Dan Abnett - Know No Fear

[mark: -136.57.07]

Who are the first to die?

Most commentaries will cite Honorius Luciel ( captain, 209th ) and seventeen others by the hand of Sorot Tchure on the company deck of the cruiser Samothrace at mark: -00.19.45 , but these are not in fact the first combat fatalities.

The fleet tender Campanile is mob-boarded and taken off the Tarmus Apogee approximately one hundred and thirty-six hours [sidereal] before count start as a preliminary to the Calth assault .

Three thousand seven hundred and nine crew members are executed, including the ship master, the Navigator, the echelon port master, two fabricators from the yards, and a detail from the Neride Regulators 10th serving as deck protection.

Proof of the loss of the Campanile , delivered to Primarch Guilliman around mark: 01:30:00 demonstrates calculation and planning on behalf of the adversary, and establishes what Primarch Guilliman refers to as a preparatory phase of acquisition, which refutes any claims that the conflict was born out of mistake or misadventure.

This represents a precondition of malice on the part of the adversary, and strengthens Primarch Guillimans hand in that it removes any compunction to resist or fight back with full military force.

There is no longer any point trying to reason with his brother, because his brother is not, in fact, mistakenly trying to kill him at all.

Lorgar has been planning it all along.

Precise details of the circumstances surrounding the loss of the Campanile are lost / and alone in such darkness, on a deceleration arc past the outer moons, one small ship, overweight and wheezing, over three and a half thousand souls / because no log record or data canister is recovered from the wreck / which had been penetrated by something in the night, made in the night, made out of the night, a void-hard darkness with teeth and eyes, squirting through every airgate and hatch seal and vent tube like pressurised oil / though it is assumed that the vessel was overhauled by a fighting ship from the XVII Legions fleet and taken with all hands / all of them screaming as they were blinded and suffocated, nowhere to flee to, no escape, no door that would open except to bare and airless space, and still the thing made of night filling the Campanile up, every compartment and deckway, every chamber and access, like black storm water flash-flooding an underground habitat, blinding and choking and drowning everything, filling rooms, filling mouths, filling lungs, filling ears, filling stomachs, stewing brains, smothering gunfire, blunting blades, swallowing the screams of the dying and the overcome, stealing the screams away and laughing them back in mocking voices that promised that screams were nothing more than the chamber music of dark monarchs mankind had only just begun to dream of / so that its anchorage codes could be used to penetrate the platform yards.