22: Chapter 22: The Empire first sees the Leviathan mothership and then begins writing to Terra requesting reinforcements.

It was not the localized, dull impact of a charging Carnifex, but a continuous, low-frequency rumble emanating from deep within the crust, as if the planet itself had been struck from the inside like a massive bell.

The Emperors Hammer in orbit was the first to detect the anomaly.

On Tech-Priest Melchior's scanner, the entire geological structure of the planet's northern hemisphere was shifting—not an earthquake, not a volcano, but a massive object buried eight hundred meters underground was moving upward.

The scanner could not penetrate the adamantine-chitin composite layer covering its surface, but it could calculate its volume through the compression waves in the surrounding rock strata.

"Eight hundred meters long." Melchior's voice rang out on the bridge, his mechadendrites freezing in mid-air. "Inquisitor, that thing is eight hundred meters long. It is equivalent to the standing height of a Warlord-class Titan."

No one answered.

On the tactical table, the blue dots representing the Ultramarines assault team were struggling to advance through the underground Hive City, while deep in the strata beneath their feet, a massive life signal the size of an Imperial Navy heavy cruiser was rising at a steady speed.

The embryonic development stage of the leviathan mothership officially ended at the twenty-first minute.

All nutrient delivery pipes detached automatically, and the pupal shell enveloping the hive ship's body was torn apart layer by layer from the inside; each layer torn released a bio-electric pulse strong enough to shatter rock walls within a hundred-meter radius.

Drones had already evacuated all non-essential facilities in the vicinity, reserving a vertical passage straight to the surface for the hive ship—an launch silo that The Swarm had built specifically for this moment over the past few days.

It pierced straight upward through eight hundred meters of rock strata, with its exit located directly beneath the split church spire in the center of the Hive City Ruins.

The hive ship began to rise.

Its adamantine-chitin carapace sparked brilliantly under the friction of the rock strata; the rocks, which could easily cut through Imperial tank armor, were crushed like foam in front of the hive ship's carapace, ground into even finer dust.

The barrels of the bio-railguns extended from the prow, and the green light of the focusing crystals inside the barrels ignited from deep within the chambers, illuminating the rock walls that had been ground to powder along the path.

Commander Ortron felt the increasingly strong vibration beneath his feet in the tunnel.

He had just cut down a Carnifex, his Power Sword still stained with fragments of xenos carapace, when the tunnel walls began to peel away.

Patches of creep detached from the rock walls, revealing the cracking rock beneath.

"Ortron, the surface is ordering you to retreat immediately." Bern's voice came through the comms channel, twice as fast as usual.

"I haven't found its core yet—"

"Its core has come to find you." Bern interrupted him. "That thing had a hive ship hidden underground, eight hundred meters long. Now it's coming up. If you are below the surface, you will be crushed. If you are above the surface—retreat immediately; this is not something your company can handle."

Ortron did not argue.

He issued a short, forceful command over the comms channel, and the Terminators shouldered the gene-seed of their fallen comrades and their wounded brothers, retreating at full speed along the tunnel they had come from.

At the sixteenth minute, the hive ship burst out of the surface.

The whole world saw its full appearance—it was an eight-hundred-meter-long chisel-shaped ram. When it broke through the ground in the center of the church ruins, the remaining spire was smashed into a sky full of rubble, which was blown hundreds of meters away by the air currents whipped up by the hive ship's ascent before it even hit the ground.

Its adamantine-chitin carapace dried and hardened rapidly upon contact with the air, turning from deep purple to a dull, light-absorbing gray-black.

The surface of the carapace was covered with thick ridges and depressions; every ridge was a biological conduit for heat dissipation and pressure regulation, and every depression was a storage bay for parasites and spore mines.

The hive ship had no portholes, no bridge, and none of the fragile structures that any human ship would have.

It was not a vehicle that had been designed; it was a war that had been grown.

After the main bio-railgun on the prow finished elevating, it fired its first test shot toward the orbit.

An adamantine armor-piercing shell, wrapped in a thick soft shell of digestive fluid, fired at dozens of times the speed of sound toward the strike cruiser "Shield of Faith" that was maneuvering to evade in low orbit.

The projectile pierced through the recharge gap of the Void Shield—that gap was only a fraction of a second, but the hive ship's main gun did not need to recharge; it used biological neural signals, which were an order of magnitude faster than the reaction speed of Imperial Lance Weapon, and it was this fraction of a second that it seized.

The armor-piercing shell bored in from below the bridge of the Shield of Faith, penetrating six layers of armored decks—bridge armor, command level bulkhead, main energy conduit compartment, ammunition depot outer wall, engine control room, bottom deck—and finally detonated successfully above the engine room.

The soft shell of digestive fluid burst open, and the high-concentration corrosive liquid dissolved all the circuits in the engine control room from the inside out.

The Warp engine of the Shield of Faith went out of control, the propulsion system shut down completely, and the hull began to slide powerlessly into low orbit.

"Shield of Faith hit! Main engines failed! Bridge contact lost!" The Tech-Officer's voice was hoarse, and the light point of the Shield of Faith on the tactical table was turning from blue to flashing red.

Before the bridge could even digest the bad news of this ship, more intense impacts followed one after another.

The hive ship's dorsal carapace opened at twelve positions simultaneously, and sixty-four Brood Lords rose from the ground in synchronization to orbit above the hive ship, forming an escort formation.

Swarms of parasites began to pour out of the chambers on the sides of the hive ship, not in the hundreds or thousands, but in the hundreds of thousands, blotting out the sky.

The density of the orbital defense's crossfire grid suddenly quadrupled after the hive ship ascended.

Marcus Aurelian stood on the bridge of the Emperors Hammer, watching the projection of the battlefield on the tactical table that was rapidly deteriorating.

He knew he had to make a decision, a decision that could not wait for the Ultramarines assault team, could not wait for Terra, and could not even wait for his flagship to deviate from its current course.

"Send emergency communication authorization to the target marked by this Leviathan's bridge—the Ultramarines 7th Expeditionary Fleet flagship 'hammer of macragge'—my authorization: allow its Commander to judge for themselves based on the battlefield situation whether to activate Exterminatus-class weapons; recommend simultaneously concentrating all remaining forces to cover the withdrawal of all ships still capable of jumping. This is not a retreat order; this is a loss-mitigation order."

The Imperial Fleet began to shrink.

Battle barges still capable of maneuvering shielded the wreckage of the strike cruisers behind the formation, and the Ultramarines' Thunderhawk Gunships aborted their assault from the surface, turning to accelerate and ascend, desperately recovering the landing craft scattered in the upper atmosphere before the Brood Lords' parasite swarms could close in.

Ortron, still in mid-air, stared fixedly at the Leviathan outside the porthole, which was still spewing corrosive barrages.

And further away, in synchronous orbit over Dead Silence-42, a six-hundred-meter-long black metal mast was transmitting a string of quantum entanglement information into the depths of The Galaxy.

The target coordinates of the information were the empty zone between the Orion Arm and the Galactic Center, and the sender was a Necron Node that had been dormant for sixty-two million years; the message content was: This node survives, requesting reconnection to the master control matrix.

The transmission time window overlapped precisely with the time the Imperial Fleet exited the Warp.

No one intercepted it, because no one noticed a Necron antenna that had been silent for tens of millions of years quietly pointing toward a direction older than the history of the Empire at the moment when the human warships and the hive ship were engaged in the most intense firefight.