"Fireforged, this is Vulkan. Respond if you read me."
"Fireforged, this is Vulkan. Can you hear me?"
"This is Vulkan. I repeat, this is..."
"Hsss—...help...me..."
There was only electrical static on the Communications Channel.
Occasionally, a few horribly distorted wails, laden with inhuman agony, broke through, but they were so fragmented and distant, as though coming from an abyss at the other end of the galaxy, that the eternal, suffocating hiss soon swallowed them again.
Vulkan lowered his hand. In the silence, his lava-like palm slowly clenched, his knuckles making faint sounds like grinding stone.
He stood at the center of the hastily established forward command post, surrounded by scorched earth and xenos remains, and raised his head toward the sky.
The sky was dead.
The daylight, once faint but still present, had been completely replaced by a thick, viscous blanket of sickly green fog that slowly writhed.
It was not cloud. It looked more like a dome of pus and blood, endlessly swelling and rotting.
It devoured sunlight and warped starlight, enclosing all of Hope Star in an enormous living coffin that exuded the sickly-sweet stench of decay.
As far as the eye could see, there was only nauseating green, with occasional flashes of dark red phosphorescence deep within the fog, like writhing entrails.
The green fog cut off everything.
It blocked the orbital fleet's view, blocked communications signals, and was even cutting off reality itself.
This was a small but exceptionally vicious and precisely targeted warp storm, coiled tightly around Hope Star's atmosphere like a viper waiting to strike its chosen prey.
It had not formed naturally. It seemed more like a carefully laid trap, steeped in malice.
And those intermittent wails might have come from the ships in orbit, trapped at the storm's edge and slowly being