Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

It is the 41st Millennium

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

About the Author

Legal

It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the
daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in His name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst his soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless Planetary Defence Forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants - and worse.

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

Chapter One

Gunthar Soreson had never been so scared in his life.

He asked himself what his heroes would have done in his place – those muscular, square-jawed warriors whose exploits he followed in the newsreels. Would they have been scared too? Maybe, he thought, but it wouldn’t have held them back. They’d have done what they had to do and faced the consequences, good or bad.

He wanted to be brave like them. He told himself he could be. He thrust his hand into his trouser pocket, before he could change his mind again, and his fingers closed around the cold, hard shape of the ring.

Arex groaned, ‘Oh no.’

Gunthar started, snatching back his hand as if the ring had shocked him. Had she seen his movement or read his intentions in his face? Had she guessed what Gunthar had been about to ask her, and was this her reaction to it?

She had dropped her fork, cupped a hand over her face. She was making herself look small in her seat, trying not to be noticed. In a stage whisper, she directed Gunthar’s gaze: ‘Two tables behind me. To the right. No, my right. That man, the one in blue, with the beard and the bald spot. Is he looking this way?’

Gunthar shook his head. ‘No.’

‘I think we’ve met. Some reception at the High Spire. He was, I don’t know, a proctor commissioner, something like that. Are you sure he’s not looking at me?’

‘I’m sure,’ said Gunthar. ‘He’s just eating his meal. It’s dark in here. That’s why I brought you here, for the privacy. I can hardly make out his face. I’m sure he can’t have recognised you, from the back, from a single meeting.’

‘You’re right. I’m imagining things.’ Arex dared a glance over her shoulder, and her round face softened with relief. ‘Of course it’s not him. What would a man like him be doing somewhere like this?’

Something in Arex’s tone, the derisive emphasis she put on those words, left Gunthar stung. ‘You’re here,’ he pointed out.

‘I’m incognito, remember?’ she said, lifting the fork again, twirling a length of borana root around it. ‘I don’t want to be found – and this is about the last place on Hieronymous Theta anyone would think to look for the Governor’s niece.’

‘Yes,’ said Gunthar woodenly. ‘I expect you’re right.’

They were right up near the top of one of Hieronymous City’s shorter towers, as high as Gunthar had ever climbed. The skyways outside had been hardly crowded, even at this time of the early evening. He had saved for weeks to afford the bribe that had got him past the doorman of this eatery. It was the first place he had been to that served real meat, not the synthetic stuff. There was room between the tables, and plenty of servitors, attentive to their customers’ every need.

Still, it wasn’t enough. Arex was used to better than this, better than Gunthar, even since his promotion, could provide.

‘I’m sorry for being so jumpy,’ she said. ‘It’s just Uncle Hanrik. I can only imagine what he might do if he knew I was here, this far from home.’

‘I know,’ sighed Gunthar. ‘I know.’

What had he been thinking, making plans, dreaming of a life with her? How could that have worked? They lived in different worlds – and Gunthar would never be welcome in Arex’s world, just as she could never be happy in his.

He left the ring in its pocket.

He insisted on seeing her home – as near as he could take her, anyway.

There was still so much he wanted to say, so many questions to ask her. Why was she here? Was this only a game to her, these regular meetings? A thrilling adventure on the lower floors. Did she ever think about where it might lead? But Gunthar could feel the ring’s dead weight in his pocket, and he was still scared, scared of the answers she might give.

They took an autocab towards the gubernatorial sector, but abandoned it a few hab-blocks away before the proctors could show too much interest in them.

They talked about Gunthar’s work, and he found himself reeling off statistics, telling Arex about the annual yield in each of his mines until he was sure he was boring her. Not that she showed it. Arex was an expert at feigning interest. She had to be, someone in her position, all those dull official functions she had to attend.

He remembered the function at which they had met, the opening of a refinery plant. Arex, backlit by the red glow of a pit of molten metal, laughing politely at something a shift manager had said to her. The twinkle in her green eyes. Her chestnut hair, bobbing on her shoulders. He remembered his first stumbling words to her, how she had just smiled and pretended he was making perfect sense.

He remembered stumbling into her on a swaying metal gantry, choking on the hot, dry air, an awkward moment defused by Arex’s good humour and that smile again.

Was she only feigning interest in him?

They strolled between plasteel and glass towers on an expansive skyway, treading on the white chevrons that marked out the pedestrian lane as grimy, bubble-shaped autocabs hummed by to each side of them. There were fewer skyways up here, but fewer people to walk them too.

‘So,’ said Arex suddenly, ‘you’ve seen no… trouble? In the mines, I mean?’

‘Trouble?’ echoed Gunthar, instinctively on the alert. ‘No, nothing. Nothing like that. My men work hard, and yields are holding steady. What have you heard?’

‘Nothing,’ said Arex quickly. ‘I was just… Something my uncle said, that’s all. He was talking to… well, I’m sure it was nothing, like you say. It doesn’t matter.’

They were at a crossway, and Arex drew Gunthar towards a row of lifter cubicles. They found one empty, and stepped inside. Even up here, the lifters stank of human sweat and excrement, the legacies of their journeys below.

‘I shouldn’t…’ Gunthar stammered. ‘If you’re going back up to the High Spire, I should… This is as high as I can really…’

‘Who said I was going up?’ said Arex. She fingered the rune panel in the wall, and the cubicle door rattled and squealed shut behind them. A moment later, they were descending fast, and Gunthar thought Arex must have entered some private code to prevent the lifter from stopping for more passengers at the intervening levels.

‘I always drop a few floors, this close to home,’ she said. ‘There’s a place I can climb up, not far from the High Spire, where no one ever looks. It’s easier than trying to get past the proctor patrols and the pictcasters up above.’

‘We’re dropping more than a few floors,’ said Gunthar nervously.

‘Don’t be such a worrier,’ said Arex. ‘I thought you were born down here.’

‘Not this far down,’ squawked Gunthar, but she didn’t seem to hear him. Her eyes were shining with excitement. This was an adventure for her.

Gunthar was relieved when the lifter brought them to a jarring halt and a mechanical voice informed them that, should they wish to proceed further, they would need a high-level encryption key to return to this floor.

‘You shouldn’t listen to what they say,’ said Arex as the door rattled open and she and Gunthar emerged onto a teeming skyway far darker and dirtier than the one above. ‘It’s not so bad down here, once you get used to it. It’s a shame it’s so late. In the daytime, from those railings over there, you can see right down to the ground. We might see a campfire burning down there, even now, if you want to look.’

Gunthar shook his head. The railings at the edge of this skyway were twisted, breached, and he feared that if he went too close he might be jostled off the edge.

They elbowed their way through the crowds, attracting a few glances with their fine clothes but nothing more sinister, and Gunthar started to think that Arex was right. He had spent his life trying to escape from places like this, climbing those towers, but he couldn’t deny he felt at home here, far more so than he had in the eatery above. Down here, Gunthar was anonymous, just one more face. No one was likely to stop him, to ask him what he was doing so far from home. No one was likely to recognise the woman on his arm, or believe their eyes if they did.

Gunthar felt safer down here.

The emporiums were closed, heavy plasteel shutters slammed over their windows. A grizzled old man was doling out grey protein burgers from a filthy, open-topped cart. Nearby, the burnt-out shell of an autocab lay half on its side, wedged into the opening of a narrow alleyway. Globe-shaped luminators did their best to compensate for the fading light, but too many of them lay burnt out and broken.

Gunthar and Arex had witnessed three fights. The proctors had moved in to break up one, but the participants, three young women and an elderly man, had seen them coming and melted into the accommodating crowd.

‘They don’t let you see this,’ said Arex, wistfully, ‘when you’re with the Governor. They pretend it doesn’t exist, but this, right here, is Hieronymous Theta. This is the world we live in.’

‘I heard they might be connecting the skyways down here,’ said Gunthar, ‘sealing off the lower floors altogether.’

‘Burying our problems,’ said Arex, ‘but they’ll still be here. We can keep on climbing, until we reach the sun itself – but we’ve built our towers on rotten foundations, and they’ll drag us all down in time.’

‘This is still a new world, though,’ said Gunthar. ‘You’re talking about centuries from now. Millennia. We’ve still got time. The Emperor will provide.’

Something was happening. Something had broken the patterns of the crowd, making them faltering and clumsy. An uncertain buzz was spreading, and building in volume. Another fight, thought Gunthar? No, something far bigger.

Arex didn’t seem to have noticed the change in the atmosphere – or if she had, it didn’t bother her. She was marching onward, leading Gunthar towards what he now judged to be the epicentre of the disturbance. He cautioned her about this, but didn’t say too much because he didn’t want her to think of him as a coward. He asked himself what the heroes of the newsreels would do.

Then the crowd before them parted, and Gunthar was faced with a monster.

It was crouching with its back to a wide tunnel entrance. Its shoulders were hunched, its skin dry and yellowing like old parchment. Its spindly arms ended in gnarled claws, and its eyes were a bright and startling pink.

Gunthar had seen mutants before, but only in pict-captures. Occasionally, one would find its way into the mines that he oversaw. He had dreamed of meeting one in the flesh, but in those dreams he had always had a gun or a chainsword, and the mutant had never been so big. In those dreams, Gunthar had been brave.

A few game citizens had armed themselves with sticks and knives. They were taunting the mutant, which was hissing and spitting, slashing at them, holding them at bay. Gunthar saw a discarded stick on the ground, and he knew he ought to take it, do the Emperor’s work, beat this aberration to a bloody pulp. Be a hero.

Then, one of the tormentors got too confident, stepped too close, and the mutant was upon him before Gunthar could blink. It tore out his throat with a feral snarl, showering itself in his blood. The victim’s last utterance in this world was a choked, gurgling scream – as, one by one, his erstwhile allies looked into the mutant’s crazed pink eyes, let their weapons fall from their numbed fingers and fled.

Before he knew it, Gunthar was running too, feeling suddenly guilty that he hadn’t stopped to think about Arex, then grateful to find her running alongside him.

They didn’t get far. Not nearly far enough.

The crowd had become a panicked mob, pulling in all directions. Gunthar struggled against the ever-shifting tide, always aware of the horror that might have been closing behind him, expecting to feel those claws raking across his back. He wanted to scream, wanted to grab the people in his path and yell in their faces, ‘Not this way! The monster is this way!’ It was all he could do, though, to keep his own balance. He almost lost it twice, but Arex was there to catch him, to save his life. If either of them fell now, they were liable to be trampled or worse.

A new sound joined the general discord, and Gunthar recognised the crack of lasgun fire. The proctors, at last, responding to the threat.

Then he realised that the sound was coming not from behind him, but from somewhere ahead – from at least two directions at once – and a cold, tight knot formed in Gunthar’s stomach as he thought about what that had to mean.

He grabbed Arex by the arm, halting her. ‘There are more of them,’ he cried. ‘The mutants. They’re everywhere!’

They stared into each other’s frightened eyes, and somehow reached an unspoken consensus. They struck out in a new direction, away from the screaming, away from the gunfire, and just prayed to the Emperor that they weren’t rushing into more danger. Knowing that some mutants could almost pass for human, Gunthar suspected everyone who came near him, staring at them, searching for the slightest hint of deformity beneath each of their coats.

He almost let out a shriek as a young woman stumbled into him – but it wasn’t an attack, she had just been knocked sideways by a surge of people. She scrabbled at Gunthar’s best grey tunic, trying to keep herself upright, and he reached out too late. The woman fell beneath his feet, and he could no longer help her.

Someone was shouting orders, a harsh male voice augmented and distorted by a loudhailer. Almost instinctively, Gunthar and Arex modified their course to make for this sound of authority. Gunthar was flushed with relief as he saw the scarlet and purple uniforms of the Planetary Defence Force. The crowd was now flowing in a single direction, starting to thin out, and he was making some headway at last.

The hailer was attached to an Armoured Response Vehicle, an ARV, broadcasting an appeal for a calm and orderly evacuation of the area. The vehicle was flanked by a score of foot soldiers, its fuel-burning engine pumping a noxious cloud of exhaust gases out behind it as it crawled up the narrow skyway.

Arex pulled back, giving Gunthar’s hand an anxious squeeze. He knew why she was worried – but at that moment, he didn’t much care. He would rather they were both exposed, rather lose his job and his home and whatever else Governor Hanrik might choose to take from him than turn back and face the horrors behind him.

‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘They aren’t asking for identity tags. They’re just checking everyone is, you know, human. Just keep your head down. They’ll let us through.’ He wished he could be as sure as he sounded. He didn’t know where that false confidence had come from, but while it lasted he started forward, pulling Arex along by her hand.

Ahead, two soldiers had stopped a middle-aged couple for questioning. Gunthar’s stomach lurched with fear, but he was committed to his course now. He couldn’t decide whether to meet the soldiers’ eyes or avoid them – which would draw the least attention? He was suddenly, belatedly aware of his fine silk clothing, so out of place, until he realised his tunic had been scuffed and torn and spattered with something dark that could only have been a dead man’s blood.

Arex’s elegant blue dress had suffered similarly, and Gunthar saw that she was no longer wearing her red amecyte necklace, her mother’s last gift to her. He didn’t know if she had concealed it herself, or if it had been snatched from her.

They were drawing level with the soldiers now. Gunthar could feel their sharp eyes upon him, scanning him for lesions, moles or anything else that might mark him out as abnormal just as he had been scanning the people around him. He must have passed their inspection, because a moment later he and Arex were past the soldiers and the ARV, on the outside – the safe side, the free side – of their tightening cordon.

Gunthar didn’t know what to do, at first. He wasn’t alone in this. There were many more escapees milling about, some laughing, some weeping, some wandering dazed or just sitting at the kerbside, shaking their heads. There were spectators too, those who hadn’t been involved in the incident but who had seen the soldiers and were hungry for scandal. Gunthar heard snatches of conversation, and discerned that few of the people here had actually seen a mutant. They were shaken all the same, reflecting upon their imagined close calls, starting rumours that would grow with each retelling.

Arex was leading Gunthar through all this, and he saw that, unlike him, she had a purpose in mind. They waited until they had cleared the worst of the crowd, until there were no soldiers watching them. Then she took his hand again, and they ran.

They ran as hard and as fast as they could away from that place.

They came to rest in a dark alleyway, and Gunthar – who had thought their flight to be aimless – was surprised to find that this was exactly where Arex wanted to be.

A rusted fire escape ladder snaked its way up a crumbling brick wall, and he sagged against it. His legs felt weak and his lungs were heaving for air. He was shaking.

Arex was drained too, and neither of them spoke nor met each other’s eyes for what seemed like forever. Then she said, in a dulled voice, ‘I should go. Uncle Hanrik will be wondering where I’ve got to. Sometimes he sends the proctors out to look for me.’

She swung herself onto the bottom rung of the ladder. Gunthar looked up, but he couldn’t see its top. It was swallowed by the darkness.

‘I should come with you,’ he said reluctantly. ‘A little further, at least.’

‘There’s no need,’ said Arex. ‘Really, there’s no need. There’s a heavy goods lifter on the roof up here that will take me most of the way.’

‘If it’s working,’ said Gunthar.

‘I checked the maintenance reports before I came out. You should be getting home too. Can you find your way back, around the PDF cordon?’

‘Of course I can,’ said Gunthar, not at all certain that he could.

Arex turned to leave again, and Gunthar’s heart gave a frightened leap. He wasn’t ready to see her go just yet. He couldn’t be alone. ‘I’m sorry,’ he blurted out.

She froze with one foot on the ladder, a hand clutching at a higher rung.

‘I should have protected you,’ he said. ‘I should have done something.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ said Arex. ‘What could you have done?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Something more than just… I was useless back there. I could see what I was meant to do, I just couldn’t… I couldn’t do it.’

Arex stepped off the ladder, took his head in her hands, and gently brushed a curl of dark hair out of his face. ‘Look what happened to the men who tried to fight.’

‘It’s just, I always thought, in a situation like that, I would...’

‘You did the right thing, Gunthar. You got us out of there.’

‘I applied to join the PDF, you know, a few years back. I was seventeen. My friends had been drafted, and they left me behind. I thought, at least I could fight for the Emperor at home. They turned me down. They must have known…’

‘If it was anyone’s fault, what happened,’ said Arex, ‘it was mine.’

‘No.’

‘I’m the one who brought us both down here.’

‘But you couldn’t have expected… I mean, mutants, this many floors up!’

‘It happens,’ said Arex, ‘more often than you might think, and this time… Didn’t you wonder how the PDF got here so quickly, in such numbers?’

Gunthar frowned. ‘You think they...?’

‘I think they were patrolling these skyways. I think they were expecting trouble. I told you, Gunthar, I heard Uncle Hanrik talking about… well, I don’t know what, but I think there’s something wrong. Something… something below. And if that “something” is driving the mutants up here…’

They looked at each other, and Gunthar could see the same thoughts, the same fears, reflected in Arex’s eyes that were whirling about in his own head.

‘They think,’ she said softly, at last, ‘Uncle Hanrik and the rest of them, they think that what happens down here, it doesn’t affect us – but it has to, one day.’

‘Will I see you again?’ asked Gunthar.

Arex smiled. ‘Of course you will. Soon. I’ll contact you.’ She leaned in close, slid her hands around to the back of his head, and before he knew it their lips had met and he was melting into her kiss, breathing in her blossom-scented perfume, feeling her warmth in his arms.

It ended too soon. Arex broke away, and she was climbing the ladder again, out of Gunthar’s life, and this time he knew he couldn’t call her back because this time there was nothing left to say. Nothing, he realised, but the most important thing, and he had left it too late now to say that.

He should have given her the amecyte ring.

Chapter Two

Hieronymous Theta.

An obscure world, located near the outer rim of the Segmentum Tempestus.

A relatively new world, Commissar Costellin noted. Its population still hovered just below the nine billion mark, and a third of its surface had yet to be built over.

Like many new worlds, Hieronymous Theta was still rich in mineral deposits. Its major industries were based around the extraction and working of those minerals. The planet paid a good proportion of its tithe to the Emperor in adamantium and plasteel.

Hieronymous Theta was a sheltered world, the Imperium maintaining a strong grip on the systems around it. Thumbing his way through the data-slate in his hands, Costellin saw that neither the world nor its closest neighbours had been touched by the smallest recorded conflict. It was perfect, he thought.

‘Will that be all, sir?’

Costellin looked up, surprised. He thought he had dismissed the Guardsman who had brought in the slate. He recalled that, in fact, he had only made a dismissive motion with his hand as he had settled into his reading. He ought to have known better.

Costellin had spent almost thirty years – since he was a young man, barely out of his thirties – assigned to the Death Korps of Krieg. If he had learned one thing in those years, it was that Death Korps soldiers, on the whole, could not take hints. They didn’t respond to body language or moods. They needed explicit orders.

The Guardsman stood rigidly in front of the commissar’s broad desk. Even here, in the controlled environment of the troop ship, he wore full combat dress. His greatcoat, trousers and boots were charcoal grey, the colour of the Krieg 186th Infantry Regiment – although, as few Death Korps regiments chose any colour other than grey or black, this didn’t exactly distinguish them from the crowd.

The Guardsman’s helmet, gloves and backpack were all in place. His lasgun was slung at his side. Most egregiously of all, he still wore his full facemask. A length of thick rubber tubing connected its mouthpiece to a rebreather unit in a square, leather carrying case resting against his chest.

Costellin didn’t know the name of this particular soldier. He didn’t know the names of any of them. Only a few Krieg men had names, and it was not common practice within the regiment to use them. On paper, they were just numbers to him – as indeed they were to the colonels and the generals who deployed them in battle.

In person, they were less than that.

Krieg had been classified a deathworld, its atmosphere toxic. Costellin understood that, as a consequence, its people wore their filtration systems as they wore their skins. Despite this, before his transfer to a Krieg regiment, he had imagined the masks would have to come off some time. He had been wrong.

The masks distanced their wearers, even from each other. In contrast to the other regiments with which Costellin had served, he had seen few strong bonds formed among Death Korps men. They trained, fought, ate, slept alongside each other, but there was no friendship, not a trace of camaraderie, between them. This was a regiment of strangers – and, as the years had gone by, Costellin had come to suspect that this might just have been the point.

‘Yes, yes, that’s all,’ he said, waving the nameless, faceless soldier away from him again. The Guardsman saluted, pivoted on his heel and made for the door.

‘I was wondering,’ said Costellin, halting him in his tracks, ‘how many of your platoon might be going planetside. I did circulate a memo. It’s just that we have four regiments aboard this ship. It might be polite to give the Hieronymous authorities some warning if we are about to descend upon them in force.’

The Guardsman stared silently at him, for a moment longer than Costellin felt entirely comfortable with. The round, dark eyepieces in his mask shielded his thoughts and lent him an eerie, hollow-eyed look.

‘We will be staying aboard the Memento Mori, sir,’ he said. ‘We have a schedule of combat exercises planned for the next six days.’

‘We’re all entitled to time off, Guardsman,’ said Costellin. ‘In fact, we’re a good way overdue, having stayed with the campaign on Dask as long as we did. The Administratum has gone to a great deal of trouble to arrange this layover.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I am sure that, whatever exercises your lieutenant has planned for you, they are voluntary.’

‘Yes, sir. We all volunteered, sir.’

‘Of course you did,’ said Costellin with a sigh. After all this time, he didn’t know why he had even bothered to ask. In this case, it had probably been out of embarrassment; his brain had been racing to come up with a reason for having kept the man waiting as long as he had.

‘One more thing,’ he remembered, ‘as long as you’re here. You can convey my congratulations to Major Gamma on his recent promotion. Tell him I’ll catch up with him as soon as I return, and we can go through the new troop allocations then.’

‘Major Gamma, sir?’

‘I mean, Colonel 186,’ Costellin corrected himself. ‘Although, while you’re at it, you should probably congratulate Major Gamma – the new Major Gamma – too.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Costellin knew he should have delivered the messages in person, but for once, he thought, his duty could wait. It wasn’t as if the gesture would have been appreciated – and, as of 06.00 this morning, he was officially on leave.

He returned his attention to the data-slate, but caught himself a moment later and looked up to find the Guardsman still standing to attention in the doorway.

‘Thank you, that’s all,’ said Costellin. ‘Dismissed.’

The Guardsman saluted again, and the door slid shut in front of him.

Costellin suppressed a small shudder. He didn’t know where it had come from. After all, he should have been used to dealing with the Death Korps by now. Sometimes, though, he found they still got to him – their lack of visible expression, of discernible emotion, of the smallest trace of empathic feeling.

He put such thoughts from his mind. He skimmed the rest of the slate, absorbing more details about Hieronymous Theta. Its capital, Hieronymous City, was currently enjoying a temperate autumn. Rainfall this year had been below average.

Not that the weather mattered much to him. Costellin intended to spend his six days’ leave indoors, in bars, in restaurants, in entertainment venues, revelling in the long-denied pleasure of simple human contact.

And the best thing by far, if he knew his regiment at all, was that there wouldn’t be a single member of the Death Korps of Krieg within thirty thousand kilometres of him.

Costellin felt the deck plates trembling beneath his feet.

He moved to the side of the corridor as a Death Korps platoon rounded the bend ahead of him. They had formed up in threes and were doing circuits, their heavy boots falling perfectly in step so the entire ship seemed to ring with each impact. The watchmaster at their head ordered them to ‘eyes left’, and threw a crisp salute in the commissar’s direction. Costellin returned it, and waited patiently for the remainder of the platoon to pass him by.

Sixty pairs of those hollow, dark eyes, fixing him with their blank stares.

Sometimes, Costellin wondered what they saw when they looked at him: a silver-haired, beak-nosed old man who had lived to an age few of them would see.

Through a concave window, he looked down onto a cargo deck. Another platoon had cleared themselves a small training space, by stacking wooden crates precariously against the wall. They were clad in black, so must have belonged to the 42nd or the 81st, he couldn’t see their shoulder flashes from here to tell which.

The Guardsmen were bayoneting sandbags, onto which, curiously, images of their own kind had been stencilled. Costellin had once questioned a watchmaster about this, to be told in a dull but self-assured monotone that the greatest potential threat to any army came from within its own ranks. The Memento Mori was equipped with a proper gymnasium and a firing range, but Costellin didn’t doubt that both of these would be in use, and booked up solid for the next six days.

In contrast, the wardroom was empty but for one other commissar: a balding man with sagging jowls whom Costellin had not seen before. The Krieg officers tended to eat with the lower ranks, having risen through those ranks themselves.

Costellin picked up his meal from the hatch and, because he felt he should, took a seat across from his opposite number. He introduced himself, and learned in return that the other commissar’s name was Mannheim, freshly posted to the Krieg 42nd.

Of course, Costellin knew what the subject of their conversation would be.

‘I was only on Dask for a month and a half,’ said Mannheim, ‘I only saw the final stages of the campaign there, but I can tell you this much – the resolve, the sheer grit I saw displayed by those men…’

‘But?’ Costellin prompted. He knew there would be a ‘but’.

‘You must have served with other regiments before you came to this one,’ Mannheim said guardedly.

Costellin nodded. ‘The Catachan Fourteenth.’

‘Jungle Fighters.’ Mannheim was impressed. ‘I’ve heard they can be difficult.’

‘Not especially,’ said Costellin casually, ‘if you know how to deal with them. I earned their respect and their trust, and they more than earned mine. The Death Korps remind me of them, in some ways. They fight as hard, and are just as unshakeable. You know, the combined Krieg regiments have the lowest desertion rate in the Imperial Guard. It’s as near as damn it to zero.’

‘They certainly aren’t afraid of dying,’ said Mannheim, mumbling thoughtfully through a mouthful of food.

‘In the right cause, no.’

‘And don’t get me wrong, they are perfectly respectful. When I give them an order, they jump to it.’

‘You just don’t know how to relate to them,’ Costellin guessed.

‘When I talk to them, it’s like… I get nothing back from them. I can’t tell what they’re thinking, how they’re feeling. What is it that drives them, Costellin?’

Costellin smiled tightly. He had asked himself that question more times than he could count. He hadn’t yet found the answer, not completely.

The men of Krieg didn’t discuss their past – to them, it was a source of shame – but, three decades ago, Costellin had made it his business to learn all he could about his new regiment, and this had included their history.

It had been a surprisingly arduous task. Much of what had been written about Krieg and its people had been lost – in some cases, he suspected, deliberately expunged – from Imperial records. One single, dreadful fact, however, was beyond doubt.

Barely a millennium and a half ago, Krieg had been lain waste by the bloodiest and most brutal civil war ever known to mankind.

It began, Costellin explained to Mannheim, when the corrupt and decadent Autocrats who ruled the planet declared themselves independent from the Imperium. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘the citizens were outraged by this heresy.’

‘Of course,’ said Mannheim.

‘So, the Autocrats sent their private armies out into the streets to crush any and all resistance. They almost succeeded.’

The man credited with the salvation of Krieg was one Colonel Jurten. When the Autocrats made their move, Jurten had been in the hive city of Ferrograd, mustering a single Imperial Guard regiment. He had acted quickly, seizing control of that city, turning it into a rallying point for the resistance movement.

Of course, Jurten and his brave men had been outnumbered thousands to one – and their enemies had had far greater resources than they, including control of the planetary defences. The Imperium couldn’t get a force through the Autocrats’ blockade to help the struggling Krieg loyalists. Jurten was fighting a war he couldn’t win – at least, not through conventional means. Then, buried beneath the Ferrograd hive, in a secret vault constructed by the Adeptus Mechanicus, the colonel had found a cache of forbidden weapons, antique devices of death, that were anything but conventional.

‘The greatest hero in Krieg’s history,’ said Costellin, ‘is the man who destroyed it. Jurten decided that, if the Emperor couldn’t have his world, then nobody could. On the Feast of the Emperor’s Ascension, he detonated those missiles in the atmosphere.’

Mannheim had forgotten his food. Pink sludge dribbled off the edge of his spoon. ‘Then that… that’s why the air on Krieg is…?’

‘The missiles destroyed the ecosystem,’ Costellin confirmed. ‘Jurten killed billions of his own people, but he also evened the odds against him. The war raged on for another five hundred years, but at last the victors emerged.’

‘The Death Korps,’ said Mannheim.

‘They were forged in that nuclear fire.’

‘Have you ever seen Krieg yourself?’

‘Just once,’ said Costellin. ‘I set foot on its surface just once – and I wish to the God-Emperor I hadn’t.’

They ate in silence for a few minutes more, Costellin giving his fellow commissar time to absorb all he had just heard. Then, in a lighter tone, he said, ‘Look on the bright side. We’ll both be dining rather better than this tonight.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Mannheim. ‘I don’t know if I’ll be going planetside. My regiment, they’ve decided to–’

‘Combat exercises,’ said Costellin, ‘and you feel you ought to stay with them.’

‘Well, yes, yes, I do.’

‘They don’t need you at the moment. Take this opportunity while you can. It’ll be a long time before you get another one, believe me. The Departmento Munitorum has a habit of forgetting to apportion leave to Death Korps regiments, and the Death Korps regiments have a habit of not complaining about it.’

‘All the same,’ said Mannheim, ‘I feel I should spend the time to get to know these men a little better, to understand what my role is here.’

‘If morale is so high in the Death Korps of Krieg, if discipline is no problem, then you don’t understand why they need commissars at all.’

‘You always seem to know what I’m thinking.’

Costellin smiled. ‘I’m not yet so ancient that I don’t remember thinking the same things myself – and you will find the answers to those questions, some of them at least. In the meantime…’ He pushed back his chair and picked up his empty plate. ‘In the meantime, I’ll be heading for the drop-ships as soon as we make orbit. I’d advise you do the same. Relax. Bring back some real food.’

He turned, and caught his breath as he almost walked into a Death Korps soldier, who had come up behind him without Costellin having heard him.

The Guardsman saluted. ‘Commissars Costellin, Mannheim,’ he said flatly – and then, he spoke the very last words that Costellin had wished to hear: ‘Your presence has been requested on the bridge, sirs.’

The bridge door was adorned with a large leering skull, two metres high, but the painting was old now, fading and flaking. Costellin caught Mannheim frowning at the bleak image, and he smiled to himself.

The area around the captain’s chair was crowded, with two black-coated Krieg generals and all four regimental commanders already present. Costellin acknowledged the newly-appointed Colonel 186 with a nod. A masked face turned towards him, but the colonel gave no other indication that he had seen the commissar at all.

As always, a small army of servitors scrabbled about the dark edges of the circular chamber, manipulating the panels of runes set into the curved wooden walls. Costellin was just glad that, with the ship out of warp space, its mutant Navigator had presumably retired to her quarters; her presence always made his nerves itch. He glanced at the giant hololithic display, but saw only a few distant points of light in the infinite blackness through which they were journeying.

He knew Captain Rokan, of course. The short, stocky Navy man squirmed about in his seat to greet the newcomers with a look of relief. Costellin exchanged brief pleasantries with the captain, and introduced him to Mannheim, while they awaited the commissars of the 81st and the 103rd. Their voices were the only ones to be heard, and they echoed from the walls and returned to their ears too loud.

As soon as the gathering was complete, one of the generals spoke without preamble. ‘We have received a communiqué from the Departmento Munitorum,’ he announced. ‘A situation is developing on Hieronymous Theta that requires our attention.’

Costellin’s heart sank, although he had expected no less than this.

The general looked at Rokan, who hesitated, unsure if this was his cue to speak. He decided that it was, and began, ‘It seems the Planetary Governor has been having some trouble – rioting on the lower levels, that kind of thing.’

‘And is this really our concern?’ asked Costellin.

‘I know,’ said Rokan with a shrug. ‘That was my first thought too. Hieronymous Theta is a newly-settled world, relatively peaceful. Its young men are as likely to become miners as soldiers. It crossed my mind that the Governor – Hanrik – might just be panicking. This could be the first time he’s had any real problems with his underclass. Hanrik has seen service, though, and there is–’

‘There are indications of a possible xenos presence,’ the general interrupted him.

‘Just rumours so far,’ stressed Rokan, ‘or so we’re told. I don’t know. It seemed to me there might be something more to this, something Naval Command didn’t quite want to put into words. There was mention of some… some artefact that has got them all excited. I can play back the whole message for you if you like.’

‘What are our orders?’ asked Colonel 103.

It was the second general who answered. ‘As ours is the nearest ship, we will proceed to Hieronymous Theta as planned. All leave is hereby cancelled. Colonel 42 and his commissar will meet with the Governor on the ground to assess the situation.’

‘We are scheduled to rendezvous with the troop ship Divine Judgement in fifteen days,’ added the first general, ‘to take on new recruits. We will now require them to come to us, as soon as is practical for them. Captain, you will arrange this.’

‘Colonel 42 will report his findings to us within one planetary day,’ said the second general, ‘by which time all regiments will be mustered and ready to deploy.’

With that, the two generals marched out of the room, and the four colonels followed them. Captain Rokan relaxed in his seat, evidently glad to see them go. He caught Mannheim’s eye, and threw him a cheerful wink. ‘Welcome aboard!’ he said.

‘I’m not happy about this, Costellin,’ said Mannheim as the two commissars strode through the corridors side by side. ‘This secrecy… Why are the Imperial Guard involved in what appears to be a purely domestic matter?’

Costellin had had the same thought. ‘The generals will tell us what we need to know,’ he said, ‘when they decide we need to know it. In the meantime, you wanted to know why a Death Korps regiment needs a commissar. You’re about to find out.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Mannheim.

‘Your meeting today. Notice how the generals sent one of their own with you, the regimental commander no less. Colonel 42 will take a half-dozen aides with him to Hieronymous Theta, maybe a major or two. You saw how Captain Rokan reacted to being surrounded by Krieg officers, and he’s had time to get used to them.’

‘This governor chap, Hanrik…’ Mannheim realised.

‘Hanrik will be glad to see a friendly face. He’ll be glad to see a face at all. This is your job from now on, Mannheim, at least the greater part of it. You’re a diplomat first and foremost. It’s up to you to mediate between the Death Korps and the planetary governors, between the Death Korps and the civilians, the Adeptus Mechanicus, sometimes even the rest of the Imperial Guard.’

‘I see,’ said Mannheim thoughtfully, ‘to smooth the way so they can do their jobs. Still, I don’t understand why they have to be so… so… The masks and the skull motifs, the atmosphere aboard this ship…’

‘To the Korps,’ said Costellin, ‘death is a way of life.’

‘You make them sound positively morbid.’

‘It’s a fact. As you have already observed, they have no fear of dying. In fact, they welcome it. To die in the Emperor’s service is their lives’ sole purpose. It’s an attitude our leaders have no wish to discourage, of course.’

‘And they all feel this way?’

‘Try talking to a Krieg Guardsman some time. You’ll find he has no hopes, no dreams, no desires, nothing but his orders and the prospect of a violent end. As far as he is concerned, there is nothing else. He is a dead man walking.’

‘But why…?’

‘The men of Krieg,’ explained Costellin, ‘still bear the guilt of their world’s sins. It is instilled in them from the moment they are born. They are taught they must atone for their ancestors’ rebellion – but their world is a radioactive hellhole. Krieg has no industry, no agriculture, with which it can repay its thousand-year-old debt to the Emperor. It has nothing but its children, so it gives these gladly.’

‘But surely,’ said Mannheim, ‘those children are the descendants of the heroic Colonel Jurten as much as they are of the Autocrats?’

‘They are indeed,’ said Costellin, as the two men halted at the junction at which they would part to return to their offices, ‘and that’s the second part of our job, Mannheim. That’s the other reason why the Death Korps of Krieg needs people like us: because sometimes, just sometimes, they need to be stopped from going too far.’

Chapter Three

Gunthar sat behind his desk, waiting.

Data-slates were strewn across the white plastek surface. He had shift rotas to sign off, mine quotas to adjust, personnel to hire and fire, maintenance reports to read. He was already well behind – spent too much time worrying about his date last night – and now he couldn’t settle to any of it. He stared at the comm-link terminal as if he could will it to chime. He tapped at a rune in its base, just to hear the static squawk that would reassure him it hadn’t broken down again.

Gunthar hadn’t slept. Whenever he had tried, he had seen the glaring pink eyes of the mutant or heard the dying gurgle of its victim.

He had turned on the holocaster several times, almost every hour throughout the long night, watching the latest reports. There had been no mention of the incident. He had wondered how that could be – until he remembered what Arex had said.

‘They don’t let you see this… They pretend it doesn’t exist… They think that, what happens down here, it doesn’t affect us.’

Gunthar had the ring in his fingers, and was turning it idly. He didn’t remember taking it from his pocket; his hand must have strayed to it just as his thoughts strayed to Arex. Yesterday, he had thought the ring beautiful. Now, he wasn’t so sure.

It was set with six red amecyte stones. Gunthar had chosen red because it was Arex’s favourite colour. He had chosen amecyte because it was mined on only one planet in the entire Imperium, and that planet was Hieronymous Theta.

Elsewhere, a ring like this one would have commanded an extravagant price. On Gunthar’s home world, however, amecyte was as common as glass – and, for a mine overseer able to lay his hands on rejected, flawed stones, almost as affordable.

The comm-link chimed, and Gunthar started. Suddenly all thumbs, he stuffed the ring back into his pocket as he lunged to take the call. ‘Mr Soreson,’ a gruff voice crackled over the link. ‘Herriksen here. You wanted a word?’

‘I did,’ said Gunthar. He fumbled across the desk, searching for the one slate he was sure he had left right there. ‘You sent me a report a few days ago, about something… You said you had found something down there?’

Herriksen’s reply was lost to a howling of strained engines and a clanking of chains in the background of the call, and Gunthar had to ask him to repeat it.

‘…kept digging, just like you instructed, but now we’ve unearthed…’

Another barrage of sound obscured the next few words.

‘…problem down here, Mr Soreson. Like I said in my report, there are these weird runes… The men don’t like those runes. They’re saying…’

It had been Arex’s words, again, that had prompted Gunthar into spending his morning going through recent reports from the mines under his supervision. He had been searching for something, anything he might have missed, anything that might have seemed insignificant before. He had already contacted three mine foremen, questioning them about small drops in yields and losses of workers. Then he had picked up the slate containing Herriksen’s report, and he had remembered.

He had hardly glanced at it, last week. He had had so much else to do, and so what, he had thought, if some miners had found a chunk of worked stone. Why did they have to come crying to him about it? It had probably been buried by the mutants on the ground, for some unfathomable reason, and worked its way down during an earth tremor. Or it had been left behind by one of the primitive civilisations thought to have existed on Hieronymous Theta before its colonisation – what difference did it make?

He had dashed off a quick reply to Herriksen. He had told him that his find, whatever it may prove to be, was of no interest to anyone. He had reminded the foreman that his mine was behind on its quotas. He had told him to keep digging.

‘…refusing to work in that tunnel. They say it makes them feel…’

An hour ago, Gunthar had called up a hololithic display of all the mine tunnels beneath Hieronymous City. He had overlaid upon this the locations of all the reported fatalities of the past six months, and he had found a significant cluster. A cluster that was centred on the north-west corner of Herriksen’s mine.

The foreman’s voice was being drowned out again, but it didn’t matter. Gunthar had heard enough. He stabbed at the ‘transmit’ rune on the comm-link’s base, and he said, ‘I’m on my way down there.’

Gunthar had worked in mining since leaving his schola at the age of fourteen. Most of his world’s young men did the same, those who escaped the draft. Despite this, he had set foot in an actual mine only twice before. His work had always been administrative in nature, undertaken in well-lit offices on the higher floors.

The mine entrances, of course, were a good way above the tunnels themselves. Still, Gunthar had to drop a few floors to reach them. This time yesterday, this wouldn’t have concerned him – but then, this time yesterday, he wouldn’t have made this journey at all. He felt his stomach churning as a heavy lifter carried his autocab down. He had taken public transport because official cars were scarce and he hadn’t wanted to wait for one. He wished Arex had called him, just to say she had made it home. If something had happened to her, would the newscasters have censored that too?

Kreuz was perched on the curved seat beside him, her eyes as blank as the data-slate in her lap. She was Gunthar’s lex-scribe – he qualified for his own lex-scribe now – and she went everywhere he did.

The cab reached its programmed destination, and Gunthar climbed out, reassured to be greeted by two proctor sentries. He showed them his identity tag, and he and Kreuz stepped through an archway into a large, dark area full of noise and steam. They were surrounded by clattering tanks and hissing pipes, with people rushing to and fro. The air in here was hot, dry and oppressive.

This was where the metal ore extracted from the ground below was smelted down. Gunthar saw an idling truck, waiting to be loaded up with the precious materials thus obtained. They would be conveyed to the nearest space port, and from there to an Imperial forge world, to be fashioned into the machinery of war.

Gunthar intercepted a burly, ruddy-faced man as he dashed between tanks. ‘I’m looking for your foreman, Mr Herriksen,’ he said.

The burly man shook his head and pointed to the yellow earplugs he was wearing. Kreuz stencilled the name Herriksen? on her data-slate, and thrust it under his nose. He nodded in comprehension, and pointed to a row of six lifters, each contained in its own metal-mesh cage. Then he made a plunging motion with his thumb, and mouthed the words, ‘Down below.’

As Gunthar approached the cages, he heard a screeching of engines and chains and a lifter rose, bearing two miners with an ore-laden barrow. An old, soot-blackened comm-link terminal was set into the stone wall, and he realised that this was where Herriksen must have been when they had spoken earlier.

He found rebreathers, safety helmets and goggles, slung from hooks beside the lifter cages. The first rebreather he tried didn’t work, but as he placed the second over his mouth, the air tasted cooler and fresher. Gunthar and Kreuz stepped onto a lifter platform and its cage door rattled shut, casting a criss-cross pattern of shadows over them. As the platform lurched into motion, two pale blue luminator strips flared at their feet, but the left-hand strip immediately faltered and died.

A moment later, they were descending through a rough-hewn stone shaft, insect eyes peering out at them from dark crevices. It was a long, slow journey, and it was made all the slower by Gunthar’s imagination, which insisted on picturing all manner of twisted horrors lurking behind those stone walls, on the lower floors of the city. Occasionally, the lifter would stall for a second, as if it had caught on something, and each time this happened he felt the sickening fear that it might not move again.

He began to ask himself what he was doing here. Trying to impress Arex? Looking for a chance to make up for his inaction last night? What made him think he could? What made him think that, given another chance to be a hero, he would be any more able to take it than he had been the first time?

Checking his chrono, he saw that a little over three minutes had passed. They had to be underground by now, he thought – and indeed, a moment later, the stone walls gave way to more metal mesh and the lifter platform dropped into a second cage. Gunthar and Kreuz stepped out of this cage into an expansive cavern, well-lit by luminator globes strung from wooden mine props.

The air here was choked with dust, and Gunthar felt an itch in his eyes despite the protective goggles he wore. Squinting through this haze, he saw dark tunnel openings and vast banks of ancient, rusted machinery. Cogitators clicked and ground to themselves, as an army of mine labourers and servitors teemed between them.

A dirt-encrusted, middle-aged man with red-rimmed eyes visible through his goggles moved to greet the new arrivals. ‘You must be Mr Soreson. From the Officio Primaris? I’m Herriksen.’ The man seized Gunthar’s hand in an uncomfortably strong grip, and pumped it hard.

‘I was expecting to meet you at the mine entrance,’ said Gunthar.

‘Too much to do down here, Mr Soreson. Well, you know how it is. Quotas to meet. I see you’ve found yourself a rebreather. There are a couple of spares by the lifters if it fails on you. You’ll be wanting to see this artefact of ours, then?’

‘I think we should,’ agreed Gunthar. Just a quick look, he thought, then he could return to
his comfortable office and do what he should have done in the first place: contact the proctors, or
even the PDF, and let them deal with the problem.

At least, this way, he would have a tale to tell Arex.

Herriksen led the way across the cavern, calling to three other miners to join them as he did so. The men seemed excited by Gunthar’s presence, and eager to see what he made of their find; he supposed it had been a talking point for them too.

They approached a tunnel entrance, passing the abandoned hulk of a clapped-out boring vehicle on their way. ‘Lights on,’ instructed Herriksen, and he activated his helmet luminator. The other three miners followed suit immediately, but Gunthar couldn’t find the rune on his helmet. He fumbled with it for a while before one of the miners reached over and performed the task for him. A little embarrassed by this, Gunthar made a show of activating Kreuz’s luminator in turn.

The tunnel was wider than he had expected, and the five men and Kreuz proceeded along it two abreast. The miners dropped back to allow Gunthar to take the lead beside Herriksen, a courtesy he could have done without. Even with their six luminators, he could see only a couple of metres ahead of him through the ever-present dust. Whenever the tunnel forked, which it did a couple of times, he almost walked into the walls. He was glad of Herriksen’s assured presence by his side, guiding him.

Gunthar knew they were nearing their destination when he heard the heavy clunks of pickaxes and the shrieking of drills from ahead. Shortly, his group’s little bubble of light merged with another, and in that light he saw the glint of augmetic body parts.

‘I think I mentioned when we spoke,’ said Herriksen, ‘that most of the men won’t work this tunnel any more. I’ve been forced to rely on the servitors, and you know what they can be like. If I don’t watch over them constantly…’

Gunthar nodded, not really caring. There were ten servitors present, semi-human drones, probably grown in vats. Little better than mutants, he thought, though at least these creatures were programmed to serve the Imperium.

As mining servitors, these particular creatures had also been augmented to suit the conditions down here. Their rebreathers were bonded with their flesh, welded to their bones, replacing the bottom halves of their faces. In place of arms, they had rock drills and piston-driven hammers, while muscle stimulants and growth hormones had given them strength enough to cope with back-breaking work that would have killed a normal man. Gunthar was careful to keep his distance from them.

He was more interested in the column.

It stood at the right-hand edge of the tunnel, just a metre or so back from the end. About two metres tall – no, a little less than that, a bit shorter than Gunthar. It was like a miniature obelisk, with a pyramid shape at its top, about the size of Gunthar’s head, and a square, stepped base still partially embedded in the tunnel wall.

The column was carved out of a smooth, polished stone – and Gunthar couldn’t be sure in the dust and the dim light, but he thought it had a pale green tint.

‘What type of stone is that?’ he asked Herriksen, but the foreman just shrugged. ‘And what are those markings on it?’

Kreuz leaned in closer, so her luminator beam fell onto the column.

‘We thought maybe some kind of writing,’ said Herriksen.

‘It doesn’t look like any language I know,’ said Gunthar. He could see Herriksen’s point, though. The runes did look like some kind of script: a sequence of symbols, the same ones often repeated. There were four rows of them, stretching around the column, and a fifth along its base. Many of the letters – if that was indeed what they were – were based on the shape of the circle, but with tangential or extended radial lines connecting them in an intricate pattern.

‘I think it’s starting again,’ said one of the miners in a low, foreboding voice.

‘What’s starting?’ asked Gunthar.

Herriksen scowled. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘It’s just the men’s imagination.’

‘You can’t feel that?’ the miner protested. ‘That… that pressure in your head? Like it was before, the last time I looked at those… those…’

And Gunthar could feel it now. Like something was growing inside his skull, straining to get out – and with that thought, he wanted to be sick.

He closed his eyes, breathed deeply, and the symptoms receded somewhat. Herriksen was right, he thought. The miners were imagining things, and he was reacting to their fear, doing the same.

He looked again, in time to see Kreuz reaching for the column, too late to shout a warning before her flesh made contact with the stone.

He felt a little foolish as she traced the outline of a glyph with her ever-present stencil. What had he expected to happen? The miners had dug the column out of the wall, he thought, their hands must have touched it a thousand times.

‘I think I’ve seen enough,’ said Gunthar quickly, hoping his voice didn’t sound too weak, too plaintive. ‘Thank you for bringing this matter to my attention. I… Let me speak with my superiors about this, and I’ll let you know what we decide to do. In the meantime… In the meantime, the artefact isn’t harming anyone, so I would carry on as you are, let the servitors mine this tunnel. We have our quotas to keep up.’

Herriksen nodded, and turned to lead Gunthar back out the way they had come. Kreuz, for her part, seemed strangely reluctant to leave the column behind, but she straightened up, made a final few notes on her slate and followed her boss dutifully.

They had barely taken six steps back up the tunnel when one of the miners stiffened and halted. ‘Do you hear that?’ he asked. ‘Tell me you can hear that. That humming noise.’ They all stood in silence, listening, and Gunthar was about to protest that he couldn’t hear anything when Kreuz spoke.

‘Yes, yes,’ she said, ‘I can hear it.’

Herriksen shook his head. ‘The acoustics in these tunnels can play some pretty odd tricks on a man, and with the servitors drilling down here…’

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ agreed Gunthar. ‘I’m sure it’s nothing.’ He started forward again – but suddenly, he could hear it too.

He thought it was a mechanical noise at first, maybe a piece of mining equipment in an adjacent tunnel. As the hum grew louder, however, it became higher in pitch and took on a more organic quality, until it sounded like a chorus of ethereal voices.

He didn’t want to turn around, didn’t want to see the stone column again, but he couldn’t help himself. He looked back over his shoulder, even as a servitor, unperturbed by the events unfolding around it, lifted a barrel of metal ore and wheeled it down the tunnel towards Gunthar and his party.

As the servitor shuffled past the column, it brushed the surface with its left arm.

Gunthar was blinded by a bright green flash. He stumbled backwards, gasping, blinking, his retinas imprinted with the image of a skeletal silhouette crumbling into dust in that terrible light. Then, as his vision began to clear, he saw a half-melted augmetic arm lying in a pool of slag, but no other remnants of the hapless servitor to whom the arm had once been attached.

The humming was even louder now, and shrill like the whining of the drills. Herriksen made the sign of the aquila, and Gunthar boggled as two of the servitors – then a third, then a fourth – abandoned their work to sink to their knees in front of the stone column. He had never seen a servitor behave that way before.

‘What… what just happened?’ one of the miners stammered.

‘What do we do?’ Kreuz whimpered. ‘Mr Soreson, what do we do?’

‘No one is to touch that thing,’ commanded Herriksen, while Gunthar was still trying to think of a single word to say. ‘We need to back out of this tunnel now, slowly and calmly, and we need to seal it off until the PDF can get here.’

‘The column,’ cried another miner. ‘Look at the column. It’s glowing!’

He was right. The strange stone was pulsing, impossibly, with an internal light. The glow was a putrid shade of green, and Gunthar felt sick again at the mere sight of it. Or perhaps his nausea was fuelled by the thought that the dust he was inhaling, even through the rebreather, might well have contained traces of the disintegrated servitor.

They were all doing as Herriksen had said, backing away. ‘What if it’s a bomb?’ ventured one of the miners. ‘What if that thing is juicing itself up ready to explode?’

They exchanged worried glances at that, all six of them.

Then, Gunthar turned and ran out of the tunnel as if all the daemons of the warp were on his tail – and, in the heart-racing terror of that moment, he didn’t care that he might be thought of as a coward, didn’t care what Arex would think when she heard about this. He didn’t even care how many times he ran into a rock wall in his half-blind flight. All that mattered to Gunthar was that he put as much distance between himself and that unholy artefact as was humanly possible.

And, apparently, this was all that mattered to the others too – because, as Gunthar quickly realised, they were all right behind him.

Gunthar was the first to emerge, in a flurry of dirt and dust, into the main cavern.

‘We need to evacuate this mine,’ he yelled at the world in general. ‘Everyone needs to get out of here. There’s a… There’s…’

Words failed him, but Herriksen came to his rescue. ‘A safety issue has arisen in one of the tunnels. Mr Soreson here is from the Officio Primaris, and he has decided–’

Gunthar nodded impatiently. ‘We need to contact the foremen of the neighbouring mines too, warn them–’

‘Mr Soreson,’ protested Kreuz, ‘do you have the authority to order–?’

‘I don’t care,’ Gunthar snapped, surprising himself with his directness. ‘We’ve no way of contacting the Governor’s office for permission from down here, and by the time we reach the surface…’ His voice tailed off as he looked at the lifters and remembered how long his journey down here had taken.

Herriksen was marshalling the confused miners in the cavern, sending them into the tunnels to spread the word. He took Gunthar by the shoulder, and propelled him firmly to the nearest of the metal-mesh cages, Kreuz scuttling along beside them.

Gunthar turned to Herriksen, and asked, ‘Aren’t you coming with us?’

Herriksen shook his head. ‘There are over two hundred workers in this sector of the mine, servitors excepted, and the lifters will only carry five at a time. It will take over an hour to clear everybody out, and I’m not leaving any men behind.’

Gunthar didn’t know what to say. He was relieved when Herriksen let him off the hook. ‘Go,’ he said. ‘Someone needs to get up there, get on the comm-link, and let people know what we just saw.’

The first miners were beginning to stream into the cavern from the nearest tunnel. Herriksen ushered three of them into the cage with Gunthar and Kreuz, then dragged the door shut behind them and sent the lifter on its way.

Their upward journey was endured in deathly silence, and it seemed to take forever.

Chapter Four

Arex hadn’t planned to listen in on her uncle’s conversation.

She was passing by his office. She heard his voice, muffled by the oak door, talking to someone on the comm-link. She was almost out of earshot when she heard a name that made her stop and take notice.

‘…Gunthar Soreson…’

She tiptoed to the door and pressed her cheek against it. She couldn’t hear anything at first for the sound of her own heart thumping in her ears.

‘…can’t ignore us now,’ Uncle Hanrik was saying. ‘This time, it’s more than just a few lumps of marble. This artefact, this column…’

He was answered by an indistinguishable buzz from his comm-link terminal, whereupon his voice grew louder and thus clearer to the eavesdropper. ‘I’m talking about the safety of my people, of my entire world. I won’t risk having a miner disturb something else down there, not until there has been a thorough investigation.’

The comm-link buzzed again, and Hanrik replied, ‘As I told you, this latest incident involved the mine overseer for that sector. I have his statement right here.’ So, Uncle Hanrik had spoken Gunthar’s name. Had something happened to him?

‘I have already given the order,’ said Hanrik. ‘Every mine within a hundred kilometres of Hieronymous City is being evacuated and sealed off. Mining operations will not resume until I am convinced it is safe for them to do so.’

More frenetic buzzing from the comm-link. Then, more calmly, so that Arex had to strain to catch his words again, Hanrik muttered, ‘Well, maybe now the Administratum will appreciate how serious… some colonel on his way here… what he has to say about the whole business.’

Arex heard shuffling footsteps: a servitor, climbing the staircase from the kitchens. She jumped away from her uncle’s door and proceeded along the hallway, hardly able to stop herself from breaking into a run.

Something was happening, something big. Something to inject some interest into the boring life of a Governor’s niece. The sort of thing Uncle Hanrik would normally have kept from her – only, this time, Arex had someone on the inside.

Dinner was served early that evening.

Arex sat across the polished table from her Uncle Hanrik, and picked at her meal without enthusiasm although the lobros had been freshly caught that morning. She asked Hanrik about his day, but he gave his usual vague, dismissive answer, shaking his head until his double chin wobbled. She wanted to ask him about Gunthar. She had tried to contact him at his office, but he hadn’t been there.

‘I… heard some of the staff talking,’ she said, ‘about some trouble... in the mines.’

Hanrik frowned at this, and grunted that it was none of her concern. ‘However,’ he said, ‘we do need to talk. I’m going to be busy for the next week or two. I have some people coming tonight, and I… It’s been a while since you last visited your aunt.’

Arex protested, ‘No!’

‘Please, Arex, don’t argue with me. I think it would be best for you to spend some time with your aunt in Imperial Cove.’

He always treated her like this, as if she were a child. Arex was twenty-one now, more than old enough to make her own decisions. She had been telling him that, though, since she was fourteen, and it hadn’t worked so far. That was the trouble with having an uncle who ruled a planet.

Hanrik had had sons of his own once, three of them. They had joined up with the Imperial Guard, and – like his brother, Arex’s father – died on a distant battlefield. In her more understanding moments, she could see why he was so overprotective of her. This, however, was not one of those moments.

Arex pushed her plate away, stood up and marched out of the room.

Outside, she leant her head to the wall and trembled with frustration. She knew what would happen next. She knew that, tomorrow if not tonight, there would be a knock on her door and she would find a personal escort waiting for her in the hallway. Uncle Hanrik didn’t take no for an answer.

Sometimes, their suite in the High Spire felt like a prison. Sometimes, Arex thought she should have left home long ago, perhaps accepted one of the many suitors her uncle had lined up for her. The problem was, she hadn’t much liked any of them.

Arex didn’t know what had drawn her to Gunthar Soreson. He hadn’t even been able to say two words to her when first they had met. Perhaps it was that very shyness, though, that unassuming nature, that had made him such a welcome change from the privileged braggarts her uncle tended to pick out for her. The problem was that she couldn’t foresee a future in which she and Gunthar could be together.

Right now, though, that didn’t matter.

She was going to find him. She would go to his hab first. If he hadn’t returned there yet, she would wait for him. She would tell Gunthar what she should have told him last night: that she loved him.

Then, before she was packed off to Imperial Cove out of harm’s way, Arex would at least know what Uncle Hanrik was trying to protect her from this time.

Arex took the stairs down to the exit, because she had anxious energy to expend and didn’t want to be cooped up in a lifter. She told the doormen she was taking a stroll around the gardens and wanted to be alone. As soon as she was out of their sight, she hopped over a wall and dropped down onto a public skyway.

There was an embarkation point a block and a half away, where two autocabs sat waiting. Arex climbed into the first of these, swiped her identity tag through the reader and found Gunthar’s address on a scrolling hololithic city map. The engine started with a judder and an ozone whiff, and the cab moved off.

Almost immediately, it turned onto a lifter platform and stopped again. Through its broad, curved windshield, Arex could see the flat tops of the shorter towers around her for a moment before she was lowered into their midst.

Then a shrieking sound turned her eyes upwards, and she saw an exhaust trail bright against the darkening sky. A troop ship, coming in to land at Hieronymous Port. Her uncle’s visitors, no doubt. At any other time, Arex would have stayed at home, eager for whatever titbits of information she could overhear from them. Tonight, she had more important things on her mind.

Arex had never been to Gunthar’s home before, so she followed her progress on the map. A dotted red line showed the cab’s intended route through the city; it had dropped some way below Gunthar’s floor in search of the closest-running skyway. It was reduced to crawling speed at this level, nuzzling its way through slow-moving knots of people, too many of them to stick to their own lanes.

Then the hololith blinked out, and the autocab came to a gentle halt.

At first, Arex thought the vehicle itself must be at fault. She muttered a dark oath under her breath, cursing the enginseers whose job it was to keep it running.

It occurred to her, then, that the world had grown darker.

It wasn’t yet time for the public luminators to come on, but a moment ago there had been lighted windows and business signs outside. Now there was nothing, no man-made light at all, and Arex was beginning to appreciate just how much earlier dusk came to the lower floors than it did to her High Spire window.

She stabbed at the door rune by her knee, once, twice, three times, to no avail. She twisted around in her seat and kicked at the door instead, putting her full weight behind each blow until the latch gave way.

The air outside the autocab was far colder than it had been above.

A moment ago, the strangers on this skyway had been moving with direction and purpose. Now, they milled uncertainly, looking at each other as if somebody else might have the answers they craved. Arex kept her head down, irrationally afraid that if she made eye contact with any of them she might be recognised.

Murmurs reached her ears, certain repeated words confirming what she had already begun to suspect: ‘…power outage… whole of the neighbourhood, maybe beyond… can’t see any lights on the upper floors…’

All of a sudden, Arex felt a long way from home.

The autocabs drew power from the skyways themselves. If there was no power in this sector, if that much was true, then there were no cabs... and no lifters. How long would it take her to climb all those floors – even assuming she could find a staircase that wasn’t barricaded from above? She could always flag down a proctor, she thought. Their vehicles had independent power sources… didn’t they? But then, she would have to explain to Uncle Hanrik what she was doing down here, and whatever lie she told him it would make him suspicious enough to start digging for the truth.

She told herself to calm down. For all she knew, the power could be restored at any moment. If the outage had affected the upper floors too, then the enginseers would certainly be working on it. In the meantime, Arex thought she could remember the layout of the surrounding towers from the autocab’s map. She could find her way to Gunthar’s hab, at least.

She wrapped her coat more tightly about herself and started walking. She knew that, statistically speaking, these floors were relatively safe, far safer than the one to which she had taken Gunthar last night. Still, the darkness unnerved her. It cast the faces around her into shadow, making it seem like everyone she passed was hiding some malevolent intent. It created inkblot shapes in the corners, in the windows, in the mouths of the alleyways, which unfailingly reminded Arex of the pink-eyed mutant.

She removed her mother’s necklace, as she had done last night, concealed it in her coat pocket. She could see Gunthar’s hab-block up ahead. She quickened her pace, thinking that in a few minutes’ time she could be safe indoors, in his arms, and these unfounded fears of hers would be a dissipating memory.

But then, a new shadow – a larger and more ominous shadow – crept over her.

A shape was collecting in the evening sky: a black cloud, but like no cloud Arex had seen before. It was too dense, too low – it was hovering between the upper floors of the towers themselves – and it was growing in size, billowing ever outwards.

Then, Arex realised what that cloud had to be.

It was a swarm. An insect swarm.

Arex stared in horrified fascination as the swarm continued to build.

There had to have been thousands, hundreds of thousands, of bodies in that great pulsating mass, and thick black streams were rising from the lower floors to further engorge it. She wondered what could have made the normally passive insects of her world behave like this, and then she realised she could hear no sound from the swarm, no buzzing. She wondered why the insects weren’t buzzing.

It was perhaps that very lack of sound that prevented Arex from seeing the danger she was in. That, and the impossibility of judging the scale and the distance of the swarm in the half-light. It wasn’t until the people around her began to see it, began to cry out and to turn and to run, to seek shelter in the surrounding hab-blocks, that Arex grasped the awful truth: that the swarm was no longer hovering, but was now moving.

It was coming directly towards her.

She started to back away, but her gaze was still fixed to the awful sight above her, her brain still trying to work out what it was she was seeing. It took her a moment to overcome this dreadful semi-paralysis, to get a grip on herself, to look for an escape route, and by then she feared it might already have been too late.

Arex ran for the nearest hab-block, finding her way obstructed by fear-frozen bystanders and also by those who had started to run but had chosen the direction of their flight at random. She forced her way through, and made it to the base of a broad flight of stone steps, but was elbowed aside before she could climb them. A skirmish broke out at the top of the steps, as those who had made it through the building’s front doors tried to close them against those still striving to follow them. There was no refuge for her in there.

She looked over her shoulder, and her heart leapt into her throat. The swarm was almost upon her, close enough now that she could make out some of its constituent components as they peeled away from its edges. The insects looked like no species native to this world. They were silver in hue, and far too large. They were the size of a large rat. No, bigger than that even. They were flying, but Arex could see no wings.

Then the insects descended upon their prey, and the screaming began in earnest.

Arex found herself at the centre of a maelstrom. The insects were everywhere, above her, around her. One of them tore at her clothing as it flew by, and scratched her skin. She had thought the swarm silent before, but now her ears were filled with the rustling of carapace upon carapace. She thrashed her arms in a vain attempt to ward the creatures away from her. She felt her balled fist making contact with a small, hard body, sending it spinning, but ten more of the insect’s kind appeared to replace it.

A woman beside her howled in agony as an insect tore the skin from her face. Arex felt something in her hair, an insect tangled up in there, and she panicked and screamed and tore at it, and escaped somehow with only a few more scratches.

She tried to keep moving, as if she might through some Emperor-sent miracle find her way to the swarm’s edge before she became a target too, but people were dying all around her, falling over each other, stumbling into her path, and she didn’t know which way was which – and, suddenly, she felt something new. A rain of debris, a half-brick glancing off her cheek, bruising her.

The swarm was attacking the towers too. A sizeable flank of it had just side-swiped the hab-block in which Arex had sought shelter. The insects had gouged a deep trench in the brickwork, causing it to contract and crumble, the windows to burst, and to her horror Arex realised that this section of the tower was collapsing in on itself.

She started to run again, but in addition to the swarm now she had to contend with an all-engulfing cloud of masonry dust. She didn’t make it ten more steps before her lungs gave up the effort, rattling and wheezing. Her eyes were streaming, her cheeks wet, although whether this was with blood or with tears Arex could not tell.

All the people, the hundreds of people, who must have been in that hab-block… not to mention the floors of the tower above that she couldn’t see from here and the skyways that were almost certainly anchored to them. It was all too much, too enormous a disaster, for her to take in. She could only think about herself for now, as hopeless a cause as that seemed to her too.

She followed a stream of people headed for the edge of the skyway, watched in hope as scores of them clambered over the ramshackle railings and jumped for their lives. It was only when she reached that precipice herself that she realised there was nowhere to jump to, no other skyway below to catch her as she had imagined there must have been. The jumpers had chosen, in their terror, to be dashed to a bloody smear on the ground thousands of metres below rather than let the bloodthirsty insects have them.

It was all Arex could do to back up, to keep herself from being pushed over the edge anyway by the press of bodies behind her. She was half-blind, her head was spinning and she wasn’t sure how much blood she had wept from her scratches, but she wasn’t ready to die just yet. She collided with a substantial metal object, as tall as her chest, wider than she could feel, and she traced its outline with her hands, realised what it was, and it seemed that the Emperor must have interceded in her favour after all.

An autocab. The very autocab, in all probability, that Arex had abandoned here only a few minutes ago. Yes, yes it was. The latch on the door was still broken from her kick. She yanked it open and scrambled into the vehicle. She pulled the door shut behind her and, although it didn’t entirely blot out the sounds of the carnage without, they were at least now muffled enough for Arex to think, to hope. For her to wipe her eyes on her sleeve, to open them and to see that she wasn’t alone.

An insect still clung to her arm. Arex snatched at it, and it tore a chunk of her flesh away with it. She dashed the insect into a rune panel, and felt the satisfying crack of its carapace beneath her fingers, but it was still squirming in her grip, and at that moment, a fresh wave of the creatures smacked into the front of the autocab from without. Arex screamed and dropped the insect she had been holding.

The windshield was cracked, but to Arex’s relief it held. Meanwhile, the insect within had dropped into her lap, and it was glaring up at her with a single baleful green eye. It was the first time she had gotten a proper look at one of these things. It resembled a common beetle, she thought – albeit an armoured beetle, its carapace a set of interlocking silver plates. She might have thought it entirely mechanical in nature were it not for the sickly green ichor that had oozed out from between those cracked plates, and which was splattered across the rune panel and the floor of the cab.

With a shudder, she batted the insect to the floor and it landed on its back, two rows of tiny legs pedalling to right itself. Arex stamped on it until it stopped moving.

Then something huge and heavy crashed into the autocab’s roof from above, and she feared for a moment that the vehicle might just crumple around her. The cracks in the windshield crazed and spread to form a fragile web. Arex knew that, if the windshield broke, she would be helpless, trapped in here, easy prey.

Then, just like that, it was over. The swarm had passed on, and Arex was left, panting and sobbing, alone in the mangled remains of the cab. Her coat had been clawed to shreds, she had stinging cuts on the palms of her hands that she didn’t even remember sustaining and the hammering of her heart felt like it was the only sound in the whole world.

Arex thought she would stay there forever, because she couldn’t face what was waiting for her outside. When she did muster the willpower to reach for the cab door, it was jammed shut and she had to kick it open again, far harder this time.

She dragged her battered body out into a scene of desolation, choking on the dusty air. Most of the towers were mercifully intact, but a couple had fallen and the skyway was strewn with their rubble. The weight that had half-crushed the autocab was a slab of skyway from over twenty floors above Arex’s head.

Worst of all were the broken, twisted bodies that lay everywhere, most of them half-buried. Some of them were twitching, moving, trying to dig themselves free. Arex could hear weeping, and plaintive cries for help. She felt she should answer those calls, but she didn’t know who to turn to first; and besides, her head was spinning and her legs couldn’t bear her weight.

She crumpled like an old sack, first falling to her knees and then lowering herself onto a mattress of rubble. Arex’s eyes felt heavy, and she couldn’t think straight, couldn’t process everything she had just experienced, couldn’t think about the reasons or the consequences of it all. Oblivion crept over her shoulders, and she welcomed it, welcomed the chance to sink into a dreamless sleep – and, maybe, by the time she awoke, there would be somebody here to make everything clearer for her. Uncle Hanrik, maybe, or the PDF, or Gunthar…

Gunthar. The stray thought sent a bolt of adrenaline through Arex’s system, jolting her awake, setting her heartbeat pounding again.

Gunthar. This was where he lived, on one of these floors above her. In one of the hab-blocks that the insects had attacked. What if they had destroyed his hab-block? He might not even have seen them coming, never had a chance to run.

Arex couldn’t foresee a future in which she and Gunthar could be together.

But, right now, she couldn’t envisage her future without him.

She dragged herself to her feet, tried to pierce the veil of dust around her, to see past the recent devastation, to remember this skyway as it had been, to regain her bearings. She had to work out which of these buildings was his. She had to find him, to know that he was okay. She had to keep herself going, for his sake.

Chapter Five

Costellin had retired to bed early.

He felt weary to his soul. He hadn’t realised how much Dask had taken out of him until he was faced with the prospect of being catapulted straight into another theatre of war. Perhaps, he thought, Captain Rokan’s initial assessment that Governor Hanrik was worrying over nothing would prove accurate. However, if there was anything to fight on Hieronymous Theta, he suspected that the Krieg Colonel 42 would find it.

The commissar was woken by a klaxon alarm and an insistent voice, buzzing over the vox-speaker outside his quarters. It was a call to muster. All personnel to report to the drop-ships immediately. He had only closed his eyes for an hour and a half.

He tied on his armoured breastplate, checked his plasma pistol and his chainsword before he holstered them. He could already feel the deck plates ringing beneath twenty thousand pairs of boots. Sometimes, he wondered if the Death Korps of Krieg slept in their facemasks and backpacks. Sometimes, he wondered if they slept at all.

The drop-ship assigned to the 186th regiment was cycling its engines in the upper portside hangar bay. The company commanders were marshalling their troops in this vast, echoing space, and Major Alpha’s first two platoons were already marching up the access ramp into the belly of the great rusted hulk.

Colonel 186 stood up on a gantry, observing the proceedings, straight-backed and stiff even in the at-ease position. Costellin threaded his way through the streams of newly-arriving Guardsmen, and climbed a ladder to join him.

‘What’s happening?’ he asked.

‘We have been ordered down to the planet,’ said the colonel.

‘Yes, I rather gathered that, but for what purpose? Nobody has briefed me.’

‘Our four regiments are to deploy around the capital city and secure its perimeter from without.’

‘Secure it against what?’

‘I do not have that information. I was asked to convey the generals’ apologies to you for not keeping you informed, but they felt the situation required urgent action.’

‘Evidently,’ said Costellin. ‘Has the Departmento Munitorum even been apprised of this operation? There hardly seems to have been time for astropathic messages to have been exchanged.’

‘I do not have that information,’ said the colonel.

‘They must have told you something,’ said Costellin, ‘about this threat that has apparently emerged from nowhere in the four hours since we made orbit.’

‘I do not have–’ began the colonel.

‘Of course you don’t,’ Costellin sighed, ‘and I suppose I don’t have time to go and talk to the generals myself, unless I wish to delay our drop.’

The colonel turned his head towards the commissar as if disgusted that he would entertain such a thought, although of course his expression was unreadable behind his ever-present mask. ‘Our orders are quite clear,’ he said.

He sounded like his predecessor.

The colonel sounded, for that matter, like every other Death Korps colonel with whom Costellin had served. There had been six of them now, or was it seven?

The previous Colonel 186 had died on Dask, leading a charge against a legion of Nurgle-spawned mutants for control of a strategic hill. He had known his was a likely suicide run – the generals had done their sums and concluded that this particular objective was worth the loss of over four hundred men – but he had chosen to lead from the front anyway, as he always had.

The old colonel had done his duty. He had surrendered his life to the furnace blast of an enemy-held flamer, but he had won the more valuable prize. He had taken that hill. The erstwhile Major Gamma had been picked to replace him by virtue of his long service with the regiment. That was how, for the most part, promotions were earned in the Death Korps of Krieg: by surviving.

‘Is there anything else?’ asked Costellin.

‘We are assigned to the western wall of the city,’ said the colonel. ‘It is close to the space port, so we can set up a Command HQ there. The 42nd regiment will be based to the north, the 81st to the east and the 103rd to the south, so our troops will be the first into position. We are then to await further instructions, unless of course a clear and present threat is presented, in which case we are to respond as appropriate.’

‘A clear and present threat,’ Costellin repeated slowly. ‘I don’t like the sound of this, colonel. I like to know what it is I’m expected to fight.’

‘The 81st and 103rd regiments will each drop a grenadier platoon behind the city walls,’ said the colonel. ‘Their mission is to locate the enemy and identify him.’

Costellin nodded quietly, but a gnawing fear was growing in his stomach. He was beginning to form his own suspicions about what might be going on in Hieronymous City. He just prayed to the God-Emperor that those suspicions were unfounded.

Hieronymous Port was packed with terrified civilians. They filled the space port buildings and had spilled out onto the main ramp despite the best efforts of the local security forces, who were simply too few in numbers to maintain control.

To Costellin’s chagrin – although not entirely unexpectedly – the appearance of a peaked cap and human features made him the new best hope for a thousand pale, imploring faces. From the moment he stepped out of the drop-ship, he was swarmed by them, each shouting its own desperate question, which the commissar brushed aside as politely but firmly as he could. ‘No, sir, I don’t know when it will be safe to return to your homes.’ ‘No, madam, I’m afraid I haven’t seen your daughter.’ ‘No, sir, these drop-ships are reserved for the use of Imperial Guard personnel.’ ‘That, madam, would be a matter for your local authorities to deal with.’

Along the way, he picked up a little information for himself, some by talking to the proctors who had come to meet him and were trying to escort him through the rabble, the rest by merely keeping his ears peeled. Costellin heard talk of a citywide blackout, and of deadly insects swarming the skyways. Hieronymous City, it seemed, was under an evacuation order – well, that was no surprise – and most of these people hadn’t known where else they could go, so they had come here, only of course the space port was a dead end for them.

A small merchant ship was just taking off, a few foolhardy souls clinging to its hull as if they thought they could hold it down or that somehow it could carry them with it to another, safer world. They were soon dislodged by the engines’ vibrations, to fall howling and wailing, yelling to the unheeding pilot to have pity on them as his ship left the space port’s circle of blazing light and was swallowed by the night.

In another corner of the ramp, a more enterprising merchant was holding an impromptu auction for the remaining seats aboard his old, ramshackle freighter.

Costellin had no doubt that, by now, Governor Hanrik would have contacted the Imperial Navy, asking for all the rescue ships they could spare. The best he could hope for was to save himself and a few handpicked cronies; the majority of the wretches now tugging at Costellin’s greatcoat would be abandoned here.

One of the other drop-ships had beaten his to the surface, and the Krieg 103rd had almost completed their disembarkation. They were unloading their equipment now, trailer after trailer being towed onto the ramp by Centaur support vehicles. Two Krieg Guardsmen walked ahead of the first of these, doing what the proctors couldn’t, clearing a path through the crowd. Despite the threat of the soldiers’ lasguns, some civilians were still slow to obey, but the Centaur’s drivers had no patience with these. They were bulldozed aside, and one man shrieked in agony as a six-tonne chassis rolled over his foot on caterpillar tracks and reduced it to pulp.

Behind the Centaurs came the more powerful Trojans, dragging heavy mortars and quad-launchers in their wake – and behind these came the big guns, massive Earthshaker cannons and the older but no less impressive Medusas. Costellin noted that, upon the emergence of these, the clamour around him dropped to a noticeably quieter level. People were stopping, staring, struck dumb by the sight of these great engines of destruction. If any of them had doubted it or tried to deny it to themselves before, they could no longer do so. Their world had gone to war.

Costellin’s regiment was unloading now too – Colonel 186 had briefed them on the way down, so they knew what was expected of them – and the final two drop-ships were also arriving, the heat of their exhaust flames washing over the ramp as they lowered themselves onto the landing platforms. Costellin took advantage of the relative lull in the bedlam to assert some authority. His voice ringing loudly and strongly, he appealed for calm and asked for the ramp to be cleared. A young proctor lieutenant followed his lead, and began to corral the willing into a nearby hangar, reassuring them that everything was under control, that arrangements were being made at the highest possible levels for their continued welfare.

To Costellin, the lieutenant confessed, ‘I don’t know what we can do, sir. We can hold a few thousand in the hangars and the waiting rooms, but there are more arriving all the time. We’ve appealed to the nearby cities, and they’ll take some refugees but they really don’t have much space themselves, and a lot of these people don’t want to go anyway. They’re worried about relatives and friends, and they’re hoping to find them here – and they’re afraid that, if they go, they’ll be dumped on the lowest levels of a strange new city, to fend for themselves.’

‘Which is no doubt what would happen,’ remarked Costellin.

‘Some of them,’ said the lieutenant, lowering his voice significantly, ‘believe nowhere on this world is safe now.’ He looked at Costellin, and the commissar could see the fervent hope in his eyes, for a reassurance he could not give.

Over in the corner, the auction had gone badly awry. A stampede of failed bidders had flattened the enterprising merchant against the hull of his freighter, and the proctors were moving in with stun batons. None of them, Costellin suspected, were going anywhere for the foreseeable future.

He spotted a peaked cap like his own through the crowd, and he hurriedly excused himself from the lieutenant’s presence and pushed his way towards it. Commissar Mannheim was busily explaining to a group of worried civilians that, no, as far as he was aware the air had not been poisoned and the arriving soldiers were wearing gasmasks and rebreather units purely as a precaution. No sooner had he made this point, however, than a grenadier platoon marched by in their hulking carapace armour and metal skull masks, and the questioning began anew.

Costellin took his fellow commissar by the arm and bustled him into a relatively quiet corner. ‘You made it down here, then,’ said Mannheim, stating the obvious.

‘I didn’t have much choice,’ said Costellin. ‘One minute, I was in my bed, dreaming of six days’ leave, waiting for you and your colonel to report on rumours of civil unrest and mysterious artefacts. The next…’ He waved his hand to encompass the hectic scene around them. ‘What’s going on, Mannheim?’

‘I wish I knew,’ said Mannheim. He looked tired. ‘I truly wish I knew. We were at Governor Hanrik’s suite in the High Spire, Colonel 42 and I, when the lights went out. His men flew us back here, to our shuttle, to vox the troop ship, and then… We were in the flyer, Costellin, when the reports started to come in. Beetles. Flying metal beetles, causing the most incredible devastation. One PDF chap was reporting in when he was swarmed by them. He was dead within ten seconds.’

‘Beetles,’ repeated Costellin numbly.

‘Well, that must have been when Hanrik gave the order to evacuate. As it happens, that was the generals’ wish too, but by the time we had spoken to them… By that time, the first of the evacuees were fetching up here, those from the lower levels. The lifters in the city aren’t working, you see. The only way out is on foot, through the old gates on the ground, through the mutants and the underclass.’

‘Is the Governor here?’ asked Costellin.

‘I haven’t seen him,’ said Mannheim. ‘They were sending a flyer back for him, the last I heard.’

‘They know,’ said Costellin with quiet certainty.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘The generals,’ said Costellin, ‘they know. They suspect, at least. You tell me, Mannheim, does it seem at all credible to you that they should have organised all this, be so sure there is a threat to this world worthy of the attention of four Imperial Guard regiments, without their having the slightest idea of what that threat might be?’

‘Nothing has been established for sure,’ said Mannheim.

‘They know,’ said Costellin again. ‘You know it too, Mannheim. You’ve been in the service long enough to have heard stories like this one before.’

Mannheim nodded cautiously. ‘Unexplained power drains.’

‘Xenos artefacts, buried deep in the ground as if there was somebody on this world before us. Tell me, have the generals seen the markings on those artefacts?’

‘I saw them,’ said Mannheim. ‘Hanrik showed us hololiths of fragments of stone – before the blackout, I mean. He showed us tracings of glyphs, from a column that was discovered in the mines, and I… I swear I have never seen anything like them before. It made my eyes itch just to look at the images of them.’

‘And the beetles,’ prompted Costellin. ‘The metal beetles.’

‘The troop ship captain, Rokan,’ Mannheim remembered, ‘he said he thought Naval Command were holding something back from him.’

‘And our generals will do the same,’ said Costellin. ‘Until they have undeniable proof, they will keep their suspicions to themselves, while preparing for the worst. They won’t dare speak those words. They won’t be the first to cry necron.’

‘Commissar.’

Costellin turned. He had thought himself alone in this part of the drop-ship, in the vacated troop compartment, his footsteps resounding from the curved walls as he paced back and forth. He wondered if Colonel 186 had been standing there all along, or if he had just seen his commissar returning to the ship and followed him.

‘Can I help you?’ asked the colonel, blandly.

Costellin shook his head. ‘Just gathering my thoughts.’

‘It may be wise to gather them elsewhere. I have instructed the servitors that, once we have unloaded, they are to return to the troop ship.’

‘Can’t that wait? I need to use this ship’s comms.’

‘I don’t want the drop-ships remaining in port,’ said the colonel. ‘They are a temptation to the stranded refugees, and we can’t spare the men to guard them.’

‘I need to talk with the generals,’ said Costellin. ‘I still have questions.’

‘We are setting up communications on the ground,’ said the colonel. ‘The generals will be able to contact us should our orders change.’

‘It may be too late by then. Have you heard of the necrons, colonel? No, of course you haven’t. Few living men have. Most of those who have encountered them, if they have survived the experience, have been driven insane by it.’

‘Necrons,’ repeated the colonel, rolling the word on his tongue as if he relished the fresh taste of it, the prospect of a new enemy to fight.

‘Back when I was a young man,’ said Costellin, ‘it was forbidden to even speak of them. Still, the rumours persisted. It was said the necrons are an ancient race, that they were already dying when the eldar were young – and that, to save themselves, they sealed themselves into great underground tombs and slept. It was said that the necrons have slept for millions of years, and that now they are awakening.’

‘You suspect there are necrons on this world?’

Costellin sank into one of the empty flight seats. ‘Look, colonel,’ he said, ‘I know you’re newly promoted, I know this is the first time we have worked together–’

‘We have fought side by side before. We shared a trench four years ago on Anakreos III for two months. I was a lieutenant in Gamma Company at the time.’

‘Right. What I am trying to say is that, in a position like mine, you… hear things; things that, perhaps, it might have been best not to hear. I have heard tales of worlds on which necron tombs have been discovered, and of the inevitable fates of those worlds.’

‘Whatever the threat to this world,’ said the colonel, ‘my men will meet it.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Costellin, ‘with an army such as we had on Dask – but we are four regiments, colonel, and depleted regiments at that. I just wonder, if what I suspect is true, if direct confrontation is our best strategy in this situation. We might be better advised to, if you’ll pardon my language, get the Golden Throne out of here!’

‘Reinforcements are en route from Krieg,’ said the colonel.

‘I suspect it’s not ground troops we need,’ said Costellin, ‘but rather a battery of cyclonic torpedoes that can blast this whole damned planet to space dust. But, of course, Hieronymous Theta is rich
in minerals, a valuable resource to the Imperium.’

‘You have still not explained why you wish to speak with the generals.’

Costellin sighed, resignedly. He saw no point in saying any more.

He knew the men of Krieg well enough by now to understand how their minds worked. He knew that, under normal circumstances, the Krieg generals would never have pitted their regiments against a necron force, a force whose numbers and capabilities were virtually unknown. They would have run their battlefield projections and concluded that the risk of defeat, of destruction, was far too great.

But then, these circumstances were unusual.

By the Emperor’s grace, the Memento Mori had been close at hand when the situation on Hieronymous Theta had been reported. They had a rare chance here, to respond to a necron incursion – if such this proved to be – in its earliest stages. They were gambling that their troops could contain that incursion before it took hold, before it could spread to engulf this world and perhaps many others. They were gambling on a chance to strike a decisive blow, perhaps the first decisive blow, against an enemy the Imperium had only just been compelled to acknowledge, one it hadn’t even begun to work out how to counter.

And the stakes of that gamble were some twenty thousand men.

‘You know I will fight for the Emperor to my dying breath,’ said Costellin. ‘I just fear that the mission we are embarking upon here may be in vain.’

‘Our lives are His to do with as He pleases,’ said Colonel 186.

He really did sound just like his predecessors.

They were setting up makeshift tents on the hill around the space port, building a refugee camp that was swelling by the minute. An endless convoy of Imperial support vehicles ground its way down that hill, filling the air with the noxious fumes of two hundred grumbling engines. The pinpricks of the vehicles’ headlights now stretched to the city’s fortress walls, built to keep the lower levels contained, and they were spreading around them in each direction.

Costellin’s eye line was about level with the tops of those walls. Rising above them, Hieronymous City was a dark, brooding shape against the clouded moonlight. He regarded its disconsolate towers, the criss-cross struts of the connecting skyways, and he searched in vain for a sign of movement, of life, of hope.

Hundreds of thousands, millions, of people were trapped in those towers, on those skyways, behind those walls. They were trapped by a lack of transport, by concern for loved ones, or simply because they couldn’t leave all they knew behind. They couldn’t have known it yet, but from this vantage point it was perfectly clear: the city was already dead. Costellin only prayed that the same could not be said for this world, and for the soldiers who were about to fight so blindly to protect it.

He thought about a backwater bar on a backwater world, and a well-lubricated inquisitor speaking in hints and whispers of the horrors he had read about in the most secret archives, tales of the dead come back to life and clad in living metal.

He thought about a decorated veteran of a distinguished regiment, confined to a secure sanatorium wing, babbling like a lunatic about weapons that could strip a man down to his immortal soul, one layer at a time.

He thought about a report he had once read, filed by the legendary Ciaphas Cain, concerning a campaign fought on the frozen world of Simia Orichalcae. The report had been redacted, of course, the threat faced by Cain left unnamed, but two facts had impressed themselves upon Costellin’s mind: that said threat had emerged from the planet’s mine tunnels, and that Simia Orichalcae had ultimately been destroyed to contain it.

He thought about metal beetles, and runes that made a commissar’s eyes itch.

And he thought about the recently concluded war on Dask, where at least he had known what his regiment was fighting, and to what end. He felt they had accomplished something there, shone the Emperor’s light on that benighted world, but even this great victory had not been without cost.

They had lost so many men on Dask, almost a third of their complement. Costellin was so tired – so tired of being the only one who cared.

Chapter Six

Gunthar had no idea where he was. He had never strayed this far from home before.

It was too dark for him to see much, anyway. He was just following the people in front of him, who in turn were following the people in front of them, who in turn were following the luminator beams of a squad of soldiers.

To begin with, Gunthar had felt as trapped by the press of bodies around him as he had during the mutant attack last night. This was almost worse, in fact, because he didn’t know what he was running from this time. He had no idea when or how or from which direction a threat might come, let alone how he might avoid it if it did.

By now, however, he had settled into the rhythm of putting one foot in front of the other, and his nerves had been numbed by tedium. He hadn’t heard any explosions or screams for almost an hour. Whatever was happening in Hieronymous City, hopefully the worst of it was over. Gunthar wondered how much further it was to the city walls, and then over them to the space port.

It had already been a long day. He had spent the afternoon with one proctor official after another, then with a couple of PDF officers. He had related the story of the artefact in the mine tunnel over and over again, omitting the part where he had fled like a coward. Returning to his office, he had received a call from the Governor himself and had told the story one more time. He had felt important for a while, the centre of all this attention. Then he had just felt tired.

He had spent the evening organising the mine shutdown, as the Governor had instructed. Each of his foremen had had questions, but Gunthar had been told to say as little as possible so as not to panic them. ‘I know about as much as you do,’ he had assured them, ‘but I’m sure this is just a precautionary measure.’

He had sent Kreuz home. Alone at his desk and undisturbed by the chiming of the comm-link terminal, Gunthar had felt his eyelids growing heavy and remembered that he hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours. The next thing he recalled was waking in a pitch black room, to the sound of amplified voices from outside.

He had had to grope his way to the stairwell, knocking his ankle and skinning his knee in the process. He had climbed two floors to the nearest skyway, where PDF soldiers had instructed him to join a guided human convoy, ten people wide and more than sixty deep. The whole of the city was being evacuated but, when Gunthar had asked why, he had been told: ‘I know about as much as you do, sir. I’m sure this is just a precautionary measure.’

Progress thus far had been painfully slow. The convoy stopped at every tower for the soldiers to employ their loudhailers and wait for more bewildered refugees to join them. Some were unhappy about being herded from their homes in the middle of the night, and there were questions and arguments to deal with. Nevertheless, few people were game to be left behind. The convoy had more than doubled in size, until Gunthar could no longer see how far behind him it stretched.

He heard a trooper talking on his vox-handset, and was pleased that at least they weren’t totally cut off from the rest of the world. The trooper gave the convoy’s position, and received directions in return. It seemed they would have to take a diversion, because… Gunthar wasn’t sure if he had heard that right. A skyway down? What did that mean? How was that even possible?

The nocturnal cold had sunk into his bones. He rubbed his arms through the fabric of his grey work tunic, but it didn’t help much. He wished he had put on a coat that morning, but then he could hardly have known the day would end like this. For that matter, there were several things he wished he could have collected from his hab before… He suppressed that thought. Everything would be all right, Gunthar told himself. The Emperor would provide.

The convoy had made a sharp left turn, trudged past a number of empty hab-blocks, and now it turned sharp right. Gunthar felt his foot touching something, which turned out to be a lump of plascrete. A moment later, he kicked another, then another, and soon he was clambering over a heap of rubble. He thought about the voice on the vox and the distant explosions he had heard, and his nerves began to jangle again.

Perhaps the artefact had been a bomb, after all. Perhaps it had not been the only one. And perhaps there were still more concealed about the city.

A brick slid beneath Gunthar’s foot, and he landed heavily on one knee, but found the impact cushioned by something soft and squishy. He was appalled to find he was kneeling in the spilled guts of a half-buried corpse. Gagging, he pushed himself to his feet and stumbled on, but he soon saw another pale hand protruding from the wreckage. From somewhere behind him, to the right, he heard a shriek and then a mutter of comforting voices, as someone else presumably made a similar discovery.

He wondered how many people lay dead beneath him. Many of them would just have been sitting in their homes, he thought, maybe even asleep in their beds. Had they even had time to be afraid, or had their worlds ended in a flash before they knew what was happening to them?

‘Over here,’ somebody yelled. ‘There’s somebody moving down here. He’s alive!’

The voice came from just a few rows in front of Gunthar. As the crowd pressed forward, a couple of them wielding low-powered luminators of their own, he saw two men digging through the debris, casting bricks aside, and between them he saw a wiry figure, little more than a silhouette to him, attempting to stand. The figure was bloodied, hunched over, evidently hurt, and if only Gunthar had been closer to this person, this brave casualty, he would have advised him to lie still, not to risk exacerbating his injuries, to wait for the soldiers to reach him with their medi-packs.

Then, the figure straightened to its full height, and Gunthar’s senses warned him – before his brain could work out the reason why – that something was wrong.

Another scream distracted him, and another – one from close behind him, one from a longer way in front – and suddenly Gunthar knew that what he had seen was not a figment of his imagination, nor a trick of the shifting light. He knew that the figure before him was not human.

Others were seeing it too, not least among them the men who had crouched to help. It was too late for them. The figure, the creature, flexed its shoulders, and the two men jerked and gasped and died. It took Gunthar a second to realise what the creature had done, that its claws had stabbed each of them through the heart – and, as a pocket luminator fell from a screaming girl’s hands, its light glinted off those claws and Gunthar saw that they were metal-like knives, each almost a metre in length.

The creature loped forward, and those terrible claws found a third and a fourth victim. Gunthar could see more clearly now, see the creature’s metallic skull face and the tatters of flesh that clung, rotting, to its skeletal form.

No, it was worse than that, he realised as a putrid stench washed over him and turned his stomach. The flesh was not the creature’s own, just a cloak it was wearing. It must have flayed the skin off one of the corpses for the purpose of disguising itself. This ghoul had been waiting in the ground for someone to find it, to reach out to help it.

Gunthar had never seen such a gruesome sight before. The mutant last night didn’t even come close. Nor had any of the newsreels prepared him for this, for the fact that the universe could spawn such nightmares. He wanted to run, wanted it more than he had thought it possible to want anything, but his legs were like lead and his gaze was riveted to the ghoul’s dead metal face.

Where could he have run to, anyway? The ghoul wasn’t alone. The screams had already told him as much – and now, it seemed to Gunthar’s cold-deadened ears that the whole of the crowd was screaming.

Two troopers appeared, their lasguns raised, and Gunthar began to mutter a grateful prayer but faltered halfway through. The first of the troopers was white with fear, his hands trembling so hard that he couldn’t squeeze his trigger. The second loosed off two shots, but they both went wild. It was enough for the ghoul to take notice, to pivot with surprising agility and speed to face its attackers. Gunthar felt ashamed of himself for being so relieved that it wasn’t coming for him anymore.

The ghoul advanced, slicing off the heads of two more civilians who couldn’t get out of its way. The second trooper got off another shot, which struck the ghoul squarely in its shoulder. The impact of the las-beam made it flinch, halting it for a second, and Gunthar held his breath.

The ghoul pounced on the trooper, who screamed as its bladed claws flashed and whirled about him. It wasn’t just killing him, Gunthar realised; it was flensing the skin from his body. The trooper collapsed, a red raw lump of meat, still alive for the moment, staring in abject horror with eyes he could no longer close. It was all too much for his comrade, who turned and ran, the ghoul hard on his heels.

As it headed away from him, Gunthar was released from his paralysis. The crowd was dispersing in all directions, and he followed suit, choosing the direction that took him directly away from the ghoul. It only occurred to him too late that he was running back the way he had come, back into the city, when he should have been trying to get out of it.

Two more troopers were coming his way, falling back before another of the skull-faced, skin-clad nightmares. This second creature lashed out with its blades, and slashed through an armoured chest plate as if it were made of paper. Its victim staggered backwards into Gunthar, and left a trail of blood down his clothes as he slid to the ground, dead. The surviving trooper set his lasgun to automatic and fired wildly. At least two of his bolts struck and injured civilians, but enough thudded into his target to send it reeling. As Gunthar watched with another prayer on his lips, the ghoul fell and lay twitching. The trooper put his lasgun to its head and blew out its brains – if indeed it had had brains inside that ghastly metal skull. Gunthar could almost have cheered.

Then, the trooper stiffened, his eyes bulging, blood pouring from his mouth, and Gunthar saw that a blade-clawed hand had struck up from beneath him, and efficiently disembowelled him. Another creature was rising from the rubble.

Gunthar ran, and was glad to leave the demolished site and feel firm ground under his feet again. He ran, and a hundred other people ran with him, but they soon began to peel away, into alleyways, around corners, into emptied hab-blocks if they could. Gunthar ran, virtually blind because the moon had disappeared behind a cloud and there were no longer any luminators around him. He ran, and he wondered how his life had come so quickly to this, one terrified flight after another.

He should have picked up the dead soldier’s lasgun. He only realised that now. It hadn’t occurred to him before. Yesterday, it would have done. He would have thought about it, at least. He would have seen himself with barrel blazing, taking down that last foul creature before it could stand. A chance to be the hero he had dreamed of being. But that was yesterday, before the mutants and the artefact, before Gunthar Soreson had learned that there was no hero inside of him, after all.

That was before he had witnessed the fate of heroes.

Gunthar rounded a corner, saw an abandoned autocab almost too late to avoid it, tripped over a flight of steps and landed sprawling on the ground, lacking the energy to get up again. He lay on his stomach in the near-silent darkness for minutes, until his breathing began to settle back into its normal rhythm.

He felt the amecyte ring in his pocket, digging into his leg, and he thought about Arex. He hadn’t been worried about her before – as a member of the Governor’s family, she was one of the best-protected people in the city – but who could protect her from what Gunthar had just seen?

He wanted to go to the High Spire, to find her, but he was hopelessly lost. He had made so many random twists and turns that he didn’t even know which way the city walls were any more. The knowledge wouldn’t have helped him, anyway. The ghouls were between him and those walls – and a moment’s thought told him that the High Spire would likely be a dead end too. Arex would have been evacuated from there long since, probably in a motor vehicle.

She was probably waiting for him at the space port, wondering where he was.

It seemed to Gunthar that, whichever way he went from here, he could only make his situation worse. His best bet, then, was to stay where he was, to find shelter for the remainder of the night, and perhaps in the morning things would look better. At least, in the daylight, he could get his bearings. At least, in the daylight, he would be able to see the monsters coming.

He climbed the steps over which he had floundered, and tried the door at their head but found it locked. He could have kicked it down, he supposed, but that would have made too much noise. He moved on along the skyway, and tried three more doors until he found one with a broken lock.

His first tentative push met with some resistance from something behind the door. Gunthar pushed harder, and winced at the resounding sound of falling crates. The door stuck halfway, and he had to squeeze through the gap into a dark, dusty hallway. Hab doors stretched along the left hand wall, a wooden staircase along the right leading both up and down.

A shadow moved on that staircase and, before Gunthar could react, something leapt at him: a snarling, spitting something. He was thrown off-balance, back into the front door, which slammed shut behind him. He couldn’t see a thing now, could just feel a flurry of limbs swiping and slashing and kicking at him. Instinctively, he threw up his arms to protect his face, and a flailing elbow caught his attacker in the throat.

The man fell back with a groan of pain, and as he stumbled into the half-light cast by a murky stair window, Gunthar saw his face and saw that, contrary to his worst imaginings, he was just a man. A middle-aged man with a thatch of black hair and a thick beard. Throwing up his hands, Gunthar cried, ‘It’s all right. It’s all right. I’m human, like you. I was just… I was looking for a place to hide.’

The man couldn’t speak, he was still trying to get his breath back, but he had calmed down a little. He was still cautious, though, keeping his distance.

‘Do you live here?’ asked Gunthar. ‘In this hab-block?’

The man shook his head. ‘I thought you...’ he panted, ‘I thought you were one of those creatures.’

‘You saw them too?’ said Gunthar. ‘You were out on the rubble?’

‘They stank of death,’ said the man. ‘There was so much blood, and that smell… I’m afraid I ran. I just saw an opening, and I went for it. I was trying to barricade this door behind me, when you… I thought they must have followed me.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Gunthar. ‘I was outside a long time, and I didn’t see… I don’t think they followed us.’

‘What were those things? And where in the Emperor’s name did they come from?’

‘I don’t know. I wish I did, but… What do we do now? Do we stay here? Would that be safest, do you think? We could build up the crates again.’

‘No. We just saw how much good they were. I don’t know what I was thinking. If anyone saw them, they’d know for sure there was somebody in here. Anyway, they’re destroying the towers, you’ve seen the wreckage. I want to be able to… I don’t want to be trapped in this hab-block if…’

Gunthar hadn’t considered that, and the thought was a sobering one.

‘I’m Weber,’ said the man, composed now and stepping forward with a hand outstretched.

Gunthar took it, and introduced himself. ‘I run the 201st Floor Emporium,’ said Weber. ‘Used to run it, I should say. I suppose we all “used to” do something now. Used to have jobs. Used to have places to live.’

‘Things aren’t that bad,’ said Gunthar. ‘They can’t be. The PDF are out there. They’ll deal with this, and everything will get back to normal.’

Weber gave a derisive laugh. ‘You obviously didn’t see what I saw. Those soldier boys were going down faster than the civilians were. Half of them couldn’t get their brains in gear to even fire their guns.’

‘That was just one squad, a few men. You wait till they bring in the tanks and the mortars, and… and if that’s not enough, they can call in reinforcements, the Imperial Guard or… We’re too… This world is too valuable to the Emperor, and we’ve been loyal, we have served Him well. He will save us.’

‘You watch too many newsreels, kid,’ grumbled Weber. He started down the hallway, trying doors. ‘I was talking to a fellow out there, before... He was up on 204, told me he was attacked by a swarm of metal insects. They were knocking down buildings, just taking slices out of them like–’

‘204?’ echoed Gunthar. The address was close to his own home, too close.

‘I suggest,’ said Weber, ‘we find ourselves an empty hab, one where the tenants left in a hurry without locking up, and we lay low for the night.’

They found a room on the next floor up. It was laid out exactly like Gunthar’s room, like all the rooms he had lived in: a basin in one corner, a stove in another, a single bed in a curtained alcove. The advantage of this particular room, however, was that it overlooked the skyway in front of its hab-block.

‘We should take it in turns to sleep,’ said Weber, ‘while the other one stays on watch.’ Gunthar agreed and volunteered to take the first shift, although privately he wondered what he could possibly do if he saw trouble coming.

He was too keyed up to sleep, though, as much as he needed to.

Within minutes, Weber was spark out on the bed, snoring. Gunthar paced the hab, trying to keep warm. Eventually, he thought to check the cupboards, and found a heavy grox-hide coat hanging in a wardrobe. He wrapped it about himself gratefully, and settled by the window.

The warmth of his breath created fleeting patterns on the glass. Weber’s snoring, an irritant at first, became softer and settled into a regular, almost soothing rhythm. Gunthar was almost too hot in his borrowed coat, and he thought about taking it off but that would have meant climbing out of his comfortable chair.

He let his eyes rest for a moment, and the next thing he knew there was a flickering light and he started and sat bolt upright.

How long had he slept? Not long, he hoped. It was still dark outside. Weber was still snoring on the bed. But there was something else.

There were figures on the skyway below, proceeding along it in a tight formation. Nine or ten of them. It must have been their luminators that had played across Gunthar’s window, waking him. He thought they were soldiers, at first. They moved like soldiers, not with the stooped, bestial gait of the skull-faced ghouls but with a sense of purpose. He wondered if he should wake Weber, or maybe bang on the window and get the soldiers’ attention. He didn’t much fancy stepping out into the cold night again, but what if the soldiers knew a safe route out of the city? They might even have a vehicle nearby.

Then a luminator beam caught one of them, and Gunthar drew in a sharp breath.

The figure was dressed like a soldier – black greatcoat, helmet, backpack, heavy armour – and it carried a gun, but its face was like the faces of the creatures, a blank-eyed, impassive, metal skull. A tube snaked out from beneath its mouth to its pack, as if the very air of this human world was poison to its kind.

Gunthar dropped to the floor beneath the windowsill, and cursed himself for not having done so at once. What if he had already been seen? Weber must have heard the movement, or sensed something, because suddenly he was awake, craning his neck to find his fellow refugee in the dark. ‘What is it?’ he whispered sharply.

‘Something… something out there.’

‘The ghouls? Have the ghouls come back?’

Gunthar shook his head. ‘Not the ghouls,’ he whispered. ‘This is something worse.’

Chapter Seven

Governor Hanrik stood atop Hieronymous City’s tallest tower, his home, and surveyed his domain for what he feared would be the final time.

His city was wreathed in smoke, great plumes of it rising from the lower floors. A minute ago, he had seen another tower crumbling before his eyes. He had been in no hurry to leave before then; the danger had seemed a long way away from him. Now, he squirmed with impatience as a flyer oriented itself above his landing pad, the downdraught from its engines ruffling his thinning hair. He knew the High Spire could be next to fall. It might already be under attack somewhere below, and the first Hanrik would know of it would be when it dropped out from beneath him.

As the flyer touched down, Hanrik dashed forward and clambered into its rear, his bodyguards seating themselves to each side of him. The flyer wheezed and groaned as it fought to escape the pull of gravity again. Hanrik didn’t understand how its ponderous, blocky form could fly at all, but it was enough for him that it did. He felt a rush of relief to be safely in the air, but it was soon displaced by a deep ache of regret.

He saw headlights crawling along the skyway below, a proctor truck into which the Governor’s staff had loaded all the things precious to him: his medals and his personal hololiths, along with a few well-chosen antiques and paintings and his favourite chair. There were enginseers working on the external lifters, rigging up a power source so that, with some luck, the truck could be lowered over the city walls. Even so, he was leaving so much behind.

He had earned his position, damn it, and the standard of living that came with it. He didn’t want to have to start again somewhere else. He didn’t want to be the Governor who had lost his world – and he wouldn’t be, he swore.

He turned to the man on his left. ‘Get me Calder again,’ he instructed. ‘I want to know what’s happening.’

The trooper obediently put out the call – and, an interminable ten seconds later, Sergeant Calder’s clipped tones came crackling over his vox-handset. ‘Still proceeding along Level 204,’ said the sergeant. ‘Some of the skyways are out, so we’re having to find a way around them.’

‘What about the tracker?’ asked Hanrik. ‘Is it still… Is she still…?’

‘Still on the move, sir. About fifteen blocks away now, and closing. Will report in as soon as we have sighted her.’

Hanrik slumped back in his seat, rubbing his weary eyes. Why had Arex had to choose today of all days to defy him? Why hadn’t she heeded his warnings? His niece had always been headstrong, but he hadn’t thought her so stubborn as to endanger herself to spite him. He couldn’t imagine what had lured her so far from the High Spire, so many floors down.

At least she was still moving. He thanked the Emperor for the tracking device in her necklace, the one her mother had given her. Thanks to his foresight in installing it, the PDF could still find her. They had to.

‘What about General Trenchard?’ he asked the trooper beside him. ‘I don’t suppose there’s news?’

‘No, sir. It seems the general might have been at home when his hab-block… when the insect swarm… He is listed as missing, presumed dead. Colonel Braun is filling in for him until… We just don’t know for sure.’

Hanrik had been hearing that a lot lately. It seemed that, suddenly, nobody was sure of anything. They couldn’t be sure, for example, what was happening at the city’s main generatorum. He had despatched proctors to investigate, and the PDF had sent squads too, but they hadn’t reported back. And Arex…

He forced himself to put her out of his mind. He had to trust the PDF to bring her back to him. In the meantime, he could see the ring-shaped edifice of Hieronymous Port approaching; he was almost blinded by the lights that streamed out from the centre of that ring, so bright after so long in the dark. The flyer was manoeuvring to land amid those lights, its belly almost scraping the crenellations of the space port wall, and this meant that Hanrik had a job to do. A world to save.

Of course, he was recognised.

As he marched through the main space port terminal, Hanrik was surrounded by desperate civilians, jostling to get to him, to have their pleas heard by him. His escort drew their lasguns, and the implicit threat was enough to keep the crowds at bay. For his own part, Hanrik kept his eyes fixed ahead, ignoring them, concerned with more important matters than their petty grievances.

He had asked a proctor to take him to the man in charge. He was led up a flight of stairs to a carpeted corridor, which was mercifully free from refugees. It was, however, teeming with Krieg soldiers, ferrying equipment and furniture between the space port’s administrative offices. The near-total silence in which they carried out their duties unnerved him; it reminded him of the sub-human servitors.

‘Colonel,’ he said, recognising the rank insignia of the officer in charge of the operation, ‘care to bring me up to speed?’

The colonel turned and regarded Hanrik for a long moment through the dark eyepieces of his all-concealing mask. ‘I don’t know you,’ he said.

Hanrik frowned, then noticed the regimental number on the Krieg officer’s shoulder flashes. ‘I apologise,’ he said, ‘I mistook you for Colonel 42. We met earlier. You must be Colonel… 186, I take it. My name is Hanrik. I am the Planetary Governor.’

‘I see,’ said the colonel brusquely. ‘Then it is my duty to inform you, Governor Hanrik, that Hieronymous Theta is under martial law. You are hereby relieved of your position.’ He turned and marched into the nearest office, leaving Hanrik slack-jawed.

‘Now, hold on a minute,’ he blustered.

He made for the open door, but a figure stepped into his path: a lean, silver-haired man in his seventies, who loomed over Hanrik’s shorter, rounder form. ‘Commissar Costellin,’ the man introduced himself. ‘Perhaps I can answer your questions.’

Hanrik threw one last, disgruntled look after the Krieg colonel, who was now directing a small group of his Guardsmen in the assembly of a communications console. Then he shook the commissar’s proffered hand, and allowed himself to be ushered away from there, albeit with a scowl on his face.

Costellin had commandeered a small office at the end of the corridor. He had already procured for himself a small jug of recaf, which sat warming on a plate on his desk. Hanrik declined the offer of a cup, with an impatient wave, then regretted it because a hot dose of stimulants was just what he needed right now.

As Costellin settled into his chair, his expression grew grave. ‘We have a serious situation developing here,’ he said, ‘perhaps more so than you know. Our troops in the capital city report that–’

‘You have sent troops into my city?’ spluttered Hanrik.

‘Just a couple of platoons for now. The objective is to–’

‘I don’t care what their objective is, I am still the Imperial Governor of this world, no matter what your death-masked colonel out there might say. I am responsible for the welfare of its people, and I insist on being consulted before–’

‘I do appreciate your position, Governor Hanrik,’ said the commissar calmly, ‘and I am aware that Colonel 186 does have rather a blunt manner.’

‘I’d call that an understatement,’ Hanrik muttered.

‘I can assure you, however,’ said Costellin, ‘that the colonel is acting solely in the best interests of this world and its people.’

‘In what he judges to be our best interests,’ Hanrik corrected him, ‘and surely I am more qualified than he is to decide that.’

‘As the colonel has explained to you, Governor, this is a military operation, and time is very much of the essence. We have had to make some difficult decisions and make them quickly, and if sometimes that means–’

‘Go on then,’ snapped Hanrik impatiently, ‘tell me the worst of it.’

So, Costellin told him. He talked about the metal insects, about which Hanrik had already heard, and about ghoul-like creatures lurking in the wreckage of Hieronymous City’s towers, about which he had not. He explained that, according to scans run by his orbiting troop ship, over a hundred towers had lost at least their top forty storeys – far more even than the Governor had feared.

‘One of our platoons came under attack,’ said Costellin. ‘Fifty Krieg grenadiers, about a quarter of them armed with melta guns, against half as many ghouls, and even they took almost thirty per cent casualties.’

‘But they won?’ said Hanrik hopefully.

‘Indeed,’ said Costellin. ‘Unfortunately, we suspect that these creatures are only the vanguard of a far larger necron force.’

Hanrik had never heard of the necron before, and yet somehow the very sound of the word chilled his soul. ‘You think there… there’s no hope?’

‘I think you should get on to Naval Command again,’ said Costellin, see if you can get a rush on those rescue ships.’

As the commissar took a sip of his recaf, the ominous rumbling of distant guns shook the walls of his office and sent plaster flakes cascading from the ceiling into his cup. Hanrik felt numb. He gripped the arms of his chair until his knuckles turned white. ‘What are you doing about this, Costellin?’ he demanded.

‘You must have seen, as you came out of the city, that we have it surrounded. The intention is to seal off the exits, and contain the necrons within–’

‘You can’t!’ cried Hanrik. ‘There are millions of civilians still trapped in there.’ Arex, he thought.

‘Of course,’ said Costellin, ‘we will allow more time for the evacuation to proceed. We will save as many people as we can. However, we must also consider the lives of those thousands who have already fled the city, and the billions who live on this world outside of it. We can’t take the risk that–’

‘You’ll abandon them,’ said Hanrik, ‘those who can’t make it out in time. They’ll be sacrificed for the sake of the rest of us.’

‘There will come a time,’ Costellin confirmed, ‘when that decision must be made.’

‘And who will make that call? Who decides who lives and who dies? No, no, don’t tell me, I’m sure I can guess: Colonel 186, I presume?’

Hanrik was waiting for Colonel Braun as his convoy of open-topped half-tracks pulled up at the space port entrance. The acting commandant of the Planetary Defence Force was a heavyset, mid-forties man with ruddy cheeks and a bristling moustache. He was accompanied in the lead vehicle by a major and two lieutenants, all of whom were glued to their voxes, receiving reports and barking out orders.

‘We’ve lost contact with almost half our squads on the ground,’ Braun told the Governor breathlessly. ‘Some of them have reported encountering creatures: vile, ghoulish creatures with skull faces. I’ve instructed them to start pulling out, but–’

‘Sir, I can’t raise Squad 84,’ interrupted one of the lieutenants. ‘I think we may have lost them too. They were nearing the generatorum. They reported that the skyways there seemed quiet, too quiet. Then… Squad 17 is en route there too, a few sectors away and four floors up. I could send them to–’

‘No,’ said Hanrik. ‘Forget the generatorum. All squads are to focus on the evacuation effort. They’re to get the civilians out of there.’

‘Sir,’ said the second lieutenant, ‘I’m receiving reports of a firefight on the ground level, by the north gate. Mutants, breaking through the cordons.’

Colonel Braun opened his mouth to reply, but Hanrik beat him to it again. ‘Send reinforcements, any and all squads that can reach them. We must not lose control of that gate. It must remain open for as long as… It must remain open.’

‘Sir, Squad 15 reports rioting in–’

‘–attacking civilians on Level 82. Sergeant Kutter wants to know if–’

‘–stranded up there. They can’t find a staircase–’

‘–lost five men, but they managed to kill that–’

‘Sir, another ambush on Level 204. Squad 47 engaging five – no, six – of the creatures. Sergeant Calder reports that–’

Amid the barrage of information, one name stood out to Hanrik’s ears like a sudden gunshot. He snatched the vox-handset from a startled lieutenant, stabbed at the ‘transmit’ rune. ‘Sergeant Calder, this is Hanrik. Your squad are not to engage the enemy. You are to withdraw from combat, do you hear me? Withdraw!’

‘–easier said than done, sir. Pinning us down. We can’t–’

‘Listen to me, Calder. Your priority is to find and rescue my niece. You can’t… You are no match for those creatures.’

‘–taken one down, but they got Reynard, sir, they… Oh, Emperor, they… they’re skinning him alive. I… trying to withdraw, but two of the men… when they saw what happened, what those things did, they tried to run, but the creatures are faster than we are… cut them down… coming for me now, I can’t–’

‘Get out of there, Calder. That’s an order. Sergeant Calder!’

There came no answer, only vox static.

‘Do you read me, Sergeant Calder? Calder, are you there?’

It seemed that everything around Hanrik had stopped. The assembled officers were staring at him, taken aback. He realised he had been shouting. He took a deep breath, switched the vox to an open channel and said, in as calm a voice as he could muster, ‘All units in the vicinity of Level 204, Sector… I don’t know, somewhere near the centre… we have lost contact with Squad 47, repeat, we have lost contact with Squad 47. I… I need you to locate them. Please.’

He handed the handset back to its owner, who immediately received another distress call and stepped aside to deal with it.

Hanrik swallowed hard, pushed Arex to the back of his mind again and turned to Colonel Braun. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘so we’ve lost our base in the city. We need to follow the Imperial Guard’s lead, set up a field HQ in the buildings here. Get on to the other bases worldwide, tell them to keep sending men, all the men they can spare. I want an office no more than two doors away from Colonel 186, and I want… I want a jug of fresh recaf on my desk.’

‘Governor, does this mean…?’

‘I’m sorry, colonel, this is no reflection upon your abilities, but I think this crisis requires an experienced leader.’ Hanrik didn’t miss the look of relief that Braun tried to hide at that statement. ‘As a former Imperial Guard officer, and as the Governor of this world, I am assuming command of the PDF, effective immediately.’

Hanrik had had his aides locate the crate containing his old war gear. They busied themselves about him, strapping him into his time-dulled armour, polishing his cap badge, lubricating his bolt pistol. His old greatcoat was too tight about his shoulders and its buttons wouldn’t fasten, so they had had to procure him a new one. Hanrik stood in the midst of all this activity, stock still, his eyes open but not really seeing the space port office around him, lost in bittersweet memories.

He had thought these days were long behind him.

He marched along the corridor, into the next-door office without knocking. ‘Mr Hanrik,’ said Colonel 186, sparing hardly a glance for his visitor, ‘I would prefer it if you addressed any future concerns to my commissar. I believe you’ve met.’

‘That’s Governor Hanrik,’ said Hanrik. ‘Or General Hanrik, if you’d prefer.’

If the colonel was surprised by that, it showed only in the short pause he took before deducing, ‘You have taken command of the Planetary Defence Force.’

‘It seems we will be working together, after all, the two of us.’

The colonel leaned forward in his seat. ‘As I understand it, your troops have not proved especially effective so far. What are your losses to date?’

‘I... don’t have those figures yet, but I’m certain we can still play a part in–’

‘I don’t dispute that… general. Any man who is prepared to lay down his life for the Emperor, no matter how able or equipped, is a valuable resource to us.’

‘Um, quite, yes.’

‘However, those resources could be more effectively deployed by a single leader. I suggest that I should be–’

‘They’re my men,’ said Hanrik. ‘They will take their orders from me and from no one else, and if you wish to argue that point with the Administratum–’

‘You will, of course, begin the draft immediately.’

The interruption rendered Hanrik momentarily speechless. His jaw worked silently as the colonel continued, ‘This space port and its environs, General Hanrik, are packed with able-bodied refugees, bereft of purpose. Whatever functions those people once had in your society, they can no longer serve them.’

‘But how…? We just don’t have the equipment to outfit them. Ours has always been a peaceful world, colonel, we have never had need of a substantial armed force.’

‘You agreed,’ said the colonel, ‘that your people are a resource, and we must surely utilise all the resources at our disposal. They are loyal subjects of the Emperor?’

‘Of course. Of course they are loyal, but–’

‘Then they will be pleased to offer their lives to Him. Better that than allowing our enemies to escape the city, in which case those lives will be lost for no gain.’

‘About that,’ said Hanrik. ‘I understand you are planning to close the city gates. As it is primarily my men who are inside the city, it should be my decision when to–’

‘Your men have until dawn,’ said the colonel. ‘Then they too shall be honoured to give their lives for the greater glory of the Imperium.’

The refugee camp had swelled in size. From the top of the space port hill, Hanrik could see new tents lining the roads, stretching almost to the neighbouring cities. He was talking into a vox-handset, trying to hear another PDF sergeant through frequent bursts of static and over the constant chatter of troubled voices.

‘…think one of the lads has something, sir. Something in the rubble. It’s… Oh, Emperor preserve us, it’s a body. It looks like… I think it’s one of ours sir, it…’

‘Be careful, Sergeant Flast, watch your step down there.’

A long pause followed. Hanrik was on the verge of transmitting again when the sergeant’s voice returned, sounding strained and nauseous. ‘Confirmed, sir. The body, it’s one of… found his lasgun, but the body has been stripped… I mean, its skin, sir, stripped from the bones… It’s… I don’t know what could have done something like…’

‘Concentrate, Sergeant. You have to hold it together. I need you to… Can you make an identification? Is there anything…?’

‘…found his dog tags. According to these, he’s… Trooper Vasor, sir, Squad 47. And there… there’s two more… three more… Golden Throne, this was a massacre!’

‘Do you see Sergeant Calder? It’s imperative you find Sergeant Calder.’

‘…found him, sir. The same as the others. Whatever it was that did this…’

‘Listen to me, Flast. I need you to… Does Calder have a tracking device with him? It should look like a vox-handset, but smaller, black, with–’

‘Confirmed, sir. The tracker is here, but it… Calder must have fallen on the machine when he… It’s in pieces, sir, inoperative. We’d need a tech-priest to begin to…’

The rest of the sergeant’s words were obscured, but Hanrik had heard enough.

He let the handset fall from his numbed fingers; one of his guards hastened to retrieve it. Of course, Hanrik had known even before this latest blow that Arex was lost to him. Not two kilometres away from here, the Death Korps of Krieg was beginning to lay siege to his capital city. They were setting up minefields around its edge, laying demolition charges to bring down some of the outer towers. They would probably cause as much devastation as the insect swarm had done – and, like the insects, they didn’t seem to care much how many lives were lost in the process.

It would have been easy for him to give up, then, to leave this war to Colonel 186, to slink away in the first rescue ship to arrive. It would have been easy, and it would have been safest, but Governor-General Talmar Hanrik prided himself on having the bloodline of heroes. As long as there was the smallest grain of hope, he would soldier on. He wouldn’t disgrace the memory of his father, his brother, or his sons.

So, he reached for the loudhailer that one of his guards had been carrying for him. He surveyed the sea of imploring faces that had gathered before their leader, and he raised the metallic cone to his lips, and he spoke:

‘My citizens,’ he said, ‘I know you have questions; I know you are afraid, and I will not lie to you, our world is under threat. That is why I… I need your help. I am asking all able-bodied males between the ages of fifteen and forty-five to make themselves known to a PDF officer by midday tomorrow. You have been chosen… We have all been chosen for the honour of serving the God-Emperor – and as long as our hearts remain pure, as long as we fight in His name against the forces that beset us, I believe He will not allow what we have built here to fall. Praise be to the Emperor!’

Chapter Eight

The sky was lightening in the east, and the shadows of the night were being washed away. The skyways of Hieronymous City seemed unusually tranquil, painted in pastel blues and greys, and Trooper Carwen could see hope at last.

His squad had reached the outskirts of the city – nine weary troopers and the indomitable Sergeant Flast, along with a handful of civilians they had picked up en route – but they were still almost a hundred floors up. In the darkness, Carwen had been sure they had no chance of reaching ground level before the city gates were closed. Now, in the cleansing pre-dawn light, anything seemed possible to him.

The long night was over, at last. If only the nightmares it had brought along with it could be so easily dispelled.

Carwen was nineteen years old. He had been a PDF trooper for three of those years. He had signed up out of a genuine desire to make his world safer. His mother was always grumbling that someone needed to keep those filthy mutants under control, keep them away from decent folk, so Carwen had thought, well, why not him? He enjoyed his job, and it had given him the means to move his mother and himself up nine whole floors, so she no longer grumbled as much.

And, after all, Hieronymous Theta was well protected. That was why so many of Carwen’s friends had joined the Imperial Guard: to keep the real threats from making it this far. That was why, until now, he had had to face nothing more alarming than a few angry, unarmed civilians during the food riots last year.

Until now…

Four hours ago, Carwen had turned over a bloodied, skinless corpse in a heap of rubble. He had looked into the dead, staring eyes of a trooper as young as he was, and neither passage of time nor the new light could dim that dreadful image. It was always there, waiting behind his eyelids, in all its stark and gory detail.

‘We should start to search these buildings,’ said Sergeant Flast, indicating the lines of hab-blocks to each side of them. ‘We need to find a way down.’ Carwen had never been more glad to receive an order.

He moved to the nearest door, and broke its lock with a blow from his lasgun butt. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the gloom beyond, then he stepped into a long hallway, sending a grey rat skittering and screeching for cover.

There was a staircase here, but as Carwen had expected the downward flight had been blocked from this side. Nobody wanted a lower-floor dweller climbing up to their room in the night. The barricade, however, was a flimsy one, just a table and a couple of chairs piled up more in hope than with certainty.

Carwen tugged at a chair and it came free with ease, and brought the table crashing down behind it. He had created a gap, now, through which a man could climb. The way was clear, at least down as far as the next skyway. Feeling pleased with himself, he turned to report his discovery to his sergeant. He had almost reached the door when the sound of shouting and gunshots from without froze him in his tracks.

He couldn’t go forwards. Every time he thought about it, Carwen saw the eyes of that bloodless corpse, and he wanted to be sick. He wanted to turn and run, down the staircase, but his conscience wouldn’t let him abandon his comrades, and besides how would his mother feel if her firstborn son was executed for desertion?

In the end, it was his conscience that won out. He forced himself to take one small step forwards, then another, then another – and he reached the doorway at long last, and he summoned up the courage to look outside.

Carwen had been warned about the metal-faced ghouls. He had spent the past four hours searching the shadows for them, imagining what they might look like. The reality, however, was more horrific than anything he could have dreamed.

They had his squad surrounded; they had appeared at each end of the row of buildings, ten of them in all, and now they were closing their trap. In the centre of the skyway, Sergeant Flast and a couple of troopers were trying to protect the civilians, but their las-beams hardly seemed to trouble the encircling monsters.

The rest of Carwen’s comrades had already emerged from the buildings, and they added to the barrage of las-fire until at last a ghoul was felled by a lucky shot, but by then it was too late. The hunters fell upon their prey, and their already blood-caked flensing blades set about their grisly work.

Carwen snapped up his lasgun, but he was trembling too hard to aim it properly. They’re already dead, he told himself. Sergeant Flast, Tondal, Garroway, you can’t hurt them now, and with that thought he switched his gun to Full Auto and let its staccato bark drown out the sounds of his comrades’ screams.

It didn’t work for long. The lasgun bled dry, and suddenly Carwen’s sights were filled by the heart-freezing sight of a leering metallic skull. The ghouls had finished with their victims on the skyway; now, they had separated and were turning their attentions to the snipers. With a yelp, Carwen leapt back into the hab-block, feverishly yanking at his spent power pack, slinging it away and fumbling to insert a fresh one into the housing. He stumbled over the words of the Litany of Loading, and the pack fell from his jittery hand.

The ghoul was in the doorway. A graveyard stench hit Carwen full in the face and made him retch. He gripped his lasgun stock with both hands, determined to meet his killer with his bayonet when it pounced, knowing it would do him no good.

Then the ghoul exploded.

There had been no warning, just a burst of flame in which the creature’s skin coat had been vaporised, the metal skeleton beneath it melted. A haze of acrid smoke added to the already overpowering stink, and Carwen fell to his hands and knees, scrabbling for his dropped power pack and was violently sick on the floorboards.

He looked up through teary eyes, saw a figure standing where the ghoul had once stood. He could almost have cried at the sight of its face – rather, its metal skull. Then, he noticed the plate attached to the front of the figure’s helmet, the image of the Imperial Eagle embossed upon it, and he breathed again.

This skull was a mask, Carwen realised, beneath which…

…beneath which he could see a second, fabric, mask attached to a rebreather unit on the man’s back. Despite his disturbing appearance, however, the man’s shoulder flashes identified him as an Imperial Guardsman, and he was carrying a melta gun, with which he had apparently just saved Carwen’s life.

The Guardsman looked down at Carwen with what might have been disdain, before turning and marching away, his weapon flaring once more. Ashamed of his weakness, Carwen reloaded and scurried after him, holding his breath and trying not to look at the simmering silver pool in the doorway as he stepped over it.

Outside, the tide had well and truly turned. A platoon of skull-masked Guardsmen had arrived from the east, outnumbering the ghouls more than three to one. Only a handful had meltas, but the remainder were armed with what looked to Carwen like hellguns, more powerful lasgun variants – he had handled one in training, but never since – and these too were having some effect. The ghouls were kept at bay, unable to employ their claws. Another two were vaporised, two more felled by crimson bolts.

For a moment, Carwen was overwhelmed with relief for his close escape, and gratitude towards his saviours – but those feelings were quickly dissipated.

He heard a whooshing sound, a concentrated blast of air, and suddenly the number of ghouls on the skyway had more than quadrupled. One second, they had been down to five, now there were over twenty of them, and Carwen had no idea where the reinforcements had come from. They had just... appeared.

The ghouls were still pinned down, but now, through sheer weight of numbers, they were starting to gain ground. Some of them had hoisted up the corpses of their previous victims and were using them as shields against the skull-masked Guardsmen’s fire. Carwen had one of the creatures in his sights, but this new tactic gave him pause. Not so the Guardsmen, who kept up their bombardment regardless.

Sergeant Flast’s body was set alight by a melta’s near-miss; a ghoul hurled it at the Guardsmen’s lines, a flaming missile, forcing them to scatter. Carwen’s lower lip trembled with frustration and rage – Flast had been a good man, a good leader, he deserved to rest in peace – and he squeezed his trigger, but few of his las-beams found their mark and those that did only glanced off the ghouls’ metallic bones.

He had expected the Guardsmen to fall back. Instead, their front ranks drew sword bayonets and charged, choosing an opponent each. Carwen admired, and was astonished by, their courage, more so when he saw that the Guardsmen were outclassed by the ghouls in close combat. They fought hard, enduring far longer than Flast and the others had done, but the ghouls were faster, stronger, and each of them wielded eight blades to the Guardsmen’s one.

The first Guardsman fell, his heart impaled by metal claws, but before he hit the ground both he and his opponent were engulfed by melta fire, and Carwen realised that this had been the plan all along. Those ten Guardsmen had offered their lives, without a moment’s hesitation, to buy time for the others to regroup.

Another ghoul was vaporised, while a third was cut down in a crossfire of las-beams. Another, to Carwen’s amazement, was run through by a bayonet, collapsing into the liquid remains of one of its kin. The victorious swordsman turned in search of his next kill, and so had his back to his last as, impossibly, it twitched and jerked and hauled itself back to its feet, its talon-knives poised to strike afresh.

Carwen managed a cry of ‘Look out!’, but if the Guardsman heard him he had no time to react. He was flensed to death in two terrible seconds, revenged in the next by a salvo of hellgun bolts. It was happening elsewhere on the battlefield too, supposedly dead ghouls rising to fight again, and it seemed to Carwen now that there was no hope, that this nightmare was never-ending.

He could see muzzle flashes in the doorways across the skyway: two of his fellow squad members, two of the few survivors, doing the best they could, doubtless aware by now that this didn’t amount to a great deal. Only the meltas were killing the ghouls, killing them for good – and indeed, now Carwen could see that the ghouls were aware of this too and they were targeting the holders of those very weapons. The rest of the Guardsmen had dropped their hellguns, fighting with their bayonets to defend their better-equipped comrades – but, as Carwen watched helplessly, a ghoul sidestepped two opponents to close with one of the melta gun-wielders. Its claws lashed out, and the melta’s containment chamber was sheared in two, immolating both ghoul and Guardsman in a brief but furious eruption.

Another Guardsman had backed up to the skyway’s edge, only metres away from Carwen’s doorway, a ghoul bearing down on him hard. The Guardsman fired his melta gun twice but missed, and Carwen tried to get a bead on the creature himself but found its victim in his way. A second later, that problem at least was solved, as the Guardsman collapsed in a spray of arterial blood – but before his killer could retrieve its prize, a PDF trooper’s lasgun struck true at last, and it too was slain.

Carwen knew what the Emperor required of him now, little as he may have liked it. Just a few strides along the skyway, apparently forgotten in the tumult, lay the dead Guardsman’s weapon, unattended. A chance for him to make a difference, save a few lives, and all he had to do was pick up that gun and make himself a target.

He had no choice, he told himself. He couldn’t think about the ghouls and their bladed claws, couldn’t think about skinned bodies in the rubble or his sergeant’s burning corpse. He had to take inspiration from the skull-masked Guardsmen, had to prove himself as brave as they were, had to take those strides.

Carwen ran to the melta gun, dropped to one knee and picked it up. His heart was thumping against his ribcage, his palms so slick with sweat that the weapon almost slipped from his grasp. He found the firing mechanism by touch; his gaze was held by the corpse of the ghoul just a metre away from him. It hadn’t moved since it had fallen – perhaps it was actually, finally dead – but Carwen was taking no chances.

He thought the melta gun had misfired for an instant, because it didn’t have the kick he had expected and the only sound it made was a burning hiss, but then the corpse of the ghoul ignited with a satisfying crump. Carwen enjoyed a moment of pure exultation, and then remembered the other creatures whose attention he had doubtless just drawn. He hefted the gun to his shoulder and prayed that he might at least take one of them down before he died, two if the Emperor was with him.

Finding a target amid the melee was harder than he had expected. He didn’t trust himself not to strike a Guardsman by accident. His fellow gunmen were not so reticent. Friendly fire had just vaporised another two of their comrades, albeit taking a ghoul with them. No doubt they had reasoned that, if they didn’t take those shots, then those men were dead anyway. Carwen couldn’t think like that.

Two ghouls were coming for him, outflanking the Guardsmen in each direction. Carwen didn’t know which to aim for, which one would reach him first, and by the time he had chosen the ghoul on the left he knew it was too late, that he had no hope of stopping them both. At least he could make his one shot count, he thought. He resisted the urge to close his eyes, to flinch from the terrifying visage of the oncoming monster. He gritted his teeth and he fired…

…and missed, but the ghoul fell anyway to a well-placed bayonet thrust from behind. It sprawled in front of the still-kneeling Carwen and, shaking, disgusted, he trained his sights upon the motionless body and squeezed his trigger. He struck only a glancing blow, and to his horror the corpse attempted to stand although the left side of its body was weeping molten metal. The creature fixed Carwen with a burning, malevolent glare, even as an eye socket elongated and dribbled down its face. Then its left leg bowed under its own weight, and the ghoul crashed back to the ground and thrashed its remaining limbs impotently until it could thrash them no longer.

Carwen wasn’t dead yet. He swung his melta gun to the right, expecting to meet the talon-knives of the second ghoul, but there was no sign of it. Panicking, he dropped his right hand to the ground and pivoted on it, but the ghoul wasn’t sneaking up behind him as he had feared, and now Carwen realised that the half-melted corpse in front of him had gone too, and he could no longer hear the hissing discharges of the meltas or the sounds of his own comrades’ lasguns. The fighting had stopped.

There were no ghouls left, either dead or alive. They must have blinked away, as suddenly, as inexplicably, as they had blinked in, but that meant…

That meant they would almost certainly be back. The metal ghouls could strike again at any moment, replenished and recharged, and no one would see them coming.

Hesitantly, Carwen picked himself up and started forward, his footsteps loud in the sudden stillness. The other survivors of his squad were emerging from their doorways; a few minutes ago they had been ten in number, now they were just four.

‘Who leads your unit?’

It took Carwen a moment to work out who had spoken, to be sure that the question had been directed at him. A Guardsman with the rank insignia of a lieutenant loomed over him, and Carwen swallowed to compose himself as he looked up into a blank-eyed face. ‘Sergeant Flast, sir,’ he said, ‘but he’s dead. You just cremated the body.’

‘What were his last orders?’

‘We were making our way out of the city.’

‘That is no longer possible.’

As the lieutenant spoke, Carwen saw the first red fingers of the morning sun, feeling their way across the skyway. The ground trembled with the force of an explosion somewhere below him, and he knew that the officer had spoken the truth. The ghouls had delayed him too long, he thought, his throat turning dry.

‘My designation,’ said the skull-masked officer, ‘is Lieutenant 4432-9801-2265-Phaesta, officer in command of the first grenadier platoon of the 81st Krieg Infantry Regiment, Beta Company. Your men will place themselves at my disposal.’

Carwen couldn’t tell if that had been a request or an instruction. He still couldn’t speak anyway, so he just nodded. Trooper Parvel was on the vox, reporting his squad’s situation, but Carwen held out little hope that Colonel Braun or the Governor or whoever was in charge at the moment might spare a flyer to extract four lowly PDF troopers from the city. There had to be hundreds like them in the same predicament, and likely a similar number of more important people.

Another Krieg Guardsman, taller and thinner than most, stalked the skyway, examining the fallen, dispensing medical care to a handful of survivors. Scuttling about him were a pair of servitors, who carried supplies for him and were also laden down with spare hellguns. When the medic found a Guardsman injured beyond hope, he spoke a quiet benediction over him and shot him through the head. Then he stripped the equipment from the Guardsman’s corpse and handed it to the servitors. The Krieg platoon had lost thirteen men, all told; they had fewer than twenty left.

The medic stooped beside a PDF trooper, and Carwen felt a brief flare of hope that another of his comrades might be saved. The fact that he couldn’t identify the flayed and mutilated body should have told him how slim a hope this was. Still, the medic produced a syringe and attached it to the fallen trooper’s arm.

It took Carwen a few seconds to fully comprehend what he was doing.

‘Stop that,’ he protested, racing forwards. ‘You can’t do that to him!’

‘He’s dead,’ said the medic in a flat, matter-of-fact tone.

‘I know that,’ said Carwen, ‘I can see that, but–’

‘We are cut off from our supply lines. We must make the most of the resources available to us.’ The syringe was full now, and the medic passed it to a servitor. ‘Your comrade has no further use for this blood, but it could save a life with which the Emperor can be served. I presume your comrade would wish to serve the Emperor?’

Carwen couldn’t argue with that logic, but at the same time he had no wish to watch what the medic was doing either. Who were these people, he wondered, who treated the dead with as little respect as had the metal ghouls themselves?

The medic stood and extended an expectant hand. It took Carwen a moment to remember that he was still carrying the melta gun, and he handed it over with some reluctance. The weapon was reallocated to one of the Krieg Guardsmen, although the medic – he was more than that, Carwen could see now; the Krieg men deferred to him, and addressed him as ‘quartermaster’ – made a gesture to his servitors, and the four PDF troopers were each issued with hellguns, which was something at least.

The lieutenant gathered his troops about himself. ‘The city has been sealed,’ he informed them, ‘but there may still be a way for us to serve within these walls. Our orders are to go to ground until that way is made clear to us.’

He must have been in contact with his superiors too, although Carwen hadn’t seen or heard it. He had noticed, however, that one of the Guardsmen carried a vox-caster, so it seemed probable that the lieutenant was wearing a discreet comm-bead.

Carwen was relieved when they moved on at last, away from the skyway and its bodies – relieved because it seemed less likely to him now that the ghouls would find them again. Relief soon gave way, however, to a stomach-knotting anxiety, when Carwen tried to envisage his fate instead.

He was following leaders he did not know, men who made him feel uncomfortable, who he couldn’t quite bring himself to trust. The ground shook again as, presumably, another skyway or a part of a building was collapsed somewhere beneath him, and Carwen knew that his dreams of escape, the dreams that had sustained him through the long night, were well and truly dead. As dead as most of his comrades, his friends.

He was still alive, still moving, but towards what he hadn’t the faintest idea. He had been turned around so that, instead of exiting the city, he was heading for its centre – and Trooper Carwen had the strongest impression that his newfound comrades were expecting to die there.

Chapter Nine

Gunthar woke to sunlight, and to distant cracks of gunfire. Looking outside, he saw an empty skyway, and no sign at all that anything had happened apart from a lone autocab sitting at an odd angle to the towers. His chrono, however, read morning-shift already, so the skyway ought to have been teeming with people.

Weber was fast asleep in his watch position by the window. Gunthar shook him awake, and they hunted for food, because they were both ravenous and because it was easier to focus on this short-term goal than to discuss what might happen next. The paste dispenser above the stove was dry, so Weber broke into a room across the hallway. The hab, as it turned out, was occupied: a young woman sat huddled in a corner, two children clutched protectively to her breast, and all three of them screaming and crying in the face of this violent intrusion. It took Gunthar and Weber some minutes to calm things down, to explain themselves.

Weber asked the woman to come with them, out of the city. It was news to Gunthar that they were going anywhere, but he didn’t object. In the daylight, he felt braver than he had last night, and the woman confirmed that they were only a few kilometres from their goal. With the sun to guide them, they could reach the city wall within the hour. There was only one problem.

‘We tried to leave last night with the soldiers,’ sniffed the woman, ‘but the lifters, the external lifters, weren’t working and the soldiers… I couldn’t do what they said. I couldn’t take my babies… Not down there. Not where the mutants live.’

Her words dampened Gunthar’s optimism, and, as he and Weber gulped down scavenged scraps in the hallway, he suggested that maybe the woman had been right. ‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘it would be best to stay put.’

‘What, and wait to be rescued?’ scoffed Weber. ‘Good luck with that. They’ll send in the soldiers for the Governor’s daughter first, then his friends after her, then the Governor’s supporters after them, and his loyal citizens at the bottom of the list.’

‘I’ve never left the city before, I never realised that… If the only way out is down… Weber, I think the monsters came from, you know, down there.’

‘But it’s quiet right now,’ said Weber. ‘It’s been quiet all morning, and I think I’d rather take my chances in the daylight then wait and see what happens
after dark.’

Gunthar nodded gloomily, but he was thinking about the soldiers that had passed his window last night. They hadn’t been like the bestial ghouls, or the insects Weber had described. He had seen from their bearings, from the way they had moved, that they were intelligent, and this scared him more than anything he had seen thus far. Those soldiers, Gunthar was sure, wouldn’t be sleeping away the day, they would be out there somewhere, scheming and planning and searching…

Weber was right. They weren’t safe here. They weren’t safe anywhere.

‘I suppose,’ said Gunthar, ‘as we are so close… We could see what’s out there, and maybe… maybe they’ll have got the lifters working by now, so we can… I don’t know, maybe we should just take it one step at a time.’

Somehow, the declaration had sounded more certain in his head. Still, Weber agreed with him – and, seeing the relief in the storekeeper’s eyes, Gunthar realised that despite his outward confidence he too had been seeking reassurance.

They emerged into the cool morning air, and although the skyway was still quiet – almost preternaturally so – Gunthar felt all his logic, all his brave resolutions, draining into his shoes. He felt isolated out here, exposed.

He prayed he wasn’t making a fatal mistake.

It didn’t take them long to find the scars of last night’s attacks.

Gunthar saw the holes in the skyline first. He tried to believe they might always have been there, that the towers might simply have been built further apart in these outskirts of the city. Then, turning a corner, he and Weber came upon a collapsed hab-block, perhaps the same one on which they had trod before, and he could lie to himself no longer.

He saw a mangled body and, although he didn’t want to look, he couldn’t tear his eyes away from it. It didn’t look like a ghoul, but without a closer inspection – and Gunthar had no intention of getting closer – he couldn’t be sure. He was relieved when, through unspoken consent, he and Weber turned and began to skirt the ruins rather than attempting to cross them, although this would lengthen their journey.

There were more bodies on the skyways. They lay where they had fallen, and some had been stripped of their flesh, their exposed blood vessels glistening in the sunlight. However, there was life here too. Gunthar and Weber weren’t the only stranded citizens to have ventured, blinking, out into the new day.

Many of the others were like zombies, shuffling shell-shocked through the wreckage of their lives. Most, Gunthar realised, were waiting for somebody to tell them what to do. Occasionally, someone would turn to him in hope, seeing through the blood stains on his fine grey tunic, evidently wondering if he was the one to lead them, and then Gunthar felt ashamed because he couldn’t be that man.

Even so, as he and Weber proceeded, they picked up a small group of followers, attracted by the very fact that they were going somewhere. Weber neither encouraged nor discouraged these tag-alongs, he just plodded on in grim silence.

They found a PDF half-track and, littering the skyway around it, the remains of a PDF squad. They disturbed a wild-eyed young man who had been in the process of looting one of the corpses; he levelled a stolen lasgun at them and triggered it by accident. Fortunately the beam hit no one, but the sound of the weapon’s report echoed along the skyway like a treacherous alarm call. Gunthar wanted to back up and get away from there but, to his chagrin, Weber was intent on talking the boy down first.

A minute later, Gunthar learned the reason why. Weber wanted the soldiers’ weapons for himself. He acquired a lasgun, hefting it in both hands then putting it to his shoulder, squinting along its sights, getting the measure of it. When Gunthar protested that he was making himself a target, the storekeeper, rifling another soldier’s webbing for spare power packs, grunted, ‘We’re targets already, all of us.’

Gunthar was still considering that wisdom when the last of the guns was claimed. There were four of them now among the group – a few more had been destroyed – and he had to admit that their presence made him feel more comfortable. He had seen one ghoul killed by lasgun fire, he reminded himself, it was possible, and surely even that slim chance was better than none.

There was some talk about taking the half-track too, but no one knew how to operate it and, when one woman managed to start its engine, its roar was deafening. Gunthar pointed out that, with so much debris about and the lifters inoperable, the vehicle couldn’t have taken them far anyway.

An old man wandered the skyways, his voice booming out to anyone who would listen. He was preaching that the Emperor was dead, that Hieronymous Theta had been abandoned to the mercy of the Ruinous Powers. A day ago, maybe even less than that, he would have been spat on for such heresy, if not summarily executed by the proctors. Today, as his motley group resumed their uncertain journey, Gunthar couldn’t have said for sure that the preacher was wrong.

One more tower. Gunthar could see just one more tower, and beyond that nothing but the sky. It might have been a sky choked with dust and smoke, and streaked with black from a thousand funeral pyres burning across the city, but still it was a welcome sight. Gunthar allowed his hopes to rise, but they were dashed in an instant.

One by one, the members of his group stumbled to a halt as they saw what lay ahead of them. The skyway that should have swept them towards freedom took a sharp plunge instead. Its support struts had been blown out, at least one of the buildings to which it had been anchored demolished. Feeling the skyway flexing and straining beneath his weight, Gunthar edged forward as far as he dared. Even if they had had ropes, if they could have climbed down, they would have alighted upon a compacted heap of rubble some twenty floors below, which stretched further than he could see.

That last tower was unreachable.

It was a long time before a word was spoken. Then Weber, reluctantly accepting his de facto position as group leader, suggested they turn back and find an intact staircase. Perhaps, he said, there was still a way out, beneath the devastated area. His defeated tone inspired nobody, Gunthar least of all, but then neither were there any better ideas. However, as the dispirited refugees trudged back the way they had come, Gunthar noted that a few of them allowed themselves to be left behind.

They were down to seven by the time they had found a sturdy-looking hab-block, by the time they had torn down a man-made barricade and cleared a route downward. Four men, three women, three weapons left between them. With two bodies ahead of him and the rest behind, Gunthar felt hemmed in on the narrow, dark staircase. He wished he had picked up a lasgun after all.

They walked for almost forty minutes, and Gunthar lost count of the number of floors they had descended. They came to a second barricade, and resignedly set about its disassembly. This one had been reinforced with barbed wire, which Weber had to carefully untangle, cursing every few seconds as a barb tore his flesh. Gunthar’s feet ached and he couldn’t reach the barricade past Weber to help, so he sat on a stair and rested his head in his hands instead.

They sought food and rest in another abandoned hab. It was smaller than Gunthar was used to, a squeeze for the seven of them, and the walls were covered in vile, blasphemous graffiti. They were obviously nearing ground level.

Gunthar braced himself for all kinds of horrors as they stepped outside. He was surprised to be met by sunlight, relieved too until he realised that it was the loss of so many towers that had dispelled the shadows down here. The skyway before them was littered with debris and looked little different to the ones above, wholesale destruction being a great leveller. A few shabbily-clad people picked their way through the wreckage, again as above, but Gunthar could see no obvious signs of mutation on them. Perhaps the mutants had escaped through the gate already, he thought, or better still been dealt with by the PDF.

Unfortunately, this level offered no more hope than the other. Barely ten minutes later, they found the skyway they were following blocked by rubble. They sagged against it, too weary to contemplate a further descent, drained of all hope that the risk might pay off. ‘We could try another direction,’ said Weber without enthusiasm. ‘There might be a way through to the north or the south. I doubt it, though. This isn’t random vandalism. Someone has done this on purpose, penned us in here. I should think the only way out of Hieronymous City now is to be airlifted out – and like I said, you’d have to be the Governor’s daughter to merit a flyer.’

As if to underscore his words, the skyway trembled gently. A railing swayed, and masonry skittered down the heap at Gunthar’s back.

‘Hanrik doesn’t have a daughter,’ he murmured distractedly.

‘Daughter, niece,’ said Weber vaguely, ‘whoever that woman was.’

‘What… which woman?’

‘I said, didn’t I? The fellow I talked to last night, the one who told me about the insects… Before they appeared, he said he saw a member of the Governor’s family.’

‘You never told me that,’ said Gunthar, aware that his voice was rising. ‘You didn’t say one thing about–’

And then the shooting started.

Multiple las-beams slammed into the rubble behind Gunthar, one striking uncomfortably close to his head so that a ricocheting plascrete shard cut his left ear. He tried to push himself to his feet, locate the source of the threat at the same time, felt the mountain of rubble shifting beneath his hands and floundered. Fortunately, Weber and one of the other lasgun-holders had reacted faster than Gunthar had, and they were returning fire.

There were shadows at the edges of the skyway, stooped, inhuman figures, and it was a measure of all Gunthar had been through in the past two days that he was almost relieved to identify them as mere mutants. Evidently, the sight of the city in disarray had emboldened them, and they were seizing this chance to claim some quarter of it for themselves. They had also scavenged two lasguns, at least.

Another beam stabbed out in Gunthar’s direction and struck a pale-faced, puffy-eyed woman beside him, slicing through her right elbow. She gaped disbelievingly at the cauterised stump of her arm, then fainted. One of Weber’s las-beams, in return, punched through a mutant’s throat, and it squealed and died.

Gunthar was an easy target where he stood. He wanted to run, as he had always run before, but this time there was nowhere to run to. He started forward, looking for shelter, and more figures rose before him. The mutants were more numerous than he had initially seen; there were eight or nine of them. A lasgun swivelled his way, but its holder came under fire and Gunthar was reprieved for a second or two.

His only, desperate, hope was to close with the mutants, to deny them the advantage of their ranged weapons. It was a terrifying plan, but it was all he had, so he lowered his head and he rushed a gaunt, foul-smelling, pustule-covered creature, hoping that his momentum would lend him the strength he needed to bowl it over. He cannoned into the mutant, but it had seen him coming, set itself against him, and it absorbed the impact of his charge without giving a footstep.

The mutant had the strength of an enraged grox. It flipped Gunthar onto his back and pinned him down with a bony knee in his chest. A rancid mouth loomed over him, and showered his face with spittle. He was trying to hold the mutant’s arms back as it scrabbled to gouge out his eyes with dirty, calloused fingers.

He was saved by another earth tremor, this one more violent and protracted than the first. The mutant lost its balance, and Gunthar kicked and unseated it from him. He couldn’t match its strength, so he made to run, but the treacherous quake stole his footing and the mutant was upon him again, tackling him around the ankles. As Gunthar fell, his hand found a brick on the skyway. He snatched it up, twisted around, swung for the mutant’s head and struck true. The impact jarred the brick from his stung fingers, but the blow had had the desired effect. The mutant crumpled.

Gunthar didn’t know where it had landed, didn’t know if it was still fighting to reach him. It seemed the entire world was shaking now, so vigorously that he was seeing double. He couldn’t stand, couldn’t even try, he could only hug the skyway for dear life and pray to the Emperor that it wouldn’t give way.

The earthquake subsided; Gunthar heard footsteps and gingerly raised his head to see four mutants scampering away in fright. He looked for the one he had fought, and caught his breath at the sight of its lifeless body sprawled beside him, black blood pooling beneath its fractured skull. He fought with conflicting emotions. He felt proud because, this time, he had fought back, done the Emperor’s bidding, but at the same time he was appalled that his hands had snuffed out a life, even a mutant life.

It could so easily have been him instead, lying there, an empty shell.

Gunthar heard a scuffle behind him, and turned to find his fellow refugees bearing the final mutant to the ground, holding it down while one put a lasgun barrel to its temple. He closed his eyes so as not to see the moment of the mutant’s death, but the sound of the las-shot nevertheless evoked the image too clearly in his mind.

Then a woman’s voice shouted for help, and Gunthar realised that somebody was down. The woman was over by the rubble heap, and Gunthar’s heart sank as he saw a thatch of black hair and recognised Weber’s body beside her.

He ran to his newfound friend’s side, although he didn’t know what he could do for him. Weber was still breathing, but raggedly, and there was a sucking wound in his chest. His face was caked with sweat, and his pupils had contracted as if he was staring at something a world away. ‘Can’t anyone help him?’ Gunthar cried. ‘Didn’t anyone take a… a medi-kit or something from the soldiers?’

‘Just… winded, that’s all,’ wheezed Weber, and with a supreme effort he lifted his arm and took Gunthar’s hand in one of his own larger, rougher ones. ‘Need a moment to… catch my breath…’ It was plain in Weber’s face that he didn’t believe his own words. He was holding on to Gunthar’s hand with a bone-crushing ferocity, as if hoping to cling to life through muscle power alone, and there was a desperate appeal in his eyes, one that Gunthar didn’t know how to answer.

He felt he should say something, offer some reassurance, but only one thought bubbled to the surface of his mind, and this was his last chance to ask about it. ‘This woman,’ he said, ‘the one your friend saw, how did he know…?’

Weber appeared consternated at first, then glad to have something other than his own fate to think about. ‘You mean,’ he said, ‘the… the Governor’s daughter?’

‘His niece,’ said Gunthar. ‘The Governor’s niece. Was it definitely her?’

‘The fellow, he… said he remembered her from a newsreel, during the food riots. I don’t know, it could be he was… maybe he was imagining things.’

‘Did he say what she looked like? Weber, did he say–?’

‘I don’t know. Young. Nice clothes. But he was probably mistaken. What would… what would someone like that be doing so far from her ivory tower?’

Weber closed his eyes, then, and Gunthar felt his hold weakening as his breathing became shallower. He had no more words, so he just squeezed Weber’s hand as hard as he could, to remind him that he wasn’t alone, until at last, with one final, wracking breath, he was gone, and his fingers went limp in Gunthar’s grip.

‘What do we do now?’ asked a hollow voice behind him, and Gunthar realised that the other refugees were ranged about him, looking to him to guide them. The woman who had lost her arm was on her feet with the rest of them, weeping softly to herself.

‘I don’t know,’ said Gunthar. ‘I… I don’t know.’

‘Do we go on,’ somebody else asked, ‘maybe try for another gate?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What if the mutants come back? What if they bring reinforcements?’

‘I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know!’

This last was shouted, and the effort of forcing out the words broke a dam in Gunthar’s throat, and allowed tears to rise to his eyes. He fought them back, swallowing hard, breathing in deeply. ‘I think,’ he said at last, when he had composed himself, ‘I think Weber was right. There’s no way out of the city for us. I think we should… We should have stayed where we were. We should go back to the upper floors, where it’s safe… safer, I mean. We should wait, wait for the governor to... well, to do something. Trust in the Emperor, and He... He will provide.’

Even as he spoke those words, Gunthar knew that he and the others would be parting company soon.

He hadn’t thought about Arex all day. Too busy thinking about himself. Now, it seemed that when the lights had gone out she hadn’t been at home. Instead, she had been on the 204th floor, facing an attack by metal insects – Weber may not have been sure of this, but Gunthar was, because he knew one thing that Weber hadn’t.

He knew that the 204th-floor skyway was the route any autocab would take from the High Spire to his own modest hab on the 223rd floor.

Arex had come looking for him – and in his fear, in his selfishness, Gunthar had turned his back on her. Nor would she have told her uncle where she was going, so she would have no prospect of being rescued by him despite Weber’s insinuations. She was probably alone, possibly hurt, almost certainly sheltering in Gunthar’s hab, wondering where he was, needing him.

He had to get back there. He had to find her.

He let go of Weber’s hand, laying it across the storekeeper’s chest. Then he reached across the body and he picked up Weber’s lasgun. It was surprisingly light.

The Emperor, it seemed, wanted Gunthar Soreson to fight, so he had given him something – something more than his own life – to fight for. And that was okay, he told himself, because he could fight now, he had just proved that to himself.

Gunthar couldn’t be a hero, he accepted that, but he could be a soldier. And he would be, he told himself – if only because he had no choice in the matter.

Chapter Ten

The tremors reached as far as Hieronymous Port.

Costellin felt the first as he stood by his office window, looking down onto the space port ramp. PDF drill instructors were marshalling an army of new, raw recruits out there, recruits who were struggling to march in step despite their most earnest efforts. The first tremor bowled a handful of them over, and the commissar smiled wryly to himself at the commotion thus sparked.

To the tremor itself, he gave little thought, assuming it to have been caused by a demolition charge. He had been hearing the distant crumps of such charges from the city all morning, though the intervals between them had lengthened.

Then the second, more powerful and longer-lasting quake hit, and he had to hold on to the windowsill to maintain his footing. Now, he had cause for concern.

Costellin wasn’t the first to reach Colonel 186’s door. Governor-General Hanrik beat him to it. The colonel’s aides were busy at the vox-caster, requesting reports from his men on the front line and his counterparts in the other three Krieg regiments. ‘It’s confirmed, sir,’ said a masked lieutenant, hefting a pile of data-slates. ‘According to our triangulations, the epicentre of both earthquakes was right here–’ He pointed to a slate with a stencil. ‘–in the heart of Hieronymous City itself.’

The colonel nodded as if he had expected nothing else. Turning to Hanrik, he asked, ‘Does this region have a history of geological instability?’

Hanrik shook his head. ‘Not at all. There hasn’t been so much as a tremor here in my lifetime. Even if there had been, the timing of this–’

‘Then we may assume,’ the colonel interrupted him, ‘that the necrons are responsible. Lieutenant, I will need fresh scans of the affected area.’

‘Yes, sir. I’ll contact the troop ship, sir.’

There was no more to be said until those scans arrived, so Costellin asked to be informed when they did and then left. He had a bad feeling about this, but he kept his thoughts to himself until there was more information. The colonel, he knew, would entertain no groundless speculation. Hanrik followed him out, but Costellin noted that he posted a PDF sentry in the corridor between their offices, presumably to alert him should a meeting be convened without him.

Forty minutes later, the Governor took the further precaution of paying the commissar a visit. Costellin waited patiently as Hanrik talked in concerned tones about the situation in general and the possible causes of the earthquakes in particular, before working his way around to his point.

‘We’ve been combing the city, of course,’ he said, ‘but our lasguns are no match for those necron ghouls. We’ve already lost two squads this morning, and the flyers they were in. I just need… We’re still adding to the list of the missing. I’m talking about important people: captains of industry, philanthropists, lords even. The irony is that, with the lifters out, it was those on the upper floors who had the least chance of escape, but I hear… I’ve been reading the reports, and it seems the Krieg–’

‘You’re asking for our help,’ said Costellin.

‘You have resources, weapons, that we just–’

‘You want Krieg soldiers to fly with your men on their rescue missions. I can see how that would be a boon to them. I can guess what the colonel’s response will be, though. He has the final say on troop allocations, as I’m sure you’re aware.’

‘The colonel. Yes.’ Hanrik cleared his throat. ‘He and I didn’t exactly get off on the best foot. I thought my cause might find more favour were it to–’

‘You’re asking me to intercede with the colonel on your behalf.’ It was a common enough request, and not an unreasonable one.

‘I understand, of course, if he can’t spare the manpower. I thought, if we could just lay our hands on those melta guns…’

‘I’d say the colonel is more likely to let you have the men,’ said Costellin dryly. ‘The weapons are more valuable, and harder to come by. But there’s more to this appeal than you’re telling me, I think. A more personal stake than simply concern for your world’s great and good?’

Hanrik’s hands had been fidgeting in his lap, betraying his apprehension. Now he stiffened, met Costellin’s steady gaze for a moment, then sighed and nodded. He reached into his tunic pocket and produced a device that looked like a vox-handset.

‘My niece,’ he said. ‘Her name is Arex. She went missing before the power cut, but she wears an amecyte necklace with… I had a machine that could find her. We lost it. I thought that was it, I know there’s… I know there’s only a small chance that she is still… but I spoke to an enginseer and he built this replacement machine for me. He says it will work like the other, he just has to find Arex’s signal, but to do that he has to get closer to her.’

‘I understand,’ said Costellin.

‘We know where she was last night. We can send a team to that location, then the machine can lead them to her. They’d be straight in and out of the city.’

‘I will put your request to the colonel,’ said Costellin. ‘I will do all I can.’

Hanrik nodded gratefully, then glanced impatiently at his chrono. ‘How much longer, do you think? How long does it normally take for one of these scans…?’

‘Oh, I should think the scan is completed by now. The Krieg generals on the troop ship will be analysing it as we speak.’

‘Then what are we waiting for? The colonel promised to consult us–’

‘He promised to keep us informed,’ said Costellin. ‘That isn’t the same thing at all. Oh, he will observe the niceties, let you have your say, he might even relay your thoughts to the generals if he finds them insightful enough – but, by the time we speak with Colonel 186 again, he will already know what his orders are.’

Another half-hour later, they were seated before the colonel’s desk, inspecting a tactical hololith, and Hanrik asked, ‘What exactly am I looking at here?’

‘I presume,’ said the colonel, ‘you do not recognise that construct. It did not show up on our previous scans.’

‘Recognise it?’ echoed Hanrik. ‘I… I’ve never seen anything like it. The towers… That area would have been packed with towers. It’s right at the heart of the city. What has happened to them all? They can’t have just… They can’t…’

‘It’s a pyramid,’ said Costellin. ‘A black stone pyramid. It must be about…’ He thumbed up some figures on the display, and performed a quick calculation. ‘It’s at least two hundred storeys high, and almost a kilometre along each side of the base.’

‘But there hasn’t been time,’ protested Hanrik, ‘to build something like… Where in the Emperor’s name did it come from?’

‘Underground,’ said Costellin gravely. ‘It came from underground. My guess would be that this construct is the source of all our problems: the necron tomb itself.’

‘Then those tremors we felt…’

‘The emergence of that tomb,’ confirmed Costellin.

‘We believe it erupted from the ground,’ said the colonel, ‘with enough force to uproot the towers still standing above it, and to pulverise them.’

‘And what… what is this?’ Hanrik indicated a green splotch on the hololith.

‘That is not yet known,’ said the colonel.

‘An energy source,’ murmured Costellin, leaning in closer and studying the runes that flickered beside the irregular shape, ‘emanating from the apex of the pyramid, pulsing green in the visible spectrum but also… is this right? These figures seem to indicate that much of the energy is bleeding off into… into realms unknown.’

‘Like a beacon,’ said Hanrik. ‘Like the necrons are… Do you think they could be sending out a distress signal? Calling for help?’

‘Let us pray that is so,’ said the colonel. ‘It would mean that, by their own analysis, they lack the resources to defend themselves against us.’

‘Until their reinforcements arrive,’ added Costellin quietly.

‘We have put our tech-priests to work on this data,’ said the colonel, ‘and they are attempting to block that transmission. Colonel 81 also advises that he has a grenadier platoon in the city. He has sent them to examine the pyramid close up.’

‘What about the Inquisition?’ asked Costellin. ‘We need all the information they’re prepared to give
us, details of past necron encounters, their observed weaknesses if indeed they have any. I know
it’s unlikely to amount to very much, but–’

‘A communiqué has been sent,’ said the colonel. ‘In the meantime, we know as much as we need to know. The necrons have provided us with a target, at last.’

‘You’re sending your men in?’ asked Hanrik.

‘Not exactly,’ said the colonel. ‘Our primary objective is still containment. We have created a ring of steel around the enemy. Now, we will close it. We are going to force the necrons back into that construct of theirs, and we are going to ensure that they don’t emerge again. Hieronymous City will be their new tomb.’

Hanrik blanched visibly at this, doubtless understanding what this plan meant for his capital. He had learned better than to argue the point, though. He sat quietly, fidgeting with his hands, as Costellin and the colonel briefly discussed the finer points of artillery placements and supply lines. Then Hanrik excused himself and left, with a meaningful glance in the commissar’s direction.

True to his word, Costellin put the Governor’s request to the colonel as soon as he found an appropriate moment to do so. He received the expected answer.

‘You might wish to reconsider,’ he pushed gently. ‘Hanrik has charge of the Planetary Defence Force, and a great deal of clout with the citizenry of this world whether you acknowledge his position or not. That means he commands a substantial amount of resources, not least a number of flyers, for which I should think a use could present itself. This mission to find one lost girl may not seem worth the time or the risk to you, but it is of the utmost importance to him, and a favour for Hanrik now ought to earn a favour from him in the future.’

He knew what the colonel was thinking. He was thinking that no man should need a bribe to do what the Emperor wished of him. Still, his predecessor had learned to trust the commissar’s judgement in such matters, and it seemed that this new colonel was at least willing to consider his words too.

‘As yet,’ said Costellin, ‘no enemy has been sighted at the walls. We have grenadiers and death riders sat twiddling their thumbs, with no target for their weapons. I’m sure a few of them would be glad to see a little action.’

‘One squad,’ the colonel relented. ‘I will turn one squad over to General Hanrik’s command, for no longer than eight hours.’ Costellin thanked him for his understanding, and left to deliver the good news to Hanrik. He tried not to think about what the colonel might ask of the Governor in return, and of his people.

Potentially, Costellin had just thrown a great many innocents to the wolves in exchange for the life of just one, but that was something to fret about later.

That afternoon, he made a tour of the troop emplacements, more by habit than anything. In his previous assignments, a sighting of an officer on the front lines had always been good for the morale of a regiment, but of course the Guardsmen of the Death Korps were rather less appreciative of such gestures.

Their morale was probably higher than his own, Costellin reflected, as his half-track sped along the approach road to the city. They didn’t know what they were facing, and they didn’t much care. They trusted in their generals to make their decisions for them, to give them the chance to make their lives count for the Emperor.

They were certainly making their presence felt. The roars of their guns drowned out the sound of the half-track’s engine long before it reached its destination. The heavy artillery of the Krieg 186th was arrayed before the western wall of the city, what remained of it after an hour’s solid bombardment. The Medusas, with their limited range but enormous destructive power, were up front doing most of the work, each ensconced in its own shallow dugout, each spitting out heavy shell after heavy shell in a deafening barrage. Behind them, the Earthshakers squatted on their static platforms, waiting in pregnant silence for a more enticing target.

Major Gamma emerged to greet the commissar from the tent that served as his Company HQ. If he spoke at all, however, between the noise and the major’s mouth-concealing mask, Costellin couldn’t tell. He signalled to the Krieg officer to carry on as he was, and moved on. As he drew closer to the wall, a dust cloud billowed up around him, tearing at his throat and his tear ducts. Not for the first time in such circumstances, Costellin felt he would have been glad of a Krieg facemask himself.

Delta Company’s section of wall was already down, as were several of the buildings and the skyways behind it. It was the turn of the foot soldiers now to move in and to start to haul the debris away, to clear a path for their engines to advance. They were constructing fresh dugouts for the Medusas, only fifty metres ahead of their old positions. At this rate, the demolition of Hieronymous City would be a painfully slow process, but one thing was for sure: it would be an exceedingly thorough one.

Costellin wondered how much longer the necrons would wait, how much closer they would allow their attackers to come, before they responded in some way.

The answer came more suddenly than he had expected.

Guardsmen were turning from their work, staring past Costellin to a point some distance above his head, reaching for their weapons. The Medusas were falling silent one by one, and now the reports of las-fire reached the commissar’s ears. He whirled around, snatching his plasma pistol from its holster. He found himself facing a giant, at least ten metres tall. It was hovering impossibly above one of the Medusas, about a hundred metres away from where Costellin stood.

It was a skeletal figure, its ribcage and its vertebrae on proud display, but for all that it wasn’t lacking in bulk. Its bones were armour-plated, or perhaps entirely metallic. It was wrapped in the tattered remnants of a royal blue cloak, and it wielded an arcane staff almost as tall as itself, a pair of curved prongs extending like horns from the tip. The giant wore an ornate, blue and golden headdress, beneath which green fires burned in the eye sockets of an impassive silver skull. It was translucent, shining with an internal glow, like a hololithic image, and the Guardsmen’s las-beams passed through it to dissipate harmlessly in the air. Costellin wondered if it was just an image, but something about the way the giant held itself, the way it scanned the amassed ranks of the Krieg regiment before it with a fractional turn of its head, spoke to him of a keen intelligence lurking behind those blazing eyes.

He had trained his own pistol upon the apparition, but he held himself back from squeezing the trigger. After a few more shots, the Guardsmen too stayed their fire, conserving their power packs. The giant hadn’t yet made a move, seeming content to wait for the activity and the noise to die down. When at last it did, the giant opened its mouth, but its speech was like nothing Costellin had heard before.

The sound reminded him of machine-cant, a high-pitched squeal, but with a hateful, raucous edge to it. It grew to a deafening volume, hammering inside the commissar’s head, and he threw his hands to his ears but he couldn’t block out the sound.

Then, suddenly, the giant was gone and a blessed silence fell.

As Costellin stepped out of his half-track at the space port, he once again became a target for the refugees there, mostly women and children and the lame after Hanrik’s PDF draft. It seemed that they had heard the necrons’ voice too.

He collared a Krieg lieutenant, who confirmed that the image of the giant had appeared floating above the space port ramp even as Costellin had encountered a similar image some ten kilometres away. Furthermore, reports from the other Krieg regiments suggested that more images had been sighted to the north, to the south and to the east of the city simultaneously, with each group of observers convinced that the eyes of the giant had been trained upon them specifically.

An hour later, Costellin was seated once more before Colonel 186’s desk, while Hanrik hovered by his window, gazing out at the continuing activity on the ramp. Enginseers had been at work running translation matrices over the necron giant’s message, and Colonel 186 was now able to play the results back to his fellow officers on an archaic recording device. The words emerged in a flat, mechanical monotone, in perfectly accented Gothic: ‘This world is mine,’ they said. ‘I am its lord and master. My people trod this soil millennia before your upstart race was born. You built your cities over ours as we slept, but we have woken now to reclaim what was ours. Leave this world now, or we will destroy you.’

‘Of course,’ said the colonel, breaking the long silence that followed, ‘the Death Korps of Krieg will not bow to this overt display of aggression.’

‘Of course,’ said Costellin, ‘and I concur that, in this case, intimidation was the object of the exercise. I doubt we’re expected to take much note of the content of this message. The delivery was all.’

‘The clearest indication yet that the necrons fear us.’

Costellin wasn’t so sure about that, but he chose not to argue. Hanrik, however, turned from the window, looking even more flustered than he usually did. ‘Pardon me,’ he said, ‘but didn’t you just tell me yesterday that the chances of saving Hieronymous Theta are negligible?’

‘The odds are unknown,’ said the colonel. ‘Never before have we been in a position to meet a necron force before–’

‘“Get on to Naval Command,” you said.’ Hanrik jabbed an accusatory finger in Costellin’s direction. ‘“Get a rush on those rescue ships.” Only you know how long that takes, and we have a population of almost nine billion people here.’

Colonel 186 clenched his fists. ‘What are you suggesting, general?’

‘I… I’m just saying that perhaps we should consider all our options. This… this necron lord has told us to leave. Perhaps, if we were to–’

‘We will make no deals with the enemy.’

‘Golden Throne, no, I wasn’t suggesting… Of course we can’t… But it seems, I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but that message was heard in at least six other cities, and people… people are afraid. The proctors are reporting rioting worldwide.’

‘That is hardly my concern,’ said the colonel.

‘And the PDF too… There have been over a hundred desertions in the past hour alone – that we know of, it’s impossible to keep track under these circumstances.’

‘Then I trust you have made an example of those hundred.’

‘What I am saying, colonel, is that a lot of those people, those nine billion people, they are asking why we can’t… There are so few rescue ships available. I just think, if we could buy a little more time, time to save a few more of them…’

‘We will buy that time,’ said Costellin, ‘by keeping the necrons contained.’

It wasn’t that he didn’t sympathise with the Governor’s position. Perhaps he was even right, if the necrons saw that a full-scale evacuation of Hieronymous Theta was under way, then perhaps this would satisfy them. It could mean the salvation of some nine billion souls, and there was always the option of scorching the planet once the exodus was done, as indeed Costellin had initially counselled, so the necrons wouldn’t have gained anything. It was an attractive proposition.

He knew, however, that neither the Krieg colonel nor his generals would see things that way. Even if such an exodus could have been organised, they would consider the price to be paid for those nine billion souls too high – and, much to his regret, Costellin couldn’t disagree with them. Hanrik’s cause was a lost one – and, if he continued to advance it, he risked Colonel 186 shooting him on the spot.

‘I believe,’ said the colonel, ‘that the first of your rescue ships is due to enter the solar system within the hour. How goes your mission to find… Arex, was it?’

‘It’s… I’m waiting for a report,’ said Hanrik, wrong-footed by the change of subject. ‘The flyer only left about fifteen minutes ago, it won’t yet have… Thank you, by the way, for the loan of your grenadiers. I’m sure they will make all the difference.’

‘Your niece could be safely off this planet by nightfall, General Hanrik,’ said the colonel, ‘as could you.’

‘No,’ said Hanrik firmly. ‘No, I thought I had made this clear to you, colonel, I am not going anywhere until this fight is done.’

‘It is reassuring to hear you say that,’ said the colonel quietly. ‘I had begun to question your commitment to this operation.’

Hanrik regarded the Krieg officer through narrowed eyes, evidently unsure how to interpret that comment. From where he was standing, he couldn’t see what Costellin could: that the colonel had moved his hand to rest lightly upon the butt of his holstered plasma pistol.

Chapter Eleven

The climb back up to the higher floors was slower and more taxing than the descent had been. However, the thought of Arex, the fear that she might be in danger, had kept Gunthar moving even when it had meant leaving his fellow refugees behind.

He had to find her. Nothing else mattered, he just had to find her.

He was still climbing when he heard the noise, muffled by the staircase walls. He thought there was something in this hab-block with him at first, and he froze, sizing up his escape routes, until he realised that the noise was distant, amplified. Vox feedback, he thought hopefully? The emergency broadcasting system? Was it possible that power had been restored to Hieronymous City?

No, if that had been the case, the staircase would have been lit. A rescue flyer, then? Or a convoy of Imperial tanks with loudhailers to round up stranded civilians?

He raced along a hallway, threw open a window, and winced as the noise drilled into his skull and drove him to his knees. It seemed to go on forever, but then Gunthar realised that, in fact, it had stopped, leaving only a horrible echo of itself inside his head. Not a hope of rescue, then, but only further evidence of his world’s damnation.

Dead beat, he laid his forehead on the cool windowsill and his borrowed lasgun on the floorboards beside him, and he wallowed in despair until the thought of Arex prompted him to pull himself together. Nothing had changed, Gunthar told himself. She was out there somewhere, his reason for going on.

He stepped out onto a skyway, and retraced his steps towards the PDF half-track he had seen earlier. He had decided to take it after all, to take that risk for a chance of finding Arex before nightfall. He knew something was wrong when he heard shouting and glass breaking and saw smoke drifting along the skyway junction ahead of him. He thought about turning back, but his prize was so close… He crept forward, faltering at the sound of a small explosion somewhere to his right, but finally reaching the corner and peering cautiously around it.

There was a riot in progress. It must have been the noise that had sparked it. The zombies of this morning were now vandals and looters and arsonists, railing against the injustice of their fate by striking at the only targets they had, their own homes and each other. Gunthar could see the half-track, a short dash away from him, but it lay with its wheels upturned, its engine burning.

There was only one thing to do. Gripping his lasgun tightly, bending almost double, he hurried across the junction. He reached the far corner, trembling and panting, but relieved not to have been spotted. Then, focusing his mind on what was important to him, picturing Arex’s face, Gunthar continued on his way, on foot.

As he moved deeper into the city, he found more towers still standing, more skyways intact. He followed a straight course along one such skyway, and, without the diversions and delays of his outward journey with the PDF convoy, he made better time than he had expected. He did encounter more rioters but, with the exception of one torch-wielding mob that pursued Gunthar for three blocks, few of them showed any interest in him and he became quite adept at avoiding them.

He was hungry and thirsty, but he couldn’t spare the time to scavenge for food and water. He was chasing the daylight. The sun, however, was sinking in the west, and, not having yet seen a landmark he recognised, Gunthar resigned himself to the encroaching night. To make matters worse, he was starting to see new gaps in the skyline, evidence that the destruction hadn’t been confined to the city’s outskirts. Soon, he found himself once again treading carefully through a world of rubble and holes where hab-blocks had once stood and skyways that led to nowhere.

And it was shortly after this that he encountered the monsters again.

They were three floors below him, striding along a skyway that looped under his. There were four of them: cadavers forged from metal, like the ghouls in the rubble, but these creatures walked fully upright and they didn’t wear the ghouls’ macabre skin cloaks. In their bearings, in their movements, they were more like the soldiers he had seen last night, intelligent – and, like the soldiers, they were armed.

Their guns were huge, unwieldy, requiring two hands to lift them. Unholy energies roiled in their transparent chambers, glowing with the same putrid shade of green as had the stone column in the mine tunnel.

Gunthar dropped onto his stomach and waited for the cadavers to pass below him, praying that they hadn’t seen him. He waited for a minute or two, then he raised his head tentatively until he could see through the railings beside him. To his relief, the skyway below was empty. However, his heart fluttered at the sight of a sign down there, a sign he hadn’t noticed before. An obscene slogan had been daubed across the proud image of the Imperial Eagle, but beneath this, in bold black letters, were still displayed the familiar words 201st Floor Emporium.

Gunthar knew where he was now: too close to his goal, to Arex, to surrender whatever the obstacles in his path. So, he pushed himself to his feet, raised his lasgun determinedly in front of him, and started walking again. Then, as soon as he could, he slipped into a network of alleyways, which he knew he could follow around to the rear of his own hab-block, remaining mostly concealed in the process.

That was the theory, at least. In practice, as Gunthar turned a sharp corner, the walls to each side of him dropped away and he stood on the edge of a precipice.

He couldn’t believe it, at first. He had been so worried about the creatures, he had never stopped to think about this… He clung to the slim hope that he might be wrong, that his tower might have been one of those few still standing; from this vantage point, without the reference points of the surrounding towers to guide him, he couldn’t be entirely sure… but it had to be so, he thought stubbornly because if it wasn’t…

He turned and pelted back to the skyway, needing to know.

In his haste, he didn’t see the four cadavers until he had almost run into them.

They turned their expressionless skull faces towards him, brought up their green-glowing guns, and Gunthar raised his weapon in return, but he fumbled with the grip and it flew out of his hands and clattered away from him. He dropped to his knees and fumbled after it, but it was too late now, so he just covered his head as best he could with his hands and he whimpered and he waited to die.

Gunthar was still waiting some twenty seconds later when at last he dared open his eyes and look up, to see the cadavers stalking away from him. They had spared his life. No, more humiliating than that, they had ignored him, like he was nothing to them: a worm, unworthy of the effort of crushing beneath their heels.

He reached for the lasgun, but hesitated. If he hadn’t dropped it, if the cadavers had judged him to be a threat to them… No, he told himself sternly, he couldn’t think about that now, couldn’t let himself be paralysed by the thought of what might have been. He picked up the gun and he started forward, but he didn’t get far.

He could deny it no longer. The skyway stretched ahead of him as it always had, but the towers that had lined it, most of them, had crumbled. What had once been a road was now an unstable bridge, and Gunthar recognised the white sign for the autocab embarkation point that had stood outside his door, now teetering on the brink of the abyss, twisting in a soft breeze.

Arex, he thought. What did this mean for Arex? He had been so sure he would find her here, but if she had been… No, he thought. She must have escaped in time. His mind simply wouldn’t accept any other possibility. Arex couldn’t have been inside his hab-block when… But then, what would she have done next, when she couldn’t find him? Where would she have gone? Gunthar didn’t know, he couldn’t guess.

He surrendered to fatigue, then, and sat down on the skyway, his knees pulled up to his chest. He thought he might cry, but his tear ducts proved dry. He had gone beyond mere misery. He felt desolated. He had spent a day grasping at hopes, and now the last of those hopes had trickled through his fingers. He had no purpose, no reason to move from his current position, so he sat where he was beneath the darkening sky, and if the patrolling cadavers or the ghouls had returned and decided that, this time, they would snuff out his meaningless life, then Gunthar would almost have welcomed them.

The droning of an engine pricked him out of his torpor. He had been hearing the sound for some minutes, he realised, and now a harsh, white light played over his face. Gunthar squinted upwards, saw the squat, black shape of a PDF flyer low above him, but by the time he thought about signalling to it, the vehicle and its searchlight beam had passed on. Why would it have stopped for him, anyway?

Gunthar was cold. He hadn’t felt it before, hadn’t noticed as the night had well and truly taken hold around him, but now he started to think about finding shelter.

The night was green, another thing he hadn’t registered until now. He thought his eyes were playing tricks on him, still scarred by the searchlight, but when he looked up he could see it: a strobing green light in the sky to the north-north-east. Green like the artefact in the mine tunnel, green like the cadaverous creatures’ guns. He didn’t want to think about what that might mean.

The sound of the flyer was growing louder again. It had banked around and was returning, even lower than it had been before – and as it passed over Gunthar’s head for a second time, he realised that something inexplicable was happening.

It was coming in for a landing.

The flyer set down, at last, about two hundred metres away from Gunthar, back along the skyway, and he was running towards it before its engines had powered down.

Then the first soldiers emerged from the troop compartment, and he came to a startled halt. They were skull-faced creatures, like the ones he had seen through the window last night, with their black greatcoats and breathing tubes. But then, thought Gunthar, what were they doing in a PDF vehicle?

They were fanning out as if they were looking for something, and among them a squat, dark-skinned man with an egg-shaped head pored over a small black handset and appeared to be directing them in their search. He wore the red robes of the Martian Priesthood, and a sturdy servo-arm protruded from his spine and arched over his shoulder, its claw fingers twitching. An enginseer, then.

The soldiers were coming Gunthar’s way, and he barely had time to think about running for cover before one of them called to him, ‘We are looking for a Caucasian female, approximately one point seven metres tall, with brown hair and green eyes.’

‘Arex!’ Gunthar exclaimed. ‘You mean Arex?’ The description could have fitted any number of women, but somehow he just knew it had referred to her.

The soldier had reached him, and Gunthar saw what he had missed in the dark, last night, from above: the flashes on his greatcoat shoulders, the aquila symbol on his helmet. ‘You… you’re Imperial Guard,’ he stammered. ‘You’re human?’

‘We are searching for Lady Hanrik. Have you seen her?’

‘No, I… I heard she might have been here, but I haven’t… I thought you were them. Those masks you wear, I thought you were the creatures.’

The Guardsman wasn’t listening. He cocked his head as if in response to a voice that Gunthar couldn’t hear, then he turned and strode away, but Gunthar had to know more. He lunged after the Guardsman, and took him by the shoulder. ‘Wait,’ he cried, ‘how did you know… Is Lady Hanrik still alive? Has she been in touch? Has she–?’

A flash of green light, and his words were swallowed by an involuntary scream.

The Guardsman had disintegrated, like the servitor in the mine tunnel had been disintegrated, layer by layer in a fraction of a second. Gunthar had been looking into the empty eyes of his metallic skull mask, then at his crumbling skeleton and in between, a searing, flash-frame image of a human face, as expressionless as the mask had been, its muscles only just beginning to contract in pain and horror.

The cadavers were back, and they were marching upon the Guardsmen, their heavy weapons spitting out jagged forks of green energy. The Guardsmen returned fire instantly. Their las-beams glanced off their attackers, but a few of them were armed with bigger guns and these proved far more effective. Two of the four cadavers were vaporised, as Gunthar saw the enginseer scuttling for the cover of the flyer and did likewise. He blundered into a Guardsman’s sights, and was pushed aside roughly. ‘Where do you think you’re running to?’ the Guardsman growled. ‘You have a weapon in your hands, don’t you? For the Emperor’s sake, use it!’

The last thing Gunthar wanted to do was to use his lasgun, call attention to himself, but cowed by the Guardsman’s words he crouched beside the flyer’s landing struts, steadied the weapon’s butt against his shoulder and rested his finger on its trigger.

The gun was shaking too much, to begin with, for him to find anything through its sights. He took a deep breath, held it, and tried to steady himself. Secretly, he hoped – and expected – that the fighting would be over before he could get off a shot. The cadavers were outnumbered, after all, and down to half strength already. Surveying the battlefield, Gunthar saw a third of them incinerated, a fourth, and…

More of them. He didn’t know where they had come from, hadn’t seen them arriving, but at least three more… no, four, and the Guardsman that had snapped at him was the next to be struck by their emerald beams, to die at Gunthar’s side, the stink of ozone and burnt flesh filling his nostrils.

One of the cadavers turned his way and, unexpectedly, a dead calm settled over him.

He had been in this situation a thousand times before, in his dreams. He knew exactly what to do, what the Emperor expected of him, and no longer was there any fear attached to that proposition. Gunthar’s old life seemed a long way behind him, as if it had been lived by somebody else. His home, his job, Arex: all gone. His local bar, the emporium, the eatery to which he had taken her…

The image of the lex-scribe, Kreuz, popped unbidden into Gunthar’s head. He would probably never see her again either. He hoped she had made it to safety.

Everything he had done, everything he had ever strived for, the floors he had climbed, it all amounted to nothing. The lasgun in his hands and the enemy in his sights, they were all that mattered now, they were his life. He had nothing left to lose.

So, he squeezed his trigger and, although his first shot missed, he fired again and again and again. Then he remembered from the newsreels that lasguns had a Full Auto setting and found the relevant switch, thumbing it over. He peppered the cadaverous creatures with las-beams until at last they began to fall – and although Gunthar couldn’t tell if his own efforts were contributing at all to that outcome, he took a certain grim satisfaction in being there, in taking part, in fighting back.

Suddenly his lasgun let out a plaintive whine and died on him; he was left purposeless and afraid again. He rattled the power pack, pulled it from its housing, thrust it back in, tried to coax a few extra beams out of it, all in vain. He could have howled with frustration. Why hadn’t he thought to take Weber’s spare packs?

Fortunately, only one of the cadavers remained standing, and now, with a fierce inrush of air, it disappeared and took the bodies of the others – those that had not been melted – along with it. Gunthar was at once relieved to see them go, and appalled at this further display of their power. He wasn’t sure how many Guardsmen had perished in the brief combat – the green guns had left behind no corpses to count – but there were only five survivors, not counting the enginseer and the flyer pilot, a boggle-eyed servitor that was just emerging from beneath its seat.

The Guardsmen wasted no time getting their breath back. They resumed their search of the skyway, and the man whom Gunthar took to be their sergeant motioned to the enginseer to join them, which he did. He had taken out his handset again, and Gunthar saw now that a wire ran from it and was plugged directly into the enginseer’s eye.

Little more than a minute later, the Guardsmen converged upon a particular spot, and sifted through the rubble until one of them recovered something small and red. He showed this to the enginseer, who nodded grimly. Then the sergeant gave an order, and the soldiers came tramping back towards Gunthar at double-time.

‘I don’t understand,’ he said, ‘where’s Arex? I thought you were looking for her.’

‘Lady Hanrik is not here,’ said the sergeant.

‘How can you be so sure? She could be hiding in one of these buildings.’

‘She is not here.’

The flyer’s engines were starting to whine again. The last of the Guardsmen disappeared into its rear, and the sergeant made to follow. ‘Wait,’ said Gunthar. ‘Take me with you. Please, take me with you.’ The sergeant regarded him for an intolerable moment, and Gunthar felt sure his request would be refused.

Then he heard a familiar inrush of air, and he whirled around to find the cadavers returning in force. There were four more directly in front of him, another four appearing along the skyway, more emerging from the remaining buildings. Gunthar brought up his lasgun, though he knew it was useless, but found himself grabbed from behind, yanked off his feet and bundled into the flyer. The air outside crackled green as the sergeant leapt after him, screaming at the pilot to take off.

As the flyer lifted sluggishly into the air, something slammed into its side, throwing the Guardsmen off their wooden benches and Gunthar into the midst of them. The vehicle listed, its engines spluttering and groaning. Gunthar thought it might crash, but then it pulled upwards and away.

‘We were lucky,’ said the enginseer. ‘That was just
a glancing blow. If those gauss beams had struck
the engines, they would have torn right through them.’

Gunthar perched on the end of a bench, and squirmed beneath the blank stares of four skull-masked Guardsmen, each of them doubtless wondering what he was doing here in the place of one of their fallen comrades. He didn’t dare question them about their mission, although he ached for news of Arex. Then he saw that the enginseer was holding in his lap a red amecyte necklace – the object from the rubble – and he recognised it at once. ‘Where did you get that?’ he demanded. ‘That was Arex’s necklace. It was a gift from her late mother, she always wore it.’

‘This is what we were sent here to find,’ said the enginseer. ‘There’s a tracking device inside one of these gemstones, which the governor hoped might lead us to his niece. Unfortunately, as you can see, she isn’t wearing it now. We found the necklace on the skyway. Its clasp was broken.’

‘Then she was here!’ cried Gunthar. ‘Don’t you see? This means she was here, and she… She can’t have gone far. We have to turn back. We can still find her.’

The sergeant shook his head firmly. ‘Even if the girl has survived–’

‘She’s alive. She has to be. I’d have felt it if… Trust me, Arex is alive.’

‘Even if she has survived,’ the sergeant repeated, ‘it has been almost twenty hours since her position was last verified. She could have reached almost any point in the city in that time. We do not have the resources to locate her, and the risk–’

‘Take me back down there,’ said Gunthar. ‘It’s safe for me, the creatures were ignoring me. I can search the buildings until… Just take me back down!’

He was being unreasonable, he knew that, and the sergeant chose not to dignify his pleadings with a response. Still, Gunthar ached with the knowledge that he had been so close to the woman he loved only to have turned his back on her. He had been tested, he thought, and his faith and his courage found wanting. He had failed her.

He held tight to the lasgun in his lap, clenched his teeth and, as the flyer carried him away from the city that had once been his home, further and further away from Arex, he made a silent vow to her, to himself, to the Emperor.

He swore that, somehow, some day, he would return.

Chapter Twelve

They were close to the source of the green light now.

Every time it pulsed over them, Trooper Carwen felt a strong wave of nausea. He could see from the grimaces of his three remaining squad mates that they felt it too. The masked Krieg grenadiers, however, gave away nothing as always.

They had holed up in an empty hab-block for most of the morning. Carwen hadn’t been able to sleep for nightmares, and when he had dozed off for an hour or two, he had been woken by a powerful earth tremor that had shaken the plaster off the walls. Shortly after this, the Krieg lieutenant had received new orders.

His briefing had been short and to the point. The platoon and its four new recruits were to investigate reports of a new necron construct at the heart of the city. Outnumbered as they were, they were to avoid engagement with the enemy.

They began by climbing to the highest floor they could. Intelligence gathered by their Command HQ from PDF squads on the ground had suggested that the necrons were concentrated on the lower floors and around the central sector, so they had been able to move relatively freely throughout the day.

As night had fallen, however, progress had become slower. The grenadiers had sent scouts ahead of them and, when a necron patrol had been sighted, they had melted into nooks and shadows and waited until the way was clear again. They had rested just once during this time, for less than twenty minutes, and Carwen was footsore and light-headed with exhaustion but he didn’t dare complain.

A voice buzzed through the comm-bead the quartermaster had provided for him: a sub-vocalised report to the platoon from their current scout. ‘I can see it,’’ he said.

A minute later, they reached the end of the skyway they had been following, and a row of six lifter cages with platforms inside three of them. The waiting scout indicated the cages with a flick of his hellgun, though it was already apparent to Carwen that the green light emanated from beyond these. The soldiers crowded onto the platforms to look down through the metal mesh behind them, and now Carwen really did want to vomit, his eyes tearing as he suppressed the reflex.

He could hardly take in the scale of what he was seeing. The pyramid was at least a kilometre away from him, laterally speaking, but its sheer size made it appear far closer. It was probably as tall as the city’s shorter towers, though it was difficult to estimate its height with any accuracy because the towers around it had been razed. In the green light, Carwen could see all the way down to the ground, and to the colossal heaps of rubble stacked around the pyramid’s base.

The pyramid was fashioned from a smooth, black stone, apparently unweathered by its millennia underground. Its four walls didn’t quite meet at their apex, providing instead a square hollow for a ball of green flame, from which intermittent sparks lashed out to ignite the dark sky. Stamped into the elevation facing Carwen was an enormous gold symbol, a circle with lines emanating from its radius, akin to a stylised drawing of a sun, and beneath this there was an opening, a gateway in the black wall, through which burnt more of that hateful green light.

There were figures moving before the gateway, too distant for Carwen to identify. They swarmed over the rubble and appeared to be clearing it away, hauling much of it into the pyramid in barrows.

He had to turn away, turn his back to the light. He was relieved when, a moment behind him, the rest of the platoon pulled back too. ‘I’ve reported our findings to Command HQ,’ came the lieutenant’s voice through Carwen’s comm-bead. ‘They want the beacon atop the pyramid destroyed. I have advised that it is beyond the range of our weapons, and I see no obvious way of climbing up to it.’ Carwen was glad to hear it. The last thing he wanted was to get any closer to that monstrous construct. Then the lieutenant continued: ‘We are left, therefore, with a single option: to find a way up from the inside.’

They trudged back the way they had come for a couple of kilometres before they broke into a luxury-hab that must have belonged to a lord. He had left his furnishings behind when he left, and as Carwen sank into a bed in the servants’ quarters he reflected ironically that he had never experienced such comfort. He didn’t expect to be able to sleep, but exhaustion soon claimed him. Even so, his dreams were haunted by glowing green ghouls.

He was woken late in the morning for watch duty. For three hours, he was stationed behind the blown-out window of an eatery across the skyway, his orders to lead any too-curious necrons away from the luxury-hab entrance. This, he knew, would have cost him his life, so Carwen was relieved to reach the end of his shift without incident.

They planned to head out at sunset, so that night would cover them as they headed downwards, deeper into the necrons’ heartland. Carwen and the other three PDF men passed the remainder of the afternoon, and distracted their minds, with a few hands of cards. They invited the grenadiers to join them, but each of them declined.

Carwen had expected that, by now, he would have known the men of Krieg a little better, established a bond with them, but he felt as uneasy around them as he ever had. They didn’t make small talk; they hardly spoke at all. They ate by smuggling ration bars beneath their skull masks, so that after almost two days with them Carwen still hadn’t seen their faces. He didn’t even know their names.

Too soon, they were on the move again, descending into the bowels of the city. Forty floors down, they disturbed a handful of deformed figures that skittered off into the night, but two grenadiers hunted down the slowest of them and confirmed that it wasn’t a necron, just a frightened mutant that had been climbing this tower to escape a worse horror than itself. The lieutenant satisfied himself that the mutant had no information worth knowing before he shot it dead, but the incident left Carwen more apprehensive than ever.

The mutants had done one favour for the soldiers: in their desperation, they had broken through the barriers on the staircase that would normally have kept them below. Even so, Carwen knew when he was stepping into mutant territory. A rotten stench pervaded the air, and the walls were thick with graffiti, much of it scrawled in blood or faeces. After a few flights, he was breathing shallowly through his hands, envying the Krieg men their rebreather units.

An hour or so later, they left the staircase and moved into a row of small, shabby habs. Most of the windows were boarded up, but they found one where a corner of the wood had rotted away and it was possible to see through the shattered pane to the pyramid below. The lieutenant designated this as his platoon’s sentry point and, for the rest of the night and the following day, they took turns to observe the activity at the pyramid’s entrance. Carwen was spared this duty, and so never got to see what was outside the window. However, lying on a flea-bitten bunk a few rooms down, he could hear the unceasing sounds of activity from outside and he imagined the necrons were right beside him, right on the other side of a thin outer wall.

The conclusion of the sentries was disappointing. They had been unable to discern a pattern to the necrons’ movements, and certainly there had been no time in the past twenty-five hours when the gateway had been left unattended. Moreover, the necrons’ numbers had been swelled by an army of mutant slaves. Their purpose was unclear – no one could understand what the necrons would want with those filthy aberrations – but it added to the odds against the Krieg men and their allies all the same.

If Carwen had hoped, however, that the lieutenant would report this fact to Command HQ, that this insane operation would be called off, then he was to be disappointed too. ‘We will divide into our three squads,’ the Krieg officer decreed, addressing his platoon in the cramped confines of the hallway outside their rooms, ‘two to attack the necrons simultaneously from opposite directions, to divert as many of them as they can from the tomb. Once this has been achieved, I will lead my command squad through the middle, and we will attempt to penetrate the gateway.’

Carwen had been assigned to a squad three days ago, but he couldn’t tell their watchmasters – the Krieg equivalent of sergeants – apart, so it was only when one of them snapped his name that he knew who to assemble with. Parvel followed him, while the other two PDF troopers went to the far end of the hallway. The command squad, left standing in the middle, was Krieg only, a little larger than the others, and it had the lieutenant, the quartermaster and the majority of the melta guns.

It was only now that Carwen realised his seven-man squad’s true purpose. They were like the men with the bayonets in the combat with the ghouls. The lieutenant expected them to die, and the Krieg grenadiers were certainly aware of this, but as Carwen had come to expect by now they had nothing to say on the subject.

They were to approach the pyramid from the north. They retraced their steps up several flights of stairs until they found a skyway – more a dilapidated bridge – that would take them to where they needed to be.

The bridge ran parallel to the pyramid’s northern elevation, and, although the grenadiers kept their heads down as they crossed it, Carwen couldn’t resist a glance upwards. He regretted his curiosity immediately because, impressive as the pyramid had been from above, it was a far more intimidating sight from below. He had to crane his neck to find its upper reaches. It blotted out the sky, and seemed to suck the pale moonlight into itself, spewing out its own hellish green light instead.

Carwen had hoped that, somewhere, there might be a skyway intact, low and close enough to the pyramid for his squad to snipe at its necron guardians from above. It was now clear, however, that no such skyway had survived, if one had ever existed. The only way to approach the necrons’ tomb was along the ground.

So it was, then, that Carwen first set foot in a world he had prayed he would never see, a world that throughout his childhood had been synonymous with the worst of all mythical hells. The PDF had forsaken this world, as had the proctors and the city administrators, and no wonder. Its roads were ankle-deep with sewage, which bubbled up through metal gratings from a pipe system long since outgrown. There wasn’t a wall here that hadn’t been scorched by fire, and the stink of the mutant was everywhere. This was the world that, behind the walls of his PDF base, Carwen had increasingly heard referred to as ‘the undercity’, the world the authorities had talked of plascreting over. This was his world, he thought with a shiver. This was what Hieronymous Theta looked like from the ground, what its towers were built upon.

The first road the squad took was completely blocked by debris. They had to back up and circle a block, but at last they found themselves within sight of the pyramid’s side wall, less than a hundred metres from its north-west corner. There was no sign of life here, but still they advanced stealthily, one by one, through towering heaps of rubble. Their caution paid off as, without warning, two necrons rounded the corner ahead of them. The watchmaster signalled his men to stay down, waited until the necrons had passed their hiding place by, then stepped out behind them and vaporised both with a single shot from the squad’s only melta gun.

They waited, then, for a vox to confirm that the second distraction squad was also in position. Once they had received it, the watchmaster ordered them forwards. Carwen had half expected that, as soon as they rounded the front corner of the pyramid, they would come under fire from the necrons at the gateway, but of course that gateway was still some way distant and shielded from their view by the heaps of rubble.

For the first time, the young trooper missed his lasgun. The hellgun may have been more powerful, but the trade-off for this was a far shorter range. If his squad was going to worry the necrons, they would have to get close to them, a lot closer than Carwen was remotely comfortable with.

As it happened, the first enemy they encountered was a mutant. It was scavenging through the rubble, and stepped into their midst before it had seen them. Carwen brought up his gun but heard the watchmaster’s voice in his ear, ordering his men to stay their fire. Two grenadiers seized the terrified creature and broke its scrawny neck before it could let out a warning cry. Then they waited in tense silence to learn if the scuffle had attracted attention to their position.

Barely had they started forward again when the fighting began in earnest.

The reports of alien weapons echoed around Carwen, and he dropped to his haunches and looked around in fright for their source. By the time the truth had dawned upon him – that it wasn’t his squad that had come under fire – the watchmaster was screaming at his men, out loud rather than through the comm-beads, to attack.

So, Carwen followed a grenadier around a rubble heap, and he saw them: the necrons. Three or four score of them, more than there had appeared to be from above, but what most surprised him was that there were almost as many mutant slaves. His throat dried at the realisation of just how badly his platoon was outnumbered.

Two things worked in their favour, the first that a large space had been cleared in front of the pyramid’s gateway so the Krieg squads were both shooting into a wide open arena from cover. The second was that the other squad had been discovered first, and so most of the necrons had turned to face them. Carwen’s Krieg comrades made full use of the targets thus presented to them, and a volley of hellgun beams found their marks, striking between metallic shoulder blades.

To Carwen’s dismay, none of the necrons fell. He wasn’t sure if this was because they were too far away for the full strength of the beams to reach them. As the necrons turned, however, as they unleashed forks of green lightning upon this second front, he was left in no doubt about one unpalatable fact: that the necrons’ great guns were blessed with both power and range.

A grenadier died in a flash of bright green, and Carwen ducked behind a rubble heap but could feel beams slamming into its far side, blasting away at his cover. ‘That’s it,’ came the calm voice of the watchmaster in his ear, ‘we’ve got their attention. Now start to pull back, but keep firing. Draw the necrons away from the gateway.’

Carwen peered around the edge of the rubble, and his heart leapt at the sight of a row of four necrons marching unhurriedly towards him. They herded six mutants ahead of them, as living shields, and it was clear from the terror in those aberrations’ eyes that they weren’t willing volunteers.

Carwen loosed off six shots, picking off two mutants, and three more were slain by the grenadiers as was one of their cadaverous masters. The remaining necrons were now too close for comfort, and Carwen looked for a safer position to fall back to. He sprinted for a gap between two rubble heaps, but green lightning cut across his path and, although a grenadier beside him kept running and made it to his goal, Carwen shied away, back to where he had started.

The necrons were almost upon him, were about to round the rubble heap and find him exposed unless he got out of sight, and the only way he could see to do this was to duck behind that same heap, to keep it between him and them. It meant getting closer to the pyramid, but Carwen didn’t have time to be worried about that now. The necrons appeared before he could fully conceal himself. He crouched down, holding his breath, expecting them to turn and find him at any moment.

Thankfully, they were distracted by hellgun fire, and they stomped off in pursuit of Carwen’s comrades. Only now did the young trooper stop to consider that he had allowed the necrons to cut off his escape route, such as it had been, to surround him. He took a few deep breaths to calm the queasy feeling in his stomach, and reminded himself that he had never expected to survive this day anyway.

More voices spoke in his comm-bead, and Carwen felt numb as two further casualties were reported, one of them Trooper Parvel, but there was some good news. The watchmaster had waited for the necrons to close to melta range; now, he sprung an ambush upon them. It sounded as if he was holding his foes at bay, destroying more than his fair share, his main concern that there weren’t enough of them.

‘We’ve lured thirteen or fourteen necrons away from the gateway so far. We need to double that number, for the command squad to stand a fighting chance.’

Carwen knew what he had to do.

‘The necrons,’ he sub-vocalised, ‘I’ve… managed to slip behind them. I’m going to try… I’m going to get closer up to the pyramid, fire on them again. Maybe, if I can move fast enough and stay out of their sight, I can convince them there’s more than… that there’s a third squad attacking them, and then maybe they might…’

‘The Emperor be with you, Trooper Carwen,’ said the watchmaster brusquely.

He had drawn as close to the gateway as he dared. He was practically in the necrons’ midst now; he could hear them labouring in the rubble just metres away from him, apparently so confident in their fellows’ ability to repulse the Death Korps’ two-pronged attack upon them that they had simply returned to their work.

He was too close, he thought. There was no way he could shoot at a necron without being seen. Then it occurred to him that he had no need to.

He aimed his hellgun at the edge of a rubble heap and fired, hoping the impact would drown out the gun’s report, confuse the necrons into believing that the shot had originated from over there. Another two wild shots in the opposite direction, then two into the air, then Carwen was running, and a green beam crackled past his ear and he didn’t dare stop to see how many more necrons his tactics had drawn out.

‘The watchmaster’s down!’ came a voice in his comm-bead. ‘Repeat, the watchmaster is down. I’m the only one left. It’s up to you now, Lieutenant, we have done all we can, and may the Emperor have mercy on our worthless–’

Carwen rounded a rubble heap, found a figure in front of him, snapped up his gun, realised that it was just a man: a dishevelled, frightened man, his workers’ smock in tatters, staggering beneath the weight of a hunk of plascrete. A necron slave, evidently, like the mutants, looking at the soldier with a desperate appeal in his eyes.

‘I can’t help you,’ he said wretchedly. ‘I’m sorry, but you should get as far away from me as you can. The necrons are behind me, and you don’t want them thinking…’

The man was rooted to the spot. Carwen stepped forward, made to give him an encouraging push in the right direction – the man’s eyes flashed and, with a guttural snarl, he smashed his plascrete hunk into the side of Carwen’s head.

He was lying on the ground with no memory of having fallen. His head was numb and, when his hand brushed against it, it came away tacky. He had dropped his hellgun and couldn’t raise his head to find it, his neck muscles felt like sponges… and the necrons were here, their metallic feet tramping down the rubble beside him.

A necron skull loomed over Carwen; he was staring helplessly into its gun barrel, and he swore he could see the green lightning sparking in its depths, or maybe it was just the light patterns in his eyes. Then the necron turned, stalked away from him, and Carwen’s stomach shook with silent, giddy laughter and he thanked the Emperor because in the end he had been one of the lucky ones, he wasn’t going to die like that.

His comm-bead was spitting static. Carwen’s eyes closed, and from the direction of the pyramid he could hear the command squad’s hellguns and meltas, and the answering reports of the necrons’ guns, like the tearing of cloth, and he thought at first that the latter sounds were outnumbered by the former, but the hellguns and the meltas were falling silent one by one, while the necron guns only seemed to increase in number until they were the only ones left firing.

The last thing he heard was a voice in his ear, the voice of the human slave that had laid Carwen low. ‘The Emperor is dead,’ the voice hissed. ‘We have new gods now.’

Chapter Thirteen

For the twenty-third time, Costellin woke to the sound of explosions from Hieronymous City. He almost didn’t register it at first, having grown well used to the constant percussive rumbling. He climbed out of the camp bed that, with due regard for the lack of billets at the space port, he had set up in his office. Sunlight streamed in through his window, and Hanrik’s PDF draftees were already training on the ramp.

Forty minutes later, washed, shaved and kitted out in the clean uniform that an aide had laid out for him, he reported to Colonel 186’s office for what had become their regular morning briefing. Governor-General Hanrik was there too, having learned of these briefings two weeks ago and invited himself to them.

The colonel was fielding a barrage of reports from his aides at the vox-caster, and it was some time before he could give his fellow officers his full attention, although by then Costellin had gleaned much about the events of the night anyway.

‘I take it the skirmish to the north is concluded,’ he said.

The colonel nodded. ‘The necrons retreated at 05.19, or rather–’

‘Or rather, they disappeared again.’

‘Nevertheless,’ said the colonel, ‘necron casualties were particularly heavy in the last hour of fighting. I have congratulated Colonel 42 on a battle well won.’

‘What about our side?’ asked Hanrik. ‘What casualties did we take?’

‘Those figures are not yet available,’ said the colonel.

‘Best estimate?’ Costellin prodded him.

‘We lost something in the region of eighteen hundred men.’

Costellin whistled through his teeth. ‘More than a third of the 42nd’s remaining complement. I suggest we pray the necrons don’t return in a hurry.’

The colonel was unfolding a brittle, yellowed paper map of the city, laying it out on his desk between them. ‘The generals consider that unlikely,’ he said. ‘This necron force was the largest we have seen yet, and the defeat handed to them a decisive one. We must have exhausted a good proportion of their resources too.’

‘You said the same after last week’s attack to the east.’

‘The important thing is that, in each case, the line was held against an enemy that was clearly desperate to break through. Our strategy is proving sound.’

‘Perhaps,’ conceded Costellin. ‘The question is, what proportion of their resources can the necrons replenish? Their beacon is still transmitting despite our tech-priests’ most strenuous attempts to block the signal.’

‘Perhaps you have forgotten, Commissar Costellin,’ said the colonel, ‘that our own reinforcements are scheduled to arrive in two days.’

‘I haven’t forgotten,’ said Costellin. ‘We will have to revise our planned troop allocations, however. I expect that, after last night, the generals will be assigning more of the new recruits to the 42nd regiment.’

‘We still have the PDF,’ offered Hanrik. ‘Recruitment and training is going well. I can spare eighteen, maybe twenty platoons. We can send them to bolster the 42nd in the short term, and also start to extend the draft to other cities. The only problem, as I’ve mentioned before, is equipment for the newer recruits. We don’t have the–’

‘Send your men,’ said the colonel. ‘The quartermasters of the 42nd will do what they can to equip them.’

‘Unfortunately,’ said Costellin, ‘the necrons’ gauss weaponry doesn’t leave a great deal behind. When we lose a man, we tend to lose everything he was carrying.’

‘The Emperor will provide,’ said the colonel.

Costellin wasn’t so sure, but then he was also aware that, increasingly, he was sounding like the voice of doom at these meetings – and perhaps, he thought, the colonel was right. The Death Korps had made good progress these past weeks, closing their ring of steel about the city, and although his own regiment had not yet seen combat, both the 42nd and the 81st had won impressive victories. He wouldn’t have dreamed it possible, but it did seem the necrons were on the back foot. Still, he felt that somebody had to sound a note of caution. Somebody had to remember that they were still facing perhaps the greatest threat known to the Imperium.

Even Hanrik had come round somewhat to the colonel’s way of thinking. Since the loss of his niece, he had certainly been more willing to offer his citizens, the people he had once been so desperate to protect, as sacrifices in the cause of winning this war.

‘I am awaiting sight of Colonel 42’s report,’ said the colonel, ‘into the enemy’s tactics in this latest encounter. In particular, I am interested in fresh insights into the nature of this new necron breed and how their abilities might be countered.’

Hanrik looked blank, so Costellin explained to him, ‘They appeared on the battlefield late last night: like half-formed necrons with no lower bodies, only spinal columns, but they can hover like ghosts and become insubstantial like ghosts too – until they get close enough to use the surgical blades they have in place of their hands, and then they are only too corporeal.’

‘I suggest we adjourn this meeting for now,’ said the colonel, ‘and reconvene when that report is available.’

It was a little over two hours later that Costellin heard a familiar insistent knocking at his door, and Hanrik let himself in. ‘I’m not disturbing you?’ presumed the governor-general, already helping himself to a seat.

‘I was about to take a stroll along the front lines,’ said Costellin, ‘spread the news of our glorious triumph last night. I believe I have collected sufficient anecdotal evidence of remarkable heroism against overwhelming odds.’

‘Hmm, yes. That is what I wished to discuss with you, in a way.’

Costellin raised an inquisitive eyebrow, inviting Hanrik to continue.

‘Last night. I was thinking about the necron attack, and I wondered, why there? Why attempt to break out of the city to the north when the regiment to the east, the 81st, was still depleted from their previous attempt? The colonel said it himself, this was the largest necron force we have seen. If they had sent that force against the 81st regiment, we may not have been celebrating a victory now.’

‘You have a theory?’ asked Costellin.

‘Of course, it could just be that the necrons’ intelligence was defective.’

‘Indeed. For all they knew, we could have been expecting a second attack to the east and built up our forces there.’

‘But I’ve been looking at some old schematics, and I’d like to hear what you make of this before I take it to the colonel.’

Hanrik handed a memory spool to Costellin, who loaded it into his desk’s hololith projector. A moment later, a grainy image flickered to life between them: an architect’s plan of Hieronymous City’s upper skyways. Hanrik manipulated the controls, scrolling through several more such images until he found the right one.

‘This,’ he said, describing a line across it with a fleshy thumb, ‘is as far as the 81st regiment had reached when the necrons made their move against them, and this–’ He scrolled to another plan. ‘–this is where they attacked the 42nd.’ He flicked back and forth between the two plans, and asked if Costellin had noticed anything about them. Costellin shook his head, so Hanrik zoomed to a particular building on the first, and now the commissar leaned forward, astounded, in his seat.

‘It could be a coincidence, of course,’ said Hanrik.

‘It could,’ agreed Costellin, ‘but if it isn’t… I think you’re right, Hanrik. I think we should take this information to the colonel immediately, because I think… I think you may just have found the necrons’ weakness.’

Colonel 186’s office was filled almost to bursting point. Crowded around his desk were numerous aides, his four company commanders and a couple of tech-priests. Hanrik, too, was flanked by a small contingent of PDF officers, and in the midst of all this stood a solitary young trooper, a recent recruit to judge by the thrown-together look of his scarlet and purple uniform.

‘Of course,’ Hanrik was saying, his chest swelling with importance as he held the floor, ‘as soon as the power went out, I despatched men to the main generatorum.’

‘None of them made it there,’ said the colonel, ‘but until now it was assumed that, in common with numerous other PDF squads inside the city, they had been ambushed. That assumption was challenged this morning.’

Hanrik took up the commentary, keen to explain the circumstances of his vital discovery, until the colonel grew impatient with him and interrupted again.

‘It seems,’ he said, ‘that both the 42nd and the 81st regiments were attacked as they neared the sites of the city’s secondary generatorums.’

‘We thought,’ said Hanrik, ‘that the power cut was an act of sabotage intended to panic the civilian populace and hamper our evacuation efforts, but what if it was more than that? What if our power is being drained for a purpose?’

‘Each time we have encountered the necrons,’ said the colonel, ‘their numbers have grown. We don’t know if there are still more asleep in that tomb of theirs or if they are pulling in reinforcements from further afield somehow. Either way–’

‘Either way,’ said Hanrik, ‘what if they are using our own power to achieve it? What if they can’t wake their troops or… or operate their beacon without it?’

‘For that matter,’ said one of the tech-priests, ‘we have all been frustrated by the necrons’ ability to regenerate themselves after almost any wound. It could be that the power to do this too emanates not from within their tomb but from without.’

The colonel called up the hololithic plans that Costellin had seen before. ‘There are three remaining generatorums in the city,’ he announced, gesturing with a pointer.

‘And, given the destruction the necrons have wrought,’ Costellin put in, ‘the fact that all three are still standing is suggestive in itself.’

‘At their current rate of progress, the 103rd should flatten this site, to the south, in approximately three and a half days, while our own regiment will reach the one here a little over two days after. That leaves only the central-most and largest installation, located here.’ The colonel indicated a site much deeper into the city.

‘May I presume, sir,’ spoke up one of the company commanders, ‘that the intention is to send in a team to take out that generatorum? If so, I would like to volunteer my company to undertake that mission, and myself to lead it.’

‘Thank you, Major Alpha,’ said the colonel. ‘That is indeed the plan, and the generals have asked this regiment to execute it. However, our primary concern is still the maintenance of our cordon about the city, and I will need all my senior officers to defend against a likely attack as we near the west-side generatorum.’

‘The bright side of that, I suppose,’ mused Costellin, ‘is that it should keep the bulk of
the necron army occupied. Even so, it will be difficult to slip a force of any useful size past them. They
have shot down most of Hanrik’s flyers already.’

‘That,’ said Hanrik with a measure of self-satisfaction, ‘is where Trooper Soreson comes in.’ All eyes turned towards the young trooper, who looked uncomfortable with the attention. ‘A squad of grenadiers under my command extracted Soreson from the city three weeks ago. He was fighting back against the necrons single-handed. As you can see, we immediately signed him up for the Planetary Defence Force. Before our current troubles, however, Mr Soreson was a mine overseer.’

‘Hieronymous City,’ said the colonel, ‘stands above an extensive network of mine tunnels. Trooper Soreson can guide our infiltration team through these.’

‘Right under the necrons’ feet,’ said Costellin approvingly. ‘Let us just pray that, when their tomb emerged, none of them remained underground.’

‘There is a mine entrance less than two blocks away from the main generatorum, sir,’ said Soreson. ‘If we can reach that…’

‘Unfortunately,’ said Hanrik, ‘we have no up-to-date plans of the tunnel system, such information was lost in the evacuation. As you have just heard, however, Trooper Soreson knows those tunnels like he knows the back of his hand.’

Soreson, for his part, seemed a lot less sure of this than the Governor-General was. ‘The tunnels don’t all link up, though,’ he volunteered. ‘To reach that mine entrance, we would have to break through two, maybe three walls.’

‘Thin walls,’ Hanrik added quickly. ‘We’ve been mining this ground for generations. Even where the tunnels don’t quite connect, they do run close to each other.’

‘I believe, sir, we still have an old burrowing vehicle aboard the Memento Mori,’ offered the second tech-priest.

‘A Termite,’ recalled Costellin, ‘but its engines make one Golden Throne of a racket. If these tunnels do run as close to each other as the Governor-General suggests, then a handful of mining charges may be rather more discreet.’

‘Have the Termite brought down,’ the colonel instructed an aide, ‘in case of need. In the meantime, General Hanrik, if you could find me some mining charges and have Trooper Soreson update your most recent plan of those tunnels… Major Alpha, I will take you up on that offer of troops, I think: a grenadier platoon from you, and also one from Gamma Company, to be led by…’

Costellin stiffened as he realised that the colonel had turned his gaze upon him.

‘Commissar, I know I cannot order you to do this, but since our losses on Dask you are the regiment’s most experienced officer.’

It was hardly an unprecedented request, and Costellin was certainly not one to hide behind a desk when the fighting started. However, he was used to choosing his own battles, and with considerably more regard for his own safety than the Death Korps officers tended to display for theirs. He had certainly never faced necrons before.

Momentarily, he wondered if the colonel was doing this on purpose, ridding himself of a commissar determined to question his every utterance. He seemed to have placed an undue stress on the word ‘experienced’, as if in judgement of Costellin’s longevity, a suggestion that a braver man than he would have been long since dead by now.

‘It goes without saying, of course,’ said the colonel, ‘that you would be doing the Emperor a considerable service.’

‘When you put it like that,’ said Costellin, tight-lipped, resenting the almost tangible expectations of the officers around him, ‘then how can I possibly decline?’

The following morning’s briefing was a tense affair, at least so it seemed to Costellin.

They discussed the timing of his mission, and agreed – or rather, Colonel 186 decreed – that he would set off two days hence at which point, if the necrons ran true to form, they would be busy defending the generatorum to the south from the artillery of the Krieg 103rd. Costellin’s team would go as far as the mine tunnels would take them, then await the colonel’s signal.

Their attack would be timed to coincide with the bombardment of the west-side generatorum. Costellin had to admit it to himself: the colonel was giving him every chance he could to succeed. With the Emperor’s favour, it was possible he might just make it in and out of the city without encountering a single necron.

Possible, Costellin thought, but almost vanishingly unlikely.

They were taking the Termite, after all. Hanrik didn’t yet have Trooper Soreson’s updated map and, when pressed, he confessed what Costellin had suspected from the start, that the former mine overseer’s memory was not as dependable as the Governor-General had boasted. The Termite would give them more options, should they take the wrong turning, though it couldn’t carry more than ten passengers so most of the men would have to follow in the vehicle’s wake on foot.

Two grenadier platoons had been selected to accompany the commissar, and the colonel had fixed a time that evening for a preliminary briefing. Costellin spent the best part of the afternoon planning an uplifting speech that he knew was hardly required as he stripped down his chainsword and plasma pistol, cleaned and oiled them and said the requisite litanies to placate the machine-spirits inside them.

The next morning, he stood out on the ramp and prepared to welcome the new recruits. They marched out of their drop-ships, perfectly drilled, indistinguishable in their greatcoats and facemasks from any Death Korps Guardsman that Costellin had ever served with. As always when a ship landed, there were problems with the refugees on the hillside, incited by the suspicion that more lords and councillors would jump the queue to be evacuated ahead of them. However, the new recruits came to the struggling proctors’ aid, and the insurgents were brutally put down.

‘Magnificent, aren’t they?’ Commissar Mannheim was at Costellin’s shoulder.

‘Yes, I expect they are,’ Costellin conceded, ‘if you’re able not to think about what they have been through to get here.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ said Mannheim, but Costellin didn’t answer him. He was remembering his sole visit to the Krieg home world nineteen years before. He had thought it a good idea at the time, a means to a better understanding of his charges. Donning a mask and a rebreather unit, he had stepped out into a barren, frigid landscape, one inimical to all kinds of life. Yet somehow life had endured there.

Costellin had been told that the war on Krieg
was long ended, had expected its ecosphere would have begun to recover by now. As he travelled under his neutral flag, however, masked faces had peered out at him from trenches that ran like bloody
scars across the planet’s surface. Exploding mortars had gouged new holes in the blasted ground, and sent great plumes of ash up into the already choking air.

The men of Krieg were still warring, no longer to resolve their ideological differences but each now to prove himself worthy of dying for the Emperor.

‘You should have seen them last night,’ enthused Mannheim. ‘The 42nd, I mean, my regiment. It didn’t matter what the necrons threw at them, they kept going. They were indefatigable. Even I… When I saw those ghouls, it sent a chill down my spine, I can tell you, but the Death Korps, they never faltered, they never flinched.’

‘And eighteen hundred of them were massacred,’ Costellin pointed out.

‘Well, yes. Yes, they were, but our projections suggested–’

‘You expected to lose more. You thought you’d lose three thousand, four thousand, but that was all right as long as the battle was won. Acceptable casualties. It happens sooner than you think, doesn’t it? I still do it myself sometimes.’

‘Do what?’

‘Start to see them as numbers. Start to share the total lack of regard that the men of Krieg have for their own lives. Emperor knows, it is easier that way.’

‘I don’t think that’s fair,’ said Mannheim. ‘The necrons are a threat, not just to this world but to the whole of the Imperium. They have to be fought.’

‘Look at them, Mannheim. Look at those soldiers, try to see past their masks. They’re fresh from Krieg, do you know what that means? It means they are fourteen or fifteen years old, most of them, and already they have known a lifetime of conflict.’

‘It’s the same on many worlds,’ argued Mannheim. ‘Of course, conditions are harsher on Krieg than most, and that breeds a certain type of individual.’

‘No,’ said Costellin quietly, ‘it is we who do that.’

The first and smallest contingent of the newly-arrived Guardsmen, those whose lighter grey coats marked them out as being destined for the 103rd regiment, had formed up now and were being marched away by their new officers.

‘Maybe you should do what I did,’ said Costellin, ‘visit Krieg for yourself and you’ll see. You’ll see that its people aren’t inhuman, just dehumanised.’

‘I’m not sure I get the distinction,’ said Mannheim, but Costellin’s thoughts had drifted back again, this time to a brick tunnel and the stale odour of infinitely recycled air. Never before or since had he seen so many people packed into so confined a space. Most had been women, most with child, and all of them shuffling through their lives in a chemical stupor. There had been no need for masks, in that subterranean labyrinth, but the citizens of Krieg may as well have been wearing them anyway.

‘Perhaps,’ he sighed, ‘if I had spoken up… but no, I’m as certain now as I was back then that nobody would have wanted to hear me. I told you, Mannheim, I told you on the troop ship, that the Death Korps of Krieg are a valuable resource to the Imperium, the perfect soldiers. The question, I suppose, is how much should we be prepared to sacrifice for that ideal? To how many horrors must we blind ourselves?’

‘I’m sure it is not our place to question,’ said Mannheim stiffly.

‘But if not us, then who? Who will say when things have gone too far?’

‘I don’t like where you’re going with this, Costellin. I know you didn’t want to fight this war, but what was the alternative? If we had done as you wished, if we had destroyed this planet, then people would still have died. We could never have carried out a full evacuation in the time we had.’

‘I know that, Mannheim,’ said Costellin quietly. ‘I just worry, sometimes, about us. I worry that we are becoming as dehumanised as they are, too used to dealing in “acceptable casualties”, in numbers. We forget that behind each of those numbers is a life – an abused, joyless life perhaps, but a life all the same. Until the day comes when that life, that number, is our own – and who will be left to care about us, then?’

Chapter Fourteen

How long had it been now?

It felt like months since the Iron Gods had come. It felt like forever. The time before was a fading memory, already so distant that it was hardly missed, while the future…

The future was endless days like this one: backbreaking, fourteen-hour shifts in the ruins of the city, eating, sleeping, rising for work again. It was remarkable how routine this had become, how quickly the human body adapted to the aches and strains, and the mind – for fear of going mad – to the confines of the here and now.

Arex’s pickaxe had come to feel like an extension of her arms. She was barely aware of the calluses on her once-soft hands, beneath its wooden handle.

Sometimes, however, her mind could still slip its chains and drift to a white-carpeted bedroom in the High Spire or an illicit liaison in a downmarket eatery, to the brush of a loved one’s lips, and then she was staggered by the pain of all she had lost.

Arex sank to her knees and wept, drawing the attention of a grizzled overseer who screamed at her to resume her work and prodded her with a proctor’s baton. She tried to obey him, she honestly did, but the hunk of plascrete she had lifted without thinking about it a moment ago now seemed as heavy as the world itself.

The overseer activated the baton’s stun charge, and Arex cringed, waiting for the jolt to slam through her as had happened many times before. Instead, she heard angry voices, a scuffle, and she peered through her tears to see that a fellow slave had come to her defence. A ruggedly handsome man, she thought, like all of them grimy from the morning’s exertions. He had wrested the baton from the cowering overseer, and he seemed almost angry enough to use it too. Then common sense dampened the fire in his eyes, and he cast the weapon scornfully to the ground instead.

‘She’s tired,’ he growled, ‘that’s all. We’re all tired and hungry, and brutalising this young woman isn’t going to change that.’

He lifted Arex to her feet, put a water bottle to her lips. The overseer had recovered his baton, and his nerves, and was raging impotently: ‘You’re on half rations for three days, Tylar, and I’m reporting this incident to Amareth, do you hear me?’

‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ said Arex regretfully, as the overseer stomped away to make good on his threat. ‘You shouldn’t have got yourself in trouble for me.’

Her saviour, Tylar, shook his head. ‘I’ve been in trouble for one thing or another since I got here. At least, this time, it was in the best of causes.’

‘I’ll share my rations with you,’ she promised. ‘I won’t see you go hungry.’

‘You’ll do nothing of the sort,’ said Tylar. ‘You must keep your strength up. You know what they do to people who can’t serve. Don’t worry about me, Arex, I’ll get by – on sheer stubbornness if needs be. I wouldn’t give that goon the satisfaction of breaking me.’

‘You know my name? But I haven’t–’

‘You don’t recognise me, do you?’

Arex looked up into his face, and tried to see past the dirt, past the untidy, overgrown strawberry blond hair, tried to peel back the years. ‘I… I do know you,’ she realised. ‘Tylar. Of course. Wasn’t your father an admiral?’

‘A lord admiral,’ said Tylar. ‘High up enough, anyway, to rescue me from the draft and set me up with a cushy administrator’s job. Well, you must remember that. I only mentioned it about a thousand times, I think, during our date, trying to impress you.’

‘I… I’m sorry,’ said Arex. ‘It’s just, my uncle, he–’

‘I know.’ Tylar smiled warmly at her. ‘You talked a lot about Governor Hanrik too, as I recall. You certainly didn’t approve of his choice of suitors for you.’

‘We were both so young,’ sighed Arex, ‘and the things we cared about back then…’

‘They don’t mean so much now, do they?’

Tylar eased himself away from her, and immediately she missed the reassuring press of his body. It had been comforting to return to the past, for however short a time, without regret, to learn that even a tiny part of it had survived. It had given her hope. But now, the empty present beckoned to Arex once more.

‘We should get back to it,’ said Tylar, ‘before that overseer returns with his goon friends. Here, I’ll help you clear this pile. If you feel weak again, you can lean on me.’

‘I will,’ said Arex gratefully.

The point of the work was to sift for materials the Iron Gods could use.

Anything with metal content was to be put to one side; gemstones and jewellery too. Every half-hour or so, Arex and Tylar took turns to wheel a barrow full of useless masonry into the silent smeltery. He arranged her loads so that they were lighter than his, though they looked as substantial. She would empty her barrow down one of the lifter shafts, while a group of overseers played cards at a nearby table.

It made Arex angry sometimes that the overseers – mostly Amareth’s friends from before – did less work than she did, and yet got more food. She wondered if they had felt the same way about her, living in the High Spire, wanting for nothing all those years, while they had lived their lives of drudgery. Now, the Iron Gods had elevated a new ruling class in Hieronymous City, and perhaps she deserved this penance.

She slept on a cold, hard floor now in a hab half the size of her old bathroom, shared with four other slaves. They had shuttered the window, but still the green light from the pyramid clawed its way around the edges of the wood.

‘Don’t you think it’s odd,’ Tylar said to her one day, ‘that we never see the Iron Gods themselves? Nor any sign that the fruits of our labour are being taken to them?’

Arex shrugged. ‘If they don’t want the metal,’ she said, ‘then why ask for it?’

‘We have only the word of Amareth that they have.’

She let the pickaxe fall idle in her hands, tempting the overseers’ wrath. She stared at Tylar. ‘What… what are you saying? Why would we be doing all this, if not…?’

‘How did you come to be here?’ he asked. ‘To join this workgroup?’

‘I didn’t know what else to… I couldn’t go back home. I met people who had been to the city gates, and they said they had been closed. Then I saw… I saw others working in the ruins, and I asked them why, and they told me…’

‘They found me,’ said Tylar, ‘and they told me that, if I didn’t join them, serve the Iron Gods, it was their duty to see that I was punished for it. Even so…’

‘Even so,’ breathed Arex, ‘it is a comfort to know… to believe that we are not entirely helpless before this terrible force, that there is some way we can…’

‘But what,’ whispered Tylar, ‘if there is no way? What if the Iron Gods do not care in the slightest if we serve them or not? What if we have been lied to?’

They began to score what little victories they could. They hid metal scraps at the bottom of the barrow and tipped them down the mine shafts so the overseers couldn’t have them. They thought it safe to do this because no one was really watching, until a collection of cutlery in Arex’s fourth load shifted with a treacherous clank and caught the light of a burning brazier, and the overseers surrounded her and questioned her.

They were men in their forties, most of them, ex-miners with unshaven faces that looked like they couldn’t ever have been clean. One of them asked Arex for her name, and she answered truthfully because she couldn’t bear the burden of another lie. The overseer looked closely at her, remembered herface from a newsreel he had seen once, and that was it, her cover was blown.

They were even more interested in her then. They wanted to know if she was a spy for the Governor, an accusation she denied angrily. They asked her why she hadn’t been flown out of the city with him, and they picked at her flimsy excuses until she confessed that she had been looking for her boyfriend. Arex burst into tears, then, partly through having had her deepest secret dragged out of her and partly at the memory of stumbling through the wreckage, finding Gunthar’s block razed by the insect swarm, finding herself for the first time in her life alone.

The overseers affected to find this story hilarious. They wanted to know more about this lower-floor dweller who had won the heart of a lady. They made vulgar suggestions about what Arex might have seen in Gunthar, and they laughed all the harder when she insisted he was the sweetest man in the world.

‘Where is he now,’ they taunted her, ‘this sweet love of yours?’

‘He’s looking for me,’ she said stubbornly. ‘Gunthar is looking for me and he won’t stop until we have found each other.’ But she reached for her necklace, her comforter, as she spoke, forgetting for a moment that she had lost this too, found it gone from her coat pocket some time after the insects. She had gone back to search for it, in vain.

‘What do you think?’ asked one of the overseers of his fellows. ‘Do we take her to Amareth? I’m sure he’d like to know we have a royal visitor.’

The cruel, mocking laughter of the others signalled their agreement.

The sun was setting as Arex was half-pushed, half-dragged along the skyway by a six-strong escort. She saw Tylar starting towards her, but discouraged him with a firm shake of her head. There was nothing he could do to help her.

She was surprised to be led into a musty old schola, down several floors and out into an intact courtyard dominated by a single grand building at its far end. A broad flight of marble steps swept up to a doorway that could easily have accommodated a visitor three times Arex’s height. The spires to each side of these steps could have belonged to nothing but a temple, and despite her situation she felt a swell of optimism in her heart, until she looked up to where the Imperial Eagle should have been displayed above the temple’s door to find it there no longer.

The eagle had been chipped away. Arex could still see the outline of its splayed wings, dark against the weathered brickwork, but across this had been painted, in silver, a lopsided image of a leering skull.

Inside, likewise, all Imperial symbols had been removed or defaced. Green drapes had been hung, black candles lit. At the end of the nave, a tall stained-glass window had been smashed and a bed sheet pinned over it, onto which another skull had been daubed, apparently by the same clumsy hand responsible for the one outside. Perched atop the black-shrouded altar was a small pyramid carved from wood, and the overseers approached this reverently, their footsteps echoing from the galleries.

An emerald-cloaked attendant loomed along the transept, and Arex was revolted to see xenos sigils painted on her cheeks and her forehead in ash. She thought a couple of her escorts appeared uneasy with this too, but she couldn’t tell for sure.

A short, whispered conversation ensued before the attendant nodded and swept away. Several minutes passed, then more footsteps sounded, ascending to the pulpit. The overseers knelt in awe, but Arex remained standing, until a sharp baton blow to the back of her knees stole her choice in the matter.

Her eyes lowered for fear of being struck again, she heard her name spoken in a rich, resonating voice. ‘Lady Hanrik, I believe. You may gaze upon my person.’

Arex looked up and caught her breath. She had glimpsed Amareth just one time before, across the smeltery floor, giving orders to his overseers. She had thought he looked like any ordinary man: perhaps a little taller than most, in his mid-thirties, with a slick of black hair and protruding ears. Now, he towered above her, a spectre wrapped in royal blue, his face concealed by a metal skull mask, which looked like one the overseers had been parading a couple of weeks ago. The mask, apparently, had been taken from the corpse of an Imperial Guardsman, although Arex couldn’t imagine a member of the Emperor’s army wearing such a thing.

Amareth held a staff with moulded plasteel prongs, a makeshift approximation of the one wielded by the giant god that had walked the skies in hololithic form. ‘So,’ he rumbled, ‘the niece of our former Governor has been delivered to my church. What clearer sign could there be that we are the favoured of the Iron Gods?’

‘It was I who recognised her, lord,’ spoke up one of the overseers.

‘Tell me, my lady,’ said Amareth, ‘how came you to be guided to us?’

So, Arex told her tale, in as few words as she could, and Amareth listened, then, when she had finished, he nodded sagely and said, ‘It was not through capricious fate that you were spared the ravages of the insect swarm. The gods must surely have a purpose in mind for the Governor’s kin.’

‘But I…’ she protested, tongue-tied. ‘That was before. My family’s wealth means nothing now. I’m just like the rest of… like everybody else.’

Amareth let out a deep-throated chuckle. ‘Oh no, my lady, you are not like the others. Not while your uncle’s forces lay siege to the gods’ own domain.’

‘To the city, you mean? They’re still fighting for us? I didn’t know.’

Arex had hoped, though, especially after the rumours of the Imperial Guard’s presence, and her delight in having that hope realised must have sounded in her voice, because an overseer at her side grumbled, ‘They are wasting their ammunition. They must have heard the voice of the gods, as we all did. They know their power.’

‘Indeed,’ agreed Amareth, ‘and yet Talmar Hanrik has chosen to stake all our lives on a futile act of defiance.’

‘He’s trying to save us!’ protested Arex.

‘We have no need of his salvation. The Iron Gods protect those who serve them. Isn’t that why you chose to join us, Lady Hanrik?’

‘I joined you because I thought… When did they speak to you? When did they tell you they desired our service? You speak of their voice, and yet I heard that too, and no one could have found any meaning in that noise. How do you know–?’

‘Now,’ continued Amareth, ignoring her, ‘we have the means to prove our worth. We have you, Lady Hanrik – and, once you have been presented to the Iron Gods–’

‘You’re insane!’ Arex felt a baton prod to her ribs, and an overseer warned her about speaking to ‘Lord Amareth’ that way. Undeterred, she went on, ‘You think you can use me as a hostage? You can’t
imagine that will work! My uncle will–’

‘As much as Governor Hanrik might disdain the rest of us, he must certainly value his precious niece’s life. He will have no choice but to–’

‘Look around you,’ cried Arex. ‘Open your eyes, all of you, and look! Your “Iron Gods” have destroyed our homes, they’ve killed our friends, and you… you think you can deal with them? You think you can buy their favour? They–’ This time, the baton prod was backed up by a stun charge. Arex’s legs gave way, and she would have fallen had the overseers not caught her, holding her like a rag doll.

‘Leave me,’ instructed Amareth. ‘I will commune with the gods, pray for guidance in this matter, and for this I must have solitude.’

‘You weren’t appointed by them, were you? The Iron Gods have never spoken to you except in your own head.’ Amareth had turned to leave, but Arex’s weak voice pulled him back. She knew she was tempting another shock or worse, but she didn’t much care. Once they had marched her into that green-glowing pyramid, it would be too late for words. ‘Don’t you see? You were right about me. I’m afraid of them, as we all are. I can’t fight those horrors, so I thought… I thought, at least, if I did as they wanted, I wouldn’t be harmed. I understand how you feel, why you’re doing all this, but if there’s still hope, if the Emperor’s forces are fighting for us–’

‘Leave me,’ repeated Amareth, ‘but ensure that two overseers have sight of Lady Hanrik at all times. She is to be quartered in the schola. In fact, it is time we brought the rest of my flock into the buildings around this courtyard. Let them see the new homes we have prepared for them, and their new house of worship.’

And he did turn and leave then, disappearing back beneath the pulpit’s lip, but his commanding voice carried back over his shoulder:

‘Services begin at dawn tomorrow.’

The lectorum had been cleared of desks and chairs. A broad window overlooked the newly reappointed temple, and there were a few surprised whispers as the other slaves noticed its silver-painted skull, luminous in the moonlight.

Arex, for her part, was just relieved to shrug her heavy mattress off her back, let it hit the floorboards in a cloud of dust. She was gladder still that Tylar had found his way to her. Two overseers stood sentry in the doorway, the furthest they had strayed from her side all night, so at last she had a chance to confide in her new friend freely.

‘Amareth is mad,’ she declaimed, ‘completely and utterly mad. He thinks he can bargain with his Iron Gods, and he’s willing to betray the Emperor Himself to do it.’

‘So, it seems we were right after all,’ said Tylar, shaking his head in despair. ‘Amareth tells us he can hear their voices, and we… so desperate are we for a slim thread of hope, for someone to guide us, that we believe him. We delude ourselves.’

‘He can see a new order coming,’ said Arex, ‘and he is seizing the chance – the fantasy – to be more than he once was. I’ve heard the overseers talking. There are other workgroups like this one – other churches, I should say – across the city.’

Tylar nodded. ‘They boast that this is the largest of them, over a hundred slaves, as if it were a competition.’

‘It is,’ said Arex. ‘Amareth wants this church, his church, to be the only one, with himself installed as its High Priest, and he thinks–’

‘Now, he thinks he has something his gods want, and he thinks he can barter it for their recognition – for real, this time.’

‘He doesn’t understand, doesn’t see that we are nothing to them!’

Arex sank down onto her mattress, pulled her knees up to her chest. The room was quieting down as the other slaves finished laying out their meagre belongings and rested their weary bodies. She was thinking of her Uncle Hanrik; all those years he had spent trying to protect her, almost smothering her.

She had been so ungrateful to him, for the life he had given her. If she hadn’t been searching, like Amareth, for something more, she wouldn’t have been in this predicament now. She had found her adventure, at last, and there was nothing exciting about it – and the worst of it was that, in the Iron Gods’ clutches, she would be endangering more lives than her own, and perhaps Hanrik had foreseen this.

He had served in the Imperial Guard, Arex remembered. He had sent his three sons off to war. Doubtless he had known, far better than she did, what lurked in the shadows beyond the God-Emperor’s blinding light.

Tylar leaned in closer to her, whispered in her ear, ‘Do you still have faith?’

‘In the Emperor? Of course I do, but I know I have failed Him. In my fear and confusion, I have knelt before the prophet of a false god. I have assisted His foes.’

‘We can still serve Him,’ Tylar insisted. ‘He has shown us the way.’

‘You mean…?’

‘Amareth can’t be allowed to carry out his plan. The Imperium is still fighting for us, and if the Governor’s resolve is weakened by his actions–’

‘But what can we do?’

‘We can escape,’ said Tylar. ‘We can get you away from here.’

‘But the city,’ protested Arex, ‘the city has been sealed. How can we–?’

‘There are plenty of places we can hide. As long as we can keep you out of Amareth’s hands, that is the main thing. Then we only have to wait until these Iron Gods have been vanquished, as they surely will be, and our world reclaimed.’

‘If only it were so easy,’ lamented Arex, ‘but Amareth won’t let me go. You know he has his men watching me, and even if we were to evade them, they would never cease searching for me. Far better if I had never come here, if I had been killed by the insect swarm. Far better, in fact, if I were to die right now.’

‘You mustn’t think like that,’ hissed Tylar, and he put his strong arm around Arex’s shoulder, held her. ‘After all you have been through, and survived, you should have no doubt that the Emperor wants you to live. He wants you – He wants us both – to fight for Him, and fight for Him we shall… somehow.’

Chapter Fifteen

Gunthar had been issued with a shaving kit, at last.

It had arrived three mornings ago, along with his body armour. The morning of his meeting with the Governor and the senior officers, although he hadn’t questioned the coincidence. He scraped shaving foam from his chin, splashed his face with freezing cold water from the cracked white basin in the corner of the bunkroom and carefully cleaned and stowed his disposable razor so as to preserve its edge.

As he turned from the basin, he glimpsed a face he did not know in the mirror, and the sight of it caused him to hesitate. Drawing closer to the glass, Gunthar wiped away a stray smear of soap and inspected the visage before him.

His tousled black hair, of course, he had lost on his first day of service. He wore a military buzz-cut now, which changed, or rather exposed, the shape of his head. He had shed some weight, too, and his cheeks had a hollow look to them. A livid purple bruise beneath his left eye further distorted the image from the familiar.

It was more than that though.

He remembered:

A rounder, fresher face, a more naïve face, reflected in the blank eyepieces of a Death Korps watchmaster. The engines of the PDF flyer whining, sending vibrations through the troop compartment and through the bench on which Gunthar sat, rattling his bones. The watchmaster had asked what he knew of Arex’s whereabouts. He had confessed only to what Weber had told him, pretended not to know her, but he had feared the Krieg man could see through his lies.

He had half-expected the Governor to meet them on the space port ramp, had wondered if he could lie to him too, but the bad news had been voxed ahead, Hanrik was grieving for his niece in private, and suddenly nobody had time to spare for Gunthar any more, he was just one more refugee among so many thousands.

He remembered:

He had decided to join the Planetary Defence Force. Well, rather, he had almost made up his mind to join when an uptight lieutenant had collared him and demanded to know why he was out of uniform. He had had to explain that he had only just arrived, hadn’t known about the draft but had fully intended to speak to someone about it soon. The next thing he knew, a heavyset sergeant was taking a razor to his hair, and he was being kitted out in boots too small for him and a tunic too large.

It was on that day that, to all intents and purposes, he had ceased to be mine overseer Gunthar and had become Trooper Soreson instead, but he hadn’t mourned the loss of that part of himself, not then. He had remembered his vow to return to the city, and had felt like this was the first step towards that goal. He had felt empowered.

He remembered:

A blur of push-ups and pull-ups, four-kilometre runs and ten-kilometre marches. Drill instructors screaming themselves hoarse, but rarely at him. Gunthar had felt a certain pride in the fact that, contrary to the expectations of a fat recruitment sergeant six years ago, he was considered one of the more promising trainees. Perhaps this was because, unlike most of the others, he knew what he was doing here.

He learned military codes of conduct, vehicle and weapon recognition, basic first aid, survival skills and how to make up his bunk. He practised with a lasgun – though he hadn’t yet been issued with his own – until he could strip it down and reassemble it in less than two minutes. His marksmanship was poor to begin with, but Gunthar practised on the makeshift range at the foot of the space port hill until he could at least hit the plasterboard target with two shots out of three.

He remembered:

The first time a Krieg officer had observed a drill session on the ramp, coldly, inscrutably. He had soon pivoted on his heel and left, but returned the next day with a comrade. Two days after that, a Krieg watchmaster had assisted with the training regime, just offering the occasional suggestion to begin with but, by evening, giving the orders. Quite clearly, the PDF instructors resented this encroachment upon their territory, but it seemed there was little they could do about it.

The next morning, there had been a watchmaster supervising at the range, another taking morning inspection, and by the end of the week Gunthar had had as many Krieg instructors as he had had non-Krieg ones.

That was when the ten-kilometre marches became twenty, the trainees’ backpacks filled with stones to simulate the weight of equipment they didn’t have. First muster was brought forward an hour, then another, evidently to the surprise of some PDF sergeants, who turned up bleary-eyed, late. Exercises frequently endured beyond sunset, and Gunthar became used to subsisting on four hours’ sleep per night. He never joined in the grumbling that went on in the bunkroom before lights out, but even he couldn’t always meet the exacting new standards required of him.

The Krieg men never raised their voices in anger. They spoke in quiet, measured tones, laden with threat, and were quick to dispense extra duties to recruits who disappointed them. ‘You aren’t training to fight old ladies and crippled mutants anymore,’ a masked Guardsman growled in Gunthar’s ear once. ‘You are training to fight with the Death Korps of Krieg, and I intend to make sure you are worthy of that honour, else you will be wasting the life you have been given.’

Another instructor, addressing Gunthar’s whole platoon, told how at the age of twelve he had been given a lasgun and sent into a rad-zone to hunt down mutants, a mission from which a third of his squad had not returned and the least of those men had been more able, more dedicated to his cause, than any of these weak, apathetic wastes of genetic material that currently cowered before him.

In the bunkroom one morning, a watchmaster demanded forty push-ups from a trainee whose boots weren’t sufficiently polished. The trainee was a burly miner in his mid-thirties, more able than most to cope with the physical demands placed upon him, but lack of sleep had made him increasingly fractious – he had been the first to complain each night about the depredations of the day – and this was the final straw.

He had refused the order. He had screamed in the watchmaster’s face, demanding to know who he thought he was, reminding him that this wasn’t his world. And, without a warning, without a word, the watchmaster had drawn his laspistol and executed him.

There was some expectation of fallout from that incident, rumours that complaints had been taken to the Governor-General himself, and for a few days it did seem there were fewer Krieg facemasks around than there had been. Then Colonel Braun had addressed the trainees, informed them stiffly that the watchmaster had acted by the book, and that was that. The facemasks returned in force, and everything was as it had been before, except that Gunthar’s bunkroom was now very quiet at night.

He remembered:

Lectorum sessions had been transformed too. Now, the greater part of each was devoted to the learning by rote and communal recital of the Emperor’s benedictions. Gunthar was taught that his officers were the Emperor, as far as he was concerned, and that to question a lawful order was the foulest kind of blasphemy.

Trainees were addressed only as numbers now, punished for the merest mentions of their old names. Gunthar was made to run around the space port three times with his rock-filled backpack for carelessly referring to himself as ‘I’ instead of as ‘this trooper’, and received an additional lap for being too slow. It was decreed that some of the trainees had become too comfortable with each other, so the platoons were reformed to split up old friends and new comrades alike.

That was how Gunthar had ceased to be Trooper Soreson and become Trooper 1419 instead, but he hadn’t really minded this either. He felt he was beginning to understand what it meant to be a soldier, and he shouldered that burden, accepted his new identity, because he knew that a soldier was what Arex needed him to be.

He remembered:

A frost-sprinkled field, the air crisp with the threat of approaching winter. Gunthar’s platoon had been marched to Thelonius City and most of the way back and they were expecting a meal break. Instead, their instructor, a senior Krieg Guardsman, separated them into two groups and told them to fight each other.

The trainees were reluctant at first, but a few growled warnings, a twitch of a hand towards a lasgun holster, and they began to grapple half-heartedly. A promise of additional rations for the winning team, to be taken from the losers’ allocation, stirred a little more passion in them, and Gunthar’s legs were kicked out from beneath him by a dough-faced colossus of a man twice his age.

Before he could stand, before he could fight back, the instructor called a halt to the proceedings. He had a few words to say, naturally, on the subject of the trainees’ efforts, before deciding that a demonstration was in order. He hauled a young man out of the ranks and ordered him to put up his fists. The trainee did so with a certain reticence, and the instructor came at him like a Leman Russ Demolisher.

Gunthar winced as the instructor hammered punch after punch into the trainee’s chin and, when he brought up his hands to protect this, into his stomach. He snarled at the man to defend himself, to forget his assailant’s rank and fight back, but the trainee was slow to respond and, although he did eventually make a spirited attempt to wrestle the instructor to the ground, by then he was already too dazed, too bruised to fight effectively. An elbow thrust into the trainee’s leg dislocated his kneecap, and the trainee was on the ground but the masked instructor continued to beat him, methodically, dispassionately, until he was bleeding and unconscious.

‘And that,’ he announced, hardly out of breath, ‘is the level of commitment I expect to see from each of you, unless you wish to spar with me.’

This time, when the fighting began, Gunthar looked for the dough-faced man, and found him engaged in a scrum in which Gunthar’s team-mates were outnumbered. He gripped his adversary’s shoulder from behind, spinning him around as he yanked him from the fray, and he punched him, but not hard enough, still holding back. A flailing arm caught him in the face. He doubled over, and the dough-faced man rushed him, using his superior weight to bear Gunthar to the cold, hard ground again.

‘Don’t be squeamish about striking from behind,’ bellowed the instructor, perhaps at Gunthar himself. ‘This is not a jousting tournament, this is war!’

He was right, and Gunthar felt angry with himself for his mistake, angry too at the dough-faced man for taking advantage of it. That may not have been fair of him, but it was surprising how easy it was to hate this man, this comrade of a few minutes earlier, for embarrassing him, for standing between Gunthar and his life’s only goal.

‘Leave him!’ the instructor barked, though at whom Gunthar couldn’t see. ‘He has a medi-pack, he can take care of himself, and if he can’t…’

He didn’t need to finish the sentence. If a trooper can’t take care of himself, he is useless to us. Gunthar was pinned down, a podgy fist raised to hammer into his head, but the memory of Arex gave him strength to wrench a hand free and to lash out. Taken by surprise, the dough-faced man was unbalanced, and Gunthar heaved him away, rolled nimbly to his feet and ducked a retaliatory lunge.

‘If you aren’t trying to kill each other, you aren’t trying hard enough.’

Two trainees seized Gunthar from behind, holding him as the dough-faced man came in for another attack. Instead of trying to evade him, this time Gunthar met him with feet firmly planted and head lowered. He butted the dough-faced man in the jaw, the impact sending both of them reeling but surprising one of Gunthar’s captors enough to shake his grip. Gritting his teeth, focusing through a crowd of blotches in his vision, Gunthar thrust an elbow backwards into his other captor’s stomach and dropped to one knee, throwing the startled, grey-haired recruit over his shoulder.

He surrendered to the moment, then, unable to stop, to think, to plan in the midst of an increasingly fierce melee, just responding to each threat as it presented itself, defending his allies when he could. At one point, he rammed an opponent shoulder-first, at the same moment that he was similarly attacked from the opposite direction, and Gunthar felt the snap of his victim’s clavicle as he fell with a shriek of pain.

It was so much easier, he thought, when he didn’t know their names.

He was barely aware of the melee thinning out about him. When the instructor blew his whistle, Gunthar swayed on his feet and saw, numbly, that only he and three of his team-mates remained standing. The field was filled with the groans of the wounded and, as the adrenaline drained out of his system, he didn’t know whether to feel ashamed or proud of himself. He settled on feeling neither, because he had only done what he had been instructed to do. Gunthar was becoming the man he had to be, and if only he had been that man before, Arex would have been saved by now.

Nor, of course, was he complimented on his achievement. The Krieg instructor toured the field, and delivered swift kicks to those awake and, in his view, capable of rising who had not yet done so. He had the platoon improvise stretchers for the rest, several of whom would certainly be in no fit state to fight for a month or two.

They must have presented a motley sight as they limped back to the space port, because a trainee squad on the shooting range, a cluster of refugees on the hill, a non-Krieg lieutenant taking drill on the ramp, all turned to gape at them. Gunthar didn’t doubt that questions would be asked about today’s events behind closed doors, just as he felt he knew what the answers would be.

He went to bed with a buzzing head that night, and his ribs were sore for a few days after, but never once did it occur to him to complain about his treatment.

He had learned a great deal, that day in the
frost-coated field, more he felt than on all the previous days of his training in total. He had found something inside of himself, and to Gunthar that discovery was well worth a few temporary aches and pains.

It wasn’t on that day that his left eye had come by its purple bruise.

He remembered:

He hadn’t enjoyed the meeting in the colonel’s office.

He had felt privileged, at first, to be invited, then uncomfortable because it had been the old Gunthar they had wanted, not Trooper 1419, and being made to remember his old life had only filled him with regret. Still, the meeting had brought him a good step closer to his goal. A few more days now.

He was excused from training for a day, given a small desk in a corner of the Governor-General’s office and a pile of data-slates containing old maps of the mine tunnels. He tried to cast his mind back, to remember the updated maps in his office, but he couldn’t seem to make his drawings match the vague shapes in his head. It didn’t help that Hanrik fussed about him so, and Gunthar was relieved when Colonel Braun appeared and asked to see his commanding officer in private.

Gunthar rose to leave, but Hanrik waved him back into his seat; he and the colonel would step outside to talk instead. The gesture weighed on Gunthar’s shoulders, impressing upon him how vital his task was, and he redoubled his efforts. He couldn’t help but be distracted, however, by Hanrik and Braun’s voices, intermittently audible to him through the half-open door.

‘–third platoon this week. This time – fighting with sticks. I know we have discussed this before, sir, but I worry that–’

‘–appreciate your concerns, colonel, but my hands are–’

‘–fourteen more troopers in the medicae – next, I ask you? Live ammunition?’

‘–discussed this several times with Colonel 186, and he is of the opinion–’

‘–respect, sir, I understood that you retained command of the–’

‘–to work with these people.’ Hanrik sounded flustered. ‘We need them. We need their resources, their… their commitment, their experience of–’

Braun mumbled something then that Gunthar didn’t catch. Hanrik’s tart reply, however, was perfectly clear. ‘We are fighting a war, Colonel Braun,’ he said, ‘and, in war, certain sacrifices have to be made.’ As he returned to his desk, however, the Governor-General looked anything but resolute on this point, burying his face in his hands until he remembered that he wasn’t alone, at which point he straightened his back and found some slatework to pretend to be doing.

Gunthar’s report did nothing to improve Hanrik’s mood. His new plan of the mine tunnels was strewn with apologetic notes to indicate which of the revisions he was unsure of: most of them, as it happened. ‘How can I show this to the Krieg colonel?’ Hanrik carped. ‘He’ll think we are… You told me you could do this, Soreson. I put my neck on the line for you, and you… You’ve failed me!’

The old Gunthar wanted to protest. Not only had he done his best, he had been honest with Hanrik from the start about his doubts, only to have them brushed aside. Trooper 1419, however, just stood to attention and said, ‘Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.’

‘I need this doing again,’ snapped Hanrik, thrusting the data-slate into Gunthar’s stomach. ‘I can’t send a hundred men underground on the basis of this guesswork. I’m sure, if you were one of those men, you wouldn’t be too–’

‘Excuse me, sir,’ stammered Gunthar. ‘I thought… That is to say, this trooper had hoped he would… I had assumed I would be joining Commissar Costellin’s team.’

Hanrik shook his head. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘You’re an administrator, Soreson, and it seems you can’t even do that job well. How many times have you even been down a mine?’

‘Three, sir. Just three. But I…’ Gunthar felt panic welling up inside him. ‘I have to go back, sir. I swore I would go back. For her.’

‘I see,’ said Hanrik gruffly, and a light seemed to dim in his eyes. ‘We all feel that way, Soreson. We’ve all lost someone, but the chances of…’ He swallowed. ‘You’ll get your chance, when your training is complete. To fight for this woman… In the meantime… In the meantime, I think we should leave this mission to the Krieg. They seem to know what they’re doing, and I… I think…’

‘It’s Arex, sir,’ Gunthar blurted out, because in that desperate moment he truly thought it would make a difference. ‘It’s your niece. I swore I would go back for her. She was at my hab-block, looking for me. I have to find her!’

Hanrik’s expression froze on his face. His ruddy cheeks paled. ‘How… how do you know my…?’ he stammered, and Gunthar knew he had said too much.

It took a moment for the truth to sink in with the governor-general, for him to be sure. Then, Hanrik’s eyes flashed, and he curled his right hand into a fist and drove an anger-fuelled punch into Gunthar’s left eye, snapping his head around. Still standing to attention, Gunthar had seen the blow coming but hadn’t tried to avoid it.

Hanrik turned away from him, his head bowed, breathing deeply to calm himself, nursing his skinned knuckles, and for an endless minute, no further words were spoken. Then, without turning, Hanrik said quietly, ‘Perhaps you could track down some of the mine foremen, see if any of them survived.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Show them the plans you have drawn up so far, and see what they can add to them.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Gunthar. ‘Thank you, sir.’

The bunkroom was waking behind Gunthar, trainees scrambling to prepare their bunks, their uniforms, themselves, for inspection. All of them needing the single basin, shouting for him to get a move on.

The second morning since his encounter with Hanrik. Two nights in a row, Gunthar had expected Krieg soldiers to burst in, to drag him from his bed, force him to his knees and shoot him in the head. But it looked as if Hanrik wasn’t going to press charges, perhaps for Arex’s sake. Perhaps because he had bigger worries.

Arex…

Commissar Costellin’s team would be heading into the city today, following a map that Gunthar had prepared, but he wouldn’t be going with them. It didn’t matter, he told himself. There would be other chances, as Hanrik had said. He was certain of that now, and that certainty was a cold, hard glint in his dull, grey eyes.

And that was it, he realised: the greatest change in that reflected face, his face. It wasn’t the hair, nor the cheeks, nor the bruise from the Governor’s knuckles. It was those grey eyes, so full after so short a time of hard-won experience, of memories.

Mine overseer Gunthar Soreson was looking into the eyes of a stranger.

The eyes, he thought with a nervous tingle, of a soldier.

Chapter Sixteen

The expected necron attack to the south hadn’t materialised.

This meant that Costellin had no distraction to cover his subterranean mission. It also called the purpose of said mission into question. As the commissar said to Colonel 186, ‘What if the necrons have no need for our power, and the timings of the previous attacks were coincidence after all?’

He had planned to depart at noon. Instead, he put his team on standby and waited at his desk, tensely monitoring vox-traffic until Colonel 103 reported that it was over, the south-side generatorum razed and not a sighting of the enemy.

Hanrik, however, was reluctant to abandon the plan his genius had inspired. ‘It could be,’ he conjectured as the senior officers gathered once more, ‘that the necrons are still weak, and have chosen not to fight a battle they can’t win.’

‘The mission will proceed,’ Colonel 186 decided. ‘We can’t overlook the chance that our original thesis is correct, that the destruction of the city’s main generatorum could give us a decisive advantage in this war, and even if we are wrong…’

‘Then, what are we risking?’ concluded Costellin, tight-lipped.

‘Indeed,’ said the colonel, oblivious to the irony in the commissar’s words.

‘Of course,’ said Costellin, ‘if the necrons have indeed reprioritised their objectives, then they might have chosen to defend the primary generatorum at the expense of the smaller ones. We could find ourselves walking into an ambush.’

The colonel nodded. ‘At least, in that case, we will have confirmation that the generatorums are important to them, and we can strategise accordingly. With the Emperor’s favour, however, the necrons won’t have anticipated a sneak attack such as this one, and will only have posted a token defence.’

‘Perhaps so,’ Costellin conceded, ‘though that would rather invite the question, where might the rest of their force be?’

The western edge of Hieronymous City was a good distance further from the space port than it had been. Costellin’s half-track carefully traversed a canyon between looming heaps of rubble, almost to where the Death Korps’ siege engines were still grinding out their destructive charges, edging inexorably forwards.

Here, an old mine shaft had been uncovered, a space cleared around it. The Termite boring vehicle requisitioned from the troop ship had already been lowered into the pit, a task that had required a full platoon of Guardsmen and a jury-rigged pulley system to perform. The Termite could have drilled its own way down, of course, but in so doing it could easily have collapsed the mine tunnels beneath itself.

Costellin was an hour early, but still one grenadier platoon had arrived before him, and the second now approached in a convoy of Centaurs. He had brought along a tech-priest named Lomax, a skinny man with watery eyes, who bristled with so many mechadendrites that he looked almost like a gigantic metal spider. Lomax was here for two reasons, the first and lesser of them being that Costellin didn’t trust the ancient Termite not to fail on him.

He formed up his troops, and gave them a cursory pep talk, a hundred skull masks staring dispassionately back at him. He knew that Krieg grenadiers were the elite of the elite, the best possible men to have at his back, but it had long been said that, when a Guardsman was promoted to their illustrious ranks, it was because he had lived too long. Grenadier squads had a brutal mortality rate even for the Death Korps, and the skulls they wore over their regulation rebreather masks were a symbol that they accepted, and were honoured by, their impending martyrdom.

When the speech was done, the grenadiers began to lower themselves into the mine shaft on ropes, two at a time. Once enough of them were down to secure the cavern below, Costellin sent the designated two-man crew of the Termite to join them and to get a feel for their vehicle while the others descended.

His turn came, at last, and although a Guardsman respectfully offered to winch him down with the still-extant pulley system, Costellin followed his men’s example and swarmed down the rope under his own strength. He regretted his vanity as ageing muscles struggled to support his weight. He persevered, however, and dropped into a lifter cage, the gate of which had been wrenched open. Concealing his breathlessness, he stepped from this into a frigid, high-roofed cavern, dark but for the pale glows of forty or so lamp-packs.

He activated his own light and studied a data-slate in its beam, orienting himself with the map programmed into it. He identified the tunnel down which he needed to proceed and sent a pair of scouts ahead, ensuring first that their comm-beads were operational. Costellin cursed under his breath as the Termite’s engine caught with a raucous roar; if there were necrons anywhere in these mines, then he feared they would be on their way here by now.

It took the squat Termite a few attempts to align itself with the tunnel mouth before it could heave itself forwards. It set a steady walking pace, crushing loose rocks beneath its caterpillar tracks, so the last of the grenadiers had plenty of time to descend the shaft and catch up with it. They had to trail along behind the vehicle because, apart from a few places where the tunnel briefly widened, there was no room to pass it: a problem for the scouts, Costellin noted, should they run into trouble ahead; a problem for everyone else should it creep up behind them.

He kept his eye on the map, voxing directions ahead of him. Fortunately, the mine tunnels tended to branch rather than turn, and only once did the Termite have to employ its heavy, roof-mounted drill in order to widen a junction and ease its passage. Less than ninety minutes later, however, the tunnel they were following made a sharp northward curve, away from their objective.

‘This is it,’ Costellin voxed, inspecting the map. ‘Right here. We need to go through that wall at an angle of either fifteen or thirty-five degrees to the direction of the tunnel – our cartographer isn’t quite sure which. I suggest we try fifteen to begin with, and a downward slope of about, oh, ten, and if we don’t hit another tunnel within five hundred metres, pull out and we’ll try an alternative trajectory.’

The Termite’s drill began to spin, its back end rising on rusty hydraulics, and as the bit made contact with the rock wall, an ear-piercing shriek made Costellin wince.

They were lucky, this time. Only a few minutes after the Termite’s back end had vanished into a hole of its own making, its crew reported that they had found the adjoining tunnel. Unfortunately, they had broken into it from above, requiring them to reverse some way and then increase their angle of descent for a second attempt. The consequence of this was a larger connecting tunnel than planned, and of course it collapsed almost at once.

Costellin retreated from a thick cloud of dust and dirt. The masked grenadiers, however, went straight to work on the instructions of their watchmasters, one squad retrieving entrenching tools from their backpacks while another collected mine props from side tunnels. They didn’t have to dig too far as much of the tunnel was still passable, albeit by clambering over mounds of rubble or by squeezing through snake-thin gaps between them. Even so, it was an hour or more before the first of them emerged into the second mine at last, where the Termite sat waiting for them.

It was then that their problems really began.

The map of the second mine was hopelessly inaccurate, leading them in circles. Costellin checked every tunnel with a compass, paced out its length and marked amendments on his slate, but it was impossible to tell which of two walls he had to break through next. His first choice proved to be the wrong one and, as close to necron territory as they now had to be, he rued the wasted use of that deafening drill.

The second wall, however, yielded with surprising speed, and the Termite’s short, straight tunnel held up long enough for everyone to rush through into the third and, so long as the map was correct on this point, final mine. They had no further need of the Termite now, so Costellin took some pleasure in having its engine stilled, though it took almost a full minute for the grumbling echoes to subside.

It was largely with this next task in mind that he had requisitioned the tech-priest. Lomax stepped forward, ducked under the back end of the Termite’s drill and opened a compartment there. He flexed his fingers, then plunged them into the vehicle’s exposed arcane workings, all the time speaking litanies and prayers to the God-Emperor in his aspect of the Deus Mechanicus. Costellin couldn’t hope to understand the tech-priest’s esoteric rituals, but he watched all the same, until Lomax stepped back from the Termite, having extracted from it a rusted grey box in a tangle of wires, which he held reverently a servo-arm’s length away from himself.

They moved on then, and this time the map brought them soon enough to a sizeable cavern, similar to the one into which they had first dropped. Six lifter cages stood silently in its centre, and Costellin pointed Lomax towards these and asked if he could bring them to life. The tech-priest confirmed that, with enough time and peace, he could, by lashing the Termite’s power source up to their mechanisms.

In the meantime, at Costellin’s suggestion, the grenadiers unravelled bedrolls and stole a couple of hours’ sleep, in their masks, although each platoon left a ten-man squad on watch. Costellin checked his chrono. After all their tribulations, they had actually made good time for a pre-dawn assault on the generatorum above them.

He didn’t sleep himself. He used this quiet time to commune with the Emperor, to make what he suspected would be his final peace with Him.

The tech-priest’s rites had been successful. With a clashing of metal, a bright blue glow and an ozone stink, the lifters lurched into life. Only four platforms were present but, after a few minutes, the remaining two dropped into their metal-mesh cages. Costellin was relieved to see them. If the lifter shafts had been blocked, then their mission would have ended right there and then.

By now, the grenadiers were all on their feet, bedrolls packed away, and Costellin marshalled three squads into the cages and sent them surface-ward, along with a lieutenant from Gamma Company. Twenty minutes later, a vox from the lieutenant confirmed that the mine entrance was secure, that there was no sign of necrons in the vicinity and that he had sent the lifters back to collect another load.

He was interrupted by Colonel 186, cutting in on the command channel. He requested an update, which Costellin gave, then the colonel advised that there had been a development at his end too. ‘The necrons are amassing a force,’ he said, ‘even larger than the one they sent north. Scans suggest it is heading our way.’

‘Just as you approach the west-side generatorum,’ Costellin breathed. ‘Hanrik was right.’

‘This is good news, Costellin. It means they do care about the generatorums. You are doing the Emperor’s work in there.’

‘They must have chosen to sacrifice the south-side facility rather than divide their forces and risk losing both. But, colonel, how many…?’

‘I have requested reinforcements from the other three regiments, but of course they are under-strength too, and they each have their own line to hold.’

‘The 42nd barely managed to hold off the necrons last week. If their army has grown since then… Eighteen hundred men, colonel. We lost eighteen hundred men.’

‘But those losses taught us much about the enemy’s abilities. The generals have run the numbers, Costellin. They say we can prevail even against these increased odds. We can beat those horrors back into the ground where they came from.’

Costellin sighed. ‘I pray you’re right,’ he said. ‘May the Emperor be with you.’

‘And with you,’ returned the colonel.

Costellin turned to give the ‘good news’ to his team, opening a vox-channel so that those on the surface could hear it too. He focused on the fact that, with the necron army heading west, they had been given their hoped-for distraction after all. ‘We have a chance,’ he said, ‘to strike a resounding blow against–’

He never got to finish speaking. Nightmarish figures loomed in the dim glow of the grenadiers’ lights, and Costellin whirled to find that they were behind him too, streaming from the walls of the cavern. Like ghosts, he thought, and immediately he knew what he was facing, remembering the descriptions of these half-formed creatures he had heard after their attack upon the 42nd regiment.

They were even more gruesome, more horrifying, in the flesh – in the metal, rather – than the commissar could ever have imagined they would be. They descended upon the Death Korps grenadiers, their elongated spinal cords snapping around to deliver lethal electric stings, but when the grenadiers fired upon them in return, their las-beams passed through the necron ghosts’ semi-transparent forms.

Costellin drew both his weapons, the plasma pistol to discourage the creatures from closing with him, the chainsword to combat them when, given their unique abilities, they inevitably did. He was comforted to feel the vibrations of the latter, trembling through the bones of his hand, and hear the buzz of its whirling blades like that of an enraged swarm of Catachan blood wasps.

‘Remember your briefing,’ he voxed to his team. ‘These things can become intangible at will. Wait until they attack and fire at them while they’re solid.’

A ghost homed in on a Krieg watchmaster, long arms lashing out like whips towards his face. Its scalpelled fingers burrowed into his mask and gouged out thick streams of blood from his eyes, but the watchmaster’s squad followed Costellin’s orders and chose that moment to pepper it with hellgun beams. The necron flinched with each strike but recovered, until one good shot – and Costellin wished he could have told which one it was, could have worked out where this thing’s weak spots were, if indeed it had any – knocked it out of the air to land in a coiled heap, inert.

Another ghost was flying at Costellin, and he greeted it with a bolt of super-heated plasma, which passed straight through it. Having anticipated this, he swung his chainsword at the moment it reached for him, and parted its metal skull from its shoulders. The next attack came from behind, and Costellin didn’t have time to swing his sword around to defend himself; he could only leap for cover as a ghost sailed over his head, bringing up his pistol as it wheeled around and made a second dive for him. A grenadier beat him to the punch, and his attacker was liquefied in a burst of melta fire, the periphery of which washed over Costellin and left his cheeks feeling sunburnt, the odour of his own singed eyebrows in his nostrils.

It was no use. There were too many of these creatures, at least thirty of them, and their intangibility gave them a distinct advantage over the admittedly more numerous grenadiers. Not only that, but their fallen were rising again. Temporarily unmolested, Costellin fired from the sidelines in support of his men, but although his aim was more often true than not, at least two in three of his shots passed harmlessly through their targets, and the grenadiers were falling one by one, stunned by those spine-tails or butchered by metallic fingers.

The voice of the remaining Krieg lieutenant hissed over Costellin’s comm-bead. Even he had accepted the hopelessness of the situation, and his suggestion was that they evacuate thirty more men in the now-returned lifters, for the good of the overall mission. ‘You should go with them,’ he said. ‘I’ll stay here, buy you as much time as I am able.’ He was right, and indeed Costellin had come to the same conclusion himself. Still, he hesitated for a second before he approved the lieutenant’s self-sacrificial gesture, because he was still human.

Then, a new sound was added to the hubbub around him: a rustling sound, like a million leaves blown on a strong gale. Suddenly, from the tunnel openings around the cavern walls, erupted great hordes of flying metal insects, each one of them larger than one of Costellin’s hands.

There was no time to lose now. The lieutenant ordered the closest grenadiers into the lifter cages, and Costellin backed into one too. His pistol was still flaring and, gratifyingly, its plasma bursts consumed whole areas of the swarm, but always the gaps were soon filled as more insects streamed inward from the tunnels. The grenadiers’ melta guns – the few they had between them – were having a similar effect, while their hellguns destroyed what they hit, but their focused beams could only take out two or three of their scores of targets at a time.

Another man fell, borne down by six smaller bodies. Costellin thought he might have been suffocated by them, but as the victorious insects took flight once more, he saw that their victim was bleeding from a hundred shallow cuts.

The necron ghosts, of course, could pass through the insect swarm with impunity to blindside the grenadiers. They were cutting down victim after victim, almost before any of them could react. Costellin’s lifter cage was now full, four grenadiers crowded onto the platform beside him, still shooting back into the melee, and he holstered his chainsword and smacked his palm into the glowing activation rune. A phalanx of the swarm came surging towards him, as if some gestalt mind had sensed his attempt to escape, and the gate of the cage was heaving and rattling, sliding too slowly shut. But it made it across and the latch slid home at the exact moment that the first of the insects slammed into it with sledgehammer force. They were clinging to the metal mesh, straining their claws in vain, too fat to squeeze their bodies through the gaps, but it wouldn’t be long before they tore that metal mesh apart. And in the meantime, of course, the necron ghosts were faced with no such obstacle.

The platform juddered, heaved and began to rise, leaving the scrabbling insects behind it, and, to Costellin’s right, a second lifter had started on its way too. Turning to his left, however, he was horrified to see two necron ghosts swooping unhindered through the lifter cage there, and efficiently dissecting its five occupants who, in such cramped confines, couldn’t even bring their hellguns to bear on their killers.

Costellin saw Lomax too, hammering on the closed gate of a fourth cage, wrenching the gate from its hinges even though the platform within was already full and rising away from him. Necrons swooped upon the tech-priest from each side, but even as they reached him Costellin was carried through the cavern roof and into a dark stone shaft, and therefore doubtless spared another grisly image to add to his nightmares.

He wasn’t safe yet.

He ordered the grenadiers back to the platform’s edges. There was little room to spare, but they did manage to clear a tiny space between them, upon which Costellin had them train their weapons. A minute passed, and he began to feel the precaution had not been necessary. Then, a necron ghost came screaming up through the floor, and four hellguns barked – Costellin’s plasma pistol would have burnt off the feet of all present – and the foul thing died, then twitched back to life, then died again beneath a second salvo of las-beams.

Another minute and a half went by, the weight of the dead necron’s skull against Costellin’s foot making his flesh crawl. There were no further intruders, however, and he began to think they had survived the worst of this encounter.

Then the platform shuddered to a halt, and the blue lights along its edges blinked out. ‘Golden Throne!’ he cursed. ‘They must have destroyed the power source from the Termite. We’re trapped down here!’

‘We can climb, sir,’ a grenadier suggested, indicating the four rusted but stout chains that had been pulling them upwards. Costellin didn’t much care for that prospect, and he tried to vox the lieutenant on the surface, hoping there might be a manual winch up there for use in just such an emergency. He received no reply, and, switching to a general channel, picked up only static. Frustrated, he tore the comm-bead from his ear. On top of everything else, now they had lost the vox-caster too.

‘All right,’ he said resignedly. ‘Climbing it is, and we had best be quick. We don’t know how much longer our comrades below us can hold out. There could be more of those creatures snapping at our heels at any moment. Worse, they could have reported our position to their main force. There could be an army of necrons heading for the top of this shaft as I speak, and if they reach it before we do…’ He didn’t have to spell out the consequences of such a disaster.

Two grenadiers had already taken a chain each. They braced their feet against the side of the lifter shaft and hauled themselves upwards, their lamp-packs attached to the bayonets of their hellguns and bobbing around like fireflies in the dark. The other two followed a moment later, which left only Costellin himself.

He tugged at a chain, and his gloves came away slick with oil. He didn’t know how much further this shaft ran, didn’t know if, lacking the youthful strength of the grenadiers, he could make it up, but what choice did he have other than to try?

He began to climb.

Chapter Seventeen

Another day, like the same day. Another twelve hours of labouring in the rubble, trying not to think. The only recent variation was that work shifts had been shortened to accommodate acts of worship, of which Amareth led three per day at dawn, noon and sunset. By this, the third day, Arex had become, if not exactly comfortable with these, then at least more tolerant of them. She was grateful for the respite they offered her from her work and for the protection of the temple building from the budding cold of winter. She wondered if this made her a sinner.

During the first service, two men had leapt up in protest, and Arex had wished for their courage… until Amareth had had them brought forward, put a laser pistol to their heads and despatched them ‘to the Iron Gods’ mercy’. There had been no more objections since then.

The temple bells began to peal now, and Arex laid down her shovel and joined the shuffling line of slaves being herded towards the sound. She hadn’t realised the morning had grown so old. She looked for Tylar, her stomach knotting when she couldn’t see him. What if he had lost track of the time too, and wasn’t back yet?

What if Amareth had chosen today to take her to the pyramid?

‘He’s afraid,’ Tylar had whispered to her last night, as they had lain together in the darkness of the lectorum. ‘Amareth is afraid that, when he goes to his gods, they’ll reject him or worse. He is desperate for their endorsement but, in order to have that, first he must risk everything he has gained, risk his very life.’

‘Then he might not do it?’ Arex had breathed. ‘He might not dare to.’

‘He will do it,’ Tylar had answered grimly. ‘Amareth is insecure, desirous of the power and the status he believes the Iron Gods can give him. He knows the risk, that is why he is holding back – but he will take it soon.’

This morning, he had left Arex to work alone, and she had scolded herself for missing him so much. He had become so important to her in so short a time. Her lifeline, her hope. They had had no choice, though. Tylar had to make plans, and he couldn’t do that around her. She was being too closely monitored.

She trudged into the temple, the painted skull above its doors no longer even giving her pause. The congregation filled only the front few pews, but still this was an increase on yesterday’s attendance. Amareth had ordained several of his overseers, elevating favoured slaves to replace them. He had sent his new priests out to ‘spread the word’, and they had returned with numerous grateful refugees.

Arex craned her neck, looking for Tylar amid the throng but not finding him.

‘I think the overseers are getting complacent,’ he had said last night, ‘and some of them are new to the job and enjoying the opportunity to lord it over the rest of us but doing little else. Added to that, they’re having to follow you around wherever you go. I think, if I time it right, I can slip away.’

Perhaps he had done just that, Arex thought. Perhaps he had escaped and, despite his best intentions, he had seen the futility of returning for her and decided to save himself. She wouldn’t have blamed him.

Many of the slaves had painted their faces in emulation of the priests. The most popular design was a sun symbol on the forehead. It seemed that, with each new day, Arex was being dragged further into a pit of madness, and she feared she didn’t have the strength to remain afloat much longer.

She half-listened to another pious sermon from Amareth, sitting, standing, kneeling as instructed, all the time sandwiched between two overseers. She mouthed the words of the new, heretical catechisms but refused to give them voice. When heads were bowed in prayer to the Iron Gods, Arex entreated silently with the Emperor instead. She mentioned Gunthar, as she did every day, but today she also prayed for Tylar. She asked the Emperor to keep him safe, wherever he might be.

She ought to have known, by now, what His answer would be.

The service was over, the congregation filing out, when two overseers appeared, pushing against the tide. They carried a third figure between them, his feet dragging behind him, his face a mass of bruises. He had obviously been beaten.

‘We have found him, Lord Amareth,’ crowed one of the escorts. ‘We have found the deserter, the heretic!’

‘I am loyal to the God-Emperor of Mankind,’ spat the prisoner. ‘I am not the heretic here.’ It was Tylar, of course, and Arex’s hand flew to her mouth in dismay as he was hauled along the nave, past her row of pews. Her legs felt weak and she made to sit down, but her overseer guards hauled her upright again.

‘His name is Tylar, my lord. He was absent from work detail this morning, and discovered near the High Temple.’

Tylar had reached the looming figure of Amareth now, and was forced to his knees before him. The High Priest’s expression was unreadable behind his skull mask and, when he spoke, his baritone voice was likewise devoid of emotion. ‘You have sought to defy the gods,’ he proclaimed, and Arex couldn’t tell if he was disappointed, angry or perhaps even glad of this excuse to flaunt his newfound power. ‘Have they not preached, through me, that to do so is to bring down their justice upon us all?’

‘Your gods are evil,’ spat Tylar. ‘It doesn’t matter what you do, how you try to please them. They will destroy you as they have destroyed all else they have touched.’

‘That will be the last blasphemy you utter,’ said Amareth, perfectly calmly, and a tear caught in Arex’s throat as he drew his pistol out from beneath his vestments.

‘I don’t think it will,’ said Tylar, ‘because you see, “Lord Amareth”, you aren’t the only one who can find a fallen soldier in these ruins. You aren’t the only one who can scavenge his equipment. I had to go all the way to the xenos pyramid to collect this prize, but I think it was well worth the trip.’

The slaves who had started to leave had returned, had begun to edge forward, ghoulishly eager to witness this heretic’s fate. Now, a susurrant horror spread through them and they drew back again. Tylar climbed to his feet, unimpeded by the overseers to each side of him, and even Amareth himself was suddenly deflated.

Tylar was holding something, and at last Arex could make it out: a red, ovoid shape, stamped with the stark black image of a skull and crossbones. ‘This,’ said Tylar, ‘is a krak grenade. It’s designed to blow through tank armour, so its blast is far stronger and more concentrated than that of the more familiar frag grenade. If I were to pull this pin now, trust me, there would be no chance of any of us surviving with shrapnel wounds, least of all our self-appointed, self-serving High Priest here.’

‘The Iron Gods will protect me,’ said Amareth, but he sounded less than sure of this.

‘What… what do you want?’ stammered one of the overseers.

‘What I want,’ said Tylar, ‘more than almost anything else at this moment, is to do it, to put an end to this lunatic cult. I want to bring down this roof, and I would give my life for it proudly, but I won’t, because this was a house of the Emperor once and I have faith that it will be again.’ He had moved around behind Amareth as he spoke, and now he slipped an arm around his throat. ‘So, instead, the High Priest and I are going to walk out of here, along with any of these people, these slaves, who wish to come with us, anyone who wishes to be free.’

‘And then what?’ sneered Amareth. ‘You talk of freedom, but people like us, we have never been free. We have only had different masters.’

‘You don’t have to listen to him,’ Tylar addressed the crowd. ‘Amareth claims to speak for his gods, but you must know by now he only speaks for himself.’

‘Walk out of this temple if you will,’ challenged Amareth, his confidence regained, his voice a quiet warning that carried nonetheless to every corner. ‘Fight the gods if you believe they can be overcome. Tempt their wrath if you dare.’

There was silence then, a long, terrible silence in which Arex felt she could almost have been crushed by the palpable longings and the fears of this downtrodden flock, and she shared those conflicting emotions, her feet like plascrete, weighted to the floor. She needed somebody else to make that first move, but nobody was game. She wanted to scream at them, What are you waiting for? This is your chance!

Then Tylar reached out to her, and Arex was released.

As she started towards him, an overseer blocked her path, then saw the threat in Tylar’s eyes and gave way. ‘We’re leaving now,’ said Tylar, ‘and taking Amareth with us. As soon as we’re clear, and sure that no one is following us, I’ll release him, you have my word on that, and you are welcome to him. If anybody does come after us, however, if even one person steps out of this building...’

They made for a clumsy procession, the three of them, stumbling towards the doors, Tylar bundling Amareth ahead of him while maintaining his hold on the pin of the krak grenade, Arex behind them, terrified that someone might call their bluff, even more afraid that Tylar might not be bluffing. If anyone did have plans to impede them, however, they were quashed by the High Priest himself.

‘Do as they say,’ instructed Amareth. ‘The gods will take care of them. There is nowhere they can run to.’

‘We don’t have to run,’ scoffed Tylar. ‘We need only hide and wait, for the Emperor’s glorious armies to destroy your so-called gods.’

Then they were outside, and overseers and priests were crowding the doorway behind them but careful not to cross the threshold, and Arex had hopes that maybe, just maybe, they could make it after all; this desperate plan might actually succeed.

Then, in his struggle to manoeuvre his hostage down the marble steps, Tylar slipped and Amareth seized his moment. He squirmed free of Tylar’s hold and lunged for his wrist, sending the grenade spinning out of his hand. It bounced, a heart-jolting two, three, four times, on its way across the paved courtyard, and only after it had rolled to a halt in the choked gutter could Arex think again, move again.

Tylar was yelling at her to grab the grenade, as he and Amareth wrestled. She ran for it, but overseers were on her heels and Arex howled in anguish as they fell upon her, bore her down. She hit the plascrete, her outstretched hand just a few centimetres short of her target. She strained her shoulder, her arm, her fingers, but the grenade was scooped up, whisked out of her reach. In the meantime, Tylar had disappeared beneath a heaving mound of attackers from which Amareth now gracefully extracted himself, adjusting his skull mask, and just like that they had failed. It was over.

Arex tried to stand but she only got as far as her knees. A jeering crowd was forming around her; her hands were pulled behind her back and secured with proctor handcuffs. She was joined by Tylar, who was similarly manacled, and the crowd were baying for the blood of them both, but silence descended as Amareth marched through them. As he stopped before his prisoners, as he called for the pistol he had dropped in the church. A nervous overseer scuttled forward with the krak grenade and asked what he should do with it, and a recoiling Amareth ordered him to disarm it, somewhere far away from here, and waved away his protestations that he didn’t know how.

‘Do what you like with me,’ pleaded Tylar, ‘but I beg of you, if there is a compassionate feeling left in you, spare Arex. She bears no blame for my actions. She only came with me because… because we are betrothed.’

Arex’s heart gave a lurch at that. She knew it had been a desperate bluff, but still she felt she was betraying Gunthar somehow by allowing the words to stand.

‘You needn’t concern yourself,’ said Amareth and, although Arex couldn’t see his face, she could hear the smirk in his voice. ‘The girl will not die, at least not yet, not by my hand. It so happens that, when I communed with the Iron Gods but an hour ago, they made their intentions for Lady Hanrik perfectly clear to me.’

An eager priest jogged up behind Amareth and handed him his weapon, which he levelled at Tylar’s head once more. Tylar closed his eyes, waited to die, but then the gun was lowered. ‘The two of you are betrothed?’ Amareth repeated. ‘Then we have been doubly blessed, to be sent two members of our former Governor’s spoilt brood. I will present you both to the Iron Gods, to do with as they will.’

His words were underscored by the crump of an explosion from somewhere behind the schola. The nervous overseer, it seemed, had not been understating his bomb disposal skills, but Arex was too wrapped up in herself, too numb, even to react to the sound. Tylar’s lie had bought him time, and kept the two of them together, and for both of these things she was grateful. She couldn’t help but fear, though, that soon they might both wish they had been granted a swift death.

Amareth had whistled up a PDF truck, in itself evidence of his growing influence. Arex and Tylar were bundled into its rear, cuffed and surrounded by a score of emerald-cloaked priests. The ‘High Temple’ wasn’t far – Tylar had made the return trip on foot this morning – but Amareth wished to travel in what now passed for style.

Arex’s first glimpse of the black pyramid was across a skyway railing, its sheer stone face blotting out the gap between two lonely towers, and it seemed to her that it was sucking all light, all hope, from the world.

Even Amareth couldn’t make the lifters work without power, so they faced a long slog down a hab-block staircase. Several times, Arex stumbled, her bound hands throwing her off-balance, and once she managed to topple four priests like dominoes. Whenever this happened, they cursed and made threats towards her, or just gloated about her likely fate once the Iron Gods had her. Tylar jumped to Arex’s defence each time, but she didn’t have the spirit to argue for herself any more.

They sloshed through the filth of the undercity, and Arex remembered a time, not so long ago, when she had leaned over a railing and gazed down into this alien world with a thrill in her heart. She had dreamed about seeing these streets close up, but never like this. She was aware of mutant eyes, watching her from the shadows, but they maintained their distance. Perhaps it was Amareth’s skull mask and sceptre that kept them at bay. It seemed that they too recognised their masters.

They found more mutants, and a few human beings, labouring in the rubble as the slaves did above. Arex didn’t know whether to feel sorry for them or despise them. As she wrestled with this dilemma, she almost walked into a creature from a nightmare.

She flinched from it, catching her breath. She had only seen these cadaverous horrors from a distance before. An impassive metal skull swung around to face her, pinpoints of green light flaring in its eyeholes, and Arex found her soul transfixed by an image of death made chillingly incarnate. She tried to back away from it, but Amareth’s priests barred her path. Evidently, however, she held no interest for the creature, and it turned and proceeded on its way, the priests parting obsequiously for it.

‘Last chance to back out of this, Amareth,’ muttered Tylar as they neared their objective. In the green light that spilled out from the pyramid’s innards, many more of the metal cadavers scurried to and fro, some wheeling barrows full of debris, their work conducted in eerie silence, the purpose of their toils unknowable.

‘You think they’ll thank you for bringing us to them?’ Tylar went on. ‘You think they’ll pat you on the back and make you their favourite pet? I think you’re no more than a nuisance to them, Amareth, an insect buzzing about their heads, and if they acknowledge your existence at all it will only be to swat you.’ The High Priest marched on doggedly, but neither he nor his henchmen rose to Tylar’s bait, perhaps because they had no answers to his charge.

Then Amareth halted before a small group of the cadavers, and his priests collected behind him, and pushed Arex and Tylar to the front of them.

Amareth waited to be noticed. When this didn’t happen, when indeed a pair of his Iron Gods detached themselves from the group and passed him by without so much as a glance in his direction, he cleared his throat impatiently. His gods ignored this too, so Amareth repeated the mannerism, and then launched into a prepared speech.

‘My lords,’ he began, ‘I am Amareth, your High Priest. I am sure you know me.’

His voice was quieter, less assured than normal. Still, it gained the creatures’ attention. Some of them turned silently to regard him, and Amareth faltered before their green-lit, hollow-eyed stares. With a sudden rush of self-consciousness, he removed his mask to reveal his sallow, too-human features, black hair plastered to his scalp by nervous sweat.

‘I… I have brought an offering to you,’ he said. ‘These people, this woman and this man here, they are related to our… to the former Governor of this world. He… Hanrik is his name, he values their lives. I thought you could…’ He trailed off, nonplussed in the face of his gods’ indifference. He glanced over his shoulder, saw his priests watching him keenly and, as far as Arex could tell, was spurred on by the growing disillusionment writ plain in their faces.

‘We wanted you to know,’ he said, ‘that we have heard your voice, and that the men who are waging war upon you, men like Governor Hanrik, they no longer represent us. We welcome you to this world, and we stand ready to serve you.’ He lowered himself to his knees, and his priests did the same. Arex almost followed suit, afraid of calling attention to herself by dissenting, but Tylar stood steadfast beside her.

The Iron Gods turned away, uncaringly, leaving the self-styled High Priest and his followers genuflecting to no one. It was a moment before Amareth dared stand again, the others following his lead but hesitantly. He was clearly shaken, but not yet ready to give up on his mad dreams of power.

He seized Arex by the arm, waved his laser pistol in her face, and gave her a push towards the entranceway to the pyramid. ‘No,’ she protested, ‘no!’ But the priests were behind her again, with their stun batons in her back, prodding her onward.

As the gateway grew before her, she was blinded by the green light behind it, had to avert her eyes from it. She longed to link her arm with Tylar’s, to draw on his strength again, but their handcuffs made this impossible. ‘Remember,’ Tylar whispered to her, ‘the Emperor has decreed that you should live. We must keep fighting for Him.’

Suddenly, the Iron Gods were stirring, noticing the strangers in their midst as if for the first time, and moving to surround them. As one of the creatures blocked Amareth’s way to the pyramid, he pleaded desperately, ‘But you can’t… Didn’t you hear what I said? I am your High Priest. I have built a church in your name, and now I bring you the means to defeat your enemies. Why won’t you recognise me?’

The creatures didn’t move. Amareth glared at them for a moment longer, then lowered his shoulders, tried to push his way past them – and four of them raised their great guns in unison, and vaporised him in a cataclysmic outpouring of emerald force.

Where Amareth had once stood, now a wisp of steam curled upwards from the ground, and Arex took no pleasure in this downfall of an enemy, this confirmation of everything that Tylar had said to him. She just felt sick.

Half the priests were on their knees again, howling in anguish, wanting to know why their gods had turned against them, what they had to do to appease them. The rest were running for their lives. The Iron Gods fired after this latter group, claiming four more kills in the blink of an eye. Then they turned their attention to the supplicants before them, and set about destroying these too.

Arex made to run after the few escapees, but Tylar pulled her back. She realised where he was guiding her, and she cried out in protest, but there was no other way. There were no eyes upon them for the moment, but that would change, and there was nowhere else for them to hide, no other shelter within their reach.

So, Arex took a deep breath. She closed her eyes and she trusted her companion to guide her – and, as they crossed the threshold of the black pyramid, the Iron Gods’ High Temple, Arex could feel a soul-numbing cold enveloping her, and that hateful green light burning through her eyelids.

Chapter Eighteen

It had begun to rain. Fat, freezing drops of water spattered off Gunthar Soreson’s cheeks and trickled down his neck. He had been standing here, hemmed in by the rest of his platoon, for an age. To refocus his mind, he practised training his gun upon selected points in the rock face ahead of him. He was ready to do his duty.

He had been issued with the lasgun that morning: the Krieg Lucius-pattern variant, more powerful than the local PDF model but consequently a greedier consumer of power. Gunthar had been warned that each of his three power packs was good for only twenty-five shots. However, his main concern was that he hadn’t had a chance to fire this new weapon yet, get a feel for it.

The lasgun, it had been impressed upon him, was on loan from the Krieg 103rd regiment, who expected its return. ‘When you know it’s your time to die,’ the quartermaster had said, ‘when you’re staring down the barrel of a gauss flayer, the last thing you do is, you save that gun by hurling it as far away from you as you can.’

There weren’t enough vehicles to transport everyone, so almost two thousand troopers had been marched down the space port hill, along the approach road to the city. Their route had been lined with refugees, some cheering them on, others near-hysterical, all placing their hopes in these inexperienced men in ill-fitting uniforms.

Gunthar had heard a few grumbles from the diehard complainers that they hadn’t had time to rest, to prepare themselves. He, however, had slept soundly and dreamlessly last night, felt as prepared as he could be, and time to rest, for him, would have been unwelcome time to think.

The western edge of the city was blocked by a mountain of debris, as tall as its walls had once been. A large space had been cleared before this, into which soldiers had been pouring all morning. Gunthar had admired the precision of the Death Korps Guardsmen arriving from the north and the south, their discipline putting that of his own service to shame. He had chosen not to question the disproportionate placement of PDF troopers among the foremost ranks.

This wasn’t how he had pictured this day. Even through the early stages of his training, Gunthar had envisaged a daring rescue mission, snatching Arex from the necrons before they could loose off more than a few badly-aimed shots at him. Since Commissar Costellin’s team had left without him, and had reportedly been lost to vox contact, he had been forced to rethink those expectations.

The Imperial forces outnumbered their foes, Gunthar had been told, so if he could just kill one necron he would have played his part. It didn’t seem like much to ask of him. With the Lucius-forged lasgun in his hands, he felt he could do a lot better.

A pair of flyers had been circling above, staying well out of range of the necrons’ guns. Now, they peeled off, back towards the space port, and a PDF lieutenant barked out from behind Gunthar, ‘This is it, M Platoon. They’re here. Front rank, kneel!’ The same order was echoed to his left and his right, and three hundred troopers dropped and raised their weapons. Gunthar raised his too, although with four ranks in front of him, he knew it could be some time before he had a clear target to aim at.

‘Remember your training,’ the lieutenant instructed. ‘Stand your ground at all costs. Those who can, switch your guns to Full Auto and give those walking cadavers all you’ve got. When a necron falls, keep firing at it. I’m receiving a message from the governor-general; he is grateful for the sacrifice we are making, and he wishes the blessings of the God-Emperor upon us all.’

Almost as soon he had finished speaking, the rock pile trembled with a succession of heavy impacts to its far side. From the rear of the Imperial formation came the answering roars of the Death Korps’ own big guns, Earthshaker shells sailing across the crumbling barricade in the blind expectation of finding targets beyond it.

The enemy didn’t wait to be massacred. Necron ghosts came pouring through the rock, and through a stuttering volley of las-fire from the front two PDF ranks. They had been briefed about these horrors, prepared as best they could have been. Still, the reality was too much for many of them, and rookies and veterans alike attempted to flee but were held by the crush of bodies behind them. To Gunthar’s left, a substantial part of N Platoon was collapsed by those cowards in their midst.

Hearing more gunshots behind him, he glanced to find the necrons’ skin-coated ghouls already in the heart of the Death Korps’ ranks. The Guardsmen, of course, had been expecting just such an ambush, and they were blasting their attackers to the ground before their talon-knives could be brought to bear. Gunthar recalled his first encounter with those ghouls, in the dead of a long-gone night, another life. He remembered how afraid he had been of them then, but all he felt now was hatred.

The situation in front of him was rather less hopeful. The would-be deserters had been rallied by the harrying screams of their sergeants or just by the realisation that they couldn’t retreat and so might as well defend themselves. The air was sizzling with a latticework of las-beams, but the necron ghosts were soaring through this with ease, and when one of them was struck it hardly seemed to be hurt at all.

Fortunately, Death Korps grenadiers were in sniping positions, small mounds of rubble giving them height to fire over the heads of the troopers in their way. Their melta guns hissed and, although some of the ghosts sailed untouched through the blasts, more of them were destroyed. Still, the survivors were relentless, scything their way through scores of men and, before Gunthar knew it, the rank in front of him was kneeling and it was time for him to step up.

His Krieg gun had no Full Auto setting. ‘One well-aimed bolt from this will suffice,’ the quartermaster had told him. ‘There is no need for waste.’ Of course, he had been taking the wielder’s eye for granted in that equation, for Gunthar’s first two shots went hopelessly astray. His third hewed closer to the path he had envisaged for it, the fourth and fifth closer still, but he was losing precious seconds. A necron swooped in front of his face, and Gunthar thought it was coming for him, couldn’t target it in time, but instead it dropped onto the kneeling trooper in front of him.

The trooper swung his lasgun, tried to bat his attacker away, and the ghost was indeed dislodged but it took its victim’s face with it. The trooper threw up his hands but recoiled from his own touch, sprawling backwards into Gunthar, and for a terrible moment their gazes met. The trooper’s eyes were filled with raw, uncomprehending horror, white against a bloodied mass of exposed sinew. Feeling a surge of fury, Gunthar unleashed a vengeful fusillade in the escaping ghost’s direction.

The last two of his beams were dead on target, and he could have wept with frustration as they passed through their intangible target.

His lieutenant bellowed again and, with a numb disbelief, Gunthar discerned the command for his own rank, the new front rank, to kneel. His time was almost up, and he hadn’t yet scored his single kill, the best he could hope for now. He forced his thoughts away from the troopers who had died wanting of that goal, didn’t dare consider what that might mean for the outcome of this war.

Gunthar’s novice regiment had been given two speeches this morning. The second, from Colonel Braun with the governor-general in attendance, had been a stirring oration on the subjects of honour and glory and devotion to the Emperor. The Krieg drill instructors, however, had got there first with a treatise on death, and even then Gunthar had known which of them was being the more honest.

A ghost came streaming towards him and he focused on his aim, let the vile apparition grow in his sights, refusing to let it hurry him. One well-aimed bolt. It stabbed into an eye socket, extinguished the green light in there, sent the creature spinning helplessly head over tail. Gunthar’s first blood, if only metaphorically in the case of these bloodless horrors. His first unequivocal kill.

He could have leapt to this feet and cheered at that moment, could have died with a smile on his face, had a hand not gripped him by the ankle, had he not looked down, alarmed, into the imploring eyes of the faceless trooper, still alive though he must have been in unendurable pain. A part of Gunthar’s old self, his compassion, welled inside him, and he almost gave the man what he so clearly wanted, the mercy of a las-beam through the brain, but the voice of a Krieg instructor inside his head berated him for taking his eye off the enemy, and for the potential waste of ammunition.

On that first score, at least, the phantom voice had a point.

The middle section of the rock barricade was blown out, the top section collapsing into the gap and slip-sliding. A solid wave of debris flowed in Gunthar’s direction, blessing his dead comrades with an unexpected burial, threatening the same for him.

The next he knew, he was floundering on his stomach, his head hurting but he didn’t know why. He tried to push himself up, and a gobbet of blood splashed onto the back of his hand. He must have been cut, he thought, by a splinter of rock, rendered insensate for a moment. Of all the ways he had imagined falling today… Not this way, he thought. He raised himself to his hands and knees, dropped again as gunfire ignited the air above him.

He raised his head, tentatively, and peered through the blur of what had now become a steady drizzle of rain, and he saw them. For the first time, he saw exactly what the Imperial forces on Hieronymous Theta were facing.

The cadaverous foot soldiers, of course, Gunthar had encountered before, and they had been ghastly enough in small numbers. They stalked towards him now in their hundreds, their thousands, and the sight of their identical, expressionless skull faces almost froze his heart in his chest. Their long-barrelled guns vomited beam after beam of green lightning into the Imperial ranks; where that lightning struck, good men were reduced to ashes. But the foot soldiers weren’t the worst of it.

Arrayed behind these were even larger figures, with larger, twin-barrelled guns, which belched out streams of emerald energy over the foot soldiers’ heads – and flanking these monsters were necrons that appeared to have been butchered like the ghosts, the lower halves of their bodies removed and the upper halves fused to heavily armoured flying skimmers. Their right arms had been replaced by bulky gauss cannons, the right sides of their skulls by targeting auspexes.

Framing this nightmare army were the necron tanks. Gunthar’s drill instructors had spoken of these, of the damage they could do. They were pyramidal in shape, fashioned from a dark green metal – techno-sorcerous metal, Gunthar had heard, which, like the necrons themselves, could regenerate from almost any wound – and they hovered a few metres off the ground. Stamped in gold upon their sides were profane symbols, and green lightning flared within their enclosed turrets. They bristled with weapons, mercifully silent for now, but Gunthar knew instinctively that he wanted to be somewhere else before those guns came within firing range of him.

For now, however, he was trapped where he was, between the clawing, slashing ghouls behind him and the lightning weapons of the foot soldiers ahead, and for a moment, he saw no hope. The necrons had to be unstoppable. He had reckoned without the Death Korps of Krieg.

The Krieg Guardsmen, the majority of them, were no better armed than Gunthar was, than many of his comrades had been. The difference was that they knew how to use their weapons for maximum effect. They exhibited flawless teamwork, squads of Guardsmen focusing their fire upon one foe at a time until it fell – and the Korps’ heavy ordnance was beginning to make its mark too. The necrons were too close for the Earthshakers to bring their cannons to bear, but the smaller Medusas were more than taking up the slack, consuming whole clusters of the oncoming forces with each explosive shell they spat out.

Something thudded into the ground beside Gunthar, half-burying itself. A second later, he was pelted by flaming scraps of metal and he realised that the first object had not been a shell as he had first feared, but a necron skull. He scrambled out, revolted, from beneath the creature’s fragmented remains, only to find them crawling, slithering, across the rubble, piecing themselves back together. The green light snapped on in the skull’s eye sockets, and Gunthar remembered his gun. He jammed its barrel into the necron’s right eye, and he pulled the trigger.

His second kill was less cathartic than the first. For long seconds Gunthar couldn’t tear his gaze away from that metal skull, fearing that as soon as he turned his back its eyes might flare into life once more. His head was beginning to clear, enough for him to wonder why he wasn’t dead yet. The necrons had overlooked him, down here on the ground, but he knew this wouldn’t last once he started firing at them again.

He pushed himself backwards with his elbows, rolled behind a small mound of debris. It would grant him some cover from the necrons in front of him; the ones behind, he would just have to pray kept their sights forward. He cleared a little hollow atop the mound for his gun barrel, used it to steady his aim.

Krieg Guardsmen were closing with the necron foot soldiers one on one, keeping them from employing their guns. Invariably, this led to the death of the brave Guardsman in question, if not at the hands of his chosen opponent then dealt by the remaining ghosts that still circled the battlefield. Each Krieg soldier that fell, however, was replaced by another, and the necrons, peppered with las-fire and the occasional melta blast and unable to fire back, were falling at the greater rate.

Then the first of those necron tanks entered the fray, the lightning from its turret lashing out in focused beams that blew great, gaping holes in the Imperial defences. The Medusas rounded on it, and a fortuitous series of direct hits blasted the floating dreadnought apart. It dropped to the ground, smoke curling from beneath its dark green plating, but more vehicles like it were already edging forwards.

Gunthar kept firing, targeting the foot soldiers because he knew his lasgun could be effective against them, counting his shots until he reached twenty-five then replacing his power pack and firing again. He scored several glancing hits, but only one target fell, and this rose again within seconds. Suddenly, the cluster of necrons into which he had been shooting was wiped out by a Medusa shell, and he wondered what the use of his being here was, what difference he was making. He knew how the Death Korps soldiers, any of them, would have answered that question.

They were like a force of nature, wave after wave of them surging towards their enemies, to be dashed against them like the tide against a cliff face. Each of their lives bought no more than a few seconds for the Medusas to reload, and yet still the skull-masked soldiers kept on coming, eroding away at that cliff.

The necrons were not without tactics of their own. Gunthar realised that they had focused their efforts upon one point in the Krieg line, and now, suddenly, they broke through there. A score of gauss guns flared in unison, and green energy coruscated around a Medusa and, incredibly, stripped the armour from its frame as if it had been mere flesh on bone. In the meantime, a pair of necron tanks nudged into the Death Korps ranks, and their manifold guns discharged great lightning arcs that could fell five men at once. While the Imperial forces were in disarray, looking to regroup before this latest threat, a flank of skimmer-mounted necrons dived over their heads to make short work of a second Medusa.

Then Gunthar heard a new sound behind him, a thundering of hoof beats, and in an instant the tide was turned once more.

Krieg death riders came sweeping in from two directions and set about the outflanked necrons, surprising them with the speed of their arrival. Their hunting lances were tipped with explosives, powerful enough to blow a necron foot soldier apart. The necrons responded by targeting the riders’ mounts, unaware that these were no commonplace horses. They were bred, like the Death Korps themselves, in the underground hives of Krieg, bio-sculpted to cope with its surface conditions. They had been gifted with sub-dermal armour and a drug injection system that kept them stimulated, aggressive and immune to all but the most crippling pain.

Of course, they were still no match for the green lightning, but they attacked with such violence, such frenzy, that few necrons had the chance to bring their guns to bear before they were knocked off their feet and trampled by uncaring hooves. In contrast, the skilled riders aimed their lances, and fired laspistols, with uncanny precision despite their mounts’ bucking and rearing. Their gas-masked faces, peering out from beneath their helmets, gave the impression that this horsemanship came effortlessly to them, and they flew their skull-emblazoned pendants proudly.

Given some respite, the Medusas barked again and two more necron tanks went up in flames. The melta gun snipers had picked off most of the remaining ghosts and some skimmers, and even Gunthar despatched another foot soldier as it brought its gun to bear upon a mounted ridemaster. The quartermasters moved in to patch up the fallen and even some Guardsmen with the most horrific injuries were rising, necron-like, to fight again.

A Krieg platoon had pinned down a smaller group of foot soldiers but, as Gunthar looked for a shot, the beleaguered necrons vanished en masse. Was that it, he wondered? Was it over at last? His other senses told him that it wasn’t. Seeking a new target, his eyes alighted upon a hovering tank even as it began to belch out a stream of gleaming reinforcements. New necrons, he wondered, or the old ones restored? Either way, this battle was far from done yet.

Gunthar’s third power pack had dried. His orders, in this situation, were to find a quartermaster and request more ammunition, but the corpse of a PDF comrade – his former sergeant, he realised – lay closer, lying where the quartermasters couldn’t get to it. It was scarred by claw marks but intact and still gripping its lasgun. He would have to break cover to reach it, but what choice did he have?

He was expected to die today, anyway.

He had been told this more times than he could count these past weeks. He thought he had accepted it, but he realised now, assailed by the clamour and the stink of the battlefield, a pawn at the mercy of the destructive forces about him, that he hadn’t accepted it at all. A part of him had clung to the image of war presented by the newsreels, had expected to buck the odds against him and return to the space port steeped in glory. He had been one of the more promising trainees, after all.

He saw now that, on the front lines of a war such as this one, no amount of training could guarantee survival, nor hardly improve those odds. Survival wasn’t a matter of seeing the gauss beams coming, or of dodging the explosions, because neither of these things were humanly possible. Survival was a matter of standing in the right place, not a fraction forwards or to the left, of not being the person beside you. It was a matter of chance, blind chance, and of the Emperor’s whim, and by coming to understand this Gunthar felt he had finally rid himself of his last vestiges of fear, of dread.

He was going to die, if not today then tomorrow, or the week after. It would happen, most likely, in the blink of an eye without his knowing his killer. So, all that could possibly matter to him now was how much he could accomplish in the meantime.

He couldn’t picture Arex’s face any more. He had been doing this for her, only for her, but at some point, without any awareness of it on his part, he had given up the hope of their ever being together again. It was better that way, Gunthar thought. The man she had known – the man she had loved and who had loved her in return – that man was gone. Perhaps, one day, she would hear his name again, even visit his grave if he had one, and remember the short time they had had together with fondness.

Perhaps she would be told how Gunthar had fought for her, died for her.

If so, then he intended to make her proud of him. Judging, as best he could, that all eyes were elsewhere, he ran for the sergeant’s body, dropped beside it, swapped its lasgun for his own. Then, in emulation of the Death Korps Guardsmen, with whom he now felt a greater kinship than he had ever dreamed possible, he ran at the enemy.

Yes, Gunthar Soreson was expected to die today.

But he wasn’t dead yet.

Chapter Nineteen

By the time Hanrik found Colonel 186, he had worked himself into a sweat. He had taken the stairs three at a time, fast-walked through the space port terminal until his chest ached. He pushed his way through the refugees on the hillside. They stood in the freezing rain, facing eastward, and Hanrik followed their silent stares.

He hadn’t been out here, hadn’t looked, in over a week. In that time, his city had shrunk further than he could have imagined, become a skeleton of its former self. Its depleted skyline was alternately lit by flashes of fire and obscured by plumes of smoke, and Hanrik knew he was already too late.

The colonel stood in the back of a half-track, surveying the scene through a pair of magnoculars. He failed to react to the Governor-General’s insistence that they needed to talk, so Hanrik talked anyway. Flustered as he was, he didn’t make a great deal of sense, but he did get the colonel’s attention.

‘You agreed,’ said the colonel without lowering the magnoculars, ‘insisted, in fact, that the Planetary Defence Force play a full part in this conflict.’

‘A part, yes,’ said Hanrik, ‘but not like this. Not–’

‘You left the details of their deployment to my company commanders.’

‘Cannon fodder!’ Hanrik burst out. ‘You used my men as cannon fodder, put them on the front lines to be slaughtered. I’ve been listening to the reports, and they… It’s a massacre out there!’

‘They are soldiers, General Hanrik. They knew what to expect.’

‘But they’re… So many of them, the majority of them, they only just… They only had three weeks to train. Even the experienced ones among them, they haven’t faced anything like this before, and they’re under-equipped…’

The colonel turned then, to regard Hanrik blankly through the eyepieces of his gasmask. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is precisely why their value is limited.’

‘They’re expendable, you mean,’ said Hanrik bitterly.

‘If you prefer. You should be proud of your men, General Hanrik. My officers on the ground report that they did their duty. They impeded the necron advance for almost a minute longer than we expected. A credit to your training.’

‘You talk about them as if they were just… They were people, damn it, with lives and jobs and families. Look around you, colonel. Look at the faces around you, every one of them praying for someone they know, someone they love. Just one of your… your numbers means everything to them, and I… How do I explain to them that most of their brothers, their sons aren’t coming back?’

He remembered being told that his own sons weren’t coming back. Three separate messages, eighteen months apart, but Hanrik hadn’t forgotten a single word of them.

The colonel said dismissively, ‘The citizens of your world have grown soft. They have forgotten their debt to the Emperor.’

That was like a blow to Hanrik’s face, and he lashed out verbally, ‘I should have known you wouldn’t understand. You’re incapable of human feeling, afraid to even show your face. Who do you care about, colonel? Who is there to miss you?’

The Krieg man turned his back and raised his magnoculars, further incensing Hanrik. ‘I’m talking to you, colonel,’ he snapped, ‘and for once you are going to listen to me. We may serve in different forces, but technically I still outrank you. I’ve asked around, I know you’ve only commanded your regiment for five minutes, whereas I–’

‘Would you rather it had been my Guardsmen who had died?’

The sudden question took Hanrik aback.

‘Would you rather we had sacrificed them, left the defence of this world to your under-equipped trainees? Because that, General Hanrik, is bordering on treason.’

‘Of course I don’t… Of course I wouldn’t… I value their lives as much as I do any life. I just think your men were perhaps better able than mine to–’

‘If you have a wish to see Krieg blood, Hanrik, you only have to wait a few more hours. We are dying as you speak.’

‘I know that, colonel, and I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to imply…’

Hanrik was still stumbling through an apology when the colonel wrenched his magnoculars around to overlook the north end of the city. He wasn’t listening any more. He had a comm-bead in his ear, and evidently it had just relayed bad news. ‘What’s happening?’ asked Hanrik. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Spiders,’ said the colonel grimly. ‘Mechanical spiders, flying out of the necron tanks. They’re tearing our Guardsmen apart.’

‘Then that confirms what we feared,’ said Hanrik. ‘The necron army is still growing. It seems that, every time we face them, they are sending new, more powerful creatures onto the battlefield. Colonel, we thought we outnumbered them, but what if…?’

‘We’re fighting back,’ said the colonel. He paused and listened to his comm-bead again. ‘The Medusas are targeting the spiders, trying to find their weak spots. One of them just… I’m hearing that it crawled away from a mortar strike. They’re tough! But… but, wait, it is wounded. I’m hearing that the spider is wounded.’

The colonel hopped abruptly out of the half-track and marched towards the space port, two aides trailing along behind him. Hanrik hastened to keep step with them. ‘I’m returning to my office,’ said the colonel, when pressed, ‘to vox requests to the 42nd and the 103rd regiments for further reinforcements.’

‘You think we need them? Are… are we losing?’

‘The necrons’ resources must be finite. I think the spiders are their last line of defence, else why were they not employed in earlier battles? We are close to winning the war, Hanrik, but first we have to win this battle, and right now it’s poised on a knife edge. I suggest you think about that instead of indulging your hurt feelings.’

Hanrik opened his mouth to protest, but didn’t know what to say so he let the colonel outpace him. He looked back at the city, thought of all the people who had died there, were dying there still, and he wondered if he could have saved them.

The truth was that, after he had lost Arex, he had given up trying. He ought to have done what he had intended from the start: contact the Departmento Munitorum and complain in the strongest possible terms about the Death Korps’ conduct on his world.

To have taken such an extreme step, however, he would have had to have been very certain of his ground – and the colonel had a way of shaking his certainties.

He returned to his office, deflated, and reached for the vox-caster to hear the latest reports but hesitated, decided to sit in silence for a while and think.

Inevitably, he found his hand straying to his tunic pocket, his fingers closing around the cold, hard shape of the data-slate he had been keeping in there, the one on which he had transcribed the message.

It had come in this morning on the PDF command channel, encrypted with a key that had been cycled out of use eight years ago. Only a handful of officers knew about the message at all, and only Hanrik knew what it said. It had taken him two hours, searching his memory, scratching away with his stencil, before he had been able to decode the sequence of electrical pulses. Just thirteen words, but he had read them a hundred times: Hanrik. We have your family. Call off your attack. You have one day.

He sat back in his seat and rubbed his weary eyes. He wished Costellin were here, but there had still been no word from him. He had come to trust the commissar’s wise advice, and his discretion. The last thing he wanted to do was take the message to the colonel, because he knew what the colonel would say.

The colonel was here. He was standing in the doorway, and Hanrik started and bundled the slate away guiltily. How long had he been there, watching?

‘How… how did you get on?’ he stammered. ‘With the reinforcements, I mean.’

‘We have ten more platoons – fewer than I had hoped, but it may suffice. The 103rd is also sending six Medusas. If you have any more men to spare, however–’

‘I don’t,’ said Hanrik, a little more forcefully than he had intended. ‘That is to say, if I had them, you could… The only recruits still here in port, the only males of fighting age at all, are the sick and those who were injured during training.’

‘There are other cities on this world.’

‘They have sent the best they have. Even if it weren’t for the unrest… Even if we could raise a new force in time, we have nothing to arm them with. We had to beg, borrow and steal the lasguns we have. I couldn’t swear we didn’t send a handful of troopers out there with nothing but knives.’

The colonel nodded and seemed to accept this. He tapped the butt of his bolt pistol in its holster. ‘There is nothing more I can do here,’ he said, ‘so I am going to the front. You will join me?’

‘No,’ said Hanrik hastily. ‘I… You’re right, maybe there is more I could do. I thought I might vox around the city administrators again, put some pressure on them. There might be old storehouses they have forgotten about, or–’

‘The equipment,’ said the colonel, ‘is less important than the men to carry it. Once this battle is over, we will have equipment to spare.’

‘I will do what I can,’ said Hanrik. After the colonel had left, however, he buried his face in his hands, thought about the whole new mass of as yet faceless citizens he had just agreed to condemn to death, and he asked himself how it was that yet again he had been manoeuvred into doing exactly what the Krieg man had wanted.

It was dark in Hanrik’s office, but he didn’t have the energy to stir himself, to switch on the light. The space port was eerily quiet but for the buzz of voices from his vox-caster unit. Hanrik was alone, and lonely. His officers were meant to be keeping him updated but, although they were stationed well back from the action, they were still too close for their own comfort. Hanrik was lucky if, between the curses and the screamed orders, they found a moment to feed him any information at all.

The news, however, what news there was, was promising. A concerted push by the death riders had forced the necrons back a good fifty metres. The majority of their foot soldiers were down, their corpses – those that had not been melted – dissipated to the winds. The new Medusas arriving from the south had made a difference, bombarding the pyramid-shaped tanks and the mechanical spiders for long, precious minutes before the skimmer-mounted necrons had reached them.

‘They can’t take the meltas out of play,’ Colonel Braun reported, sounding almost optimistic for the first time. ‘Even when the necrons can target a grenadier, he is usually able to throw his weapon to a comrade before he is obliterated.’

Hanrik read the transcript on his slate again. One day… It was almost dawn.

He didn’t think the message had come from the necrons, although he had flirted with that dreadful thought at first. From someone in the city, then, although that was almost worse. To think that his own people could have betrayed the Emperor, collaborated…

A return call came in from a grouchy city administrator, woken from his bed and nursing a grudge that a seat on a rescue ship hadn’t yet been found for him. Hanrik conveyed the colonel’s request for more resources and, for the fifth time that night, was subjected to a tirade of protestations including a list of incidents with which the overstretched authorities were already dealing. He waited for this to subside before adding that medical supplies were also urgently required.

Finally, it was all over. The confirmation came from a breathless PDF major, astonished that the remaining necrons had vanished before his eyes. Switching to the open channel, Hanrik heard the colonel ordering a grenadier squad forward to the generatorum with demolition charges. There were many requests for medical assistance, but he switched off the vox-caster before the bodies could be counted. He would have to face that final tally soon enough, he reasoned.

He sat for a short while longer in the darkness, in the silence, composing himself. For Governor-General Hanrik, the real work was about to begin.

The sun was up, though the sky was still grey. Hanrik hadn’t slept in almost twenty-five hours, hadn’t eaten for longer. He didn’t feel like doing either right now, but he needed a break, emotionally more than physically.

He had spoken so many words of condolence that they had begun to sound hollow, meaningless to him. He had visited troopers in the bunkrooms that now served as medicae wards, had thanked them for their service and assured them that, through their efforts, a glorious victory had been won. He had argued with a Krieg quartermaster reluctant to expend resources on patients liable to die anyway.

So few of his men had come back. Nor were there any celebrations.

The Krieg returnees were even fewer in number, and comprised only the most wounded. Of course, they still had a line to hold, and so most of them had remained at the city’s edge. They had co-opted a few PDF men to assist them, a decision about which Hanrik had been neither consulted nor informed. This made it difficult to compile a list of the dead and offered false hope to numerous grieving relatives.

Hanrik joined a table of weary officers in the temporary mess hall. He filled a dish with unappetising paste, which he pushed around listlessly with a spoon. It was Colonel Braun who first said what they were all thinking.

‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘I don’t mean to sound disloyal, but I wonder if it might have been better, if the Emperor might have been best served, by, well…’

‘You mean by leaving when the necrons demanded it,’ said Hanrik.

‘If we had been given the resources to fight them,’ said Braun, frustrated. ‘If the Departmento Munitorum had sent a larger force, more than four regiments… We’ve been sending civilians to the front line, for the Emperor’s sake!’

‘We have lost so many men,’ lamented the young, olive-skinned Major Hawke, ‘but these necrons, they have to be fought, I think.’

‘Fought, yes,’ said Colonel Braun, ‘but like this?’

‘I’m beginning to think Costellin had the right idea,’ said Hanrik. ‘Exterminatus! We’d have lost the planet, and Emperor knows we all detested the thought of that to begin with, but we could have wiped out the necrons in a stroke, without the loss of a single life – assuming, that is, that we could have evacuated everyone.’

‘There wouldn’t have been enough ships,’ another young major pointed out, ‘and where would we have gone?’

‘We should have demanded the ships,’ said Hanrik, pounding the table with his fist, ‘and a colony world to settle on. I blame myself. I allowed the Departmento Munitorum – no, I allowed the Death Korps of Krieg – to use us as an experiment.’

‘And what if,’ said a cold voice behind him, ‘in the time it took for an evacuation to be organised, the necrons had woken their forces and escaped from us?’

Once again, Hanrik hadn’t heard Colonel 186’s approach. Nevertheless, bolstered by his officers’ support, no longer feeling so isolated, he stood and squared up to him. ‘And what have we achieved,’ he asked, ‘fighting this war your way? What did our people die for today? The destruction of one secondary generatorum, and what use is that if Costellin failed to reach the primary facility?’

‘We have dealt the necrons a blow from which they–’

‘That’s what you said after the 42nd fought them, but they came back stronger. The truth of it is, we don’t know the limits of the necrons’ self-repair capabilities. We don’t know how many more soldiers they can wake or… or fashion or bring in from elsewhere, but you don’t care about that, do you, colonel? You saw the smallest chance of glory, and the human cost of it meant nothing to you.’

‘What would you have me do? Withdraw my troops? Leave the necrons to you? Then the men who have given their lives so far will have done so for nothing.’

‘I just want you to… I’m the Governor of this world, and ever since you came here, you have ignored me, belittled me, ridden roughshod over my concerns.’

‘You place too much value on individual lives, Hanrik, those to which you can attach a name and a face. I am fighting for more than that, for the billions threatened by the necrons’ existence. If you can’t accept this, if you wish to file a complaint about my conduct on this world… that, of course, is your right.’

‘I will do that,’ said Hanrik belligerently. ‘That’s exactly what I’m going to do, as I should have done from the beginning.’

‘Just be careful,’ the colonel growled, ‘that our enemies do not use your weakness against you – and be warned that I will not allow that to happen.’

Hanrik had sent the message.

He had had no choice in the end. He hadn’t been able to sit by and do nothing, couldn’t have lived with the regret. Still, he felt sick to his stomach. He sat with his head in his hands, elbows on his desk, barely keeping his eyes open but knowing that now, more than ever, he had no chance of sleeping. Not until he received a reply.

It came sooner than he had expected.

There was a curt rap on his office door, and, without waiting to be invited, Colonel 186 entered. Immediately, it was clear that something was wrong. The colonel was flanked by two Krieg majors, who took up positions, standing to attention, against the back wall. ‘What is it?’ asked Hanrik, rising.

‘We have reason to suspect,’ said the colonel, ‘that there is a traitor among us.’

‘No. I mean, I can’t believe that. Who…?’

‘You came straight to this office after we spoke in the mess hall?’

‘Yes. Well, almost. I was waylaid by someone. A mother. Her son was fifteen years old when we sent him to war. He was caught in the blast of one of our own–’

‘You have not left this room in the past ninety minutes?’

‘No, I haven’t. Why are you asking me these questions? What are you–?’

‘Did you send any messages during that time?’

‘I might have. Yes, I spoke to the Thelonius City administrator. He said the situation there is worsening. There have been… Some people, lower-floor dwellers, they’ve turned away from the Emperor. They have started to worship the necrons, can you believe that? Of course, I instructed that they be summarily–’

‘Anything else?’ growled the colonel.

‘I haven’t… No. Nothing else. I didn’t… I never sent that complaint, if that’s what you mean. I thought, perhaps I was being a little hasty, and perhaps… perhaps we can talk about it later, tomorrow, when things aren’t so… when we aren’t so tired.’

‘My vox operator detected a transmission,’ said the colonel, ‘originating from this room.’ Hanrik just gaped at him. He couldn’t have known… could he?

‘It was sent,’ continued the colonel, ‘over the PDF command channel.’

‘That’s… That channel,’ spluttered Hanrik, ‘is for private communications between my officers and myself. You have no right to–’

‘As I informed you when we first met, Hanrik, this world is under martial law. My law. That makes everything that happens here my business. It gives me the right.’

He produced a data-slate and Hanrik took it, though it almost slid out of his nervous hands. He examined the slate’s contents, and a pall of dread settled over him. The words of the message were familiar to him, but he read them anyway, then read them again as a delaying tactic. ‘I am informed,’ the colonel prompted him, ‘that this message was sent at 09.13 this morning, in response to the one received at 09.46 yesterday.’

‘You knew about that? How…? You were waiting, weren’t you? Waiting to see what I’d do. But… the code in which I sent this message … You shouldn’t have been able to decrypt that code. How on Holy Terra…?’

‘That is hardly the issue here, Hanrik.’

‘No. I suppose you’re right.’ Hanrik sighed, defeated, sinking back into his chair. ‘I suppose you want me to explain… You must understand, colonel. Try to understand, please. Arex is the only family I have. I have devoted my life to… What use is the Imperium, what use all our armies, if we can’t protect one girl?’

‘The Imperium can only endure so long as we stand together. That is why there are rules about collaborating with–’

‘Collaborating?’ cried Hanrik. ‘No, you can’t accuse me of… You’ve read this message, I was just… I was playing for time. I couldn’t call off the attack if I wanted to, you know that more than anyone does. I just thought, if I could make these people think… if I could imply that a deal could be reached, then perhaps… I couldn’t just leave her to die. She’s my niece, colonel. What would you have done?’

As soon as those words left his mouth, he realised his mistake.

Colonel 186 drew his bolt pistol, levelled it at the Governor-General’s head. ‘I gave you fair warning,’ he said quietly, and the last thing Talmar Hanrik saw in this world was the flash of that bolt pistol’s muzzle.

Chapter Twenty

Costellin woke to unexpected warmth and softness, and for a moment he couldn’t imagine where he could be.

Had he been taken captive? It seemed unlikely, and anyway, the necrons would hardly have relieved him of his peaked cap, greatcoat and boots and set him to rest in a comfortable bed. He tried to move, but felt a sharp pain in his right side and the pull of a patch of synth-skin. The sensation reminded him of a recent, harsher pain, but the memories were jumbled. He remembered the climb up the mine shaft, straining himself to his limit, finding himself wanting. He remembered staring into the abyss, being caught from above by a pair of gloved hands, hauled up into the light.

Then, a desperate chase…

He was in a hab, little bigger than his office at the space port. He could see the guttering flames of candles, shadows against the wall. Rain beat against the window shutters. He lifted his head, laboriously, to find two figures, elderly women dressed in rags, dozing in armchairs. Sitting beside the bed, watching him impassively, was a skull-masked grenadier.

‘Did we do it?’ he asked weakly. ‘Destroy the generatorum?’

The grenadier shook his head, and Costellin groaned and sank back into his pillows. Unconsciousness tried to reclaim him, but he resisted it. He remembered the spiders, with their green eyes…

‘How many?’ he asked. ‘How many of us made it?’

‘Two of us,’ said the grenadier, and Costellin realised that his eyes had closed, that the soldier’s voice was coming to him as if from the end of a long tunnel. ‘You and me, sir. We are the only survivors.’

The second time he woke, one of the old women was bathing his brow. She had a round, matronly face and pockmarked skin. Costellin tried to thank her, but his throat was too dry to speak. She heard him croaking, and brought him a mug of cold water.

They had run through the city, he and his grenadiers, separating into five squads in the hope of eluding their pursuers: skimmer-mounted necrons. They had been faster than the Krieg men, gliding unhindered across the clogged skyways, their cannon arms flaring. Almost fifty grenadiers had set out from the mine entrance. Less than thirty had made it to the generatorum, where they had found worse waiting for them.

In his nightmares, he remembered:

Mechanical spiders, the size of small tanks, scuttling out from the generatorum building. Like the pursuing necrons, they had floated above the ground, but their movements had been slower, more ponderous. Despite this, they had shrugged off the grenadiers’ hellgun fire and been on them too soon.

The third time Costellin woke, the rain had stopped and the shutters were open a crack to allow in the daylight. He couldn’t see anyone, but he heard hushed voices. ‘–taking a dreadful chance,’ said the voice of his round-faced nursemaid. ‘They have left us alone so far, but if they learn we are sheltering their enemies–’

‘You can’t mean–’ Another female voice, unfamiliar to Costellin, so presumably belonging to the nursemaid’s sharp-featured friend.

‘May the Emperor strike me dead for thinking it, but–’

‘You heard what the one in the mask said. They are here to fight the necrons.’

‘Two of them, alone? If I thought they had a prayer–’

‘Do you think…? The paste we have found won’t last forever. Do you think, if we please them, they might feed us?’

‘I remember,’ said Costellin. He was sitting up in bed, sipping from the mug. ‘The soldier in front of me… A spider ripped out his throat. My pistol punched a great hole through its carapace. I thought it would fall, but…’

‘What are your orders, sir?’ The surviving grenadier was standing beside him.

Costellin shook his head, tried to dispel the image of those multi-faceted green eyes swivelling his way. His side ached. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’s evident that our mission here is done. Perhaps we should just–’

‘With respect, sir, is that really the case? The necrons don’t know we are alive, else they would have found us by now. It only takes one man to make it past them, with enough demolition charges to–’

‘You’re still carrying charges?’

‘No sir, else I would have continued to fight.’

‘I suppose I should be thankful you didn’t. You got me out of there, I assume?’

‘You were wounded, delirious. Sir, I realise the odds are against us, but if we don’t do this, if we can’t destroy that generatorum, then who can?’

He had a point there. Certainly, the necrons would be ready for another approach through the mine tunnels. Even so, for two men to attempt what a hundred had already failed to do… ‘We can’t do anything,’ said Costellin, ‘without those charges. Maybe, if we could retrieve them…’

The grenadier shook his head. ‘I tried, sir, before dawn. I got as close to the generatorum as I could, but most of our comrades were destroyed by gauss weaponry. I found only a few of their bodies intact, and unfortunately–’

‘They weren’t the ones with the bombs,’ Costellin guessed.

‘I did retrieve something of value,’ said the grenadier, and Costellin looked up hopefully. Then the Krieg man produced a small wooden box from the folds of his charcoal greatcoat, and the commissar knew what it must contain before it was opened. ‘Now, our fallen comrades will always be with us,’ said the grenadier, displaying a collection of bone fragments. ‘Their spirits will share in our victory.’

‘The women,’ said Costellin suddenly. ‘When I… The first few times I woke up, there were two women here.’

‘They took us in, sir. They are too frail to fight the occupiers, but they are resisting in their own way. They have been hiding out in this room since–’

‘Where are they now?’

‘They went in search of food for us. They say the necrons are mostly ignoring the human survivors, which tallies with what we–’

Costellin looked at the shelves above the tiny stove in the corner, saw them brimming with tubes of food paste. ‘We have to get out of here,’ he said urgently.

They ran down eight flights of stairs before coming to a barricade that they couldn’t shift. Costellin needed a rest anyway, having exerted himself too soon. He sat on a step and studied the plan of the mine tunnels on his data-slate. ‘Obviously,’ he said, ‘we can’t go back to the entrance we came out of, but there are several more marked on here, and each must have its own store of mining charges.’

‘Can we find them?’ asked the grenadier.

‘Maybe. As we’ve learned to our cost, this map is hardly accurate, and it certainly isn’t to scale. We may have to rely on the wisdom of the natives, and pray of course that the necrons have left some of these buildings standing.’

‘The old ladies spoke of informants among the civilian populace.’

‘I’ll bet they did,’ said Costellin. ‘Even if that weren’t the case, we may have a great deal of ground to cover.’ He was already shedding his greatcoat and cap. ‘I think this is one mission best undertaken sans the benefaction of the Imperial aquila.’

The grenadier stared at him in uncomprehending silence.

‘The uniform, Guardsman. You said it yourself, the necrons are on the lookout for soldiers, but civilians are beneath their notice. If we want the freedom to roam this city, and to ask questions of its people, then we cannot be soldiers any longer.’

So, they searched a row of habs for clothes, finding long coats to conceal their body armour and weapons holsters. Costellin swapped his military-issue boots for a pair of shoes, but didn’t insist that his Krieg comrade do the same. His chainsword, he reluctantly left behind because it created too distinctive a bulge, though he concealed it beneath a floorboard alongside his cap in the small hope of returning for both.

The grenadier kept as much of his equipment as he could, trying at first to don his coat over his backpack. He crammed his pockets with frag grenades, medical supplies, his lasgun maintenance kit, even his spare bootlaces and personal grooming kit. His bulky hellgun was a problem, but as the alternative was to leave him defenceless, they would just have to hope that no one looked too closely at his right leg.

The last things to go were the mask and the rebreather unit.

Costellin was surprised, though he shouldn’t have been, at the youth of the face thus revealed. Only the most experienced Death Korps Guardsmen were assigned to grenadier platoons, but this Guardsman couldn’t have been more than nineteen. His pale cheeks were studded with acne, his hair lank and greasy and his purple-rimmed eyes as dead as the lenses that, for the greater part of his life, had concealed them.

They were ready, at last, and they stepped out into the cold afternoon, Costellin murmuring a short prayer to the Emperor. They headed for the second nearest mine entrance, the nearest being towards the city centre and thus towards the necron tomb. They consulted the map as infrequently as they could. Best, they thought, to appear as if their wanderings were without purpose.

They encountered few people, although more than once they heard skittering sounds and saw shadows flitting away from them. As the afternoon drew on, and their map reached the limits of its usefulness, they took to searching a hab-block. They kicked open doors until they cornered a frightened, scraggly-bearded man who threatened them with a knife. Costellin calmed him down long enough to request directions but his reply was incoherent. Further down the same hallway, a pregnant teenage girl pleaded with them to take her away from here. She confirmed that the mine was close by, on the skyway above this one or maybe the one above that.

Outside, they saw a patrol of four necrons, too late to hide from them. They shrank into an emporium doorway and the creatures marched by without a glance in their direction. Costellin could feel the young grenadier tensing, reaching inside his coat for his hellgun, and he warned him quietly to stand down.

It was soon after this that they came upon a grizzled scavenger, too intent upon wrestling a shattered vidcaster from the rubble to detect their approach. He agreed to help them, for a price, and Costellin had to stop the grenadier from drawing his weapon again. In return for the commissar’s old chrono, the scavenger pointed the pair towards their goal, and advised them that they would have to drop ten floors en route, circumventing a fallen skyway, to reach it.

He also warned them what they would find there.

The slave’s work party had left him behind.

He didn’t seem to have noticed. He kept on digging, obediently, mechanically, despite having escaped the sight of his baton-wielding masters. The grenadier seized him from behind, clamped a hand over his mouth before he could so much as squeal and hauled him into a hab-block, where the slave kicked and cursed and threatened his two captors with deific vengeance.

At this, the affronted grenadier went for his gun again and, as there was no one to see this time, Costellin didn’t stay his hand. Cowed, the slave answered their questions, but regained his defiance as he spoke of a High Priest, Amareth, so esteemed by the necrons – the Iron Gods, he called them – that they had welcomed him into their High Temple. ‘His priests drove back last night with the glorious news,’ he said.

Costellin was more interested in the slaves’ shift patterns and, although he didn’t ask directly for fear of betraying the question’s importance, in learning when the mine entrance around which they laboured might be left unattended. Once he had his answer, he met the grenadier’s enquiring gaze with a nod, but added, ‘Make it quiet.’

The slave let out an angry shriek when he saw the knife blade, and the grenadier had to stifle him again. He still managed to struggle, more violently than Costellin had thought possible given his scrawny frame, and to spit muffled insults and threats that his gods would revenge this assault upon their servant. The grenadier cut the slave’s throat, silencing him forever. As he looked down at the body, the grenadier’s lip curled in disgust; the closest thing to an emotion that Costellin had yet seen on that youthful face.

They waited until sunset, then, for the pealing of bells to summon the remaining slaves and their masters. Costellin was glad of the rest, as his side had begun to hurt again. His Krieg comrade, however, was quick to point out their duty to execute every member, willing or not, of this Amareth’s heretical church. ‘Any other time,’ said the commissar, ‘I would agree with you, of course. Today, we have greater concerns and cannot afford to be sidetracked.’

The storage vault was situated to the rear of the smeltery, past a row of metal-mesh cages that taunted Costellin with the false promise of an escape route. Even if he had had a tech-priest to get those lifters working, if he could have been sure that no necrons lurked below, the shafts appeared to have been blocked.

The vault door bore the marks of numerous attempts to pry it open. Costellin’s plasma pistol melted its locks in a heartbeat, and in the glow of the grenadier’s lamp-pack they found what they had come for: crate after crate of small, cylindrical explosives. They began to take as many as they could carry, but the grenadier was concerned about leaving the remainder for the necron cult to find.

‘I suggest we detonate them, sir,’ he said, ‘blow this building sky high.’

‘Too risky,’ said Costellin. ‘These charges have, what, a sixty-second fuse? We couldn’t get far enough away before the necrons came pouring down on us.’

‘I could set a booby trap, sir, wire the charges to trigger when this door is opened. That would give us forty minutes or more until the overseers return, and with the Emperor’s grace we might kill the whole damned lot of–’

Costellin silenced him with a raised hand. ‘Do you hear that?’

The grenadier listened for a moment, before nodding. ‘A combustion engine.’

‘A vehicle, coming our way. A large one from the sounds of it. Remember what our captive said about his priests driving back from somewhere? Your idea about the trap is a good one, Guardsman, but I think we can do better. I think we can take every one of these charges with us.’

The truck nuzzled its way through the mine entrance, a pair of blazing headlights blinding Costellin to the shape of the chassis behind them. He felt certain those lights would find him, crouching behind a thick pipe, but they played over him and left him in darkness again. A moment later, the engine ceased its grumbling, though its noxious fumes still tickled the commissar’s throat and threatened to make him cough.

Thanks to the lights, he hadn’t been able to count the bodies inside the truck, didn’t know if any of them were armed, but now doors were slamming and boots were ringing on plascrete and he had no choice but to act as planned. He sprang from cover to find the grenadier had beaten him to it by a footstep, emerging from behind the lifter cages. A hellgun barked, and a plasma pistol joined in the chorus once Costellin had taken time to ensure that his blasts wouldn’t hit the truck itself. Their targets, shadows in green cloaks, fell with gratifying ease – all but one of them.

Suddenly, those headlights flared again, the engine revved, and Costellin was still blinking away stars when the truck came howling towards him. He stood his ground until the last possible second, steadied his aim, loosed off a single shot through the windscreen, then dived as the truck nose-butted a smelting tank behind him.

The grenadier reached it first, yanked the smouldering corpse of the driver from his cab and discarded him like a sack of rubbish. The truck’s front end was mangled, venting steam, but its engine was still running, albeit throatily. ‘Do you know how to operate this machine?’ asked the grenadier.

‘I’ve seen it done many times,’ said Costellin. ‘I might need a few minutes to familiarise myself with the control runes, though.’

‘I’ll load up the mining charges.’

In the event, it took Costellin almost fifteen minutes to pull the truck free from the tangled embrace of the protesting tank. He was still trying to orient it towards the exit, to master the pedals beneath its control wheel, when the grenadier, now occupying the passenger seat to his left, grunted a warning. Costellin ducked, and a las-beam sizzled over his head to blast a circular hole through the partition behind him.

The service at the temple must have ended, because a small group of priests was suddenly framed against the night sky ahead. Two more las-beams stabbed into the truck through the melted windscreen, and one of them sliced through Costellin’s right sleeve and left a painful burn on his shoulder. He was more concerned with the beam that had missed him: one accidental strike to a single charge behind that partition, and they would all be blasted into very small pieces.

He let the grenadier provide the answering fire, while he concentrated on getting them out of there. Fortunately, only two priests were armed and one quickly fell, while the other dropped his gun and fled as Costellin stamped down hard on a pedal and the truck surged forwards, breaking a third priest’s body over its bonnet.

They were outside, then, fitting and starting along the skyway, and Costellin was wrenching the control wheel back and forth to avoid the worst of the debris. In his mirror, he saw a priest racing up behind them, flinging himself onto the truck’s rear axle, but the commissar’s erratic driving shook him loose without his even having to try, and the grenadier’s hellgun ensured he stayed down for good.

They had checked and double-checked the map, and the annotations Costellin had made to it, until there was no room for doubt. Fourteen blocks, straight along this skyway. ‘I should be the one to do it,’ said the grenadier. ‘It would be wasteful for both of us to die, and yours is the more valuable life.’

‘You don’t know how to control this truck,’ said Costellin.

‘You can teach me, sir. Once you have summoned the engine’s spirits again, I need only know which pedal to press down on.’

‘The way will be guarded, of course. Our target may be six floors above us, but the necrons would be foolish not to have anticipated an attack from below.’

‘This is the only way, sir. We can’t fight our way through them, but perhaps…’

‘Perhaps a single vehicle, moving at speed… If the necrons aren’t expecting us, if they have been depleted enough by the battle to the west…’

‘The impact should set off the mining charges, but I will keep one beside me in case of need. If the tower is collapsed down here, then the generatorum will fall with it.’

‘May the Emperor be with you, Guardsman,’ said Costellin. He turned and, inadvertently, did something he hadn’t done in almost thirty years. He made eye contact with a soldier under his command, a soldier about to die.

The grenadier must have seen the look in his eye and, remarkably, understood it, because he produced his ossuary box again. ‘I have my comrades with me,’ he said, ‘and I will be granted a more noble death than this wretched soul deserves.’

‘Your sacrifice will not be forgotten,’ said Costellin quietly, and for once he knew he was speaking the truth. Something tugged at the corners of the grenadier’s mouth, and the commissar thought he might have been trying to smile.

He didn’t look back as the truck sped away from him. He couldn’t bear to watch. He plunged his hands into the pockets of his borrowed coat and limped in the opposite direction, favouring his injured right side. He heard the tearing-cloth sounds of gauss guns and he held his breath. He waited for the explosion, worried at first that it might come too soon, then that it might not come at all. When it did come, it shook the skyway beneath his feet, showered him with debris even at this distance, but Costellin kept walking. He thought about the soldier’s eyes, and he prayed that the truck had found its target if only so, in the final moments of his life, that young man might at least have had some measure of fulfilment.

He trudged on, orienting himself by the position of the clouded moon. He knew that, eventually, he would come within range of the regimental vox-net and be able to request a pickup from a PDF flyer. Then, once he was out of this damned city, he intended to make a few changes in his life.

He spent much of that night thinking back to earlier, happier postings, postings in which he had felt he was making a difference. It seemed a long time since he had felt that way. Costellin was old and tired, and wearied by the compromises he had made, the blind eyes he had turned. He was sure that Colonel 186 wouldn’t miss him, any more than would the generals above him. They would more likely question, as he questioned now, the very point of his presence among them.

He had made up his mind. As soon as he was back at the space port, he would vox the Departmento Munitorum. He would put in for a transfer.

Chapter Twenty-One

The passageway was cold, almost painfully so. Its walls were fashioned from black stone, like the outside of the pyramid, and the air was suffused with a familiar putrid green glow, which provided the only illumination.

Arex’s hands were still cuffed behind her back, and her shoulders ached. She stumbled, fell against the cold stone, and allowed herself to slide to the floor. ‘I can’t go on,’ she whimpered. ‘I just… There’s no hope, Tylar, none at all.’

‘I feel it too,’ said Tylar, ‘like a physical sense of despair, but we have to–’

‘We don’t… Ever since that door slid shut behind us, we don’t even know the way.’

‘We’re almost out of here, I’m sure of it. And, Arex, we haven’t seen an Iron God in… I don’t know how long it’s been, but maybe they’re sleeping. Or maybe they’ve found something other than the two of us to concern themselves with.’

‘I just want to stay here, Tylar. I just want to curl up into a ball and–’

‘I know,’ said Tylar, ‘but I think… I think we’ve wasted enough time hiding. The Emperor has given us this chance, and we must take it.’

He waited for Arex to find her faith, to make the only choice she could. When she drew in a deep breath, gritted her teeth and made to stand, using the wall behind her for leverage, he smiled, and the smile strengthened her. ‘I would offer to help,’ he said, ‘but…’ He rattled his own cuffs ruefully.

He led her onward, though she was deterred once more by a deep, throbbing sound emanating from somewhere ahead of them. They found themselves at the threshold of a cavernous chamber, filled with ominous, dark machinery with green light streaming from its control surfaces. Arex felt the urge to turn and flee, but fought it this time. She looked at Tylar imploringly, and read the worst in his dismal expression.

‘Just a little further,’ he whispered. ‘Just… just through this room.’

They threaded their way between the machines, Arex straining to hold herself in, not to brush against them for fear of what might happen if she touched them. ‘What… what do you suppose they’re for?’ she whispered.

‘I don’t know,’ said Tylar. ‘I don’t dare think about it. I feel that, if we could even begin to understand these contraptions, the knowledge would drive us insane.’

At least, Arex told herself, they had plenty of cover in here. They were far less likely to be seen than they had been in the passageways outside. Even as she formed that thought, however, she started at a sound above her. The chamber had no roof that she could see, its black walls reaching into infinite darkness. She could make out nothing up there, but she was sure there was something. Something watching her.

Then, an Iron God crossed their path.

It was gone before they could do anything more than freeze, almost suddenly enough for Arex to believe she might have been seeing things except that Tylar had plainly seen it too. They waited for minutes in the gloom, straining for a sound of footsteps above the pervading mechanical hum and the rasping of their own breaths. Then Tylar whispered to Arex to stay back, he was going ahead to check the way was clear. She shrank between two hulking consoles, still careful not to touch either, and she peered out after him as he crept forward.

The second Iron God stepped out, as silently as the first had done, between them. Tylar had his back to it, hadn’t seen it yet, but it had seen him. As it brought up its gun, Arex shrieked his name in warning, and he ducked beneath the emerald blast.

The Iron God swung around, facing Arex now, and she wormed herself deeper into her bolthole and squeezed out into a gangway behind.

She ran, not caring now if she brushed the machines, thinking only of the horror behind her, of what it would do if it caught her. She ran until she no longer knew which way she was going, couldn’t tell if she was running away from the cadaverous creature or towards it, then she stopped and she looked for a hiding place. She found one, beneath a mushroom-shaped console alight with xenos runes. Barely had she secreted herself beneath this when she heard something. Not footsteps, though. This was the sound from before: a scuttling, scrabbling sound, and a shadow was cast on the wall, of a gigantic spider perching on the console above her head.

Arex held her breath, and for a moment the spider was still and silent too, as if listening for her in turn. Then it jerked into motion, and she heard the thunk of a lever being pushed into place. Then the spider was scuttling away, across the tops of the infernal machines, and Arex breathed out with a tearful shudder.

She levered herself to her feet again, with her bound hands, the struggle more fraught this time because if an Iron God had appeared now she would have been helpless before it, floundering. She didn’t know where Tylar was, didn’t know how to find him again or even if he was still alive, although she had heard no gunfire.

A short, vertical stream of green energy flowed between a pair of jutting prongs, and Arex saw a chance to rid herself of her cuffs. She backed up to the stream, but had second thoughts as she felt her flesh tingling with its mere proximity. One millimetre out of place, and she was liable to strip her wrists down to their bones. She thought about Tylar, and took the risk anyway. Arex’s hands parted, and she slapped her arms to restore some circulation to them.

She sensed rather than heard something stealing up behind her. She whirled around, but stumbled in the process, her flailing elbow just missing the deadly energy.

Tylar was there, horrified by what he had almost made her do. Recovering her balance and her composure, Arex suggested he free himself as she had done, but Tylar shook his head. ‘Either of those things could return at any moment,’ he whispered. He looked haggard, sickly, but Arex couldn’t tell if it just was the green light on his skin that made him appear that way.

They abandoned the idea of stealth, to skirt the chamber at a half-run, their footsteps echoing around them. Arex’s eyes kept drifting upwards, searching for more spiders above her. At one point, she thought she detected a glimmer of compound eyes, but by the time she had pointed this out to Tylar, it had been extinguished.

They emerged into another black-stone passage and saw the entranceway at last, grey daylight spilling in through it. Arex had expected night, and now she couldn’t tell if she had been in the pyramid for more hours or fewer than she had imagined. Its green glow had scrambled her sense of time.

She could also hear gunfire, and she held Tylar back until he could hear it too. ‘The Imperium?’ he asked hopefully, but Arex shook her head. She could hear only one type of gun. Whatever was happening out there, she opined, the last thing they wanted to do was to step out into the middle of it.

‘I’ll take that chance,’ grunted Tylar, ‘to get out of this Emperor-forsaken crypt!’

They waited, all the same, until the sounds from without had receded somewhat. Then Tylar insisted on approaching the entranceway first, signalling to Arex when it was safe for her to join him, and she didn’t argue with him.

They slipped out of the pyramid, Arex’s heart pounding as they crossed a wide open space and dropped behind a mound of rubble. When last she had been here, when Amareth had brought her to his imagined masters and paid the price for it, this area had been teeming with activity. Now, the Iron Gods and their slaves were gone, shovels left abandoned and half-filled barrows upturned.

They crept from one rubble heap to the next, and in so doing disturbed two filthy, hunched figures that may have been mutants. The pair bolted, and immediately an Iron God appeared from nowhere. Its weapon flared green and, like Amareth and his priests before them, the hapless figures were destroyed in an eye blink. Arex hoped they had been mutants, because no man deserved to die in such pain.

She and Tylar watched in frozen horror, waiting for the Iron God to turn their way. It couldn’t have missed them if it had. Fortunately, it kept walking, as if the murders it had just committed had been no more than a passing distraction to it. A moment later, they heard the tearing-cloth sound of its gun again, and a similar retort from the opposite direction. ‘We’re surrounded,’ Arex whispered.

Tylar shook his head. ‘I think they’re spreading outwards from the pyramid. If we stay behind them…’ He never got the chance to complete the thought.

A small, wiry shape cannoned into Tylar from behind. A green-robed priest. Arex thought she recognised his protruding brow and misshapen nose; he had been one of Amareth’s ill-fated entourage, evidently one of the handful of survivors.

Impeded by his cuffed wrists, Tylar was knocked down, and the priest leapt upon him. ‘You have caused this,’ he screeched. ‘You have brought the wrath of the Iron Gods down upon us. I have them, masters. Do you see? I have captured your enemies for you. I have served you well, have mercy upon me!’

In panic, Arex looked for the quickest way to silence him. She found it: a hunk of plascrete, which she hefted to her shoulders and brought down two-handed, splitting the lunatic’s head wide open. He was bleeding, reeling, but not felled, and his screams had attracted more unwelcome attention. An Iron God appeared from between two rubble heaps, and its gun was trained upon Arex. The priest teetered towards it, one hand to his cut head, the other outstretched in imploration. ‘M-master…’ he moaned.

The Iron God squeezed its trigger. At the same time, Tylar kicked out from the ground. His foot struck the priest behind his knees, and propelled him, flailing, into the path of the emerald discharge. His scream of agony was cut short as he was flayed to death. Arex hauled Tylar to his feet and they ran for their lives, even as a second shot crackled between them.

They kept on running, until they came within sight of the nearest towers of the city. Then they faltered to a numbed halt, unable to believe what they were seeing.

There were creatures in the air, skeletal and metallic like the Iron Gods but of different shapes and sizes, a menagerie of horrors. They were circling, swooping onto skyways and through windows, lighting the sky with the green of their weapons, and, although Arex and Tylar couldn’t see the monsters’ victims from this distance, they could certainly hear their screams.

‘They’re hunting people down,’ stammered Arex. ‘They’re… What if he was right? That priest, I mean, when he said… They were leaving us alone, Tylar. They were leaving us alone, until we… What if this is all our fault? What if we–?’

Tylar shook his head firmly. ‘It was always going to end this way,’ he said. ‘Amareth and his followers were mad to believe otherwise. The Iron Gods aren’t interested in us, they don’t care what we do, and they never said otherwise. They were never going to share their world with us.’

‘But why now? Why choose now to… to slaughter their own followers?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Tylar, ‘and as far as the cultists and the mutants are concerned, I don’t much care. Better them than us, that’s all I can say.’

‘What do we do now?’ asked Arex. ‘We can’t go forward into… that.’

‘We can’t go back either,’ said Tylar.

He caught Arex’s gaze, and she saw something in his eyes that she hadn’t seen before. She had been relying on him to keep her going, to give her hope – but now, for the first time, she saw that his own hope had gone. Tylar was as terrified as she was.

There were creatures circling overhead. Shrinking into a doorway, huddling on its step, Arex and Tylar watched their emaciated shadows flitting across the ground, as Arex struggled to break Tylar’s cuffs open with a jagged rock.

They had agreed to get as far away from the pyramid as they could. That was their goal. So far, this had meant remaining at ground level rather than climbing the towers, but that was okay with Arex because, frankly, one floor felt as safe as any other to her now. They had encountered no more mutants anyway, hearing only the occasional wail from a nearby hab-block as one was hunted down and slain.

They had stuck with Tylar’s plan, advancing slowly behind the Iron Gods’ line as this expanded outwards across the city. Arex was trying not to think about what would happen once the creatures had done their worst and decided to turn back.

‘This must be my uncle’s doing,’ said Arex. ‘He has triggered this.’

Tylar looked at her quizzically.

‘What else could it be?’ she said. ‘He must have… When the Iron Gods gave him their ultimatum, our lives for the city, he must have–’

‘They gave him no ultimatum,’ said Tylar. ‘Amareth, perhaps, may have played those games, thought to take hostages, but these creatures–’

‘All the same,’ said Arex, ‘Uncle Hanrik knew I was here, trapped in here, and yet still… But he did the right thing. I know he did the right thing, and… and what if he’s winning, Tylar? What if that’s why...? I asked why the Iron Gods are doing this now, killing people now when they have been content to ignore us before, and perhaps… perhaps it is because they are losing the war. Perhaps they–’

‘It could mean the reverse,’ said Tylar. ‘It could mean they have defeated the Imperial forces, and are scouring Hieronymous Theta of its final remnants of human life. We keep on running, Arex. For weeks, we have been running – but what if there is nowhere left to run to? What if it would be better for us to accept our fates?’

‘What did you see?’ asked Arex quietly.

‘Nothing,’ said Tylar. ‘I don’t know what you–’

‘There was something,’ said Arex. ‘You were always so… You’ve been different, Tylar, since I lost you in the Iron Gods’ temple, in that room of machines.’

‘I think those flying things have gone now,’ said Tylar leadenly. ‘We should move on. And we should start climbing soon. We’ve gained enough distance on the pyramid. We’d be safer, less likely to be seen, indoors now. With the Emperor’s grace, it just might be enough to save us. It just might.’

Arex agreed, and they went on their way, but Tylar’s optimistic words had been a lie and they both knew it.

They had been walking for hours, but had made little progress. They had spent too much time hiding from shadows, had climbed only thirty or forty floors. Arex was exhausted, more with the tension of her plight than with the physical strain of it.

Then they heard unholy screaming from above them, abruptly curtailed, and they cowered in the dreadful silence that followed, until Tylar plucked up the courage to climb to the next floor, to emerge into a hab-block hallway, Arex at his shoulder.

The walls were wet with blood. Lumps of bloody red meat were strewn across the hallway’s floor. Arex’s hand flew to her mouth in revulsion, as she realised that these were human corpses. Before them lay the remains of two women and three children. They had been skinned, dismembered, in one case decapitated.

She turned away from them and, as she did so, she caught a flicker of movement on the edge of her vision and she shrieked. ‘There was something there in that corner,’ she insisted to the concerned Tylar, pointing unsteadily. ‘Something that just… It passed through that wall like a spirit!’ He calmed her down, pointing out that if indeed there had been something, evidently it hadn’t noticed them, and anyway, wasn’t it more likely that Arex’s weariness and hunger had induced a fleeting hallucination?

They agreed, in any case, that they didn’t want to stay here, this in spite of the logical but unvoiced argument that the Iron Gods had searched this place and were unlikely to return to it. They resumed their climb, but even more slowly now as they stopped on every floor to search the nearby rooms for food and drink.

Unfortunately, most of the habs in this tower had been picked clean. Most of them had also been turned over, and some of them bombed or burnt out. Arex grew tired of picking her way through dust, ash and soot, and in the end her only reward for it was a near-empty tube of food paste from which she and Tylar were able to squeeze out a few tasteless globs. Arex felt sick anyway, and so couldn’t have eaten much.

A few rooms over from there, they found a serviceable bed, the only off-putting detail being that its former owners, a young couple, were hanging by their necks from a pair of ropes alongside it. In contrast to the mutilated corpses a few floors below, they looked peaceful, almost content. They hadn’t been dead long, because their flesh hadn’t had time to rot yet. Tylar cut them down and rolled them out into the hallway, while Arex kicked off her shoes and snuggled down beneath a filthy blanket.

Tylar sat on the bed beside her, but he was shivering, so she folded the blanket around him too. It was quiet in here, and although they both felt they had further to go, neither of them was in any hurry to resume their fraught journey.

Arex longed for sleep, but her brain was too full, so she lay and stared sightlessly at the ceiling as the silence between them lengthened and deepened.

Then Tylar took a deep breath to steel himself and, avoiding her eyes, he finally answered her question.

‘You saved my life,’ he said. ‘In the machine room. When you shouted that warning. I saw the creature going after you, and I tried to follow. I listened out for your footsteps. They sounded different from the creature’s. Iron Gods don’t run. They have no need to. I lost you near the wall. I guessed, I prayed, you had hidden, but I couldn’t call out to you without them hearing. I followed the wall around, praying you would see me. And I came to a doorway.’

He faltered then, swallowed, and continued in a somewhat smaller voice. ‘There was another chamber through there, even larger than the machine room. They were in there, Arex, scores of creatures, Iron Gods. They had their backs to me, watching some manner of construct: pylons, curved pylons, like claws, holding… I don’t know how to describe it. Like a ball of flame, green flame. No, not a ball, a disc, an upright disc, perfectly flat, and then… Stepping out of the flame, they came, marching in four by four, until they almost filled that great chamber.’

‘More of them?’ Arex breathed. ‘But where could they have–?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Tylar. ‘I don’t know where they came from. I only know that… Do you see now? Do you understand why I–?’

‘They don’t know what they’re facing, the Imperial forces. If the Iron Gods have the power to… If they can bring in reinforcements like that–’

‘An infinite number of them,’ said Tylar.

‘If we could only send my uncle a warning...’

‘But we can’t leave the city, we know that, and every day more mortars fall. Every day, the city will shrink further, driving us back, back towards the horrors at its heart. You were right, Arex, in the pyramid. We should have stayed put. All that effort, the risks we took, and we’re no safer out here than we were in there.’

She could bear to hear no more, so she hugged him tightly. He surrendered to her arms, and for the first time Arex felt that, instead of her drawing from his strength, they were drawing on each other’s, sharing all they had. She pulled him gently down until his head rested on the pillow beside hers, and for a moment everything was all right, she was warm and protected.

Then an image of Gunthar came into her mind, unbidden, and she pulled away from Tylar, feeling guilty. ‘It’s okay,’ he said softly. ‘Really, it’s okay.’

‘I didn’t mean to…’ she said. ‘I hadn’t thought about him in so long. I hadn’t dared to, because I knew… I know I shan’t ever see Gunthar – his name was Gunthar – again. I wish I knew if he had escaped from the city, or if… That’s the worst part of it, I believe, the not knowing.’

‘He was a lucky man,’ said Tylar, and Arex allowed herself to relax into their embrace again. It wasn’t that she loved him, at least she didn’t think she did. Right now, however, she needed someone, needed him, and he needed her too, and what, she thought, could be wrong with that? What was wrong with their finding, in the midst of all this madness, a crumb of simple human comfort, and in taking it?

What was wrong in her holding him and being held by him, in their bodies melting into each other for this one lonely night?

Chapter Twenty-Two

The orders had come down that morning.

The bombardment of Hieronymous City was to cease forthwith. Not that there was much left to bombard. The city was a fraction of its former size, reduced to fewer than four hundred forlorn towers standing in an expansive field of debris. Gunthar Soreson had long since stopped thinking of it as his former home. It was hard to believe that once the city had been alive, vital, a proud symbol of everything good about the Imperium. It was an empty shell now. Worse, it was rotten, decayed from within, a cancer upon this world that needed to be excised.

It would be, soon.

It had been almost three weeks since Gunthar had seen combat. He remembered the moment, almost unreal, when the necron force had vanished before his eyes. It had taken him a minute to adjust, to understand what had happened; to be sure the monsters weren’t coming back. It had taken him longer to accept that a victory had been won, and he had lived to see it. He had felt oddly bereft, lacking in purpose. But, of course, one battle, no matter how grand, did not a war make, and there was much more yet to be done.

Ten days ago, a band of mutants had tried to blast their way out of the city, having somehow managed to lay their hands on a pile of demolition charges. A handful of them had had lasguns, and these were the first shot down by the waiting PDF troopers and Guardsmen. Gunthar had killed one himself, almost surprised when the vile creature had succumbed to a single hellgun beam.

The remaining mutants, unarmed, were considered a waste of las-power, and a Death Korps platoon had all but finished them off with a bayonet charge. One had come screeching, wailing, towards Gunthar, to be met by his gun butt. Its yellow parchment skin and startling pink eyes had reminded him of something he had seen a long time ago. The creature was so warped and twisted that he couldn’t tell if he had struck it in the chin or the elbow, but either way it fell, with a satisfying crunch of bone, and Gunthar drove his bayonet through what he judged to be its throat.

After necrons, mere mutants were hardly a threat to him.

They had dumped the bodies in a mine tunnel, to be buried under tonnes of debris. They had been filling in the tunnels ever since Commissar Costellin had used them to infiltrate the city. They didn’t want the necrons using the same trick in reverse. A few bodies, however, had borne no visible signs of mutation, and had been clad in dark green cloaks to boot. A Guardsman had pointed to necron sigils scrawled in ash across one dead man’s face, and had commented on the depravities to which some people could sink, especially those who had been brought up no better.

Gunthar had agreed with him, and felt shame for the life he had once lived.

Officially, he still served with the Planetary Defence Force. His commanding officer was Colonel Braun. He had nine squad-mates, none of whose names he knew, none of whom had fought the necrons at his side. Increasingly, however, his orders came from a Krieg watchmaster or lieutenant. Gunthar worked alongside the Krieg Guardsmen, ate and drank alongside them. More often than not, he also slept alongside them, eschewing his space port bunk for a bedroll in an abandoned siege emplacement.

He spoke few words to them, nor they to him, which suited him well. Most of the time, he had nothing to say. He had been interrogated once, by a group of Krieg men who had heard about his dealings with the disgraced Hanrik. He believed he had convinced them that he didn’t share the late Governor-General’s heretical views. Moreover, they had seemed impressed by the part Gunthar had played in Costellin’s triumphant sabotage mission. Certainly, since then, they had treated him as a comrade, nothing more or less.

In the newsreels, great wars had been won within days, if not hours. Three weeks ago, Gunthar had half-expected the Imperial forces to recover their breath then chase the necrons back to their black pyramid. Instead, they had resumed the daily grind of ploughing a few hundred metres into the occupied city each day. They had waited for Guardsmen to recover from their injuries and return to the front, for vehicle and equipment repairs and for new PDF platoons to be raised and deployed. The delay was frustrating, because it gave the necrons time to recover their strength too, but Gunthar accepted the necessity of it.

In the past few days, however, he had witnessed a marked increase in the number of soldiers around him. He had felt, even before this morning’s new orders were read out, that the waiting was coming to an end at last. They were almost ready.

The afternoon brought a further distraction.

Gunthar’s squad was one of eight marched to Thelonius City in the company of three Centaur support vehicles. As lifter platforms cranked them up to the 110th floor, they passed well-lit bars and eateries, clubs and casinos, and it felt as if he was viewing an alien landscape. He had always believed that, by doing his job, supporting the mining operation, he was paying his dues to the Emperor. He understood now that he could, he should, have been doing so much more.

The truth of it was that, before the necrons, he had felt too safe.

The further they moved into the city, the more evident were its scars. Windows were boarded up, emporiums burnt out or looted. The skyways were strewn with refuse, and more than one white autocab had been upended and torched. Most shaming of all were the pro-necron slogans graffitied on the walls. Had Gunthar known no better, he could have mistaken this for a lower floor, somewhere in the mid-twenties at most, and attributed the vandalism to the usual mutant suspects.

He heard the rioters before he saw them, their voices united in an outpouring of fury. The proctors came into view first. There were four lines of them, ranged across the skyway, their shields raised but staggering beneath an onslaught of pure chaos. At the sight of the Imperial convoy, they parted gratefully, and the first of the rioters came flooding through the gap. When they saw what was waiting beyond it, many of them faltered, tried to turn back, but found the proctors moving to surround them.

Others were more game, or just out of their minds, and a hail of half-bricks and petroleum bombs came Gunthar’s way but shattered uselessly against armour plating and flak helmets. A Krieg Guardsman, sitting up in the turret of the leading Centaur, squeezed off ten rounds from his heavy stubber over the rioters’ heads, demanding their attention. Some didn’t heed the warning, or perhaps didn’t think it was serious, and they squared up to the oncoming juggernaut. A few hurled themselves at it, tried to climb its sponsons, but they were quickly seized by troopers, wrenched from their precarious perches and dashed to the ground.

One fell under the Centaur’s tracks and was crushed to death, but Gunthar felt no sympathy for him. He could almost have forgiven these people their previous ignorance, but to have learned of the necrons and reacted this way? Many of them were male and of draft age. They could have been fighting. Instead, their selfish concern for their own lives was impeding the war effort, an affront to the Emperor and a threat to everything He had built. A good number of them flew banners, proclaiming support for their erstwhile Governor and opposition to the Krieg ‘invaders’ of their world. He didn’t remember Hanrik being so popular in life.

The tumult had subsided a little, angry voices struck dumb by awe and doubt. This gave a PDF sergeant with a loudhailer a chance to be heard, which he used to order all citizens off the skyways. The PDF were leading this operation, a single Death Korps squad along to man the Centaurs: a familiar pattern. It was felt, Gunthar had heard, that the people of Hieronymous Theta were more likely to respond to their own kind, that the presence of alien soldiers in their homes would be a further incitement to them. Personally, he would have sent in the death riders to mow down anyone in their way, had it not been for the need to conserve ammunition.

Gunthar and his comrades moved into the crowd, displaying their guns although they didn’t want to have to use them, two Centaurs lurking in threat behind them. A scrawny young man attacked the trooper to Gunthar’s right, tried to wrest his lasgun away from him but found himself impaled on its bayonet instead. They were beginning to get their message across, and a lot of makeshift weapons had been dropped, a lot of trembling hands raised. Dispersal was a slow process, however, with everyone penned in as they were. Suddenly, there was an upsurge of activity ahead of Gunthar, and a phalanx of rioters broke through a proctor cordon and streamed away down a side street.

It was for this very reason that the third Centaur had peeled off minutes earlier, guided by the proctors towards the nearest heavy lifter, two squads of troopers trailing along behind it. By now, it would be wheeling up behind the would-be escapees, ready to give them a nasty surprise – and indeed, a moment later, Gunthar heard the staccato retort of its stubber and was satisfied that an example was being made.

He climbed through the smashed window of a food emporium, found a group of older men setting a fire in there and one filling a box with all the goods he could lay his hands on. Staring down the barrel of Gunthar’s hellgun, the old thief turned pale and pleaded, ‘It’s for my wife and my children. With all the upheaval, the unrest, the mines have been shut down and I can’t make an honest living.’

When he saw that Gunthar was unmoved by his plight, his face darkened and he growled, ‘I’m entitled to this. I’ve worked hard for the Emperor all my life, and what do I have to show for it? He abandoned us to die here!’

Gunthar was disgusted by him, by the waste of a life he represented. He squeezed his trigger, burnt a hole through the old thief’s head and watched dispassionately as his lifeless body crumpled. For a moment, he wondered if he had failed himself, allowed emotion to cloud his judgement. Then he saw the expressions on the remaining looters’ faces, heard their whimpered apologies and promises of future loyalty as they backed towards the window, and he knew that word of his single shot would spread and probably grow, and prove an object lesson to anyone who heard it.

He had used his resources well.

A half-track came to meet the returning convoy, pulling up alongside it. A thin-faced, young major spoke to a sergeant and was directed to another, who directed him in turn towards Gunthar. ‘Trooper Soreson?’ asked the major, and Gunthar blinked and took a moment to confirm that, yes, that had been his name. It had been so long since he had been addressed by it, he had almost forgotten.

He didn’t know why he had been singled out again. He didn’t ask. He was driven to the space port and taken upstairs to the office that had once been Hanrik’s, now Colonel Braun’s. Rising from behind his desk, Braun met Gunthar with a handshake and a vapid remark about the cold weather, as if greeting an old friend. He offered the nonplussed trooper a seat, and regarded him at length with a smile presumably meant to reassure him but decidedly strained.

‘I hear you’re just back from Thelonius City,’ said Braun.

‘Yes sir,’ said Gunthar. ‘We quelled the insurrection there.’

‘That’s good,’ murmured Braun, half to himself, ‘that’s good news. We have been finding it hard to recruit from Thelonius, but perhaps now…’

The colonel was flanked by two PDF lieutenants, while the major who had fetched Gunthar here had seated himself behind the door. It was a smaller gathering than the one to which he had last been summoned in these offices, with the Krieg Colonel 186 and his deputies being the absentees of most note, apart from Hanrik of course. Still, it was clear that something big was afoot, if only Braun would get to the point.

Commissar Costellin was in front of the window, leaning against the sill. His left arm was in a sling, and he looked as if he had aged ten years in the past three weeks.

Braun cleared his throat and fingered the ends of his moustache. ‘As you may have inferred from recent events,’ he said, ‘we are about to enter the decisive phase of this war of ours. We have driven the necrons back, corralled them quite nicely thank you very much, and we – that is to say, the Krieg officers and myself – have been making plans for one final push against them.’

‘You may also be aware,’ a lieutenant put in, ‘that there has not been an enemy sighting since the unfortunate events of a few weeks ago.’

‘You mean,’ said Costellin quietly, ‘since the necrons butchered thousands of civilians confined to the city by our own actions.’

‘Um, yes, quite so.’

‘Evidently,’ said Braun, ‘they are hiding out in that tomb of theirs, licking their wounds. Our objective, then, is to destroy that tomb, and the necrons along with it. Unfortunately, its composition and internal layout remain a mystery to us, since our early attempt to send in a scouting party met with failure. Nevertheless, we – that is to say, our tech-priests and enginseers – consider that a small number of atomic mining charges ought to be sufficient to the task.’

Gunthar was starting to see where this was going. Costellin spelt it out for him: ‘We need a man to deliver those charges.’

‘That man would play no other part in the battle,’ said the lieutenant, ‘but to wait for the entranceway to the tomb to become clear. At that point, with the protection of his squad, he would, um, convey the charges inside.’

Colonel Braun added, ‘We – that is to say, Colonel 186 – remembered your mining experience, Trooper Soreson, and your invaluable assistance in our earlier, ah…’

Gunthar had heard enough. He could have mentioned that, to him, atomic mining charges were just a stock number on a requisition form, he had never actually handled one, but that was not what anyone wanted to hear. ‘I would like to volunteer, sir,’ he said, and was rewarded by his commandant’s expression of relief.

Evidently, Braun had never sent a soldier to his certain death before.

‘You are clear, I hope, on what is being asked of you here,’ said Costellin. ‘These charges will not be detonated remotely, nor by a timed fuse. Either circumstance would allow the necrons a chance to deactivate them. You would be giving your life, Trooper Soreson, as would the other nine members of your squad.’

‘When do we leave, sir?’ asked Gunthar.

Colonel Braun reached into his desk drawer. ‘I have something for you, Trooper Soreson,’ he said, ‘in recognition of your, ah, your dedication. I know you have only been with the Planetary Defence Force a short time, but in that time you have served with distinction, and what with the losses we have sustained… well, I understand your squad is short of a sergeant at present.’

He was holding out a pair of sergeant’s flashes. Gunthar took them and thanked him. It didn’t matter that he didn’t feel ready to wear them. It was the Emperor’s will.

‘I know it isn’t much,’ said Braun. ‘If it were up to me… I’ve been in discussion with the Departmento Munitorum, I was hoping to arrange… We may not be Imperial Guard, but these past months we have fought alongside them, lived alongside them, given as much as they have, more even, and I don’t see why… I feel that, under the circumstances, the Iron Aquila shouldn’t be out of the question.’

He didn’t understand, thought Gunthar.

They were digging their way into Hieronymous City.

Four Centaurs had been fitted with dozer blades and were bearing the brunt of the task. There was still plenty for individual soldiers to do, however, armed with spades and barrows, watching that the rubble didn’t slide and bury them all. A fine layer of snow had settled in the night, making their labours more precarious. Gunthar had slept for the regulation six hours – he had become used to closing his ears, switching off his brain and taking his rest when he could – and was now back on duty.

His sergeant’s stripes affected the way his comrades looked at him. He resented this to begin with, resented the way in which they seemed to expect him to think for them now. He preferred the anonymity he had enjoyed before. He soon learned, however, that little had changed really. The officers still made the decisions, gave the orders, and all Gunthar had to do was oversee their implementation, ensure that everyone understood and performed the functions assigned to them.

That afternoon, Guardsmen and troopers alike formed up for a briefing from Colonel 186, who arrived with his usual entourage of Krieg officers and a smattering of PDF ones, Braun among them. An almost tangible sense of anticipation hung in the air as the colonel declared their work here almost done. ‘We will enter the city at dawn,’ he announced, ‘as will our fellow regiments to the north, east and south, converging upon the necron edifice, where the final battle of this war will be fought and won.’

Then he outlined the plan to destroy the necron tomb, and revealed that the honour of striking that blow would fall to a PDF squad but didn’t say which one. He referred to Gunthar, but called him ‘Sergeant 1419’, an appellation that few were likely to recognise. A number of troopers glanced nervously about, at each other, or tried to make out the digits stamped into their sergeants’ dog tags, to reassure themselves that they weren’t the chosen martyrs. They didn’t understand either.

‘Why does it have to be a PDF squad?’ he heard one trooper complaining as they returned to their work, after the Krieg officers had departed. ‘Why can’t that faceless bastard send his own men to die for a change?’ Gunthar reminded him sharply that he was talking about a superior officer, and therefore about the Emperor, and the trooper scowled at him but was silenced.

He was far from the only malcontent, however. Gunthar heard them muttering wherever he turned:

‘–think their lives are more valuable than ours, but they don’t even–’

‘–Braun should stand up to them, tell them we won’t take it. Hanrik would have–’

‘–about the rest of us, that’s what I’d like to know. When that blast goes off–’

‘–got their rebreather units to protect them from the radiation, while we–’

He consoled himself with the thought that most of the complainants were recent draftees. Their training period had been even more cursory than Gunthar’s had been, and none of them had experienced real combat yet. They hadn’t seen the necrons.

It took forty minutes for one of them to approach him: a sandy-haired, freckle-faced youth, sixteen or seventeen years old, from his own squad. ‘Some of us were wondering, sergeant,’ he said, ‘if the troopers that are to… the squad they are sending into the tomb… Sergeant, would be that our squad?’

‘Yes, trooper, it would be,’ said Gunthar, and the boy’s face turned ashen.

An hour later, a Krieg watchmaster informed Gunthar that one of his men had been caught attempting to desert and shot dead. He felt ashamed, and angry with himself. He felt he ought to have foreseen that occurrence and acted to prevent it.

By the time Lieutenant Harker, the platoon commander, assembled Gunthar’s squad and drew them to one side, there was nobody left with much doubt about what he might have to say to them. The lieutenant spoke about the great honour that had been conferred upon these ten men – nine now, he corrected himself. He told them that their actions tomorrow would make them heroes, and then, to Gunthar’s surprise, he gave each of them a choice: a transfer to another squad, should they wish to accept it.

Three of them did so, hesitantly at first, perhaps suspecting a trick. Gunthar was disappointed in them, but proud of the five that remained – and he took heart in the fact that, once word went out, there was no shortage of volunteers to replace them.

It wasn’t the way he would have handled the situation, but he had to admit to himself that it had been effective. He had nine men again, all of whom he could trust. They would do what they had to do, die to ensure that he could deliver his crucial payload, because they all thought as he did.

They believed in a cause, and they needed no more motivation than that, no promotions or medals, to fight for it. It was enough to know that their lives would make a difference, and in this sense they were luckier than the men they had replaced. Those men would most likely die tomorrow anyway, more cheaply and in fear.

There was no fear for Gunthar and his squad, because the future for them was set. They were dead men walking, all of them – but now they had the comfort of knowing exactly how and when they would drop.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Costellin was packing.

He didn’t want to leave it to the servitors, didn’t trust them with the items important to him. Not that there was much. Hololiths of his four grandsons at their passing-out parades. His first set of dog tags. An old, cracked data-slate inside which were locked the fond memories of a particular four-year period of his life. He wrapped them all carefully in his spare uniform, lowered them into a zip case.

The room looked empty, as it had when Costellin had first walked into it almost two months ago. It was funny how, in so short a time, it had become his room, his home. He wouldn’t miss Hieronymous Theta when he left it, but a small part of himself would remain in this room, as it had in all the other rooms, the many other rooms, on the many other worlds before this one.

Opening the bottom desk drawer, he was startled to find a pair of Krieg eyepieces staring up at him. He had forgotten he had put the mask and rebreather unit in there, forgotten he had retrieved them from the hab in the city. He had gone back for his chainsword and cap, lifted the floorboard beneath which he had stowed them to be transfixed by a dead man’s eyes.

He had remembered his promise to that dead man.

He should have left the mask where it lay. It had been a mistake to carry extra weight with him, wounded as he had been. Nevertheless, carry it Costellin had. A memento mori. He was getting as bad as the Guardsmen with whom he served. Yet one more reason, he thought, why the time had come.

‘I hear you are leaving us.’

Colonel 186 was in the doorway. Costellin was surprised to see him, and also a little guilty. He ought to have broken the news to his fellow officer in person. He had been putting off that ordeal, telling himself the colonel wouldn’t care anyway.

‘Once this campaign is over,’ he confirmed. ‘I have accepted a posting to a Royal Validian regiment.’

‘I will be sorry to lose you,’ said the colonel. Will you? thought Costellin uncharitably. ‘Your service with us has been long and distinguished, and in particular the mission you led into the occupied city–’

‘I can take no credit for that outcome,’ said Costellin. ‘It was one of your men who planned and implemented the attack on the generatorum. All I did was survive.’

‘I hope…’ said the colonel, with uncharacteristic reticence. ‘I trust it was nothing I said that–’

Costellin shook his head. ‘I know we have had our differences since your appointment, but no, colonel, my leaving has nothing to do with you. You have performed your duties as you saw them, efficiently and logically, and as such you have more than lived up to the standards set by your predecessors.’

‘You did, however, disagree with the decision taken by my superior officers, to engage the necron force.’

‘I did. I felt that… I don’t know, colonel. When I look at what we have – what you have – achieved here... I couldn’t have imagined it only two months ago, but we have the necrons on the run. We are beating them, we are actually beating them!’

‘Then you have revised your opinion?’

‘I think that, if all goes well tomorrow, if that tomb is destroyed and this world saved, then the value of that to the Imperium… and yet… I keep thinking about the cost. I don’t know, colonel. I just don’t know, and perhaps that is the problem. Perhaps I am simply too old. I have seen too much.’

‘It is likely,’ said the colonel, ‘that, after tomorrow, the Krieg 186th Infantry Regiment will no longer exist. Our losses have been such that we will probably be merged with the other regiments on this world. I would be proud to know that our sacrifice was worthwhile, that it will be remembered.’

‘And Krieg’s debt to the Emperor? Will it be repaid then?’

The colonel didn’t answer that, as indeed Costellin hadn’t expected him to. Instead, he observed, ‘You have taken the sling off your arm.’

‘The quartermaster informs me that the nerve damage is healed,’ said Costellin. ‘My right shoulder is a little stiff, but apart from that…’

‘Then you will be fighting with us tomorrow?’

‘Of course. The least I can do, before I begin my new assignment, is to see this one through to its bitter end.’

The colonel nodded his approval, and told Costellin that, this being the case, he would see him at dawn. Then he pivoted smartly and left, and the commissar stood alone in thought for a moment before he opened the desk drawer again.

He had pushed it shut with his leg when the colonel had appeared, unaccountably embarrassed by its contents. He steeled himself to do what he ought to have done three weeks ago. He took the mask and the rebreather unit down to the space port proper, and handed them to the first quartermaster he saw.

‘Find a good use for them,’ he instructed. ‘The last man who wore that facemask died a hero.’

The colonel had one final surprise up his sleeve.

As he briefed his troops in the pre-dawn cold, he reached into his greatcoat and produced a small, transparent cube of some yellow-tinted substance. Suspended in that cube was an off-white, irregular shape, longer than it was wide, tapering to a point like a tiny, primitive blade.

‘Such will be the magnitude of our actions here today, such the faith our generals have placed in this unworthy regiment, that they have obtained for us this…’ and, at this, the colonel’s voice became hushed, reverent, ‘…this fragment of bone from the skull of Colonel Jurten.’

A collective murmur went up from the Krieg Guardsmen, the most human reaction Costellin had ever heard from them.

‘I can think of no man more qualified to carry this for us,’ said the colonel, ‘to direct its holy light upon our humble endeavours, than our commissar.’

Taken by surprise, Costellin accepted the cube. He cradled it in his palms, admired it from all angles, and although a part of his heart remained hardened to it – he wondered how many more of these relics had been conveniently conjured, if the other three regiments on Hieronymous Theta had them too – he could feel how its presence touched the untouchable men before him, how it lifted their cynical spirits, and he knew that this made it a rare and precious thing indeed.

He had no words, but everyone was waiting to hear him. So, Costellin cleared his throat, recalled his training of a lifetime ago and launched into a speech that, while halting at first, soon became more confident in tone, more passionate, and ultimately proved, in the commissar’s own opinion, to be the finest, the most inspiring speech he had made in the whole of his decades-long career.

Then, a bloated red sun rose behind the shell of the city, and the time for words was done. Colonel 186 gave the order to move out, and the air was soon filled with the grumbling of reticent engines, thickened by exhaust fumes.

Three great armoured Gorgons led the way forward, each with an entire platoon crammed into its open-topped hold. Weighing more than two hundred tonnes apiece, these lumbering giants pulverised the remains of fallen hab-blocks beneath their tracks, while their reinforced prows combined to shield not only themselves but the stragglers in their well-trampled wake.

Of course, there was not enough transport for everyone, and so between the troop-carrying Centaurs and the artillery-heaving Trojans came the foot soldiers, approximately one half Death Korps of Krieg and one half Planetary Defence Force. Their colours clashed, their equipment was ragtag and many of them were injured. There were half as many of them as there had been three weeks ago, there would be fewer still tomorrow, but still they lifted their chins with pride.

Costellin rode with the colonel and his command squad in a Centaur, his view of the outside world blocked as soon as the hatch came down. He followed the progress of their army on the vox-net, but felt distanced from it in his own cramped, noisy little bubble. They followed the most direct path towards the city centre, as indicated by the most recent tactical scans, and for a time, all was quiet.

Then, Costellin’s Centaur was rocked by an explosion. The colonel, of course, was straight on the vox, demanding reports, which arrived instantly: ‘–road was mined, sir. It looks like the charges were buried in the rubble.’ ‘–they rolled right over–’ ‘No serious injuries, sir, the prow absorbed the brunt of it, but the engines–’ ‘No sign of any hostiles.’ ‘–appear to have been mining charges, but to have created a blast that size there must have been–’ ‘–tech-priest is inspecting the damage now, sir, but I think we’ve lost the Gorgon.’

They proceeded more cautiously after that, and sent a squad ahead of them on foot. Of course, if more explosives were buried as deeply as the first lot had been, then the scouts were unlikely to detect them; still, they could keep an eye out for signs of life in the otherwise dead city. It wasn’t long before they found them.

‘Hostiles up ahead, sir. We took them by surprise, fired on them before they saw us. Four down, but the rest have separated, taken cover.’

‘How many, watchmaster?’ asked the colonel.

‘Unknown, sir. There are more hiding in the buildings. Eight, at least, but there could be many more.’

‘Define “hostiles”,’ Costellin voxed. ‘Necrons?’

‘No sir, humans.’

‘Then how do you know…? Have they fired on you?’

‘Sir, our orders were to–’

‘Have they threatened you in any way?’

The colonel interceded, ‘Keep them pinned down, watchmaster, but do not advance. All units, hold your positions and await instructions.’ To Costellin, aloud, he said, ‘I don’t believe it was necrons who laid that trap back there.’

‘Agreed,’ said the commissar. ‘That wasn’t their style. More likely, it was the work of one of these treacherous cults we keep hearing about. Even so–’

‘Three weeks ago,’ said the colonel, ‘the necrons purged this city of every last human soul they could hunt down. We have to assume that any survivors–’

‘–are probably cold, hungry and frightened,’ Costellin argued, ‘and I doubt that being shot at has done much to reassure them. You don’t have much faith in humanity, do you, colonel? Must I remind you that, without the very human members of this world’s PDF, without their loyalty–’

‘What do you suggest we do?’ asked the colonel.

‘I’m going out there,’ said Costellin. ‘I’m going to talk to them.’

He clambered through the hatch and dropped to the ground, a few drifting snowflakes stinging his cheeks. The colonel disembarked from the Centaur behind him, and together they considered the line of idling vehicles stretching before them.

‘I’ve studied the maps,’ said Costellin. ‘The roads to the immediate north and south of this one are impassable. There are other routes through, but we would have to back up a good way to follow them.’

‘They’ve picked the perfect spot for an ambush,’ the colonel grumbled.

‘If that is indeed what this is. I still think–’

‘The most expedient way to deal with this is to shell those towers.’

‘And risk bringing them down, blocking our path? And what if you’re right, and those people up there do mean us harm? Can you guarantee that a few indiscriminately tossed shells will end their threat? We are carrying atomic bombs, colonel. A single survivor, a fortuitously placed mining charge, and this regiment will go out in its blaze of glory a few hours ahead of schedule.’

‘Then we send the Gorgons forward.’

‘I’m surprised at you. You’d risk losing another Gorgon to a potential minefield, and perhaps this time its occupants too, rather than a single life?’

‘The hostiles have used up a great many charges. The odds, I believe, are against their having as many remaining. Your plan may entail a lower stake than mine, but as its chances of success are negligible–’

‘I disagree with that assessment,’ said Costellin, ‘and as my life is the one to be staked, I believe it my right to do so. I can get through to these people, colonel. Even if they have turned to the necrons, it is only in despair. I can give them hope! At least, I can draw them out, establish the true extent of their resources.’

The colonel considered for a moment, then nodded his assent. He voxed the waiting scouts ahead, told them the commissar was on his way and that they should keep their distance but cover him as best they could.

Costellin marched past the watching soldiers, past the Centaurs and the Gorgons, his confidence fading as he found himself alone but for the occasional glimpse of a masked Guardsman crouching in a doorway or lying flat behind a step.

He kept his hands raised, his gaze fixed ahead, and kept walking until his peripheral vision detected movement in a first floor window. Then he came to a halt, introduced himself in a loud, clear voice and announced that he wanted to talk.

The echoes of his words died down before, from the window, he heard the unmistakable click of a power pack being pushed into place, then a female voice: ‘My husband has you in his sights. Lay down your weapons, all of them.’

He did as he was bade. Then, at the voice’s urging, he took ten paces backwards and waited. A door opened, and a small, dark figure scurried out, keeping his head down. He retrieved Costellin’s plasma pistol, but struggled with the chainsword and decided to leave it. The pistol, he levelled inexpertly as he motioned to the commissar to follow him back inside. The body of a young woman lay slumped in the doorway, and Costellin took a moment to examine her, concluding to his chagrin but not to his surprise that she was long beyond helping.

A rickety staircase led him up to a large, open floor, a scattering of flea-bitten sheets and the stink of faeces telling him that this had been a mutant flophouse. He counted six people huddled in gloomy corners.

He was met by a middle-aged couple, the man bearded and balding, wielding a lasgun. The younger man who had brought him here took refuge behind this pair, still brandishing Costellin’s pistol.

‘You’re Imperium,’ said the woman, glaring at the aquila on the commissar’s cap through narrowed, suspicious eyes. ‘Why should we trust you?’

‘I can get you out of this city,’ said Costellin.

‘And off this world?’

‘With the Emperor’s grace, that will not be necessary. I am taking an army to fight the invaders. We believe we can–’

‘Don’t listen to him,’ the man hissed. ‘It’s just words, that’s all. Where was his Emperor when the invaders came? Why couldn’t his army save us then?’

‘I know it must seem that way, like you were forgotten, but–’

‘Sealed up in this hell,’ said the woman, ‘abandoned to the slaughter!’ She was brimming with tears. ‘We thought we would never…’

‘The attack took us all by surprise,’ said Costellin. ‘We did what we could. We’re fighting back now. You were never abandoned.’

‘It’s been so long. The priests, they told us…’

‘I know what they told you, but you must see now they were mistaken. You were right, you’ve been living in hell, and it must be hard sometimes to look up at the sky, but there is still a world outside of this city, and people waiting for you.’

A report rang out, a las-beam sizzled past his ear, and a voice roared, ‘Dissembler!’ Costellin whirled around to find that a short, stocky man had stepped into the room behind him. He wore the white vestments of a priest, but they had been defaced, holy runes obliterated by a smear of paint or a touch of flame.

‘Marig,’ the woman gasped, ‘we thought you were... You’re…’

The newcomer strode forward, jabbed an accusing finger in Costellin’s face. ‘This man lies to you. He promises freedom, while his soldiers are poised to destroy us.’

‘No,’ said Costellin, ‘that isn’t–’

‘Their guns have slain four of our brethren. They tried to silence me too, but my faith in the Iron Gods shielded me.’ Costellin felt his trigger finger twitching at these words. In any other circumstances, he would have executed this heretic on the spot.

‘There are so many of them, Marig,’ pleaded the bearded man, ‘and we have only these two weapons, these three now. Shouldn’t we…?’

His wife completed the thought: ‘Surrender to them, throw ourselves on their mercy. They know what we have been through, they must understand.’

‘Their Emperor understands nothing. He has no mercy. Don’t you see? I know how they work. They will kill us to protect themselves from the truths we have learned.’

‘And how many have the necrons killed?’ Costellin asked quietly. His words were ostensibly directed at the priest, but he meant them for the others. Marig was beyond reason. He was no fool, however. He extended a hand towards Costellin’s erstwhile guide, took the plasma pistol from him, swapping it for his lasgun. He examined the unfamiliar weapon, and smiled in approval, then the smile hardened as Marig raised the pistol and pressed it to Costellin’s temple.

‘Our lord spoke clearly to us, although few chose to understand. He warned that resistance would incur His wrath, and so it came to pass. However, by seeking out His enemies, sending them to His judgement, we can show Him that–’

Costellin made a grab for the gun. His fingertips brushed its stock, but Marig recoiled too quickly, accidentally unleashing a plasma bolt in the process. The other refugees dived for cover as Costellin cursed his age-slowed reflexes, pushed the priest away from him and ran. He vaulted the staircase rail, landing with a bone-jarring thud that loosened a precarious step and almost pitched him the rest of the way down the stairs headfirst. As he hit the ground floor, a second bolt whooshed over his head and exploded against the wall, searing and blinding him with its backwash. Costellin could hear the heavy, running footsteps of the deranged priest in pursuit.

His vision filled with miniature supernovae, Costellin fumbled his way through the door. He stumbled in the road, scraping his hands, and felt for his dropped chainsword. He found it even as his eyesight cleared, thumbed the activation stud in its grip, and the engine spluttered but failed to catch.

Marig seized him from behind, choking him, twisting his wrist until the chainsword fell, the pistol barrel at Costellin’s head again. ‘Stay back,’ the priest screamed, ‘stay back!’ and Costellin saw the shapes of Death Korps Guardsmen edging forward through the shadows, saw the glints of their lasgun sights.

‘I saw nine of them,’ he sub-vocalised into his comm-bead, ‘but there could be more in the other buildings. The priest is their leader. Take him out, and the rest will almost certainly flee or surrender. In any case, they have only two lasguns between them, and no explosives as far as I can ascertain.’

‘We have your officer,’ Marig yelled. ‘One more step forward, and I will kill him, I swear to the Iron Gods I will. Turn back! Leave us be, if you value his life.’

Obviously, he didn’t know the Death Korps of Krieg.

Costellin hadn’t felt the las-beam that had killed him.

He couldn’t feel much of anything. He had fallen, all the same, and couldn’t stand again for the invisible weight resting on his chest.

He could hear booted footsteps tramping about his head, the approaching engines of the Gorgons, but no gunfire. He had been right; with the death of the priest – Marig’s corpse was splayed out in the road alongside him – his followers had abandoned the fight. The Krieg army was free to advance.

A facemask loomed in Costellin’s blurred vision. ‘Colonel?’ he said.

Then the mask drew closer as its wearer knelt beside him, and he saw a quartermaster’s shoulder flashes. ‘Tell me the worst,’ he wheezed, trying to make light of his fate, to hold the paralysing dread at bay. ‘Can you fix me? Will I live?’

The quartermaster shook his head.

He was searching through the commissar’s greatcoat, for what reason Costellin couldn’t guess until the quartermaster located his prize in an inside pocket: the holy relic, the bone fragment in its cube. He extracted it with due deference, transferred it to his own coat, and only then turned his attention to his human charge.

His masked face looked like a skull, like a harbinger of death itself. The last sight that so many Krieg eyes had seen. Somehow, Costellin had never thought the same would be true of him, never thought he would come to this place.

As a young man, he had thought he would die on the battlefield. Of late, he had begun to anticipate a more peaceful passing, at a ripe old age in his bed. It had never crossed his mind that, in the end, he would be gunned down by his own men. He could almost have laughed at the ignominy of his fate.

‘Let your soul be at rest now,’ said the quartermaster, ‘and know that the Emperor is pleased with your sacrifice. Your life was worthwhile.’

Then he passed a gloved hand over the commissar’s eyelids, and closed them.

The last thing Costellin felt before he surrendered to the darkness was the quartermaster easing his chainsword out from under his hand.

Chapter Twenty-Four

There had been no sign of necron scouts on the way into the city, no spy craft glimpsed overhead. Still, the necrons were prepared and waiting for their attackers, arrayed before their night-black tomb, and their numbers had grown again as the Death Korps’ generals had expected they would.

What the generals had not anticipated was that the necron army would have grown to outnumber their own, at least this regiment of it. When he saw the odds against them, a PDF officer let slip with a curse over an open vox-channel.

The necrons concentrated their initial fire upon the remaining Gorgons. Gauss blasts scythed through armour plating, heavy stubbers spitting back while they could. The Gorgons endured long enough to disgorge their passengers, who advanced with hellguns blazing. As before, ghouls burrowed into the heart of the Death Korps’ ranks, and as before the Death Korps was ready for them. This time, however, the melta-wielding grenadiers were the primary targets of the ghouls’ blade-claws, three of them flensed to death before a full minute had passed.

Gunthar followed all this over the vox-net, struggling to sift through overlapping, frenetic reports to build a picture of the battlefield in his head. His Centaur was fitted with a periscope in the co-driver’s side, but so far this had been of little use, he was too far from the action. He could see the vast face of the necron pyramid, but he couldn’t work out where the gateway into it might be.

His gunner, an on-loan Krieg Guardsman, had a better overview from his turret, and his updates were invaluable. To Gunthar’s right, a civilian farmer, more used to handling tractors than tanks, held the steering wheel in a white-knuckled grip. His four squad mates – the remaining five had been packed into another vehicle – were almost as tense. They couldn’t take their eyes off their sergeant, off the deadly payload that was strapped to his chest.

They didn’t look like much, the mining charges: four batons, each wrapped in yellow and black tape stamped with warnings and skull symbols, but Gunthar remembered the care he had been mandated to take when arranging transport for them in his overseer’s role. He had certainly slept more soundly for the fact that the charges were conveyed in unmarked trucks, along lower-level skyways, a long way from his bed.

He had sanctioned their use just once, to blast through stubborn bedrock in a mine in which yields had been down for almost a year. To this day, those tunnels could not be entered without a rad-suit, other than by the expendable servitors.

No officers had accompanied him to Thelonius City to collect the charges from a storage depot. A grizzled ex-miner had lifted the lid from a lead-lined crate, and at his first sight of its contents, Gunthar had taken an involuntary – and entirely futile – step away from them. Since the charges had been attached to him, he had been afraid to walk, to sit down, to make any movement at all lest he set them off.

He ordered his driver to edge forward. Now that the ghouls had been deployed, their positions known, it was probably safe to do so. The Krieg gunner reported necrons skimming towards them, and for a moment Gunthar thought his heart would stop, but then they were intercepted by a squad of death riders, held at bay.

The gunner had asked for permission, more than once, to cut loose with his stubber. It was imperative, however, that the Centaur drew no attention to itself. It was up to the rest of the regiment to draw the necrons away from it, and away from that gateway. Until they could do so, Gunthar could only sit and watch, helpless.

He squinted through the periscope again, saw a blur of ghosts dropping upon a grenadier platoon, an explosion of hellguns greeting them, cutting through some of them. He heard the familiar voice of Colonel 186, promising reinforcements. It seemed that the 42nd and 103rd regiments had met with only token resistance to the north and south of the tomb, so the bulk of their forces were en route. The 81st regiment to the east, almost three kilometres away, were taking a different tack, sending forth their cannons to break through the pyramid’s back wall.

Gunthar relayed this news to his men, who lacked the benefit of comm-beads with which to have heard it. One middle-aged rookie opined that the Death Korps could switch to defensive tactics now, keep the necrons occupied until their fellow regiments arrived, at which point it would all be over. Gunthar set him straight. The rookie hadn’t seen the necrons up close, hadn’t seen that, against their armour-piercing gauss weaponry, the only possible defence was a fierce offence.

They waited.

The reinforcements were here, but they hadn’t turned the tables as completely as Gunthar had prayed they might. Both regiments had arrived in unison, capturing the besieged necrons in a pincer movement, taking out scores of them before they could begin to defend themselves, and yet…

And yet, it seemed to Gunthar, watching through his periscope, that there were as many necrons between him and his goal as there had been from the start.

He had to get to that tomb. The source of the necrons’ power was held in there. Once the tomb was destroyed they would be unable to regenerate themselves, unable to blink out of a difficult spot to appear elsewhere. At any rate, that was the theory.

The 42nd regiment was going in hard against them, the 103rd falling back, luring the necrons south. Gunthar didn’t need the colonel’s voice in his ear to tell him it was time to move forward again, and to circle around to the north.

His driver hit the brakes as they were buffeted by an explosion, vox-traffic confirming that a Centaur had been hit only twenty metres from them. Gunthar swallowed nervously and agreed they should stay put for the present.

Through his periscope, the tomb appeared tantalisingly close, but the figures fighting in front of it provided a more realistic sense of scale and distance, of how far Gunthar still had to go. From the turret, the gunner announced that he could now see the gateway, and as Gunthar swung his scope in the indicated direction, he could see it too, see the green light blazing from it. There were still too many necrons in the way, however, far too many, so they waited.

One more surge forward, another interminable wait, then Gunthar made up his mind.

A phalanx of necrons had just vanished, and reports suggested they had gone to the pyramid’s far side to repel the invaders there. The way ahead was as clear right now as it would likely ever be, and this close to the enemy guns a Centaur was as vulnerable as any foot soldier. His squad, therefore, had more chance of survival as ten small targets rather than riding in two larger ones. They could also arrange themselves, on foot, so that their sergeant, their human bomb, was the hardest of those ten targets to hit. So Gunthar gave the order to disembark, and relayed this through his comm-bead to the senior trooper in the second Centaur.

The battlefield was as crowded, as chaotic, as his last one had been. Hadn’t he been told that this battle would be easier? He suppressed an echo of the feelings he had had back then, the fear, the uncertainty. They were unworthy of him. Gunthar was an experienced soldier now, a leader no less, and everyone was counting on him. Still, he couldn’t help but feel exposed and vulnerable, even more so than he had the first time. The mining charges made him vulnerable.

The Centaur rumbled away, its gunner making up for lost time. Gunthar crouched behind a stout Medusa chassis as the rest of his squad formed up around him. He could see the gateway’s green light, diffused by a mortar smoke haze, and there were soldiers fighting in that smoke but, to his horror, Gunthar couldn’t tell which were necrons and which Death Korps.

He had to get closer still. He motioned to his men – he had no hope of making his voice heard – and they tucked themselves in as best they could behind an advancing platoon, then raced for the shelter of a rubble heap. They were in the open for no more than a second, long enough for a ghost to pick off one luckless trooper. As it opened his throat with its blades, a second trooper faltered in his tracks, almost turned back, until Gunthar grabbed his arm and hauled him away from there. There was nothing he could have done, nothing any of them could have done. Only three of them were even armed, the colonel’s view being that lasguns were still scarce and that the moment Gunthar’s squad needed them was the moment they were dead anyway.

He peered around the rubble, saw that green glow closer than he had imagined it would be and the way clear to it. He almost gave the order, almost started forward, then smoke tendrils parted to uncover the shape of a necron tank, the tomb in miniature with that same dreadful green light streaming from its hatchway.

Its guns lashed out, and as Gunthar dropped he was pelted by debris and his cover reduced to half its height. He dared raise his head, after a minute, to find the tank floating away from him. A squad of Krieg Guardsmen rushed it, and although most were disintegrated by its green energy whips, two leapt for its hatchway and dragged themselves through. A moment later, the tank combusted, blown apart, if Gunthar was any judge, by a concentration of krak grenades in its belly. The Guardsmen, of course, did not return, but their deaths had counted. They had done what Gunthar was struggling to do, granted on a smaller scale, but they had made it look easy.

He could see the gateway again and he knew that, the longer he waited to make his run for it, the more of his comrades would give their lives, but it was impossible to judge his moment, to predict the ebbs and flows of the combat, and he couldn’t afford to get this wrong. With every second that passed, he became more anxious, more fearful that he might have missed his chance already.

The decision was made for him.

He didn’t know where the colonel was, but presumably he had found himself a good vantage point or was in contact with somebody who had, because his voice was in Gunthar’s ear again, screaming at him to move. He moved.

He raced headlong into that chaos, and he kept his eyes fixed on the gateway and swore he wouldn’t stop for anything. He didn’t stop when the ground exploded a metre to his right, taking out two of his bodyguards and showering him with rock fragments. He didn’t stop when a third trooper lost his nerve and fell to his knees, his hands raised in surrender for a second before his head exploded, the victim of fire – from which side Gunthar didn’t have time to tell.

He didn’t stop as the first necrons saw his plan and turned their guns upon him. The Death Korps closed ranks, took the brunt of the gauss beams, and Gunthar was more than halfway to his goal now. The green light was all he could see, the Krieg colonel’s voice all he could hear, urging him to run faster, ever faster.

‘Once you’re inside that pyramid,’ his own colonel, Braun, had briefed him, ‘you are to waste no time. Remember, we don’t know what’s in there, and one gauss blast could disintegrate you and the charges you carry without setting them off. That said…’ He had averted his eyes from Gunthar, awkwardly. ‘That said, if you do see a chance… The deeper in you can get, the more damage you’ll do when… and the more walls you can put between you and… well, the more protection we’ll have, from the blast I mean and from the fallout.’

There was something new in the gateway’s green light. A thousand dark spots, bubbling to the surface. Gunthar blamed the smoke at first, then his eyes.

Then a swarm of metal insects was belched out from the gateway to engulf him.

They alighted upon him, scratching, biting. Gunthar tried to plough on through them, but the combined mass of their small bodies repulsed him. One of his bodyguards was already down. An insect was crawling on the mining charges, and he brushed it away frantically. The colonel’s voice sounded from somewhere, distant and tinny, drowned out by the rustle of the swarm. They had dislodged Gunthar’s comm-bead from his ear, so he didn’t know if his orders were to advance or retreat.

The latter seemed to be the only practical option.

Casting about, he saw another rock pile and gesticulated wildly towards it although he didn’t know if his remaining squad mates could see him. He ran, leapt, and as his feet left the ground he was lifted from behind by a shockwave, carried further than he had intended to go. He just had time to wrap his arms about himself, protecting the mining charges, before he landed on his stomach.

He recovered his breath, looked up. The insect swarm had gone. No more than a handful of aimless drones remained, the rest incinerated by a well-placed mortar blast. Well-placed, but insanely risky. Two of the four charges had become dislodged, were hanging from Gunthar’s bruised body. It was a miracle they were intact.

Three of his bodyguards had stayed alive, stayed with him. Their faces were cut, weeping blood. The gateway was less than two hundred metres away, but the necrons were strafing the area in front of it, keeping them pinned down. The Krieg soldiers were fighting to suppress their enemies’ fire, to block it where it couldn’t be suppressed, to give Gunthar a second chance, so he waited.

The light in the gateway flared again, and this time it was a veritable legion of foot soldiers that was disgorged. Gunthar watched in horror as the air was filled with green lightning, and a platoon of Krieg Guardsmen harvested like so many cornstalks. A moment ago, it had seemed like his comrades were making headway. Now, their front line had collapsed, and the necrons were closing on Gunthar’s own position.

He should have fallen back, but he couldn’t bear the thought of losing what ground he had gained. He had reinserted his comm-bead, but the Krieg colonel had nothing to say to him. Even now, Gunthar was waiting, watching for his chance, for an opening no matter how small. Then a trooper tugged at his sleeve, pointed with a trembling finger, and he looked at the gateway.

Another necron had appeared there, more substantial than the others, taller than the tallest of them by a head, wearing a tattered blue cloak, wielding an arcane staff. Gunthar had not seen its like before. He had heard but not seen the giant hololithic images that had hovered above Hieronymous City two months ago. He had heard enough descriptions, though, to recognise the image made incarnate, to know he was crouching less than two hundred metres from his enemies’ leader.

The necron lord flung its skeletal hands skyward, and Gunthar saw that cradled in its left palm was a large, black orb. Something flashed green in the depths of that orb, and he could taste metal, feel the hairs on his neck standing to attention. His flesh was tingling, and the air felt pregnant as if a great storm was coming.

And the necrons were rising – in their scores, in their hundreds, even those that had lain dead and blasted apart for minutes, and those felled by melta fire. Necrons weren’t supposed to recover from melta fire… were they?

Something shifted, slithering beneath Gunthar’s hands, and he recoiled as a stream of molten metal flowed around him, meeting other streams, coalescing into the form of a necron ghost, which immediately took flight. It was too much for one trooper, who ran screaming, but his cowardice proved a boon of sorts: he offered the creature a tempting target, and it swooped after him without seeing his huddled squad mates, three of them remaining now where there had been ten.

Revenant ghouls crawled out from beneath a Medusa and set about it with their claws. It ought to have been impossible but, where they struck, armour plating rippled and distorted, and fell apart. Gunthar could hardly process what he was seeing. This wasn’t how it was meant to be. The necrons were meant to be depleted, denied the resources of the city’s generatorums, in hiding. Instead, they were fighting back with new and more lethal weapons, and their numbers were growing still; there were as many of them on the battlefield now – no, more – than there had been at the start of this fight.

The tomb was well and truly guarded, and Gunthar’s comrades were on the back foot, too busy defending themselves to even think about changing that situation. The necron lord raised its staff, and three great green blasts erupted from its prongs, finding and destroying three Krieg death riders. Flanking their lord in the gateway, a pair of mechanical spiders squatted, waiting, and Gunthar knew then, before the colonel’s voice confirmed it to him, that their cause was a lost one.

All the same, when the order to withdraw came, he railed inwardly against it. He had been so close. He even wondered, where had the Emperor been when He was needed, though he was immediately ashamed of that thought, and he asked himself: What if I just did it, blew the charges now? I might still damage the tomb, and more importantly I could kill the necron lord, and if I took the rest of my comrades with me, well, wouldn’t they understand? Wouldn’t they consider that a worthwhile sacrifice?

He almost did it. His hand was on the detonator. Then, he thought maybe he should vox the colonel first, request sanction for his plan, and then he knew what the colonel would say. He would point out that half the necrons, their leader most likely included, would take the atomic blast and stand up again, while the soldiers of the Death Korps would die and remain dead. It wasn’t worth the price.

There was nothing Gunthar could do.

The process of disengagement was as difficult and costly as might have been expected. The grenadiers exhausted their melta guns laying down covering fire for retreating Guardsmen. The necrons still pressed them hard, although Gunthar noticed that their parting shots were mostly aimed at ordnance and vehicles, reducing their enemies’ capacity to mount another attack like this one.

He slipped away when he judged it safest to do so, his remaining bodyguards falling into step behind him. Their mission might have been aborted, but the charges at Gunthar’s chest still had to be protected. Both troopers died providing that protection, shot in their backs, and it was a weary, desolate and solitary Gunthar who stumbled out of the range of the necron guns at last to join the departing column of soldiers.

In defeat, the Death Korps of Krieg were as disciplined, as regimented as ever, in contrast to the shuffling, dejected survivors of the PDF. They still numbered in their thousands, but those few thousand, Gunthar realised, were all that remained of three regiments now. A couple of Guardsmen in the 103rd confirmed that they had been ordered west to the space port rather than south back to their dugouts. The same was true of the 42nd regiment, and the 81st, who had also disengaged from their battle to the east, were planning to make a wide half-circuit of the city and follow them.

‘Then who’s left guarding the city walls?’ asked Gunthar, but he feared he already knew the answer to that question.

He found Colonel 186 marching with the lower ranks. He must have lost his transport – or, to judge by his drawn bolt pistol and the limp he sported, left it to take a more active role in the fighting. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said Gunthar. ‘I tried. I just couldn’t see an opening, but next time… Give me another chance, and I’m sure I can…’

The colonel stared at him as if he didn’t have a clue who he was.

‘Sergeant 1419, sir. I was – I am – carrying the mining charges.’

The colonel shifted his gaze to Gunthar’s chest, and immediately summoned a quartermaster to his side. ‘Remove the explosive devices,’ he instructed, ‘and make sure they are stored safely.’ The quartermaster produced a knife and began to slice through thick straps and layers of tape. The colonel, in the meantime, strode on without another glance at Gunthar, leaving him feeling wretched and worthless.

‘I didn’t know what to do,’ he confessed as the quartermaster extricated the first of the batons from its wrappings and lowered it gingerly into a reinforced box.

‘Our orders were to withdraw,’ said the quartermaster.

‘I know. I know they were, but…’ Gunthar was tongue-tied again. He hadn’t been tongue-tied in so long. He didn’t feel like a soldier any more. ‘I just never imagined… I thought it would be over by now. I thought the Death Korps of Krieg always fought to the end. What do we do now? How do we fight the necrons now?’

‘We don’t.’ The quartermaster had detached the last of the atomic mining charges, and he knelt by the box now, secured its lid with a series of latches and handed it to a servitor to carry. ‘This war is over,’ he told Gunthar bluntly. ‘The necrons have won.’

Chapter Twenty-Five

The day had begun like any other day. Arex had been woken by a touch of sunlight through ill-fitting shutters. She had sat bolt upright, searching for the intruders she had sensed in her dreams. Skeletal hands, reaching for her as she slept… The hab, the latest in a long line of identikit rooms, had been empty, the rest of the nightmare all too real. Arex had almost been disappointed.

She knew the dream would come true one day, and this waiting was a form of slow torture for her. In the dream, she had welcomed the skeletal hands’ touch.

Something was different today: distant sounds from the outside, below. Arex strained to make out the tramping of boots, the roaring of engines. Too noisy for the invaders. She had slipped out of bed, crept up to the window, put her eye to the crack between shutters and frame, and she had seen the most wonderful sight of her life:

An army, unmistakably marching to war. The Imperial Guard, behind a banner depicting a white, eagle-winged skull against black. A convoy of siege engines crawling in its wake. She had shaken the sleeping Tylar, excitedly, told him the good news. The Emperor hadn’t abandoned them, after all.

Her Uncle Hanrik hadn’t failed her.

She was all for running right out there, but Tylar had counselled caution. The soldiers would be long gone before they could reach them. They took their time, got dressed, Arex’s hands shaking so much that Tylar had to fasten her scavenged top for her. They ate the last of the food paste. They had been trying to make it last, to delay the day when they would have to venture into the outside again. They hugged each other for courage, then they opened the door.

It had taken them days to climb as far as they had, minutes to descend to the ground level again. They had found the streets empty, as Tylar had predicted they would. From the east, however, they heard sounds of a pitched battle, which Arex had found reassuring. ‘What do we do?’ she asked. ‘Wait for them to come back?’

‘Maybe,’ said Tylar, ‘we don’t have to. If the soldiers came into the city this way…’

‘We can retrace their steps,’ Arex realised. ‘We can leave!’

Even as she had spoken the words, she had doubted them. It had seemed impossible, after all this time, everything she had been through, the hopes she had seen dashed, that it could be so easy. She kept waiting for something to go wrong, for the invaders to spring an ambush, or perhaps to wake and find herself back in that squalid little room on a day like all the other days.

What she had not expected was that, as she and Tylar neared the outermost surviving tower, as they climbed a heap of rubble in their path, just as she had begun to entertain the faintest hope again, to taste freedom, they would come under lasgun fire.

They ducked into a doorway. Arex could smell burnt hair, and was afraid it was probably hers. ‘Lasguns,’ she whispered to Tylar. ‘The invaders don’t use lasguns.’

‘Probably cultists,’ he growled. ‘A few of Amareth’s bunch survived the purges, or they might belong to one of the other churches.’

‘I think,’ said Arex, ‘I think I glimpsed a red and purple tunic. I think they’re PDF, Tylar. They must think… They must think we are the cultists.’

Tylar craned forward, tried to see, and another las-beam nearly sliced off his nose. ‘Don’t shoot,’ he yelled, ‘don’t shoot! We aren’t who you think we are. We’re on your side. Praise be to the Emperor!’

‘I can’t let you through,’ came a nervous voice in response. ‘Go back!’

‘You can’t!’ cried Arex. ‘You can’t make us… We’ve been kidnapped, shot at, almost sacrificed, and we just want to… Please, let us out of here!’

‘I have the governor’s niece with me,’ called Tylar.

There was silence for a moment, then the voice returned, uncertainly: ‘Lady Hanrik? Is that really you?’

Negotiations had proceeded swiftly after that. The owner of the voice, a Lieutenant Smitt, claimed to have met Arex at several functions, so she had pretended to remember him and, fortunately, had recalled one of those functions in enough detail to convince him of her identity. She and Tylar had emerged cautiously from hiding, to find a single PDF squad waiting for them, the majority of them unarmed and teenaged. Smitt, in contrast, was grey-haired and wizened, and walked with the aid of a cane. He had been retired, he explained, but had returned to duty to help out as best he could in the current crisis.

He had directed them to the space port, apologetic that he had no vehicles to take them there. Tylar had said it was okay, they had become well used to walking. Smitt had kept looking at Arex with tears shining in his eyes, and repeating that this was a miracle, they had never expected to find her alive. It wasn’t until later that she had learned what those tears were for.

Tylar had taken her hand, then, and they had set off along the road together. They had walked out of the ruined city, at last, into a world they had almost forgotten. On a day that Arex would always remember as being like no other.

They sat in the warm mess hall at the space port, alone but for a wounded trooper slumped at a corner table. They nursed their first hot drinks in two months, but Arex had no appetite for hers.

‘This isn’t…’ she ventured haltingly. ‘I had a picture of this moment. Even when things were at their most hopeless and I thought I would never get here, I always…’

Tylar reached across the table, took her hands in his. ‘I did the same. I imagined that, outside, everything would be… normal, I suppose. As it was before.’

She had been recognised on the hillside. Refugees had flocked to her, wanting to lay their hands upon her. Most of them had probably never heard her name before, but now they were saying her return from certain death was a sign from the Emperor, a good augur for the outcome of the war. She had flinched from their touches. How could she be their saviour when she had come in such dire need of salvation herself?

There had been one name on all their lips, and from them Arex had heard what the aged Smitt had been too cowardly to tell her.

‘He should have left on a rescue ship,’ she said bitterly, ‘when he had the chance. He must have stayed for my sake, and I never even…’

‘You don’t think,’ said Tylar carefully, ‘he could really have done what they say?’

‘Uncle Hanrik was no traitor,’ she said fiercely. ‘He must have had some reason for sending that message, and we have only this Krieg colonel’s word for it anyway.’ Arex groaned, and ran her fingers through her tangled hair. ‘I just expected that, of all people, he would be… I’ve lost everything else, and Emperor knows I never thought I would see him again, but I always supposed… I thought he would be okay.’

‘We could ask around. We could find out about… Gunthar, was it?’

Arex shook her head. ‘If he was here, he’d have found me by now. You saw how word of our arrival spread. He’s gone, Tylar. Gunthar is gone.’

Tylar gave her hands a comforting squeeze. ‘The Iron Gods, the… the necrons, they have destroyed one city out of many, not a world.’

‘It’s only a matter of time,’ said Arex. ‘We thought… When I saw the soldiers this morning, I thought there was still hope. I was forgetting… What you saw, Tylar, inside the pyramid. The green portal. The necrons cannot be defeated.’

They could hear a stirring in the corridors, running footsteps and raised voices. A black-uniformed proctor skidded to a halt in the doorway and announced excitedly, ‘They’re coming back! The soldiers, they’re coming back!’

The wounded trooper leapt to his feet with surprising spryness, to follow the proctor out of there at an eager run. Tylar was standing too, but Arex remained where she was, in no hurry to hear the news. Everyone else was praying for a miracle – their second of the day – but they hadn’t seen what she had seen. Arex couldn’t bring herself to share their optimism, much as she would have liked to. Her stomach felt heavy with dread, and she had given up praying a long time ago.

Colonel 186’s office was a frenzy of activity. Krieg soldiers were disassembling a communications console, packing it away into crates. The colonel himself stood untouched in the eye of the maelstrom. It took Arex three attempts to find a way through to him. He turned to her, and she tried to meet and hold his gaze but found only her own eyes reflected in his facemask’s lenses. The image would have given her pause had she been less determined than she was.

‘My name is Arex Hanrik,’ she said, imitating the imperious tones her uncle had used when dealing with authority. It had worked twice so far, got her to this room. ‘I am the niece – the last surviving relative – of Governor Talmar Hanrik, and I–’

‘I explained to your uncle at the outset,’ said the colonel, turning away from her, moving to his desk, ‘that this world is under martial law. That means–’

‘I’m aware of what it means. I just want to know what’s… The people out there, they want to know what is happening. I think the least you can do, colonel, the very least you owe them, is an explanation.’

‘We are leaving Hieronymous Theta,’ said the colonel.

‘Then it’s true, what they say. You are pulling out. You’re… giving up.’

‘The first of the drop-ships will arrive in thirty minutes.’

‘But the Iron… I mean, the necrons!’

‘In the judgement of our generals, there is no more we can do here. There has been an ork uprising on a world called…’ The colonel pulled a data-slate across his desk, glanced at it. ‘Djangalla. We are scheduled to arrive there in eight days’ time.’

‘What about us? Aren’t they…? Are they sending someone else?’

‘We did all we could. We almost destroyed the necrons’ tomb, but we expended the majority of our resources in the attempt and we failed.’

‘Then acquire more resources. Get on to the Departmento Munitorum, demand they send more troops. I know how they work, I heard my uncle arguing with them often enough. You have to keep on at them.’

‘It appears,’ said the colonel, ‘that some assumptions we made about our enemies were mistaken. Our only certainty at this point is that further engagement with them would be a long and costly process, with little chance of a positive outcome.’

‘Then you’re just… You’re leaving us to their mercy? Colonel, there are – there were – nine billion people on this world.’

‘Even so, Lady Hanrik, the numbers just don’t add up.’

‘I won’t accept that. I can’t believe you could be so… myopic. What happens when the necrons are finished with us? When they set their sights on the next world, and the one after that? What happens when they spread to your world, colonel? Krieg is only a few systems away from here, as I recall. If these monsters aren’t stopped now…’ Arex’s voice trailed off. The colonel was just sitting, staring blankly at her, but although his mask expressed nothing as always, his silence spoke volumes.

She sank into a seat herself.

‘They won’t let that happen, will they?’ she said. ‘I should have seen it at once.’

‘The Imperial Navy has been contacted,’ said the colonel. ‘The necessary authorities have already been granted. An Exterminatus order is under preparation.’

‘How long…?’

‘These things take time, as I am sure you’re aware. Our commissars have asked for more rescue ships to be sent, and I believe that some of–’

‘I hear the last ship left over a month ago,’ said Arex. ‘Where has Naval Command been since then? No, let me guess. So long as they believed we had a chance, so long as they thought you might actually beat the necrons, we weren’t considered a high enough priority, and now… now, it’s too late.’

‘I believe,’ the colonel repeated, ‘that some of your city administrators have also made strong representations. Six ships have been despatched, with more–’

‘That isn’t enough,’ protested Arex. ‘Six ships isn’t nearly enough and you know as well as I do, colonel, that some of them won’t even arrive in time to… to help us.’

‘That is not my concern,’ said the colonel. ‘I suggest you contact–’

Arex flared up at him. ‘It might not be your concern, but don’t you even care? Uncle Hanrik was right about you. I’ve been talking to the people, to the refugees, to the few remaining members of the Planetary Defence Force, and do you want to know what they’ve been saying about him? About what you did to him?’

‘Governor-General Hanrik,’ snapped the colonel, ‘made contact with a necron cult. He intimated that he was prepared to negotiate with them.’

‘For my sake!’ cried Arex. ‘He was trying to help me! He wouldn’t really have… and you… you killed him and for what? You said it yourself, colonel. You tried to deal with the necrons your way, and you failed. You lost our world to them anyway.’ She was filling up with tears. She turned away from the colonel, tried to hide it. She had sworn to herself that she wouldn’t cry in front of him.

‘The troop ship Memento Mori,’ he said quietly, ‘has quarters and provisions for some thirty thousand men. Our numbers, those of our four regiments combined, have been reduced to somewhere in the region of five thousand.’

‘You’re saying you might…?’ Arex sniffed.

‘We have been asked,’ said the colonel, ‘to take some refugees. You will have to journey to Djangalla with us. However, once there, you should be able to arrange for shuttles to convey you to the nearest appropriate colonised world.’

‘That… that’s very generous of you. Thank you.’

‘If it were up to me,’ said the colonel, ‘we would fill the space we have with all the vehicles and the useful machinery we can salvage from this world. As I mentioned, however, your city administrators have been making strong representations.’

‘I… see,’ said Arex.

‘The quartermasters will liaise with you, to produce a list of those to be–’

‘No!’ she said hastily. ‘I don’t think I could… I couldn’t do that.’

‘We require a list,’ said the colonel adamantly. ‘The people we save must at least be those with the greatest potential value to the Imperium.’

‘And you feel qualified to judge that? Because I certainly don’t.’

‘I assume, however, that you would wish a place reserved for yourself.’

Arex hesitated before she answered that. She knew with all her heart what her answer would be, but she felt she was being unbearably selfish. Twenty-five thousand people, she thought, against the population of a world. It was almost nothing, less than nothing, and what entitled her to be one of the privileged ones again?

Uncle Hanrik had said no, she thought. When the first ships had left. He had stayed behind to help his people, to find her. He was dead now.

‘Two places,’ she said, staring at her hands, avoiding the colonel’s blank eyes. ‘I need two places, one for me and one for my…’ She remembered Tylar’s lie from the temple, thought it might help. ‘My betrothed,’ she said. ‘Tylar is my betrothed, so you see he is a part of the Governor’s family too, and I… colonel, I need him.’

‘As you say,’ said the colonel.

‘As to the rest of your list,’ said Arex, ‘let one of the others do it. One of the administrators. They will pick your names for you, and be only too glad to, I suspect. In fact, I’d be surprised if, between them, they hadn’t drawn up a list already.’

Drop-ships had been sent to three spaceports around the globe. Even so, some people had been cut from the rescue list because they couldn’t reach any of those ports in time. Arex had listened to Commissar Mannheim of the Krieg 42nd, arguing over a comm-link terminal with an indignant nobleman who had his own landing pad and didn’t see why he and his family couldn’t be picked up from there.

Everything had been done in such a rush. The Krieg generals wouldn’t delay the departure of their troop ship even for an hour. Mannheim had mumbled something about their generosity in agreeing to take aboard refugees in the first place, but Arex knew that such finer feelings had nothing to do with it.

They had been sent to a disused office to wait, she and Tylar, with Mannheim looking in on them when he could. The window looked out over the space port ramp, and they watched as two drop-ships were loaded up with vehicles and equipment including, according to Mannheim, a crate of the Governor’s belongings salvaged from the High Spire. The commissar sidled up behind them, followed their gazes, and sighed. ‘We arrived in four,’ he lamented.

Trouble broke out as soon as the first proctor and PDF vehicles were sighted. Arex heard the swell of angry voices from outside and knew what was happening before the news had reached Mannheim’s comm-bead. ‘Apparently,’ he reported, ‘the crowd out there is still growing. We’ve issued warnings, asked them to stay at home, told them we can’t do anything for them here, but they keep on coming.’

‘Can you blame them?’ said Arex.

‘I suppose not,’ Mannheim conceded, ‘but there aren’t enough of your proctors to cope, and it sounds like…’ He cocked his head, listening to another transmission.

‘And what about those who have lost their homes?’

‘Some of the proctors are even joining the rioters. Don’t worry, I’m sure we can...’

‘They’ve been waiting for months to be helped.’

‘Colonel 103 has sent out a couple of platoons. That ought to defuse the situation.’

The sound of las-fire made Arex wince. Less than five minutes later, however, the first PDF truck came rolling into the port, accompanied by an escort of masked Guardsmen and, surging in its wake, a wave of dispossessed humanity. Another Krieg platoon moved forward, formed a line to block the latter, parting only to allow a second truck through, then a third and a fourth. The vehicles mounted the first drop-ship’s loading ramp, intending to disgorge their passengers inside the belly of that metal hulk rather than exposing them to the mob without.

‘We’ll be just like them,’ said Arex quietly, ‘on the next world. They’ll have their own lords there. Our fathers’ names, and the ranks they held, won’t mean all that much anymore. We’ll just be two more refugees, two more mouths to feed, and if they can find a home for us at all, it will surely be on one of the lowest floors.’

Tylar put his arm around her, drew her close to him. ‘We’ll survive,’ he said.

More trucks were arriving below, and now Mannheim cleared his throat politely and Arex and Tylar turned to find four Guardsmen waiting for them at the door. It was time for them to leave too.

Arex hesitated, glancing back at the window, and Mannheim rushed to assure her she would be well protected down there, that the drop-ship was only a very short walk away, but that wasn’t what was bothering her. ‘There’ll be more ships,’ Tylar said to her, and Arex forced a brave smile onto her face and chose to believe him.

As they crossed the room, her foot struck an open zip case, upsetting its contents. Looking down, she saw a handful of hololiths peeking out from a stack of clothing. Four young men, resplendent in dress uniforms. She wondered who they were.

Watching the bedlam on the space port ramp from afar had not prepared Arex for the shock of being thrust into it. She couldn’t see where she was going, couldn’t hear the instructions that were shouted to her. She could only keep her head down, keep as close to Tylar as she could, trust in the Krieg Guardsmen to form a protective shell around her as she stumbled along between them.

She almost wished she had accepted Mannheim’s suggestion of covering herself with a blanket, concealing her identity. This morning, she had been hailed as a hero, as a symbol of hope. Now, she was a deserter, a traitor. She would have felt dishonest, however, fleeing under a cloak of anonymity. She would have felt cowardly.

They were through the hostile crowd at last, and through the Death Korps’ cordon, a ramp extended invitingly before them. As they climbed it, something – a plastek container – struck Arex on the back of the head, and Tylar looked around, scowling, for the culprit as he brushed food paste from her hair.

She faltered on the threshold of the drop-ship’s loading bay, turned back, couldn’t leave like that. She wanted to say something, felt she ought to explain herself. She was greeted by a sea of a thousand enraged faces, and she knew no one would want to hear her words. Tylar slipped an arm about her shoulders again and gave her strength as he always did, coaxed her out of that dreadful moment.

Arex gave a final, tearful sigh, and she allowed him to guide her away from there, away from the only life she had ever known, towards an uncertain new one.

Chapter Twenty-Six

The necrons were on the move again.

Gunthar was woken by the news being shouted around the space port. Reactions ran the full range from hysterical screaming to weeping to silent acceptance. It wasn’t as if nobody had known this was coming. How long had they been waiting now?

Gunthar felt cold, and wrapped his threadbare blanket tighter about himself. He didn’t know how long he had slept, sitting upright against a hangar wall, his knees drawn up to his chest leaving room for another refugee to sprawl at his feet. His neck muscles had become accustomed to this position and no longer ached so much.

How long had it been since the soldiers had left? Weeks? Months? He had stopped counting the days. The rise and fall of the sun meant nothing to him, a device to impose some structure upon a life that no longer had a use for one. Gunthar slept when he had to now, when his exhausted body had no option but to shut down. He didn’t dream that way. He ate when he could find food, which wasn’t often.

He did his best not to picture her face.

He remembered that last day, fooling himself he still had a purpose, helping with crowd control, keeping the refugees from the drop-ships, at least trying to. His uniform, his rank, had ceased to mean much in that fraught situation. He had had no gun, so he had been trying to make his voice heard in vain.

He had heard her name, and the sound of it had been a jolt to his heart. He had thought himself mistaken at first, until he had heard it again, spoken with venom, and he had realised then... She had been so close, all this time, one of the very evacuees he had been striving to protect, and Gunthar hadn’t known, hadn’t even wondered.

He had elbowed his way to the front of the crowd, all thoughts of duty forgotten, and he had seen her there. For the first time in a lifetime, he had seen her.

Arex. She was climbing the ramp to the rescue ship, surrounded by Krieg Guardsmen, and he cried out to her but she didn’t hear him. She was walking away from him, two footsteps away from walking out of his life forever, but the Emperor must have heard his prayers because she stopped. She turned. She looked directly at Gunthar, and she looked exactly as he remembered her, her round face, green eyes and chestnut brown hair. He started towards her, found himself blocked by the Krieg cordon. He tried to explain himself, pleaded with them, but they wouldn’t listen to him. Eight hours ago, they had been his allies. They were strangers now.

Arex wasn’t alone. Gunthar hadn’t noticed before, but now a blond, muscular man was brushing her hair, putting his arm around her, and she hadn’t seen Gunthar at all. She had eyes only for this new man, this man who was taking her away from him. He watched them go, disappearing into the drop-ship, and he thought that perhaps it was best that way. He was pleased, he told himself. Against all odds, he had achieved his life’s only goal. Arex was safe. She would be happy.

They could never have been together anyway. They had always known it.

Everyone had supposed the space port to be the necrons’ next target. Many had fled, tried to get as far from Hieronymous City as they could, to delay the inevitable. Even as they had left, more people had arrived to replace them, still praying for a rescue but less fervently so with each new day and each fresh disappointment. Gunthar knew the truth: that it didn’t matter what they did, which path they chose.

He rested his head on the wall again, closed his eyes, wondered if he would have the willpower to keep them closed when the slaughter began. He didn’t need to see death coming. He couldn’t close his ears, however, and fate dealt him one final surprise in the form of a rumour that began as a whisper but grew into a shout. The necrons, he heard through the hubbub around him, weren’t coming here after all.

They were skirting the hill, following the road around to richer pickings. Thousands of them. No, tens of thousands. Gunthar found it incredible that they could ever have been contained, even for a short time. They were free now though.

It was night-time – inside the electric-lit port, he hadn’t known – but the necron army was bathed in a sickly green glow. It emanated from the chambers of their guns, the hatchways and the turrets of their tanks, and the single pinprick eyes of the metal insects that swarmed about them.

He followed their progress from the hillside, along with everybody else. He didn’t know what had brought him out here. He had seen this tragedy played out once already, up close, but he couldn’t resist watching it again. He wondered if the sight might make him feel something.

The necrons fell upon Thelonius City and began to sack it. The hushed onlookers could see and hear little from this distance, just green flashes in the night sky and the occasional rumble or suggestion of a scream on the breeze, but their mind’s eyes were more than capable of completing the picture. They caught their breaths as the first tower crumbled, wreathing its proud fellows in dust and smoke.

Thelonius had been home to millions of people. Gunthar knew what they were going through, every one of them, but he couldn’t allow himself to care. A second tower fell, then he saw the first escapees, some in vehicles, many walking, being lowered by the external lifters as if there were somewhere to
go, somewhere they could be safe. Twenty minutes after that, the city’s lights went out for the final time.

Gunthar’s eyes were heavy, and he sat down on the grass to rest them.

In the aftermath of the Krieg withdrawal, the Planetary Defence Force had fallen apart. Most of the senior officers had left when they could, Colonel Braun among them, and many of the lower ranks had deserted. Gunthar had stayed. He was a soldier, after all, but a soldier now with no orders to follow.

Three more rescue ships had come, and there had been rumours of others sent to other ports. Every time one had landed, the trucks had returned with their quota of the privileged to fill those ships. They had run out of soldiers to guard them, so the would-be evacuees had had to arm themselves. The anger of the space port refugees at being left behind again had reached boiling point and, by the time of the final ship’s arrival, guns had no longer been sufficient to cow them.

Several of them had died in the attempt, but they had wrested the guns from their inexperienced wielders. They had commandeered the rescue ship, but it hadn’t been large enough to hold all of them, not nearly, so more fighting had broken out over which of them got to board it. The ship had departed, in the end, with a fraction of its passenger capacity, and left much wailing and howling behind it.

Gunthar had watched the fighting, but hadn’t joined either side. The hijackers had thought they could outrun death. They would soon learn their mistake, when the Imperial Navy caught up with them. There was no escape for them.

Colonel Braun’s replacement, an idealistic young major who had genuinely tried to pull everyone together for all of three days, should have been on that ship. Gunthar hadn’t seen him since then, but rumour had it he had put a gun to his own head, that his body lay at the foot of the hill with all the others.

Daylight streamed through Gunthar’s eyelids. He had drifted off to sleep, waking now to find his left cheek frozen to the ground. Dew had seeped into his tunic, and something small and hard was digging into his leg. The hillside was less packed than it had been, many of his fellow spectators having returned to their tents or to the relative warmth of the space port buildings. Plenty remained, however, to continue their silent vigil over Thelonius City although there was little new to see.

Digging into a hole in his trouser pocket, Gunthar found something in the lining. He extracted it carefully, almost didn’t recognise it. It had been so long since he had even thought about it. A gold ring, set with six amecyte stones. It was the colour of those stones, more than anything, that reminded him. Red was Arex’s favourite colour.

He ought to have thrown the ring away. It was worthless now. He returned it to his pocket instead. A connection to a life once lived and lost. A memento mori.

It was hard to believe how petty his concerns had been in that life, how different his goals and the future he had imagined for himself, but at least, he thought, he had had goals then. He recalled his drill instructors in the Death Korps of Krieg, and he knew what they would have said to him, how they would have diagnosed his problem. They would have told him he had lived too long.

His Death Korps comrades had abandoned him here, gone to find a new purpose to their lives elsewhere. It was time Gunthar did the same.

He had lived here once.

Hieronymous City. A field of rubble, now, most of it. Gunthar had marched through that field proudly on his way to war, trudged back through it in defeat, but he hadn’t really looked, hadn’t thought about what each of the mounds around him represented. He remembered now, the towers and the skyways, the emporiums and the eateries.

He remembered the people. So many, many people. The queues for the autocabs each morning, the throngs of administrators above and miners below. Sometimes, he had thought the skyways might collapse beneath the weight of them all.

When he looked, really looked, at the heaps of rubble, he could see those people, the remnants of their lives: strewn clothing, ornaments once cherished now shattered and forgotten, hololiths in cracked frames. Worst of all, he could make out a foot here, a grey hand there, protruding forlornly. This place was a graveyard.

He saw a scrap of scarlet and purple, and scrabbled to uncover a PDF trooper’s corpse. The boy had fallen foul of a necron ghoul, probably during the first wave of attacks to judge by his state of decomposition. The ghoul must have been distracted, though, as there was still some flesh on the trooper’s bones. Much good it had done him. He must have lain undiscovered for weeks until the Death Korps’ guns had collapsed the skyway beneath him and given him a semblance of a burial.

Gunthar took his lasgun and the cleaning agents for it. He began to strip down the weapon, but saw it was burnt out, useless. He kept it anyway. It could still deter a mutant or a cultist from attacking him, if indeed there were any survivors of either breed. He searched the trooper’s backpack for grenades, or anything else he could use, found only a mangled but serviceable luminator.

The sun was going down as Gunthar reached the cleared area in which an army had once assembled. He paused here and tried to see past that fresh, stark memory, to recall what this place had been before then. He couldn’t have been too far from home. His old home, that was. He scanned the few remaining towers ahead of him, searching for a reference point, but saw nothing he could recognise.

He needed to get closer, climb higher. He followed the Death Korps’ route into the heart of the city, and soon found buildings rising around him, skyways running over his head, neither as ubiquitous as they had been but still providing some small measure of familiarity. He looked for a staircase and began to make his way upwards. He counted the floors carefully, and emerged on 204. He nearly stepped into an abyss, had to grab on to the door and haul himself back over the threshold.

The 204th-floor skyway was gone. There was nothing left of it. What the necrons had begun, the Death Korps of Krieg had finished – and to judge by the broken windows, the graffitied walls and the burnt-out habs Gunthar could see across the gulf, his own people had been only too eager to abet them.

He stared at the defaced image of the Imperial aquila, displayed over the doorway of what looked like it had been a records office. Had he passed that building on his journey to work each day? He couldn’t be sure. He retreated into the tower, found a room to sleep in. It looked like his old room, the same layout, but pretend as he might he knew better than to trust the illusion. He tried to fill a cup with cold water, but all that came out of the tap was a trickle of brown sludge. He drank this anyway.

He didn’t know what he was looking for, but he knew he hadn’t found it yet.

He almost reached the eatery. The exclusive one, the one for which he had purchased the ring. It was on an adjacent skyway, so close, but he could see no way across to it.

The night had drawn in, a sullen half-moon only intermittently visible through drifting clouds, so Gunthar was finding his way by luminator light. He shone his beam towards the eatery window; saw only debris stacked up behind it. The internal walls had collapsed. Even if he could have made it to the door, he couldn’t have got inside, and why would he, he thought? Those doors had always been closed to the likes of him before. He would recover few memories from in there.

He could use the position of the eatery, however, to orient himself. He knew how many floors to drop now, how many more blocks to walk, before he came to the statue. It had been vandalised, of course, cut off at the knees, buts its feet were still plascreted to its layered plinth and Gunthar could sit on that plinth in the same spot he had sat before. He did so, tentatively, closed his eyes and tried to imagine that nothing had changed since then, that the body of the statue still rose behind him, that the offices around this public square were intact and only shuttered for the night.

He tried to imagine Arex was beside him, that he could smell her blossom-scented perfume, see the sadness in her eyes as she looked up at that statue: one of hundreds commissioned by successive Governors to honour those they had sent off to fight, those who hadn’t returned. A graven image of Arex’s father.

What had they done before that? He remembered. The newsreels. He had taken Arex to see them. They had made her uncomfortable, all that talk of bloodshed, but Gunthar had said it was okay because the Imperium always won. Arex had suggested they snatch protein burgers from a cart, surprising Gunthar who had been saving his credits for somewhat finer fare. He had loved that about her, the absence of any airs or graces.

They had sat beside the statue as the city had closed around them. A perfect summer evening, until Gunthar had spoiled it, his insecurities bubbling up as they always had.

‘Let’s not talk about the future,’ Arex had said, tearing her gaze from the statue, looking into his eyes instead. Her voice came as clear to him now as it had been back then. ‘I don’t care about the future right now. We have this moment, and we should enjoy it and not think about my uncle or your job or any of the rest of it. The future will happen regardless, and probably not in the way any of us expect, so why worry?’

He had opened his mouth to argue, and Arex had leaned in and touched her lips to his. Their first kiss. He had thought, at first, she was doing it to silence him. Then he had ceased to care if she was or she wasn’t, just lost himself in that blissful moment.

He hadn’t forgotten a single detail.

Arex broke off the contact, slipped through Gunthar’s arms, left him wreathed in a melancholic haze. On an impulse, he snatched the ring from his pocket, extended it towards her, begged her to take it before it was too late. Of course, she couldn’t answer him. She was only a ghost, and, when Gunthar opened his eyes, she was gone.

The past was gone.

He was weeping, without having felt the tears coming, and once that dam had burst he found he couldn’t rebuild it. He was doubled over, convulsed by wracking sobs, at the stone feet of Arex’s heroic father, howling his anguish at all he had lost to the uncaring sky and he didn’t care who or what might have heard him.

In the chill of the early morning, he found what he had been seeking.

He had had to venture closer than planned to the necron tomb, returning to ground level to do so. This was where the majority of his comrades had died, after all. Fortunately, there were few necrons about, the bulk of them doubtless still occupied in Thelonius, and Gunthar had only had to conceal himself twice from their patrols. Few corpses had survived the gauss guns intact, and those that had had been stripped of anything useful by the Death Korps quartermasters. However, Gunthar found a corpse the quartermasters had overlooked, and struck lucky. It was a grenadier, which meant he was likely better equipped than the average Guardsman.

He was lying in the open. The green light from the pyramid washed over him in sickening waves, albeit diffused by daylight. Gunthar bent low, scurried over there, relieved the body of its possessions as rapidly as he could. As he wrestled with its backpack, he knocked the facemask loose. Of course, he recalled, unlike the other Krieg men, the grenadiers carried their rebreather units on their backs, allowing room for more armour at the front. He had no time to untangle the connecting hose, so he bundled the whole assembly together, taking everything, armour and all.

He closed the fallen soldier’s eyes as a mark of respect, but didn’t stop to mourn him. He had purged the last of his human feelings in front of that statue.

He retreated to a bolthole: a dormitory several blocks away and a few floors up, where he laid out his haul for inspection. A hellgun with two spare power packs. Six frag grenades held within pouches in the grenadier’s belt, which Gunthar now donned. The rations and the medi-pack, he didn’t need. He was likewise about to lay the rebreather to one side when he hesitated, stared into the blank eyepieces of that mask.

He turned it around, lifted it to his face. The fabric felt scratchy against his cheeks and the mask restricted his peripheral vision. Still, there was something almost reassuring about looking at the world like this, through Krieg eyes. It made him feel one step removed from it all, looking in on life but no part of it. The only sound he could hear was that of his own breathing as he sucked in dry, filtered air through the hose. It felt good. It felt right – and, when Gunthar caught sight of his reflection in an unbroken window, it looked right too. It seemed fitting. So, instead of removing the mask, he picked up the rebreather unit, pushed his arms through its worn straps and hefted it onto his back. It was heavy, but he bore its weight gladly.

He fastened the grenadier’s shoulder guards, chest plate, shin and knee guards to himself. The helmet was a little too large for him, but he wore this too, and pulled on the charcoal grey greatcoat for good measure. He was ready now.

He stepped out into the street again, hellgun in hands. He had cleaned it thoroughly, familiarised himself with it, knew it was a good weapon.

He knew he could do little alone, he wasn’t fooling himself. Gunthar had heard it said that the Emperor would raze Hieronymous Theta rather than allow his enemies to keep it. He believed this, but he also believed that if anyone or anything could survive a planetary cataclysm, the necrons could. They would flock from here to another world, begin the cycle of destruction all over again.

He marched towards their tomb, his back straight, his head upright, no attempt at stealth made this time. Let the necrons see me, he thought, let them come. What could they do to him, after all? What more could they take from him?

Gunthar Soreson was dead, along with everything he had valued in his meaningless life. In his place, inhabiting his flesh, was a soldier. A soldier with no orders but now possessed of a new sense of purpose, the only purpose a soldier ever really had.

He remembered what his instructors had told him before his first battle: that if he could take down just one foe, he would have justified his life. He had already done more than that. He was fighting for the others now, for those comrades of his who had not been as lucky as he had been, for those who had died unfulfilled. He had no name any more, no face. He represented all of them, and he carried their souls with him.

He was going to be a hero.

About the Author

Steve Lyons has written novels, short stories, radio plays and comic strips for characters including the X-Men, Doctor Who, Strontium Dog and Sapphire & Steel. For the Black Library, he is known for the Imperial Guard books, Death World and Ice Guard, and the audio drama, Waiting Death. He has also written several non-fiction books about television shows, and contributed to many magazines.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2010 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

Cover illustration by Stuart Witter

© Games Workshop Limited 2010. All rights reserved.

Black Library, the Black Library logo, Games Workshop, the Games Workshop logo and all associated marks, names, characters, illustrations and images from the Warhammer universe are either ®, TM and/or © Games Workshop Ltd 2010, variably registered in the UK and other countries around the world. All rights reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-85787-047-6

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This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.