But Dust in the Wind

by Jonathan Green

The Thunderhawk gunship dropped through the planet’s exosphere like a star falling from heaven, its scorched and scarred hull-plating glowing hot as molten gold. Beneath it lay a vast shroud of cloud cover and beneath that the frozen world of Ixya.

Clouds boiled and evaporated at the caress of the burning craft, and as the vessel continued its descent, those on board were afforded their first view of the snowball world at last.

Ixya might look no more than a vast planet-sized chunk of ice drifting silently through space at the far reaches of the freezing depths of the Chthonian Subsector, but according to the data the Chapter’s archivists on board the Phalanx had been able to coax from the ancient Archivium’s cogitators, it was the foremost provider of essential ores and precious metals to the forge worlds of the Chthonian Chain.

Platinum, iridium, plutonium and uranium were all found buried within the crust of the planet, even though it was compressed beneath ten kilometres of crushing ice in some places. Iron ore was found in vast quantities in great seams running practically the entire circumference of the planet’s equator and it was the only attainable source of a number of rarer elements for twelve parsecs.

But all that was currently visible to the Thunderhawk’s pilot was kilometre after kilometre of fractured ice sheet, crawling glaciers and frost-formed blades of frozen mountain ridges.

‘Any lock on the source of the signal yet?’ Sergeant Hesperus enquired of the battle-brother piloting the craft.

‘Triangulating now, sir,’ Brother-Pilot Teaz replied via the vessel’s internal comm.

There was a pause, accompanied by an insistent pinging sound as the Fortis’s machine spirit gazed upon the blue-white world through its auspex arrays, seeking to pinpoint the source of the distress signal. Mere moments later, the servitor hard-wired into the gunship’s systems in the co-pilot’s position began to burble machine code, its eyes glassy and unblinking as it continued to stare perpetually out of the front glasteel shield of the Thunderhawk’s cockpit.

‘Scanners indicate that it is coming from a location three hundred kilometres from our current position. Signs are that it is uninhabited. But...’ Teaz trailed off.

‘What is it, brother? What else is the Fortis telling you?”

‘Very little at that location. But there is a large settlement – a Mechanicus facility of some kind two hundred kilometres from here.’

‘The miners,’ Hesperus mused. ‘And the distress signal isn’t coming from there?’

‘No, brother-sergeant.’

‘And yet the facility is inhabited?’

‘Reading multiple life-signs, sergeant. Cogitator estimates somewhere within the region of three thousand souls.’

‘And are you reading any other settlements of comparable size anywhere else upon the planet’s surface?’

‘No, sir. This would appear to be the primary centre of human occupation.’

‘Then I think we should pay our respects to the planetary authorities, don’t you, Brother Teaz?’

‘Shall I hail them, sergeant?’ the pilot asked.

‘No, brother, that won’t be necessary. Besides, I am sure they already have us on their scopes and if they don’t already know of our imminent arrival, then they soon will. I think it only right that we meet with those charged with the care of this world face to face. After all, first impressions matter.’

‘You think they will brave this blizzard to meet us, brother?’

‘If they have any sense, they would brave the warp itself rather than leave a detachment of Imperial Fists unattended.’

‘Very good, sir. Landing site acquired. Planetfall in five minutes.’

Keying his micro-bead, Sergeant Hesperus addressed the other battle-brothers on board, strapped within the ruddy darkness of the Thunderhawk’s belly hold.

‘Brothers of Squad Eurus, the time has come,’ Hesperus said, taking up the venerable thunder hammer that it was his honour to wield in battle along with the storm shield that bore his own personal battle honours. ‘Lock helmets, bolters at the ready. We make planetfall in five.’

Like a spear of burning gold, cast down from heaven by the immortal Emperor Himself, Thunderhawk Fortis made planetfall on the snow-bound world.

With a scream of turbofan afterburners and attitude thrusters – the jet-wash from the craft momentarily disrupting the blizzard sweeping across the barely-visible mass of chimneys, pylons and refinery barns – the Fortis touched down on the landing pad located within the facility’s outer defensive bulwark.

Power to the engines was cut and the Doppler-crashing white noise of the fans descended to a deafening whine, the craft’s landing struts flexing as they took the weight, as the great golden bird settled on the plasteel and adamantium-reinforced platform.

By the time the disembarkation ramp descended and Sergeant Hesperus led the battle-brothers of Squad Eurus out onto the hard standing of the firebase, the Space Marines’ ceramite boots crunching on the ice-patched rockcrete, the welcoming committee was already trooping out onto deck to greet them. The blunt shapes of shuttle craft and grounded orbital tugs squatted on the platform, their hard profiles softened by drifts of snow.

Three men, diminutive by the standards of the Emperor’s finest, made the long walk from the shelter of an irising bunker door to where Squad Eurus had formed themselves up in a perfectly straight line, ready to receive them.

Although he was at least half a head shorter than either of his two companions, from his bearing, along with the red sash and ceremonial badge of office, to his straining dress jacket, ursine fur cloak, and polished grox-hide jackboots, Hesperus knew at once that the Space Marines’ arrival on Ixya had brought none other than the planetary governor – the Emperor’s representative himself – to receive them. It was a good sign; Sergeant Hesperus liked to be appreciated.

The three men faced the nine mighty Adeptus Astartes of the Imperial Fists Chapter, resplendent in their black-iron trimmed golden yellow power armour, the jet packs they wore making them appear even more intimidating. Every member of the welcoming committee had to look up to meet Hesperus’s visored gaze.

With a hiss of changing air pressures, Sergeant Hesperus removed his helmet and peered down at the shortest of the three. He had to admire the man; his steely expression of resolute determinedness did not falter once.

The governor had a face that looked like it had been carved from cold marble. His pate was balding but the white wings of hair that swept back from his temples and covered his chin gave him an appropriately aristocratic air.

The man held the Space Marine’s gaze for several seconds and then bowed, his ursine-skin cloak sweeping the powdered snow from the landing deck.

‘We are honoured, my lords.’ He rose again and carefully considered the smart line of Space Marines. ‘I am Governor Selig, Imperial administrator of this facility and by extension this world. I bid you welcome to Aes Metallum.’ Hesperus considered that the man’s chiselled expression did not offer the same welcome his words offered. Governor Selig was suspicious of them.

A wry smile formed at the corner of the sergeant’s mouth. And so would I be, Hesperus thought, if I were governor and a fully-armed assault squad of Imperial Fists Space Marines arrived unannounced on my watch.

Governor Selig turned to the man at his right hand, a military man wearing a cold-weather camo-cloak over the uniform of a PDF officer. ‘May I introduce Captain Derrin of the Ixyan First Planetary Defence Force,’ – the man saluted smartly and the governor turned to the towering, semi-mechanoid thing shrouded by a frayed crimson robe to his left – ‘and Magos Winze of the Brotherhood of Mars who oversees our mining operation.’

Hesperus noted the huge ceramite and steel representation of the Cult Mechanicus’s cybernetic skull heraldry on the towering facade of the structure before the landing pad, the details of the huge icon blurred by the snow that had settled upon it.

‘Welcome to Aes Metallum,’ the tech-priest hissed in a voice that was rusty with age and underlain by the wheezing of some augmetic respiratory function. A buzzing cyber-skull – looking like a miniature version of the Cult’s crest – hovered at the adept’s shoulder.

Hesperus acknowledged the tech-priest’s greeting with a curt nod of his head.

‘What can we do for you, sergeant?’ Selig asked.

‘Ask not what you can do for us,’ Hesperus countered, ‘but what we can do for you.’

‘My lord?’

‘The strike cruiser Fury’s Blade picked up a faint automated distress call being broadcast from this world three standard days ago. Our glorious Fourth Company was en route on the Phalanx, our fortress-monastery, to the Roura Cluster, to bolster the defence of the Vendrin Line against the incursions of the alien eldar. However, it was deemed appropriate to send a single Thunderhawk and accompanying assault squad to assess the level of threat that had triggered this distress beacon accordingly. I presume you are aware of this distress signal yourselves, are you not?’

To his credit, Governor Selig’s steely expression didn’t change one iota. ‘Yes we are, thank you, brother,’ he stated unapologetically.

‘An explorator team is currently carrying out a survey of that region,’ Magos Winze explained, ‘searching for new mineral reserves we suspect may be located in the area.’

‘And have you sent rescue squads to investigate?’ Hesperus challenged.

Governor Selig turned his gaze from the looming Astartes to the PDF officer at his side. ‘Captain Derrin?’

‘No, sir.’

Hesperus looked at him askance.

‘And might I ask why not?’

Captain Derrin indicated the blizzard howling about them with a gesture. The clinging flakes were steadily turning the Imperial Fists’ armour from dazzling yellow to white gold.

‘It’s the ice storm, sir,’ he said, pulling his cold-weather camo-cloak tighter about him as he shivered in the face of the freezing wind. ‘We’re only at the edge of it here but further north it’s at its most intense – so cold it’ll freeze the promethium inside the tanks of a Trojan. The planes and armour we have at our disposal are not able to withstand its full force.’

Hesperus turned from the captain to the tech-priest, the altered adept’s mechadendrites seeming to twitch with an epileptic life all of their own.

‘You can confirm this, magos?’

‘Captain Derrin is quite correct,’ Winze wheezed. ‘Aes Metallum’s been locked down for three days. However, our meteorological auspex would seem to suggest that the storm is moving east across the Glacies Plateau. In two days it should be safe to send out a team to investigate.’

‘Have you had any pict-feed or vox-communication with the explorator team since the storm began?’ Hesperus pressed.

‘No. Nothing but the signal put out by the automated beacon.’

The Imperial Fist on Hesperus’s right, Battle-Brother Maestus, keyed his micro-bead. ‘Do you think it could be the eldar, brother-sergeant?’

At mention of the enigmatic alien raiders, Governor Selig’s expression faltered for the first time since he had welcomed the Astartes to Ixya.

‘The distress beacon could be explained by any one of a dozen or more scenarios,’ Magos Winze interjected. ‘A snowplough could have fallen into an ice fissure, or the team saw the storm coming and triggered the distress beacon hoping for a quick extraction. We would not wish to keep you from your holy work, brother.’

‘We may yet be needed here,’ Hesperus countered. He turned to Maestus. ‘Remaining here will not tell us whether the eldar are poised to attack this world as well. It is time we followed the signal to its source.’

He addressed each of the Ixyan welcoming committee in turn. ‘Captain Derrin, ice storm or no, mobilise your men. Magos Winze, see that your servants run diagnostics of all this facility’s defences; I want them primed and ready for action. Governor, good day to you.’

‘But–’ Selig began before Hesperus cut him off with a curt wave of an armoured hand.

‘It is better that you prepare for the worst and ultimately face nothing than it is to do nothing and reap the bitter harvest that follows as a result of your inaction. Look to your defences. Secure the base. We shall return presently. Squad Eurus, move out.’

And with that the nine golden giants boarded the Fortis again. Only a minute later, as Governor Selig and the rest of the welcoming committee returned to the shelter of the bunker, the Fortis lifted off from the landing platform, the snow flurries returning as the Thunderhawk was swallowed up by the blizzard.

The Fortis shook as the freezing winds assailed it, the constant staccato of hailstones pounding its hull-plating like a remorseless barrage of autocannon fire. But the Thunderhawk, as capable of short range interplanetary travel as it was of atmospheric flight, resisted and held firm, Brother-Pilot Teaz steering a course through the hurricane winds and hail towards the spot indicated by the chiming distress signal.

‘This is the place,’ Teaz said as the Thunderhawk’s forward motion suddenly slowed, holding it in a hover above the ice and the snow for a moment before bringing it down in the middle of a whiteout so intense that for all the visibility there was, they might as well have landed on the dark side of the planet; if that had been the case, at least then the Thunderhawk’s lamps would have been able to make a difference.

Squad Eurus disembarked from the craft again, Teaz remaining on board as before, in case there was the need for a hasty extraction or the Space Marines found themselves involved in an encounter that required heavier firepower to resolve it than was carried by the members of Hesperus’s team.

And yet continued sensor sweeps carried out by the Fortis’s instruments during the short hop from the Aes Metallum facility, now one hundred kilometres to the south-west, had revealed nothing. No signs of life, no indication of an alien presence, nothing at all. It seemed that there was nothing out there beyond the howling ice storm, other than whatever anomalous geological feature it was that had led the explorators here in search of mineral deposits in the first place.

‘Search pattern delta. Battle-Brother Ngaio, I want you up front,’ Hesperus instructed his squad members via the helmet comm. He would have struggled to make himself heard by his battle-brothers otherwise, even with their Lyman’s ear implants.

In response the nine Imperial Fists began to fan out from the landing site, sweeping the snow-shriven wilderness with their weapons, each alike – bolter in one hand, chainsword in the other, except in Battle-Brother Verwhere’s case, who targeted the illusory shapes created by the flurries of gale-blown snow with his plasma pistol. Battle-Brother Ngaio advanced at the forefront, at the apex of the expanding semi-circle of warriors, his chainsword mag-locked to his hip, replaced in his gauntleted hand by the auspex he was carrying.

Hesperus moved forwards, between Ngaio and Battle-Brother Ahx. Then came Ors and Jarda. To Ngaio’s left were arrayed, in the same formation, Battle-Brothers Maestus, Verwhere, Haldrich and Khafra.

Not one of them had been born on the same world – Jarda had not even set foot on one of the vassal worlds of the galaxy-spanning Imperium until after he had been inducted into the Imperial Fists Chapter, having been void-born, while Khafra was from the desert necropolis world of Tanis – but they were all brothers nonetheless. They might not have the same predominant eye colour, skin tones, hair or bone structure, but thanks to the gene-seed they all bore inside them now, they were all Imperial Fists and shared the common physiological traits of a Space Marine.

The Imperial Fists gathered their aspirants from a whole network of worlds, many of which they had visited before in the ten millennia since the Phalanx had set out upon its never-ending quest to bring the Emperor’s mercy and justice to the galaxy. But although the brothers of Squad Eurus might not have come from a common culture or been born of a common ancestry before joining the ranks of the Imperial Fists, since their induction into the Chapter – second only, other agencies claimed, to Great Guilliman’s Adeptus Astartes paragons, the Ultramarines – they were all Sons of Dorn now, the superhuman essence of the primarch having been passed down to them through his blessed gene-seed.

Hesperus peered through the whiteout, everything coloured now by the heat spectrum of his helmet’s infrared arrays. But even the HUD struggled to reveal any more than he could already see with his own occulobe-enhanced sight.

Shapes came into relief out of the impenetrable whiteness, ice-obscured objects delineated by the subtle variations in light and shade that existed even within this white darkness. Huge things with tyred wheels and caterpillar track-sections, twice as tall as a Space Marine, and bucket scoops large enough to contain a land speeder emerged from the storm-wracked ice-desert.

Servos in his suit whirred as Hesperus scanned left and right, surveying the frozen wrecks of earth-moving machines and the explorators’ abandoned equipment.

‘Where are the bodies?’ he heard Brother Jarda wonder aloud over the helmet comm.

Hesperus had been thinking the same thing. Here were the explorator team’s machines, left to be claimed by the ice and snow, but there was no sign of the crews that had driven the hundred kilometres across the ice sheet to bring them to this place.

‘Sergeant Hesperus,’ Brother Ngaio voxed. ‘I have something.’

‘It’s all right, brother, I see it too,’ Hesperus replied.

‘No, I mean there’s a structure, sir.’

‘A structure?’

‘It should be right in front of us.’

A gust of biting wind suddenly swept the ice sheet all about them clear of snow and – beyond the frozen, broken shapes of the earthmovers and drilling rigs – Hesperus saw it. It was a great rift in the glacier, as if a great cube had been cut out of the ice where the explorators had dug down into the ice, exposing...

Hesperus tensed.

It was a pyramid. It was caked in ice, half-buried by the drifts of snow. What little of it that was visible appeared to be made from a seamless piece of some unrecognisable compound that looked like dark silver, but it was pyramidal in form and there was no mistaking its origin.

‘The soulless ones,’ Hesperus growled. Not the renegade eldar they had been expecting perhaps, but xenos nonetheless – something even more alien than the piratical raiders. Something utterly inimical to life.

‘Brothers, with me,’ Sergeant Hesperus instructed, leading the march down the rutted slope of ice that had been carved from the ice sheet by the explorators’ machines. ‘Brother Teaz, remain with the Fortis,’ he commanded the Thunderhawk’s pilot. ‘We may be in need of the Fortis’s legendary firepower before too long.’

The rest of the Imperial Fists formed up behind him, trooping after him into the hole, which was ten metres deep and more than six times that across, that had been carved into the ice of Ixya.

Over the keening of the wind Sergeant Hesperus imagined he could hear another sound, like the echoes of the desperate cries and terrified screams of those who had met their end here. For there was no one left to find. They would not find anyone alive this day; of that fact Hesperus was certain.

The nine Space Marines gathered before the looming pyramidal spike of alien metal, their weapons trained on the xenos structure.

‘You think they’re in there?’ Brother Maestus asked. He and Hesperus had a unique relationship within the squad, since they had been aspirants together almost sixty years before.

‘I think that something unspeakable woke, walked from this tomb and took them.’

‘Do we attempt a rescue?’ Brother Verwhere asked, his plasma pistol ready in his hand, trained at the curious spherical and hemispherical hieroglyphs etched into the otherwise perfectly smooth surface of the pyramid.

‘And rescue what, exactly?’ Hesperus challenged his brother. ‘We would find nothing alive in there, I can assure you.’

He took a step back from the towering structure.

‘This is only the tip of the iceberg,’ he said, smiling darkly. ‘No, we pull back, return to the Aes Metallum facility. We send an astropathic message to our brethren aboard the Phalanx and the Fury’s Blade and we prepare for a battle the like of which I’ll wager this world has never seen.’

‘Sir, I have something on the auspex,’ Ngaio announced, the adrenaline-rush detectable in his tone.

‘Range?’ Hesperus demanded, scanning the ice-locked structure in front of him, searching for any sign that the sepulchre was about to open and disgorge its unholy host.

‘Sixty metres. Moving this way.’

‘Vladimir’s bones! Where did that come from?’

‘Nowhere, sir. It came out of nowhere!’

‘Direction!’ Hesperus demanded.

‘Heading two-seven-nine degrees!’ Ngaio stated, turning to face the approaching menace, bolter in one hand, auspex still gripped tightly in the other.

‘Squad Eurus!’ Hesperus called to his companions over the sheet ice and howling gale. ‘Ready yourselves. The enemy chooses to show itself.’

And then he saw it through the blizzard, a black beetle shape gliding towards the Imperial Fists through the whirling snow.

More than twice as large as a Space Marine, the construct hovered over the frozen ground towards them, its flight unaffected by the powerful wind shear.

Eight articulated metal limbs hung from the iron carapace of its body. The thing reached out with its forelimbs and with a ringing of blades the tips each ratcheted open to form three savage cutting claws. Multiple asymmetrical artificial eyes scanned the Space Marines, pulsing with the eerie green light of an unfathomable xenos intelligence.

‘Fire at will!’ Hesperus commanded and a cacophony of bolter fire immediately filled the ice hole like the barking of angry hate-dogs.

Mass-reactive shells exploded from the resilient carapace of the construct. The arachnoid-thing jerked and faltered, rotating wildly about its centre of gravity as the battle-brothers found their target.

The spyder-like construct surged forwards again, closing the distance between the Space Marines and it. And was it merely the strange acoustics set up by the flesh-scouring wind keening through the teeth of the weird ice formations that clung to the pyramid, or at that moment did the xenos-construct give voice to a disharmonic shriek of its own?

With a high-pitched scream, a pulse of rippling blue-white energy burned through the whipping winds of the ice storm and struck the soaring spyder. There was an explosion of sparks and one of the construct’s fore-claws went whirling away into the storm. The limb landed in a wind-blown drift, still twitching with a macabre life of its own. As the spyder recovered and closed, Brother Verwhere stood his ground, his plasma pistol still trained on the construct as he waited for the weapon to recharge.

Sergeant Hesperus strode forwards, ready to bolster Verwhere’s defence. If the spyder evaded the next shot from his plasma pistol, he would ensure that the thing did not escape the wrath of his thunder hammer.

As the spyder construct closed on them, Brother Verwhere fired again, the shot making a molten mess of the thing’s head and sending it ploughing into the ice in a sparking, crackling mess, bolts of green lightning arcing from its metal carcass.

‘We have multiple contacts,’ Ngaio declared clearly over the comm, one eye on the blizzard of returns now painting the scope of his auspex.

And then the snowstorm birthed a host of figures even more macabrely grotesque and yet, at the same time, hauntingly familiar. They possessed the form of hunched humanoid creatures and advanced at a gambolling gait, darting through the ice and snow, reaching for the Space Marines with hands shaped into glinting razor-sharp talons, as long as a man’s arm, dripping blood and sticky with gore.

And as if the presence of such soulless, inhuman things was not bad enough, then the grisly trophies with which they had adorned themselves made their very existence all the more mind-wrenching. Their ghoulish garb – the shredded skins they had flayed from the bodies of their victims – eradicated any lingering doubt within the minds of the Space Marines as to the fate of the lost survey team.

As the sinister silver and crimson figures stalked towards them out of the blizzard, Squad Eurus opened fire with their bolt pistols, the rattle of gunfire warped by the wind into something that sounded not unlike the drumming of iron bones on a taut skin of human hide.

Metal bodies jerked and spun, clipped by the mass-reactive shells, or were thrown backwards into the snow when a direct hit was scored.

Hearing a thrumming, insistent buzzing noise, Sergeant Hesperus’s attention was drawn away from the approaching alien automatons and onto the approach of another three of the hovering spyder-things.

‘Defence pattern gamma,’ Hesperus commanded and the eight battle-brothers present reacted immediately, forming a tight circle of ceramite and adamantium armour between the pyramid and the Thunderhawk. With every angle covered, they lay down suppressing fire, dropping spyders and the flayed ones before they could even get close.

‘Sergeant,’ Teaz’s voice came over the comm, ‘look to the pyramid.’

Hesperus stepped forwards and dropped another of the skin-wrapped metal skeletons with his crackling thunder hammer and stared at the frozen structure even though he already knew what he would see there.

Under its cladding of ice and snow, part of the pyramid’s solid surface appeared to have liquefied and now rippled like quicksilver. Defying all the laws of physics, the liquid surface remained at a slant, ripples gliding out from its centre as if a pebble had been dropped into a pool of mercury.

All this happened in only a matter of seconds. His attention still half on the approaching xenos constructs, Hesperus turned and spun, bringing his hammer down on another of the spyder-things even as it reached for him with snapping pincer-claws.

Something was emerging from the pool of liquid metal that had formed in the side of the pyramid. At the periphery of his vision, Hesperus saw a skeletal metal thing step out from the fluid shimmering surface and begin to stalk towards the Space Marines’ line. Its gleaming metal skull was hung low between its armoured shoulders, its crystal eyes glowing with a malign intelligence. In its gauntlet-like hands the inhuman warrior carried a bizarre-looking weapon of alien design, but nonetheless lethal for all that. Hesperus had read a treatise disseminated by the Cult Mechanicus that postulated how such weapons operated and recognised the glowing green rods that formed what could best be described as the barrel of the gun as a linear accelerator chamber. Beneath this, the firearm sported a cruel, scything blade – a lethal close quarters combat attachment.

‘We’re not prepared for this,’ Hesperus muttered. It was not the way of an Imperial Fists commander to readily give the order to retreat. The Chapter was notorious amongst the Adeptus Astartes for the stubborn determination of its warriors, who would stand and fight long after the brethren of other Chapters would have quit the field of battle. But nor was it the Imperial Fists way to waste such a precious commodity as experienced battle-brothers, by fighting a suicidal action which would not win them the day and which, in the case of Ixya and the Aes Metallum facility, would leave the Emperor’s loyal subjects open to attack, with no hope of victory in the face of the xenos threat.

There was a steady stream of the skeletal warriors emerging from the quicksilver pool now, without there being any indication as to when the reinforcements might come to an end.

Beside him Brother Ors’s chainsword bit through the spine of a warrior, sending chewed-up chunks of metal vertebrae flying and leaving shorn gold wiring exposed.

In the face of ever-increasing numbers, having no idea how many there might still be to come, Hesperus called the retreat.

‘Squad Eurus! Ignite jump packs and fall back to the Fortis. We are leaving – now!’

He did not fall back lightly; it was not the Imperial Fists’ way. But Hesperus knew from bitter experience, that where there was one necron, a multitude might follow.

‘Brother-Pilot Teaz,’ he called into the comm, once again. ‘Covering fire, now!’

One after another, in quick succession, the Space Marines’ jump packs ignited with a roar and Squad Eurus rocketed skywards.

A split second later searing laser light streaked over their heads and down into the excavation site, exploding spyders and warriors where it struck as the grounded Thunderhawk’s strafing fire found targets even through the obscuring blizzard.

Pulses of sick green lightning burst from the weapons of the advancing warriors, chasing them from the depths of the whiteout, evaporating the falling snow and lending the snowstorm an eerie, otherworldly cast.

Almost as quickly as the Thunderhawk’s laser barrage had begun it cut out again.

‘Brother Teaz!’ Hesperus called into the comm as he began to descend again towards the waiting Thunderhawk. ‘We need covering fire, now!’

He could make out the silhouette of the great adamantium craft on the ice beneath them now. What he could not hear, however, was the roar of turbofan engines running up to take-off speed and he could not see pulses of laser-light spitting from the Fortis’s guns.

As he and his brother Space Marines dropped lower he understood the reason for the Thunderhawk’s unprepared condition. The hull of the craft appeared to ripple as if its adamantium plates had fractured and acquired some unnatural form of life.

As they came closer still, Hesperus could see that the undulating surface was in fact formed from myriad beetle-like constructs that were swarming all over the Fortis, jamming its flight controls, clogging its propulsion systems and interfering with its weapon arrays.

There were more of the beetling machines burrowing up through the ice to join the host already smothering the Thunderhawk. If the craft was to be of any use to the Imperial Fists in their flight from this xenos-cursed place, the silver scarabs had to be eliminated.

‘Squad Eurus, deploy grenades.’

As well as being armed with bolt pistols and chainswords, each of the Space Marines also carried a number of grenades. Mag-locking their chainswords to their armoured suits, the battle-brothers of Squad Eurus slowed their rapid descent, dropped the primed frag charges where the swarm was thickest, training their pistols on the scarabs interfering with the weapons systems and the Thunderhawk’s engines, removing them with precision shots to free the more delicate parts of the craft from the xenos swarm infestation.

The grenades detonated as they hit, sending fragments of alien artifice flying, turning the beetle-things into just so much more shrapnel, clearing a score of the creatures from the fuselage with every blast.

As the Space Marines dropped the last twenty metres to the landing site, they opened up with their bolters, their own strafing fire clearing yet more of the insidious scuttling things from the stricken Fortis.

Hesperus landed hard, the ice shuddering beneath his feet. He was up and at the swarm in the time it took him to rise from the crouch in which he braced himself as he landed, batting the scrabbling scarabs clear of the wings of the Thunderhawk, sending a dozen flying with every powerfully concussive blow of his hammer.

But the Space Marines’ action against the Thunderhawk was making a difference now. Slowly, the flyer’s turbofan engines began to whine as the cockpit controls came online again and Brother-Pilot Teaz coaxed the great craft into life.

Striding into the thick of the skittering beetle-things, Hesperus made his way to the Fortis’s hold access and, with well-placed sweeps of his crackling hammer head, he beat the scarabs clear of the hatch.

‘Brother Teaz, can you hear me now?’

‘Re– czzz– ving you now, s– czz– geant.’

‘Then open up and let us in.’

With a grinding whine the embarkation hatch opened and Squad Eurus boarded the Thunderhawk. Brother Khafra, the last on board punched the switch to activate the closing mechanism as the Fortis lifted off, shaking the snow from its landing struts and sending the last of the scarabs tumbling from its surface where they had persistently clung onto the outer hull.

As the Thunderhawk continued to gain altitude, Brother-Pilot Teaz swung its nose round, pointing it back in the direction of the mining facility. Sergeant Hesperus, his hearts still racing within the hardened shell of his ribs, peered through the closing crack of the outer hatch and uttered a heartfelt prayer to Dorn and the Emperor. A multitude filled the excavation site before the frozen pyramid, the legions woken by the explorators’ innocent interference darkening the snow and ice with their innumerable host.

‘Brothers,’ he said, ‘we return to the facility to prepare for a siege.’

‘What news, sergeant?’ Governor Selig asked as the great and the good of Aes Metallum met the Imperial Fists again upon the adamantium skirt of the shuttle pad.

Hesperus removed his helmet again before answering the governor.

‘Nothing good I fear,’ he said, his face hard.

‘But did you find the missing explorators?’

‘What was left of them.’

The governor stared at him aghast. Hesperus took a long, slow breath, carefully composing what he was about to say in his mind first.

Selig blanched as Sergeant Hesperus told him what had befallen the explorator team and what would soon befall the mining facility. For those who had once claimed this frozen hell as their own had woken from the slumber of aeons to take it back.

‘Governor, were it not for our presence upon this world, I would say that the fate of this world was sealed, that Ixya was doomed. But you see here before you ten of the Emperor’s finest warriors, each one worth a hundred of those who fight within the Emperor’s inestimable armies, and as a result this world is not yet doomed. For as long as you have us to bolster your defence of this bastion, there is still hope.’

‘Throne be praised,’ Selig gasped, making the sign of the aquila across his chest.

‘The Emperor protects.’

Magos Winze’s circling mechadendrites formed the holy cog symbol in supplication to the Omnissiah of Mars, accompanied by a chirrup of machine code-prayer.

‘Captain Derrin,’ Hesperus said, turning to the commander of Ixya’s planetary defence force. ‘What armour have you? Aircraft? Gun emplacements? How many men do you have at your command? What other defensive measures? I need an inventory of everything you have got at your disposal. You too, Magos Winze. Tell me everything.’

When Captain Derrin had finished running through the PDF’s resources on Ixya – from the flight of Valkyries, through to Hades breaching drills, Sentinel power-lifters and Trojan support vehicles – aided by the tech-priest’s indefatigable augmented memory, Sergeant Hesperus looked at each of the three men and said, ‘Then we prepare for war!’

‘Permission to speak honestly, brother-sergeant,’ Brother Maestus said over a closed comm channel so that only Hesperus could hear him.

‘For you, Maestus, always.’

‘Sir, it is not enough,’ the battle-brother said, gravely.

‘I know that, brother,’ Hesperus replied, ‘but what would you have me tell Selig and the others? Take away their hope and we take away the best weapon these people have at their disposal. As it stands, this facility may well be doomed, but if we can hold the enemy at bay long enough, then it is still possible that reinforcements may arrive in time.’

He hesitated and then turned back, calling after the departing tech-priest. ‘Magos Winze, a word if you would be so kind.’

Winze appeared to rotate at the waist and then glided back across the hard deck towards them. ‘How may I assist you, sergeant?’

‘How are the refined minerals you produce here transported to the forge worlds of this subsector?’

‘Why,’ the adapted adept croaked rustily, ‘Mechanicus transport vessels arrive on a regular basis to transport the ores and isotopes we refine here to Croze, Incus and Ferramentum III.’

‘And when is the next shipment due to leave?’

‘Why, the Glory of Gehenna is coming in-system as we speak,’ Magos Winze announced, augmetic nictitating eyelids clicking in quick succession. ‘Would I be correct in the assumption that you are now cogitating what I predict you to be cogitating, sergeant?’

‘Hail the Glory of Gehenna. We shall have need of the might of Mars as well as the might of the strength of Dorn’s legacy this day.’

Like some leviathan void-spawn birthed in the cold, dark depths of space, the Mechanicus vessel Glory of Gehenna coasted in the exosphere of the frozen planet a thousand kilometres below, like some vast and ancient cetacean trawling the shallows of an arctic sea.

The servitor bound from the waist down into the ordnance post of the nave-like bridge rotated to face the command pulpit and a string of machine code emanated from the speaker grille that stood in place of a mouth.

The tech-priest at the pulpit-comm smiled in satisfaction, a hundred artificial muscle-bundles articulating the near-dead flesh of his mouth into something approximating the correct facial expression.

‘Target confirmed,’ Magos Kappel said.

While on the surface of the snowball world everyone and everything – from caterpillar-tracked servitors, as large as a full-grown grox and twenty times as strong, to huge earthmoving machines – was pressed into service in preparing the mining facility for the siege that was to come, the Glory of Gehenna prepared to deliver a dolorous blow against the enemy and pre-empt the xenos attack on Aes Metallum Hive.

Dropping into low orbit, the Mechanicus vessel locked onto the coordinates relayed from the surface by Thunderhawk Fortis’s machine spirit, the signal boosted by Magos Winze’s Mechanicus-maintained communication arrays.

A seismic shudder passed along the length of the Glory of Gehenna as with a silent scream the vessel’s port and starboard laser batteries fired on the surface of Ixya. They hit the ground with a deviation of only point zero six degrees, due to atmospheric distortion, and pounded the excavation site and the xenos ruins with everything the servants of the Machine-God on board could coax from the ancient weapons batteries, channelling as much energy as they could from the leviathan’s ancient plasma core.

Atmospheric gases were split into their component elements as the beams of focussed retina-searing light, as hot as the heart of a sun, speared down through the cloud-festooned atmosphere of the planet, setting the sky on fire, mere nanoseconds later reaching their target on the ground.

Ice melted and water boiled as the furious heat of the Glory of Gehenna’s attack burned away the layers of frozen glacier within which the doomed explorator team had found the alien pyramid waiting for them.

Hundreds of the inhuman constructs were wiped out in the initial phase of the bombardment. The skeletal warriors were reduced to their component parts, as units of tomb spyders and swarms of scarabs, too numerous to count, were eradicated alongside them.

In only a matter of seconds half the emerging necron force had been eradicated by one decisive, pre-emptive strike.

But as the clouds of steam drifted clear of the burn site and the whirling snow returned, it soon became apparent to those monitoring the results of the orbital barrage, from both the heavens and one hundred kilometres away within the rockcrete bunkers of the Aes Metallum base, that despite wiping out a significant portion of the burgeoning necron host, the blasphemous structure on the ground – the pyramid itself – still stood. The only thing that had altered about its status was that much more of it had been uncovered by the scouring laser lances as their furious barrage cut through ice many metres deep, exposing not just the primary pyramid, but the peaks of two smaller structures that lay in its deathly shadow.

‘Magos Winze,’ the adept-master of the Glory of Gehenna said, speaking into the pulpit comm-link, addressing the senior adept on the surface. ‘I regret to report that the target still stands.’

‘Understood, Magos Kappel,’ a static-distorted voice replied, echoing back across the gulf of space from the planet below, echoing like the voice of some disembodied machine spirit between the ornamented metal ribs of the bridge nave. ‘Our initial sensor scans suggest that too.’

‘We are charging batteries for a second attempt,’ Magos Kappel continued, and then broke off abruptly. ‘Wait, auspex arrays are detecting fresh activity in the vicinity of the structures.’ He stared at the data-splurge scrolling across the pulpit monitor screen. ‘Just a nanosecond...’

A series of live-feed data-inputs from the various servitor scanner stations ranged throughout the bridge spiked as a dramatic change in energy output was detected, centred upon the three xenos structures.

No more than four kilometres from the pyramidal hibernation sepulchres, the compacted snow covering the ice sheet fractured like the sun-baked clay bed of a receding summer watering hole. Three crescent-shaped pylon structures shuddered up out of the snow, seismic tremors rippling through the glacier, quantities of the white powder falling from them in fresh cascades as more and more of the pylons were revealed. Each supported a huge green crystal emitter, and all three were already pulsing with pent-up esoteric energies. Finally the alien devices shuddered to a halt, the last of the clinging snow dropping from them in blocks of melting slush.

With the whining thrum of ancient machinery grinding into operation again after countless millennia of inaction, the three pylons rotated slowly, like morning flowers turning to follow the sun. As one they turned and as one their energising crystals glowed into deadly life, as an aetheric light began to trickle like a shower of pulverised emerald dust from the tips of each crescent. With a crack, like the ignition of a thousand rocket launchers, the gauss annihilators fired.

Whips of coruscating energy lashed out from the crystals, focussed by the vanes that projected from the pylons to either side of each emitter that harnessed their unimaginable power, streaming it into a lethal crackling discharge kilometres in length.

The annihilator beams merged a thousand metres up, cutting through the tortured atmosphere, their combined lethal lightning fingertips reaching into the exosphere, not stopping until they made contact with the Glory of Gehenna itself.

The annihilating beams stripped the shields from the Mechanicus vessel within seconds setting the port weapons batteries on fire and tearing through the hull plating. The carefully regulated artificial atmosphere on board the ship ignited as it bled out into the void in rippling waves of flame a hundred metres long.

As the beams continued to rip through the Mechanicus vessel, the Glory of Gehenna was clearly doomed. Listing badly to port, the ship commenced its descent, its blunt prow glowing magma-red as it plunged head-long through Ixya’s upper atmosphere.

The blazing wreckage of the Glory of Gehenna fell on Ixya like the divine wrath of the God-Emperor of Mankind Himself. It struck the ice sheet two hundred kilometres east of Aes Metallum, the shockwave of its crash-landing rippling through the crust of ice and rock, hitting Aes Metallum only a minute later, followed by a dense white cloud, a tsunami of snow that was thrown up into the freezing air as the concussive energies raced outwards from the epicentre of the crash site.

The distant crump and boom of its reactor core was also the sound that signalled the beginning of the assault on Aes Metallum.

‘Brother-sergeant, they are here,’ Ngaio announced from his place on the northern bulwark of the defended facility.

Before its catastrophic death, perpetrated by the gauss annihilators, the Glory of Gehenna had eradicated much of the necron force as Magos Kappel tried to destroy the pyramidal structure. But out of the thousands that had already emerged from the tomb, hundreds had still survived the orbital bombardment. And that surviving vanguard force had now reached the walls of the mining facility.

Aes Metallum already had two semi-circular rings of defences, based on the Phaeton pattern – the rear of the facility being shielded by the towering cliff face against which it had been built – but the Imperial Fists had worked hard to bolster these by barricading the gates with earthmoving vehicles. Magos Winze’s tech-priests had done what they could to hard-wire a number of the servitors available to them into the gun emplacements in redoubts and atop the bulwarks of the base. Atop the cliffs behind the refinery works and the ore-processing sheds stood yet more servitor-tasked Tarantula gun turrets, covering the reverse approach.

But the Imperial Fists had also used the mining equipment and facilities available to them to prepare a few other surprises with which to challenge the enemy’s assault.

Skimming towards them now, over the wind-whipped ice, advanced the destroyers. To the untrained eye they looked like anti-gravitic speeders, only where a land speeder needed a separate pilot, in this example of heretical xenos machinery, the vehicle and its pilot were one and the same. Rising from the prow of each of the skimmer bodies was the torso, arms and head of a humanoid automaton. These mechanoids were more heavily armoured than the warriors Squad Eurus had encountered at the excavation site and were noticeably more heavily armed as well.

As Hesperus peered through a pair of magnoculars at the approaching skimmers he could see that each of the constructs had had its right arm melded into an energy cannon that pulsed with malevolent emerald energy.

‘On my mark,’ Hesperus announced into his helm comm, ‘activate forward countermeasures.’

The Imperial Fists, the serried ranks of the PDF and even the miners of Aes Metallum, who had exchanged hammer-drills for autoguns, waited. The sense of tense anticipation shared by the Space Marines, the half-human things of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and the mortal defenders of Aes Metallum, was a living breathing thing, and its breathing was shallow and its pulse panic-fast.

‘Wait for it,’ Hesperus muttered under his breath. ‘Wait for it.’

They waited. The destroyers drew nearer.

And now scuttling swarms of scarabs, the trooping warriors of the necron host and other skulking or swiftly darting things appeared as the snowstorm abated at last.

Gauss weapons glowed with a foetid green light as the advancing host prepared to fire on the mining facility’s defenders.

The destroyers were in range of the defenders’ guns now and, more worryingly, the aliens’ own weapons were in range too, ready to give the defenders a taste of their lethal lightning discharges.

‘Mark!’ Hesperus shouted into the comm.

A split second later, the bulwarks of the base were rocked by a series of detonations that threw up great clouds of white snow and black rock that enveloped the speeding necron destroyers. As the Imperial Fists and PDF conscripts had worked to strengthen the base’s forward defences, teams of miners, under the supervision of tech-priests, had cut trenches in the ice in which they had laid the explosives they normally used as part of the mining process to open new seams of precious ore. But they had been put to a more war-like use this day.

A moment later, the destroyers emerged from the smoke and fresh-falling snow, trailing smoke, their carapaces scorched and dented. Some were listing badly. One had almost lost its cannon-arm to the charge it had passed over. Another skewed sideways, collided with one of its fellows and the two of them then ploughed into the frozen ground, triggering another detonation that had failed to fire first time round.

Broadcasting on all channels, Sergeant Hesperus cried, ‘For Ixya, for Aes Metallum, and for the Glory of Gehenna!’ His cry was echoed by the miners and PDF troopers while their tech-priest overseers made the sign of the cog and offered up prayers of supplication to the Omnissiah for the thousand souls that had perished aboard the mighty Mechanicus vessel.

Then Hesperus spoke again, standing atop the battlements overlooking the main gate of the facility, behind which had been parked a host of heavy, earth-moving and drilling machinery to form an additional barricade behind the vulnerable entrance. Thrusting his thunder hammer into the sky, he shouted – so that all could hear – ‘Primarch. Progenitor, to your glory!’

‘And to the glory of Him on Earth!’ his brothers bellowed in response.

The necron advance hit the outer bulwark like a hammer blow. Destroyers and tomb spyders sprouting particle projectors blasted battlements, gun emplacements and defenders alike with coruscating beams of molecule-shredding energy and searing bolts of hard-white light.

A turret-mounted autocannon magazine cooked off, not thirty metres from the main gate, the gun emplacement disappearing in an expanding ball of black smoke and oily orange flame.

Men caught in the coruscating emerald beams screamed briefly and then died as layer after layer of their bodies was stripped away by the gauss guns.

Necron warriors advanced by the score, rank after rank of the relentless warriors, each locating their targets on the battlements and then picking them off with mechanical precision. Other things, only partially humanoid in form – the elongated spines of their armoured skeleton bodies tapering to lethal shocking blades – moved with bewildering speed, blinking in and out of existence, vanishing in one position only to reappear at the foot of the base’s defences. Then they would blink out of existence again and re-materialise atop the battlements, striking with whip-like arms and deadly scalpel-fingers.

More of the facility’s guardians screamed and died, in horror as much as in agony as they were cut down by a grotesque vision of their own mortality made manifest.

The ground itself appeared to be moving. And then, through the drifting smoke and whirling snow, the panicked defenders of the curtain defences saw the seething mass of scarabs closing on them, crawling over everything in sight.

With a roar of turbofans, the Thunderhawk Fortis swept low over the icy no-man’s-land before the walls of Aes Metallum, twin-linked heavy bolters raking the troops massed on the ground in front of the siege works. Where the massive-reactive shells hit, necrons were blown into their component parts, mechanoid body parts raining back down onto the sullied snow in a shower of twisted black metal and fused components.

A second later, Captain Derrin’s Valkyries screamed overhead, great blooms of orange fire blossoming in their wake and more of the undying legion fell – destroyers, spyders and warriors alike.

A dreadful scream – like the rending of reality itself – ripped the heavens asunder. Green fire blazed across the firmament and tore the snow-white skies apart as the trailing Valkyrie disintegrated in shredding flames.

The red harvest had begun.

Sergeant Hesperus batted aside another darting robotic wraith-form, the crackling head of his thunder hammer pulverising its living metal cranium. The thing slid back down the second curtain wall, throwing up a stream of sparks behind it as it scraped against the adamantium-reinforced bulwarks.

The defenders of Aes Metallum had had to abandon the outer defensive ring after a concerted pounding attack by a trio of heavy destroyers had breached the main gate. But losses had been heavy on both sides. As the Imperial Fists performed a rearguard action, the surviving PDF troopers and others involved in the defence of the facility retreated behind the second curtain wall and the refinery barns and processing manufactorums beyond. Battle-Brother Verwhere triggered another trap, igniting the promethium store that had been positioned between the two gates with a well-placed shot from his plasma pistol.

Flames rose twenty metres into the freezing air, licking at the mechanoid forms pouring through the breach in the base’s defences, but doing little in the way of any real harm.

A coruscating cord of dread lightning tore across the sundered ice-field, shredding the tyres from a massive spoil plough and sending the machine sliding sideways.

The particle whip reached out again, sending half a dozen of the curtain wall’s defenders to their deaths.

Sergeant Hesperus’s gaze immediately went to the source of this devastating attack.

Standing serenely at the centre of the necron strike force, clad in crumbling vestments, was a thing apart from the others of its kind now marching into the compromised mining facility. Its body was the colour of antique silver inlaid with hieroglyphs of gold, its skull tarnished with the fractal patterns of the patina of epochs past. It scanned the progress of the battle raging all around it with tactical interest as it directed its forces into the fray.

It was the calm at the centre of the storm, the eye of the hurricane, and in its hands it clasped its staff of power. With a silent gesture it guided its warriors forwards, towards the breach, glittering arcs of energy crackling between its skeletal digits, its entire being suffused with ancient power.

This was the focus of the necron force’s esoteric energies. For this was their lord. As their mechanoid master passed by, those among their number that had already fallen to the Imperials rose to fight again, living metal re-knitting itself, repairing damaged limbs and forging their armoured shells anew.

‘Brothers,’ Hesperus spoke into the comm, directing his own troops into the fray, ‘we have our target. The xenos lord cannot be allowed to stand any longer. It is a blasphemy in the sight of the Emperor. In the name of Dorn, ignite jump packs.’

To which the battle-brothers of Squad Eurus replied in unison, ‘And Him on Earth!’

Hesperus’s body smashed through the ranks of the milling necrons, sending a number of the xenos flying as his armour-hard body collided with them. His hurtling flight was brought to a sudden stop by the dozer blade of a heavy earth-mover. The bodywork of the huge digger buckled at the impact and Hesperus dropped to the ground, momentarily stunned by the blast from the necron’s arcane weapon.

Recovering quickly, he got to his feet again, grey tendrils of smoke rising from the scorched ceramite plates of his power armour. If it hadn’t been for the now dented storm shield that he still held fast in his left hand, he would have been lucky to survive the staff of light’s unkind ministrations at all.

Raising his thunder hammer above his head once more, he began to pound towards the silver and gold ancient a second time, hammer held high, an unintelligible bellow of battle-rage on his lips. The pace of his pounding footfalls began to pick up as he covered the expanse of ice before his target.

As he ran, servos in his armoured greaves squealing, the necron prepared itself for another onslaught from the Imperial Fists. With his eyes locked on the necron lord, Hesperus could still see the broken and mangled metal carcasses of fallen xenos warriors knit themselves back together – as if he was watching a pict-feed of the destruction of the alien host running backwards – the undying automatons rising from the sullied snow to fight again at their master’s side.

Hesperus readied himself both physically and mentally for the necron’s retaliatory attack that was sure to come, but kept running.

Hearing the hot roar of a jump pack above him, he looked up and saw Battle-Brother Maestus, shorn of one arm already, descend upon the necron from the sky like the wrath of Dorn himself.

As Maestus dropped on the necron, Hesperus could tell that something was wrong with his battle-brother’s jump pack immediately. The Space Marine was doing his damnedest to direct his wild plunge directly onto the target, rather than making a controlled leap across the ice-field. The trail of smoke trailing from the port gravitic thruster attested to the problem as well.

But Hesperus had no idea just how badly damaged Brother Maestus’s jump pack was until, preceded by a cry of ‘For Dorn!’ from the plunging Space Marine, the pack’s power core overloaded, resulting in a detonation as powerful as that of a cluster of thermal charges.

Time suddenly slowed for Hesperus as he watched the scene unfold before him as if he were watching a pict-feed playing at half-speed.

He saw the jump pack rip apart like burnt paper as the blast consumed it. He saw Brother Maestus reduced to his component atoms as the resulting fireball from the sub-atomic explosion consumed him. He saw the necron’s tattered robes burn away to nothing on the nuclear wind. He watched as the skeletal lord warped, melted and disintegrated nanoseconds later. Then the hungry flames were washing over him and the shockwave hit, sending him somersaulting backwards once more across the vaporised ice-field.

Sergeant Hesperus picked himself up for a second time and gazed in stunned shock across the ice-field, knowing what he would see there. Nothing at all.

Brother Maestus was gone. Of the necron master, there was no sign either. What there was, was the solidifying bowl of a melted crater focussed on the epicentre of the catastrophic blast. For thirty metres in every direction lay the fallen of the necron host: warriors and wraiths, scarabs and spyders, all obliterated by the blast, their cybernetic components fused into lumps of useless metal, the flicker of artificial automaton intelligence in their eyes fading to the black of oblivion.

The loss of Battle-Brother Maestus was a dolorous wound in the very heart of Squad Eurus, but his passing had dealt an even more dolorous blow against the enemy. Maestus’s sacrifice had taken down the entity that had led the necrons into battle. With the ancient’s passing the attacking force was as good as defeated.

‘Squad Eurus,’ Hesperus commanded. ‘Sound off!’

As the seven surviving battle-brothers under his immediate command signalled their condition to their sergeant and the rest of the squad, Hesperus stared in wonder at the debris littering the battlefield all around them.

Even as the remaining necron warriors continued to stride towards the mining facility over the ice with lethal purpose blazing in their incandescent eye-sockets, they began to shimmer, their armoured bodies becoming blurred and hazy. And then suddenly Hesperus was staring right through them until they weren’t actually there at all.

Even the battle debris of necron constructs besmirching the snow and the crater-gouged ice – up-ended spyders and sparking scarabs included – shimmered and phased out of existence. Soon even the spectral forms of the steel skeletons were no more.

If it had not been for the great smouldering wounds scarring the bulwarks of the base, the wrecked earth-movers, the devastated Trojans, the downed Valkyrie and the bodies of those who had died defending the facility, Hesperus could have believed that there hadn’t been an attack launched on the base at all. Of the enemy there was now no sign.

The Imperial allies had won. Aes Metallum had been saved but at a price, a price that had been paid in the blood and the lives of PDF troopers, tech-adepts and one battle-brother of the lauded Imperial Fists Chapter.

A leaden silence descended over the blizzard-blown wastes, falling across the battlefield like a funerary shroud, as autoguns, las weapons and the huge autocannon emplacements ceased firing.

Then, intermittently at first, Hesperus’s acute hearing registered the utterances of disbelief of the Ixyans. Many men had died, but Aes Metallum still stood and the enemy had been vanquished.

Gathering pace and momentum, like a snowball rolling downhill, the gasps turned to emotional whoops of joy and of relief, mixed with wailing cries of intense emotion and heartfelt howls of grief.

But, as the sounds of jubilant celebration increased, overwhelming all other expressions of emotion, ringing from the cliffs behind the base, the Imperial Fists remained silent. Their sergeant’s dour mood reflected how they all felt.

Hesperus’s helm comm crackled into life.

‘Sergeant? Are you receiving me?’ It was Brother-Pilot Teaz.

‘Receiving,’ Hesperus confirmed. ‘Where are you, brother?’

‘Sir, I’m eighty kilometres north of the facility.’

‘What news?’

For a moment Hesperus could hear nothing but the hiss of static over the helm comm. He knew immediately that the news was going to be bad.

‘Reinforcements are moving in on your position from the north-east.’

Hesperus took a deep breath, trying hard to dispel the chill that had now permeated even his ossmodula-hardened bones. ‘Reinforcements, brother?’

‘Well, no, sir, not really, I suppose. It would appear that the force that attacked Aes Metallum was only the vanguard of a much larger reaper force that has risen from inside the pyramid.’

‘How much larger, Brother Teaz?’

‘A thousand times, sir.’

‘Their number is legion,’ Hesperus breathed.

The remaining members of Squad Eurus met with Governor Selig, Captain Derrin and Magos Winze in the shell of a manufactorum temple. None of them had escaped the battle for the base unscathed. The governor had acquired a haunted, hollow-eyed expression. Captain Derrin’s right arm was bound up in a sling that was now soaked with blood. Even the magos showed signs of having played his part in the battle for Aes Metallum: a half-shorn mechadendrite convulsed spastically and there was no sign of his attendant cyber-skull.

‘But the battle is won, brother-sergeant,’ Selig protested, a haunted look in his eyes. ‘The necrontyr are defeated. I witnessed their destruction with my own eyes. You and your men bested them and in their rout the blasphemies quit not only the battlefield but reality itself!’

‘The force we defeated was merely the vanguard,’ Hesperus stated bluntly, ‘but a fraction of the legion of undying xenos constructs that is even now marching on this base.’

‘But our hard-won victory cost us dear,’ Derrin said hollowly. ‘We shall not survive another battle like it, I fear.’

‘Whatever else happens, we must not despair,’ Sergeant Hesperus told the Ixyans.

‘You have been in touch with your brethren?’ the magos queried, his croaking words washed through with a static buzz.

‘We have reported our status but they are too far away to be able to relieve Ixya and are already on course for the Chthonian Chain. Even if they broke off from that Chapter-sanctioned campaign, they would not reach us in time. The only ones who stand between the necrontyr and their re-conquest of this world is us.’

‘But Captain Derrin has made an accurate assessment of the situation. Those who remain cannot hope to win this day.’

‘Perhaps not,’ Hesperus admitted, ‘but that does not mean that the necrontyr shall either.’

‘Please explain yourself, Astartes,’ the tech-priest crackled.

‘Magos, from where does Aes Metallum get its power?’

‘We take our energy from the boiling heart of this world, deep, deep below the ice.’

‘As I suspected, geothermally.’

‘Your point being, sergeant?’

‘Captain Derrin, you are right; I fear none of us shall see another dawn, but our deaths shall not be in vain.’

The governor’s shoulders sagged, his head hung low.

‘We must prepare to sell ourselves dear. We shall die this day, yes, but we shall die as heroes all. For it is in our power to ensure that no more Imperial lives are lost. Through our actions here, this day, we can keep the rest of the Imperium safe from the menace being birthed here.

‘Magos Winze – broadcast a repeating signal via your satellite network that Ixya is Terra Perdita. Then do all that is necessary to ensure that you overload the geothermal grid. We shall use Aes Metallum’s very power source, the beating heart of this Emperor-given world, to split it asunder. This base, and everything in it, shall be destroyed in a volcanic eruption the like of which Ixya has not seen in ten thousand years. We may die this day, but so shall the undying legions of the necrontyr!’

Hesperus’s tone was all vehement righteousness.

‘In time our battle-brothers will visit this world and our deaths shall be avenged. But for the time being we shall tear this planet apart and blow this place sky high, in His name!’

Sergeant Hesperus stood atop the inner curtain wall of Aes Metallum, with the battle-brothers of Squad Eurus at his side.

Behind them were gathered the remnants of the PDF, indentured miners and Mechanicus-mustered servitors, battle-weary but resolute the lot of them. The Imperial Fist’s rhetoric had lent them the strength they needed to face the end with courage and resolve. Every man, tech-adept and servitor was ready to sell himself dear if it meant they might deny the necrontyr this world and, through their own deaths, bring about the destruction of their hated enemy.

Bowing his head, Hesperus led his battle-brothers in prayer. ‘Oh Dorn, the dawn of our being. Lead us, your sons, to victory.’

Hesperus stared, his immovable gaze focussed beyond the limits of the ice-field. As far as his occulobe-enhanced eyes could see, to both left and right, the far horizon glinted silver. The ice storm had blown itself out at last, revealing the necrontyr in all their morbid might as they advanced in a solid line of living metal.

Hesperus hefted his hammer in his hand, the blackened storm shield already in place on his left arm, and heard the hum of Brother Verwhere’s energising plasma pistol, accompanied by the clatter of bolt pistols being primed and the growl of chainswords running up to speed.

‘In the name of Dorn!’ Hesperus bellowed, his eyes still locked on the seething tide of dark metal.

‘And Him on Earth!’ his fellow battle-brothers shouted, giving the antiphonal response, their battle-cry almost drowned out by the roar of turbofan engines as the Fortis roared overhead, to meet the enemy head-on and make the first strike against the xenos hordes.

Through the cockpit of the craft Brother-Pilot Teaz could see the advancing horde in all its terrible glory. Truly could the term innumerable be applied to the host. Where the Imperial Fists had faced hundreds of the mechanical warriors during the initial attack on Aes Metallum, here thousands advanced on the right flank, thousands on the left, thousands more forming the central block, an unstoppable mass of moving metal. From this height individual necrons looked not unlike the scarab swarms that now turned the sky black above them as millions of the beetle-form constructs took to the air.

Hesperus cast his eyes from the soaring Thunderhawk to the seething mass of silent metal warriors that stretched from the ancient sepulchre complex to the very gates of the devastated refinery, covering every centimetre of the ice wastes in between.

The planet’s ancient masters had returned: the necrontyr. Their number was legion.

And they would show no mercy to the servants of the Emperor – not that the Imperial Fists would have sought it – for their name was death.

And today, Sergeant Hesperus decided, was a good day to die.

That we, in our arrogance, believed that humankind was first among the races of this galaxy will be exposed as folly of the worst kind upon the awakening of these ancient beings. Any hopes, dreams or promises of salvation are naught but dust in the wind.

Excerpted from the Dogma Omniastra

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2011 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

Cover illustration by Hardy Fowler

© Games Workshop Limited, 2011. 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 2011 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 978-0-85787-205-0

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise except as expressly permitted under license from the publisher.

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.

See the Black Library on the internet at

blacklibrary.com

Find out more about Games Workshop’s world of Warhammer and the Warhammer 40,000 universe at

www.games-workshop.com

eBook license

This license is made between:

Games Workshop Limited t/a Black Library, Willow Road, Lenton, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, United Kingdom (“Black Library”); and

(2) the purchaser of an e-book product from Black Library website (“You/you/Your/your”)

(jointly, “the parties”)

These are the terms and conditions that apply when you purchase an e-book (“e-book”) from Black Library. The parties agree that in consideration of the fee paid by you, Black Library grants you a license to use the e-book on the following terms:

* 1. Black Library grants to you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free license to use the e-book in the following ways:

o 1.1 to store the e-book on any number of electronic devices and/or storage media (including, by way of example only, personal computers, e-book readers, mobile phones, portable hard drives, USB flash drives, CDs or DVDs) which are personally owned by you;

o 1.2 to access the e-book using an appropriate electronic device and/or through any appropriate storage media; and

* 2. For the avoidance of doubt, you are ONLY licensed to use the e-book as described in paragraph 1 above. You may NOT use or store the e-book in any other way. If you do, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license.

* 3. Further to the general restriction at paragraph 2, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license in the event that you use or store the e-book (or any part of it) in any way not expressly licensed. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the following circumstances:

o 3.1 you provide the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.4 You attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.

* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.