More Space Marines from Black Library

CRUSADE & OTHER STORIES
Various Authors

• MEPHISTON •
by Darius Hinks
Book 1: BLOOD OF SANGUINIUS
Book 2: REVENANT CRUSADE

• DARK IMPERIUM •
by Guy Haley
Book 1: DARK IMPERIUM
Book 2: PLAGUE WAR

KNIGHTS OF MACRAGGE
by Nick Kyme

DEATHWATCH: SHADOWBREAKER
by Steve Parker

SPEAR OF THE EMPEROR
by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

Space Marine Conquests

THE DEVASTATION OF BAAL
A Blood Angels novel by Guy Haley

ASHES OF PROSPERO
A Space Wolves novel by Gav Thorpe

WAR OF SECRETS
A Dark Angels novel by Phil Kelly

OF HONOUR AND IRON
An Ultramarines novel by Ian St. Martin

APOCALYPSE
A Primaris Marines novel by Josh Reynolds

Contents

Cover

Backlist

Title Page

Warhammer 40,000

Prologue

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

About the Author

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

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 Astra Militarum 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.

PROLOGUE

The seraph trees of Ultach grew long leaves tipped with blade-like fronds the colour of blood. In the planet s scarlet season, the canopies of the southern polar jungles became oceans of coppery red, hissing and whispering like a frightened crowd. And so it had been for as long as human records had been kept upon the world.

But not this year.

This year, a foul blight had turned the scarlet season into naught but rot.

Lieutenant Aetian Keltos crept through the jungle. His ceramite boots sank into the churned mud, causing gas to belch up from rotting soil. Pallid worms as fat as severed fingers squirmed out of his path, while clouds of biting mites buzzed through the ochre fog that rolled between the putrescent trees.

'To think we saved Phoenysis and Ascleros Hives from the Black Legion, only for the Death Guard to do this to Ultach?' growled Brother Thessos through Keltos' helm vox.

Keltos glanced back at his brothers, strung out through the rotting jungle.

His Mark X helm's auto-senses projected an auspex map onto his peripheral vision; on it, each battle-brother's signifier rune flashed silver. But still, Keltos preferred visual confirmation of the hand-chosen warriors of his kill team. The eight other Silver Templars were clad in their armour of gunmetal and yellow, all brothers of the Fourth Company alongside whom he had fought time and again. He knew these warriors as well as he knew Mercy, the masterwork power sword sheathed at his belt, and Absolution, the heavy bolt pistol he held in his left hand.

'Brother Thessos, you know as well as I that there are no depths the traitors will not sink to in pursuit of victory,' voxed Keltos. 'It is right to despise them for this, but do not let the extent of their depravities shake your focus.'

'No, brother-lieutenant,' replied Thessos, and Keltos saw the Hellblaster raise one armoured gauntlet in acknowledgement. The other hand retained a grip on Thessos' heavy plasma incinerator, Draconic. Powered via a backpack and a coiling mass of cables, the volatile weapon fired searing blasts of energy that could melt through even tank-armour.

Keltos cast his eyes over the rest of his squad. There was Brother-Sergeant Dimitrin, an irrepressible bear of a warrior whose armour barely contained his muscled physique, and who carried a heavy-bladed power axe maglocked to his back as well as a bolt rifle in his fists. Behind him came Brothers Kylun, Bemaeus and Protus, Intercessors in tacticus armour with their bolt rifles held ready; Thessos and another Hellblaster, Brother Spiros, their plasma weaponry glowing balefully; two Aggressors, Brothers Ulyssan and Nykus clad in hulking suits of Gravis armour. All went helmed, their sanctified seals locked and their armour's internal atmospheres pressurised. Despite the incredible physiology of the Primaris Space Marines and their resilience to inimical agents of every sort, Keltos would not countenance his warriors going unprotected amidst this polluted murk.

They were expert killers and weapon-masters all, thought the lieutenant with satisfaction. They had gathered to ensure the destruction of the enemy whose foul presence had brought this blight to Ultach: Mytoxos, despised daemon prince of Nurgle.

'It will not be long now,' Keltos voxed on a private channel to Sergeant Dimitrin.

'No indeed, brother-lieutenant, we'll soon have that bloated sack of ill wind in our gunsights,' replied Dimitrin, deep relish in the sergeant's voice.

'The guns shall drink their fill of other traitors' blood,' said Keltos. 'Mytoxos falls by the blade for the honour of Novaris. Mercy shall be the daemon prince's doom.'

'Not if Severer finds his rotten neck first,' said Dimitrin, and Keltos heard his fierce grin. 'Then it will be my blade that does honour to the Chapter planet.'

'That weapon is not Codex-compliant, brother,' admonished Keltos, suppressing his usual flicker of scandalised amusement. 'I should put you on penitent duties for simply bringing it into the field, let alone wielding it in the Chapter's name. What would the primarch think?'

Dimitrin barked a laugh.

This was an old game they played. An old sparring match.

'Brother-lieutenant, you know just as I do that the weapon spirit choses the wielder as much as the wielder selects the blade. I would no more abandon Severer in the lonely depths of the armouries than you would dare to go into battle without me watching your back. It would dishonour the Bond Martial. Now, if you're worried that this fine slab of weaponry on my back affords me an advantage over that slip of a fencing foil you carry...' Keltos gave a dry chuckle.

'Have a care, brother. If you insult my blade, we shall have to settle the matter in the duelling cages.'

'Insult your blade?' asked Dimitrin, sounding aghast. 'I would never do Mercy such a disservice. However, the fumbling novitiate wielding that unfortunate sword—'

A rune flashed before Keltos' eyes and he pipped his vox twice for silence. The Primaris Marines dropped into the easy fighting stances characteristic of their Chapter. Keltos muttered silent prayers of fealty and brotherhood to his bonded weapon-spirits, knowing his brothers did the same as they scanned the festering jungle for threats.

Ahead, rotting fronds parted and another silver-armoured figure emerged, his stripped-down Phobos armour smeared with diseased slime. Eliminator Sergeant Xerxys cradled his sniper rifle and offered Keltos the ghost of a nod.

'Quarry located, three-point-eight-four miles west-south-west, accompanied by a warband of followers,' came Xerxys' smooth murmur over the vox. He had a slight lilt, the last vestiges of what would once have been a strong south-Novarian tribal accent. It was an accent that Keltos, as one of those created by Archmagos Cawl beneath the surface of Mars, would never possess.

'Status?' asked Keltos.

'Encamped around and within an ancient structure at the mouth of a gorge. Currently unaware of any hostile presence in their vicinity,' replied Xerxys. 'When I left their position, the heretics were beginning a profane ritual.'

'Assessment?' queried Keltos.

'I counted eighty-six hostiles, but only fourteen Heretic Astartes, including four psykers whose attention is upon their ritual. The gorge provides high ground to the north and south of their position. Beyond its mouth is a stretch of mangrove swamp that would offer excellent cover for a flanking advance. I posit their position has been chosen for its ritual, rather than strategic significance. With proper disposition we can counteract their numerical superiority.'

'We'll have them at even more of a disadvantage once the Ultramarines move up from sector fifty-six,' said Brother Thessos.

'We are not going to wait for the Ultramarines,' said Keltos.

'Brother-lieutenant?' asked Dimitrin.

'I do not like the sound of that ritual,' said Keltos. 'We know the current strategic situation, but if the heretics work some deviltry there is no guarantee the ground will remain in our favour. Besides brothers, we're Silver Templars. With focus and fury, we will end this matter before the Ultramarines arrive.'

Moving slow and as quietly as his armour's rumbling power pack would allow, Keltos slid through turgid water. He had moved out in a flanking manoeuvre with Dimitrin and the Intercessors, wading into the polluted waters of the mangrove swamp and then approaching the heretics' position from the south. Keltos pushed through the waist-high sludge. It had become so filth-ridden that it was little more than gelid slime. He ignored the things that coiled and squirmed against his armour and held his weapons above the water out of respect for their noble spirits.

Keltos slid in behind a decomposing tree and peered around its trunk. His augmented senses pierced the roiling yellow smog. He made out a pair of figures lurking on a crude platform that had been raised between the branches of a tree ahead.

'Sentries,' he voxed, and with a blink-click he highlighted the enemy with angry red runes that would show up on his brothers' auto-senses, waypoints overlaid on their vision.

'Barely,' rumbled Dimitrin. 'Worthless little heretics look so sickly I am surprised they can stand.'

Keltos could not help but agree. The sentries were a pair of mortal cultists, their bodies clad in a barbarous blend of leather and rusted metal strapped over the tattered remains of Astra Militarum uniforms. Both men wore rebreathers, but even from here Keltos could see they were doing little good. The cultists' flesh was a mass of red weals and fat buboes, their eyes yellow and so swollen they looked ready to pop out of their sockets.

'They have a vox-set,' he said. 'That is all they need to pose a problem. Hold.' He switched vox-channels. 'Brother-Sergeant Xerxys, are you in position?'

'Confirmed,' came the response. 'Three sentries neutralised up here.'

'Sending you telemetry. Dual target. Dense surrounding cover.' Keltos exloaded the target-data to Xerxys' auto-senses. The Eliminator Sergeant was on the ridge above the gorge, he and the Hellblasters waiting to provide covering fire for their comrades down below.

'Stand by,' voxed Xerxys. Keltos pictured his brother sighting through the optics of his weapon, feeling the familiar weight of the gun with which he had established his Bond Martial, muttering prayers both verbal and binharic to its machine-spirit as he lined up a seemingly-impossible shot against distant, invisible targets. There were few warriors who could make such a shot, blind of all but remote coordinates, taken through dense foliage and whirling smog. But the Silver Templars communed with their weapons on a spiritual level even deeper than the bond they formed with their battle-brothers. It allowed them to fight with a skill that others found uncanny.

Sure enough, he saw one of the sentries twitch violently. A split second later the man's torso erupted in a spray of gore and razor-sharp shrapnel as Xerxys' round detonated inside him. The sentry's comrade was reduced to bloody tatters.

'A magnificent shot, Brother-sergeant,' voxed Keltos.

'Reaper is a magnificent weapon, brother-lieutenant,' replied Xerxys.

'In position, updating auspex now,' came the voice of Brother Thessos, who had moved to take up position on the opposite lip of the gorge to Xerxys. Keltos nodded in satisfaction as the Hellblaster's elevated auspex sweep filled his local strategic map with additional data.

'Thank you, brother,' voxed Keltos, receiving a dour grunt in response. Thessos was fatalistic at the best of times, but he was a tremendous marksman and icy calm under pressure. Keltos easily forgave the Hellblaster his brusque manner.

The lieutenant studied the strategic data, which highlighted several enemy patrols moving around the edge of their position. The main concentration of foe-runes was gathered around an indistinct structure, half-buried in undergrowth at the gorge's mouth. Even from here, Keltos felt a pounding pressure in his skull that suggested warp craft was afoot.

'We don't know how long until the heretics' ritual reaches fruition,' he voxed. 'All brothers, confirm in position and combat ready?' Vox pips came back to him, from the Aggressor Brothers Ulyssan and Nykus waiting on solid ground to the east of the traitors' position, from Brothers Xerxys, Thessos and Spiros up on the lip of the gorge, and from the Intercessors at his back.

_ 'Focus and fury, brothers. For the Emperor,' said Keltos and began moving forward. He and his brothers would rely on stealth and surprise for as long as they could, but speed was also of the essence. He didn't need to order his warriors further; they knew what to do. Even now he could see claim-runes appearing on his auto-senses as his brothers selected their first opponents and focused upon them. This was how the Silver Templars fought, as duellists, selecting each new foe and applying all their focus to laying them low before moving on to the next. The claim-runes ensured that, in all but the most ferocious and tangled of combats, the Silver Templars could split their attention between enemies with the optimum possible efficacy, without accidentally dishonouring a comrade or their weapon by slaying their intended victim.

Of course, there was always a degree of healthy competition, with brothers vying to battle and defeat the most powerful foes. Keltos fully expected to race Dimitrin to this prize, as he so often did, but whoever claimed the victory would do so with the greatest respect and honour from the other.

Keltos saw a cluster of three foe-runes moving right to left through the undergrowth ahead; his enhanced vision couldn't pierce the jaundice-hued murk, but auspex confirmed three more enemy cultists picking their way along the muddy bank. Claim runes flashed up; Xerxys, Dimitrin, brother Kylun. A sniper round took care of the first cultist. The other two fell to hard-flung combat blades, which the Intercessors had brought from the Company's armoury to provide them with a means of affecting just such swift and silent kills. These side-arms would not be fully bonded with their wielders, for there had not been time, but they would be honoured nonetheless.

Keltos gained the muddy bank, rising out of the mere like a behemoth from the deep, filthy water sluicing from his armour. As his brothers recovered their blades from the fallen cultists, Keltos marked a claim rune of his own on a lone figure twenty yards ahead. The lieutenant loped through the smog and wove between the clawing branches of dying trees, coming up on the cultist from behind. Keltos punched his power sword into the back of the man's neck and out through his mouth before ripping it free again. The cultist collapsed, blood jetting from his ruined neck, and Keltos swiftly wiped the diseased gore from Mercy's blade before moving on.

More runes flickered up then vanished as the Silver Templars closed their net. From on high, Xerxys picked off one victim after another, each death silent and unnoticed amidst the murk. Keltos' sword, Dimitrin's axe and the Intercessors' knives accounted for more, each blow perfectly placed to end the heretics' lives with silent efficiency. It was a kinder end than such traitors deserved, Keltos reflected as the ghost of the ruined structure rose out of the murk ahead of him.

Still, needs must.

The ruins before him had once been an Imperial cathedrum, he realised. The architecture was ancient, the once-grand glassaic windows shattered and discoloured, the stonework furred with slimy moss. But those were the eroded remains of Imperial saints and aquilas depicted in friezes and statuary around the roofless structure.

How such a holy site had come to be lost amidst the southern mangroves of Ultach, Keltos could not say. This was an old world, though. Older than many, and humans had been here a long time.

Suddenly a foul light bled through the jagged remains of the structure's windows, sending nauseating streamers of colour writhing into the sky.

'Witchlight,' spat Dimitrin.

'Squad, converge upon the target, prepare to—'

Keltos was interrupted as an awful shriek pierced the murk. It was a hideous sound, brimming with outrage and hate. From within the ruins came answering cries that rose in volume until Keltos winced in pain.

'What is that?' he demanded.

'Worms, some kind of worms,' growled Aggressor Nykus. 'I encountered a Plague Marine, brother-lieutenant, and slew the traitor before he could vox an alarm. His body was infested. As he fell, the damned parasites started to scream.'

From some distance to his right, Keltos heard the distinctive thunder of boltstorm gauntlets opening fire. There came a flurry of muffled detonations and the screams were cut off. Yet the cacophony from within the ruins only intensified, and now he could hear angry bellowing coming from behind the mouldering walls.

'We are detected, brothers,' voxed Keltos. 'Mark your foes and hit them hard. Slay them in Guilliman's name. Remember, whatever else happens, Mytoxos must die or this world will sicken and perish.'

He thumbed the activation rune of his power sword and Mercy's blade awoke with a thundercrack of power. Its blue blaze reflected in the slime-smeared silver of his armour.

'Come, old friend,' he whispered. 'Let us end this heretic together.'

With that, Keltos broke into a run and leapt through the nearest window of the cathedrum. Ancient glass shattered around him and he landed in a fencer's crouch amidst the spinning shards.

Before the lieutenant was a sight of gruesome depravity. The interior of the ancient cathedrum had been defiled with filth. Its age-worn flagstones were cracked and split from below by nests of slimy green tendrils that carpeted the floor and pulsated with revolting life. Long iron spikes, thick with rust, had been driven into the ground and upon each was impaled the corpse of an Imperial priest. Keltos could identify the bodies only by their stained robes, for such horrors had been worked upon their flesh, and such a cornucopia of diseases had afflicted them before the end that they were otherwise unrecognisable as human.

Where once the cathedrum's altar must have stood, a great pit had been excavated and filled with noxious fluids. Keltos could smell it even through his armour. Arching bridges of bone stretched out from the edges of that vast pit and converged in a huge central platform, holding it suspended above the bubbling lake of filth. The platform was choked by foul yellow smog, a whirling vortex of unclean gases that veiled it entirely. The witchlight shone from within that awful murk.

'Death Guard,' voxed Keltos to his brothers as he marked the hulking Plague Marines advancing between the structure's rotted pews. There were nine of them, ogre-like figures whose dirty green power armour was split and rusting. Cables and gurgling pipes pierced their bodies, and greying flesh bulged through the rents, raddled with open sores that dripped bloody pus. Worst of all, their bodies were stippled with noisome, honeycomb-shaped holes in and out of which slithered fleshy worms. It was from the lamprey mouths of these revolting parasites that the incessant scream arose.

The Plague Marines stared at Keltos through grimy eye-lenses. They carried an assortment of verdigrised weapons and, as they trudged forward, they let fly.

Keltos dived aside. He rolled smoothly behind a stone pillar as bolt rounds and sprays of caustic slime converged on the spot he had occupied.

Vivid energies flashed from somewhere high above and bolts of plasma whipped down to strike the Plague Marines. One of the heretics fell as a blast seared through his back and melted his torso into a blackened ruin. The other lost an arm, flesh and armour vaporising at the touch of unleashed star-fire. Yet to Keltos' horror the blackened stump of the heretic's shoulder bulged into a massive blister then burst, disgorging a flood of slug-like flesh that rapidly solidified into a barbed tentacle. Wrapping the foul new appendage around the end of his boltgun, the Plague Marine gave a gurgling laugh and advanced.

The Intercessors entered the cathedrum. Their bolt rifles roared. Another Plague Marine was riddled with explosive bolts and fell, his ruined body jetting gore.

Keltos saw Brother Bemaeus caught amidst a jetting spray of ichor that melted his armour like ice before a flamer. Bemaeus gave a liquid cry and fell back, his dissolving body coming apart before it even hit the floor.

'Heretic scum!' roared Keltos, vox-amplifying his voice so it boomed through the cathedrum. He spun out from cover and, rune-marking his target, fired his heavy bolt pistol. Absolution barked thrice. The three mass-reactive shells roared across the open space and punched into the faceplate of Keltos' chosen Plague Marine. They detonated one after another, reducing the heretics head to a mangled mess of blood and bone. To Keltos' revulsion the Plague Marine kept coming, yellow eyes opening in the warrior's breastplate while a leering maw split his bulbous belly.

'Try... harder... loyalist dog,' grunted the abomination before hammering Keltos with bolt shells of its own. The first shot ricocheted from the lieutenant's shoulder guard. The second and third ricocheted from his torso hard enough that they drove the air from his lungs. The fourth shot clipped Keltos' right thigh and dug into the armour before detonating.

The lieutenant was flung off his feet by the blast. Agony raced from his hip into his torso, and down through his right leg. He rolled with the fall, coming back up into a crouch, and took a quick glance to inspect the damage. Already, pain blockers were flooding his enhanced bloodstream while his Primaris physiology went to work stemming the blood flow. Still, the wound was grievous. Keltos' armour was torn open and a ragged red rent had been blasted through the flesh and muscle of his thigh, deep enough that he could see the white glint of bone. Already he could feel the wound burning as the unnatural contaminants filling the air tried to afflict him with a dozen different diseases at once.

'Try harder?' he spat. 'Very well.'

Shrugging off his pain, Keltos focused as he had been trained. The world shrank down to him and his opponent. Keltos launched himself into a charge, the pain in his thigh forgotten as he pounded across the open space with Mercy crackling in his fist. The Plague Marine chortled from his belly maw as he fired again, but Keltos wove aside and spun his blade in a lightning arc. The heretic's leer faltered as the lieutenant dodged or swatted away every bolt shell that came at him.

Switching his bolter to one fist, the Plague Marine dragged a filth-encrusted knife from a sheath at his belt. It was too late. Keltos feinted at the last moment, drawing his enemy's fire one way before lunging the other. He severed his enemy's blade arm at the elbow and the rancid weapon clattered to the floor, still clutched in one armoured fist. The Plague Marine roared and swung a clubbing blow with his gun butt. But Keltos had fought far more skillful foes than this diseased brute. The lieutenant stepped back, careful to put his weight upon his uninjured leg, then pivoted and swung his blade in a lightning arc. Mercy crackled through the air and hacked deep into the Plague Marine's torso.

The heretic gave a gurgle of pain. Revolting slime spilled from the wound, hissing as it cooked on Mercy's energised blade. Shrieking worms and maggots slithered madly out of his body and writhed away across the cathedrum floor. The Plague Marine's knees buckled and, by the time he collapsed, Keltos was already assessing the strategic situation.

Two Intercessors down now, he saw with a stab of cold anger — both Bemaeus and Kylun had been slain by the Plague Marines. The Aggressors had smashed their way into the cathedrum to reinforce Keltos' push, but with each passing moment there seemed to be more enemy cultists converging on their position. Lasguns and autoguns flashed in the murk, and shots rang from his power armour from every angle. Several Plague Marines still fought on, the worms in their flesh shrilling madly as they converged upon Dimitrin, Protus and the two Aggressors.

'Where in the Emperor's name is Mytoxos?' he demanded, and then realised he already knew. He looked up to the platform and its veil of smog, which was whirling faster and faster like a reeking cyclone. Unnatural light vomited from amidst the murk. The fluids in the pit swirled and churned in sympathy.

Brother Nykus cursed as a blight shell punched through his Aggressor armour then detonated. The luckless battle-brother stumbled as concentrated contagion ate away his body. He kept firing, hammering his killer with bolts that drove the Plague Marine back before Nykus collapsed into a slowly dissolving heap. An instant later there came a flash and a scream, and the Plague Marine vanished in turn as twin plasma blasts annihilated him.

'They are too damned tough, their cursed weapons are too powerful,' voxed Dimitrin as he wrenched Severer out of another Death Guard warrior. His opponent staggered but did not fall despite his grievous wounds. 'We need to finish this.'

'Distract the heretics. I am going for the platform,' ordered Keltos, but before he could move the whirling vortex of noxious gases billowed outwards. As the maelstrom tattered apart it revealed Mytoxos in all his monstrous glory, standing on the platform's edge between Keltos and four chanting, swaying Death Guard sorcerers.

Keltos had seen Mytoxos only in pict-images, during his mission briefing. They had not conveyed the daemon prince's true horror.

Standing fourteen feet tall and as bulky as a Dreadnought, Mytoxos was clad in a gruesome approximation of power armour. His form was immensely bloated, and his armour had run like rotten wax to form screaming visages. From the maw of each emerged a rusted metal pipe, something like a tank's exhaust. Vast bellows set into Mytoxos' chest armour gasped and wheezed, and with each pumping motion more ochre fumes spilled from the daemon prince's pipes. His head was set low between his hunched shoulders, resembling a cross between a swine's muzzle and a crude gas mask, and his eyes were yellow-green lanterns that shone through the lenses with diseased intensity.

Mytoxos held a massive hammer taller than a Space Marine. This he now hefted in one hand and pointed it imperiously at Keltos.

When the daemon prince spoke, it was in a gasping rasp that boomed through the cathedrum. 'How dare you defile this ritual? This is the Grandfather's place. There is nothing here for corpse worshippers but death.'

Keltos did not waste time on words. With every second he could see the heretic sorcerers drawing closer to the completion of their ritual. Instead he took a moment to commune with the spirits of Mercy and Absolution, felt the nearness of their machine-spirits, their familiarity as they meshed with the systems of his armour. Keltos' leg was burning at the touch of disease. His battle-brothers were fighting furiously for their lives, and he was surrounded by heresy and horror. Yet in that moment he felt the strength of his Bond Martial, his connection to the weapons he had wielded since the day he had emerged from stasis beneath the sands of Mars, and he knew strength.

Focus restored, Keltos charged.

A cultist hurled himself into Keltos' path, but a shot from Xerxys' rifle took the man's head off. In his peripheral vision, Keltos saw one of the Plague Marines try to break away from the fight to intercept him. Dimitrin's axe clove deep into the traitor's shoulder and drew him up short.

'Focus and fury!' bellowed Keltos as he charged up the bone bridge at Mytoxos. In response, the daemon prince let out a belching roar and swung his hammer in a mighty arc. Keltos saw the blow coming and slid under it, hacking upwards with Mercy as he did so. His blade bit deep into the daemon prince's wagging gut and a flood of brackish blood splattered forth. Keltos slid clean through his enemy's legs and came up shooting. His bolts took one of the sorcerers in the back of the head, blowing the witch's skull apart.

The cathedrum shuddered and an awful groan filled the air. Cracks raced across the platform on which Keltos and his enemies stood. Beneath them, Keltos heard the lake of filth bubble and churn more furiously. The lieutenant saw the other three sorcerers glance his way in eerie unison. He recoiled in horror as he realised that all of them were riddled with worm-holes; hundreds of the slithering parasites squirmed through and across the sorcerers' bodies, spilled from their mouths and swayed like water-weed in their eye sockets.

Mytoxos rounded on him, and Keltos threw himself aside as the hammer whistled down. Its rusted head struck the platform hard enough to crack it, and chunks of shattered bone fell away into the slime below. This was not an even duel, Keltos realised, put off balance by the unfamiliar sensation; his enemy's weapon struck with such titanic strength that a single clean blow would see Keltos reduced to a sack of shattered bones.

'It is not for you to disrupt this sacred moment,' hissed Mytoxos, and as he did, billowing clouds of unclean fumes rolled around Keltos. The lieutenant choked, even behind his rebreather; he felt his eyes sting and burn. The next hammer swing almost had him, Keltos rolling desperately aside as the lumpen metal head crashed down.

He scrambled to his feet, coughing, and saw cracks spreading through the platform like a shattered mirror. Mytoxos stomped towards him and the cracks spread further. Behind Keltos the sorcerers chanted madly, their voices united with the shrilling screams of the worms that filled them. Unclean light pulsed from below and the lake became a whirlpool from which spilled the tainted glare of the warp.

A rift, he thought with sick horror. They were opening a warp rift.

'Keltos to all brothers!' he voxed. 'Destroy the psykers! Kill them now!'

Mytoxos charged again. Keltos read the swing of his enemy's weapon and span aside, allowing it to crash into the platform again. He lunged around Mytoxos' guard and Mercy bit deep, sliding into the daemon prince's left eye all the way to the hilt.

Mytoxos gave a rasping bellow of agony and reared back.

'Blood of Novaris!' spat Keltos as the motion tore Mercy from his grasp. He felt the parting of the weapon's machine-spirit from his own as a physical wrench, suddenly unable to catch his breath. There came a howl of plasma and another of the sorcerers was blasted to ash on the howling wind.

Below him, Keltos felt rather than saw the rift rage out of control. The two remaining sorcerers screamed as their ritual ran amuck, before the third was spun off his feet by a round from Xerxys' rifle.

Keltos only had eyes for Mercy, still jutting from Mytoxos ruined face. He ran across the collapsing platform even as chunks of it were sucked down into the raging vortex. Beams of foul green light burst up around him, but Keltos closed on Mytoxos with Absolution blazing. He aimed for the flesh around his blade, pummelling Mytoxos' head and shoulder with shots.

The daemon prince belched a great cloud of fumes that ate away at Keltos' armour. Mytoxos swung his hammer in a wild arc that struck the lieutenant a glancing blow to the shoulder and shattered Keltos' arm and collar bone. Keltos was thrown sideways in agony, managing to stop his slide just before he plunged through the widening cracks in the platform. Dimly he registered the last of the sorcerers fleeing amidst a whirling storm of flies.

'Brother-lieutenant, get clear! That structure is about to come down!' Dimitrin's words rang in his ears, but Keltos could not comply. The Bond Martial was sacred. Mercy was as much a part of him as his own soul. He could not dishonour himself and his blade by simply abandoning it. No Silver Templar would be able to endure such shame.

Instead he drove himself back onto his feet and ran at Mytoxos. The daemon prince saw him coming.

'What have you done?' he roared.

'Release my blade!' Keltos roared back, hurling himself at Mytoxos. Again the daemon prince swung, and again his hammer connected. Bones broke. Armour cracked. Keltos felt himself soar through the air like a comet. For an instant he was weightless, a bright star of pain streaking through a fume-choked firmament. In that moment he saw green light burst up around Mytoxos and the daemon prince fell away with a howl of dismay to be swallowed by the sucking rift.

Keltos hit the flagstones with a jarring crunch. Armour runes and vital sign indicators strobed a red blizzard in his peripheral vision, but they were dimming now, turning to black.

He was dying.

He did not care.

He had lost Mercy to the warp. The sword was gone beyond his reach to recover. Horror and misery swelled up inside him like a flood tide. Such dishonour was catastrophic, unendurable, a personal tragedy so massive that his heart could not bear its weight. Keltos' last thought before oblivion took him was that death was too good a punishment for one as dishonoured as he.

Consciousness fled.

I

TWENTY-ONE YEARS LATER...

The boarding torpedo was one hundred feet long from its armoured nose to its bright-blazing rear thrusters. Painted in the gunmetal and yellow livery of the Silver Templars, the projectile streaked through the darkness of the void. It was one of several spat from the launch tubes of the strike cruiser Unsheathed as the warship closed with its target.

Within, lashed into two rows of restraint thrones along the flanks of the torpedo's cramped transport hold, were Captain Aetian Keltos and nineteen of his Primaris battle-brothers.

Captain. The rank was still new to Keltos, still felt like a helm drawn fresh from the Chapter armoury and unfamiliar in fit. Part of him felt satisfaction at the honour; surely, he had laboured long and hard enough to earn it. The other part sounded a voice of caution, for could one such as he ever truly deserve such a position of command?

After what he had allowed to happen to Mercy, Keltos was not sure.

'Full velocity reached,' came an artificial voice from the torpedo's internal vox-emitters. 'Time to target impact four minutes thirteen seconds and counting.'

'Hear that, captain?' asked Veteran Sergeant Dimitrin from the throne next to Keltos'. 'Not long now. Honour will be satisfied at last.' His voice held its usual relish for the conflict to come. Severer was across the Veteran Sergeant's back, and Keltos knew the weapon's machine-spirit would be thirsty for heretic blood.

'It is long overdue,' replied Keltos.

Twenty-one years, he thought. A confused mix of bitterness, anger and grim satisfaction roiled in his chest. Twenty-one years since the mission that had almost killed him. Twenty-one years since he had lost Mercy, had been shorn of his honour and his rank, and had damn near lost his mind.

Upon their return to their homeworld of Novaris, Keltos' surviving brothers had brought his shattered body to the apothecarion within the Chapter's fortress-monastery, Kolossus. There his physical hurts had been healed to the best of the Apothecaries' abilities, while the Chapters Librarians had attended to his malefic maladies. Keltos' disease-ruined leg and one shattered arm had been shorn away and replaced with mechanical augmetics made sleek and well-balanced in the Novarian style. His system had been purged of unnatural contaminants, the unclean spirits causing his fever exorcised and his humours brought back into balance.

So had Aetian Keltos' physical wounds been healed. The hurts done to his soul, and to his honour, had taken longer to repair.

For ten years Keltos had been a penitent. He had held no rank and worn nothing over his black carapace save the penitent's robes. He had not left Kolossus nor fought alongside his brothers, for he had been deemed unworthy. Keltos had laboured in the Chapter armoury to forge and to repair the weapons of other, more honourable warriors. He had worked the anvils alongside the Techmarines and the Chapter novitiates, forever tending to the weapons of others while never bonding with a blade of his own.

To do so would have been grossly disrespectful to the lost spirit of Mercy. Besides, deep within his black pit of mourning, Keltos could not have faced the notion of giving up the memory of his lost blade, nor forgiving himself for its loss.

At last, after he had served a full decade in this fashion, Keltos had been summoned to kneel before Chapter Master Akilios Zanaris himself. There he had been commanded to shed his penitent's robes at last and to don once more the armour of the Silver Templars. War called, the Imperium was beset, and Aetian Keltos could remain a sheathed and blunted blade no longer.

Afforded the reduced rank of sergeant, Keltos had begun his fight for redemption. He had forged anew the Bond Martial, first restoring his fellowship with his heavy bolt pistol, Absolution, and then establishing a fresh link with a finely worked power sword which he named Penance.

Those weapons were sheathed now at Keltos' hips, and as the boarding torpedo howled on through the darkness of space, he reached out to feel their machine-spirits resting comfortably at either side of him.

For another eleven years he had fought with these weapons and in that time gun and blade had become his closest companions. He had battled the enemies of the Emperor on a dozen worlds. Had known only victory, until at last his penitent status had been forgiven and his honour restored in the eyes of his brothers. Only then had Sergeant Keltos become Lieutenant Keltos and then, but three months ago, Captain Keltos.

Everyone else appeared to have drawn a line beneath his shame and moved on.

Keltos had not.

Nor had he forgotten its architect.

'Mytoxos,' breathed Keltos.

'The same diseased monster we fought all those years ago,' said Dimitrin, running one bear-like paw across the black stubble of his scalp.

'He will not escape us again,' said Keltos. 'This time, brother, we will hunt the daemon down as one and purge him from existence for his crimes.'

'Does it strike anyone else as convenient that the daemon prince should raise his head again in a war zone to which we have been despatched? It is rather a large galaxy for coincidence, is it not?' asked Hellblaster Sergeant Thessos. His long face wore its usual dour expression, pulling the shiny skin of his plasma-scarring tight down the left-hand side of his jaw.

'Are you implying this is some sort of challenge, Maxim?' asked Dimitrin.

'More likely a trap, Ezion,' said Thessos. 'I'm hardly an expert upon the servants of the Dark Gods and how they think, only how to slay the filth. But I can imagine how Mytoxos might be out for revenge of his own, no?'

'For the fate that he inflicted upon Mercy, whatever hatreds Mytoxos might bear us pale against my own like a candle flame held up to a raging inferno,' said Keltos. His voice was quiet, barely audible over the dull roar of the torpedo's engines, but it was hard as adamantium. 'I will fulfil my oath to banish him back to the darkest nether-hell of the warp for all of time, even if it costs me the last breath in my body to do so. I swear this by the Emperor and the primarch both.'

'So it should be, brother-captain,' said Dimitrin gruffly. 'But come, battle should not be a wholly dour experience. Don't tell me that you're going to affect the same mien as our oracle of doom here?'

Thessos offered Dimitrin a rude Novarian gesture, but there was no rancour in it; the two had fought together for many years now.

'Not dour, Ezion, no,' said Keltos. 'But this is an oath-quest long overdue, and its ending will not be as it should. Mercy cannot be recovered, nor the bond reforged. I made the mistake once before of underestimating this foe and it damned warriors and weapon alike to a horrible fate. I won't make that error again.'

At Keltos' behest, the Librarians of Kolossus had many times read the omens for him, had sought any hint of Mercy so that he might declare an oath-quest as Chapter tradition dictated, and forge a path to reclaim his lost weapon and his honour both. They had never once detected the blade's spirit-spoor in any of their prognostications.

However, upon Strike Force Keltos' deployment to the Anjoria war zone, Librarian Nicodem Akillus had sought urgent audience with the captain. The psychically gifted battle-brother had detected not Mercy, but the warp spoor of the foul being who had stolen the blade from Keltos' fist. Mere days later, orders had reached the Unsheathed from segmentum command that they were to launch a strike against the Anjoria System's primary orbital defence station.

Hanging in orbit over the oceanic, death world of Anjoria Tertius, X-Delphi-34 was an immense and semi-automated defence platform whose missile silos and macro-lance-arrays dominated the space lanes of the entire system. How the forces of the Archenemy had come to capture the defence platform was unclear but seize it they had.

Somehow, despite everything, Captain Keltos had been wholly unsurprised when Mytoxos' name appeared upon his briefing slate as the architect of this conquest. From the moment Librarian Akillus sought him out, Keltos had known that the Emperor was guiding him and his nemesis back together, that he might avenge the wrongs done to him and to his blade all those years before.

Keltos knew this was most likely a trap. Yet whatever ambush his enemy had prepared, its jaws would snap shut upon air as his forces struck hard and fast. Those who had set it would find that their quarry had become the hunters. His oath of vengeance demanded no less.

'Time to target impact two minutes four seconds and counting,' came the mechanical voice. The lumen inside the torpedo flicked from yellow-white to a deep and forbidding amber.

Keltos shook off thoughts of the past and focused upon the now.

'Sergeants, enough debate. We have our plan and it is sound,' he said. 'Our enemy will not predict it, nor counteract it. The Swordsman stands ready, the Dagger is unsheathed. Lead your squads in pre-battle weapon rites and ready yourselves to duel the foe.'

Keltos activated the vox bead in his armour's gorget and cycled swiftly through channels. He contacted the officers aboard the other boarding torpedoes streaking towards the orbital platform.

'Veteran Sergeant Kouminis, Agressor Sergeant Asklepos, Lieutenant Thessellan, Librarian Akillus, make ready for battle,' said Keltos. A string of confirmations flashed back across the vox through the icy darkness of space. The torpedo shuddered around Keltos and he checked his data inloads to see that the enemy platform's close defence guns had opened fire.

'Captain Othella, the enemy musters a response,' voxed Keltos to the shipmaster whose vessel had launched the boarding torpedoes. That warship was even now thundering in towards the orbital platform in their wake.

'Don't trouble yourself, Captain Keltos,' came Othella's laconic reply. 'Claim runes are already set. Unsheathed has their number.'

The mission had commenced seven minutes earlier, when the Unsheathed had used its long-ranged lance batteries to stipple X-Delphi-34 with precisely-placed energy blasts. Gun batteries and macro-lances had detonated as beams of energy reduced them to flaming wreckage. Many more had been rendered dead and dark as overloaded conduits vented excess motive force and caused critical chain-detonations.

It had been every bit as artful as a bladesman wielding a foil with consummate skill; Captain Othella was one of those rare brothers able to achieve the Bond Martial with an entire warship. Working in concert with Unsheathed he could fight with the balletic grace of a master fencer.

Even as X-Delphi-34 reeled, Unsheathed had dived within the envelope of the platform's crippled guns. It would take time for the enemy to divert power, effect repairs and manoeuvre other weapons into suitable firing arcs. The rapacious Captain Othella would make them pay for every second.

He had launched his boarding torpedoes towards the distant platform. Gunship squadrons flashed in around and ahead of them, ripping through the platform's desultory fighter screen and executing lethal attack runs against the few weapons batteries still operational.

Now, as the torpedoes began their final approach, it seemed that the foe had managed to rouse a few battered weapon spirits in a last-ditch attempt to stop them.

Keltos slammed his helm into place. As its auto-senses awoke, he patched in to the external view through the nose-cone picters of the torpedo. He saw flickering images of heavy shells and las blasts whipping toward the boarding torpedoes, saw a few lucky hits ricochet from the heavily armoured projectiles.

Each impact made him wince. At this speed, it would take only a few degrees' pitch or yaw to send a torpedo sailing off course to dash itself to ruin against the platform's less penetrable armoured inner sectors, or, worse still, to plunge it into Anjoria Tertius' crushing gravity field. Such a fate would spell the deaths of every battle-brother on board.

Sudden blasts of crimson light washed out the picters. When image clarity returned, the weapons batteries firing upon his strike force were reduced to glowing wounds in the platforms flank. Burning atmosphere vented around them. Ruptured bodies drifted in the grip of the void.

'My thanks, Captain Othella,' voxed Keltos.

'Reign victorious. Slay the heretics. Reclaim that platform, or destroy it if need dictates,' replied Othella in the same slightly bored, slightly superior tones. 'That will be thanks enough.'

'Time to target impact thirty-three seconds and counting,' came the voice from the vox-emitters. 'Thirty-two seconds, thirty-one seconds, thirty seconds...'

'All torpedoes on target,' reported Dimitrin, consulting their craft's inbuilt cogitators. The torpedo shuddered furiously, its lumen flickering fiery red. Additional thrusters kicked in along its hull to lend it a last surge of speed. Keltos felt himself pushed sideways in his restraints.

'Final litanies,' he ordered across the strike-force-wide vox. 'Give thanks to your weapons for their strength and give thanks to the primarch and the Emperor for this chance to slay their heretical foe. You all know the battle-plan, my brothers, now prepare to enact it. Focus and fury!'

Their voices came back to him as war cries and shouted oaths.

None bore the same weight as his oath, thought Keltos as the torpedo shook madly and the voice counted down from ten, to nine, to eight, to seven.

None of them wanted vengeance as sorely as he.

'Six,'

'Five.'

'Four.'

He would be the one to slay Mytoxos, for eternity this time.

He would be the one to avenge Mercy.

'Three.'

'Two.'

'One.'

The boarding torpedo hit the outer hull of X-Delphi-34 at over two hundred miles-per hour. The shock of the impact was baffled by layers of grav-servos and adamantium plating. Plasma cutters in the nose array ignited and spun in a hungry energy-cyclone to shred apart the solid plasteel that barred the torpedo's path. Still, the collision was so furious, so jarring that whiplash stunned Captain Keltos for several double heartbeats.

For long moments the world was a red-lit cacophony of tearing metal, bellowing explosions and screaming atmosphere. Then the lumen inside the torpedo flicked from red to green, the vehicle screeched to a sudden halt, the locking bolts blowing with concussive bangs all around its nose cone.

'Disembark! Secure landing zones!' voxed Keltos as the boarding torpedo's nose cone irised wide. He was already up and out of his restraints, blade and heavy bolt pistol in hand. His brothers moved with him, lunging for the open maw of the torpedo and the interior of the enemy-held structure beyond.

Veteran Sergeant Ezion Dimitrin leapt down from the open end of the boarding torpedo. He took in the chamber in a heart-beat. As intended, the torpedo had punched into one of the outer gunnery-cogitator shrines that dotted the voidward flank of the platform. It was a comparatively cramped space, barely two hundred feet by two hundred and only two storeys high. That made it the perfect location to establish a beachhead before pushing out to link up with the rest of the strike force and advance on their objectives. As Dimitrin had expected, the place was crammed full of glowing cogitator banks, with thick tangles of wiring and flashing data-panels that ran floor to ceiling.

What he had not expected was the advanced state of decomposition many of those systems were already in. The foe had taken this place mere days earlier, yet already the platforms machinery showed signs of biomechanical corruption. Walkways, railings and ladders were furred with rust while foul fluids dripped and pooled. An ochre fume drifted on the air. It was nowhere near as thick as it had been all those years ago on Ultach but it was horribly familiar.

'Focus and fury!' cried Dimitrin at vox-amplified volume, seeing shell-shocked enemies beginning to rouse themselves. Boarding torpedoes were designed to punch clean through the hulls of enemy void craft and deliver their Space Marine cargoes into the enemy in as violent, disruptive and destructive a fashion as possible. That had certainly been the case here; the cogitator banks were sparking wrecks that had toppled like felled trees to snarl entire sections of the chamber, and fires were spreading while atmosphere shrieked out through the imperfect seal formed between the torn hull and the torpedo's intruding mass.

Still, cultists of Nurgle were staggering to their feet. Wounded, bloodied and dazed as they were, they still held firearms and blades. As they recovered their wits, some were beginning to use those weapons.

Bullets rattled against Dimitrin's armour. In reply, the veteran sergeant raised his bolt rifle, Wrathful, and fired the weapon one handed. He laid a claim rune upon a hulking cultist hefting a pilfered boltgun, and his shot blew the heretic off his feet. Power armoured figures flowed around Dimitrin as his brothers stormed the ladders leading to the upper gantries. A greater number of heretics had survived the impact up there; their shots whipped down to whine from gunmetal armour and spang from the deck plating.

Captain Keltos ran past Dimitrin with a roar and swung Penance, lopping the head from another heretic who had just risen to his feet. Keltos rune-marked and gunned down two more foes in quick succession before mag-locking his pistol to his thigh and taking a ladder in one-handed upward lunges.

His captain's choler was up, thought Dimitrin, and well might it be. He could not image what enduring the loss of Mercy must have been like. Still, he worried for Keltos. The man was not only his captain, but also his friend and brother despite his Martian origins. Dimitrin could see that the damage that had been done to Keltos' spirit ran deep. Watching Keltos hurl himself into the enemy now, the sergeant realised that the captain was not the deft and considered swordsman he had once been. A powerful need for revenge was upon him, and nothing would stand in his way.

'He won't be stopped this day, will he?' came Thessos' voice over a private vox-channel. The Hellblaster sergeant was off to Dimitrin's right, he and his warriors unleashing blasts of plasma to scour away the heretic taint.

'I believe you are right, brother,' replied Dimitrin, firing his own bolt rifle and feeling its machine-spirit rejoice in the deaths of the enemy. Above him, Captain Keltos led his warriors to purge the upper gantries. Sundered heretic bodies fell to thump wetly upon the decking or crashed down amidst nests of sparking cogitator wreckage.

'What price would he pay for his vengeance, I wonder?' asked Thessos. Dimitrin felt a stab of anger at his brother. Whether it was for asking the question at all, or for reading Dimitrin's own private thoughts he could not have said.

'Our duty is not to stand in judgement, but to honour him with our aid,' Dimitrin replied. 'We shall stand by Brother-Captain Keltos while he fulfils his oath, and we will aid him in whatever way he needs.'

Another volley of plasma flashed across the chamber, reducing screaming cultists to a fine ash that was dragged swirling out of the rent in the platform's hull. Several Intercessor brothers from Dimitrin's squad had now secured the chambers ground-level entrance and were exchanging fire with unseen hostiles in the corridor beyond.

'Whether that is aid he requests, or aid he does not realise he requires,' said Thessos darkly. 'This plan is daring but if the foe truly has laid a trap for us, and its nature is something the captain has not foreseen...'

'You cannot still doubt his honour? Need I remind you he has done his penance,' warned Dimitrin, stalking across the chamber and stamping down on the skull of a heretic attempting to crawl away from him. This wasn't a battle, he thought, his good mood spoiled. It was butchery. 'The plan is sound, no matter what our foe throws at us.'

'I do not doubt the captain for a second, Ezion,' replied Thessos. 'But Keltos still doubts himself. Can you not see it? The Chapter Master might have forgiven Keltos for his failure and restored to him his honour, but Keltos has not yet forgiven himself.'

Thessos cut the link and stomped across the chamber to aid their force's Techmarine in applying void-hardened sealant gel to the ruptured hull. Dimitrin saw that the last of the heretics had been slain and, for now, even the Intercessors guarding the chamber door had stopped shooting.

'Beachhead alpha secure. Report,' he heard Keltos vox from the gantries above.

'Beachhead beta secure,' came the deep voice of Lieutenant Thessellan from elsewhere in the platform's outer hull.

'Beachhead cerastus secure,' voxed Intercessor Sergeant Kouminis.

'Beachhead deltos secure,' reported Aggressor Sergeant Asklepos.

'Dagger is in hand,' came Librarian Akillus' voice.

'Strike force deployed,' came Captain Othella's voice last of all. 'Auspex sweeps show enemy main guns approaching wakefulness at sectors four, six and seven. Multiple enemy forces converging on your positions, brothers. There's a lot of them. The Unsheathed shall withdraw outside of the defence platforms primary fire arcs and lend what aid we can from a distance. If and when extraction is required, merely send us the signal and we shall come.'

'Good work, all of you,' voxed Keltos, who was now climbing back down to join his brothers.

A lot had changed about the captain, mused Dimitrin. His physical augmetics and his intense spiritual focus not least, yet here still was that brave warrior who had led the battle on Ultach.

'This fight is only just beginning however,' continued the captain. 'You heard Othella. You all know your objectives and you all know that the Emperor and the primarch expect. As do I. Focus and fury brothers, be about your war.'

So far, so successful, thought Dimitrin as he hefted his axe and prepared to lead his squad out into the tangled corridors of X-Delphi-34. So why, he wondered grimly, did he feel such a terrible sense of foreboding?

II

Lord Mytoxos stirred amidst glorious, festering gloom and reflected upon the stronghold that he and his followers had seized.

X-Delphi-34 was huge, a breathtaking product of void-born military artifice. The platform's diameter was over fifty miles across. Its circumference would have taken an unaugmented man many days to traverse. The platform's gothically buttressed sensor spires rose almost a mile above its midpoint, its undertowers trailing a similar distance below, and its individually fortified sectors rose like fortresses into the darkness of space. Lumens in their billions winked and flashed across its surface, while the firepower to level cities bristled from the platforms countless gun batteries and missile silos.

At the heart of this armoured leviathan, sequestered behind districts of generatoria, crew habitation stacks, armouries, cogitator macro-shrines, void docks and other, more esoteric locales, was its command strategium. Until a mere fourteen days before, this had been the beating heart of X-Delphi-34. It had been a hub of Imperial loyalty, an impenetrable fortress nigh-unassailable through military means, a stronghold of unwavering authority.

But the worms had got in through the water supply.

By the time the horrified crew of the defence platform had realised their predicament they were riddled with nascent daemonic parasites. They could only watch as their comrades went mad around them, as their flesh blistered to disgorge shrilling white worms that had fallen upon the few uninfected crew-members even as they attempted to barricade themselves away.

The thought of it still made Mytoxos chuckle. He had watched from afar through warp-given dream sight that pierced the hateful veil of reality. He had observed with growing excitement as his most loyal champions transformed the sternly austere interior of the strategium into a diseased abattoir of sacrifice in response to his whispered guidance.

The deal had been struck, though it bore great risk.

The veil had parted.

Mytoxos had been returned far before his time. Now he lurked like a bloated spider at the heart of a pestilent web and watched with satisfaction as his prey came to him.

The strategium was a wide, dome-like chamber filled with sectors of cogitator columns that ran floor to ceiling. Servo-pulpits thronged each of its ziggurat levels up to a central command throne that looked out over the mile-wide space like the seat of some heathen emperor.

The acolytes and servitors who had worked the pulpits before the coming of Mytoxos were still at their stations, yet their eyes were yellow-white orbs that stared unseeingly ahead. Their bodies were riddled with dripping holes through which the worms of the Squirm slithered, and their disease-marred hands moved over their runic keys at their parasites' bidding. The screens they hunched over glowed with static-curdled yellow light and danced with foul runes not meant for human eyes.

Rust and corruption crawled across every surface. Cogitators were wound about and punctured by bloated tentacular growths that pulsated in time as though to the beat of a monstrous heart. Thick fumes roiled in banks that obscured the far walls of the strategium. They rendered each data pulpit a glowing island in a sea of fog, wreckers' lanterns attended by ghouls. Cyber cherubim swooped through the murk, but they were ghastly things of rotting flesh and rattling chains that spewed foul effluvia upon all that they passed over. Larger figures, too, moved through the murk; hulking Plague Marines, many of them willing worm-hosts; robe-shrouded priests of the Dark Mechanicum, whose cadaverous figures extruded writhing nests of tentacular mechadendrites to caress the tortured mechanical systems that they passed; other, less visible things that moved like stirring heat-haze through the murk and occasionally flickered into reality enough to leave a fleeting impression of cyclopic eyes, drooling maws and a dirge-like counting that never ended.

Mytoxos sat above it all upon the wide command dais, his obscene bulk utterly consuming the command throne, his tortured flesh bound into the unholy machines raised around it by nests of cabling and rune-inscribed tubules. His body was not as it had been. That had been part of the deal. So had the dark iron casket that lurked beside his throne, pulsing with malevolent energies.

Though above the waist Mytoxos was the same magnificent creature of Nurgle that he had always been, below his voluminous gut his form became ironclad and arachnid. His body was bound and chained into a mighty metal carriage of spider legs that hissed sulphurous steam and creaked with every movement.

Monstrous power and potential lurked in this form, Mytoxos knew. But it was not yet truly his. First, he had to uphold his end of the bargain.

He looked down upon the figures who stood around him. His champions. His lieutenants. They who had brought him back through the veil and given him this chance at vindication. Grandfather Nurgle smiled upon these chosen sons, and so too did Mytoxos.

'Praise the Grandfather, they come, master, just as you planned,' said the enormous brute to Mytoxos' left. A hulking plague champion in a slitted mask, this was Olboch the Glutted, Mytoxos Noxious Blightbringer. The huge warrior wore a butcher's apron over his armour that was stained with every manner of filth imaginable. A huge, rusted bell hung in a rotwood frame that rose from his shoulders.

'They do, and not a moment too soon,' said the abomination to Mytoxos' right in many voices. The Squirm was a colony of seven hundred and seventy-seven daemonic corkscrew worms that infested the sac-like body of one of Mytoxos' former sorcerers, Ghulm. The parasitic symbiosis was, to Mytoxos' knowledge, entirely voluntary on Ghulm's part. Though it had left him as a hollowed out and ruined thing, it had granted him vast sorcerous power. The Squirm desired only to spread and multiply to ever most hosts, both willing and not. Mytoxos facilitated that desire, and so the Squirm had long served him.

'Fret not so,' grumbled the cowled being that fussed around the machines plugged into Mytoxos' flesh. 'The deal has not yet run its course, and now the offering is here, fulsome and ripe for plucking.'

This was Plague Surgeon Slecht Quirmloch. The only Death Guard warrior more loyal to Mytoxos than him was Olboch, and it was a close-run thing. The sackcloth robes covering Quirmloch's pitted power armour were the eggshell white of loyalist Apothecaries' armour, a grim jest on the Plague Surgeon's part. They were so caked in filth that they crackled as he moved.

'All of you, still your rotted gums,' said Mytoxos, his voice a wet rumble that rolled through the murky air. He gazed upon his champions and the pallid wychlights of his eyes picked them out from amidst the plague-fog like a searchlight beam. 'The enemy have entered our sacrificial circle, just as intended. Now begins the Grandfather's work. Quirmloch, is all in readiness?'

The Plague Surgeon straightened from his ministrations and checked a filth-smeared dataslate.

'Oh it is, my lord Mytoxos. Our pact with the Dark Mechanicum has borne many fascinating scrapcode cultures. The strains are ebullient and pulsing with eagerness. All the rituals have been enacted. Just speak the word, and we shall stir the infection to life.'

Mytoxos gave a growl of satisfaction. He gestured with one taloned hand and a trio of servo-skulls swarmed into position before him. Their jaws clacked, mouthfuls of rotted teeth grinding together, and their eyes glowed in mirroring approximation of his own.

'Show me the sacrifices,' commanded Mytoxos.

The servo-skulls burbled corrupt binharic cant, and their eye-lamps grew in brightness. From them projected a trio of flickering holo-screens that hung in the air in the shape of the tri-lobe sigil of Nurgle. Mytoxos observed as images flickered and danced across the hololiths.

'There they are,' he snarled as he watched the pathetic silver armoured warriors fan out along the station's corrupted corridors. Mytoxos felt his loathing for the loyalists burn like fever-heat within him. He felt light-headed with hatred. The stuff of the warp roiled through his body like a wrathful hurricane as he observed those who had cast him so carelessly into the abyss.

'Where is he, my lord?' asked Olboch eagerly. 'I cannot see him. I wish to. Where is he who must be punished above all others? Where is the sinner?'

'There,' shrilled the Squirm in its compound voice. It raised one worm-riddled finger and pointed to the left-most screen. Mytoxos looked, and his anger at his enemies swelled like an infected joint as he saw what his sorcerer had seen. Lithe and swift, the warrior led a band of his brothers along a wide corridor with pistol in one hand and blade in the other.

'Not the blade you once wielded, is it, little slug?' said Mytoxos, and his breath gusted out in a cruel laugh. 'You took from me my ritual. A wonder that would have parted the veil and loosed the glories of Nurgle's Garden upon that poor mistreated world. You stole my victory, but at least I tore your blade from you.'

He hissed, leaning closer.

'I heard how that rent your soul. My flies did whisper to me as I languished in Grandfather's garden of how that rent your soul. Now I see their truth in the curdling of your aura.'

'We shall do worse to him this time, my lord,' said Olboch with eager relish. The Blightbringer hefted his rusted plasma pistol and his filth-encrusted mace. He had named the weapons Feast and Famine and they had spelled the deaths of countless loyalist foes over the centuries.

'Stay your ebullience, dearest Olboch,' said Mytoxos. 'The proper steps of the ritual must be observed. The trap must be sprung before our victims can be brought to the butcher's block. You will get your chance, soon enough.'

'Of course, my lord,' said Olboch, hanging his head in a strangely childlike posture of shame.

On the monitors, the Silver Templars could be seen spreading out with swift efficiency through the sector of the fortress into which they had deployed. Voidward sector 5, if Mytoxos was not mistaken. As good as any part of this paltry fortress, he supposed.

'You understand what we have wagered, my champions?' he asked. He knew that they did, but Mytoxos wanted to hear them say it aloud. He was a creature of Nurgle, blessed by the Grandfather with unholy power and demigod stature, but still the lengths he had gone to in order to force his way back into reality had left Mytoxos anxious. As close as such a being could get to feeling concern, at any rate.

'The deal that you struck with the Soul Forges ails,' said Quirmloch. 'Too much longer and your newfound vitality shall fall into remission. It was the daemonmasters of the Soul Forges who created the body-carriage in which your essence now resides. What they give, they can take away again if they do not have their price. We understand, master.'

'Worse,' said the Squirm with what Mytoxos considered a note of unseemly glee in its many voices. 'If you do not pay their price, my lord, they will drag you back and entomb you within their forging engines forever. You will never pass through the veil again, never fight for Grandfather Nurgle, but instead labour as the slave of the daemonmasters for the rest of time.'

'And what, my children, is the price that they demand?' asked Mytoxos.

'Him,' hissed Olboch, pointing his mace at the screen on which the Silver Templars captain could be seen.

'Him,' echoed Mytoxos. 'And so you understand, do you not, that none can slay that warrior but me.'

'Of course, my lord,' said Olboch, sounding as though the order came as a surprise to him though he had heard it several times already.

'We understand,' said Quirmloch, while the Squirm squealed its comprehension.

'And do your warriors also understand it? Can I count upon my loyal Death Guard not to act... overzealously?' asked Mytoxos. 'My existence and his are entwined within the empyrean, and if he dies too soon, or in the improper way, I shall perish like a virus that has burned too swift and eager through its host.' The threat in his voice was like gathering thunderclouds. He doted on his champions as Nurgle doted on his myriad pretties, but the price of failure on this day was absolute. Nothing could be left to chance.

'None shall slay the sinner, my lord,' said Olboch. 'If any tries, they shall taste famine before they expire.'

'The strains have been teased, the cultures refined,' said Quirmloch. 'My shambling blessed are compelled not to slay this one, but only to seize him and drag him before you that you might end him yourself, my lord. Of course, his comrades have no such immunity. They will be butchered, and their bodies laid open as test beds for my blessed experiments.'

'Just so,' said Mytoxos, and his gas-mask visage twisted in a fleshy approximation of a leer. The vents across his body moaned like the voices of the damned, and gouts of plague fog spewed from them. 'Then if all is in readiness and all understand their duty this day, let us tarry no longer. Entropy is no ones friend if it passes unnoticed. Quirmloch, give the word. Olboch, Squirm, be about your business.'

All three of Mytoxos' champions dropped to one knee before him and bowed their heads in unison.

'Yes, Lord Mytoxos,' they chorused. Rising, Olboch and the Squirm set off down the rusted steps of the strategium. Quirmloch, meanwhile, tapped out a swift series of commands upon the runic panel of his dataslate then looked up at Mytoxos, a leer stretching his stitched and scarred features.

'It is done, my lord,' he said with undisguised glee. 'Burgeoning are the strains and driven are their hosts. So Nurgle's blessings begin to spread.'

'Good,' said Mytoxos, his voice a wet rumble of distant thunder, his lamp-like eyes fixed on the Silver Templars captain still displayed upon the hololith. 'That is... good...'

On the bridge of the Unsheathed, Captain Othella sat wired into his command throne and allowed the streams of data-inloads to play across his vision. His silver-flecked irises darted back and forth as he absorbed the vast quantities of information required to maintain the Bond Martial with his warship. Around him, he half-heard the stern murmur of bridge officers, servitors and tech-adepts as they attended to their duties. He barely paid them any mind; either his servants, or the ship itself, would ensure that all pertinent information reached him in good time.

Othella was more concerned with the Silver Templars who had deployed onto X-Delphi-34. Yes, the Martian had done his penance. He had earned forgiveness, and then glory. Still, Captain Keltos had suffered his bond sundered in the worst way imaginable. He had been dishonoured and, in Othella's eyes, was dishonoured still. The shipmaster half-suspected at any moment to hear distress cries fill the vox from the warriors on the platform, and to have to return under fire in order to extract them from some catastrophe.

What he didn't expect, as the defence platform dwindled in his rearward monitors, was the sudden spike of power signatures that blossomed across X-Delphi-34. Auspex alarms shrilled. Lock runes pinged with sudden fury. Around Othella, voices rose in timbre and took on the urgent, strained quality of soldiers confronted with sudden danger.

'Captain, multiple power signatures detected across the voidward flank of X-Delphi-34,' said his adjutant, Adept Nyssok.

'I see them, Nyssok. Source?' asked Othella. There was no way the heretics could have effected repairs so quickly, he thought. Not through any natural means, at any rate. The power signatures were spiralling, spreading through the blasted structure; they looked like tendrils to Othella's practised eye, something more organic than mechanical.

'Auspex stations are scanning now sir. They—'

Raised voices came from the auspex-stations. Binharic prayers rang out as tech-adepts moved forward with frantic haste. Alarm sigils appeared on Othella's retinal display and he felt the machine-spirit of Unsheathed stir with sudden discomfort.

'What was that, Nyssok?' demanded Othella, his fingers dancing over the runic keys before him. He had one eye on the data streams and the other fixed on the gun batteries of the defence platforms behind him. Gun batteries that should be dead and dark but were even now rousing again to wrath.

'A disruption, sir, heretical feedback from the defence platforms systems. The tech-priests say it is concurrent with something they call scrapcode. They have shut down the auspex banks and begun cleansing rites to prevent any taint spreading through Unsheathed's systems. Before they sent the auspex into quiescence they say it found trace of something they are calling strain Obax-Hades-Heretica spreading through the platforms systems.'

'Magos Gholmax, elaborate,' barked Othella, his voice carrying across the command deck to the servo-narthex where the ship's senior tech-adept hunched over his own systems. The robed tech-priest twitched as his mechadendrites swished through the air. They thunked in and out of myriad dataports and meshed with complex mechanisms with blinding speed.

'Strain Obax-Hades-Heretica, malefic macrocontaminant also codified as the Obliterator virus,' said Gholmax, his uninflected mechanical voice sounding as though he was reading from a primer text. 'A biomechanical contagion of the Archenemy with many heretical strains. It melds living flesh conjured from empyric energy with the holy technologies of the Machine-God, debasing them in the process and transforming them into perpetually-shifting biomechanical abominations.'

'Could this contagion have brought the enemy's systems back to wakefulness with the speed we are seeing?' asked Othella. His fingers sent out rune-key-commands for rear void shields to be strengthened, for weapons batteries to be roused and the enginarium to prepare for evasive manoeuvres. Othella seethed and worried at the same time; Unsheathed was nimble for such a massive craft, but evasive efforts could only take them so far. He had orchestrated his brothers' torpedo insertion on the assumption that the enemy's long guns would be quiescent until he had got his ship clear again, like a swordsman lunging for the jugular secure in the knowledge that his foe's shield is knocked aside and their guard wide open.

Now, it seemed, he had overextended himself and Unsheathed might be about to pay the price.

'It is conceivable, captain, that the Obliterator virus might be utilised in this fashion, though it is not something that we have any comprehensive data-sermons to consult upon. I have never witnessed anything close to this scale or virulence. It is heresy on a breathtaking scale.'

'A guess will have to suffice, magos,' began Othella. He was interrupted as ruby lights sparkled across the flanks of X-Delphi-34.

'Battery fire!' called out a deck officer.

'Macro lances discharging,' reported another. 'Emperor, what are those projectiles?'

Othella flicked a dataspool into his field of vision and frowned at the sight of what looked like masses of flesh and bone hurtling through the void towards his craft. Baleful lights pulsed deep within them, reminding him of the forge-furnaces back on Novaris. No forge-furnace had ever shone with such diseased light as this, however.

'Evasive manoeuvres, form barbute,' he ordered. 'Rear batteries, screening fire. All hands brace for impact.'

On his monitors, Othella saw the Unsheathed's void shields flicker as shells and long-ranged laser blasts slammed into them. Then the grotesque projectiles reached the shields. The first burst into an horrific cloud of organic detritus that sparked with purple lightning like a storm in the void. With its ferocious impact, the rear voids collapsed entirely.

Damage reports flashed up in Othella's peripheral vision. He felt heavy motion in the pit of his stomach as Unsheathed did its best to respond to his commands. The strike cruiser rolled with a ponderous grace and, through a flurrying burst of varied thrusters, dragged its prow several points starboard. Its arcing trajectory put tremendous strain upon the ship's superstructure, and choral alarms rang out as plasteel beams groaned.

The second diseased projectile whipped past Unsheathed, so close that confused boarding warnings flashed up in Othella's peripheral. He dismissed them and gritted his teeth as he realised there was no way the last of the projectiles was going to miss them.

'Strength, my friend,' he whispered to his ship, and then the mass of diseased flesh and bone slammed into the rear thrusters.

The entire ship shuddered. Lumens flickered. Damage reports swarmed across Othella's vision. Cries carried across the strategium as feedback caused several crew-stations to short out. Laud hailers activated, booming ritual prayers normally reserved for warp transit as a precaution against Chaos corruption.

Unsheathed faltered. The bridge lumens cut out for a slow three count, then stuttered back to life. The ship limped on.

'We cannot sustain another hit like that,' said Othella, his normal laconic detachment replaced by cold fury at what had been done to Unsheathed. He felt its pain as his own, a terrible cold ache in the small of his back and a fever heat racing through his blood.

Othella could see that two of the ship's six primary thrusters were out of action, and sections of both the enginarium and void shield control had been severely damaged. Crewmen were dead. Systems were ailing. 'Never mind lurking in harassing range, give me a full burn of every remaining thruster and get us clear of those long guns.'

As Unsheathed roared around him, Othella switched vox-channels to speak directly to Captain Keltos.

'Be advised, Unsheathed is retreating outside of engagement range, we have come under heavy and sustained fire and cannot risk another approach upon the platform at this time.'

Keltos' voice came back to Othella, underpinned by the sounds of bolt rifle fire and the awful groan of damned voices.

'Understood, captain. This is some artifice of the machine-blight that has swept through the corridors around our location, no doubt. Get your craft clear, shipmaster. We will do our duty down here.'

Othella pushed aside the temptation to ask what was happening on the station. He had enough trouble to deal with where he was and could do nothing to aid his battle-brothers. He cursed the traitors and their otherworldly powers. The Silver Templars had suspected perhaps some form of enemy ambush, maybe even the arrival of heretic warships or teleport attacks by concealed enemy forces. Such rational threats, Othella had been ready for. But mutating diseases that healed ruined systems in a matter of moments using living flesh as their mortar? How could any sane warrior prepare for such deviance?

He watched the displays around him like a hawk, fingers dancing across his controls as he felt the wounded Unsheathed respond doggedly to his commands. Othella felt a moment's pride as the next volley of enemy projectiles flashed well wide of the mark; most shipmasters would have had their craft torn out from under them by such a sudden and overwhelming threat, but he and Unsheathed were cut from finer cloth.

Still, as his strike cruiser swept out of maximum operational range and repair and resanctification crews spread out through its decks, Othella did not relax. He would be wary and keep his ship's weapon batteries ready for any threat.

'Primarch, watch over them,' breathed the captain, aware he could do nothing for his comrades on the platform but beseech Guilliman's blessing. 'They are on their own.'

The separate elements of the Silver Templars strike force had almost reached their rendezvous point in the platform's voidward enginarium when Keltos felt the viral surge sweep around them. Corridors darkened as their lumens flickered and began projecting a dirty brown light. Rust crawled like tainted fingers across deck plating, bulkheads and runic consoles. A terrible static blare filled the air as wall panels buckled and warped as though hammered from within. In places they burst away to reveal writhing nests of pulsating organic matter through which bundles of wire and fluid-filled tubes were threaded. Living eyes rolled and stared amongst the hellish tangles. Rot-toothed maws opened to moan like dying men.

Keltos had watched one such foul mass grow before his unbelieving eyes. As it had done so the sentry gun that hung dead and powerless from the ceiling of the corridor had twitched and then stirred back into life. Its runic lumen glowed a sickly green and tendrils of pulsating flesh could be seen worming their way through its structure. The weapon had let fly, and its sawing lines of fire had wounded Brother Pyloxis before Dimitrin had slain the turret with a grenade from the underslung launcher on Wrathful.

'Movement all around us,' came Sergeant Asklepos' voice over the vox. 'Station servitors reactivating and... Storms of Novaris, there's something wrong with them. Some corruption.'

'...engaging swarming hostiles moving up from the lower enginarium decks,' came Lieutenant Thessellan's report. 'Target recognition as Poxwalker plague mutants. Throne, I think they're enginarium crew.'

Reaching the end of the corridor beneath the smoking ruin of the sentry gun, Keltos and his warriors looked out from an observation gantry across the sprawling industrial tangle of the enginarium chamber. He saw his battle-brothers of the other spearheads, fighting their way along walkways and down service ramps, guns blazing as the machinery around them twisted out of true and swarms of plague mutants shambled towards them from all sides.

Then came Captain Othella's message.

'As I said, a trap,' said Sergeant Thessos morosely.

'We knew that the enemy might expect our arrival,' said Keltos, his tone stern despite the horrors he was witnessing. 'Nothing has changed. We have a mission to complete and oaths to fulfil.'

'Much has changed, Brother-Captain,' said Dimitrin. 'We did not expect—'

Keltos raised a hand for silence, and cut Dimitrin off by reciting one of the Chapter's tenets of bladesmanship.

'A skilled warrior knows that the foe's movements cannot always be perfectly predicted, and at such times must rather be countered with such speed that it appears as prescience.'

'Yes, brother-captain, hesitation is death,' replied Dimitrin with the ritual rote response, but he didn't sound convinced. Below them, the Silver Templars saw massed Plague Mutants surging in their direction.

'Mark your claim runes and offer thanks to your weapons, brothers,' said Keltos. 'We shall fight our way to the rendezvous and then strike for our objectives from there.'

'And should we need to withdraw, to retreat without the aid of Unsheathed?' asked Thessos.

Keltos felt a surge of anger and looked sharply at his old comrade.

'The Dagger is aimed and our blades are in motion, and retreat will come only when the ground is right beneath our feet,' he said. With that, Keltos raised Penance and Absolution and hurled himself into the traitors before him. He knew that the situation was degenerating rapidly, that the enemy's trap had been far more insidious than he could have predicted. But what else were the Adeptus Astartes for, he thought angrily, if not for defeating the machinations of heretics no matter what form they took?

Besides, his oath demanded fulfilment, and they would not achieve that aim by retreating. No, thought Captain Keltos, as his blade met the first heretical mutant's neck in a spray of gore. Victory lay in advance, attack, aggression no matter the odds. In retreat lay only dishonour and defeat, and he would not know those feelings again.

III

Poxwalkers stumbled towards Captain Keltos, their putrid features, some so wide that they had split skin and torn tendons in the creatures' jaws. He cut them down one after another. His formation had fought its way deep into the enginarium chamber, but their progress slowed by the moment. Soul-rending moans filled the air in a cacophony so loud that they drowned out even the thump and boom of bolt rifles firing, and the howl of the Hellblasters' plasma incinerators.

'These monsters look damned cheerful, considering how miserable they sound,' commented Dimitrin over the vox.

'Their eyes tell the truth,' said Keltos, gunning down a clawing horror then sweeping Penance through the throat of another and sending its betentacled head bouncing away. 'You see their misery in their hopeless gaze. These wretches are enslaved to the Plague God. In death, we offer them the gift of release.'

'Well then we are generous today indeed, because the gifts we give are without number,' replied Dimitrin. The veteran sergeant swung Severer and bisected a plague mutant. Rancid guts spewed from inside its ruptured body, which vanished beneath the trampling feet of its many, many brethren.

Keltos could see that Dimitrin was tight. They had fought their way down a series of service ramps towards the heart of the enginarium and were now working their way along a wide gantry-walkway that circumnavigated a vast generator coil. The Primaris Marines fired tight volleys into their enemy from point-blank range, every shot a kill, every clubbing blow of fist or gun-butt a lethal impact. So far they had lost no one, though several brothers had sustained contusions and minor injuries as Poxwalkers battered, grasped and bit at them with unholy vigour. Still, progress had slowed to a crawl, and the enemy just kept coming. It was as though the enginarium was a hive, and lurking in its shadowed depths were an infinite number of mindless worker drones, to be vomited forth until the Space Marines' guns ran dry and even their remarkable Primaris bodies collapsed from exhaustion. It was a battle of pure entropy.

Just the sort of conflict that the followers of Nurgle so enjoyed.

Keltos felt his frustration grow. For his vengeance to be so close, and yet so far out of reach was maddening. He drew a deep breath and fought to centre himself, to find his focus and ward his mind against rash thoughts. That way led only a repeat of a history that must never be allowed, he thought.

'I can see our brothers on the auspex but reaching them through this horde seems an increasingly faint hope,' said Thessos. He paused, braced and fired Draconic. Its searing blast hit the mutant horde at point-blank range and obliterated a knot of them. Bodies crumpled with limbs, heads, entire torsos reduced to ash. More creatures pushed forward, staggering over the ruined dead to grasp at the Silver Templars with fat tentacles and clawing hands.

'That is not our only problem, brothers,' came the voice of Techmarine Nissus, underpinned by its usual faint static burr. He was fighting near the rear of the small band of Silver Templars, flanked by Intercessors and Hellblasters whose guns hammered and howled. 'See how the very stuff of the defence platform mutates around us. The work of the Omnissiah is perverted here. It is corrupted by the debase magicks of Chaos and it turns against us.'

Keltos could hardly have missed this gruesome phenomenon. It was accelerating by the moment. Metal railings blistered as though they were flesh exposed to fierce heat. Buboes and fat cysts puckered metal plating, which flowed and bulged and became darkly fleshy in hue as it mutated. Crawling nests of sparking wires threaded through the runic consoles around them and chewed their way through the housings of the generator coil, for all the world like maggots gnawing tunnels through a corpse. Yet where they meshed in crackling profusion the flowing metal writhed angrily and grew jutting blades that stabbed at the Space Marines, or yawning maws that vomited warp flame across their armour.

Keltos hacked down another mutant, struck another in the face with the hilt of his blade and then in flicker-quick succession, rune-marked and gunned down three more. There came a cry from his right and he turned to see Brother Eusebius of Dimitrin's squad being hoisted off his feet. Thick cables of flesh-metal and trunking had spewed from a power coupling above and wound themselves around Eusebius' armour like the tendrils of a Novarian snarlfish. They were dragging him into the air, his armour crumpling and crawling with lightning as the tentacles tightened their grip.

'Brothers,' barked Keltos, raising Absolution and firing bolts into the mass of cables. His rounds punched deep and detonated, severing multiple tendrils. Yet wherever one broke, two more spewed from its sparking stump to whip around Eusebius with vicious cracks. The battle-brother's snarls sounded over the vox. His bolt rifle, pinned useless to his side, dropped from suddenly nerveless fingers and clattered to the deck. More bolts struck the cables from Dimitrin's Intercessors, furiously trying to save their brothers life.

It was no good. Though biomechanical matter and lubricant gore filled the air, the tentacles would not be denied their prize. An especially thick cable lashed around Eusebius' helm and, seeming almost spiteful, ripped his head around and snapped his neck like kindling.

'Storms of Novaris! Hellblasters, eradicate that abomination before it claims any more of us. Do not let it taste Eusebius' gene-seed, primarch knows what might result!'

Compelled by Keltos' order, the Hellblasters turned their guns from the dead around them and unleashed a furious torrent of plasma into the tentacled mass. Eusebius and the tentacles that had killed him were annihilated in tandem, the fury of their end so bright that Keltos had to look away. He saw brother Kessus snatch up Eusebius' fallen bolt rifle and mag-lock it to his armoured thigh; such was the way of the Silver Templars, who recovered the bond-broken weapons of the fallen with as much diligence as their Apothecaries harvested the gene-seed of the slain. None that could be saved were ever left behind.

The bolt rifle might be safe but the grotesque assault had cost him a battle-brother, Keltos thought sourly. Worse, it had given the diseased mutants a chance to press close on all sides while the Silver Templars' guns were pointed elsewhere. Now the fight was more desperate than ever. Even as he swung his blade and fired his pistol, Captain Keltos switched his vox to the strike force command channel. Runes lit green in his peripheral vision, signalling that he had an encrypted link to Dimitrin and Thessos, to Techmarine Nissus and Lieutenant Thessellan, and to Librarian Akillus, Sergeant Kouminis and Sergeant Asklepos.

'It is time to consider the Swordsman, brothers,' he voxed.

'Agreed, brother-captain, our stance must alter,' replied Lieutenant Thessellan.

The Swordsman was a strategic hypothetical that the Silver Templars used in a similar fashion to the Ultramarines' theoretical-practical tactical discourse. All brothers of Novaris were trained from novitiate rank to envision the totality of their force as a single swordsman, and the enemy army as a single gestalt foe. The Space Marines would use this mental exercise to assess the strategic situation with lightning speed and to formulate a new tactical approach before their foes could react.

'We had expected to be within the enemy's guard at the start of this fight,' said Dimitrin. 'We knew that he might have some strategy to entrap us but believed that our thrust would be so swift as to pierce his throat before he could react.'

'Instead our foe has parried our initial attack and now entangles us and beats us down,' continued Sergeant Kouminis. 'We cannot rally or regather our strength because we are over-extended.'

'Worse, we find that our foe has corrupted the very arena in which we fight,' said Librarian Akillus, his voice low but crackling with barely suppressed power. 'The killing floor itself turns against us and aids our enemy's cause. Our footing is poor. Danger closes in from all sides.'

'Our route of retreat is currently blocked, for the foe has driven off our warship and now wields weapons whose might ensures it cannot risk another approach,' said Thessos.

Keltos ripped his blade out of a Poxwalkers face, shook off another that was clinging to his vambrace and dragging at him, and came to a decision.

'Brothers, you have the right of it. Lieutenant Thessellan, swift blow, form tertius, plan Ajax. I will lead a blinding sweep form alpha. Once the enemy reels and the way is open, all forces coup de grace and then retreat before the fires of the Emperors mercy fill the arena. You know your new rune-marks. Follow them in and execute. Focus and fury!'

Keltos had just condemned X-Delphi-34 to death. He had deemed the primary asset beyond salvation and repurposed his warriors to new targets. Thessellan would now gather half the strike force and lead an attack directed toward the platform's primary gravimetric engines. If allowed to land, the blow would condemn the platform to a slow plunge into the planet's gravity well. Meanwhile, Keltos himself would lead another force to cripple the ballistic cogitator spirits in the data-catacombs near the platform's heart. By reaching the primary offensive nexus, he would in theory gain the ability to eliminate the enemy's long guns and thus re-open the way for Captain Othella's craft to extract the strike force alive. Only once both targets had been eliminated could the remaining Silver Templars drive a killing blow into Mytoxos' rotted heart then retreat before X-Delphi-34 completed its death-dive.

'We will have victory and vengeance yet,' Keltos promised himself. Securing this platform was never their primary goal, and something so corrupt could never have been salvaged, only slain swiftly. But Mytoxos... he would not escape Keltos' blade. Penance would end that bloated monster and hurl him back into the warp for a thousand years. So Captain Keltos swore to himself again as he began to hack and bludgeon a path towards the new mission coordinates flashing upon his auto-senses.

Lieutenant Thessellan and his warriors were almost half a mile away from Captain Keltos. Several levels higher in the enginarium, his and Sergeant Asklepos' squads had managed to link up but had then been penned in the higher reaches by unending hordes of Poxwalkers. Even now the leering never-dead were staggering up a trio of service ramps and besieging Thessellan's forces where they had dug in on a maintenance dais above the chamber's tertiary generators.

Thessellan and Asklepos had between them a force of twenty Intercessors and nine Aggressors, and were accompanied by the strike forces Apothecary, Zakaris. They rained fire down the ramps into the advancing plague mutants and built ramparts of their corpses. Yet still the bloated horrors came on.

'I wish I could block out their damned moaning,' voxed Sergeant Asklepos. 'I would take even a moment's respite.'

'No need to block them out brother, we simply blast our way out of here and make for our target,' said Thessellan. 'You heard the brother-captain. Rendezvous is non-viable. We can get moving.'

Thessellan typically fought clad in a heavy suit of gravis armour, for he was a blunt and direct duellist who favoured punishing bodyblows in decisive, close-quarters engagements. One of his fists was encased in a massive boltstorm gauntlet named Judgement and his other gripped a gilt-hilted power sword he had named simply Death. He had thus far been holding back amidst the lines of his brothers, firing short bursts from his boltstorm gauntlet while he held the Silver Templars' designated rally point.

Now, that requirement had been lifted and he could unleash the might the primarch and Belisarius Cawl had given him.

'On me, my brothers! On me!' roared Thessellan, vox amplifying his voice so that it carried over the groans of the foe. Following new runic waypoints that flashed up on his auto-senses, the lieutenant stormed towards the rightmost ramp that spanned a gap over churning machineries to a heavy bulkhead door. Nurgle's luckless victims were pressing through the doorway en masse, but Thessellan was determined to stem the tide.

In quick succession he rune-marked and annihilated a string of foes. Judgement swung through the air to land thunderous blows that lifted mutants off their feet and flung them from the ramp into the void below. Their corpses smashed down amidst the sacred machineries and were mangled by churning gears. Death lashed out again and again, taking heads, puncturing skulls and lopping off tentacular limbs. Thessellan used his sheer armoured bulk as a weapon, bulling forward into his enemies, many of whom were little more than emaciated half-corpses clad in the ragged remains of engine-serfs' robes. Their bones snapped like rotwood as he slammed into them. His impact drove them off their feet and his stamping footfalls crushed them to a pulp. Many kept moaning, kept writhing, he noticed with disgust, but each foe that Thessellan engaged was rapidly neutralised as a threat.

The lieutenant knew that many of his brothers looked upon his fighting style with a degree of distaste. He was a blunt instrument of carnage in a Chapter that bred sleek and graceful bladesmen.

Thessellan didn't care. He fought in the way that worked best for him, with the weapons that suited him the most, and by doing so he wrought of himself an engine of destruction to punish the Emperor's foes.

It was for this reason that Lieutenant Thessellan was so popular amongst the Chapter's Aggressor Squads, which tended to attract like-minded and somewhat atypical battle-brothers. Now, Asklepos and a phalanx of those very warriors fell in alongside Thessellan and forged a path along the service ramp. If the foe were a river, thought Thessellan, then he and his Aggressor brothers were the prow of some unstoppable warship, carving through the flowing tide of foes and casting them aside in ruin. Boltstorm gauntlets roared. Flamestorm gauntlets sent rushing jets of flame into the foe and set them ablaze in great swathes. Punishing missile salvoes leapt from the Aggressors' shoulder racks, and under their combined assault the Poxwalkers dissolved into a blizzard of flesh and gore that misted the Silver Templars' armour.

Led by Apothecary Zakaris, the Intercessors followed. They stuck close behind their assault brethren and fought a rearguard action against the mutants that flowed in behind them. Bolt rifles barked. Underslung grenade launchers gave explosive thumps as they spat fragmentation projectiles into the enemy's midst and blew them apart. Wherever the machinery or metal skin of the defence platform attempted to flow and mutate around them, the Space Marines directed rapid and devastating bursts of fire into it for they had been forewarned by the fate of luckless Brother Eusebius. Tongues of flame blistered eye-studded fleshmetal tentacles and sent them rearing back with static-laced squeals of pain. Krak grenades span through the air to lodge amidst nests of pupating guns, blowing them apart before they could split the wire-threaded meniscus that nurtured them.

'Keep pushing, brothers. Through that bulkhead, along the service corridor, through shuttle bay Gehenna-septimus and then into the station's hydroponic shrines,' ordered Thessellan, punching a mutant's grinning face off. 'The nearest orbital engines are beyond that sector. Current distance to target two-point-six-miles. Focus and fury, push on, brothers!'

He was aware they knew all this, had the same information flowing through their auto-senses as he did. But Lieutenant Thessellan believed that repetition of a mission's goals, and the strategic situation his warriors faced, aided focus.

Sergeant Asklepos cursed as Aggressor brother Kysoris went down, buried beneath the sheer mass of foes. Somewhere amongst the horde a massive engine-wrench rose and fell, rose and fell. Thessellan raised Judgement and swept bolt rounds through the massed mutants around brother Kysoris. They detonated one by one, but not before the bloodied wrench had risen and crashed down one more time. He caught a glimpse of Kysoris' sprawled corpse before the Poxwalkers flowed over it, and cursed.

'Vengeance!' bellowed Thessellan, driving forwards into the foe with even greater brutality. The Aggressors roared their anger and stormed in alongside him. The next wave of Poxwalkers vanished in sprays of gore and suddenly the door yawned open before Thessellan. A quick glance up the corridor beyond revealed that the enemy numbers thinned considerably.

'Onwards,' he ordered. 'We have time to make up.'

The Silver Templars pushed through the doors and, while several Aggressors kept the Poxwalkers penned in on the access ramp they had just crossed, Intercessor Sergeant Dimonis applied himself to a runic control panel. A swift and dirty blend of prayers, pidgin binharic and brute force saw the panel emit a flurry of sparks before the bulkhead doors ground shut and locked with a decisive boom.

'That one will be a Techmarine yet,' commented Sergeant Asklepos over a private channel to Thessellan.

'Only if we make it off this corrupted heap of wreckage alive, brother-sergeant,' the lieutenant replied.

'True enough. Best be about it then hadn't we, brother-lieutenant?' said Asklepos, grimly amused.

There was little enough to laugh about as Thessellan led his men down the mile-long service corridor. The bilious fog was thicker here, and fat flies buzzed through the air thick as dust-storms. Worse, the machine contagion was spreading fast through the structure around them, becoming more pronounced by the minute. Even as they gunned down the knots of Poxwalkers that staggered into their path, the Space Marines saw wall panels mutate into necrotising flesh, and fat buboes rise on sheet metal before bursting to disgorge swarms of skittering insects. Cables and wires twined together into long, worm-like masses that writhed and lashed. Lumens flickered through the colours of blood, pus and gangrene, filling the warping corridor with such hellish hues that it looked to Thessellan more like they were advancing down the gullet of some diseased monster than making their way along a service corridor in an Imperial naval installation.

The Silver Templars were alive for sudden threats bursting from the walls, floor and ceiling; occasional rune-marks appeared in Thessellan's auto-senses, followed swiftly by a burst of fire from one brother or another that would annihilate a nest of barbed tentacles or glowing gun-maw before it could attack.

'What have the enemy done to this place?' he voxed to Asklepos, Dimonis and Zakaris as they neared the corridor's end.

'They have sickened it, as the servants of Nurgle sicken all that they touch,' replied Apothecary Zakaris, his soft voice full of loathing and controlled anger. 'It is only good for the Emperor's mercy now.'

Passing through another huge doorway, the Silver Templars crossed shuttle bay Gehenna-septimus as swiftly as they could. Many of the lumen in this cavernous space had died, leaving it wreathed in noisome shadow and thick plague-fog. The shuttle craft hung above Thessellan and his men in chained docking cradles, half-visible dark shapes that swayed and creaked in an invisible breeze.

'Do you feel that?' asked Sergeant Dimonis as they crossed the cavernous bay, their footfalls clanging and echoing into the gloom.

'There is something malevolent in the air, is there not?' agreed Sergeant Asklepos, his tone wary. That concerned Thessellan more than anything else. Asklepos, occasionally known to his brothers as the Bull of Novaris, relished even the greatest dangers and never expressed concern. Yet Thessellan knew what his brothers spoke of. He felt it too, a strange sense of watchfulness about him as though at any moment he might turn and find some ghastly thing reaching out with grasping talons.

'Malevolence,' he said. 'There is a sense of something directing its hatred towards us, something intangible yet no less terrible for all that. Be on your guard, brothers.'

'Is it the machine sickness?' asked Zakaris. 'Surely the enemy's taint must pain the defence platform's machine-spirits. Perhaps it is their agony and hatred that we feel, directed towards all those who battle here?'

'No sense guessing, just keep the formation tight, press on, and be ready for anything,' said Thessellan firmly. His auto-senses kept trying to produce targeting solutions for flickers of movement in his peripheral vision, yet every time he turned his head to aid their focus they chimed a false reading and showed nothing there.

At last, the Space Marines made it across the hollow expanse of the shuttle bay and halted before an arched airlock. A huge circular doorway led into it, sealed with a cog-toothed skull design and flanked by graven cherubim who stared at the Silver Templars with sightless lens-eyes.

'The lenses are red, look,' said Sergeant Dimonis. 'The platform's hydroponic shrines lie beyond, the source of all the oxygen on the station. Presumably there must be augurs set up to detect airborne contaminants and shut them out.'

'Open it,' ordered Thessellan. 'Aggressors, cover the airlock. Intercessors, keep watch behind us.' Sergeant Dimonis went to work again, prying up the runic panel next to the airlock door and muttering prayers through his vox-grille. Thessellan stared hard into the drifting fog that filled the shuttle bay. It was thickening, he was sure of it. A few sputtering lumens still cast their light through the murk, the feeble illumination doing little more than to seed the chamber with shifting shadows. The shuttles swung and creaked, swung and creaked incessantly. The sense of malevolence grew by the second, pressing in on them like a muffling shroud. He felt the hatred of something diffuse and awful directed against him, something that surely haunted these churning shadows and meant him and his brothers harm.

Somewhere far off in the chamber something fell with a clang of metal on metal. Echoes bounced away across the walls.

Thessellan felt his hearts thump a little faster at the sound.

'Steady, brothers,' he said aloud through his helm's vox emitter. 'The Emperor's Space Marines know no fear.' That might be true, he thought, but they knew danger well enough when it threatened.

'Something is coming,' hissed Apothecary Zakaris.

Behind Thessellan, the airlock panel gave up its fight and chimed a choral tone whose notes fell flat amidst the muffling brown smog.

'Primarch be praised, let us—'

Thessellan's words were cut off as the airlock hatch opened along the seam-line of the skull to emit sickly green light and a buzzing storm of flies. As he spun, Thessellan had a fleeting impression of a revolting mass of green-brown flesh, staring yellow eyes, jutting horns, spilling innards and rusted, slime-dripping blades. A sudden drone of voices filled the air, warped and inhuman, clotted with matter and counting mindlessly.

Rotting hands grabbed Sergeant Dimonis and he was dragged forward with a yell. Filthy blades flashed and the sergeant's helmed head was hacked messily from his shoulders.

'Daemons!' bellowed Sergeant Asklepos even as he and his Aggressor brothers opened fire. They blitzed the airlock chamber with bolt and flame. Unnatural bodies danced, burst and burned in the sudden storm of firepower.

From amidst the roiling fume of the shuttle bay a muffled drone arose. The sound was like sickly thunder, rolling around the cavernous space, its echoes warped by the dense plague-smog.

'Foes behind!' voxed Apothecary Zakaris. Thessellan had a fleeting impression of huge shapes materialising from on high, fly-like abominations ridden by leering daemons. The fat-bodied horrors plunged through a hail of bolt rifle fire, their gangling legs trailing behind them, their stingers jutting menacingly.

The lieutenant raised Judgement and added more shots to the fusillade being levelled by the Intercessors. Explosive rounds punched into rune-marked targets and detonated wetly. Viscid slime slopped out from the daemons' bodies by the bucketful and still they came on. Several discorporated before they reached the Space Marine lines. Several more did not, and roars of pain and revulsion echoed out as Silver Templars were smashed from their feet.

Thessellan saw brother Kazmis run through by a three-foot-long bone stinger that burst right through his armours power pack in a spray of diseased slime. The Plague Bearer riders hurled a volley of bloated heads that burst across Brother Belesus' armour in stinking sprays and caused his armour to corrode in moments. Scrabbling limbs enfolded Brother Icharus in a grotesque embrace and sucking mouthparts stretched as they slithered over his faceplate to engulf his head whole. Bellowing inside his collapsing helm, Icharus triggered the frag grenades lashed to his belt and annihilated both himself and his assailant.

'We can't hold here, push forward,' commanded Lieutenant Thessellan. Leading by example, he lowered one shoulder, accelerated into a pounding run, and drove into the burning confines of the airlock.

Warning lumens strobed madly around him, turning everything into a stuttering mass of light and shadow in which grotesque monsters pressed in upon him. Flames and smoke boiled around his armour and his auto-senses chimed multiple thermal warnings.

'Novaris!' roared Thessellan as his armoured bulk flattened daemonic assailants and Death ripped through cadaverous bodies. 'Novaris!' He lashed out with Judgement and a plaguebearer exploded like a sack of putrid offal. Thesellan triggered his boltstorm gauntlet's guns and the lightstorm inside the airlock became more intense as shells rocketed away and exploded inside the daemons of Nurgle.

Rusted blades scraped and gouged at his armour, but none could break through. Thessellan headbutted a one-horned foe and stove in its skull. He punched another into the wall hard enough to dent the metal. Bolt shells detonated all around him as the Aggressors followed his lead and for a handful of seconds it was as though Lieutenant Thessellan strode through a storm of fire and whizzing metal.

Then he was through the far doorway and into the hydroponic shrines with his brothers hard on his heels. Thessellan's posthuman senses allowed him to assess his new surroundings even as the daemons continued to press upon him, filling the air with the drone of counting. He supposed that hydroponics must once have been a comparatively peaceful locale within the industrial immensity of the defence platform; mesh walkways ran between high-ceilinged armourglass domes in which huge lumens and auto-saturators had sustained vast groves of oxygen-generating greenery. Thick nests of hydro-pipes covered the walls and ceilings between lumens and gothic architectural flourishes.

Where those pipes must once have carried a steady flow of reclaimed water, however, they were now thick with clotted green-and-yellow filth that had burst through in many places to drizzle down the rusting walls. Eyes rolled and stared from mutated climatological control panels. The lights had taken on an awful yellow glare, and the plants that had once supplied the platforms air had exploded into a fecund riot of diseased growth. They transformed the hydroponic shrines into a sort of twisted indoor jungle.

It was from amidst these pulsating groves that the streams of daemons were staggering, and it was from amidst their twisted fronds that a sudden hail of bolt fire hammered Thessellan and his brothers.

Apothecary Zakaris snarled in pain as a shell-burst gouged a rent in his chestplate. Aggressor Brother Quinsus toppled backwards, his helmed head blown apart by a lucky shot to the eye-piece.

Hulking shapes moved in the hellish jungle. Thessellan saw the dirty green of despoiled power armour, riddled with holes through which corpse-white worms writhed. A sudden shrilling screech joined the ghastly cacophony filling the space, threatening to overload his auto-senses altogether.

'Intercessors, hold the airlock. Seal it by any means you can then join our line,' ordered Thessellan, desperately seeking any way for his warriors to escape the trap that had engulfed them. 'Aggressors, hold position and drive the enemy back. Parry, brothers, parry and seek where best to place our blade. Do not let them through our guard. The Dagger must strike true!'

But would it, he wondered? How could it, when they faced abominations like this? For the barest of moments Thessellan understood how lesser humans gave in to despair, even fear. The sensations sickened him, and he rejected them fiercely.

The Aggressors planted their feet and unleashed a tornado of firepower, even as corpulent daemons hacked at them and Plague Marines hammered them with return fire. From somewhere amidst the festering undergrowth came a voice, a terrible compound squeal that cut through Thessellan's straining nerves like a rusty saw.

'Welcome, corpse-worshippers. Are you ready to give your flesh to Grandfather Nurgle? Do not fight us... Let us chew... Let us nestle in your flesh! Let us in! Let us innnnn...'

'By the Emperor we will destroy you and all your filthy get,' bellowed Thessellan, but as his boltstorm gauntlet clicked dry and another wave of daemons shambled forward to engulf his beleaguered force, he knew that his defiance rang hollow. With focused detachment his mind ran through scenario after scenario, any combination of bludgeoning blows, feints or sudden strikes that might see him break out of the enemy's trap.

He could see none. Their strike had faltered well short of the mark.

They were going to. be overrun.

IV

Olboch the Glutted felt righteous exhilaration burn through his body like a fever. His master had given him a quest, a holy duty to fulfil, and Olboch would see it done. He could think of nothing else.

Olboch retained pallid flashes of memory from the time of Horus' great betrayal, swirling amidst a stew of thoughts and echoes that spattered the millennia since. He supposed that made him ancient, in mortal terms. Dimly, the champion was aware that Nurgle's blessings had long ago eaten away his mind until the slurry of grey matter sloshing in his skull lost its ability to retain any grasp on temporal flow.

But Olboch didn't care. He knew three things, a tri-lobe of certainties that held his necrotising sanity together and filled his straining frame with purpose.

First, he was utterly and zealously devoted to Grandfather Nurgle and would give every iota of body and soul for his patron deity.

Second, he was every bit as much a servant to Mytoxos' whims, for he worshipped the daemon prince as a direct manifestation of the Grandfather's divine might.

Third, he fought for the side of righteousness and ever-burgeoning life against a stagnant regime of corpse-worshipping unbelievers whose ignorance and fear had damned the galaxy.

Now, as he had so many times before, Olboch marched out to strike a blow against those ignorant heretics. On Mytoxos' orders he would unleash his crushing might against the diluted scions of deluded primarchs. His every mace-swing, every pistol-shot and thunderous peal of his tocsin would bring Nurgle's galactic dominance a little closer, and so he would strike down the corpse-worshippers with a joyous song in his heart.

'Entropy, that's the thing!' Olboch roared to the Death Guard warriors who advanced alongside him. 'Like maggots we chew at the flesh of reality until at last it all gives way!'

They raised a glottal cheer in return, the power-armoured Sevenfold Sons and the Terminator brethren of the Poxwrought raising their curdled voices so that they echoed through the wide chambers of the data-catacombs. Behind the footsoldiers of the Death Guard came daemon engines, a trio of Myphitic Blight-haulers rumbling forward on twisted treads. Their mouthparts worked at matted clots of slobber. Their cyclopic eyes rolled madly. Blight Drones thrummed above them on corroded turbines, trailing brown-black smoke as they wobbled through the air. At the heart of the warband came Olboch's favoured toy, his most adored and destructive pet.

Once it had been a renegade Vindicator siege tank, a blocky armoured fighting vehicle from whose hull jutted the massive barrel of a short-ranged but devastating demolisher cannon. Now it was something more, for a daemonic essence had been bound within it and had twisted its hull to better suit its liking. The tank's hatches were clotted shut with filth and rotting tendons. Baleful runes shone through the bulging masses of tumorous flesh that grew from its flanks. A cataracted eye bulged to one side of the tank's cavernous gun barrel, which was itself now fringed with tendril-fangs like a lamprey's maw. The once-tank was named Rupture and it was Olboch's most faithful pet. He would see it feed well this day, of that he was sure.

Olboch and his warriors were nearing the fringes of X-Delphi-34's primary offensive nexus. They strode along wide thoroughfares strewn with the corpses of the tech-priests and adepts who had once ministered to the platforms weapon systems and machine-spirits. Vast columns divided the thoroughfares, titanic stacks of cogitator banks and ballistic augury systems and thermoregulators and engine shrines, each the width of a hab-block and stretching from near the defence platform's lowest reaches all the way to its highest towers.

Quirmloch's obliterator-virus hybrid was spreading beautifully here, Olboch observed. Many of the cogitator stacks pulsed with mutant flesh and twisted growths. Giggling nurglings squirmed through machine-guts just as they would the intestines of living victims. They squirted their noisome fluids and sank needle fangs into cables and flesh-tubes alike.

'The Plague Surgeon has done good work, has he not?' asked Olboch to his warriors. They raised a grudging rumble of acknowledgement. 'And the worm-man has caught many of the foe in his slithering grip, hasn't he?' shouted Olboch. This time the response was even less enthusiastic. An awful smile stretched itself cross Olboch's visage beneath his grilled helm-plate. His warriors hated to be outdone.

Good.

'Are we going to let their efforts outshine our own, my filthy fellows?' he roared, and his tocsin rang out a dolorous peal as though struck a mighty blow.

'No!' they shouted, suddenly animated.

'Again!' cried Olboch, and his bell tolled once more.

'No!' they howled.

'THRICE!' cried Olboch, and again his tocsin boomed out its discordant note.

'NO!' yelled his followers.

'By Nurgle's festering cauldron, no we are not!' shouted Olboch. 'Now follow me, you blighted and bubonic, for the enemy will try to cross the databridge any moment. It's there that we shall bring them to their knees, rot their souls!'

Another roar of approval from warriors and daemon engines alike, and Olboch's rambunctious warband stormed between the last of the stacks towards the databridge beyond. Soon, Olboch thought, the enemy's leader would be dragged before Lord Mytoxos in chains. Then could the wrong be righted, the awful pact fulfilled and his lord restored as an agent of righteous bounty. Simple joy raced through Olboch at that thought, and his pace quickened.

Captain Keltos fought his way up a twisted corridor packed with the leering never-dead. Hands and tentacles grasped and slithered across his filthy armour. Again and again they tried to grasp him, to bury him in bodies and bind him in grabbing hands. It was as though they sought not to slay him, but to drag him away. And he had a horrible notion that he understood why. Ammo conservation warning runes flashed in Keltos' peripheral vision while his armour's machine-spirit warned of increasing air toxicity and multiple integrity-breaches where the foe had torn its seals.

'Is there no end to these filthy things?' snarled Dimitrin over the vox. Keltos' auto-senses showed the sergeant a few paces behind him, forcing his way up the narrow corridor as doors like fanged maws opened around him and vomited more plague mutants into his path. He glanced back to see Dimitrin for himself and felt a momentary echo of memory stir at the gesture.

'We are fighting our way through the tertiary crew-habs,' observed Thessos archly. 'This platform operated with a running crew of over eight hundred thousand souls. So honestly, brother, no, there probably isn't.'

'Wonderful,' replied Dimitrin, arid Keltos heard the swish and crack of Severer scything through another knot of enemies. They had lost almost a quarter of their force since fighting their way out of the enginarium, and still the foe kept coming. Squads Dimitrin, Thessos, Kouminis and Ignatius were all still with him, but all had lost warriors to the grasping, crushing clawing masses.

Keltos' muscles burned with the exertion of constant battle, his spirit with frustration and fury at the enemy's crude entropic tactics. It was like facing a bloated fool in a duel only to have your every advantage of cunning, skill and poise negated by his sheer crushing, idiot bulk.

His spirit remained undimmed, however. Keen as Penance's edge, his desire for vengeance burned within him.

'Brothers, we are one deck below the databridge,' he voxed to the warriors of his force, who were strung out through the termite-mound of corridors and cabin-spaces to his rear. 'We are almost free of this cloying maze and our mark lies dead ahead. We shall plunge home like the tip of the blade and strike the killing blow! Focus and fury!'

'Focus and fury!' they roared back at him.

Keltos struck off a mutant's head. He shouldered its lumpen corpse aside and unloaded Absolution into the face of a hulking thing with tentacles for arms and a maw in its gut. The mutant flew backwards in a spray of blood and Keltos ejected his spent clip, slamming another into its place.

Two left, he thought. Almost dry, and then it would be all down to bladework. How the enemy had bled their strength. How they had slowed what should have been swift and deadly strikes. Yet he wouldn't relent now. He couldn't, for his warriors were well within the enemy's guard and to stay their blow now would only see them crushed and bludgeoned into ruin.

Keltos fought his way up a switchback metal stair beneath flickering lumens. He hacked and stabbed, cursing as two more Poxwalkers entangled his limbs in their own and cost him precious seconds as they hauled and dragged at him. Keltos' bionic leg sparked where a spar of bone had pierced his armour and his augmetic both, but it still operated within the tolerances he needed, and so he pressed forward.

A final swipe of his blade through a rune-marked victim's neck and Keltos gained the head of the stairs. Sergeant Dimitrin and his warriors came up behind, guns booming in the confined space of the stairwell. Mutants groaned and gave mirthless cackles of insane laughter. Filth dripped from the bulging walls as they convulsed with unnatural growth.

'Forward!' cried Keltos, slamming his gun-butt into a runic door panel and eliciting a shower of sparks. The machine-spirit gave way with an angry hiss of static, and the door slid sideways into its frame. Captain Keltos lunged through the portal and out onto the eastern edge of the databridge.

He had emerged from a solid cliff of metal studded with doors, stairways and gantry-platforms. Around and above him, his warriors were bursting from within the crew-hab, butchered plague mutants falling around them.

Ahead, the databridge stretched between the hab's flank and the primary offensive nexus; Keltos' auto-senses informed him that the bridge was three hundred feet wide and a quarter-mile in length, thick as two station-decks pressed together and tangled with trunking and node-shrines. Below yawned a vast chasm spanned by smaller bridges and arched conduits, its depths lost to the ever-present miasma of Mytoxos. The space spiralled up and away above, vague suggestions of cyber-cherubim still flitting through the murk with their ocular lumens sparking and the flesh rotting from their metallic skeletons.

It was a darkly magnificent vista of mechanical architecture and seething corruption that would have temporarily stolen the wits of even the most highly trained mortal warrior. Captain Keltos' warrior focus was more than the merely human, however. His attention focused upon a single element of the sight that confronted him: an enemy warband had moved out from the arched entrance of the central offensive nexus and drawn themselves up at the far end of the databridge.

'Death Guard,' he growled, feeling hatred burn through him. Keltos checked his auto-senses, cycled rapidly through auspex read-outs and dispositional updates. Even as they fought, his brothers elsewhere on the station sent him by-the-minute inloads of strategic data that allowed the captain to keep track of precisely where his blade-strokes had driven home and where they had been parried. It was part of the Silver Templars' way of war, and though some Chapters would have called such a constant flow of overarching strategic information a distraction or a burden, Captain Keltos and his peers underwent additional hypnoindoctrinational training regimes to manage the bombardment of data.

Keltos envisioned the Swordsman for a moment, even as another part of his mind took stock of the enemy forces arrayed before him, and yet another coordinated his limbs to cut down a plague mutant that had stumbled after him through the doorway. A last part of his attention was spared for a signifier rune that flickered amber in his peripheral vision. It was a stylised dagger, and he willed it to turn green with all his might.

Thessellan's force was a shield-blow to the enemy's face, preceding a hamstringing strike in third-form Ajax. The enemy had entangled Thessellan's shield, however. Now he was wrestling it from the Swordsman's grip. It would be destroyed if the Silver Templars' true blow did not land soon. Keltos' own force was a blade to the gut, the disembowelling blow that would leave the foe reeling, weakened and ready for the killing strike. Yet here too the Swordsman's arm had been entangled. His strike had been slowed as though he fought underwater against some many-tentacled thing. Even now that grip wound tighter as the Swordsman drowned.

'That will not be the way of it,' Keltos snarled to himself. 'By the Emperor and the primarch, we will not be stifled, nor smothered, nor choked.' He switched to a force-wide vox-channel and issued his orders.

'Force Thessellan, stand unbowed! Command remains, plan Ajax! Hold for Dagger. Force Keltos, muster and drive ahead. You know your role in this, my brothers. Let duty shield you and hate make you fleet. For the primarch and the Emperor, we advance!'

Keltos vaulted a rusted railing and dropped ten feet to land on the end of the databridge. His boots clanged down, and he broke into a run as he heard more Silver Templars thump down behind him.

'There's little enough cover, captain,' observed Sergeant Dimitrin. 'They'll punish us on the way in. Are you sure you are rational in this?'

'The strike must be driven home, brother-sergeant, you know that,' replied Keltos.

'Let us just hope we live to see it land,' replied Dimitrin.

Keltos ran toward the enemy and his battle-brothers followed. They raised a mighty war cry as they raced out along the databridge, a valiant charge of silver-armoured warriors across a wide-open space into their enemy's guns.

'For the Emperor!'

Olboch chortled with glee.

'Here they come, my beloved plagueriddled!' he boomed. 'Extend them our warmest welcome. Share the Plaguefather's bounties. Come on now, be not miserly, let your generosity flow.'

The Plague Marines of the Sevenfold Sons levelled boltguns and rusting plague spewers. The Blightlord Terminators of the Poxwrought gave slug-slick laughs as they squeezed their triggers and unleashed bolt rounds blazing down the length of the bridge. Behind them the Myphitic Blight-haulers added to the fusillade, rockets leaping forth from their pods on tongues of fire.

Some of the shots went wide.

Some ricocheted from datashrines or thumped into feet-thick cables and detonated uselessly.

Many more hit home and Olboch laughed again as he saw Space Marines punched from their feet. A swarm of rockets streaked down amidst a knot of warriors toting plasma weaponry and blew three of them apart.

'Oh yes, indeed!' bellowed Olboch, tolling his monstrous tocsin. Shockwaves rolled from it, pulsing visibly through the roiling smog and battering the charging loyalists like a sonic gale. Their armour buckled and where it did, rot and rust blossomed with impossible swiftness. Another loyalist crumpled, the corruption taking him entirely.

They were still coming, Olboch thought with growing glee. The Death Guard's first punishing salvo had slain maybe a quarter of the advancing loyalists and yet they were still coming. To his surprise, some of those he thought killed came back to their feet, shrugging off wounds that should surely have brought them low.

'Oh, oh yes indeed!' Olboch laughed with delight. 'These are enemies worth the killing! Thank you, great Grandfather, for this blessing of battle! More, my suppurating sons, give them more!'

The loyalists fired as they came. Plasma rounds screamed into the ranks of the Sevenfold Sons and Olboch heard gleeful war cries turn to gurgles of pain as armour melted and foul flesh was blasted to ash. Bolts streaked along the bridge and detonated against the armour of the Poxwrought, bringing one Terminator low.

As though that would be enough, thought Olboch scornfully.

His warriors unleashed another salvo as the loyalists reached the midpoint of the bridge, and now the Rupture fired its massive demolisher cannon. The shell ploughed through the murk and fell right into the midst of the Space Marines' charge. The impact was enough to shiver the databridge. The dirty-green fireball consumed the loyalists' centre and threw more warriors from their feet as the shockwave rolled over them. One corpse-worshipper was flung clean off the bridge, tumbling away into the chasm with a vanishing wail.

For a moment Olboch felt panic twist his guts as he realised the enemy captain had vanished amidst that blast.

'Slopgutted fool!' he roared at Rupture, the tank's eye rolling towards him and its servos whining like a whipped cur. Yet even as he drew a rattling breath to shout more abuse, Olboch saw figures rising from amidst the blast-smoke.

'My goodness,' he said with growing delight. 'That is absolutely spectacular.' Olboch had heard tales of the resilience and tenacity of Primaris Space Marines, but he hadn't had occasion to fight them himself until this day. He was thankful to Nurgle for saving him this marvellous treat.

'Lord, they are still comi—'

The Plague Marine's voice cut out mid shout as a plasma round erased his head and his body toppled sideways.

Maybe half the loyalists were still on their feet, still charging headlong, closer by the moment. Olboch hefted Feast and Famine and felt his rot-blackened heart thump with excitement.

'Now we come to it, bilgebloods! Now we shall have some fun, my clot-hearted killers! Forward to meet them! Charge, and leave their lord to me!'

Olboch's tocsin tolled again and he broke into a lumbering charge. Secondary bells strung across his armour whipped and clanged as he ran, each heavy pace causing them to jangle discordantly. The Foetid Bloat-drones thrummed overhead, arcing high to fall upon the Space Marines with their cannons chattering. Even Rupture accelerated with a snort of dirty smoke, hungry to grind loyalists beneath its rusted tracks.

Olboch had Terminators, and daemon engines, and greater numbers than his enemies. This would not be a fight, he thought, it would be a slaughter. He would relish every minute of it.

'Come on,' whispered Keltos as he dragged himself upright and resumed his charge. His augmetics sparked and smoked with damage. His ears were ringing. Still the dagger rune glowed stubbornly amber in the corner of his eye.

Bolt rounds sparked from Keltos' armour. A blight shell whipped past his head and detonated on the shoulder guard of one of Dimitrin's men, spinning the Space Marine from his feet. Their casualties mounted with horrific speed, and Keltos felt a moment of doubt.

Would their blow not land? Had their forces been too badly eroded? Was the foe's guard too strong?

'We can't take another shot from that throne-damned tank,' spat Sergeant Dimitrin.

'Thessos, can you deal with it?' demanded Keltos, firing Deliverance as he ran and taking a Plague Marine's arm off at the elbow.

'No, brother-captain, not with any certainty of success,' replied Thessos grimly. 'That's a Vindicator under all that slop and slime, and I've only four brothers left standing. We are better holding off the drones.'

'Understood, strike well,' replied Keltos, vaulting a nest of cables several feet high and hitting the ground running. Plasma flashed from behind him and one of the enemy's drones shuddered then spiralled away trailing filthy smoke. It vanished into the chasm, even as one its fellows listed and fell from the air with its turbined melted to slag.

It was a small victory, thought Keltos as he counted the approaching foe, who had now broken into a ponderous charge. He saw the bell-festooned monster thumping towards him and recognised a challenge when he saw one.

'What are they doing?' voxed Dimitrin over the thump of his bolt rifle. 'With respect, brother-captain they could have blown us to pieces before our charge hit home.'

'Mytoxos wants to face me alive as much as I him,' replied Keltos. 'They come to claim me, brother, just as I expected. Why else would their mutants have made so much effort to entangle me, and to drag me away? They look where we wish them to look, though Throne knows the cost has been high enough. We will make them suffer for it.'

Keltos saw Dimitrin's rune-mark appear on the bell-carrying enemy champion and grinned fiercely despite himself.

'That we will, brother-captain. I'll race you for that lumpen ogre's head.'

He ran through the whipping hail of enemy fire with Penance crackling in his hand.

Closer.

Closer.

At last the rune in his peripheral flashed green and a voice echoed over an encrypted vox-channel into Keltos' ear.

'Librarian Akillus reporting force Dagger in position, brother captain. Charges set and console rune-mark Ajax isolated. We cannot hold the corruption back for long.'

'Do it, Brother-Librarian,' ordered Keltos with a stab of fierce satisfaction. 'Land the blow.'

* * *

Olboch was mere feet from the charging loyalists when a tremendous explosion sounded. It took him a moment to realise that it had come from behind him. Confused at the critical moment, Olboch began to turn. His turgid wits struggled to make sense of the billowing clouds of fire erupting from amidst the cogitator stacks of the defence nexus.

'What—' he began before a terrible pain lanced through his capacious gut. Olboch tried to spin back towards the enemy only to realise that he had been spitted upon the blade of a loyalist's power sword. He could feel his innards disintegrating as the weapon's disruption field tore him apart from within.

With a roar of fury, Olboch swung his mace at the Space Marine captain who held the blade. All thought of his master's orders forgotten, Olboch attempted to crush the Space Marine's silver helm into his neck. The blade ripped free in a spray of gore and his enemy spun away, unloading bolt shells into Olboch's helm. With blood now filling his mouth, his helmet deformed by the blasts and fiery agony lancing through his innards, it further stoked his fury.

Olboch raised his plasma pistol, Famine, but at that moment another volley of explosions sounded behind him, even louder than the first. Debris flew. Towering cogitator stacks toppled like felled trees. A vast spar of metal and mutant cables crashed down upon Rupture like a headsman's axe and gore sprayed high as the daemon tank was crushed into the surface of the databridge.

'NO!' howled Olboch, all thought or restraint leaving him in a whirlwind of grief. He didn't care why or how the enemy had hit the defence nexus, or that his duty had been to ensure it remained undamaged. He didn't care that his foes had tricked him somehow, or even about his orders from Mytoxos. He just wanted these loyalist fools rotted to wormfodder!

* * *

The hulking plague champion swung a clubbing blow with his mace and Keltos barely parried the attack. Again, the warrior swung his weapon up and brought it down in a thunderous arc, and this time as he did so his monstrous bell tolled of its own accord. The shockwave cracked Keltos' eye lenses and drove him back. It sent fever-heat racing through his bones and he dragged in a choked breath as he felt his posthuman body resisting the surge of sickness that tried to take hold within him.

The champion's plasma pistol came up and Keltos stared into its glowing barrel. Then Dimitrin's axe blade fell and lopped the plague champion's hand off in a spray of gore. The plasma pistol fired even as it hit the floor and its searing shot streaked off into the murk. Dimitrin swung his axe again as a third string of detonations shook the defence nexus, and his blow opened up the plague champion's armoured chest. Putrid filth spilled forth, maggots and insects squirming in the surge of foul blood.

'Force Dagger moving to support,' came Librarian Akillus' voice. 'Ajax instigated. Defence torpedo away. Impact in twenty seconds.'

Keltos grinned savagely behind his faceplate and surged back to his feet. He stepped in beside Dimitrin and the two of them drove the monstrous plague champion back, hacking and cutting in a storm of blades that clove through his guard again and again.

At the same time, heavy fire whipped in from behind the Death Guard position as silver armoured Vanguard Space Marines emerged from the arched entrance of the data-catacombs with Librarian Akillus at their head. Autocannon rounds tore into the Myphitic Blight-haulers and blew two of them apart in quick succession. Sniper fire sent Blightlord Terminators and Plague Marines alike toppling from their feet, several plunging from the edge of the bridge to plummet out of sight.

The Death Guard kept fighting, but suddenly it was they and not the loyalists who were on the verge of being overrun. Another Foetid Bloat-drone tumbled from the air to explode amidst the Plague Marines' ranks and immolate several more of them. Behind him, Keltos heard his surviving battle-brothers roar their war cries and press forward for a last killing blow.

The plague champion tried to rally, jabbing the head of his mace at Keltos' helm in an attempt to crush his face-plate. Keltos wove aside from the clumsy blow and hacked off his enemy's other hand. He exchanged a glance with Dimitrin, and the two of them raised their blades as one.

Olboch didn't understand how any of this could have happened. His curdled wits could not keep up. His body was a howl of pain like he hadn't known in millennia, and his assailants could not be stopped.

He had failed Lord Mytoxos.

He had failed Grandfather Nurgle.

Misery filled Olboch, and he did not raise the jetting stumps of his arms to defend himself as his enemy's blades swept down. The axe blade took his head from his neck. The sword impaled his primary heart.

The last thing that Olboch learned in the dying moments of his long, long life was that the gift of boundless life was not always a good thing. It was over five minutes before the burgeoning vitality finally left his body, and he burned with agony and shame for every second until his final, blissful demise.

Lieutenant Thessellan saw the dagger rune turn green in his peripheral vision. Almost too late, he thought. Barely a third of his brothers remained standing, and they were moments from being utterly overrun. Worm-infested Death Guard pressed from the front, striding in amidst the clawing, stabbing daemons who had dragged down several of Thessellan's Aggressors and seemingly just would not die. The last few Intercessors had at least managed to seal the far door of the airlock, but even more of their number had fallen to the diseased blades of the daemons.

'Ordnance incoming,' barked Thessellan over the vox. 'Retreat into the airlock and close this door.'

They fell back in good order, expending yet more ammunition to drive the foe back for the moments it took to extricate themselves from the fight. As the airlock doors rumbled closed and shut the Silver Templars inside the confines of the blackened airlock, Thessellan heard the shrieking laughter of the enemy's commanding entity again. It seemed to issue from all around, from the body of every Plague Marine in the hydroponic shrine.

'Where are you going, flesh? Think you to hide in that little metal box? We shall have that door open in moments, you fools, just let us—'

'In?' asked Thessellan as the doors cycled shut. 'You'll wish we had, heretics. Brace, brothers. Impact in four, three, two, one...'

Launched by Librarian Akillus' warriors via console runemark Ajax, the defence torpedo had surged from one of the platform's surviving silos and streaked low over the hull of X-Delphi-34. Passing well below the arc of the station's defensive guns, it had plunged down on a death-dive straight into the roof of the hydroponic shrines.

Cogitational data transmitted from the Unsheathed had helped the Silver Templars land their blow perfectly. Punching through the upper hull of the hydroponic shrines the ship-killing munition blew out the armourglass domes and vented the shrines to space in a split second. Fuelled by excess oxygen and methane, a catastrophic firestorm roiled through the shrines and blew back along service corridors and ventral chambers directly into the defence platform's orbital engines to wreak irreparable havoc.

All this Lieutenant Thessellan watched with grim satisfactionon a wireframe schematic of the station, projected directly onto his auto-senses.

'A beautiful shot, Brother-Librarian,' he voxed. 'You have our heartfelt thanks.' The door of the airlock glowed blood red as the fury of the firestorm beat against it but, hardened to withstand just such pressure differentials and explosive hull breaches, the door held. Thessellan could only imagine the howls of his enemies as they were sucked out of the platform's ruptured hull and voided into the darkness of space like so much pus from a wound.

'Feint successful, casualties heavy,' voxed Lieutenant Thessellan across the command channel.

'Understood, lieutenant,' came Keltos' voice. 'Are your forces in fit condition to join the coup de grace?'

'A handful of us, brother-captain,' said Thessellan, casting his gaze across the battered gathering of battle-brothers he had left. They had several walking wounded, and several more far too wounded to walk, their Apothecary amongst them.

'Understood,' said Keltos. 'Those fit to land the last blow, rendezvous at location Knessos-Theta. The rest fall back to evacuation point Kytus-Janus. The nexus is in flames, the enemy's long guns crippled for good, or so we must hope. Captain Othella, move in and commence recovery operations. As of now X-Delphi-34 is on its death dive, and time is short. In the Emperor's name, brothers, it is time to finish this.'

V

They gathered in an observation gallery above one of the voidward gundecks. In small groups the band of warriors came together amidst the scattered cadavers of X-Delphi-34's slain crew, while around them the defence platform shuddered and died. Captain Keltos, Sergeant Dimitrin and Sergeant Thessos were first there, accompanied by Intercessor Brother Protus and Hellblaster Brother Spiros, and Techmarine Nissus, who tended to the captains sparking bionics. Above them, visible through the plague smog and the armourglass viewing windows, the defence platform could be seen to tilt slowly towards the vast mass of the planet below.

A section of the worldward flank of X-Delphi-34 could be seen in the distance. Already it was wreathed in a corposant glow as it dipped into Anjoria Tertius' upper atmosphere and began to burn. Augur towers shuddered then broke away, blackening and breaking up as orbital debris in the platforms wake. Upper decks peeled back like strips of parchment or dead flesh, trailed fires into the void, then scattered as ash. Somewhere in the distance alarms screamed, but Captain Keltos paid them little mind.

'This station won't be reclaimed by the Imperium,' he growled through his helm's vox-emitters. 'But neither shall it fall into enemy hands.'

'We commend its mighty machine-spirits to the Emperor's mercy,' intoned Techmarine Nissus as he effected minute adjustments to Keltos' knee-joint-actuators. 'The Omnissiah will be thankful that this great weapon was not turned upon those who fashioned it, brother-captain.'

'With those orbital engines destroyed, its death is only a matter of time,' said Dimitrin, who was checking the workings of his bolt rifle with diligent care. Foul blood and filth caked his armour from head to toe, but he was even now ensuring that his weapons gleamed like new.

'As is that of Mytoxos,' said Keltos, steel in his tone.

Librarian Akillus joined them soon after, accompanied by Eliminator Sergeant Xerxys and one of the Vanguard Infiltrators, Brother Kytor.

The Librarian cut a sinister figure, his helm's eye lenses burning red from beneath the deep-hooded cameleoline cloak drawn over his sleek Phobos-pattern armour.

'Who else comes to fight at our side?' he asked in his gravelly whisper.

'Thessellan and two of his Aggressors,' said Captain Keltos. 'They are bare minutes away. They had to maglock their boots to the decks and make their way through a depressurised section of the platform before they could proceed. That, and the continued threat of the foe, has delayed them. We have scattered the enemy's strength, but I do not believe the Death Guard to be a spent force here.'

'Time is short now,' said the Librarian. 'Do you cleave still to your oath, captain? The spirit of Mercy was long ago put to rest. If we forge on from this point to ensure the demise of Mytoxos, I foresee a great danger that none of us may make it off the platform before it plunges into Anjoria Tertius' atmosphere and is destroyed.'

'You don't need to be a psyker to foresee that,' commented Thessos. 'Is this truly a risk worth taking, brother-captain?'

'Mytoxos must be banished. We must see it done,' said Keltos fiercely.

'Be sure you do this for the right reasons, my brother,' voxed Sergeant Dimitrin to Keltos on a private channel. 'Anger and revenge are not enough. You are a blade in the primarch's hand as surely as Mercy was in yours. I do not believe he would wish to see mistakes repeated.'

For a moment Keltos felt anger at the sting in Dimitrin's words, but he took a breath and sought focus. He knew his brother's counsel for what it was, honest and well-intentioned.

'My anger at Mytoxos...' replied Keltos then paused before starting again. 'I see now that I had the Swordsman strike furiously this day, perhaps rashly, in my eagerness to land the killing blow. I have viewed the enemy here as an impediment rather than a duelling partner and for that we have suffered losses. But again, we have seen Mytoxos and his foul brood unleash the darkest sort of warpcraft. Again, brother, they have called upon sorcery and fought us with weapons as dishonourable as they are destructive. If the daemon prince or any of his worshippers escape this place, do you truly believe they will not wreak fresh havoc elsewhere, upon Imperial servants who do not know their ways? Worse, Dimitrin, do you truly believe that, were I to walk away from this fight now, the daemon prince would see the matter as done?'

'I do not,' said Dimitrin after a moment's thought. 'Our enemy laid a trap here filled with spite and malice. It must have required vast resources. You were correct upon the databridge, brother-captain. For whatever reason, I think Mytoxos wants to face you alive. It is not in the nature of such heretical beings to abandon a vendetta, is it?'

'No. Mytoxos will keep coming for us, for me,' said Keltos. 'I would not have him pursue me to Novaris and spread his blights there.'

'Emperor forbid it,' said Dimitrin sounding horrified. Clearly, thought Keltos, the notion had not occurred to his old friend.

'I have to do this here, now,' said Keltos out loud. 'I do not expect any of you to risk your lives in the upholding of my oath, but for victory to be assured we must not let the monster escape to wreak havoc anew. If any of you wishes to depart now, and to join the evacuation, there will be no censure.'

None of the Silver Templars moved. The station shuddered as something exploded deep within its guts. The quiet was broken as a doorway slid sideways and Lieutenant Thessellan stomped in, his armour smoking and slathered in slimy gore. Two Aggressors followed him in, brothers Gylos and Ulyssan.

Dimitrin, Protus, Thessos, Spiros, Ulyssan, Xerxys... it could not be coincidence that so many of the brothers still fit to fight alongside him had done so a decade before on Ultach, thought Keltos. He sensed the hand of the Emperor at work and was glad. This, surely, was a good omen.

'Brothers,' said Thessellan, shaking foul blood from his blade. 'I sincerely hope someone has some spare ammunition. We have a daemon to kill. Even with my reputation, I'd rather not have to do so with my bare hands.'

Deep within X-Delphi-34 Mytoxos muttered furiously to himself. His anger bubbled like a pox-cauldron boiling over upon a raging fire. The worms infesting the console-acolytes were squealing to one another as their consoles spewed increasingly frantic data-auguries. Some rose, the worms tearing their hosts loose from the consoles into which they had been anchored and slinking away towards the strategium's saviour pods. Mytoxos knew they fled but did not care; the Squirm would always seek to preserve at least some fragment of itself, he had expected no less.

Adepts of the Dark Mechanicum gave angry binharic shrieks as they directed remote servitor work crews in desperate attempts to effect repairs. Biomechanical systems writhed in pain, blistering with sudden internal fires and bursting wetly amidst crackling storms of electrical feedback. The entire chamber tilted at a drunken angle, internal gravitic compensators struggling to keep pace with the worsening slant. At his side, Mytoxos heard the leaden chest scrape upon the floor of his command dais as it began to slide. He put one huge hand down to hold it in place. Above him, his trio of view screens showed exterior pict-captures of the station's gradual demise and the approaching loyalist warship, all furred with silvery static.

'First Olboch, then the Squirm. They have failed me utterly,' snarled the daemon prince. Noxious gases gushed from the vents in his body, filling the air with a poisonous cloud of displeasure. Knelt before him in supplication, even the Plague Surgeon Quirmloch struggled to breathe the choking fug.

'Olboch and his warband were annihilated, lord,' croaked Quirmloch, coughing wetly into his fist. 'The Poxwalkers still number in their thousands but without herding they wander aimless and worthless. We have had a report that at least some of the Squirm escaped, as did a number of the entities that he summoned. They are making their way back here even now.'

'To what end?' demanded Mytoxos, overcome with a morbid despondency. 'The captain was to be brought to me in rust-wrought chains. His corpse-worshipping followers were to be slain to the last, their bodies rendered into plague-beds. With Keltos' sacrifice the pact with the Soul Forges would have been honoured. I would have been made whole again. Through your viral artifice would this platform have become my new seat of power! Instead, the loyalists have cut a path out of our trap, two of our tri-lobe of warhands are destroyed and this platform falls from the skies into ruin. And truly, stitch-slitter, none of this matters a withered whit when set against the fact that Keltos has escaped and I cannot fulfil my pact.'

Mytoxos' voice had risen to a rushing roar that echoed around the stricken strategium and made his underlings cower. His words risked spreading dismay, Mytoxos knew, but he no longer cared. By all reports the platforms long guns were dead, and even Quirmloch's Obliterator plague could not revive them. By the time he was able to rally the last of his forces and send another hunting party to entrap the enemy captain, his quarry would surely have slipped the net and fled aboard his warship or else the platform would have fallen out of the sky and dashed them all to ruin.

'The station has copious shuttles, my lord,' said Quirmloch, stoically enduring his master's wrath. 'We can evacuate, regroup, fall upon the enemy ship in a swarm like the Grandfather's blessed flies and seek to board them?'

'Even if that did not see the warband blown from the void, my time rots too swiftly,' growled Mytoxos, his eyes flashing amidst the smog that rolled from his body. 'No, Quirmloch, we are doomed to plunge into the blazing embrace of the meagre world below and be destroyed. And then, for me, an eternity of servitude.'

'Not so, my lord, not so,' came the shrilling voice of the Squirm. Mytoxos peered through the smog to see the raddled sorcerer slouching back up the steps towards the dais. Its body was blackened and stiff, its veins and tissue burst from depressurisation. Its voice was reedy and weak, so few of its worms remained.

'You possess a fool's nerve to return to Lord Mytoxos' sight!' cried Quirmloch, rounding on the parasites and their ruined host and pulling out his bonesaw. 'Lord, let me carve him for you, one last sacrifice to Grandfather Nurgle before the end!'

'You would cut me apart for study like some loyalist medicae,' spat the Squirm in disgust.

'Enough!' roared Mytoxos as a fresh volley of feedback and explosions raced through the strategium. On his screens he could see loyalist gunships springing from the strike cruiser's launch bays on tongues of fire.

Come to steal away my prize, he thought grimly.

'Squirm, why do you say 'not so'? Speak not cleanly words or I will make you suffer as you could not imagine before our end claims us.'

'The daemons whisper it my lord,' said the Squirm, prostrating its broken body atop the dais. 'They have seen it. Not all the enemy flee. Some are coming here. Now.'

Mytoxos frowned at his underling's words. He gestured to the tri-lobe holoscreens and they juddered lower. Static crawled as corrupted machine-spirits sought an image lock that matched their master's desire.

Twisted chambers and hellish corridors flashed past in quick succession, some swarming with Poxwalkers or overcome with fecund rot, some heaped with decaying corpses or laid bare to the killing void. He saw silver-armoured figures falling back in good order, carrying their wounded, trading shots with the scattered handful of Plague Marines who still attempted to harass them.

Where was he, thought Mytoxos, craning forward with a whine of rusty gears. Where was he?

Then he saw the band of warriors making their way through a maintenance bay in central sector seven, guns and blades at the ready. A band of questing heroes, he thought with dawning delight.

'Of course...' he hissed.

'My lord?' ventured Quirmloch.

'They do not know!' said Mytoxos, his voice rasping with hoarse delight. 'They do not know of my bargain. Oh noble, dedicated little corpse-worshippers, they do not believe their duty to be done! We need not scrabble to hunt them down. They are coming to us! There is still a chance!'

'We shall rally the warbands,' began the Squirm at the same time as Quirmloch said 'Let me seize them, lord, this time you shall not be failed.'

Mytoxos held up a pustule-ridden hand for silence.

'No, the grasp of entropy quickens. I can risk no more mistakes. I shall do the deed myself.'

So saying, he gritted his fanged teeth and wrenched his body upwards. Metal groaned. Wires sparked and writhed as they snapped. Tubes burst free and gushed brimstone vomit across the dais.

'My lord, the machines sustain you!' gasped Quirmloch. 'You risk your death.'

Mytoxos rose on clanking mechanical legs. Cogs of bone and iron meshed and span, and deep within his twisted guts a furnace rumbled to life. He towered over his champions and, even as he felt the pain of separating himself from his mechanical throne and its bounteous plague-engines, Mytoxos also felt strong, stronger than he had at any time since he had squirmed back through the veil.

'I risk my damnation if I do not do this, stitch-slitter,' said Mytoxos, the virulent elation of purpose filling him. He reached down and wrenched open the iron chest. Hellish green light spilled from inside, and yet more noisome gases belched out to thicken the air atop the dais. From within the chest came a skittering tide of skull-headed lice that swept down the steps and latched themselves onto screaming Dark Magi before suckling blood and oil with unseemly greed.

Mytoxos plunged one huge fist into the leprous depths of the chest, into a wet and fleshy darkness amidst which something glinted. His taloned fingers wrapped around its hilt and with a wrench he dragged the parasitic blade from its metaphysical host. It came free reluctantly, with a slithering, tearing sound.

Mytoxos brandished the sword above his head. It was small, for a daemon prince's weapon, little more than a stabbing dagger in his huge fist. Its rust-thick blade pulsed with fat veins, its edge festooned with rotten teeth. Spider-like legs scrabbled madly from the fat, hairy mass of its hilt and wrapped themselves around Mytoxos' hand, digging in with little squirts of ichor. Black-and-yellow eyes rolled in the weapons hilt, and it crooned with horrible hunger.

'With Parasite must I sacrifice the captain, for only with this sacrificial blade can the ritual be completed. Such was the forgemasters' decree. Then, by Nurgle's grace shall I be restored,' declared Mytoxos, and his booming voice echoed around the chamber like thunder through fog. 'Rally all those who can reach us in time,' he commanded his champions. 'We shall fortify this chamber and halt them here. Let us set one final trap for these heroic fools that we might taint their flesh and sup upon their essence.'

The turbolift swept downward with a muted hum, shuddering occasionally as the station around it tilted further out of true. Keltos and his warriors stood shoulder to shoulder, the power packs of their filthy armour snarling. Nearly all carried the weapons of slain brothers, locked ritually to their armour, machine-spirits quiescent in mourning for wielders lost.

'I sense the beast below us, growing ever closer,' said Librarian Akillus. 'His taint is the diseased heartbeat that pushes poisons around the platform's dying body.'

'We shall cut that heart out with our blades,' said Keltos.

'Ammunition check,' barked Dimitrin. Answers came back from Keltos' brothers, each a variation on 'not a great deal'.

'This'll be mostly bladework then,' said Lieutenant Thessellan.

'And fist,' added Aggressor Brother Ulyssan with relish.

'Captain Othella, how fares strike force recovery?' voxed Keltos across the command channel.

'Eighty per cent complete, brother-captain,' came Othella's terse reply. 'Be advised, according to our orbital trajectory cogitators you have only fourteen minutes before the station passes evacuation terminator and it will no longer be possible to extract you. Chances of your surviving re-entry aboard the platform are vanishingly poor.'

'Understood, captain, be ready for our signal,' said Keltos.

'The strategium has access to its own saviour pod banks,' said Techmarine Nissus, working at his armour's gauntlet-auspex. 'I estimate one minute sixteen seconds and counting until this elevator deposits us in the outer atrium. That chamber leads directly onto the strategium. Providing we conclude combat operations in less than ten minutes, we will have sufficient time to extract to the saviour pods and eject before critical terminator is reached.'

'Understood, Nissus.'

'Swift and dirty then?' said Dimitrin.

Thessellan gave a rumbling growl of approval.

'Have a care that this does not go ill,' said Sergeant Thessos, his tone dour.

'It will go ill for the heretics,' said Eliminator Sergeant Xerxys quietly. 'Reaper and I shall see to it.'

'Twenty-five seconds,' said Nissus.

Keltos felt fresh adrenaline surge through his body. He offered a silent prayer to Penance and another to Absolution, feeling the nearness of their machine-spirits and drawing strength from it.

'When the doors open, Thessellan, Ulyssan, Gylos and I shall lead the attack,' he ordered. 'Dimitrin, you and Thessos coordinate fire-support. Librarian Akillus, use your powers to obfuscate our attack and ward off Chaos witchery.'

They chorused their understanding.

'Focus and Fury, brothers,' said Keltos.

The turbolift thumped to a halt, its gravitic motors straining hard enough to stagger them all. The doors slid open onto a glass-walled atrium that canted at a crazed angle, and a storm of bolter fire blitzed in.

Keltos felt shells burst against his armour.

'For the Emperor and Novaris!' he roared and pushed himself out of the turbolift. The hulking figures of Thessellan and his two Aggressors came with him, forging uphill against the false gradient created by X-Delphi-34's death-dive.

The chamber they entered was wide and had once been intended as a place for meetings, sermons and the strained patience of all those who waited to attend upon the defence platform's commanding officers.

Its walls were stained armourglass, each towering panel depicting an Imperial saint or hero. The chamber boasted rows of brushed metal pews and tall marble columns and had even been decorated by a scattering of heavy stone amphorae in which expensively imported plants had grown.

The enemy had despoiled the saints with filth, shatter marks and gunshot holes. They had torn up the pews to make rusting barricades and had smashed the amphorae; the plants that had grown there were thick with mould and crawling mites, as were the hundreds of bloated corpses of acolytes and command-crew serfs piled in drifts across the floor.

A high stone arch graven with cog-sided skulls led off into the strategium at the atriums far end. Plague smog billowed thick from within, obscuring any sight of their foe's lair. It did not hide the band of Plague Marines who marched out to meet the Silver Templars, however, or the worm-fleshed monster that led them.

The Death Guard guns roared.

Their blades dripped filth.

'A second chance to partake of Nurgle's bounty, that is what we offer!' shrilled a foul choir of voices, and Keltos realised with a start they were coming from the parasites that studded the enemy Champion's ruined body.

'Those worms, we saw them on Ultach,' he gasped.

'And in the hydroponic shrines, where I thought them purged,' said Thessellan angrily.

'They are warp parasites, daemon filth. They shall be seen no longer,' spat Librarian Akillus as he swept from the elevator doors behind Keltos.

The captain stormed forward alongside the lieutenant and the Aggressors, their guns blazing.

'Disperse, return fire, clear a path,' barked Dimitrin as his warriors spread out in Keltos' wake.

Shots blitzed back and forth. Keltos rune-marked the nearest Plague Marine and fired off a trio of shots at his chosen opponent. The first struck the warrior's right shoulder guard and staggered him. The second deformed his helm and set him reeling. The third punched into his fleshy guts and blew out a geyser of filth and blood. Keltos had known better than to think that would be enough to kill the heretic. Instead, as his enemy staggered and raised his bolter to blast the captain point-blank, Keltos leapt, drew back his blade level with his head, and stabbed it forward through the Plague Marine's helm as he struck his opponent. Bolt shells roared away on fiery contrails to shatter the armourglass walls, and Keltos bore his convulsing opponent to the ground with Penance impaling the heretic's helm right through.

The captain came back up and took quick stock of the fight. Aggressor Brother Gylos had fallen, his armour torn open by sustained bolt fire and his chest cavity a hollowed ruin. Techmarine Nissus had caught the jet of a plague sprayer across his right side and was staggering forward with his augmetics and flesh alike melting and blistering. In return, the Silver Templars had taken down four of the Plague Marines and driven the rest back from their scrap-metal barricades.

'Eight minutes remain,' said Nissus through gritted teeth.

'Taste Nurgle's burgeoning bounty!' shrieked the worm-raddled sorcerer. Its jaws cracked and split as they stretched wide and Keltos felt the air thicken with warp-taint.

'Beware,' cried Librarian Akillus, his psychic hood sparking with power and his helm's eyes blazing. 'The taint is too strong here, I cannot stop him!'

Keltos watched in horror as the sorcerer's throat and cheeks bulged obscenely. The next moment a gushing flood of bile erupted from his maw, thick with wriggling white worms. They spewed across Lieutenant Thessellan, who had been bearing down upon the sorcerer with Death held high for a killing stroke. The lieutenant staggered, yelling in revulsion as the river of acidic vomit ate away at his armour plates. Silver ceramite bubbled and melted, and the squealing worms burrowed eagerly into the flesh beneath.

Stumbling sideways, Thessellan raised Judgement and triggered the boltstorm gauntlet's guns. A hammering volley of shells struck the sorcerer in the chest and blew dirty gobbets of flesh from his body. The worm-thing staggered backwards, his revolting power interrupted and the river of bile spattering to a stop. Yet the damage was done. What remained of Lieutenant Thessellan hissed and sizzled, writhing with gore-slick worms as it spread in a slick across the decking.

'Vengeance of Novaris upon you,' roared Keltos and stormed forward. Rune-marks lit the sorcerer up in his vision.

'Brothers, focus. Keep the enemy suppressed,' he barked, and half the runes flickered out to reappear overlaid on other Plague Marines. Still it was Akillus' psychic bolt that found its mark upon the enemy witch first. Shamed, no doubt, by his failure to prevent his enemy's foul sorcery, the Librarian unleashed a blast of raw force that the sorcerer attempted to catch upon his worm-eaten stave. The psychic rotwood cracked, warped, then exploded under the fury of Akillus' mental assault. An instant later a round from Sergeant Xerxys' rifle hit the sorcerer between the eyes and blew out the back of his rotten skull.

Worms screamed. The air thickened again as the sorcerer attempted to gather his powers for another assault. Keltos wasn't close enough, he realised with horror. The plague-smog billowed in a vortex around the foul champion, swirling faster and faster. Just as another awful curse must surely be unleashed, Aggressor Brother Ulyssan hit the sorcerer like a thunderbolt. His flamestorm gauntlets curled into mighty fists, he punched the heretic in the gut with enough force to fold him over, then delivered a ruinous uppercut that tore the sorcerer's head clean off. The body crashed down onto the deck and still it writhed, its worms screaming as it tried to rise.

'Shut. Up,' snarled Ulyssan as he levelled both flamestorm gauntlets. One of the last few Plague Marines raised his bolter to blast Ulyssan from his feet, but a howling plasma bolt incinerated the heretic. The next instant a storm of fire blitzed forth and consumed the worm-riddled sorcerer utterly.

The squeals rose to fever pitch, then finally, mercifully, fell silent. Keltos skidded to a halt before the stone arch as he realised that the last handful of Plague Marines had fallen back into the all-encompassing smog bank. Even his auto-senses couldn't penetrate that foul fume. Whatever was in there, they would have to face it all but blind.

Behind him, Keltos' remaining brothers gathered, swiftly changing out magazines in near-empty guns and wiping slime from their blades and fists.

'Five minutes twelve seconds remain,' reported Nissus.

'Then we must be swift, said Captain Keltos. 'Come on.'

With that, he plunged into the murk.

VI

The moment Keltos stepped through the doorway he sensed it, a shifting of reality that caused his auto-senses to flicker and his instincts to scream. The plague smog pressed thick around him, an impenetrable haze that swirled with the suggestion of screaming faces and staring eyes.

'The veil is thin in this place,' whispered Librarian Akillos. 'This chamber is not truly part of our reality. It is strange... and dangerous. Keep your wits about you, brothers.'

Hazard runes flashed in Keltos' peripheral vision until he blinked them away. He knew that the smog around him was toxic, that it was doubtless chewing at his armour seals and spreading verdigris across his armour, that to breathe it would surely be to die.

None of that mattered now. Only finding Mytoxos mattered.

Keltos had inloaded maps of all the platform's chambers during the subliminal pre-mission briefing, as had his brothers. He called up the schematic of this chamber now from his eidetic memory and took a moment to scrutinise its layout; the command segments arranged around its outer floor area, and the strategium ziggurat at its heart, climbing like a data-mountain to the dais at its peak. He had a sense he knew where Mytoxos might be waiting, considering the egomaniacal tendencies of those who fell to Chaos.

'Advance form-theta tertiary,' voxed Keltos to his brothers. Auto-senses are all but useless amidst this filth. Let your instincts and the spirits of your weapons be your guides and follow your inload maps.'

His orders spread his brothers out into a line-abreast formation, each warrior partnered with another to prevent anyone from vanishing unnoticed into the mists, each pairing advancing ten feet apart from the next. The Space Marines' short-ranged helm-augurs allowed them to maintain the formation though they could not see one another at all, their runic displays glimmering in overlay across each warrior's vision.

Keltos advanced at a steady stride, Penance crackling softly in one hand, Absolution ready in the other. Strange sounds reached him through the murk, creaks and groans that could have been over-stressed metal, the crackle of fire and the spark of sundered machinery.

'Where are the Death Guard? Where's Mytoxos?' muttered Dimitrin, who had partnered himself with Keltos.

'They are in here with us,' said Keltos, straining his senses for the slightest sign of the foe. His footsteps clanged on slanted metal decking that ran thick with effluvial filth. The chamber was tilted at such an angle that he was having to dig in with each step and stride uphill. Dark shapes loomed out of the murk, strategium consoles at which slumped blackened and mutated figures raddled with empty worm holes. Yet there was still no sign of the foe.

'Four minutes fifteen,' came Nissus' voice and Keltos felt his frustration grow. At last they came to Mytoxos' sanctum and the enemy were playing games? Didn't they realise that the defence platform had minutes to live? If only he could see through this damnable plague smog, he thought. Even his auspex couldn't reach more than a dozen feet through its murk before its returns hazed out to nothing.

'Akillus, brother, can you use your powers to dispel this haze?' he voxed.

'I can try, brother-captain,' replied Akillus. 'I make no promise regards the efficacy of my efforts in a place so warp-claimed, or whether such an action will leave us exposed to the enemy's sight.'

Keltos' foot struck a metal step. He stopped. He could climb the ziggurat but what if, at its peak, he found nothing? What if even now Mytoxos and his followers were fleeing the platform and leaving Keltos and his brothers to die pointless and foolish deaths.

'Is the daemon definitely here?' he voxed to Akillus.

'I sense his filthy aura. It looms over us all, it enfolds us,' replied Akillus.

'Three minutes forty,' said Nissus.

'Captain...' said Sergeant Thessos, a note of warning in his voice.

Keltos shut his eyes, took a slow breath and focused. He could command Akillus to blast away the warp-fog as best he could, but what if that were precisely his enemy's hope? What if they were lurking, waiting for the Silver Templars' frustration to get the better of them and do whatever they could to sweep aside the fog and thus make targets of themselves. Their enemy had laid trap after trap since they had come here, thought Keltos; why should this be any less insidious? After all, this chamber was made for an ambush, with its rising levels of cover and exposed central stair.

Suddenly, he had it. He envisioned the Swordsman, stood in a dark chamber while somewhere nearby his enemy circled closer to spring its final trap. His foe had once been Adeptus Astartes, and though the reasoning behind their warfare might have run to madness, still he could understand their methods. Where would he place his blade? Where would he array his warriors were the situation reversed and the Silver Templars the ambushers, not the ambushed?

Keltos blink-clicked claim runes into existence one after another, one part of his mind upon the schematic of the chamber, another upon the armaments and abilities of both his warriors and what he knew of the foe.

'Brother-Captain?' asked Dimitrin.

'Our foe is most likely concealed at some or all of these locations. It's where I'd array us if I were Mytoxos,' said Keltos. 'Fire on my mark, brothers, then cover my advance to the peak of the ziggurat.'

'If you're wrong, we expose ourselves for nothing,' said Dimitrin.

'True, but the sands of time are running out brother,' replied Keltos. 'With focus we gather our strength and with fury we unleash it. Trust me.'

'I do,' said Dimitrin.

Keltos took a breath. His twin hearts thumped. The fog swirled around him and strange sounds creaked and shifted in the murk.

'Fire!' he roared, his voice vox-amplified.

Bolt-rounds roared away on propellant contrails. Plasma blasts lit the murk. A coruscating orb of mental energies silhouetted Librarian Akillus as it rocketed through the smog and slammed into a high-adept's monitoring console one level up. Warp flare pierced the murk as the psyker-blast detonated and Keltos felt fierce satisfaction as he saw the bulky shape of a Death Guard warrior flung through the air by its ferocity.

'Contact!' bellowed Thessos as his shot struck a Plague Marine who had been standing statue-still amidst the lower command consoles. The bloated plague warrior was blown off his feet, ploughing backwards into a rune-console, crushing the corpse of the adept fused to it before perishing in an explosion of sparks and flames.

Several of the Silver Templars' shots struck nothing but consoles or columns, for not every one of Aetian Keltos' guesses had been perfect. Yet enough hit home. Heretic Astartes bellowed in shock and anger as shots hammered into them and blew them apart.

From atop the ziggurat came an outraged roar, a sound like the last exhalation of a dying macro-turbine mangled with the wrath of some stygian beast. Keltos remembered that ghastly voice only too well. Sickly light blossomed atop the structure, lighting the smog banks like the rays of a Novarian way-tower stood above coastal rocks.

'Mytoxos,' spat Keltos. He blinked a claim rune into existence atop the ziggurat and felt no surprise as Dimitrin's overlaid it.

'Together this time, brother-captain,' said Dimitrin.

'Just so,' said Keltos and charged up the ziggurat with Dimitrin at his side.

The plague smog came alive with fire as they ran. Clearly the Death Guard had arrayed themselves for ambush just as Keltos had suspected, banking on their enemies advancing far enough into the chamber that they could be slain with a few quick and crashing volleys of crossfire. Now, with their ambush sprung prematurely and their supposedly blinded foes guessing their locations with lethal accuracy, the Death Guard struggled to regain the initiative.

Muzzle flare blossomed amidst the smog again and again, strobing flashes that momentarily illuminated the huge figures doing the firing. Keltos' vision filled with half-seen ghosts and dark, hulking silhouettes that trudged through the murk. Shots whined around him. Bolt shells sparked off the stairs or slammed into consoles and exploded, showering Keltos' battered armour with shrapnel.

The corrupted platform itself joined the attack, thick tendrils of bladed wire and flesh bursting up from the decking to lash at the invaders.

Keltos heard an agonised cry over the vox that sounded like Thessos. There wasn't time to stop or go back and check.

'Two minutes until we must withdraw, captain,' barked Nissus over the sound of his heavy bolt pistol firing. 'Recommend—'

The Techmarines words were replaced by a pained grunt, and then static.

'Emperor, lend us your strength!' roared Keltos as he pounded up the steps. Fleshmetal tendrils burst from the flank of a rune-console and Keltos hacked them apart while Dimitrin hammered bolt-rounds into them. The entire console split open like a gaping wound fringed with foot-long fangs. Dimitrin triggered Wrathful's grenade launcher and fired a projectile into the yawning flesh-maw. The detonation deformed the console and left it slumped and gory, belching thin black smoke.

A monstrous warrior with a rotted horn jutting from his helm stepped into the captain's path and fired its bolter at his face. Penance swept up and struck the bolt shells from the air before whipping back around to take the heretic's helmed head off. Keltos planted one foot on the Plague Marine's chest as it fell and launched himself higher.

Another heretic stepped from the smog with a roar and swung an enormous cleaver at Keltos. Dimitrin lunged in and blocked the blow with Severer. Sparks exploded amidst the murk as the two blades met, and Dimitrin roared with effort as he forced the foe's diseased weapon back.

'Can't... hold him...' snarled Dimitrin through gritted teeth as unnatural muscle rippled through the Plague Marine's gangling limbs.

In one smooth motion, Keltos stepped inside the Plague Marine's open guard, pressed the muzzle of Deliverance directly into his enemy's faceplate, and pulled the trigger. The bolt snapped the Plague Marine's head back as it drilled into his skull, then detonated with enough force to shower Keltos and Dimitrin in rotted brains and spinning metal.

'Efficacious,' commented Dimitrin dryly as the two of them ran on.

Keltos had maintained a count in his head from the moment Nissus gave the two-minute mark. He gauged the distance to the ziggurat's peak and made a decision.

'Brothers, fighting retreat. There is insufficient time to conclude this action and pull back, and I will not lose any more warriors to this place. Emperor knows we have seen enough gene-seed lost and weapons beyond recovery already this day. Provide us what covering fire you can. Akillus, you have command.'

Vox pips sounded in his helm, his surviving warriors confirming that they understood and would obey his orders. The corridor to the strategium's saviour pods lay on the eastern edge of the chamber, and his brothers should still have time to reach it even under fire. Other Chapters' warriors might have argued with his command, cited honour or comradeship as reasons to remain and sell their lives dearly.

Not the Silver Templars. They retained their focus and obeyed those who led them.

Most of them, anyway.

'You know I am not going anywhere, yes?' asked Dimitrin as the two of them approached the peak of the ziggurat.

'I knew indulging your need to carry that damned axe would lead to further insubordination,' replied Keltos, but his words masked his gratitude poorly. Even the warriors of the Adeptus Astartes did not wish to die alone.

'The weapon chooses the wielder, brother-captain,' said Dimitrin. 'I'm your brother and your blade both, always have been.'

'And I'm glad of it,' said Keltos. 'Let us finish this together then. For vengeance, and for Mercy.'

They were one level below the ziggurat's peak when something huge exploded nearby. A dull roar reverberated through the chamber and made the smog ripple with shockwaves. Consoles exploded, sparks spraying up from them as they died. The chamber tilted with a monstrous groan, and Keltos was forced to maglock Deliverance to his thigh and snatch at a console to prevent himself being flung from the ziggurat's flank.

Fire blossomed high above, racing across the chambers ceiling and lighting the scene with a hellish glare. Huge slabs of blazing wreckage fell, crashing down upon the ziggurat's flanks and rolling down them aflame like boulders from an erupting volcano.

'We are crossing the evacuation terminator,' said Dimitrin, gripping a support pillar and hauling himself upwards. 'Slim chance of us escaping now. Or Mytoxos. Should we not just leave him to burn?'

'I would not count on that, brother,' said Keltos, maglocking his boots to the teetering steps and clambering upwards. 'He is warp spawn. The only way to be sure of his destruction is to do the deed ourselves.'

'Then we had best be quick about it, if we are to have any chance at all of surviving,' said Dimitrin as more explosions raced through the chamber's edges.

Keltos kept his thoughts on that to himself as he scrambled one-handed up the ziggurat's final steps, Penance held tight in his fist.

Danger came so suddenly that even Keltos' super-human reactions were no match for it. As he was swinging himself out and upwards, a massive hand reached down over the edge of the dais and clamped onto the captain's shoulder guard. Biomechanical talons dug deep and he felt himself dragged upwards, the maglock seals of his boots letting go and his armour shrilling warnings into his ears.

Keltos heard Dimitrin yell behind him as he was hauled up and outwards then swung through the air. The chamber spun around him for a moment then the surface of the dais raced up to slam into his helm's faceplate.

Keltos slid to a stop, managing to roll up into a crouch despite his bewilderment. He almost fell again as he registered the crazed angle of the dais, but with his boots maglocked he managed to keep his feet.

The platform, he saw, was fifty feet across. Where he would have expected a command throne to stand, there was instead a ruptured cradled of foul machinery and bubbling alembics that seemed to have all but buried the original architecture of the throne. A dark iron chest lay against this mess of burst pipes and chittering machines, its lid open. Gripping one arm of the throne, Keltos saw a cadaverous warrior clad in a gruesome perversion of an Apothecary's garb. The creature's right forearm was encased in an insectile-looking vambrace of chitinous metal from which rusty surgical tools jutted; his armour was swathed in a foul half-cloak that stank of effluvia and his face was a horror of suppurating scar tissue from which red-rimmed eyes stared with mad hatred.

It all paled in comparison to Mytoxos. The daemon prince towered above the command dais, both exactly how Keltos remembered him and yet also grossly altered. Loathing sparked a fire in his chest, and it was as though all the intervening years burned away in its flames until he faced his foe through the mists of Ultach again, his blade freshly ripped from his fist.

The captain took in the mechanical frame into which Mytoxos' body was bound and for a moment he feared that his foe had been enhanced with fresh gifts by his patron god. Yet something sat ill about the daemon prince, something about the way he was chained and sutured into his carriage.

This alteration looked more like slavery than empowerment, Keltos thought, and the daemon prince's form shimmered at its edges as though wreathed in an ephemeral heat haze.

Mytoxos lunged for them with a gaseous roar. In one huge fist, the daemon prince clutched the hammer that Keltos remembered with such hatred. Jutting from the other was a grotesque sword, little more than a stabbing-dagger in Mytoxos' grip but easily the length of Penance and disfigured with horrible mutations. Keltos had no doubt that whatever else happened, he did not want that grotesque weapon anywhere near him.

'At last I have you,' hissed the daemon prince as he clattered forward, his mechanical legs stabbing into the surface of the dais and making a mockery of its drunken slope.

Keltos leapt backwards as Mytoxos swept his hammer down, springing back up the steep incline as best he could. The weapons massive head crashed into the decking and left a deep dent from which feelers of rust crawled.

'I do not seek escape, you revolting abomination,' spat Keltos. 'I come for vengeance, and to see you banished for all eternity from the Emperor's realm.' With that he launched himself at Mytoxos' gas-mask-like head, swinging Pennance in a furious swipe intended to blind the daemon prince without suffering the awful fate that Mercy had before it. Mytoxos' insectile dagger flashed up to parry and the two blades met with a clang.

At the instant of their impact, Captain Keltos felt a shudder run through him that left his flesh goosebumped and his instincts crying out a wordless warning. He landed with a clang and tried to gather his wits, barely dodging aside to avoid one of Mytoxos' spider-like mechanical legs as it stabbed down.

'I am told your grubby little Chapter have a fetish for blades,' wheezed Mytoxos, cruel mirth bubbling in his words. 'I hope that you like Parasite. It has been waiting for you.'

Keltos didn't waste time replying. Instead he lunged in and slashed his blade through the blood-bloated pipes that fed through Mytoxos' nearest knee joint. Sulphurous gore jetted hot and rank as the pipes parted, and the cogs churning in that metal limb hitched amidst gouts of reeking steam.

Mytoxos roared and reared high before bringing his hammer down in another brutal swing that Keltos barely dodged. As the captain rolled to his feet, he saw Dimitrin haul himself over the edge of the platform and gather himself to charge.

The Plague Surgeon had seen him too, and as the veteran sergeant rose to his feet the plague apothecary ran at him with a cry. Articulated blades sprouted from his vambrace like weeds, their snicker-snack accompanied by the piercing whine of a reductors drill. The horrible tangle of blades swept toward Dimitrin's faceplate, but the sergeant swept Severer up and lopped several of the attachments clean off. The Plague Surgeon reeled back as clotted gore burst from his vambrace, and, never one for subtlety, Dimitrin shot him point-blank in the chest with his grenade launcher. Both combatants vanished in a roiling cloud of flame and smoke, and Keltos lost sight of them amidst the stamping forest of Mytoxos' legs as the daemon prince came at him again.

'You came right to me, little slug,' sneered Mytoxos as he swung his hammer in great swooping arcs. 'All you had to do was flee, but instead you slithered your way into the heart of my trap like a corkscrew worm into poisoned meat.'

CLANG.

The hammer slammed into the decking again, smashing a crater where Keltos had been but moments before. The captain fired a volley of bolts into Mytoxos' face, blasting craters in the rubbery flesh and bursting one of the daemon prince's eye lenses just as he had so long ago.

CLANG.

The hammer slammed down again, a hair's breadth from Keltos' feet. The sword-dagger came next, waves of repugnant hunger baking off its blade like heat as it jabbed towards Keltos' face. He brought his blade up in a cross-parry and as he intercepted Parasite he felt another horrible jolt.

Was it the power of the warp? he wondered as he gave ground. Was that the terrible frisson he felt? Yet he had faced warp craft a dozen times and more even since they landed on X-Delphi-34 and none of it had felt anything like this.

'Sergeant, do you live?' he barked into his vox, scrambling away up the deck and firing Absolution as Mytoxos came after him. Fire rippled across the ceiling high above and arched girders tore away with groans like dying giants.

'I do, brother-captain,' replied Dimitrin. Keltos saw movement behind Mytoxos, Dimitrin using his axe blade to help him climb the decking behind the daemon prince. The Plague Surgeon sprawled behind him, sliding slowly away down the decking and leaving a bloody smear in his wake.

'Strike this thing from behind, Dimitrin. Hamstring his back limbs and slow him down so that we can strike the killing blow.'

CLANG.

Down came the hammer again and this time Keltos could not scramble aside fast enough. He bellowed with fury as his augmetic foot and much of the mechanical ankle above it were crushed to scrap. Mytoxos stared one-eyed at him with a triumphant grin and raised his sword-dagger to impale Keltos while he was trapped. Teeth gritted, Keltos swept Penance down and scythed through his own artificial leg, severing it above the lumpen anvil-head of the daemon prince's hammer. Oil and coolant spurted. Sparks flew. Pain-receptors howled feedback but he managed to roll aside. Parasite struck the decking with a clang mere inches from Keltos' head, its embedded teeth ripping into the metal hungrily.

He felt the weapon's tormented machine-spirit then, felt the unbearable hunger that curdled its scrapcode-ridden soul. His auto-senses glitched at the weapon's nearness but in that moment its binharic designators flashed into Keltos' vision and he felt his blood run cold.

'No,' he choked.

'Yesssss,' Mytoxos drawled gleefully as he ripped the sword-dagger out of the decking and loomed over Keltos. 'Did you not recognise your dour old blade? Do you not approve of the fecund gifts I have bestowed upon it?'

Keltos howled. It was though the blade had already found his heart. He could see it now, buried beneath the corruption and the foulness and the unbearable hunger.

Mercy.

In that moment all of Aetian Keltos' training abandoned him. His focus, his poise, his speed and skill, all were drowned in a surge of hatred and fury that drove him upright with a despairing howl. He fired Absolution, ammo counter dropping swiftly on his last clip, his bolts ricocheting from Mytoxos' thick armour or blowing meaningless gobbets of flesh from his bloated body. Keltos tried to lunge, to hack the tainted blade from Mytoxos' grip, but on the drunkenly tilting deck, with one foot nothing more than a sparking stump, he could not keep his balance. He swung hard and true, but Mytoxos caught the blow easily on the haft of his hammer then smashed Keltos flat onto his back. One piston leg came down and mashed Keltos' sword hand into the deck. His mangled gauntlet sparked. Pain rocketed up Keltos' arm. His blade slid down the deck and snagged on a trailing cable.

Then Dimitrin was there, ducking between Mytoxos' legs, Wrathful firing bolt after bolt up into the monster's underbelly. Mytoxos reared back with a pained roar and swung his hammer at Dimitrin, who dodged the blow.

'Don't worry captain, I'll—'

Keltos never found out what Dimitrin planned, for at that moment the Plague Surgeon appeared at the sergeant's side. Blackened and battered, his armour split open and one side of his face a burned ruin, the foul Apothecary had no right to be alive. Yet he was there, and in an instant he had driven his mangled vambrace into Dimitrin's neck with all the force he could muster. Surgical tools and screaming drill-bits punched through the seal where the sergeants helm met his gorget. Bright red Space Marine blood fountained and Dimitrin reeled back with a gurgle of horror. He clapped one hand to the wound and, as he straightened up to turn his gun on his attacker, Mytoxos' hammer swept in and hit Dimitrin full in the chest.

Ceramite crumpled. Black carapace broke with an audible crack. Sergeant Dimitrin tumbled away and rolled into a crumpled heap. His inert body slid until his boots auto-maglocked and there he lay, motionless.

Keltos could barely process any of it. Dimitrin, stabbed and smashed, most likely slain. His foot and his hand crushed to ruin. Penance lying beyond his reach, he and his blade impotent to aid one another. Yet worst of all, filling his mind and choking his reason until it was all he could see, was Mercy.

How could he have failed so utterly? How could he have allowed such gross dishonour to come upon his blade? It was nightmarish, worse than anything Keltos could ever have imagined, and like an electromagnetic pulse banishing the machine-spirits of mighty weapons, the horror of it seemed to have exorcised every rational thought from his brain.

Keltos barely felt it as the Plague Surgeon dragged him up into a sitting position and began fumbling for the catches to release his helm. As he did so he crooned, and as though in answer, the decking buckled and diseased cabling slithered forth. It sparked and twitched as it wound-around Keltos' limbs to restrain him. The captain barely listened as Mytoxos settled low on his wheezing mechanical carriage and brandished Parasite before Keltos' eyes.

'I am going to sacrifice you to the masters of the daemon forge with your own blade,' said the daemon prince. 'Thirsting is the Parasite for your blood and your soul. It too seeks vengeance, for it was you who denied this blade its true potential for time-out-of-rust. Unlike you, it will have its revenge, and as it suckles upon your soul so my debt shall be paid most fulsome. Oh yes, had you but scuttled away into the shadows and hidden from me, had you but ignored my summons then I would have never fulfilled my bargain and Parasite would never have known vengeance. But you did, little slug. You did, and I thank you. Now hold still while I spit you like the insect you are!'

Parasite would never have known vengeance.

The words rolled through Keltos' fractured thoughts like thunder.

Parasite.

Mercy.

Mercy deserved vengeance.

It was not too late. He had given in once before, had not had the fortitude to follow his blade into the rift and to fight for it as he should have.

'Not... this... time,' he whispered, his voice grating from his vox-emitters in a ragged snarl. A warning flashed in his peripheral vision and he realised that the Plague Surgeon had found his helm seals. He was about to wrench Keltos' helm off, exposing him to the full corruption of Mytoxos' sanctum and baring his throat for Parasite's descending blade.

'Cease and die,' spat the Plague Surgeon.

For just a moment, Captain Keltos pictured the Swordsman. He saw him at bay, on his knees, limbs chained, his weapons scattered and his foe triumphant. He saw how the situation could be reversed, how the killing blow might land.

He felt the spirit of Absolution still locked to his thigh. Just a trio of bolt shells still waiting in its clip.

He found focus. He acted.

Keltos drove his head up and backwards with sudden force. There was a satisfying crack and a spurt of foul gore as the traitors nose caved in. Grabbing the decking with his one good hand, Keltos rolled himself over with such furious force that the slithering cables stretched and tore like rotted flesh. He got his knees beneath him and launched himself at the Plague Surgeon. His enemy was gagging on the blood sheeting from his ruined face and could not stop Keltos as the captain ploughed into him.

They both went over with a tremendous clang. Mytoxos roared and the dais shook beneath his footfalls.

Knowing he had seconds at most, Keltos grabbed the Plague Surgeons chitinous vambrace and wrenched with all his might. Calcified metal split. Unnatural tendons ripped and flesh gave way amidst spurting fluids. The Plague Surgeon howled as Captain Keltos tore off a fistful of surgical blades then span them around and rammed them hard into his enemy's face. The blades sank deep, cracked bone, pierced eyeballs with viscid pops and drove deep into the grey matter behind.

The Plague Surgeon convulsed and then went limp. With a snarl of exertion Keltos rolled aside, knowing the hammer would be coming down like a meteor. Sure enough, its head slammed into the Plague Surgeons corpse in an eruption of gore.

Keltos fought his way back to his feet, standing as best he could on his sparking stump, and drew Absolution.

Mytoxos wheeled and came at him. The daemon prince smiled cruelly as he brandished Parasite.

'Stand or kneel, I care not, only offer up your soul to the blade. Let the matter be done.'

'Never,' spat Keltos. He raised Absolution, laid his claim runes upon his target, took aim and fired.

Not at Mytoxos.

At Parasite.

At Mercy.

A trio of bolt shells whipped through the smog-filled air and struck the weapon in quick succession. They were perfectly aimed, guided by all the duellists' skill of the Silver Templars, and all the cold and furious focus of a warrior who had a debt to repay.

The first bolt drove deep into the meat of Mytoxos' hand and exploded, tearing through not only the daemon prince's flesh but also the foul insectile mass that Mercy's hilt had become. The second shot hit the weapon's blade dead centre. The sword's tainted disruption field triggered the bolt and detonated it with a fiery crack that shattered Mercy in two. The last shot drove deep into the sword's crossguard where its circuitry had once been nestled and its machine-spirit housed. Staring eyes burst and foul flesh ruptured as the bolt drove home then detonated, blowing Mercy's tortured mechanisms apart and freeing its tormented machine spirit at last.

'You may slay me, you sack of filth, but you shall torture my blade no longer,' said Keltos.

To his surprise, Mytoxos staggered and let out a howl of abject horror. The hammer dropped from the daemon prince's grip and hit the deck with a dolorous clang. Steam erupted from his walking carriage, Jetting angrily as pipes burst and gears sheared.

'What have you done?' rasped Mytoxos. 'Without that blade I cannot...'

His words vanished into an inarticulate howl of fury and he started forward towards Keltos like a runaway maglev train. Yet the daemon prince had taken barely three paces before the smog around him began to swirl madly. Suddenly it was as though he was straining against an invisible force that dragged at him from behind. The whisping around the daemon prince's frame increased, so that it seemed he was being siphoned away from the edges like gas through an airlock. Keltos watched in amazement as Mytoxos tried to dig his taloned legs into the decking. They ploughed furrows through the metal as the force pulling at him increased, for all the world like the void sucking hapless crewmen out of a ruptured hull. Yet Keltos felt nothing.

This doom came for Mytoxos alone.

The daemon prince bellowed as the chains binding him to his carriage went suddenly slack and his bloated upper body tore free of its housings with a series of gristly crunches. Clotted gore spilled from sundered pipes and rotted innards trailed as the daemon prince was borne upwards and away into a screaming cyclone of plague-smog. His screams became nerve-shredding squeals of pain as his physical form crumpled and imploded, and then was gone with a sudden crack of displaced air.

For an instant, Aetian Keltos felt as weary as he ever had in his life. The pain of his injuries pressed in upon him and he swayed as though he might fall.

Then the thought that he had released Mercy surfaced in his mind, and he felt fresh strength and purpose fill him.

'It is over, old comrade. You are at peace now,' he said. It was as though a weight had been lifted from his chest. He felt sorrow, of course, bereavement for a friend now lost forever. Yet he felt the elation of release, also. The debt was paid. He had saved his blade at the last.

Captain Keltos could forgive himself.

'But the Emperor won't forgive you if you stand here until the whole place goes up in flames,' he said, limping to where Penance lay and grasping the blade's hilt. He felt its machine-spirit mesh joyously with his own and smiled behind his faceplate. 'No blade wielded in the Emperor's service should ever be set aside,' said Captain Keltos, quoting from the Book of Blades that all Novarian novitiates read during their training to become Space Marines. 'Better to die fighting with blade in hand against even the most impossible odds, then to perish in peaceful surrender.'

He hobbled to where Sergeant Dimitrin's body lay crumpled against Mytoxos' throne. He panned his auspex across his fallen friend and felt a spark of hope at the readings. Dimitrin's life signs were ghostly faint, but they were there.

'Come on, you damned fool, we're for the saviour pods,' said Keltos, hefting his old comrade awkwardly and beginning a skidding clamber down the sloping deck. He didn't truly believe they could make it before the chamber caved in around them or, even if they did, that they would survive a trans-atmospheric ejection amidst all the tumbling, burning wreckage of the defence platform. But Keltos would keep fighting until there was nothing left of him to fight with.

He owed the primarch and the Emperor no less.

Staggering as systems exploded and flaming wreckage rained down all around, Captain Keltos made for the saviour pods. Behind him, Mytoxos' throne burned.

VII

Librarian Akillus stood behind the gunships piloting throne, holding onto a grip loop as he stared through the rain-streaked armourglass canopy. The craft swept as low as the pilots dared over the crashing waves, auspex suites at full extension and stab-lights sweeping as they searched.

The death of X-Delphi-34 had been as magnificent as it was catastrophic. The platform's own weight had torn it apart as it plunged through Anjoria Tertius' atmosphere, each ruptured section soaring away wreathed in the flames of re-entry to plunge into the world's turbulent oceans. Immense geysers of boiling steam had erupted from each impact site, while tsunamis raced away to crash and clash in their own battles amidst the deepest oceans. Had Anjoria Tertius possessed any landmasses above its surface, they would surely have drowned. As it was, the world's oceanic currents and weather systems had doubtless been crippled for decades to come. And that, thought Akillus grimly, was before one even considered whether any corruption of the enemy's had survived amidst X-Delphi-34's wreckage.

'Will this planet be scoured, my lord?' asked one of the pilot-helots, as though he had picked up on Akillus' thoughts.

'That is not for us to question, pilot,' replied Akillus. 'We are here for one task only.'

'Of course, my lord,' the pilot replied. 'We have almost concluded the sweep of this sector. Fuel levels at nineteen per cent plus required escape-velocity reserve. We can proceed to the next sector, my lord?'

Akillus grunted acquiescence. They had been searching for three days now with no luck. He knew that the chances of success were slim indeed. In theory, both battle-brothers' power armour broadcast a coded signifier that the Silver Templars' gunships should have been able to detect. In reality, between the atmospheric disturbance created by the death of X-Delphi-34, the ferocious storms lashing the oceans, and the fact that Keltos and Dimitrin had almost certainly been annihilated in the crash or else long-since drowned...

No, thought Akillus, he would not give up on them. Not yet. It was not the Novarian way. They must fight until they could not and never abandon Novaris' blades. But the rescue operation would have to end soon. The reality was that the fuel reserves would only last so long, and the Silver Templars were needed elsewhere. The strike force had suffered serious casualties during the fighting on X-Delphi-34 and, as the surviving senior officer, Akillus had a duty to get his forces patched up, reinforced if possible, and then to respond to one of the dozen fresh cries for aid that had been received since the battle for the defence platform had ended.

'Anything?' asked Thessos, moving up to stand beside Akillus. The Hellblaster sergeant's new bionic eye was still taking, the flesh around it red and puffy, fresh scarring livid on his face. Still, he had insisted on accompanying the rescue flights; Akillus respected him for that.

'I do not believe so,' said Akillus. 'I...' his voice trailed off and his eyes narrowed as something tickled at the very edge of his perceptions.

'Akillus, what?' asked Thessos. Akillus held up a hand to silence him. He scowled with concentration, pushed his unnatural senses out through the fury of the storm. It was maddening; for the barest of moments he had sensed something familiar, as though he had glimpsed a second's flash of light through a dense forest canopy. He sought it now again, straining until he felt a trickle of blood run from one nostril and the veins in his temples pulse with effort. Thessos stared at him, alarmed.

'Is it an attack?' he demanded. 'Should we rouse the weapon spirits?'

There!

Akillus had it again, the faintest trace of a familiar mind amidst the maelstrom of waves below. He shook his head at Thessos.

'Three degrees starboard, drop as low as you can get,' he told the pilot, effort and pain reducing his voice to a gravelly whisper. 'Slow advance and full sweep. I have soul trace, but it is faint... so faint...'

The gunship's engines whined. Rain slapped the canopy as the pilot obeyed. Waves leapt hungrily below them, as though they were attempting to swat the gunship from the air. The white foam at their crests spattered the metal of the hull. Pools of stark white illumination played over the deep troughs and surging flanks of the waves. Dark water turned briny green and blue-white in the sweeping lumens, and Akillus saw chunks of flotsam churning amidst the turmoil. A nest of cabling tumbled over itself, several bloated corpses tangled in it, there and gone again as the jealous waves bore it away. Light flashed off a slice of glassaic, one eye of some shattered saint staring surreally up at them for a moment as the waters toyed with it then cast it away.

'Lock! We have armour signal lock!' announced the pilot-helot, voice tight. The gunship's stablights converged on a sizeable cylinder of metal, blackened by the fires of re-entry and buckled at one end. Somehow, the inflatable skirts had deployed as the saviour pod hit the water, Akillus saw. Somehow, against all the odds, it was still afloat.

'In there...' gasped Akillus, not daring to release his tenuous mental connection in case the pod should be swept away again by the brawling waves.

'Commence recovery operations,' barked Thessos, and the pilots scrambled to obey. The gunship settled above the spinning pod with a rumble of thrusters and more light spilled across the waters as its underbelly opened to release magna-grapples on long, armoured cables.

Akillus did not release his mental fix upon the soul below until he saw the grapples clang down on the saviour pod and begin to hoist it from the waves. Only then did he sag against the back of the throne, eyes closed, and allow his mind to rest.

Minutes later they stood beside the dripping wreck of the pod in the gunship's transport bay. Akillus could no longer sense anything from within, though whether that was mental fatigue or something worse he could not say. He had ordered the bay sealed, and he and Thessos had both affixed their helms and readied their weapons. After all, if any of the station's corruption had survived there was an even chance it would have done so in his captain's saviour pod. The thought sickened Akillus. Still, just because he did not wish to believe something could be true, that did not make it so. Precautions must be taken.

'Can they truly be in there?' asked Thessos, hope and doubt at war in his voice.

'Open it,' Akillus said wearily.

Servitors lumbered forward to obey, bulky mechanical limbs deploying cutting tools that scythed through the fused outer hatch of the pod. It clanged heavily to the deck. From within came a thin stream of stale smoke, mixed with the last remnants of Mytoxos' foul fumes. The Space Marines stepped back, guns raised, while the servitors promptly shut down amidst showers of sparks. Those units would have to be destroyed, Akillus thought. But that did not matter now.

He stepped forward, hearts thumping in anxiety at what he might find. It would be a ghastly irony if the Emperor had allowed them to find Keltos and Dimitrin only for them both to be riddled with Nurgle's corruptions. He did not wish to consider what actions he would be forced to take if it were so.

Gradually the fumes cleared to reveal the pod's interior, dark and cramped. It was small, thought Akillus, built for one or two, maybe three normal-sized humans at a stretch. It must have been intended for senior strategium personnel, built compact but to the very highest standards to ensure the survival of those considered irreplaceable. Presumably that was why the pod had endured its crash and remained afloat, thought Akillus. But surely two of the Adeptus Astartes would have struggled to fit into such a conveyance?

'There,' said Thessos, wafting smoke aside. Akillus saw him then, a single figure in silver power armour so tarnished that its heraldic devices could not be discerned. He was lashed into enough restraints to hold two lesser men in place. Several had broken during the violence of the saviour pod's flight and subsequent impact. But enough had held to keep the figure upright, though it lolled forward, its helmed head hanging down between its heavy shoulder guards.

'Captain,' said Thessos, starting forward. Akillus placed a hand on his arm to stay him. 'Let me,' he said. 'This still may be some last ruse of the foe.' For a moment an image flashed unbidden into Akillus' mind, of the figure suddenly raising its head to reveal a leering daemonic visage and spewing forth a stream of unholy corruption upon them. He shook off the nightmarish premonition and stepped over the pod door's threshold with his mental defences raised.

The Librarian reached out one gauntleted hand and gently pushed the figure back into a sitting position. Its head lolled back, and he saw sergeant's markings upon the helm. The warrior's chestplate was crushed, caked in old, dried blood and the thinnest sound of respiration wheezed from its vox-grille. Only now, as the fumes cleared further, did Akillus see Severer lashed into a tangle of restraint webbing near the Space Marine's right hand. And there was Wrathful and —

'Penance,' he breathed, taking in the power sword that had been securely fastened beside Sergeant Dimitrin's axe. 'And Absolution. There was not space for two battle-brothers, but there was room enough for one man and both of their weapons.'

'And the brother-captain himself?' asked Thessos, though Akillus could hear from the heaviness in his voice that the Hellblaster sergeant already knew the answer. They exchanged a wordless look, the faceplates of their helms no barrier to the understanding that passed between them in that moment.

'This is search unit sixteen,' said Akillus, opening a vox-channel to the Unsheathed where it hung in orbit above Anjoria Tertius. 'We have located the saviour pod and recovered Veteran Sergeant Dimitrin. He is sorely wounded but he lives yet. We are returning at once, request priority landing clearance. Have decontamination and apothecarion teams ready upon the embarkation deck.'

'Understood, Brother-Librarian,' came the voice of Captain Othella after a moment's pause. His voice was flat and uninflected. 'What of the Martian?'

'If any truly believed that his honour was still tarnished, it is now cleansed,' replied Akillus. 'Just as Mercy was sacrificed for Keltos all those years ago, Keltos has sacrificed himself in Mercy's name. Have the other search units continue their sweep, but do not despatch them again as they return.'

'And then?' asked Othella.

'And then we will do our duty, just as the brother-captain did his. Should Sergeant Dimitrin live then we may yet learn enough of Aetian Keltos' last battle to enshrine the memory of his deeds in the fashion he deserves.'

'Understood,' replied Othella before severing the link.

Thessos had already moved to unstrap the comatose Dimitrin from his sundered cradle of restraints and lay him out on the deck, the better to begin applying what medical aid he could with the limited medi-pack strapped to the gunship's bulkhead. Akillus, meanwhile, took Penance reverently from its webbing and held it up to the light. The blade had been wiped clean of the enemy's filth before it had been placed in the pod.

As Akillus felt the gunship tilt around him and accelerate for the void above, he considered the weapon in his hands and gave a deep sigh.

Whoever next wielded this blade would have a great legacy of honour to uphold, he thought. He only hoped they could find a swordsman equal to the task.

About the Author

Andy Clark has written the Warhammer 40,000 novels Fist of the Imperium, Kingsblade, Knightsblade and Shroud of Night, as well as the novella Crusade and the short story 'Whiteout'. He has also written the novels Gloomspite and Blacktalon: First Mark for Warhammer Age of Sigmar, and the Warhammer Quest Silver Tower novella Labyrinth of the Lost. Andy works as a background writer for Games Workshop, crafting the worlds of Warhammer Age of Sigmar and Warhammer 40,000. He lives in Nottingham, UK.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2020.
This eBook edition published in 2020 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Thomas Elliott.

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