a million. Add the daemonic incursions, the cults that bloomed on worlds where the Imperial Truth had collapsed under its own contradictions and left populations grasping for meaning in a galaxy that had shown them gods were real, the sabotage operations against Mechanicum forge outputs, and the number became something that the administrative apparatus could only approximate.
A thousand cuts, just a thousand cuts. The traitor remnants lacked the mass to assault Terra, lacked the leadership to coordinate a second heresy, lacked the fleet strength to contest a sector for longer than a single engagement. What they had was speed and spite and an entire galaxy's worth of shadows to hide in. They struck where the Imperium was thin, took what they could carry, and vanished before the response arrived.
Neoth leaned back in his chair and laughed.
The sound filled the stone room and bounced off the wooden wall and startled the flower near the ceiling into closing its petals. Malcador's eyebrows rose, and his staff shifted against the desk's edge.
"You find something amusing in half a million dead?" Malcador said.
"Not in the dead," Neoth said. "In what the strategy reveals."
He picked up one of the reports and held it between two fingers. "Chaos had four gods aligned inside a single vessel, supported by nine traitor legions and a fleet large enough to blockade Terra. They had a Warmaster. They had the element of surprise. They had the corruption of institutions that should have held. And they spent all of it on a single throw, and they lost."
He dropped the report. "And now they're running convoy raids with salvaged ships and broken legions. The four great powers of the Warp are scraping and improvising and, for the first time, just trying to hold on."
Malcador's expression didn't change. "They will adapt."
"Of course they will. They always adapt. But adaptation takes time, and time is what we're buying with every convoy we run and every world we evacuate and every soul we bring through the Webway gate into a space where the Warp can't follow." Neoth pressed his palms flat against the desk. "The Webway is secure. Hashirama's sealing work and Magnus's wards and your own contributions have made the interior proof against incursion in ways that the original Aeldari architects would've found impressive. The Four have been probing the boundaries continuously since we sealed the gate, and they've found nothing. Every tendril they send gets burned by the ward network before it can establish a foothold. Every daemon they push through a weak point gets caught in the root lattice and dissolved. The Webway is ours, and forty-three billion people are alive inside it, and that number grows with every transport that reaches Terra."
"Forty-six billion," Malcador said. "The latest census was filed this morning."
"Forty-six." Neoth's mouth curved. "The corridors are working."
"The corridors that are protected. The ones that aren't continue to hemorrhage."
"Then we protect more of them. Guilliman's evacuation infrastructure in the Ultima Segmentum is a model. Standardized convoy formations, pre-cleared Warp routes, waypoint fortifications at every translation point. Losses in his sectors have dropped to four percent. Replicate his system across the other segmentums and the overall rate falls with it."
"Replication requires resources we don't have." Malcador's voice was patient. "Guilliman built his system with the Ultramarines and a compliant Mechanicum presence that gave him local manufacturing capacity. The other segmentums lack one or both. The Khan moves too fast to hold waypoints. Russ is temperamentally incapable of building infrastructure. Vulkan builds beautifully and slowly, and the rate at which he can construct waypoint stations doesn't match the rate at which the enemy destroys them."
"Then we adjust." Neoth stood again and crossed to a hololith projector mounted on a plinth near the room's east wall. He activated it with a touch, and the star chart bloomed above the plinth in blue and gold, sectors marked and transit corridors drawn in lines that crossed the galaxy's spiral arms. Red markers dotted the corridors, each one a confirmed attack or incursion.
The pattern was obvious. The red markers clustered along the periphery of the Eye of Terror, thickened in the space between the Eye and the Segmentum Solar, and thinned where the loyalist fleets maintained continuous patrols. The Ghoul Stars corridor was a mess of overlapping markers. The Maelstrom approaches were worse.
"They're bleeding us at the margins," Neoth said. He traced a line from the Eye to the Solar approaches with his finger, and the hololith tracked the motion in a faint trail of gold. "Every corridor that passes within range of the Eye or the Maelstrom is vulnerable. Every convoy that transits those regions without heavy escort is a target. And we can't avoid those regions because they sit astride the most direct routes from the compliant worlds to Terra."
Malcador rose and joined him at the hololith, his staff striking the floor twice before he reached the plinth. He studied the chart carefully.
"The Word Bearers concern me more than the rest," Malcador said.
Neoth nodded. "Because they're the only ones still organizing."
"Because Lorgar is the only traitor primarch with the capacity to lead what remains." Malcador planted his staff and leaned forward, his eyes following the cluster of red markers near the Eye's coreward edge. "Angron is a Daemon Prince chained to Khorne's will. His World Eaters follow him because he's the loudest source of violence in their proximity, and that's the extent of his leadership. He can't plan a campaign. He can barely finish a sentence that doesn't end in a kill. Curze is a murderer, and the Lion will find him eventually. The Iron Warriors have no primarch. The Emperor's Children have no primarch. The Sons of Horus are eating themselves. Abaddon is unaccounted for, which is its own concern, but a First Captain without a Legion is a different kind of threat than a primarch with one. The Alpha Legion has whatever the Alpha Legion has, and it serves its own ends. The Death Guard and the Thousand Sons have returned to loyalty–or, at least, most of them have. That leaves Lorgar."
"And the Word Bearers are the only traitor legion that retained its structure through the Heresy's collapse," Neoth said.
Neoth watched the red markers pulse.
"He's building something," Neoth said.
"A crusade of his own."
"Perhaps. Perhaps something else. Lorgar was always the one who thought in terms of civilizations rather than campaigns. He doesn't want to raid convoys. He wants to build a counter-faith, a counter-culture, a reason for people to choose Chaos willingly. And the collapse of the Imperial Truth has given him fertile ground. We told humanity there were no gods, and then gods tore the Imperium in half. Every world that witnessed the Heresy knows we lied, or were wrong, and either conclusion leaves a void that Lorgar is eager to fill." Neoth tapped the cluster of red markers near the Eye. "The raids are probes. He's mapping our response times, testing our coverage, identifying the corridors where we're weakest. And he's recruiting. Every slave taken from a raided transport, every cultist cell that sprouts on an unprotected world, every population that sees the Imperium's convoys pass them by without stopping; those are all potential converts. Lorgar doesn't need a fleet to match ours. He needs followers who believe."
Malcador was quiet for a time.
"Then we have a primary threat," Malcador said.
"We have the only traitor capable of turning this insurgency into something coherent." Neoth deactivated the hololith, and the star chart collapsed into its plinth. The room dimmed. "Angron will spend himself on slaughter until the blood stops satisfying his patron. The other warbands will lose cohesion as their legions bleed out in ones and twos across a galaxy too large for them to hold. Without a unifying purpose, Chaos devours its own instruments. Lorgar provides that purpose. Remove him and the traitor remnants become what they already are without him. Scattered, purposeless, and grinding themselves to nothing."
"And if we can't remove him?"
"Then we outrun him." Neoth turned from the plinth and walked toward the door. "Every soul we bring into the Webway is a soul Lorgar can't reach. Every world we evacuate is a world his cults can't seed. Every child born inside these walls grows up in a space where the Warp has no purchase. He wants to build a civilization in the Eye of Terror? Let him. We're building one in the light, and ours doesn't require suffering to sustain itself."
He stopped at the door and looked back at Malcador.
"Send word to Sanguinius. I want the Cadian corridor reinforced with a permanent picket drawn from the Blood Angels' reserve fleet. And tell Guilliman to extend his evacuation model to the Tempestus approaches. I want his logistics cadre training local defence forces at every waypoint between Macragge and Terra."
Malcador nodded and pulled himself upright with his staff. "And Lorgar?"
Neoth's hand rested on the door frame. The living wood beneath his fingers was warm, and through it he felt the distant pulse of the Webway's infrastructure, the wards and the roots and the golden light that carried forty-six million lives.
"Lorgar is patient," Neoth said. "And so am I."
He opened the door and walked through it, and the sound of his footsteps faded into the long corridor beyond.